academie: June-iversity

[Judithsca at aol.com]

My thoughts are that since this particular area of the kingdom has been 
pretty left out of the dance loop, we should volunteer to teach a full track 
of classes, one per hour.  I don't know how often some of us from the north 
are going to have the time and money to make the sojourn down to Bordervale 
Keep, so I say we get the absolute most out of it.  I feel perfectly 
confident that we will have the audience for a full track, and that also 
gives people more chance to take a dance class because there will be more 
options during the day (and more chance that the dance class will not 
conflict with another class they want/need to take more).
    I personally like Vard's suggestions for classes, but I have a thought to 
take it one step further.  This University will be our chance to educate the 
public about renaissance dance, and my thought was that perhaps we should 
work towards presenting the various types of dances in the context of their 
sources (i.e.  Refer to Playford' Dance Master when talking of ECD, or 
Arbeau's Orchesographie when teaching bransles, etc.).  What I see so 
frequently happen (and I am as absolutely guilty of this as anyone else), is 
that we teach a dance that we learned from someone else, but never bother to 
go back and confirm the original source for that dance.  Sometimes, little 
memory glitches occur, and new elements get introduced to the original 
dance---and thus the problem of the regional variation occurs, which can 
cause friction at larger events that draw from larger areas.  (Also, some of 
these variations might have absolutely nothing to do with any sort of period 
practice---but that is just the pre-1650 snob talking.... ;)  In short, I was 
thinking that maybe we could teach a bit more theory, thus verifying the 
veracity of what we are teaching, even if only a little bit, in with our 
practical classes.

mes deux centimes...
judith

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