The branle — from the French word for 'to sway' — is a chain or circle dance in which everyone moves sideways together. Peasants and kings both danced it, and in 1589 Thoinot Arbeau wrote down more than twenty kinds, from the stately double branle to mimed branles of washerwomen and hermits.
Branles appear in France around 1500 as village dances and were soon taken up by the nobility. Dancers hold hands in a line or circle and travel sideways, mostly to the left, with steps that sway from one side to the other — the name comes from branler, 'to sway'. The most detailed record comes from Langres, where the canon Jehan Tabourot, writing as Thoinot Arbeau, published Orchésographie in 1589, a dialogue between a teacher and his pupil that gives tunes and steps side by side. Arbeau explains that every ball opened with a suite of four branles — double, simple, gay and Burgundian — so that young and old could all take part, and he describes regional branles from Champagne, Poitou, Haut-Barrois and Brittany (the trihory), as well as mimed branles in which dancers act out a scene: washerwomen clapping their hands as if beating laundry, horses stamping, hermits bowing in their hoods. In 1612 Michael Praetorius published hundreds of French dance tunes, many of them branles, in his collection Terpsichore. In England it was called the 'brawl', and Shakespeare mentions the 'French brawl'; at Versailles, Louis XIV's balls still opened with a branle. Many folk dances descend from it: in the Ossau valley of the Pyrenees, the fête of Laruns on 15 August still opens and closes its bal with branles, and Renaissance festivals such as Le Puy-en-Velay's Roi de l'Oiseau bring the court branles back to the streets.
