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 entlemen
invite your Ladies!
 eing
a form of mimicry and aesthetics, dance, since its earliest origins, has
always been an expression of culture, elegance and good manners….
Arising from the rhythm of movement and from the charm
of music, dance is an almost instinctive pleasure and seems to be designed
to express the joy of life.
 ith
these words G. Gavina, one of the greatest dancing-master of the century,
opened his 1914 volume dedicated to XIX century traditional dances entitled
“Balls of Yesterday”. Just in those words we recognise the spirit which
inspired the group of young students who in 1991 founded the Società
di Danza in Bologna.
 he
Società di Danza emerged from a workshop experience organized by
the department of Music and Recreation of the University of Bologna, and
nowadays it is a cultural association which carries out historical researches
about XIX century trditional dances. Its purpose is to connect philological
exactness in the interpretation of old dance manuals, with the opportunity
of reviving old dances in a contemporary social framework.
altzes,
polkas,
mazurkas,
quadrilles and
country dances come back to embellish
the ancient ball rooms, theatres and splendid squares of many Italian towns,
giving life to a way of dancing which purpose is not only the pursuit of
artistic value, but also the pleasure of socializing.
he
starting point is society dance of the first decades of XIX century, which
was a widespread custom in European tradition, but restricted to a narrow
social group: aristocracy, the court, the upper middle class and wealthy
and cultured people. The destiny, fashions and lifestyles of these social
groups blended together continuously during the century, and the result
was that people danced in the same way in Rome as well as in Paris, in
Bologna as well as in London. The “Società di Danza” makes a travel
in the past in order to restore a tradition which got lost over the XX
century, and seeks for artistic design and technique of composition in
the testimony of XIX century dancing masters, without falling into mere
philology.
The “Società di Danza” is situated in different
Italian towns (Bologna, Modena, Pisa, Livorno, Ferrara, Faenza, etc.) where
weekly classes are dedicated to the study of dance techniques and the culture
of society dance.
esides,
the “Società di Danza” organizes special courses, both practical
and theoretical, in cooperation with dancing masters coming from all over
Europe.
The “Circolo Bolognese” is an associate of The Royal
Scottish Country Dance Society of Edimburgh, which propagates country dances
tradition all over the world.
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