The unexpected choreographic career of Elizabeth Aldrich: an expert on Renaissance dance now creates steps for the ultimate twentieth-century art form

Dance Magazine, March, 1995 by Lynn Garafola

Sometimes there is nothing more to go on. In Jefferson in Paris, for instance, there is a scene where Sally Hemings, the slave woman said to have been Thomas Jefferson's mistress, dances for the future president. Aldrich hunted high and low for information about what a female house slave in late-eighteenth-century Virginia might have danced, only to discover that there were very few sources. Relying on the music, the style of the production, and the personality of the character depicted in the script, Aldrich crafted a dance that seemed appropriate to the situation at hand.

Still, Aldrich does take authenticity seriously. She describes, for instance, the fuss she made about the music for the ballroom scene in The Age of Innocence. A music consultant had been hired, and he thought that Chopin was just the thing. Aldrich pointed out that Chopin's waltzes were never used as ballroom music and that the period was wrong. So the consultant came up with another suggestion: Carl Maria von Weber's Invitation to the Dance. Best known to ballet buffs as the music for Le Spectre de la Rose, the piece, as Aldrich patiently explained, was composed years before the movie's protagonists were even born. "How about something by Johann Strauss?" she asked. They finally compromised on Strauss's Tales from the Vienna Woods, which still bothers Aldrich, since it was composed a few years after the scene actually took place.

Costumes can also be a touchy point. For the same scene Scorsese had imagined the women in swirling skirts a la Gone with the Wind. However, ball gowns of the 1870s had slim skirts and three-foot-long trains. "I had to figure out a way of making the scene look like what he wanted, despite the constraints of the costumes. So I kept the dancers moving very symmetrically, and had them turn only to the right, at exactly the same time, which created an impression of swirling." If less than totally authentic (nineteenth-century waltzers covered the entire floor and turned in both directions), the solution not only worked but also helped make this one of the film's more impressive scenes.

The picnic that launched Aldrich on a movie career changed her professional life in other ways. Prior to The Europeans, she had worked exclusively on Renaissance dance. Now she had discovered the nineteenth century. For someone interested in social dancing, this was virgin territory. "`Well,' I said to myself, `there could be a career in this.'" And so Aldrich embarked on the research that led to the founding of the International Early Dance Institute, as well as the publication in 1991 of From the Ballroom to Hell, a highly regarded study of American social dances viewed from the context of nineteenth-century manners and mores. This, in turn, led to her present research project, a book about nineteenth-century table manners and food.

Although she has completed five chapters, the manuscript has temporarily been shelved. The reason is her present one-year job at Oxford University Press as managing editor of the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Dance, nursed through the years by Selma Jeanne Cohen.