The CEMS Dance Workshop, Early Modern Dance: Politics and Pleasure, combines four academic papers and an interactive dance workshop led by Baroque dance specialist Philippa Waite. The event is aimed at specialists and non-specialists alike, of both early modernity and practical dance. The papers will explore the wide variety of early modern dance, from its courtly incarnations to their subversions, in its popular and colonial political contexts, and as civilising force and liberating expression. The dance workshop will last for an hour and a half and focus on teaching court dance of the Baroque period.

Speakers

Sara Smart is Associate Professor of German at Exeter University and holder of a Senior Fellowship from the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Her research focuses on the court culture of the Empire in the early modern period, particularly German-speaking, Protestant courts, and ranges from court festivities to images of dynasty. Publications include The Ideal Image: Studies in Writing for the German Court 1616-1706 (2005) and the co-edited interdisciplinary volume The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival (2013).

Barbara Ravelhofer is Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University and a Research Associate of the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge. She has written on European spectacle from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, editing and book history in comparative perspective, as well as oral forms of literature. Her edition of the French dance treatise Louange de la danse (2000) explores the life and professional practices of dancers and musicians in early modern London and Paris. Her most recent book, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (2006), studies illusionistic theatre of the Renaissance.

Helen Watanabe O’Kelly is Professor of German Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Her research interests are in early modern German literature and culture and in women’s writing in all periods, with a special focus on early modern court festivals throughout Europe and on court culture. Her most recent book is Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (2010).

Julia Prest is Reader in French at the University of St Andrews. Her research interests focus on early-modern theatre, including ballet and opera, in France and the Caribbean colonies, notably Saint-Domingue. She is author of Theatre under Louis XIV: Cross-casting and the Performance of Gender in Drama, Ballet and Opera (2006; 2013) and Controversy in French Drama: Molière’s ‘Tartuffe’ and the Struggle for Influence (2014; 2016).

Philippa Waite is a performer and teacher of Baroque dance. She is currently guest teacher of Period Movement and Dance at the School of Acting, Birmingham City University, and the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Cardiff. She is Artistic Director of Consort de Danse Baroque and choreographs in the Baroque style for the company's productions. She teaches, performs and gives lecture-demonstrations throughout the UK and abroad.