Contredanse
A dance of facing lines — an ancestor of the quadrille
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A contredanse is an eighteenth-century line dance: two facing rows exchange positions in set figures. It came to France from the English country dance and spread across Europe, becoming an ancestor of the quadrille.
It differs from the minuet: the minuet is a courtly couple dance, the contredanse a collective line; it differs from the quadrille too: the quadrille is later and more formal. The usual mistake is to translate it simply as "country dance" — it is related to the English country dance, but in France it had already become an urban ballroom form.
Read deeper → quadrille
Sources
- 对舞的英法传统与方阵舞的关系，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Contredanse"；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.