Book Review: A Dance Through Time

I received a copy of Jeremy Barlow's A Dance Through Time: Images of Western Social Dancing from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Bodleian Library, 2012) as a Christmas gift from a friend.  I know (of) Barlow primarily through his excellent recordings of sixteenth and seventeenth century dance music as the leader of the Broadside Band.  I've read only a few of his many articles and books, but I trust his scholarship and consider my copy of his edited edition of the music from the eighteen editions of Volume I of Playford's The Dancing Master, The Complete Country Dance Tunes from Playford's Dancing Master, 1651-c.1728, invaluable for working with Playford-published country dances. 

A Dance Through Time combines Barlow's interest in dance and music imagery with the collection of Oxford's Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum, with stunning results: a sturdily-bound trade paperback printed on heavy, glossy paper containing forty-nine full-color images of dance ranging from illuminatons from the margins of medieval manuscripts to photographs of twentieth-century ballroom dancers.  A number of them are completely new to me.  Barlow offers commentary throughout on the depiction of dance and points out intriguing similarities across the centuries in the representation of varying styles of dance and the social class of the participants. 

Unsurprisingly, given Barlow's expertise in early music, the book is much stronger on illustrations of medieval and Renaissance dance than on eighteenth and nineteenth century dance, but that makes it all the more useful -- I have far fewer images from the earlier eras.

The commentary is aimed at a general audience and, as it covers at least eight centuries of dance, necessarily only an overview of the topic, but I found it useful and interesting.  I do think Barlow occasionally goes a bit too far in regarding images as depicting a particular dance rather than being symbolic illustrations of dance in general, but he is clear enough about when he is speculating.

The one complaint I have with the presentation of the images is that some of the larger ones are printed across two facing pages, meaning that the centers of the images are partly lost by the way the pages are bound.  I would have happily settled for smaller reproductions that I could see all of.  Happily, his index of illustrations includes the locations of the originals, so tracking them down would be easy enough.  And the index offers intriguing hints of the riches the Bodleian has to offer.

I highly recommend A Dance Through Time both for dance researchers and for anyone who enjoys historical dance. 

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