The history

Chapter 2

The history of dance is a human science which aims to describe the historical interactions between dance and the other arts. The 18th century is the century of all innovations, of all research, and it is at the beginning of this period that we must find the first attempts to tell of an evolution of dance since Antiquity. The first author to have written on the subject is the Frenchman Jacques Bonnet, in his Histoire générale de la danse sacrée et profane (Paris 1723), which he published eight years after his Histoire de la musique (Paris 1715). Starting from dance in Greek and Roman Antiquity, Bonnet explores the history of this art, both from a sacred and secular perspective, and tackles the major questions which agitated the opera-ballet at the beginning of the 18th century. It also evokes the balls of the court and the city, as well as the fairgrounds, dancers of rope and "jumpers". The work will be authoritative for a long time and will be copied extensively until the 20th century. 30 years later, Louis de Cahusac developed Bonnet's thinking and laid the foundations for the theories that Jean-Georges Noverre would publish in 1760 on the renewal of ballet and on action ballet. The nineteenth century does not bring any new ideas and is content to reproduce the previous discourse, embellished with a few formal updates. It was not until Curt Sachs' fundamental work (Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes, 1933) that a universal vision of dance was formed, freed from the Eurocentrism that had prevailed until then. Dance is the first born of the arts. Music and poetry flow through time; the visual arts and architecture shape space. But dance lives in both space and time. Before entrusting his emotions to stone, to words, to sound, man uses his own body to organize space and to give rhythm to time1. Dance has been around the world and has always been around.