Branle

The name branle derives from the French verb branler (to shake, wave, sway, wag, wobble), referring to the side-to-side movement of a circle or chain of dancers holding hands or linking arms.

Some of these dances were reserved for specific age groups - the branle de Bourgogne, for instance, for the youngest dancers.

[1] Among the dance's courtly relations may be the basse danse and the passepied[3] which latter, though it is in triple time, Rabelais and Thoinot Arbeau (1589) identify as a type of Breton branle.

Antonius de Arena briefly describes the steps for the double and single branle,[4] and John Marston's The Malcontent (1604) sketches the choreography of one type.

[6] Most of these dances seem to have a genuine connection to the region: the Trihory of Brittany, Arbeau says, was seldom if ever performed around Langres where his book was published, but "I learned it long ago from a young Breton who was a fellow student of mine at Poitiers".

[9] Antonius de Arena mentions mixed branles (branlos decopatos) in his macaronic treatise Ad suos compagnones.

[3] There are even a few late examples in Beauchamp–Feuillet notation (invented in 1691), such as Danses nouvelles presentees au Roy (c. 1715) by Louis-Guillaume Pécour.

Settings for this appear in the lute anthology Le trésor d'Orphée by Anthoine Francisque (1600) and the ensemble collection Terpsichore by Michael Praetorius (1612).

The male dancer moves away from his partner before performing a "galliard trick of twenty"—apparently a number of capers or leaps in the manner of the galliard—before returning to the conventional ending.