The lecture recital is an excellent way of presenting to an audience an art-form that may be unfamiliar or novel. Baroque dance is perhaps one of the least familiar forms of dance – despite the enormous popularity of baroque music.
Barbara Segal has a wide experience of presenting baroque dance in the form of a lecture recital. Either on her own or in partnership with other musicians or dancers, she can provide an audience with an enlightening and entertaining encounter with the context and form of this art. For many years she was a costumed interpreter at Hampton Court Palace, either dancing in the Georgian Apartments, or entertaining visitors with stories of the inhabitants of the court, or of court life and etiquette in general, while dressed as a noblewoman of the time.
The use of period costumes and projected images adds an extra dimension to the presentation, creating a vivid illustration of the past in which baroque dance flourished on the stage and in the grand court ballrooms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Barbara has presented lecture recitals in many different venues for a wide range of audiences, including the Georgian Society, the Lute Society, for Fiori Musicali and to a number of universities both in the UK and abroad; she also teaches and lectures regularly at the Krakow Court Dance Festival in Poland. In 2005 she was invited to give the Annual Lecture of the Early Dance Circle, presenting a paper entitled Heroes and Harlequins: Dance & Pantomime on the English Stage in the early 18th century. Barbara has given papers at many academic conferences, including Music in 18th Century Britain, the International Dance Conference in Belgium, the Early Dance Circle Biennial Conference, the Rothenfelser Tanzsymposium and the Dolmetsch Historical Dance Biennial Conference. She has also given talks on historical dance on the BBC Radio3 Early Music Programme, including an experiment in teaching dance on radio!