The Loves of Mars and Venus

The Loves of Mars and Venus was an undoubted success, with seven performances during its first season and revivals at the Drury Lane Theatre until 1724. Colley Cibber the English actor- manager, playwright and Poet Laureate, said of it ‘To give even Dancing therefore some Improvement; and to make it something more than Motion without Meaning, the Fable of Mars and Venus, was form’d into a connected Presentation of Dances in Character, wherein the Passions were so happily expressed, and the whole Story so intelligibly told, by a mute Narration of Gesture only, that even thinking Spectators allow’d it both a pleasing and a rational Entertainment’.^[4] It also inspired a parody version by John Rich^[5]

The Weaver Dance Company, was founded in 2016, to produce a show to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the first performance of The Loves of Mars and Venus. Weaver created a patchwork to make his musical score, a pasticcio, but it has been lost. So a pasticcio was pieced together using music from the London stage of the day with works by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87), Jacques Paisible (c1656-1721), Henry Purcell (1659–95), Gottfried Finger (c1660-1730), John Eccles (1668-1735), Jeremiah Clarke (c1674-1704), and William Croft (1678-1727), using Weaver’s text as a guide.^{[citation needed]}

As a reconstruction of the full dance-drama with its cast of 26 characters was beyond the Company’s resources, they set out to create a show that would introduce the audience to the world of the 18th-century London stage and John Weaver’s frustrations with the limitations of dancing there, following Weaver as he tries to create his first ‘Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing’ with dance taking an equal place as an art alongside music and drama.

Using John Weaver’s own published scenario to reconstruct the gestures and theatrical dances recorded in Beauchamp–Feuillet notation in the early 18th century as the basis for new choreography, The Weaver Dance Company presented their The Loves of Mars and Venus, exactly 300 years to the day after the first performance, at the Fitzwilliam College Auditorium in Cambridge on 2 March 2017.