Network of Dancing Masters in German Speaking Area (1600-1750)

In the 17th and 18th centuries, a lot of Italian, English and French dancing masters moved to German-speaking areas. The German rulers engaged them for teaching dancing and choreographing ‘ballets de cour’. Some of them wrote libretti, published dance collections or theoretical tractates.  

This paper will discuss how the dancing masters lived and worked at German courts. Did they have a high reputation? How did they communicate? Were there standards in dance pedagogic?  In order to analyze these questions, documents like letters, autobiographies, contracts, personal lists, teaching orders as well as descriptions of ballet performances and pictures of dancers will all be consulted.    

Uta Dorothea Sauer studied Musicology, History, Social Science and Psychology at the Technische Universität Dresden. After her study she worked for the Festival Dresden 800 organizing the revival of the opéra ballet “Les Quatre Saisons”. From 2008 to 2010 she was curator of an exhibition in context of the project “Clara und Robert Schumann in Dresden” (TU Dresden). In 2009 she became a Research Assistant at the Institute of Art und Musicology at TU Dresden (supported by the Europäischen Sozialfonds ESF) in order to write her thesis about ballet at the Dresden Court. Since 2013 she has been working as an Associate Lecturer organizing conferences and curriculum lectures for the TU Dresden. Concurrently she finished her doctoral studies. Her scientific interest is focused on dance and music history as well as systematic musicology, and in 2016, she starts studies of “Dance as Music Cognition. Theories and Methods of a Systematic Dance Research”. In respect of that she gave presentations in Warsaw, Rome, Zurich, Zittau, Dresden, London, Oxford and Belfast and published the results in encyclopedias and proceedings.      
Uta_Dorothea.Sauer@mailbox.tu-dresden.de