Until the Renaissance and seventeenth century in Europe, theater, music, and dance were ritual arts. Performance in early-modern Europe took the form of religious or court spectacles, which often included all of the living arts performed together.
European theater achieved the status of high art through the poetic compositions of Shakespeare and the French Classical playwrights, whose work could be printed and disseminated across Europe. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, innovations in dance, notably in how dancers recorded what they did, gave this art form a life of its own. Choreography, from the French "chorégraphie," a symbolic language of movement still in use today, was perfected at Versailles in the 1690s.
The time period in which dance was written down is a turning point in the history of European performance. Henceforth, choreographed movement claimed an ancient history and became the subject of critical inquiry when it took the form of a written language. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth century the shift from ritual performance into modern dance was manifestly facilitated by the passage of movement into print culture.
Drawing on early-modern documents preserved in the Rare Books Division of Marriott Library at University of Utah, we have archived a short history of European dance as it intersects with theater, print, and visual culture.