Stepping through History Five Hundred Years of Dance and Type
Contents Introduction 1469
Galliard Jenson typeface
1754
Minuet Baskerville typeface
1784
Waltz Didot typeface
1845
Polka Clarendon typeface
1903
Tango Franklin Gothic typeface
1956
Twist
Helvetica typeface
Dance masters were needed to teach the complicated steps, gestures, and floor pattern of the minuet.
Introduction Dance and language share innateness to the human experience: All humans everywhere and in all times have used language and dance to express themselves. This small collection traces the evolution of one subset of language, typography, and social dance (as opposed to performance dance) over five hundred years, from the Early Renaissance to the International era of the 1960s, looking at the dominant dance and the emerging typographic standard at six moments in that period. We also pause to consider the particularities of a single expressive letter form in each typeface, the Q, to illustrate the personality of the type and the times. In both typography and dance the new does not necessarily eliminate the old. For example, the Baskerville typeface from 1754 is still used by universities and others who wish to convey their seriousness; and the waltz remains de rigueur as the first dance at wedding receptions, two-and-a-half centuries after it emerged from Bavaria to take the world by storm. And still in both domains the new invigorates or supplements rather than supplants the old and creativity remains effervescent. This book is a companion to the Typography Museum exhibit of the same name.
Queen Elizabeth I is said to have loved the galliard and danced it for her morning exercise.
Humanist Type Style
Jenson (1469) Jenson, the first Roman-styled typeface, bears the mark of the handwritten letters on which it was based. The life of Claude Jenson, the typeface designer, illustrates the lively cultural exchange occurring in the period before modern European country borders were fixed. He was born in Champagne, France; studied in Mainz, Germany with Gutenberg; opened his printing shop and designed his typeface in Venice; and died in Rome.
Galliard
Early Renaissance
Uncontrollable zest The galliard (from the French gaillard for “lively”) is a vigorous Early Renaissance court dance performed first as the afterdance of the stately pavane and later as an integrated dance of the two. It appeared at the end of the fifteenth century in Lombardy (Italy)and is mentioned in France in 1529 and in England in 1541. It was popular until about 1620. The step was performed in six counts (two measures in moderate three-four time) as a wooing pantomime. After a general promenade through the hall with his partner, the man released the woman and danced in front of her; she retreated
dancing to the opposite end of the hall in coy courtship. It was the only dance performed bareheaded, the man holding his hat in his hand. From this dance come the five thrusting steps known as les cinq pas—or sinkapas as Shakespeare called them. This linguistic borrowing illustrates the great cultural mixing among the European peoples of the day, including in the dance. One contemporaneous observer said, “Word coining is the order of the day and foreign and native classical and dialectical are combined with uncontrollable zest.” This expresses precisely what is taking place at the same time in the dance.
The tail on the Jenson Q resembles the uplifted arm of a galliard dancer as she grasps her partner's hand.
The minuet held sway for more than 100 years in the glittering ballrooms of the French aristocracy.
Transitional Type Style
Baskerville (1754) John Baskerville designed his typeface to go with the paper and ink he also engineered and on the press he designed. With this superior paper and ink, the ink spread less on the paper and he could increase the contrast between the thick and thin of the lines in his letter forms. These forms echoed the uprightness of the posture of the minuet dancers, whose time was ending as he worked. In his own time, the French appreciated his work more than his own countrymen.
Minuet
Baroque Era
Creative power of artistic prescriptions The age of Louis XIV, the Sun King, is the peak in the development of the minuet. The French court believes in the creative power of artistic prescriptions. The artistic strength of the French dance lies in its technical perfection, its striving for the classical ideals of clarity, regularity, and balance—even if bought at the price of rigidity. Yet the steps— two bending and two straight—are simple. The body is held erect. The minuet is performed in open couples; spectators and partners are saluted with ceremonial bows. With the minuet the leap is no more. The step becomes dainty, mincing. After the bow
comes gallant play—the sexes meet and separate, glide past each other gracefully, approaching and retreating, searching and evading — the ancient dance play of courtship, yet almost unrecognizable. The erotic is stylized. Eros here is the courtly ideal of devotion, not love; discipline, not impulse. The dance follows a clear floor pattern, which evolves from a figure 8 into an S and then a Z. The radical change in social conditions and ideals at the close of the eighteenth century meant the end of the minuet. Like the French court, it was deposed and made obsolete.
The tail on the Baskerville Q resembles the Z or the 2 of the minuet’s floor pattern.
The Viennese waltz is considered the standard among waltz variations.
Modern Type Style
Didot (1784) While the Germans’ dance takes the world by storm, Firmin Didot, the second generation of a Parisian printing dynasty, designs a typeface with thick vertical strokes and bracketless serifs flattened to a very thin horizontal line. The accentuated contrast required—and requires still—high-quality paper and printing processes, so that the typeface yet today denotes exclusivity and sophistication.
Neoclassical Era
Waltz Intimate exuberance The waltz deposed the minuet like the French Revolution deposed Louis XVI. It emerged from the new bourgeois society as the old courtly world came to an end. The waltz abandoned stylized courtship for exuberance and communal festivity. Gone are the mincing steps that lead nowhere; now whirling, exuberant romance leads the way. What is more, it is a couples dance, not a group dance. In the waltz’s intimate embrace, the man holds the woman in his arms, their faces a few inches apart. Their movement is characterized by swaying, a smooth rising and falling—sweeping movements and
turning figures. The tempo is faster than with the minuet. Not only feeling propels the new dance out of Bavaria into all of European society, but technological development as well. Floors are smoother and shoes are no longer cobbled together with nails that would impede the sliding steps of the waltz. Wherever the waltz spread it was first seen as vulgar and inappropriate, not only because of its tight embrace but also because of the relative simplicity of its steps. But the waltz, with all the permutations it has undergone, became perhaps the most popular dance of all time.
The tail on the Didot Q looks like the skirts of waltzing ladies as they twirl around the dance floor.
Polka behavior in Parisian dance halls was so outrageous that the police intervened.
Egyptian Type Style
Clarendon (1845) Clarendon is contemporaneous with the polka. It is a slab serif designed to reproduce well in the new medium of newsprint advertising, making “a striking word or line either in a hand bill or title page,� as its foundry advertised. The consumerism of polkamania and the advertising intent of the Clarendon typeface go together.
Polka
Industrial Revolution
Frenetic reign of polkamania The polka is a lively courtship dance
its sweep westward—to London
that originated, despite its name,
by 1844 and to America by 1845.
not in Poland but in Bohemia. It is
Many variants emerged; everyone
characterized by three quick steps
claimed to have the authentic dance.
and a hop and is danced to fast-
The polka was the rage not only in
tempo music. Like in the waltz,
ballrooms but also on the stage.
dancing couples circle the perimeter
These were days of the industrial
of the dance floor. The dance is so
revolution and the birth of consumer
lively it is likened to galloping.
society. One could buy polka jackets,
Beginning about 1830 as a Czech
polka hats, and polka boots in which
folk dance, the polka by 1835 had
to dance the polka. The common
spread to the ballrooms of Prague;
Swiss dot fabric, a muslin with
from there, to Vienna, and by 1840
a regular array of small circles,
to Paris. Polkamania ensued. Dance
becomes polka dotted. Polka dots are
masters could not meet demand;
today the remaining vestige of the
they enlisted ladies of the night to
consumer products of polkamania.
teach the steps. The polka continued
The tail on the Clarendon Q looks rather like half of a big twirly mustache such as fashionable men wore at the time.
The tango was taken up and transformed into a less lascivious dance by high society in Europe and America.
Gothic sans Type style
Franklin Gothic (1903) Morris Fuller Benton designed the first weight of Franklin Gothic as the tango emerged half a world away, and as the tango spread, the type family grew in weights and styles. Franklin Gothic is about business and getting things done (although it is not without whimsy or humor), while the tango seems to revolt against the trend of machinization of human nature and the mechanization of tools.
Machine Age
Tango Ceding to passion and nature The tango evolved at the turn of the twentieth century in dance halls and brothels along the Rio Bravo, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay, merging Spanish flamenco and the African-influenced Cuban habanera. The tango is danced in close embrace, with the man and woman touching chest-to-chest. It uses crossing and flexing steps and dramatic pauses halfway through a glide. It is less a dance representing courtship, as European dances throughout history have been, than a simulacrum of sex itself, with dancers’ limbs intertwining and raw emotion leading the way. The steps are improvised; there is no predetermined sequence that dancers must follow.
The man leads not with his hands or his feet but the weight of his body. The woman follows, maintaining her own equilibrium from her own center while keeping the axis of the couple, but without trying to guess the steps that will come next. When it arrived in France in 1910 its scandalous sensuality released a frenzy that spread to England and Germany, and by 1913 to the United States. As the dance traveled around the world and from the lower classes to the higher, new tango styles emerged. But the Argentine is considered the authentic, and it is still danced in Buenos Aires, where the dance is considered part of the city’s cultural heritage.
The tail on the Franklin Gothic Q looks like the leg of the tango dancer as she kicks up her heels.
Scandalously racially integrated dancers in New Jersey dance the twist to a live band.
Neo-grotesk Type Style
Helvetica (1956)
In the documentary Helvetica, Wim Crouwel said about the typeface, “It was neutral.� As the typeface showing no emotion, Helvetica represented authority and corporate dominance to some. The spirit of the twist is more akin to the rebellion against the hegemonic culture Helvetica was seen as expressing than to the typeface itself.
Twist
International Style
Breaking the rules The twist started the trend in popular dance in which partners do not touch. Indeed, a dancer did not need a partner at all to dance the twist. The twist bubbled up to the white world from the African American experience and became part of the teenage life of Americans in the mid-1950s. The dance’s popularity preceded Chubby Checker’s 1960 hit, “The Twist”; the Drifters sang about a girl doing the twist in a popular song from the 1950s, but “The Twist” cemented the dance’s renown throughout society. With their feet positioned shoulders’ width or more apart, one foot forward,
Q
dancers swiveled their hips, arms bent at the elbow and held out from the body, while lifting alternate heels and twisting the ball of the foot. Dancers might add vertical movement or lift one leg off the floor for styling. As ever, the new dance created scandal. Not only scandal, but injury. Teenagers were damaging their knees, and the middle-aged, who could not resist joining in the fun, were throwing out their backs. Culture was spreading in new directions, from young to old and from the new world to the old as the twist spread from America to the rest of the world with rock-and-roll music.
The tail of the Helvetica Q shows the minimalist nature of the typeface, like the steps of the twist.
Colophon The generosity of public institutions in digitizing their collections and making them available online to the public for free made this book possible. Illustrations come from the following institutions: Intro Z Library of Congress—Excerpt from Le Maître a Danser by Pierre Rameau, 1725 Galliard Rijksmuseum—Dansend paar by Heinrich Aldegrever, 1551 Minuet Metropolitan Museum of Art—Le bal paré by Antoine Jean Duclos, 1774 Waltz
National Gallery of Art—The Waltz by Anders Zorn, 1891
Polka
New York Public Library—Polkamanie by Charles Vernier, 1844
Tango
New York Public Library—Ted Shawn and Norma Gould in the Argentine Tango by Rembrandt Photographers, 1914
Twist
Library of Congress—Riverheart High School to Montauk: Doing the Twist in the Baggage Car by Herman Hiller, 1962
© 2016 Andrea Heggen