Heh. It was an elaborate show. I thought the dancing was quite good, if occasionally more balletic than would really happen among courtiers. The shawms were good, the recorders were good, the singing was good, the dulcians not so great, and the one rauschpfeife number took a while for all the players to get into the same key.
I saw Udalrich, and Luc and Jehan, but didn't see you there.
I found it heartbreaking. The high level of musical performance, the full period-correct costuming, the clever conceit, the astonishingly skilled dancers giving it their all and leaving it all on the stage...
...and the authenticity of the dance started rock solid, slowly degraded across the first act, then fell off a cliff and died during the intermission.
There was nothing 16th century about the dance in the second act. It wasn't even correct-for-another-period. It was just Made Up Stuff.
And, and, and the stuff that was Made Up Stuff (both first and second acts) was made up in ways which nailed the trifecta of being ahistorical, made the dancers work harder than necessary, and were unattractive artistic choices. And! In one notable case, made the dance more dangerous for the dancers.
There was one moment which stood out to me as just the perfect metonymy for the whole thing:
For literal decades early music has engaged respectability politics, where performing in historical costume was eschewed in favor of concert blacks, to signal "we are serious classical musicians!" That may have been necessary, but the consequence is that, to the extent that 16th century dance requires 16th century clothing to perform, 16th century dance was locked out of early music performance. At least 17th century dance had a role in period opera, which admits of costuming.
For my entire life, performance of 16th century dance has been, in mundania, a bit edgy, and treated as a bit gimicky. It is very rare that it has been presented at all, and usually in badly approximative costume if at all costumed. (Certainly never with the musicians also in historical costume.)
When I saw that there was a Festival concert that was 100% 16th century French music with featured dancing, and the pictures showed that they really were showing up in costume, I was pretty stoked. And particularly hopeful because god I love Doulce Memoire. If anybody could pull this off, it was them. They are far and away the most theatrical of not-actually-theater concert musicians. They are totally willing to take the risks and sell the performances they put on.
And the performers took the stage and, migod, the women were all - including the widow! – apparently wearing fully boned, fully load-bearing 16th century corsets.
And then, and then, at one point there are two couples on the floor dancing a galiard (only not) and... the men squarely face the women, put their hands on either sides of the women's ribcages, under their arms, and lift them.
...
...
...
The only thing that has been stopping the performance of La Volta on modern stages for the last fifty years has been the unwillingness to put women dancers in load-bearing 16th century corsets. And here on stage, at last, are women in all the necessary equipment to do La Volta. Houston, we are cleared for take off! Time to fly!
And the choreographer chose to put in a modern lift instead of the much easier and safer period lift. (The women provide the vertical propulsion with a jump so the men aren't lifting with their backs, and the men are grasping the women's corsetry so they can grasp the women's body firmly without crushing the women's internal organs or causing friction burns on the skin.) Which IMHO is way more visually interesting. And also, you know, actually a 16th century dance move attested to in 16th century France.
On top of everything, it's a massive violation of Checkov's Gun law of theater.
Wha... Why would you do that?! Did the choreographer not know about La Volta? Or did the choreographer not care about La Volta?
Given the pattern of cuts the woman with the feather performed during "The Abduction", the choreographer was at least familiar with the existence of Orchesography - those came right out of Buffens.
Over and over again, choices were made with the dance which suggested to me the choreographer had some glancing familiarity with period sources, but felt his entire responsibility to historically authentic dance having been acquited with a (perfectly respectable!) Rostibulli, he chose deliberately to disregard period practice in favor of making up alternatives.
Like, the entire peasant revel foolery section. The conceit is this is nobility play-acting at being peasants. Cool! We have a whole section in Orchesography - the mimed bransles – which is pretty much exactly that! Annnnnnd instead of doing any of Orchesography's mimed bransles, the choreographer just had the dancers sort of flail around goofily on stage.
Like, galliard can be thought of as a game with just two rules: 1-2-3-4-and-6, and that which is done on the left must be done on the right, and vice versa. The second rule was completely ignored. It's... it's an improvisatory dance form! You can do just about anything with your feet in it! You just have to follow the two rules and that's what makes it a galliard! The consequence of ignoring the second rule was not just to make it... not actually a galliard... it also put the dancers in the position of having to memorize twice as many figures. And, worse, by removing that structure, artistically, you actually reduce the excitement and legibility of the dance for the audience. It is a less visually attractive choice.
Like, yes, I know, period reverances are hard for moderns to acquit with conviction, but the right costuming helps! They could actually have done it correctly instead of those half-assed quasi-curtsey things we've been trying to beat out of Scadians for the last fifty years! They had hats they could have doffed!
Like, heavy use of mirror symmetry steps. What. I'm open to hearing someone found evidence of this - I've been out of the game for more than a decade! But last I heard, this was Wrong And We're Pretty Certain Of That (and that Geffrei Louarn de Kaermeriadec is really sorry for Saltarello 'La Regina').
And probably other things but by half way through the second act I had just started dissociating and I don't remember everything that made me go, "bwuh...."
It felt like the choreographer was saying, "16th century dance is unattractive and uninteresting, so I'll just Make Up Stuff - it's not like there will be anybody in the audience who will know better."
So that was my experience of it.
P.S. AND FOR ANOTHER THING there are some consequences and questions I have about the music.
Did somebody find a period arrangement of Rostibolli? Or was that modern composed?
Their choice to do the so-called "Nosegay" dance* to something other than actual Ballo del Fiori is not wrong, per se - I'm okay with musical substitutions...
... especially the substitution, by less secure and able musicians, of a thoroughly-composed piece for something that would ordinarily be improvised. sad face
(* Was that supposed to be Ballo del Fiori? What is wrong with arm demilunas? Bwuh?)
P.P.S. It was just... really... guh. To have those incredible forces all arrayed, to have all that talent and preparation at their disposal, and to see this rare opportunity squandered like that.
And I wouldn't have cared if this was some amateur theater thing, or even maybe a Fringe Festival event. But this was on the goddamned BEMF main stage.
I keep thinking of the Scadian admonishment about authenticy, "Sometimes you are the only book someone will ever read", and the heartbreaking email someone once sent to sca-dance about getting to Pennsic and discovering that all the dances she had learned in her local group weren't period, and realizing that she had basically been lied to.
This was early dance, where early music was in the 1950s. The BEMF would never have tolerated this level of non-authenticity in the music.
And I want to make this absolutely explicit: yes, as a matter of fact I am comparing a world-famous professional early music group headlining for the biggest and best respected early music festival in the world to the plastic-recorder weilding rabble of the SCA and finding the former wanting in the comparison.
P.P.P.S. Also, let me affirm that I appreciate that, in melting down over issues of authenticity in 16th century dance that nobody else at the event noticed, I have never been as Carolingian as I am in this moment.
But last I heard, this was Wrong And We're Pretty Certain Of That (and that Geffrei Louarn de Kaermeriadec is really sorry for Saltarello 'La Regina').
To be fair, I apologize for this pretty frequently, and tend to assume that Jeff feels the same, but I'm not sure I've ever explicitly confirmed that with him.
From the description, I kind of regret not seeing the show, but my blood pressure is probably happier having not done so.
On the brighter side (and actually kind of relevant): the GOH at Known World Dance this past weekend was specifically a historian of dance in Renaissance theater and court spectacle. (Emily Winerock -- she's a hoot.) *Hugely* informative -- we learned tons of stuff that I've never heard about in an SCA context, including what for all the world seems to be small-scale marching-band maneuvers on the dance floor...
I did notice the lift, but was far enough away (second row balcony, whence we could see floor patterns well) that I couldn't see exactly where they were lifting from. I did wonder whether they were going to do La Volta at any point, and was disappointed that they didn't. I noticed that the galliards were made up of plausible steps, but weren't necessarily the same on each side. And there was some line dance in which I commented to shalmestere "It's like a catalogue of every possible way to progress, done once each." And I was sorta wondering about the Ballo del Fiore thing.
I know of two period sources for the Rosti Boli tune, both monophonic (one in Ebreo or Domenico, I forget which, and the other in the Burgundian basse-dance repertoire), but the "arrangement" was in line with what we know about 15th-century ornamentation practices, and in line with lots of recordings by professional groups that have done more research than I have. I didn't have a problem with it. It was one 15th-century dance in an otherwise 16th-century show, in 16tth-century clothes, but one can imagine 16th-century courtiers occasionally doing an out-of-date dance because the King's mother likes it. Of course, they didn't do anything that looked like Caroso or Negri, either, more Arbeau. (I'm not familiar enough with 16th-century costume to know when in the 16th century they were aiming for.)
Ah here we go. Here's the artist's statement from the choreographer, emphasis mine:
The Dancing
For the dancing in this show we strove to keep as close as possible to what we know of choreographic practices under Francis I.
The scarcity of sources lead us to explore a variety of documents, form treatises on the subject to the eyewitness accounts of ambassadors of the time, not forgetting iconographic sources and descriptions of masquerades. We wished to bring out the multiplicity of court practices during that period, with the perpetuation of early repertoires, foreign influences, and the appearance of new fashions, new forms, new manners: moving towards what was to be known, much later, as the French style.
With the exception of just one dance taken from the repertoire and completely restored from information found in Renaissance treatises [they must mean Rostibulli] all the dances have been choreographed anew , using the steps, figures, and movements, but also the methods of composition and ornamentation of the Renaissance often based on geometrical or numerical relationships, and of course a fine concordance with the music. The various texts available and a wealth of untapped iconography revealed dancing that was much more inventive, virtuosic, dramatic, grotesque, or fanciful than we had imagined. We thus aimed to bring out the variety and complexity of those dances. In the different tableaux, we have explored a range of styles, from the most noble, measured, or subtle, to the most lively or demonstrative. Restoring the vitality of this "new" choreographic material finally encouraged us to restore its meaning and its spectacular dimensions too, and to go beyond a mere reconstruction of movements in order to bring to life the hearts and minds of that period.
AAAAAAAAAACH *spit*
That is some Mannschaft Pavane level bullshit.
P.S. I am beginning to suspect why is was and how it came that Ingrid Brainard was the irrascable terror she was.
They seem to be saying "all the dances have been choreographed anew" with pride rather than apology. It could be that they wanted to give the choreographer something to do, and felt that analyzing and synthesizing multiple conflicting musical and choreographic sources was insufficiently creative.
It also says, elsewhere in the notes, that the silk (!) for the costumes was sourced from a brocade company that has been in continuous business since the 16th century.
Perhaps this is me being partial, what with my fondness for Doulce Memoire, but it doesn't seem to me like this is a "they" here, but a "him". It looks to me like Denis et al are scrupulous reconstructors who do not do what the choreographer did, and would not have tolerated it if they understood - it sounds like he used points upward a heap of excuses as to why it was okay to get his Creative on and since they all sound plausible to non-dance-scholars, he got away with it.
I think Hazebroucq betrayed Doulce Memoire (and the BEMF), not that Doulce Memoire put him up to it. I think they delegated the job to him and trusted him not to do... exactly this. And he took advantage of their ignorance to supervise his work.
A pity, because he is a good dancer and has a brain. (I saw him at "Comic Italian dancing in the time of Handel and Rameau". Which referred to research he and Gloria Giordano had done, which he could speak about convincingly. I've known good dancers with less brain.) I wonder what would happen if you wrote to him.
I know of two period sources for the Rosti Boli tune, both monophonic (one in Ebreo or Domenico, I forget which, and the other in the Burgundian basse-dance repertoire), but the "arrangement" was in line with what we know about 15th-century ornamentation practices, and in line with lots of recordings by professional groups that have done more research than I have. I didn't have a problem with it.
I didn't have a problem with it either - it seemed in excellent style. I'm trying to figure out what the hell they were thinking.
And I have a hypothesis that Denis said, "Hey, let's do a program of 16th cen French dance music! Hey, we could get dancers." And that order of things has consequences.
I'm not sure how much you've wrestled this yourself: the fundamental conflict in the heart of early dance is that we have dance sources and we have music sources and they don't match. The dance sources often don't have much in the way of music - from the Brussels mss tenors to Orchesography's melodies - performance is either monophonic, polyphonic found in a music source, non-matching polyphonic, or modern arranged or improvised. The music sources, such as Susato's part books, which are thoroughly composed, not only don't have choreographies, they are for different repertoires than the dance books. The intersection of the set of extant choreographies and the set of extant thorough composed part music is small. In that set, often there is some problem with the part version of the music such that it doesn't match the dance (e.g. Bransle de Guerre in Phalese vs Arbeau). The set of choreographies and composed part music that match is, IIRC, Lorraine Alman and the Spanish Alman.
Squaring that circle is what I did for 11 years.
But I was in Carolingia, so it was, "Tibicen, we want to dance this: come up with some music".
It's looking like this was, "Hubert, we want to play music for some dances: come up with some dances."
So it's looking like the one place they did something actually authentic, it was when they did it the Carolingian way: start with the dance repertoire, and figure out how to do the music as periodly as possible.
The problem, it would seem to me, is that when you start with a strict adherance to the dance, and tell the early musicians to go figure it out, the early musicians have this whole community of practice and analytic language and, like, standards. If you do something dumb musically, the other early musicians with notice and say something like, "What are those inversion chords doing there? Aren't we in the 16th century?" (And also not play your arrangements, which is something we care about in the SCA.) There's just more people around who know what it's supposed to sound like, who will bust your chops if you do something too ungrounded.
But out in the mundane early music world, apparently nobody knows enough for early dance to realize what nonsense something like this is and halt it in its tracks. I can notice, "What's that mirror symmetry doing there? Aren't we in the 16th century?" and have the language to express that, but I spent my 20s in a living vital community of practice of early dance scholars and fans. But apparently nobody on this production was in a position to evaluate Hubert's work - the truth claims or decisions he was making.
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no subject
Date: 2019-06-17 11:30 am (UTC)I saw Udalrich, and Luc and Jehan, but didn't see you there.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-17 07:41 pm (UTC)In the second row, orch, as is my custom.
I found it heartbreaking. The high level of musical performance, the full period-correct costuming, the clever conceit, the astonishingly skilled dancers giving it their all and leaving it all on the stage...
...and the authenticity of the dance started rock solid, slowly degraded across the first act, then fell off a cliff and died during the intermission.
There was nothing 16th century about the dance in the second act. It wasn't even correct-for-another-period. It was just Made Up Stuff.
And, and, and the stuff that was Made Up Stuff (both first and second acts) was made up in ways which nailed the trifecta of being ahistorical, made the dancers work harder than necessary, and were unattractive artistic choices. And! In one notable case, made the dance more dangerous for the dancers.
There was one moment which stood out to me as just the perfect metonymy for the whole thing:
For literal decades early music has engaged respectability politics, where performing in historical costume was eschewed in favor of concert blacks, to signal "we are serious classical musicians!" That may have been necessary, but the consequence is that, to the extent that 16th century dance requires 16th century clothing to perform, 16th century dance was locked out of early music performance. At least 17th century dance had a role in period opera, which admits of costuming.
For my entire life, performance of 16th century dance has been, in mundania, a bit edgy, and treated as a bit gimicky. It is very rare that it has been presented at all, and usually in badly approximative costume if at all costumed. (Certainly never with the musicians also in historical costume.)
When I saw that there was a Festival concert that was 100% 16th century French music with featured dancing, and the pictures showed that they really were showing up in costume, I was pretty stoked. And particularly hopeful because god I love Doulce Memoire. If anybody could pull this off, it was them. They are far and away the most theatrical of not-actually-theater concert musicians. They are totally willing to take the risks and sell the performances they put on.
And the performers took the stage and, migod, the women were all - including the widow! – apparently wearing fully boned, fully load-bearing 16th century corsets.
And then, and then, at one point there are two couples on the floor dancing a galiard (only not) and... the men squarely face the women, put their hands on either sides of the women's ribcages, under their arms, and lift them.
...
...
...
The only thing that has been stopping the performance of La Volta on modern stages for the last fifty years has been the unwillingness to put women dancers in load-bearing 16th century corsets. And here on stage, at last, are women in all the necessary equipment to do La Volta. Houston, we are cleared for take off! Time to fly!
And the choreographer chose to put in a modern lift instead of the much easier and safer period lift. (The women provide the vertical propulsion with a jump so the men aren't lifting with their backs, and the men are grasping the women's corsetry so they can grasp the women's body firmly without crushing the women's internal organs or causing friction burns on the skin.) Which IMHO is way more visually interesting. And also, you know, actually a 16th century dance move attested to in 16th century France.
On top of everything, it's a massive violation of Checkov's Gun law of theater.
Wha... Why would you do that?! Did the choreographer not know about La Volta? Or did the choreographer not care about La Volta?
Given the pattern of cuts the woman with the feather performed during "The Abduction", the choreographer was at least familiar with the existence of Orchesography - those came right out of Buffens.
Over and over again, choices were made with the dance which suggested to me the choreographer had some glancing familiarity with period sources, but felt his entire responsibility to historically authentic dance having been acquited with a (perfectly respectable!) Rostibulli, he chose deliberately to disregard period practice in favor of making up alternatives.
Like, the entire peasant revel foolery section. The conceit is this is nobility play-acting at being peasants. Cool! We have a whole section in Orchesography - the mimed bransles – which is pretty much exactly that! Annnnnnd instead of doing any of Orchesography's mimed bransles, the choreographer just had the dancers sort of flail around goofily on stage.
Like, galliard can be thought of as a game with just two rules: 1-2-3-4-and-6, and that which is done on the left must be done on the right, and vice versa. The second rule was completely ignored. It's... it's an improvisatory dance form! You can do just about anything with your feet in it! You just have to follow the two rules and that's what makes it a galliard! The consequence of ignoring the second rule was not just to make it... not actually a galliard... it also put the dancers in the position of having to memorize twice as many figures. And, worse, by removing that structure, artistically, you actually reduce the excitement and legibility of the dance for the audience. It is a less visually attractive choice.
Like, yes, I know, period reverances are hard for moderns to acquit with conviction, but the right costuming helps! They could actually have done it correctly instead of those half-assed quasi-curtsey things we've been trying to beat out of Scadians for the last fifty years! They had hats they could have doffed!
Like, heavy use of mirror symmetry steps. What. I'm open to hearing someone found evidence of this - I've been out of the game for more than a decade! But last I heard, this was Wrong And We're Pretty Certain Of That (and that Geffrei Louarn de Kaermeriadec is really sorry for Saltarello 'La Regina').
And probably other things but by half way through the second act I had just started dissociating and I don't remember everything that made me go, "bwuh...."
It felt like the choreographer was saying, "16th century dance is unattractive and uninteresting, so I'll just Make Up Stuff - it's not like there will be anybody in the audience who will know better."
So that was my experience of it.
P.S. AND FOR ANOTHER THING there are some consequences and questions I have about the music.
Did somebody find a period arrangement of Rostibolli? Or was that modern composed?
Their choice to do the so-called "Nosegay" dance* to something other than actual Ballo del Fiori is not wrong, per se - I'm okay with musical substitutions...
... especially the substitution, by less secure and able musicians, of a thoroughly-composed piece for something that would ordinarily be improvised. sad face
(* Was that supposed to be Ballo del Fiori? What is wrong with arm demilunas? Bwuh?)
P.P.S. It was just... really... guh. To have those incredible forces all arrayed, to have all that talent and preparation at their disposal, and to see this rare opportunity squandered like that.
And I wouldn't have cared if this was some amateur theater thing, or even maybe a Fringe Festival event. But this was on the goddamned BEMF main stage.
I keep thinking of the Scadian admonishment about authenticy, "Sometimes you are the only book someone will ever read", and the heartbreaking email someone once sent to sca-dance about getting to Pennsic and discovering that all the dances she had learned in her local group weren't period, and realizing that she had basically been lied to.
This was early dance, where early music was in the 1950s. The BEMF would never have tolerated this level of non-authenticity in the music.
And I want to make this absolutely explicit: yes, as a matter of fact I am comparing a world-famous professional early music group headlining for the biggest and best respected early music festival in the world to the plastic-recorder weilding rabble of the SCA and finding the former wanting in the comparison.
P.P.P.S. Also, let me affirm that I appreciate that, in melting down over issues of authenticity in 16th century dance that nobody else at the event noticed, I have never been as Carolingian as I am in this moment.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-19 01:58 am (UTC)I'll be over here in the corner, sobbing quietly and hoping nobody was injured.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-20 06:56 pm (UTC)To be fair, I apologize for this pretty frequently, and tend to assume that Jeff feels the same, but I'm not sure I've ever explicitly confirmed that with him.
From the description, I kind of regret not seeing the show, but my blood pressure is probably happier having not done so.
On the brighter side (and actually kind of relevant): the GOH at Known World Dance this past weekend was specifically a historian of dance in Renaissance theater and court spectacle. (Emily Winerock -- she's a hoot.) *Hugely* informative -- we learned tons of stuff that I've never heard about in an SCA context, including what for all the world seems to be small-scale marching-band maneuvers on the dance floor...
no subject
Date: 2019-06-18 11:12 am (UTC)I know of two period sources for the Rosti Boli tune, both monophonic (one in Ebreo or Domenico, I forget which, and the other in the Burgundian basse-dance repertoire), but the "arrangement" was in line with what we know about 15th-century ornamentation practices, and in line with lots of recordings by professional groups that have done more research than I have. I didn't have a problem with it. It was one 15th-century dance in an otherwise 16th-century show, in 16tth-century clothes, but one can imagine 16th-century courtiers occasionally doing an out-of-date dance because the King's mother likes it. Of course, they didn't do anything that looked like Caroso or Negri, either, more Arbeau. (I'm not familiar enough with 16th-century costume to know when in the 16th century they were aiming for.)
no subject
Date: 2019-06-19 04:58 am (UTC)That is some Mannschaft Pavane level bullshit.
P.S. I am beginning to suspect why is was and how it came that Ingrid Brainard was the irrascable terror she was.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-19 11:12 am (UTC)They seem to be saying "all the dances have been choreographed anew" with pride rather than apology. It could be that they wanted to give the choreographer something to do, and felt that analyzing and synthesizing multiple conflicting musical and choreographic sources was insufficiently creative.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-20 04:58 am (UTC)It also says, elsewhere in the notes, that the silk (!) for the costumes was sourced from a brocade company that has been in continuous business since the 16th century.
Perhaps this is me being partial, what with my fondness for Doulce Memoire, but it doesn't seem to me like this is a "they" here, but a "him". It looks to me like Denis et al are scrupulous reconstructors who do not do what the choreographer did, and would not have tolerated it if they understood - it sounds like he used points upward a heap of excuses as to why it was okay to get his Creative on and since they all sound plausible to non-dance-scholars, he got away with it.
I think Hazebroucq betrayed Doulce Memoire (and the BEMF), not that Doulce Memoire put him up to it. I think they delegated the job to him and trusted him not to do... exactly this. And he took advantage of their ignorance to supervise his work.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-21 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-19 05:28 am (UTC)I didn't have a problem with it either - it seemed in excellent style. I'm trying to figure out what the hell they were thinking.
And I have a hypothesis that Denis said, "Hey, let's do a program of 16th cen French dance music! Hey, we could get dancers." And that order of things has consequences.
I'm not sure how much you've wrestled this yourself: the fundamental conflict in the heart of early dance is that we have dance sources and we have music sources and they don't match. The dance sources often don't have much in the way of music - from the Brussels mss tenors to Orchesography's melodies - performance is either monophonic, polyphonic found in a music source, non-matching polyphonic, or modern arranged or improvised. The music sources, such as Susato's part books, which are thoroughly composed, not only don't have choreographies, they are for different repertoires than the dance books. The intersection of the set of extant choreographies and the set of extant thorough composed part music is small. In that set, often there is some problem with the part version of the music such that it doesn't match the dance (e.g. Bransle de Guerre in Phalese vs Arbeau). The set of choreographies and composed part music that match is, IIRC, Lorraine Alman and the Spanish Alman.
Squaring that circle is what I did for 11 years.
But I was in Carolingia, so it was, "Tibicen, we want to dance this: come up with some music".
It's looking like this was, "Hubert, we want to play music for some dances: come up with some dances."
So it's looking like the one place they did something actually authentic, it was when they did it the Carolingian way: start with the dance repertoire, and figure out how to do the music as periodly as possible.
The problem, it would seem to me, is that when you start with a strict adherance to the dance, and tell the early musicians to go figure it out, the early musicians have this whole community of practice and analytic language and, like, standards. If you do something dumb musically, the other early musicians with notice and say something like, "What are those inversion chords doing there? Aren't we in the 16th century?" (And also not play your arrangements, which is something we care about in the SCA.) There's just more people around who know what it's supposed to sound like, who will bust your chops if you do something too ungrounded.
But out in the mundane early music world, apparently nobody knows enough for early dance to realize what nonsense something like this is and halt it in its tracks. I can notice, "What's that mirror symmetry doing there? Aren't we in the 16th century?" and have the language to express that, but I spent my 20s in a living vital community of practice of early dance scholars and fans. But apparently nobody on this production was in a position to evaluate Hubert's work - the truth claims or decisions he was making.