A PLEASING PAS DE CHEVAL.

LE CARROUSEL DU ROI
BERKELEY FESTIVAL AND EXHIBITION
HEATHER FARMS PARK
WALNUT CREEK, CALIFORNIA
JUNE 9-10, 2000

In the seventeenth century, every minor Italian duke who married his son to a daughter of an equally minor Austrian duke arranged for a wedding celebration that almost inevitably included an equestrian ballet. The fashion may well have started with Mafia de Medici in 1612, when she commissioned a horse ballet to celebrate the engagement of her son Louis XIII to a princess of Spain. It was this ballet, a semblance of which was reconstructed by musicologist Kate van Orden and dressage trainers Creeky Routson and Teresa Trull, that proved to be the crowd pleaser at this year's Berkeley Festival and Exhibition.

Spectacularly costumed and ably accompanied by period music (assembled by conductor Richard Cheetham), this was a delightful evocation of what the original pageant--which apparently went on for hours and involved a cast of hundreds--might have been like. Since the actual ballet which van Orden had unearthed was short, Routson choreographed additional numbers in the spirit of the time: a stately procession for the knights (all twenty-one of them) a mock tournament, a quadrille (on ponies) for "the young ladies of the court" and a divertissement (girl tumblers and a patient Appaloosa).

While these choreographies, based on dressage principles that originated around the time of the ballet, were relatively simple, they had their charm, particularly in the way music and dressage moves cooperated. The stately entrance for the ponies, for instance, was performed to mellow tunes on the sackbut, while that for the knights was preceded by drum and trumpet flourishes and then segued into martial airs for a whole spectrum of Renaissance instruments.

"Combat for the Trophy of Love," the tournament, based on a poem by Pierre de Ronsard, featured three white and brown horses representing opposite sides of the issue. Their prancing, trotting and stepping-in place patterns included head-to-head confrontations, criss-cross, half-quarter and full-circle patterns done in varied measures. Simple, but charming, it was narrated by an elaborately bowing master of ceremonies (actor Scott Simon) who at first didn't feel all that comfortable in Ronsard's declamatory style but who, by the end of the second performance, had found his ease.

The Carrousel's high point was the 1612 ballet a cheval for which van Orden found not only a fairly detailed description (including something approaching notation) of the choreography by dressage master and theorist Antoine de Pluvinel, but also its accompanying music by Robert Ballard. While, of course, eight horses can but approximate what the original might have looked like, it did provide glimpses into what must have been a splendid spectacle. For a dance-watcher, the most intriguing part was to recognize the court dancing of the period in the reserve and quiet elegance with which these riders went through their cadenced and geometry-inspired moves.