(b ?1651; d 11 April 1729). French dancing-master and choreographer. He was one of the finest dancers working under the celebrated royal choreographer Pierre Beauchamp. He is said in one source to have made his début as a dancer in a repeat performance of Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione in 1674. When, on Lully's death in 1687, Beauchamp left the Opéra, Pécour was appointed in his place. He gave up dancing in about 1703 but he held the post of ballet-master and choreographer at the Opéra until his death. His tutelage produced such outstanding dancers as La Fontaine, Subligny, Guiot, Prevost and Menese among the women and Blondy, Ballon, Dumoulin and Marcel among the men. He is credited with changing the ‘S’ figure of the Minuet to a ‘Z’, an innovation that helped keep the dancers in a proper relationship to each other and to the figure.
Many of his dances were recorded in the Beauchamp-Feuillet system of dance notation and can to a certain extent be re-created. Both the floor pattern and the steps are given in the notation. The style may be derived from a study of Pierre Rameau's Le maître à danser (Paris, 1725; Eng. trans., 1931/R), a didactic work that he personally approved. A total of 120 choreographies by him have so far come to light; most of them are for the theatre, but many are for social dancing. Many of the theatre dances include the names of the works for which they were created and of the performers who executed them. The choreographies may be found in Recüeil de dances (Paris, 1700/R, nine ball dances); Recüeil de dances (Paris, 1704/R, 35 theatre dances); Recüeil (Paris, 1712, nine ball and 30 theatre dances); annual collections published by Feuillet and Dezais (Paris, 1700–22, 26 ball dances); E. Pemberton: An Essay for the Further Improvement of Dancing (London, 1711, one jig); miscellaneous manuscript collections, four theatre dances (Little and Marsh contains a complete annotated inventory). Many of Pécour's works appeared in several prints and manuscripts; for example, 12 dances, all published previously, were put into a slightly revised version of the dance notation by Pierre Rameau in the second part of his Abrégé de la nouvelle méthode (Paris, 1725).
A. Levinson: ‘Les danseurs de Lully’, ReM, vi/3 (1924–5), 44–55
W. Hilton: Dance of Court and Theater (Princeton, NJ, 1981)
A.L. Witherell: Louis Pécour's 1700 ‘Recüeil de dances’ (Ann Arbor, 1983)
M. Little and C. Marsh: La Danse Noble: an Inventory of Dances and Sources (New York, 1992)
F. Lancelot: La Belle Dance: Catalogue raisonné (Paris, 1996)
MEREDITH ELLIS LITTLE