Beauchamp-Feuillet Notation: How the Court of Louis XIV Wrote Down Dance

A Notation Problem, Solved

For most of human history, dance has been transmitted by imitation. A teacher shows you. You copy. You practice. Maybe, if you're lucky, you learn from three teachers over a lifetime, and you remember what they taught.

Then, in 1700, a Parisian dancing master named Raoul-Auger Feuillet published a book titled Chorégraphie, ou l'art de décrire la danse par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs — "Choreography, or the art of describing dance through characters, figures, and demonstrative signs." It was the first widely-distributed dance notation system capable of recording a complete choreography on the page.

Inside the book were symbols for every step, every direction, every foot, every musical beat. Arranged on the page, they traced the literal floor pattern the dancers would make. A dance could now live on paper and be reconstructed by anyone who could read the system.

For much of the eighteenth century, this is how new court and theatre dances travelled. Collections in the notation were printed in Paris and London, and a dancing master abroad who could read it could learn a new Paris dance from the page. What the page carried was the floor track, the step units, their timing against the music and, sketchily, some arm movements. What it did not carry stayed oral: the carriage of the body, the head and shoulders, the shading of the steps, the musical phrasing. A notated dance was a precise skeleton, not a full performance.

Our general piece on dance notation systems surveys everything from Feuillet to modern Labanotation. This article is a deep dive on Beauchamp-Feuillet specifically — because it is, more than any other system, the notation that shaped how Western dance thinks about writing itself down.

The "Beauchamp" in "Beauchamp-Feuillet"

Why the hyphenated name?

Pierre Beauchamp (1631–1705) was Louis XIV's dancing master and, from 1671, director of the Académie Royale de Danse (founded in 1661; contrary to a common claim, he was not among its founding members). He is often credited as the inventor of the five basic positions of the feet — the system every ballet dancer still learns on day one.

Beauchamp developed the core of the notation system years before Feuillet's 1700 publication but never published it himself. Feuillet took Beauchamp's system, codified it, added significant innovations, and put it in print. Depending on which historian you read, Beauchamp-Feuillet is either:

• Beauchamp's invention that Feuillet stole and published
• Feuillet's invention built on principles Beauchamp had articulated informally
• A joint development over decades of which Feuillet was the final editor

The surviving documents do not settle the question, which is why the system is now usually called Beauchamp–Feuillet, crediting both men.

What the Notation Actually Looks Like

Open any Beauchamp-Feuillet plate — more than three hundred choreographies survive in the notation, inventoried by Meredith Ellis Little and Carol G. Marsh — and you'll see something surprising. You won't see a sequence of body positions the way you'd see in a modern dance manual. You'll see a floor plan.

The page is a map of the dance floor. On it, a curving line shows the path the dancer's body traces through space. Along that line, small vertical tick marks indicate the beats of the music. Clustered around the tick marks are symbols that tell you:

• Which foot takes each step (a small indicator near the tick)
• The step quality — a plain step, a hop (saut), a leap (jeté), a slide (glissé), a turn (pirouette)
• The direction the body faces as it travels along the path
• Whether the foot is bent or straight at key moments
• Small ornaments — beats of the foot, cabrioles, entrechats

Above the floor plan, or running alongside it, is the music in staff notation, aligned beat-for-beat with the floor plan.

The result is astonishing in its information density. A few pages can hold a whole couple dance, each partner's steps placed against the bars of the score. If you can read the system, you can reconstruct the footwork and floor pattern of the dance.

What It's Good At

Beauchamp-Feuillet was a near-perfect notation for a specific kind of dance: the 18th-century French court and ballroom repertoire.

These dances had several features that make them ideal for the system:

They were built around floor patterns. The menuet, the bourrée, the sarabande, the passepied, the loure — all were designed as geometric figures the couple traced on the floor. Beauchamp-Feuillet's floor-plan approach matched this structure exactly.

They used a relatively contained vocabulary of steps. A dozen base steps, each with a handful of variations, could describe almost the entire Baroque social and theatrical repertoire. Those dozen steps each got a symbol, and the symbols composed predictably.

They were through-composed, not improvised. Each dance was a specific choreography. The point of notation was to preserve and transmit this exact dance, not to capture a general style.

They were performed at a relatively modest tempo. The system had time to specify every detail.

For this repertoire, Beauchamp-Feuillet did something genuinely remarkable. We can still look at a plate from 1720 and recover the steps and floor pattern a court dancer learned, bar by bar. Very few performing arts preserve that much of their early repertoire.

What It's Bad At

The limitations show up the moment you try to apply the system outside its native repertoire.

Upper body. Beauchamp-Feuillet tracks feet and facing. Feuillet gave some signs for the arms, but the notated dances use them sparingly, and the hands, torso and head are not written at all. A notated dance captures the legs' journey through space with great precision, and leaves most of the upper body to oral tradition. For Baroque dance this mostly worked — there was a shared understanding of "how the arms go" that dancers absorbed from their teachers. But it makes the notation insufficient for any dance where the upper body is independently expressive. No Latin dance, no expressionist modern dance, no dance with complex gestural content, can be recorded in Feuillet alone.

Group dances. The system is optimized for solos, duets, and small groups. Large ensemble works with complex spatial interaction between many dancers become rapidly illegible.

Improvisation. Beauchamp-Feuillet is a recording medium for fixed choreography. Dances that are partially or wholly improvised — tango, swing, most folk traditions — can be sampled in the system (you can notate what happened on one performance) but not described as a living practice.

High tempo. When figures are thrown faster than the music can be clearly segmented, the notation's beat-by-beat specificity becomes cluttered.

These limitations explain why Feuillet faded after 1780. The repertoire itself changed. Social dancing moved from figured court dances to the waltz (which requires almost no notation — the whole dance is one figure, rotated continuously). Theatrical ballet moved toward virtuosic solo vocabulary and complex ensemble tableaux that the system couldn't handle. By 1820, Feuillet notation was a historical curiosity.

The LODance Connection

At LODance, Beauchamp-Feuillet has a special place. Its curving lines, its tick marks, its ornamented pages are the inspiration for the site's visual language. You'll see Feuillet-derived motifs throughout the platform — in dividers, in borders, in the decorative calligraphy that frames the history portal.

This isn't ornament for ornament's sake. It's a deliberate aesthetic choice: LODance catalogs the entire lineage of partner dancing, and Feuillet notation is the script in which the most important first century of that lineage was written. Treating its imagery as living visual vocabulary is our way of foregrounding that heritage.

When you see a Feuillet-style curl in a LODance page, that's not decoration. That's a quiet pointer to 1700, to a Parisian dancing master who figured out how to freeze dance on paper, and to the three centuries of dancers who learned from what he wrote.

Reconstructions Today

You can still, today, watch reconstructions of Beauchamp-Feuillet dances performed live. Several early-music and historical-dance ensembles specialize in this repertoire. Notable reconstructions include the complete Pecour and L'Abbé court dances, Isaac's English Baroque dances, and a growing catalog of theatrical ballets from the Académie Royale de Musique.

The reconstructions are imperfect — the upper-body problem means every reconstruction makes interpretive choices about arm carriage, head position, and torso inflection. But the footwork and floor pattern are read directly from the plates. Watching a reconstruction is literally watching what Louis XIV watched, with a margin of interpretation.

This is a gift. No other European dance tradition before the 20th century is recoverable in this much detail. The Renaissance sources (Arbeau, Caroso, Negri) give partial information. The 19th-century social-dance manuals give prose descriptions that leave enormous interpretive room. Only Beauchamp-Feuillet, for its brief 80-year ascendancy, gave us the dance itself on paper.

Further Exploration

Want to go deeper?

• The LODance timeline traces the arc from Feuillet's 1700 publication through the system's decline and the subsequent century of notation experiments.
• Our dance notation overview situates Beauchamp-Feuillet alongside Labanotation, Benesh, and other systems.
• The figure glossary includes Baroque dance figures with their original Feuillet citations where applicable.

Beauchamp-Feuillet is, in a sense, the first draft of a three-hundred-year-old experiment that is still ongoing: the attempt to write dance the way we write music. No one has succeeded fully. Feuillet came closer for his repertoire than anyone has for theirs since. That's why the notation, the man, and the system still matter.

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Sources

• Raoul-Auger Feuillet, Chorégraphie, ou l'art de décrire la danse par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs (Paris, 1700).
• Wendy Hilton, Dance of Court and Theater: The French Noble Style, 1690–1725 (Princeton Book Company, 1981) — the standard modern introduction to reading and performing the notation.
• Meredith Ellis Little and Carol G. Marsh, La Danse Noble: An Inventory of Dances and Sources (Broude Brothers, 1992) — the inventory of surviving notated choreographies.
• Francine Lancelot, La Belle Dance: catalogue raisonné fait en l'an 1995 (Van Dieren, 1996) — the catalogue of the French noble-style repertoire.