Square Dance History Project
The rich story of North American square dance finally has a home in the digital age.

Browse Items (26 total)

  • Subject is exactly "Cotillon / cotillion"
Website

An Invitation To Dance: A History of Social Dance in America

This online exhibit on the history of social dance in America draws on documents in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society to offer a multi-faceted portrait of the changing nature of… View item
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Cotillon

French dancing masters in the early 18th century created a dance for two couples called the cotillon. This morphed into the cotillion and later became the quadrille. The opening minutes of this… View item
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Cotillon - Dezais

This performance shows one of fourcotillons described by Jaques Dezais in his 1725Premier livre de contre-dances. View item
Document

Cotillon / Cotillion / Contredanse Française

referring to a dance in our collection:The dance is a contredanse from de la Cuisse, published in 1762. It was not called a cotillion in France. Once de la Cuisse had published his collection, the… View item
Website

Cotillon website

These detailed website pages are created by Moira Goff, a self-described "baroque dance specialist." They document her research into various dances of the period with a special look at thecotillon,… View item
Document

Do Squares Come from Quadrilles?

This item starts with a 1957 article by Rod LaFarge that takes a strong stand: "the assumption that our present day square dance is derived from the formal quadrille is completely false."… View item
Document

Emergence and Development of the Cotillon

Jean-Michel Guilcher is a pre-eminent scholar of French dance. This is an excerpt from his book, La contredanse: un tournant dans l'histoire française de la danse, translated for the Square… View item
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George Washington's Favourite

This dance comes from the Asa Wilcox 1793 manuscript held by the Newberry Library of Chicago; St. Louis dance leader John Ramsay found it in Leland Tichnor’s George Washington’s Birthday… View item
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History of Square Dancing - Ralph Page

Between 1972 and 1974, Ralph Page wrote a series of essays entitled A History of Square Dancing. For ease in downloading, we have collected them into "chapters" that group together similar topics.… View item
Website

Kitty Keller - Social Dance History

This is a series of six edited videos, selections from a 90-minute interview with social dance historian Kate Van Winkle Keller. She is a specialist in dances of the 18th century, and here she trace… View item
Document

La naissance du cotillon et du quadrille, contredanses françaises

Article (in French) by Simonne Voyer, who is the author of La danse traditionnelle dans l'est du Canada: quadrilles et cotillons. For a translation in English by Susan Kevra, click here. View item
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La Nouvelle Carel, French cotillion 1762

Cotillion, La Nouvelle Carel, Le Repertoires de Bals, de la Cuisse, Paris, 1762Here is another dance from the same collection, performed by a different group. View item