WRITING THE MOVES

KEITH M C EWING

DESCRIPTION Two pages from a dance workbook, 1708

MAKER / ARTIST Kellom Tomlinson (c. 1693–c. 1753)

REFERENCE Ms-Group-1914: MSX-2866_060; MSX-2866_061

The Turnbull has a dance manuscript dating back to 1708, a workbook penned in his youth by Kellom Tomlinson (c. 1693–c. 1753), a famed English dancing master and choreographer. It is the oldest volume in a substantial collection of dance resources that belonged to Joseph Lowe (1797–1866), one of four brothers who were all dancing masters, as their father had been. Lowe’s son, Joseph Eager Lowe, travelled to New Zealand from Edinburgh in 1853 with these resources to help him establish a dancing school in Dunedin and then Melbourne.

Tomlinson was born in London and lived and worked there throughout his life. He is most noted today for his 1735 publication The Art of Dancing, and for a series of dances he composed, published and sold during his lifetime. As an apprentice dancing master, he had started a workbook that included exercises and notations copied from published baroque dance treatises of the time. Its greatest significance, however, is the six dances composed by Tomlinson himself that had not been published previously.

In 1988, Lowe’s collection came into the Turnbull’s care via his New Zealand descendants and extended family (among them the celebrated dancer Sir Jon Trimmer). Here, dance scholar Jennifer Shennan prepared and edited the workbook for publication in facsimile in 1992 by Pendragon Press in New York. Dance historians worldwide were agog. In addition to the Tomlinson manuscript, the Lowe collection includes a rare and beautiful nineteenth-century dance manual and Joseph senior’s journal of the years he had spent teaching dance at Queen Victoria’s court.

Two pages from the workbook of Kellom Tomlinson (known also as ‘Kenelm Tomlinson’). On the left is the concluding page of ‘Canary for a Man and a Woman’. On the right is the first of two pages of ‘Saraband for a Man’. Both dances were created by Tomlinson, with the music to ‘Saraband’ also composed by him.

Reading the dance manuscript is beyond most of us. Just as many of us don’t read music, so deciphering dance notation—where the steps are transcribed into stylised symbols—is a skill known to only a few. To those who do know that mysterious code, the repertoire of dance history expands to reclaim forgotten dances.

Dance in New Zealand draws on many traditions, including those documented and encoded in centuriesold manuscripts. Dance resources in the Turnbull collections are relatively modest, but a determined search by dance performers, teachers and researchers yields treasures like the Tomlinson workbook.