Читать книгу The Art of Ballet онлайн

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It may seem a far cry from the date of Pope Zacharias’ edict of 744, to 1462, when the first of the ballets ambulatoires is recorded, but it must not be supposed that dancing, if not miming, is entirely lacking in history during those seven hundred odd years. Any history of dancing would aid us in at least partly bridging such a gap; but it will be convenient in a chapter dealing more especially with early ecclesiastical influence on the evolution of Ballet, to deal now with a form of entertainment or of religious festival which was essentially a creation of the earlier Church.

The famous procession of the Fête Dieu which King René d’Anjou, Count of Provence, established at Aix in 1462, was, as an old historian tells us, an “ambulatory” ballet, “composed of a number of allegorical scenes, called entremets.” This word entremets, which was later replaced by “interludes,” designated a miming spectacle in which men and animals represented the action. Sometimes jugglers and mountebanks showed their tricks and danced to the sound of their instruments. These entertainments were called entremets because they were instituted to occupy the guests agreeably at a great feast, during the intervals between the courses. “The entre-actes of our first tragedies,” the writer adds, “were arranged in this manner, as one sees in the works of Baif, the interludes in the tragedy of Sophonisbie. More than five hundred mountebanks, Merry Andrews, comedians and buffoons, exhibited their tricks and prowess at the full Court which was held at Rimini to arm the knights and nobles of the house of Malatesta and others.”