Ravensong presents Le Roi Danse

The evening provided a taste of a dance form we seldom see, performed by dancer and dance scholar Hubert Hazebroucq. Violinist Stefan Plewniak and members of his Baroque orchestra Il Giardino d’Amore, with Philadelphia’s own Kleine Kammermusik, provided the accompaniment and some brilliant interludes of their own.

Five views of Baroque dance

Louis XIV is generally credited as the father of ballet. A dancer himself, he used his skill to challenge nobles to excel in feats of refinement in the art. The courtiers engaged in social dancing and, as respected amateurs, presented dances for the king and court that expressed the attitude of the music through choreographed and highly complex movement. But a modern audience expecting ballet is in for a shock.

I found it more useful to view Hazebroucq’s Baroque dances as a sort of hybrid form: not social dance per se, but performance pieces created out of that high-culture tradition of minuets, sarabandes, allemandes, chaconnes, and gavottes. Jumps were small, almost hops. Arms were held lower, in a graceful position that acknowledged the 17th century’s elaborate court dress. The emphasis was on quick, complex footwork capturing the music’s rise and fall, and sometimes, in counterpoint as a call and response with the musicians.

The program for Le Roi Danse presented five sections, each with two or three dances separated by musical interludes. In “Noble Character,” Hazebroucq, dressed as a cavalier, performed intricate, stately dances. In “La Belle Danse,” he appeared en travesti, masked and with a skirt over his cavalier’s knee breeches to present pieces choreographed as women’s roles.

The third section, “From Demi-Character to the Comical,” was the most fun. In “Chacoon for a Harlequin,” (choreographed by F. Le Rousseau) from Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Le Malade Imaginaire, Hazebroucq showed off his comic chops. Where the noble style was contained in its complexity, here the dance grew faster and more broadly exaggerated with jumps and pirouettes, until he fairly reeled across the stage. The “beauty masks” of the earlier dances were left behind for the grotesque.

The fourth section, “In Majestic Step,” included another showstopper, “Entrée d’Apollon,” from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Le Triomphe de l’Amour, choreographed by Guillaume-Louis Pécour.

For this grand climax, Hazebroucq appeared in the gold mask and costume with Apollo’s plumed headpiece in a measured dance that could still kick up its heels.

The Apollo would have made a grand finale, but a fifth section remained. “Where the Characters Mingle” unaccountably presented Hazebroucq en travesti again, this time in a mantilla and dark skirt for Vivaldi’s “Folies d’Espagne,” Choreographed by Pécour and Raoul Auger Feuillet. It was a puzzling way to end the night.

Great Baroque music in the interludes

The evening was billed as a night of dance, but the music deserves a mention as well. Two pieces, in particular, impressed me. Étienne Galletier beautifully performed Robert de Visée’s “Chaconne for Lute,” on the Theorbo, and the vivid brilliance of Nicola Matteis’s “Diverse Bizzarie sopra la Vecchia Sarabanda ò pur Ciaccona” gave that final section a reason to exist.

Stefan Plewniak is arguably the best violinist I have heard in Baroque music. The orchestra, eight musicians on historical instruments, sounded full and rich in the intimate community room provided by Saint Clement’s Church: the perfect venue for dances of the court of the Sun King.