Beauchamp-Feuillet Notation: How the Court of Louis XIV Wrote Down Dance

A Notation Problem, Solved

For most of human history, dance has been transmitted by imitation. A teacher shows you. You copy. You practice. Maybe, if you're lucky, you learn from three teachers over a lifetime, and you remember what they taught.

Then, in 1700, a Parisian dancing master named Raoul-Auger Feuillet published a book titled Chorégraphie, ou l'art de décrire la danse par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs — "Choreography, or the art of describing dance through characters, figures, and demonstrative signs." It was the first widely-distributed dance notation system capable of recording a complete choreography on the page.

Inside the book were symbols for every step, every direction, every foot, every musical beat. Arranged on the page, they traced the literal floor pattern the dancers would make. A dance could now live on paper and be reconstructed by anyone who could read the system.

For 80 years, this is how the Western world's most refined dancers learned their repertoire. Dancing masters in London, Madrid, Vienna, Lisbon, and Saint Petersburg all read the same notation. A choreographer in Paris could compose a new dance in 1720 and have it performed with full fidelity in Stockholm by 1723.

Our general piece on [dance notation systems](/blog/beginners-guide-to-dance-notation-systems) surveys everything from Feuillet to modern Labanotation. This article is a deep dive on Beauchamp-Feuillet specifically — because it is, more than any other system, the notation that shaped how Western dance thinks about writing itself down.

The "Beauchamp" in "Beauchamp-Feuillet"

Why the hyphenated name?

Pierre Beauchamp (1631–1705) was the royal dancing master under Louis XIV and the first director of the Académie Royale de Danse, founded in 1661. He is often credited as the inventor of the five basic positions of the feet — the system every ballet dancer still learns on day one.

Beauchamp developed the core of the notation system years before Feuillet's 1700 publication but never published it himself. Feuillet took Beauchamp's system, codified it, added significant innovations, and put it in print. Depending on which historian you read, Beauchamp-Feuillet is either:

• Beauchamp's invention that Feuillet stole and published
• Feuillet's invention built on principles Beauchamp had articulated informally
• A joint development over decades of which Feuillet was the final editor

The scholarship generally favors something closer to the middle. Both names are credited, and together they represent the most important dance-theoretical partnership in European history.

What the Notation Actually Looks Like

Open any Beauchamp-Feuillet plate — there are hundreds of surviving examples — and you'll see something surprising. You won't see a sequence of body positions the way you'd see in a modern dance manual. You'll see a floor plan.

The page is a map of the dance floor. On it, a curving line shows the path the dancer's body traces through space. Along that line, small vertical tick marks indicate the beats of the music. Clustered around the tick marks are symbols that tell you:

• Which foot takes each step (a small indicator near the tick)
• The step quality — a plain step, a hop (saut), a leap (jeté), a slide (glissé), a turn (pirouette)
• The direction the body faces as it travels along the path
• Whether the foot is bent or straight at key moments
• Small ornaments — beats of the foot, cabrioles, entrechats

Above the floor plan, or running alongside it, is the music in staff notation, aligned beat-for-beat with the floor plan.

The result is astonishing in its information density. A single large plate can contain a two-minute dance with every footfall specified, for both partners, synchronized to the score. If you can read the system, you can reconstruct the dance.

What It's Good At

Beauchamp-Feuillet was a near-perfect notation for a specific kind of dance: the 18th-century French court and ballroom repertoire.

These dances had several features that make them ideal for the system:

They were built around floor patterns. The menuet, the bourrée, the sarabande, the passepied, the loure — all were designed as geometric figures the couple traced on the floor. Beauchamp-Feuillet's floor-plan approach matched this structure exactly.

They used a relatively contained vocabulary of steps. A dozen base steps, each with a handful of variations, could describe almost the entire Baroque social and theatrical repertoire. Those dozen steps each got a symbol, and the symbols composed predictably.

They were through-composed, not improvised. Each dance was a specific choreography. The point of notation was to preserve and transmit this exact dance, not to capture a general style.

They were performed at a relatively modest tempo. The system had time to specify every detail.

For this repertoire, Beauchamp-Feuillet did something genuinely remarkable. We can still, in 2026, look at a plate from 1720 and perform the exact dance the Duchess of Burgundy performed at Versailles, with every foot placement specified. Very few performing arts have that kind of time-machine access.

What It's Bad At

The limitations show up the moment you try to apply the system outside its native repertoire.

Upper body. Beauchamp-Feuillet tracks feet and facing. It says almost nothing about the arms, the hands, the torso, the head. A notated dance captures the legs' journey through space with obsessive precision, and leaves the entire upper body to oral tradition. For Baroque dance this mostly worked — there was a shared understanding of "how the arms go" that dancers absorbed from their teachers. But it makes the notation insufficient for any dance where the upper body is independently expressive. No Latin dance, no expressionist modern dance, no dance with complex gestural content, can be recorded in Feuillet alone.

Group dances. The system is optimized for solos, duets, and small groups. Large ensemble works with complex spatial interaction between many dancers become rapidly illegible.

Improvisation. Beauchamp-Feuillet is a recording medium for fixed choreography. Dances that are partially or wholly improvised — tango, swing, most folk traditions — can be sampled in the system (you can notate what happened on one performance) but not described as a living practice.

High tempo. When figures are thrown faster than the music can be clearly segmented, the notation's beat-by-beat specificity becomes cluttered.

These limitations explain why Feuillet faded after 1780. The repertoire itself changed. Social dancing moved from figured court dances to the waltz (which requires almost no notation — the whole dance is one figure, rotated continuously). Theatrical ballet moved toward virtuosic solo vocabulary and complex ensemble tableaux that the system couldn't handle. By 1820, Feuillet notation was a historical curiosity.

The LODance Connection

At LODance, Beauchamp-Feuillet has a special place. Its curving lines, its tick marks, its ornamented pages are the inspiration for the site's visual language. You'll see Feuillet-derived motifs throughout the platform — in dividers, in borders, in the decorative calligraphy that frames the history portal.

This isn't ornament for ornament's sake. It's a deliberate aesthetic choice: LODance catalogs the entire lineage of partner dancing, and Feuillet notation is the script in which the most important first century of that lineage was written. Treating its imagery as living visual vocabulary — the way Middle-Earth treats Elvish — is our way of foregrounding that heritage.

When you see a Feuillet-style curl in a LODance page, that's not decoration. That's a quiet pointer to 1700, to a Parisian dancing master who figured out how to freeze dance on paper, and to the three centuries of dancers who learned from what he wrote.

Reconstructions Today

You can still, today, watch reconstructions of Beauchamp-Feuillet dances performed live. Several early-music and historical-dance ensembles specialize in this repertoire. Notable reconstructions include the complete Pecour and L'Abbé court dances, Isaac's English Baroque dances, and a growing catalog of theatrical ballets from the Académie Royale de Musique.

The reconstructions are imperfect — the upper-body problem means every reconstruction makes interpretive choices about arm carriage, head position, and torso inflection. But the footwork and floor pattern are read directly from the plates. Watching a reconstruction is literally watching what Louis XIV watched, with a margin of interpretation.

This is a gift. No other European dance tradition before the 20th century is recoverable in this much detail. The Renaissance sources (Arbeau, Caroso, Negri) give partial information. The 19th-century social-dance manuals give prose descriptions that leave enormous interpretive room. Only Beauchamp-Feuillet, for its brief 80-year ascendancy, gave us the dance itself on paper.

Further Exploration

Want to go deeper?

• The LODance timeline traces the arc from Feuillet's 1700 publication through the system's decline and the subsequent century of notation experiments.
• Our dance notation overview situates Beauchamp-Feuillet alongside Labanotation, Benesh, and other systems.
• The figure glossary includes Baroque dance figures with their original Feuillet citations where applicable.

Beauchamp-Feuillet is, in a sense, the first draft of a three-hundred-year-old experiment that is still ongoing: the attempt to write dance the way we write music. No one has succeeded fully. Feuillet came closer for his repertoire than anyone has for theirs since. That's why the notation, the man, and the system still matter.

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