In 1700 the London theatrical world was in crisis. The quality of English plays had deteriorated during the 40 years of restored Stuart rule. Playwrights, believing themselves to be working in the tradition of the finest Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic poets, were churning out ranting tragedies, stripped of the subtle heroes and comic relief of Shakespeare, and amoral comedies, rarely showing the sparkling wit of Jonson. The two London theatre companies were locked in bitter competition for the small, mostly aristocratic audience, and managers compromised the poets and actors by introducing into their plays music-hall entertainments, from ventriloquists to tumblers. At the center of the crisis, however, was not the lack of playwrights of genius nor a fickle, world-weary audience; rather British drama was seriously weakened by a tradition that had since 1660 allowed the play to become the vehicle not only for spoken drama, but for large quantities of music and dance as well.

This paper announces a forthcoming bibliography for dance scholars and details some of the major sources it will list. The publication originated as a bibliography for a course on French music and dance taught at the University of California, Riverside, by Dr. Judith Schwartz, Wendy Hilton (guest artist), and the author. It has since taken on larger dimensions, including the cooperation of another scholar, Dr. Meredith Little of Stanford University. The collaborators sought to develop a definitive bibliography on French dance of the period 1643-1793.

The bibliography will be published by Joseph Boonin, Inc., in the series Music Indexes and Bibliographies, George R. Hill, General Editor. The full title is French Court Dance and Dance Music during the Reigns of Louis XIV-Louis XVI: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources. Part I contains printed and manuscript collections of notated chorégraphies, and an index of musical incipits for notated chorégraphies. Part II contains writings about dance and dance notation. Part III contains writings about dance music, with a selective list of composers of dance music in the French manner.

The medium of dance can refine its own instrument; the dancer gains fuller possession and utility of the body, of sensibilities, the uniqueness of total self. The rational and intuitive begin to flow freely into each other; the equipment becomes more subtle. Dance can thus be one more way, and a potent one, of enabling a human being to command more fully his powers.

Philosophical statements such as this exemplify the emphasis the dancer must put upon the ideal as well as upon the practical application of the real. Dance technique, how-ever, exhibits the gap between fact and theory. Today, the dance instructor has available literature related to kinesiology and research methods that could be of help to improve the theory underlying dance technique; but it appears that full advantage has not been taken of these resources to correct existing errors in technique.

Dance in a particular cultural tradition may be analyzed from any of several different perspectives, which may be classified in two categories. In the first, analysis may be structural or stylistic. By structure I mean the set of relationships among discrete movements characteristic of a dance tradition; it is similar to grammar in language (cf. Woodard 1976). Style refers to the general qualities of a dance tradition or classes of the tradition: tempo, energy level, parts of the body used, characteristic number of dancers, smoothness or abruptness of movements, body decorations and objects manipulated in the dance (cf. Lomax 1968:222-273). Although this category is concerned with analysis of dance qua dance, it may justifiably be argued that a kind of meaning inheres in pure structure and style, and therefore that their analysis is an explication of meaning.

Other ways of analyzing dance in a cultural tradition approach meaning in a different way. Meaning is sought in the relationship between structure and style on one hand and other aspects of the culture on the other.