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Overview |
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| 1. The Choreographer's Fancy A World of Symbols / Interlaced Borders / Perpetual Motion / Invented Tradition From the 17th to early 19th century dance so thoroughly permeated the Bordonians' culture that their language became filled with sayings which seem profoundly obscure now but once had straightforward meanings. For example 'A foot between and a leg around', 'A hand held is a heart in reach', 'They spin longest who remember the way forward', 'Its the room which turns. The lovers stand still', 'The feet will follow when the head leads' and 'The slowest feet slip on the fastest floor'. Indeed, in this period Bordonia was a virtual terspsiarchy with all its administrators elected on the basis of dance proficiency. Bordonians firmly believed, as Moliere's dancing master put it, that 'There is nothing so necessary for men as dancing... Without dancing a man can do nothing... All the disasters of mankind, all the fatal misfortunes that histories are so full of, the blunders of politicians, the miscarriages of great commanders, all this comes from want of skill in dancing...'. Accordingly, the Bordonian choreographer took his role as pedagogue very seriously. This D'Honger invention offers dancers an opportunity to enjoy four different types of cross-armed swing, each separated by a progression and each slightly more intimate than the last. To get dancers used to the sequence before turning it into a canon, it is best to first teach or even dance the sequence with everyone being a number 1 couple. 2. Rings and Swings Beyond Oak and Elm / Between Cherry and Plum / Behind Purple Gates / Between Cherry and Plum / Behind Purple Gates D'Honger is believed to have written this flowing swing- ring- and flower-filled dance as an engagement present to the woman who became his lifelong partner. Country dancing had been wanting to give birth to the swing since the beginning of the 18th century, but polite society refused to receive anything so face-to-face or giddy. One father wrote to The Spectator condemning his daughter's dance school: 'They very often made use of a most impudent and lascivious step called setting to partners, which I know not how to describe to you but by telling you that it is the very reverse of back to back' and 'an impudent young dogü ran to his partner, locked his arms in hers, and whisked her round cleverly above ground in such a manner that I, who sat upon one of the lowest benches, saw further above her shoe than I can think fit to acquaint you with. I could no longer endure these enormities, wherefore, just as my girl was going to be made a whirligig, I ran in, seized my child, and carried her home.' It was not till waltzing and galoping made taking and turning each other in close holds socially acceptable that swinging also became accepted, was written into country dancing in England and increased handkerchief sales among sweaty contradancers in America. These tunes are remembered as offering directions to the home D'Honger and his wife moved into some years after they were married. 3. The Quarter-Short Square Chatting in the Marketplace / Chance Encounters / Distant News / Hot Gossip This dance and these tunes, in the very rustic triple-time bourr¯e rhythm, invoke all the hustle and bustle of a Sunday market in Terpsichorea's old town square. Couples go from here to there, stopping to chat and then hurrying on. Dudelsac informants variously identify the quarter someone was short as the fourth part of a load of grain, the fourth part of a sum owing, the hind leg of a slaughtered beast. The people of Nenjira, however, point out that the dance title has not someone in a square a quarter short, but the square itself a quarter short, and argue that the dance celebrates not a market place theft but an agricultural revolution. A hundred years after the English and Dutch had been converted to its benefits the Bordonians finally found themselves in a position to experiment with crop rotation. By changing the fields in which root, leaf and seed crops were planted, by always leaving one field fallow and grazing cattle and sheep through these fields at the right time, they were soon producing bigger turnips, taller millet, more sorghum, richer milk and better wool. To ensure, however, they had the optimum square of fields to rotate between and the space for new crops such as potatoes, forest and hedgerow were cleared. Agricultural efficiency peaked in the mid-19th century with a total dependence on crops which then succumbed four years in a row to drought and blight. 4. Past, Present and Future The Elves' Pavan / The Fairies' Frolic / The Goblins' Brawl On their wedding day D'Honger received from his wife a ring consisting of three interlinked coloured gold bands - a rose one representing the past, a yellow one for the present and a white one for the future. Together they symbolised a never-ending love. On their 8th wedding anniversary (particularly auspicious in Bordonia as the number 8 underlies the structure of their music and dance) D'Honger replied by dedicating to his wife this most elegant canon. The three circles which the couples trace each time through the dance are temporally out of phase but together form a strong ring, which slips about on its centre to start each time from a different place. There is ring imagery also in the three tunes. The tunes, which date back to a more enchanted age, describe a moonlight ball which starts with a stately promenade for the elfin nobles, continues with a carefree dance for the ever-young fairies and finishes with a brawl (in the technical sense of a circle dance - it being the 17th century English equivalent of the French word 'branle') for the poorly-mannered goblins. Evidence that such balls were taking place in forest clearings was found in the appearance of 'fairy rings', near perfect circles of dark green grass which actually resulted from the sub-surface growth of certain nitrogen producing fungus. Here then is a dance and set of tunes which spells eternity. 5. Turning the Tables A Hope-Filled Heart / Chase and be Chased Like most 18th century western European quadrilles this dance involves no changing of partner, simply a rotating of the lead role. Whereas the artful high society dancer in 18th century London or Paris liked to show off in quadrilles with a perfect jett¯, chass¯e, assembl¯, balanc¯, changement de jambe, and perhaps even a coup¯ dessous or entrechat ¶ quatre, the Bordonians, though capable of the above, preferred, like the rest of Europe a century later, to execute their quadrilles using a simple pas march¯, walking step. For the Bordonians the thrill of a quadrille was in the patterns and the story they tell. In this dance, likely to have been written for their annual palindrome festival, the second half starts with a mirror image of the end of the first half and nearly all the figures in the second half are the same as in the first, except executed in reverse direction. As in life, it is not always the man who is chasing the woman. Indeed, while most European art from Medieval times onward found an inexhaustible theme in the sentiments awakened in a knight by a lady and in the knight's attempt to be worthy of reciprocated feelings, the love which the Bordonians exalted was always somewhat less courtly and less one sided. In place of meticulously argued or gallantly demonstrated declarations of love, Bordonian art favoured even-handed lust, intrigue, charade and conquest - as exemplified in this dance game. 6. Two-to-Twirl Strange Sights / The Dancer's Calling / The Caller's Piping / The Piper's Dancing As noted on Summer 3, the follow-the-leader and circle dances which constitute the earliest strata of European social dance could be varied through footwork, group figures or improvisations by breakaway couples. The Eastern Europeans, in their thrilling kolos, built on the footwork, the English, in their elaborately patterned sets, on the figures, while the Alpine people of Europe pursued the third possibility to the point where the line became less important than the turning under raised hands enjoyed by the paired-off couples. So were born the double time 'RheinlÌnder' or 'Allemande' and triple time 'Drehentanz' and 'LÌndler', the later taking its name from a small region also called 'Steirer' near the Austrian-Slovenian border. Similarly, in this twisting twirling Bordonian dance the line has vanished except as an imaginary route along which dancers travel. The dance must predate Jan D'Honger but the tune names would seem to record the impact he had on contemporaries as he moved from being a dancer to a well-known caller of dances, to becoming a tolerable pipe player, and then finally to being a performer who could play the pipes while dancing and calling. This tune set travelled quickly through neighbouring lands and the third tune is still played as a bourr¯e in Central France under a name which translates as 'Hark I hear the Caller Piping'. 7. The Loose Cannon Galop The Lute-Backed Boat / The Carved Head / On an Ocean of Drones In Paris and London in the 1830s the galop was believed to have come from Russia, regarded as one of the simplest of couples dances, added as a final figure to the ballroom quadrille and helped clear the way for the popularity of the waltz. In Bordonia, however, the dance was believed to be indigenous and, in a land where children are dragged around on chaff bags to spread candle scrapings and ensure the fastest possible dance floor, the galop is danced briskly and dramatically with small steps. The maritime elusions in the title of this galop sequence and its accompanying tunes are not surprising as, land-locked as they may now be, Bordonians believe that their ancestors were seafaring folk who decided they had had enough of that life and like Odesseus, carried their masts and oars inland until they started to pass people who asked what it was they were carrying. Only then did they feel they were far enough from the sea to make a new life. By which sea the ancient Bordonians once lived, it is far from certain. The people in Dudelsac say the Mediterranean and those from Nenjira the Baltic. For what reason they left, neither remember. Both, however, believe it was on the rolling decks of boats that their ancestors invented the galop here described (though surely in an age before cannons) and by the sea that they invented the boat-shaped hurdy-gurdy on which they play the accompanying tunes. 8. The Coachman's Puzzle Glittering in the Snow / The Golden Key / The Jewelled Chest The tune titles elude to the last story in the Grimm brothers' Household Tales. A boy out on his sled finds a golden key. After digging in the snow, he finds a jewel encrusted box. The key fits the box's lock and upon opening the box the story ends. There is no key in this dance, but the set is a little like an old puzzle box which needs to be twisted this way and that in a secret combination before opening. The Bordonians loved such puzzles and made them in all shapes and sizes. It is possible that there were even coach-shaped ones. There was certainly an active coachman's guild. This dance was initially an all male coachmen's dance - just as there still survive in surrounding lands dances specifically for hoop, sword, flag and dress makers. Thus the two hand turns are done with dancers of the same gender, and partners, who would have originally also been of the same gender, are simply someone to greet at the beginning of the sequence. As the dance slipped away from its guild origins and began to include women, the greeting after the circling half-way turned into a kiss and the figures traced out came to be interpreted as telling the story of a coach journey - from partners farewelling each other and the coach wheels turning to people leaving and joining the coach and groups rearranging themselves for the next leg of the journey. 9. A Delightful Play A Slow Dawn / The Early Bird / Chuang-tzu and the Butterfly In this dance D'Honger would seem to be simply passing on an Egan Hrodnj composition. Through its overlapping weaving patterns the Bordonian dancing master would seem to be paying homage to the English aesthetic of which he was so enamoured. Indeed, he would appear to have taken the title from William Hogarth's An Analysis of Beauty : 'The lines which a number of people together form in country or figure dancing, make a delightful play upon the eye, especially when the whole figure is to be seen at one view, as at the playhouse from the gallery; the beauty of this kind of mystic dancing, as the poets term it, depends upon moving in a composed variety of lines, chiefly serpentine, govern'd by the principles of intricacy'. The tunes may well also date back to Hrodnj's day, a time in which the first translations of many of the most significant Chinese philosophers were being published. Of special appeal to Bordonians, given their long history of interest in sceptical philosophy, would have been the work of Chuang-tzu, a philosopher who more than 2,000 years ago drew attention to the difficulty in discerning whether you are a sleeping human dreaming you're a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming you're a human asleep. Like many Central Europeans, while looking to the west for some of inspirations, Hrodnj may have looked east for others. 10. The Shepherd's Trials Red Sky Warning / Drops from Nowhere / The Foreshadowed Storm / The Blue between the Clouds Such were the rivalries engendered by the polka craze of the 1840s that votaries of the dance in Paris arranged for the two great masters Cellarius and Coralli, accompanied by their star pupils, to meet 'Polka to Polka'. The Cellarians stumbled embarrassingly with a new tune they'd especially commissioned and had to request more familiar music. They then took courage and 'advanced with great spirit, bringing their heels up under the coat tails in the most daring fashion, and remained masters in the field.' As was reported, however, 'The crowd presently made way for their terrible rivals, whose very first steps ensured the discomfiture of the Cellarians. The whole cohort dispersed, and the unhappy chief, his eyes darting flames, his heart full of fury, withdrew to swallow the affront as best he might.' Hearing of this competition, the Bordonians decided to have their own 'Polka off'. Polka master after master switched with ease between sequences in which men started left foot and women right, as in 'The Pyrotechnic Polka' or 'Loose Cannon Galop', and ones in which both started left foot, as in the 'Courtship Polka'. The day was won, however, by some polka-mad farm workers who, obliged to practise on poop-strewn ground had invented this counter-intuitive sequence in which men and women start on the 'wrong' foot and support each other as they hop about desperately. 11. The Knotted Square The Cloistered Wish / The Parterre Rendezvous / Topiary Lovers Some folk from Dudelsac see the dance and tunes as telling the story of fraternising between the young men and women at the old University in their capital Terpsichorea. In the evenings from their separate dormitories they would sneak down to the central courtyard where, hazarding encounters with others, they would rendezvous with their lovers. As students may have several loves in the course of their studies the rendezvous figure is repeated with different partners in the course of the dance. Others in Dudelsac see the dance as describing not the lovers' meetings but the garden in which the meetings took place, noting that the main courtyard in the old University used to have a central knotted square, tall intertwined twin topiaries in each corner and a circular path touching each face of the square. The sage people of Nenjira reconcile the two Dudelsac versions by suggesting the dance is simultaneously telling the story of the lovers and the garden - the two having shaped each other. The originally rudimentary gardens were made progressively more elaborate by gardeners wanting to reflect the use to which they were being put while the parterres the gardeners established to commemorate the meetings ended up facilitating more meetings and the entwined topiaries they clipped to look like lovers encouraged still more romantic moonlight assignations. 12. Reconciliation Reel The Crowd in the Park / Sitting on the Outside / Sitting on the Outside / Dancing on the Inside Bordonians were never a homogenous people. Their land absorbed many outsiders and their language many influences. Though the arrival of the English in the 17th century made a lasting impact on their dance and the influx of Wends in the 18th century a lasting impact on their language, their identity remained intact. It was the newcomers who came to see themselves as Bordonians rather than the other way around. The accommodation of outsiders was not, however, trouble free. Disputes arose - mostly over land and women - and some feuds, exacerbated by the seemingly intractable Dudelsac-Nenjira rivalry, lasted for decades. In the 19th century, with those identifying as Bordonian plainly a dwindling minority within another dwindling minority (that of Wendish-speakers in German lands) a movement began for the setting aside of internal differences. As Bordonians used to say, 'If you need to share a dam, you need to mend a fence.' Fences, of course, meant layered hedges - and it is no coincidence that this dance contains a figure which takes its name from the French word for a hedge, 'Haie'. It is also no coincidence that it is the women who start the hey and cross the set to swing their opposite, for it was the women who organised the large public meeting and first tried to show the way to a more harmonious future. 13. The Tangled Web The Morning Walk / The Midday Dream Jane Austin in Emma (chapter XXIX) wrote: 'It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months, successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrues either to body or mind; but when a beginning is made - when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt - it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more'. This fast moving quadrille is one dance for which people always call for an encore. Quadrilles are societies in microcosm and offer the opportunity to create on an intimate scale a whole web of social interaction. As the motion in this dance is indeed rapid, D'Honger has contrived for the action to alternate direction regularly between clock-wise and anti-clockwise. In another dimension the focus moves in the course of the dance from the individual (with the women and men dancing similar figures out of phase with each other), to the whole group (with everyone ending up caught in a rare but rewarding basket hold) to the couple (with everyone finding a partner to swing and promenade). Puzzling over dances such as these and tunes to go with them must have been a pleasant way for D'Honger to occupy his mind when taking morning walks or when taking his midday siesta. 14. The Cavalier's Mazurka Dance Card Clues / Brass Button Waistcoat / Long White Gloves Though elsewhere a dance might have a 'wild' country style and a 'tame' upper-class style, in Bordonia competency in dance was as much valued by the labourer and youth as by the merchant and noble. For all classes a dance had to satisfy both the body and the mind, be as exciting as it was graceful. Accordingly, in this dance the Bordonians have combined two distinct steps with two different characters. In the first half are the heel clicks and hobble steps practised by the half-wild cavalry men of the Polish ruling elite. In the second half the balletic gliding turn of the redowa which took its name from the triple time Bohemian folk dance the rejdovak, but was probably a neo-classical invention of the professional dancers. The Bordonians had no problem with either, but in Paris Cellarius observed that the Redowa 'is much more talked of than practiced'. Similarly, Ferrero wrote that many 'imagine they are dancing the Redowa, when in fact they only accomplish a few steps of the schottische, to a wrong measure' and Dodsworth lamented that the redowa was often simplified to a hop waltz. Thus, while the opening of the sequence requires erect pride - with a puffed up chest and free hands forming fists on the hips and forcing a strong elbow to tilt a little forward, the closing part requires supple grace and perfectly parallel extensions of the legs. 15. The Druid's Ring The Worm Ouroboros / Infernal Music This snowballing dance goes back to Europe's Celtic past and versions of it persist in the Welsh dances Mellionen and Dargeson. The tunes take their names from a mythical serpent that eats its tail and from the Hieronymous Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights in which bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies become instruments of torture in hell. The apocalyptic serpent or dragon may go back still earlier to the fear of the longboats which carried Viking raiders. The dance is a highlight of the Bordonians' annual Dragon Festival, always following the open-air play in which a comically gruesome dragon threatens everyone by twisting its huge body, rolling bulging eyes, flashing giant teeth and poking out a large red tongue. On one unfortunate occasion the knight who arrived to thrust his spear down the dragon's mouth, missed the ox-blood-filled pig's bladder and struck the man manipulating the beast. As the injured man's friends needed him to complete their set for the dance which followed and did not want to miss out for want of his presence, they quickly bandaged him and led him to his place. When the music struck up he seemed to revive but with the closing strain he passed out and died. The trail of blood left in the town square as he perfectly executed the Druid's Ring has been regarded by those who've followed, literally in his footsteps, as an invaluable aid-memoire. 16. The Chess Dance Crowned Pretenders / Glove-Puppet Bishops / Hobby-Horse Knights / Cardboard Castles As archaeologists in the Bordonian region have uncovered a life-size chess board dating back to the 17th century, variants of this dance game and perhaps even the satirical tunes which accompany it, may well go back to before Egan Hrodnj's 1738 book. D'Honger's version strictly obeys the rules of both chess and dance. It opens with the slow advance of the pawns and concludes as a draw with the slow moving King in the company of his Queen still standing. In between, the faster moving rooks move in straight lines, bishops on the diagonal and knights, if danced carefully, in a series of 2-forward- 1-to-the-side-and-close Ls. Dancers aim to finish each sequence in the diagonally opposite place but right at the end usually progress as here described so the nobles all get to dance each other's roles and the pawns, usually children or less experienced dancers, rotate the leadership among themselves. Although rarely done these days, informants remember a time when a complete set of 32 experienced dancers would request twice the normal music and progress 16 times through every position, noble and pawn, on their own side. No need for a pawn to drop out or rook to travel. To finish, all nobles simply move one place to the left and the left- hand rook steps forward to left most pawn position while all pawns file back on as far as they can go and the last one becomes the right hand rook. Beautifully simple!
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