Judith Rock, Terpsichore at Louis le Grand Baroque: Dance on the Jesuit Stage in Paris
This is the first extensive study in English of the role played by baroque ballet in the Jesuit college theater. Its focus is the College of Clermont / Louis le Grand in Paris, from 1600 (the year before Louis XIV founded the Royal Academy of Dance) to 1762 (when the Society of Jesus was suppressed in France). Topics include the meeting of baroque style and classical aesthetic that shaped the ballets; the ballets’ dance technique and production process; their role as part of the network of Paris theaters and political comment; and their place in the college rhetoric curriculum during this flamboyant era when dance was the most popular of the French theater arts. The study suggests that the relationship between the ballets and the five act Latin tragedies they accompanied were a happy balancing of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ theatrical dynamics.
The ballets are also seen as a reflection of their audience and its concerns, and as a vehicle for the Jesuits’ pastoral concern for the audience. An incarnation of Counter Reformation theology and Christian humanism, the ballets asserted the essential goodness of the physical world and the freedom of the human will to make moral choices. In this book and in the world that it described so vividly, seventeenth and eighteenth century France comes to life in its politics, its religious beliefs, its aesthetic convictions, its society relationships—in a word, in the complexity that makes France an ever interesting subject of study and delight.
paperback 212pp.
Price: £17.00
About $25.60 or €19.87 at the current exchange rates
ISBN: 978 1 880810 22 4
Publisher: Institute of Jesuit Sources
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