Josias Priest

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Josias Priest (c. 1645–January 3, 1735 in Chelsea, London) was an English dancer, dancing-master and choreographer.

[edit] History

In 1669, he was arrested along with four others for dancing and making music without a license. In 1668, he was a dancing-master in Holborn, and in 1675 he moved to Leicester Fields to run a boarding school for gentelwomen. In 1680 he started a similar school at Gorge's House in Chelsea, London. Here Priest hosted operas, including John Blow's Venus and Adonis (1684) and Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689). It is widely believed that Priest choreographed dances for these and other semi-operas by Purcell, including Dioclesian, The Fairy-Queen, The Indian-Queen, and King Arthur ; however, the evidence is not entirely conclusive.

In 1699 Thomas Bray published a collection of dance music which included music for dances by Josias Priest and his son, Thomas Priest. Only one dance by Priest survives, a 'Minuet by Mr Preist' in An Essay for the Further Improvement of Dancing (1711) published by Edmund Pemberton. References to Priest's choreography remain in some musical sources, however. The surviving minuet is for twelve women and uses a limited step vocabulary of minuet steps forwards, backwards and sideways, the main choreographic interest being in the floor patterns. It is recorded in a simpified form of Beauchamp-Feuillet notation that was typically used for recording English country dances^[1].

[edit] References

Jennifer Thorp. "Josias Priest", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed July 22, 2006), grovemusic.com (subscription access).

^ A facsimile of Priest's choreography can be found at The Library of Congress' An American Ballroom Companion

Persondata
NAME	Priest, Josias
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Josiah Preist
SHORT DESCRIPTION	English dancing-master and choreographer
DATE OF BIRTH	circa 1645
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH	January 3, 1735
PLACE OF DEATH	Chelsea, London