Bourrée

The bourrée (borrèia; also in England, borry or bore) is a dance of French origin and the words and music that accompany it. The bourrée resembles the gavotte in that it is in double time and often has a dactylic rhythm. However, it is somewhat quicker, and its phrase starts with a quarter-bar anacrusis or "pick-up", whereas a gavotte has a half-bar anacrusis. In the Baroque era, after the Academie de Dance was established by Louis XIV in 1661, the French court adapted the bourrée, like many such dances, for the purposes of concert dance. In this way it gave its name to a ballet step characteristic of the dance, a rapid movement of the feet while en pointe or demi-pointe, and so to the sequence of steps called pas de bourrée. The bourrée became an optional movement in the classical suite of dances, and J. S. Bach, Handel and Chopin wrote bourrées, not necessarily intending them to be danced. The bourrée originates in Auvergne in France. It is sometimes called the "French clog dance" or a "branle of the sabots". First mentioned as a popular dance in 1665 in Clermont-Ferrand, it still survives in Auvergne in the Massif Central and in the department of Ariège and is danced during bals folk in France and in other countries. The present-day dance in lower Auvergne, also called Montagnarde (Montanhardas), is in triple time while that of high Auvergne called Auvergnate (Auvernhatas) is in double time. Modern variants termed bourrées are danced as partner dances, circle dances, square dances and line dances. However bourrées have been composed as abstract musical pieces since the mid-16th century. Michael Praetorius mentions it in his Syntagma musicum and it is one of the dances arranged for his collection Terpsichore. However, there is no early dance notation and it is difficult to assess the early interaction of the folk dance and the courtly dance. Musically, the bourrée took on the common binary form of classical dance movements, sometimes extended by a second bourrée, the two to be played in a grand ternary form A–(A)–B–A.