Basse Danse

The feet stay low and the weight is carried high, with a slight rise onto the toes at the beginning of a step unit and a controlled lowering at its close, producing a rocking rise and fall without any leaving of the ground. The double is a three-step travelling unit and the reprise a small drawing motion that recovers ground or marks time; there is almost no turning and no elevation. The line of travel is essentially straight down the hall, with the couple maintaining a light joined hold and moving as one.

A couple dance performed as a procession. Partners stand side by side with hands lightly joined and move together; there are no figures that separate them or take them across to other couples, and the group ordering matters as much as the pair.

No competitive form exists or ever has. It survives in early-dance reconstruction, where it is taught in workshops and performed at early-music festivals, and it is more often a scholarly problem than a piece of repertoire. Disagreements about how the notation maps onto musical time produce visibly different reconstructions of the same choreography.

The Burgundian and French form is the plain slow processional described above. The Italian bassadanza belongs to a different tradition in which dances move between contrasting measures and admit more variety of figure and tempo, and the two should not be treated as one dance under two names. A simplified common form circulated later and is described as a degenerate version by writers who preferred the older sequences.

Basse does not refer to low social rank or to bass instruments; it describes keeping the feet near the floor, in contrast to the high or leaping dances. It is also easy to overread the surviving notation: it records the order of step units reliably, but says far less about their timing, styling and relation to the music than reconstructions often imply.