Footprints of the Dance: An Early Seventeenth-Century Dance Master’s Notebook

Footprints of the Dance -- An Early Seventeenth-Century Dance Master’s Notebook by Jennifer Nevile provides new, fascinating and detailed information on the life of an early-seventeenth-century dance master in Brussels. The dance master’s handwritten notebook contains unique material: a canon of dance figures and instructions for an exhibition with a pike; as well as signatures and general descriptions of his students, ballet plots and music associated with dancing. Reproduced for the first time are facsimile images of all the dance-related material, with transcriptions and translations of the ballet plots and instructions for the pike exhibition. The dance master is revealed as an active choreographer and performer, with strong ties to the French court musical establishment, and interested in fireworks and alchemy.

Jennifer Nevile, Ph.D. (1992), UNSW, holds an honorary research position at that university. She is a leading authority on Renaissance dance and its relationship with contemporary artistic and intellectual practices, publishing over thirty book chapters and articles, and a monograph.