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Danza Mundana

The most quoted philosophical work on dance is Sir John Davies’ Orchestra Or a Poeme of Dauncing (1596). Davies sees dancing as the means by which order is imposed on chaos and as a symbol of harmony and accord amongst planets, people, or ideas:

Dauncing it selfe both love and harmony,
Where all agree, and all in order move;
Dauncing the Art that all Arts doe approve:
The faire Caracter of the worlds consent,
The heav'ns true figure, and th'earths ornament. [16]

According to Davies, the symmetrical choreography of figured dances mirrors and makes manifest the divine order of the cosmos, as well as providing a pleasing visual display. Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) expresses a similar idea, “The Sun and Moon (some say) dance about the earth... they turn round, jump and trace... Four Medicean stars dance about Jupitar, two Austrian about Saturn &c., and all (belike) to the musick of the Speres.” [17] Although Burton employs more technical language than Davies, he similarly embraces dancing as an appropriate metaphor for the movements of the heavenly bodies.

However, the celestial movement is not the only example of danza mundana in Orchestra. Davies also sees the creation of the world as a dance:

Dauncing... then began to be,
When the first seedes whereof the world did spring,
The Fire, Ayre, Earth and Water did agree,
By Loves perswasion, Natures mighty King,
To leave their first disordred combating;
And in a daunce such measure to observe,
As all the world their motion should preserve. [18]

Wherever structure and organization emerge out of chaos and disorder, Davies sees dance. Moreover, as Alan Brissenden explains in Shakespeare and the Dance, “Since number and pattern are essential to it, dance was seen as the means by which order came out of primal chaos.” [19] Whether in describing the creation of the world, or the subsequent motion of heavenly bodies within it, dancing imparted a sense of both the beauty and wonder of the natural world and its order and hierarchy.

While Orchestra‘s version is certainly distinct from the generally approved Christian creation story, dance as a metaphor for ordered movement was not inherently anti-Christian, and indeed most dancing manual writers went to great lengths to emphasize the biblical precedents for “a time to dance.” [20] Rather than undermining or perverting Christian theology, positing creation as an orderly, choreographed dance strengthened the argument for a divinely created world. Still, the Orchestra relies on classical more than on biblical writings. The poem was, after all, nominally “a Dialogue between Penelope and one of her Wooers.”

Similarly, Plato inspired Sir Thomas Elyot’s handful of references to the cosmic dance in The Boke Named the Gouernour (1531), “The interpretours of Plato do thinks that the wonderfull and incomprehensible ordre of the celestial bodies, I meane sterres and planettes, and their motions harmonicall, gaue to them... a semblable motion, whiche they called daunsinge or saltation.“ [21] Elyot gives the danza mundana much less attention than Davies does, preferring the utility of the danza humana and danza practica. Nevertheless this passage clearly demonstrates Elyot’s conscious nod to classical philosophy.

As previously noted, interest in and reliance on classical learning was standard for writers on dance. In the Renaissance, “All discussions of dancing, by philosophers, educationalists, churchmen and dancing masters came to include at least some references to the dances of Antiquity, indeed, to know about these dances seems to have been expected of a well-educated man.” [22] Further more, not only was an educated man supposed to be familiar with the kordax and the pyrrhic dance, he was also expected to know the galliard and the pavan.

Footnotes