1.
Dance
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Dance is a performance art form consisting of purposefully selected sequences of human movement. This movement has aesthetic and symbolic value, and is acknowledged as dance by performers and observers within a particular culture, Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoire of movements, or by its historical period or place of origin. Other forms of movement are sometimes said to have a dance-like quality, including martial arts, gymnastics, figure skating, synchronized swimming. Theatrical dance, also called performance or concert dance, is intended primarily as a spectacle and it often tells a story, perhaps using mime, costume and scenery, or else it may simply interpret the musical accompaniment, which is often specially composed. Examples are western ballet and modern dance, Classical Indian dance and Chinese and Japanese song, most classical forms are centred upon dance alone, but performance dance may also appear in opera and other forms of musical theatre. Such dance seldom has any narrative, a group dance and a corps de ballet, a social partner dance and a pas de deux, differ profoundly. Even a solo dance may be solely for the satisfaction of the dancer. On the other hand, some cultures lay down strict rules as to the dances in which, for example. Archeological evidence for early dance includes 9, 000-year-old paintings in India at the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka and it has been proposed that before the invention of written languages, dance was an important part of the oral and performance methods of passing stories down from generation to generation. The use of dance in trance states and healing rituals is thought to have been another early factor in the social development of dance. References to dance can be found in very early recorded history, Greek dance is referred to by Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, the Bible and Talmud refer to many events related to dance, and contain over 30 different dance terms. In Chinese pottery as early as the Neolithic period, groups of people are depicted dancing in a line holding hands, Dance is further described in the Lüshi Chunqiu. Primitive dance in ancient China was associated with sorcery and shamanic rituals, during the first millennium BCE in India, many texts were composed which attempted to codify aspects of daily life. Bharata Munis Natyashastra is one of the earlier texts and it mainly deals with drama, in which dance plays an important part in Indian culture. It categorizes dance into four types - secular, ritual, abstract, the text elaborates various hand-gestures and classifies movements of the various limbs, steps and so on. A strong continuous tradition of dance has since continued in India, through to modern times, where it continues to play a role in culture, ritual, and, notably, the Bollywood entertainment industry. Many other contemporary dance forms can likewise be traced back to historical, traditional, ceremonial, Dance is generally, though not exclusively, performed with the accompaniment of music and may or may not be performed in time to such music. Some dance may provide its own audible accompaniment in place of music, many early forms of music and dance were created for each other and are frequently performed together
2.
Renaissance
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The Renaissance was a period in European history, from the 14th to the 17th century, regarded as the cultural bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history. It started as a movement in Italy in the Late Medieval period and later spread to the rest of Europe. This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science, Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, the Renaissance began in Florence, in the 14th century. Other major centres were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, the word Renaissance, literally meaning Rebirth in French, first appeared in English in the 1830s. The word also occurs in Jules Michelets 1855 work, Histoire de France, the word Renaissance has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century. The Renaissance was a movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism, however, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were back from Byzantium to Western Europe. Political philosophers, most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, sought to describe life as it really was. Others see more competition between artists and polymaths such as Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Masaccio for artistic commissions as sparking the creativity of the Renaissance. Yet it remains much debated why the Renaissance began in Italy, accordingly, several theories have been put forward to explain its origins. During the Renaissance, money and art went hand in hand, Artists depended entirely on patrons while the patrons needed money to foster artistic talent. Wealth was brought to Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries by expanding trade into Asia, silver mining in Tyrol increased the flow of money. Luxuries from the Eastern world, brought home during the Crusades, increased the prosperity of Genoa, unlike with Latin texts, which had been preserved and studied in Western Europe since late antiquity, the study of ancient Greek texts was very limited in medieval Western Europe. One of the greatest achievements of Renaissance scholars was to bring this entire class of Greek cultural works back into Western Europe for the first time since late antiquity, Arab logicians had inherited Greek ideas after they had invaded and conquered Egypt and the Levant. Their translations and commentaries on these ideas worked their way through the Arab West into Spain and Sicily and this work of translation from Islamic culture, though largely unplanned and disorganized, constituted one of the greatest transmissions of ideas in history
3.
Partner dance
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In 1023, the German poet Ruodlieb referred to a couple dance with a basic motif of a boy wooing a girl, and the girl repulsing his advances. Men and women dancing as couples, both holding one hand of their partner, and embracing each other, can be seen in illustrations from 15th-century Germany. At the end of the 13th century and during the 14th century, nobles, farmers and lower classes of society danced turning in a lively, springing fashion. The relatively new burgher middle class combined the dances with the processional as a dance. Danse de Paysans by Théodore de Bry shows a couple with a man lifting his partner off the ground, and his Danse de Seigneurs et Dames features one Lord with his arms around the waist of his Lady. Syncopated and dotted rhythms gained widespread popularity for dancing in the last two centuries, although usually less complex and more regular than previous music, an old couple dance which can be found all over Northern Europe is known as Manchester or Lott is Dead. Dance partners stay together for the duration of the dance and, most often, dance independently of other couples dancing at the same time, if any. Although this kind of dancing can be seen, for instance, in ballet, this term is applied to various forms of social dance, ballroom dance, folk dance. Partner dance may be a basis of a dance, a round dance. In square dance one will often change partners during the course of a dance, in most partner dances, one, typically a man, is the leader, the other, typically a woman, is the follower. As a rule, they maintain connection with each other, in some dances the connection is loose and called dance handhold. In other dances the connection involves body contact, in the latter case the connection imposes significant restrictions on relative body positions during the dance and hence it is often called dance frame. It is also said that each partner has his own dance frame, in promenade-style partner dancing there is no leader or follower, and the couple dance side-by-side maintaining a connection with each other through a promenade handhold. The man dances traditionally to the left of the woman, some peoples have folk partner dances, where partners do not have any body contact at all, but there is still a kind of call-response interaction. A popular form of dancing is slow dance. Generally, partner dance has taken place between a man and a woman, from the 1800s-1950s, however, if there was not a sufficient number partners of the opposite sex available, couples formed into pairs of the same-sex. At the time, same-sex partnering had nothing to do with sexual orientation and it was acceptable ballroom etiquette for a woman to dance with her sisters and/or friends if there were no available men. Sometimes this is also done as part of a dance tradition, partnerships of the same-sex may not necessarily describe sexual orientation as many straight individuals still partner up with members of the same-sex
4.
Basse danse
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The basse danse, or low dance, was a popular court dance in the 15th and early 16th centuries, especially at the Burgundian court. The basse danse was a precursor of the pavane as a processional dance. The term may apply to the dance or the music alone, the earliest record of a basse danse is found in an Occitan poem of the 1320s by Raimon de Cornet, who notes that the joglars performed them. In Germany it became the Hofdantz, thoinot Arbeau used the basse danse to explain his method of dance notation in his Orchésographie. The basic measure is counted in sixes but, like the later courante, often combines 64 and 32 time and this rhythm matches the basic steps of the dance. Most basse danse music is in form with each section repeated. The basse danse was often followed by a tourdion, due to their contrasting tempi, and these were danced and composed in pairs en suite like the pavane and galliard and the allemande and courante. Early music consisted of songs based on a cantus firmus. In performance 3 or 4 instrumentalists would improvise the polyphony based on this tenor, in others multiple parts were written, though choice of instrumentation was left to the performers. A treatise in the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels gives us information about the elements of basse danse, the basse danse is based upon four steps, pas simple, pas double, démarche and branle. Pas simples are done in pairs, dancers take two steps in one measure counting 2–2–2, in pas double, dancers take instead three steps, counting 3-3. These steps take advantage of the feel of the basse danse. In the démarche, dancers take a backwards and shift their weight forward. In the branle, dancers step to the left, shifting their weight left, the révérence, occurring typically before or after the choreography, is a bow or curtsey that takes place over the course of one measure. Western Music – Britannica Online Encyclopedia, a Dictionary of Music and Musicians. W. W. Norton and Company Incorporated, Dance – A Short History of Classical Theatrical Dancing. Archived from the original on 13 April 2007, the Derivation of Some Fifteenth-Century Basse-Danse Tunes. Materials for the Study of the Fifteenth Century Basse Danse, in Compositione di Meser Vincenzo Capirola, Lute-Book, edited by Otto Gombosi, xxxvi–lxiii
5.
France
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France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Nice, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established. The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is also a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks
6.
Italy
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Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a unitary parliamentary republic in Europe. Located in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, San Marino, Italy covers an area of 301,338 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate and Mediterranean climate. Due to its shape, it is referred to in Italy as lo Stivale. With 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth most populous EU member state, the Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom, which eventually became a republic that conquered and assimilated other nearby civilisations. The legacy of the Roman Empire is widespread and can be observed in the distribution of civilian law, republican governments, Christianity. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration, Italian culture flourished at this time, producing famous scholars, artists and polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The weakened sovereigns soon fell victim to conquest by European powers such as France, Spain and Austria. Despite being one of the victors in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil. The subsequent participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in defeat, economic destruction. Today, Italy has the third largest economy in the Eurozone and it has a very high level of human development and is ranked sixth in the world for life expectancy. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military, cultural and diplomatic affairs, as a reflection of its cultural wealth, Italy is home to 51 World Heritage Sites, the most in the world, and is the fifth most visited country. The assumptions on the etymology of the name Italia are very numerous, according to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin, Italia, was borrowed through Greek from the Oscan Víteliú, meaning land of young cattle. The bull was a symbol of the southern Italic tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides. The name Italia originally applied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy – according to Antiochus of Syracuse, but by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to apply the name Italia to a larger region, excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Palaeolithic period, some 200,000 years ago, modern Humans arrived about 40,000 years ago. Other ancient Italian peoples of undetermined language families but of possible origins include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni. Also the Phoenicians established colonies on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily, the Roman legacy has deeply influenced the Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world
