Copyright

Egil Bakka, Elizabeth Svarstad and Anne Fiskvik

Published On

2024-04-25

Page Range

pp. 299–312

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

10. The Minuet in the Theatre

Chapter of: The Nordic Minuet: Royal Fashion and Peasant Tradition(pp. 299–312)
The chapter presents examples on minuets created for the theatre. It also examines how the theatre versions are related to the ordinary minuet. The staged minuets are defined as minuets performed in front of an audience in a space where there is a clear difference between the performers and the audience. The chapter concludes that the theatre kept repeating references to the minuet for a long time. In the eighteenth century, old theatre pieces were remade and often in the form of parody, and those who had a dance scene with a minuet, often kept that. Also a few minuet choreographies like the Menuet de la Reine, Menuet de la cour, and Menuetten af Elverhøj were remade, and these references that are still in the twenty-first century repeated by the theatre, have probably contributed to the nimbus of the minuet far beyond the time the menuet ordinaire was a social dance in towns and cities in the Nordic countries.

Contributors

Egil Bakka

(author)
Professor Emeritus of Dance Studies at Norwegian University of Science and Technology
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9959-1474

Egil Bakka was the founding Director at the Norwegian Centre for Traditional Music and Dance (1973-2013) and is professor emeritus of Dance studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He built and chaired the programme for dance studies at his university and initiated the NOFOD Nordic master programme with Danish, Finnish and Swedish colleagues and the Choreomundus Erasmus international master’s in dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage with colleagues from France, Hungary and UK. He was the first academic coordinator of both masters. He held many positions as chair or board member of national and international organisations, institutions, research projects and conferences, has seven honorary membership and prizes and is Commander of the Royal St. Olav Order. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Norway and the Faroe Islands and had tasks in the UNESCO environment with the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Publications: Bakka, Egil et al. ed., Waltzing through Europe: Attitudes Towards Couple Dances in the Long Nineteenth-Century (Open Book Publishers, 2020), Bakka, Egil, 'Dance and Music in Interplay: Types of Choreo-Musical Relationships in Norwegian Heritage', in Diverging Ontologies in Music for Dancing European Voices V, ed. by Ardian Ahmedaja (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2023), pp. 29-50

Elizabeth Svarstad

(author)
Assistant Professor in Baroque Dance at Norwegian Academy of Music
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4134-6417

Elizabeth Svarstad PhD is an Assistant Professor in baroque dance at The Norwegian Academy of Music. She holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in dance studies from The Norwegian University for Science and Technology. Educated dancer from The Norwegian Academy of Ballet, she works as a dancer, choreographer and teacher and has participated in and created a vaste number of performances in Norway and abroad. Among her research articles are 'Traces of Dance and Social Life: A Dance Book and its Context' in Relevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770–1860. Questioning Canons, edited by Randi Margrete Selvik, Svein Gladsø and Annabella Skagen. London: Routledge, 2021, and 'Dance and Social Education in Early Nineteenth-Century Christiania' in Performing Arts in Changing Societies edited by Randi Margrete Selvik, Svein Gladsø and Anne Margrete Fiskvik /Taylor and Francis, 2020), 'Kort Udtog: A Danish Translation of Gottfried Taubert’s Kurtzer Entwurff Der Nutzbarkeit Des Künstlichen Tantz-EXERCITII (1727) ' in Tauberts Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister (Leipzig 1717) edited by Hanna Walsdorf, Marie-Thérèse Mourey, and Tilden Russell (Verlag Frank & Timme, 2019), and Svarstad, Elizabeth, and Nygaard, Jon. 'A Caprice – The Summit of Ibsen's Theatrical Career' in Ibsen Studies 16, no. 2 (2016): 168–85.

Anne Margrete Fiskvik

(author)

Anne Margrete Fiskvik PhD works as professor of dance studies at the Department for Musicology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Previously a professional dancer and choreographer, she has pursued an academic career and today her main research areas are within dance and music history. She has especially been interested in Norwegian theatre dance and itinerant practices during the 18th and 19th centuries. Fiskvik was a member of the research projects Performing Arts between Dilettantism and Professionalism (pArts) and Dance in Nordic Spaces. Fiskvik is also a certified dance movement therapist and interested in health aspects of dance. Her most recent publication includes the editing of Dance Articulated 8 (1) Special Issue Dance. A way towards health and well being (2022). Some of her recent publications dealing with dance historie(s) include the co-editing of the anthology Performing Arts in Changing Societies: Opera, Dance and Theatre in European and Nordic countries around 1800 (Routledge, 2020), as well as the article 'Renegotiation Identify Markers in Contemporary Halling', published in Dance Research Journal vol. 52 (1), (2020).