Dell' Arte Cascardare

[ This article appeared in volume 4 of the Letter of Dance. ]

Choreographic Analysis of the Cascarde in Caroso's Il Ballarino

Messer Siôn Andreas o Wynedd (Ian Andrew Engle), Copyright 1996

Avant Propos

"...la danse, elle se treuue necessaire pour bien ordonner une société."
-- Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesographie

The foregoing testimony bears witness to an interesting concept from the Sixteenth century, that a single activity, dance, could have the power to form, and therefore to transform, a society. If dance ever had such power to so effect society, even in an allegorical sense, then the art and profession of the dancing masters, those who taught and formulated the dance, must have held some corresponding importance. Prior to the Fifteenth century and the earliest known codification of the art of dance, we have evidence which suggests that improvisation was the practice of the day. With the age of the named and known dancing masters, however, we are presented with a means to know how dances were constructed in the courts and upper society of the pre-Classic era.

We have a more than passing acquaintance with what constituted Sixteenth century dance, certainly. The various manuals, from the elaborate treatises of Fabritio Caroso and Cesare Negri to the less polished such as Thoinot Arbeau's Orchesographie, the cheat sheets of Lutio Compasso, Livio Lupi da Caravaggio and Prospero Luti and the bare-bones aides-memoir of the Inns of Court manuscripts, give a quite good, if yet incomplete, picture of what dance of that time was in practice. Most dances surviving from the Sixteenth century are of anonymous provenance; however, six choreographers from the time are known from their surviving works: Caroso, Negri, Lupi, and the masters Matire, Batistino and Bastiano. To understand how these choreographers created their dances, one has only to analyze their extant choreographies and compare them to the mainstream of Sixteenth century dances.

These masters mostly worked in a dance form then popular in Italy called, simply, the balletto. That term is, in and of itself, vague, especially as it seems to be applied to several different sorts of dance forms, among them four-movement "dance-suite" dances, verse/chorus divided dances running through several movements, and unified movement dances running through several movements. Of the other major dance forms of the Sixteenth century: the pavane, the galliard, the allemande, the coranto, and such like dances, there is barely a mention in the four books in which these masters' works are to be found.

The dancing master Fabritio Caroso, on the other hand, did something which was unparalleled by his contemporaries and peers. He appears to have created a dance form; at any rate he is the only choreographer, but for a single exception(1), to utilize that form, that form being the cascarda. This paper will identify the ways in which the cascarde were constructed, and hopefully by this shed some light on the art of the Sixteenth century choreographer.

La Cascarda

Introduction to the form

In the introduction to her translation of Caroso's Nobiltà di Dame, Julia Sutton has described the cascarda as a discrete, light, triple-time dance clearly related to the Sciolte in Saltarello movements of the "dance-suite" balletti. In so far as that goes, her description is correct, and, in fact, because she identified only these basic features Sutton's description is the most accurate which has been made in the literature by any dance historian. The cascarda, however, may also be identified by a highly predictable choreographic construction as well as by Sutton's basic description.

The cascarda is, as has been noted, danced to triple-metre tunes which often have distinct subsections and which are played quickly and lightly. This quality of the music makes a corresponding skipping quality proper to the steps of these dances, and by in large the seguito spezzato is the usual traveling step, taking advantage of that quality in the music. The tune will repeat anywhere from three to seven times, with four or five repetitions being the most common. Each of these repetitions is a distinct movement in the cascarda.

The tunes are often derived from popular songs of the day, and it is also possible for phrases from one cascarda melody to pop up in another.

The cascarda is primarily a couple-oriented dance. While there are some three-person cascarde, they do not conform so stringently to the standard choreographic formula which I am going to lay out, although they were obviously created with a knowledge of what this formula entailed. It is an interesting exercise to question why the three-person cascarde should differ so much from the two-person cascarde. Were they an experiment in the form? We may never know, but because they are so far from the norm demonstrated by the two-person cascarde and because they differ from one another and do not form a distinct subset of cascarda, they will for the most part be overlooked in this examination.(2)

The dancers in a cascarda affirm their identity as a couple by facing one another within a circular dance area some six feet across. Caroso did not dictate this at any point in his text, but through experimentation, this size of a dance area has proven the most conducive to the performance of the cascarda. The cascarda is then entirely contained within that area, and it is always introspective to the dance area.

The Movements: The Intrada

Examination of the movements of the cascarda reveals within each of them a tripartite division. There are three distinct, recurring, and therefore predictable, themes or parts to each movement. The first part is an initial figure, which I shall call an Intrada. The second is a posing figure, what I shall call a Mostra. The third and last is a teasing "chorus," which I shall call a Ritornello. By expanding upon and varying these basic divisions, the dances of the cascarda repertoire emerge.

The Intrada is the "hook", the showcase part of each movement due to its initial position. There is a freedom and a structure to this section of the dance. So long as a certain progression of Intrada figures is maintained in the dance, the exact ways in which the Intrade accomodate the prescribed figures vary from dance to dance.

An important feature of these Intrade is that they are figure-oriented, not step-oriented. The later sections, Mostra and Ritornello, are defined by their figures, and therefore they take their differences from the ways that the figures are done, or rather, from their steps.

There is a predictability to the progression of these Intrade from movement to movement. When deciding how to begin to examine the Intrada, one must first determine where to begin. The four- and five-movement cascarde are the most numerous and the most cohesive in their regularity, but one may derive all the various configurations of the Intrade from the basic progression found in the three-movement cascarda.

The single example of a three-movement cascarda is named "La Castellana". The Intrada of its first movement contains a circling figure accomplished with four seguiti spezzati, wherein the dancers dance in a circle around a common center point, or, as Caroso described it, "in ruota." When done "in ruota" these four seguiti spezzati suffice to bring the dancers back to the spots in which they began, and as a result I will refer to this as a Circling form, more specifically a Full Circling figure(3). The Intrada of the second movement is, essentially, a Challenging form, in this case a "Siding" movement, to use the parlance of the English country dances. The Intrada of the last movement, the Finale, is another circling figure, but instead of the four seguiti spezzati, this circling uses two sequences of the Pavane proportion of two simples and a double, varied in different ways. The first sequence leads about the circle to the left and the second to the right. Caroso also did not use the term "in ruota" when referring to this Intrada, so one may infer that there is some underlying difference between this figure and the full Circling figure. I will refer to this finale when it appears as a Grand Circling figure.

Progression of the Intrade in La Castellana:

The progressions of Intrade in the other cascarde, as has been noted above, are clearly derived from this basic formula and progression. The Intrade are basically doubled or mirrored in predicatable combinations.

The first expansion upon this formula, in the four-movement cascarda, was to double the Circling form. In some cascarde an initial Riverenza was included, and when this occured, the music could only support two seguiti spezzati "in ruota." Since two seguiti spezzati suffice only to take dancers to the opposite side of the dance, I will call this realization of the Circling form the Half Circling figure.

This example of the expansion of the three-movement cascarda to four movements is, in this regard, unique, for no other four-movement cascarda doubled the Circling form. Rather, they doubled the Challenging form. The progression of the Intrade in this dance, "Alta Sergarda," is:

Progression of the Intrade in Alta Sergarda:

Movement	Form	Realization
1	Circling	Half Circling
2	Circling	Full Circling
3	Challenging(6)	Challenging
4	Finale	Grand Circling

The four-movement cascarda is also the perfect showcase for demonstrating the other ways in which Caroso played with the figures of the Intrade. The Siding figure from the second Intrada of "La Castellana," dropping the taking of hands and dancing towards one another, "all'incontro," became instead a Challenging figure in "Alta Sergarda". As the Half Circling figure expreses the same circling form as does the Full Circling figure, so does the Challenging figure express the same challenging form as does the Siding figure.

"Alta Sergarda" is, however, a singular example of the four-movement cascarda. To create the remainder of the dances of this type, Caroso expanded mostly upon the Challenging form, not so much doubling figures but mirroring them(7). As a result, the Challenging form became a solo figure for the man first and then for the woman to perform. The steps of the soli are always the same, even though there is no continuity as to the precise steps of the soli from one cascarda to the next.

There are five examples of the four-movement cascarda: "Chiara Stella", "Fiamma d'Amore", "Florido Giglio", "Laccio d'Amore" and "Maraviglia d'Amore".

Progression of Intrade in four-movement cascarde:

Caroso in this set of dances also showed versatility in his ability to interpret the theme of an Intrada. In the four-movement cascarde, for the first time, the Siding figure, which was initially the figure used to realize the Challenging form in the three-movement dance, "La Castellana", reappears as a variant realization of the Finale form, but slightly altered so that it also may be related to the Grand Circling figure. Caroso's ability to realize such a degree of choreographic sophistication allowed him to create a wide range of dances which would be visually different while remaining thematically constant.

The five-movement cascarde are the most numerous, there being seven of them: "Bentivoglio," "Fedeltà," "Gentilezza d'Amore," "Giunto m'ha Amore," "Gloria d'Amore," "Gracca Amoroso," and "Vita e Quanto Haggio." Their derivation from the three-movement Cascarda, involved doubling the Circling form and mirroring the Challenging form.

Progression of Intrade in five-movement cascarde:

Note how "Fedeltà," while clearly different from the model used by the other five-movement cascarde in the third and fourth movements, is still true to the form in that it has returned to using the Siding figure as it was used in the Challenging form of "La Castellana". This is one of the rare cases of the Challenging form being doubled rather than mirrored.

The six- and seven-movement Cascarde are derived in the same ways that the four- and five-movement cascarde are. The six-movement cascarda, "Alta Regina," is very straightforward in that in it Caroso doubled or mirrored all sections of the three-movement cascarda(8). The seven-movement cascarda, "Leggiadra Ninfa," doubled the Circling form and mirrored the Challenging form. It then doubled the mirrored Challenging form, so that there are two sets of paired solo sections. Theoretically, an eight-movement cascarda could have been built along the lines of the seven-movement cascarda, doubling the Circling form, a mirrored pair of Challenging forms, and then a doubled Finale

Progression of Intrade in Alta Regina and Leggiadra Ninfa:

The second solo sections in "Leggiadra Ninfa," it must be noted, are distantly different from the first solo sections. As a result it can be assumed that mirroring mirrored sections to provide four repetitions of the same figure did not afford Caroso the variety he required, even though it would have been acceptable within the parameters of the formulaic progression of the Intrade.

The Mostra

With the Intrada, one may revel in the progression of form and realization from movement to movement, but in the case of the Mostra and the Ritornello, as has been noted above, one must concentrate on the steps as the figure is implicit in the section. Even then, however, no pattern will be observed.

There is no thematic progression of figure from movement to movement, and that may well be because of the very nature of the Mostra. The form is inherent in its being the Mostra. The posing aspect of the section is all the thematic content is has, or that it requires.

The Mostra, holding second position in each movement of the cascarda, may manifest in one of two different forms. I use the word manifest purposefully. The Mostra, depending upon the length of phrasing of the music, may be swallowed by either the Intrada or Ritornello where the music is of insufficient length to accommodate all three sections of the movement. Of the sixteen cascarde examined here, nine of them have the Mostra swallowed in at least one movement. The usual practice in a cascarda in which the Mostra is swallowed is for the Mostra to be absent for the whole dance except one movement. In such a case, the Mostra will usually take the form of two scambiate.

There are two major forms which the Mostra can take: Diminished and the Stepped. A minor form would be the Irregular.

The Stepped Mostra is the longer of the two major forms. It uses pairs of conventional steps to one side and then to the other, and these steps may be either scambiate, seguiti spezzati or passi grave. A quick check will show that the scambiata is done in twice the time as are either of the other two, four measures. Where steps are used which require less time to perform, the left-over time is filled in, usually by stepping into a meza Riverenza.

There are three forms of the Stepped Mostre:

• Stepped Mostra, done with Passi
• Stepped Mostra, done with Scambiate
• Stepped Mostra, done with Spezzati(9)

Dances which use the Stepped Mostre very seldom use the same step all the way through the dance. One movement will use a Stepped Mostra done with Spezzati in one movement, then one done with Scambiate, then one done with Passi. They are also very prone to being swallowed by either the Intrada or the Ritornello, and the section which is most like to swallow the Mostra is the Intrada This swallowing most often occurs when the tune itself does not possess three clear subdivisions.

Where the Mostra is swallowed, it will, however, make a minimum of one appearance per dance, and good examples of this in action may be seen in both "Fedeltà" and "Gloria d'Amore." Oddly, when the swallowed Mostra does make an appearance, it will inevitably be as a particular version of the Stepped Mostra, the two scambiate, and these scambiate have the best chance of appearing in the second movement, the first movement being the next most popular place to appear, and finally the last movement.

The Diminished Mostra is clearly a diminutive of the Stepped. It may use either puntate or trabucchetti, and the motion is always very simple, either puntate forwards and back or else trabucchetti to different sides. There are no little additions such as a step into a meza Riverenza.

There exists a final form which the Mostra might possibly take, and that is the Irregular. This is a figure which breaks from the simple posture of the Stepped and Diminished Mostre in its step choice and exact figure, but which is still a pose, that pose being the defining characteristic of the Mostra. Irregular Mostre may occur alongside other forms of the Mostra or exist on its own, and it is also susceptible to being swallowed. It may also appear as a cuckoo would, varying dances which would otherwise be classed as possessing pure Stepped or Diminished Mostra progressions.

An idea of the way Caroso used the Mostra may be had from an examination of these examples. Since there is no good way to subdivide the Mostre progressions, I can only give the progressions as they occur and let the reader draw his own conclusions.

Stepped Mostra dances

Diminished Mostra dances

Irregular Mostra dances

Most interestingly, I have been unable to note any correlation between the figure used in the Intrada and the version of the Mostra used in the same movement.

The Ritornello

The Ritornello, a teasing chorus, is in many ways the most stable part of the dance. The variations which occur in this section include Ritornelli which are done once through, twice through, and irregularly. A Ritornello may either advance or retreat, and it may or may not be resolved, which is to say, a dancer may or may not come back to place by the end of the Ritornello. A typical step combination for a once-through, retreating, resolved Ritornello might be:

"Due Seguiti Spezzati fiancheggiati indietro & un Seguito Semidoppio innanzi."

To vary this, the choreographer had a menu of steps which might be substituted for the seguiti spezzati. These included tranghi, puntate, passi grave, seguiti finti and saffice.

He might also substitute other steps and step sequences for the seguito semidoppio. These included the seguito ordinario, two passi presti to a cadenza or the corinto.

The steps involved are, however, secondary to the figure of the Ritornello. The Ritornello may be distinguished by the numbers of times it is done, by the direction or form of accomplishment, and by whether or not the travel in the Ritornello is resolved, which is to say whether or not the dancers return to the place from which they began the Rotirnello(10). There is also one unique case, in which there is no Ritornello in a movement of the cascarda "Fedeltà". One might be tempted to view this as the lone example of a Mostra swallowing a Ritornello. In any case, it is too important a variation in the form to not take note of.

As was true with the Mostre, there is no progression of Ritornelli, and likewise there is no relationship between the intent and realization of the Intrada figure and that of the Ritornello in the same movement. There is, however, an element of symetry to take into consideration when reviewing the Ritornello. There are four broad classes of Ritornello based on the way that this part of the dance is treated from movement to movement.

The first class of Ritornello is the Regular. In this Ritornello, the same step sequence is used throughout the dance, for example: aaaa.

The second class is the Symetrical. In this Ritornello, the first and last movements use the same step sequence, but the middle sections use another step sequence, for example: aba, or abba.

The third class is the Sequential. In this Ritornello, the steps sequences follow one after another, for example: aabb.

The fourth class is the Extra-Sequential. In this Ritornello, three or more step sequences follow one another, for example: abc.

The fact that there is not an asymetric progression, abaa, is interesting.

The different treatments which the Ritornello may receive are strewn across the various movement-types. In order that one might appreciate how Caroso did use these different Ritornello progressions, however, one must see them.

Regular Ritornello

Symmetrical Ritornello

Sequential Ritornello

Extra-Sequential Ritornello

In Conclusion

The importance of identifying this formula is that it can be found in a great many other places than just Caroso's cascarde. It therefore may have a much greater significance than just helping to teach the one dance form. Musically, the "Aria del Gran Duca" which is originally found as the melody for a spectacular dance in an intermedio from the opera, "La Pellegrina," and which tune was later applied to Caroso's balletto "Laura Soave," was composed according to the proportions which appear in the cascarda, as was the dance tune "La Mantouana." So too were composed Caroso's various spagnolette and several dances in Negri's Le Gratie d'Amore, "Lo Spagnoletto" and "Bizzaria d'Amore" especially. The "Bransle des Lavadrieres" from Arbeau's Orchesographie is a stripped-down dance created to the same proportions, and the country dances "Rufty Tufty" and "Gathering Peascods" from the English Dancing Master also use the proportion and progression pattern of the cascarda.

These popular proportions and progressions did not appear spontaneously, however. A cascarda was built, deliberately, according to a general plan in much the same way that Chartres Cathedral and the Parthenon were built. In fact, to best understand the structure of a cascarda it helps to visualize it as a small Graeco-Roman temple. A certain number of columns make up the temple's front colonnade, and each of those columns is constructed of three distinct parts: Base, Shaft and Capital.

The Base of the column is the Ritornello. As the cascarda is a light and flirtatious dance, the Ritornello, with its teasing retreats and advances, best exemplifies that nature. This is where all is rooted.

The Shaft is the Mostra. It connects the two other parts and holds separate the more elaborate Capital from the Base.

The elaborate Capital is the Intrada, which is fitting since most of the artistry and elaboration occur here. It is the head of each movement, and the rest of the movement depends from it. Additionally, while there is a predictable sameness to the Shaft and Base, as there is to the Mostra and the Ritornello, the Capitol of the column determines its order, as the Intrada determines a movement's place in the greater dance.

The columns of a temple catch the eye, and it is the stand of those columns that people think of when asked to visualize a Graeco-Roman temple. So likewise it is with the cascarda. The formula for its construction, once noted, becomes easy to see and likewise easy to look for. Both the temple and the cascarda, however, have something further in common. It is what is inside each which is important to contemporary peoples.

The progression of Intrade in the cascarda runs, symbolically, through a courtship, from opening gambit to consummation. As the Graeco-Roman temple housed the mysteries of the gods, so did the cascarda house the mysteries of Love. Such a conceit would certainly have been in keeping with the classical pretense of the day, but what Caroso, in fact, had in mind when he established the form of this dance type is a secret which he took with him.

Through choreographic analysis we are now better able to understand how, if not why, Fabritio Caroso composed the dances that were his and his alone. Knowing this, we modern dancing masters can borrow Caroso's formula now, step into his role, create other cascarde in a mode that is undeniably proper to the Sixteenth century and, as Arbeau noted, well-order our Society.

Bibliography

Caroso, Fabritio. Il Ballarino. Venice: Ziletti, 1581; facsimile reprint ed., New York: Broude Brothers, 1967.

Notes

1 "Allegrezza d'Amore" by Oratio Matire which is included in Caroso's Il Ballarino. Livio Lupi da Caravaggio also included a dance called "Leggiadra Pargoletta" in his Libro di Gagliarda, and one may assume that he was also its choreographer. This dance is notable in that is concludes, "sì fineranno detta Cascarda, con far la Reuerenza incontra tempo", and the lute tablature is preceded by the words, "Intauolatura di Liuto dela Cascarda." While this dance has many cascarda elements in its construction, the metre of the music is duple time, and therefore it fails the most basic of Julia Sutton's criteria defining the cascarda, the triple time metre.

2 The cascarde of Caroso s second book, Nobiltà di Dame, will also be set aside for this examination. In his introduction to Nobiltà, Caroso notes that he has corrected dances from Il Ballarino to bring them into line with his now perfected theory of beauty. Or in other words, the Nobiltà cascarde, being taken from a prescriptive codex, may be assumed to be formulaic, and they are, adhering to a formula certainly derived from that used to construct cascarde in Il Ballarino. These Il Ballarino cascarde are taken from a more descriptive than prescriptive text.

3 When examining the Intrada, one must consider both the intent of the figure, in this case circling, and the way in which that intent is realized, in this case a full circling figure, one in which the dancers come back to place. This difference between intent and realization will be remarked on at length, for the intent of the Intrade always adheres to a definite formula, and the realization of the intent follows a similar, although more elastic, formulaic progression.

4 In this case, the siding movement requires the dancers to take hands, so it is not a true siding that one would expect from England's country dances.

5 These ralizations/figures may also be represented by codes, a device which is useful in fast notation and for quicker comparison. These codes include:

• Ch = Challenging figure
• Fc = Full Circling figure
• Gc = Grand Circling figure
• Hc = Half Circling figure
• Ms = Man's Solo
• S = Siding figure
• Ws = Woman's Solo
• 2Ms = Second Man's Solo
• 2Ws = Second Woman's Solo

6 OK, this is a cop-out as far as terminology goes, but there was nothing better to describe the movement called for at this point in this dance except Challenging.

7 This difference is of interest insofar as it demonstrates the type of symmetry which was accepted in choreographies of the day. Doubling relates more to the form than to the figure. The same intent is conveyed by the Intrade in adjacent movements. The Challenging form is never simply doubled , however. It is usually mirrored, with one dancer performing the figure first, followed by the other dancers doing the same thing in the next movement.

8 It is interesting, and probably important, however, to note that Caroso in almost every other case avoided doubling the Finale. Where is was doubled, in Alta Regina, it was in the form of a Siding figure, not the Grand Circling figure.

9 If one were interested in using alphabetic codes to these Mostre, such as was shown previously for the Intrade, I have used:

• Sm (P) = Stepped Mostra, Passi
• Sm (Sc) = Stepped Mostra, Scambiate
• Sm (Sp) = Stepped Mostra, Spezzati
• swi = Mostra swallowed by the Intrada
• swr = Mostra swallowed by the Ritornello
• Dm (Pn) = Diminished Mostra, Puntate
• Dm (T) = Diminished Mostra, Trabucchetti
• Zm = Irregular Mostra

10 If one were interested in using alphabetic codes to the Ritornelli, such as was shown previously for the Intrade and Mostre, I have used:

• X1 = Ritornello done one time through
• X2 = Ritornello done twice through
• (Ad) = Advancing
• (Rt) = Retreating
• (Ar) = Archreprise

This Archreprise is a combination step involving two riprese and two trabucchetti, often with a turn thrown in on the end. It is used extensively in the cascarda's sister dance form, the Spagnoletta.

• /r = Resolved (ie: X2 (Rt/r))
• nn = No Ritornello