ABSTRACT
What sort of dances did the likes of Scaramouche, Harlequin and Pierrot perform in the London theatres during the first three decades of the eighteenth century? Who were the dancers, what did they do, and what reactions did they provoke from audiences of the day? These questions are not easy to answer, for the performance advertisements do not all survive and very few of the dances themselves still exist. Nevertheless, it is clear that these London dances, which were performed by both French and English dancers, had begun to form an increasingly distinct dance genre which owed little to the traditions of the commedia dell’arte of Italian spoken theatre beyond some of its costumes and visual characterization, and even those elements were filtered through dance, and specifically through the work of French dancers who had worked in Paris at the fairs, the Comédie Italienne, and the Opera house. Thus the additional elements of purely English comic dance overlaid an already hybrid art form which ranged from low comedy to technically virtuosic dance. This chapter therefore uses the term ‘commedia’ to refer only to the genre of dance seen increasingly on the London stage during the early part of the eighteenth century, and perhaps is better described as the sort of theatrical dance that John Weaver called ‘dancing in grotesque characters’.
