Elegance and freedom

The ballroom dancing of the baroque era is restrained and rational.  It is as far remove as can be from the dancing that results from the injunction to "let it all hang out, baby" that insinuated itself in the sixties.  Here is a move from that dancing.  The move is called doing a reverence, or bowing.  Note that it is mutual: both partners must participate. And what they participate in is an art form where nature is constrained and restrained and forced by human will to conform to ideal patterns. A complicated reverence requires presence of mind and self-control.  It cannot be performed by, say, someone in the grip of road rage. 

In such a move we see tradition, order, rules, restraint and training at work.  Indeed, at the end of the video we hear the voice of the teacher, the dancing master of those days.  Dancing was something you learned how to do, not something that was inside you automatically and merely needed a steady rhythm and a few pops to come out. It was the epitome of being civilized.  The puritans could sniff at dancing but society, both high and low, enjoyed it in a good spirited way.  Whether in the manor house or in the barn, the dancers, the musicians, the dancing-masters, the onlookers knew good form when they saw it.

Romanticism smashed all that.