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In Memory of
CHESTER A. COC]
Instructor of Frei
1936 - 1970
WHAT IS DANCE?
WHAT IS DANCE?
READINGS IN THEORY
AND CRITICISM

ROGER COPELAND

MARSHALL COHEN

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford New York Toronto Melbourne
1983
 Oxford University Press
Oxford London Glasgow
New York Toronto Melbourne Auckland
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
and associate companies in
Beirut Berlin Ibadan Mexico City Nicosia

Copyright © 1983 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

First published by Oxford University Press, New York, 1983
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1983

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title:
What is dance?
Bibliography: p. Includes index.
1. Dancing—Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Copeland, Roger. II. Cohen, Marshall.
GV1599.W47 1983 793.3 82-14366
ISBN 0-19-503217-9
ISBN 0-19-503197-0 (pbk.)

Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all the copyright notices,
pages 569-572 constitute an extension of the copyright page.

Printing (last digit): 987654321

Printed in the United States of America

 To
Michele Gross
and
Margaret Dennes Cohen

833781
'
 PREFACE

Those looking for a widely diversified collection of good writ¬

ing about dance will, we are certain, find it here. In fact, we
would like to think that What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and
Criticism contains much of the best writing about dance currently
available in English. But—as the subtitle implies—this anthol¬
ogy was conceived with a somewhat more specific purpose in
mind. The essays in this book have been selected and organized
so as to identify and examine the basic issues of dance aesthetics,
the questions and problems that arise when one thinks about the
art of dance in a sustained and rigorous manner (e.g., questions
about the underlying nature of dance, its unique properties, the
ways in which movement conveys meaning, the relationship of
dance to the other arts, etc.).
But at the same time, we have no intention of artificially iso¬
lating theoretical approaches to dance from those of more imme¬
diate concern to the performer, choreographer, critic, or histo¬
rian. For example, questions about genre distinctions and the
nature of style are obviously of consequence to the student of
dance history, as well as to the philosopher. Questions about the
varying ways in which movement may represent the world
beyond the dancer's body or express emotions are essential to
any critic or reviewer who wishes to use words such as “repre¬
sentation" or “expression" in an informed and philosophically
viii PREFACE

responsible manner. The difference, then, between this anthol¬

ogy and other existing dance collections is that the articles have
been selected not only for their merit, but for the representative
positions they take and the problems they raise. In other words,
we have selected articles that will ask the same sorts of questions
about dance that philosophers have traditionally asked about the
other arts.
Anthologies of this sort have long been available in the other
arts, even those such as cinema and photography that have
acquired cultural respectability more recently than dance. Thus,
a dance collection of this sort is, we believe, long overdue. Dance
is surely among the most vital of the contemporary arts, espe¬
cially in America. In fact, for some time now it has been fashion¬
able to speak of a “dance boom" in this country. But the impulse
to theorize about dance continues to meet with considerable
resistance, not only from dancers and choreographers, but also
from many dance critics and historians who tend to dismiss the¬
ory as either an irrelevance or an impertinence.
According to this view, dance writing should be primarily
descriptive; and writers who stray from the immediate, palpable
surface of the dance commit an act of sacrilege against the art
itself. Some, no doubt, would go even further and argue that of
all the arts, dance is the most resistant to theoretical consider¬
ation, the art that continually re-directs our attention to the con¬
crete and the immediate. In their view, one of the functions of
dance is to keep us firmly rooted on earth, to prevent us from
floating away into the heady atmosphere of “pure" thought.
But the dance community pays a considerable price for this
bias against theory. It rarely enjoys the sort of vigorous intellec¬
tual debates that enlivens discussion of the other arts. And now
that academic dance programs have largely declared their inde¬
pendence of physical education departments, it is essential that
they find ways of integrating the study of dance into the liberal
arts curriculum. Why should dance be immune to modes of
inquiry that are routinely applied to the other arts? Those who
criticize dance theory for not retaining the sensory vitality of the
dance experience, or for failing to resemble the dance under dis¬
cussion, are asking theory to perform a function it was never
designed to undertake. The poet and critic Baudelaire once spoke
of his desire to “ . . . transformer ma volupte en connaissance"—
that is, to transform voluptuous, sensory pleasure into knowl¬
edge of how that pleasure was produced. This strikes us as a per¬
fect description of what many of the theoreticians represented in
 PREFACE IX

this book have attempted to do. Theory is the mind reflecting on

sensory experience, uncovering the general principles that gov¬
ern (and make possible) that experience.
Furthermore—and this is something that critics of theory
often fail to understand—theories answer to experience. They
stand or fall according to how well they account for individual
cases. This is one of our reasons for including in this book a chap¬
ter of practical criticism largely focused on individual dances or
the work of particular choreographers. We believe that at their
best, theory and criticism exist in a mutually beneficial relation¬
ship with one another. The best theory can always be brought to
bear upon particular works. The best criticism will be informed
by general principles and will not simply express intuitions or
subjective reactions.
Whenever possible, the essays in this book have been arranged
dialectically, so that significant areas of disagreement can be
brought into sharper focus. The chapter introductions are
intended not merely to summarize the articles but to clarify the
issues they raise and to test their theoretical assertions against
actual choreographic practice. Frequently, the introductions
refer to essays that for one reason or another are not included in
the book. We hope, thereby, to situate the book's contents in a
broader intellectual context and at the same time to suggest addi¬
tional, related readings. We have tried to limit our selections to
articles not readily available in other existing collections, but
several widely anthologized articles by writers such as Noverre,
Ellis, and Valery are so essential to our purposes that it would be
unwise to exclude them.
As for the book's format: In the first section—"What Is
Dance?"—we examine attempts to define the art of dance and to
distinguish it from other sorts of rhythmic, patterned move¬
ments performed by human beings, other animals, and inani¬
mate objects. Here, we have selected articles by theoreticians of
dance that most clearly parallel the classic definitions of art in
general (e.g., the theory that art is an imitation of nature, the
expression of emotion, or the embodiment of form).
Section II—"The Dance Medium"—explores the inherent lim¬
itations of the dance medium. What sorts of tasks is dance
uniquely well equipped to perform? At what point does dance
begin to exceed its competence and encroach on the domain of
the other arts? In the next section—"Dance and the Other
Arts"—we expand this line of inquiry, exploring not only the
similarities and differences among dance and the other arts, but
X PREFACE

also the means by which movement can (or cannot) be united

with related arts in performance. Several writers in this section
also discuss the ways in which dance has influenced—and been
influenced by—the other arts.
The fourth section—"Genre and Style"—examines the genres
or categories into which individual dances have traditionally
been classified. In other words, what sets of shared properties
enable us to refer to some dances as examples of ballet, others as
modern dance, still others as post-modern, etc. And ultimately,
how adequate and how necessary are such systems of
classification?
In Section V—"Language, Notation, and Identity"—some of
the articles consider the question of whether or not a system of
movement can be thought of as a "language" in any meaningful
sense. Other articles examine the problems that arise when one
attempts to notate choreography and to reconstruct older dances
from written notation. Section VI—"Dance Criticism"—is
devoted to examples of practical criticism organized so as to illus¬
trate the historical development of dance criticism. The intro¬
duction to this section discusses the special difficulties that the
critic of dance must contend with. The final section—"Dance
and Society"—contains articles that analyze dance sociologically.
Some of these essays examine the non-aesthetic, utilitarian func¬
tions that dance performs in various societies. Others explore the
ways in which particular dances—especially social, non-theatri¬
cal dances—reflect and illuminate the cultural mores of the soci¬
eties in which they are created. ,
Obviously, many significant issues go unexplored in this book.
But we hope that these essays and the manner in which they
have been organized and introduced will stimulate a more rig¬
orous approach to the subjects the book does address. The intro¬
ductions to Sections II, III, IV, and VI were written primarily by
Roger Copeland; those to Sections I, V, and VII were written pri¬
marily by Marshall Cohen. The editors would like to thank
Michele Gross, Margaret Dennes Cohen, John Wright, Curtis
Church, Natalie Tutt, and the staff of the Dance Collection, New
York Public Library, for their invaluable advice and assistance.
Photographs not otherwise credited are used by courtesy of the
Dance Collection, The New York Public Library at Lincoln
Center.

Oberlin, Ohio R. C.
Princeton, N.J. M.C.

November 1982
 CONTENTS

I WHAT IS DANCE? 1

JEAN-GEORGES NOVERRE
From Letters on Dancing and Ballets
Letter 1 10

SELMA JEANNE COHEN

Dance as an Art of Imitation 15

JOHN MARTIN
From The Dance
Dance as a Means of Communication 22
From The Modern Dance
Metakinesis 23
Extension of Range 25
Form and Metakinesis 26

SUSANNE K. LANGER
From Feeling and Form
Virtual Powers 28
The Magic Circle 36

ANDRE LEVINSON
The Idea of the Dance:
From Aristotle to Mallarme 47
xii CONTENTS

PAUL VALERY
Philosophy of the Dance 55

NELSON GOODMAN
From Languages of Art
Modes of Symbolization 66
Afterword—An Illustration 80

DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN

Philosophers and the Dance 85

FRANCIS SPARSHOTT
Why Philosophy Neglects the Dance 94

II THE DANCE MEDIUM 103

STEPHANE MALLARME
Ballets 111

JACQUES RIVIERE
Le Sacre du Printemps 115
DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN
Balanchine's Formalism 123
FRANK KERMODE
Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev 145

MARSHALL COHEN
Primitivism, Modernism, and Dance Theory 161

HEINRICH VON KLEIST

Puppet Theatre 178

III DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS 185

RICHARD WAGNER
From The Art-Work of the Future 191

ERIC BENTLEY
Martha Graham's Journey 197

CONSTANT LAMBERT
Music and Action 203
 CONTENTS xiii

ERIC BENTLEY
The Purism of Etienne Decroux 210

BERNARD SHAW
From Music in London 1890-94 215

THEODORE REEF
Edgar Degas and the Dance 217

IV GENRE AND STYLE 225

Ballet
LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
Classic Ballet: Aria of the Aerial 238

ADRIAN STOKES
From Tonight the Ballet
The Classic Ballet 244

A. K. VOLINSKY
From The Book of Exultation
The Vertical: The Fundamental Principle
of Classic Dance 255

MICHEL FOKINE
Letter to "The Times," July 6th, 1914 257

Modern Dance
ISADORA DUNCAN
The Dance of the Future 262
I See America Dancing 264
Richard Wagner 266

RAYNER HEPPENSTALL
From Apology for Dancing
The Sexual Idiom 267
KATHARINE EVERETT GILBERT
Mind and Medium in the Modern Dance 289

MARY WIGMAN
My Teacher Laban 302
The Philosophy of the Modern Dance 305
XIV CONTENTS

ROGER COPELAND
Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception 307

Post-Modern Dance
YVONNE RAINER
A Quasi Survey of Some "Minimalist" Tendencies . . . 325

TOM JOHNSON
Running Out of Breath 332

STEVE REICH
Notes on Music and Dance 336

Style
SELMA JEANNE COHEN
From Next Week, Swan Lake:
Reflections on Dance and Dances
Problems of Definition *339

R. P. BLACKMUR
The Swan in Zurich 354

ANNA KISSELGOFF
There Is Nothing "National" about Ballet Styles 361

LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
From Ballet Alphabet
Classic and Romantic Ballet 364

V LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND

IDENTITY 367

ROBIN G. COLLINGWOOD
From The Principles of Art
Language and Languages 371

JOSEPH MARGOLIS
Art as Language 376

FERNAU HALL
Dance Notation and Choreology 390
 CONTENTS xv

NELSON GOODMAN
From Languages of Art
The Role of Notation 399

JACK ANDERSON
Idealists, Materialists, and the Thirty-Two Fouettes 410

VI DANCE CRITICISM 421

THEOPHILE GAUTIER
Fanny Elssler in “La Tempete" 431
Revival of “La Sylphide" 434

ANDRE LEVINSON
The Art and Meaning of Isadora Duncan 438

CARL VAN VECHTEN

Anna Pavlowa, 1920 445

EDWIN DENBY
Three Sides of Agon 446
A Balanchine Masterpiece (Concerto Barocco) 454

DEBORAH JOWITT
Monumental Martha 456

ARLENE CROCE
Momentous (The Four Temperaments) 459
Joffrey Jazz (Deuce Coupe) 465

VII DANCE AND SOCIETY 473

HAVELOCK ELLIS
From The Dance of Life
The Art of Dancing 478

E. M. W. TILLYARD
From The Elizabethan World Picture
The Cosmic Dance 497

JANE HARRISON
From Ancient Art and Ritual
From Ritual to Art 502
XVI CONTENTS

ROSS WETZSTEON
The Whirling Dervishes:
An Emptiness Filled with Everything 507

ROLAND BARTHES
Striptease 512

ROGER COPELAND
Dance, Photography, and the World's Body 515

RUTH KATZ
The Egalitarian Waltz 521

JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU
An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet
as a Form of Ethnic Dance 533

ELIZABETH KENDALL
From Where She Danced
"A Possible Grace" 550

Bibliography 561

Index 573
WHAT IS DANCE?
»

\
 I
What Is Dance?

What is dance? Can we formulate a definition comprehensive

enough to cover the wide variety of activities routinely referred
to as dance? Unfortunately, the theoretical literature of dance
provides only limited help in answering this question. Dance is
sometimes defined as any patterned, rhythmic movement in
space and time. A broad definition of this sort, which refuses to
distinguish between human and non-human motion, enables us
to describe as "dances" the movements of waves or the orbits of
the heavenly bodies. In addition, this usage enables biologists
like Karl von Frisch (in The Dancing Bees) to describe the move¬
ment patterns of non-human creatures, like bees, as dances. Even
if we consider this usage metaphorical and reject such a broad
conception of the dance on the ground that dance is an exclu¬
sively human activity (and perhaps necessarily a learned or an
intentional one) serious problems still arise. For there are other
patterned rhythmic movements performed by humans—march¬
ing in parades for example, or sawing trees—which are gener¬
ally thought to differ from dancing. If we are to arrive at a sat¬
isfactory conception of dance we have much to gain by
appealing to the most influential traditional theories of art and
the dance literature that is informed by them.
Three of these traditional theories may prove especially useful:
the theories of art as imitation, expression, and form. If, as the

1
2 WHAT IS DANCE?

imitation theory suggests, art is an imitation of nature, or of

human actions or passions, then parades will not be dances
because they do not in general imitate anything. Nor, if
the expression theory is correct, will sawing trees or rowing
boats be forms of dancing because these activities are not gen¬
erally expressions of emotion or attempts to communicate
emotion.
Some approaches to artistic activity, such as the theory that it
is essentially the creation of form, may not seem to help in dis¬
tinguishing parades from dances; for, even if we concede that
dances must have form, it may be that parades (and even that
tree-sawings) do so as well. Form may be a necessary though not
a sufficient condition of art. But it may be that, by combining
elements from different theories, we can achieve a more ade¬
quate one. Perhaps dances, unlike parades, must create forms
that express emotion. Or perhaps, unlike tree-sawings, dances
must be undertaken for purely aesthetic (as opposed to utilitar¬
ian) purposes. Let us, then, turn our attention to some of these
traditional theories in the hope that they can help us to formu¬
late a more adequate definition of “dance."
The dominant theory of art in the Western tradition, deriving
from Aristotle's Poetics, assumes that art is a form of imitation.
This doctrine received its most influential statement in the lit¬
erature of dance in the letters of the great eighteenth-century
choreographer and theorist J.-G. Noverre, who claimed that
dancing is, or should be, "a faithful likeness of beautiful nature."
As with many other theorists, Noverre's failure to adhere to the
distinction between "is" and "should be" often makes it unclear
whether he is offering a real definition of dance, or expressing a
principle of preference or taste. Clearly, Noverre's taste in dance
led him to reject the empty acrobatics of his day in favor of a
more pantomimic and accurate "representation of nature." But
he and others might argue that what is not "true" dance is not
in fact dance except in a trivial and uninteresting sense.
Despite the fact that the mimetic theory began to be chal¬
lenged in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century
by formalist and expressionist views, the idea that art is a form
of imitation has retained its influence up to the present time. The
American dance historian Selma Jeanne Cohen examines Aris¬
totle's contention that the dancer can imitate human character as
well as what people do and suffer. In her opinion, however, it is
only in the last three hundred years that the technical achieve¬
ments of classical ballet and of modern dance have permitted
dance actually to represent characters as well as their action and
 WHAT IS DANCE? 3

suffering. In the original version of her article, which she has

revised and expanded for this anthology, Cohen accepted the
Aristotelian tradition's conception of the dance and did not ask,
with the modern formalist, whether dance needs to serve any
imitative function at all. The formalist might argue that the tech¬
nical advances she mentions have in fact permitted dance to
elaborate its purely formal potential more convincingly and
therefore to renounce extrinsic imitative concerns. Alternatively,
the expressionist might ask whether some of the techniques of
modern dance and of twentieth-century ballet that Cohen
describes do not serve the purposes of greater expressiveness
rather than of more accurate imitation. Both Noverre, an imita¬
tion theorist, and Fokine, who speaks mainly of expression, reject
what they consider empty spectacle and meaningless virtuosity.
But they do so in the name of significantly different ideals.
The theory that art is a form of self-expression, or an expres¬
sion of emotions, has been especially influential since the roman¬
tic era and has been given elaborate philosophical defenses in
such works as Croce's Aesthetic and Collingwood's The Principles
of Art. It is a theory that has been especially influential with
advocates of modern dance, and one of the most influential of
these was the New York Times critic John Martin. For Martin the
art of dance is the expression and transference through the
medium of bodily movement of mental and emotional experi¬
ences that the individual cannot express by rational or intellec¬
tual means. According to Martin, the dancer's movements are
intentional. The movements of the dancer's muscles are trans¬
ferred by kinesthetic sympathy to the muscles of the spectator;
and because he is used to associating movements with inten¬
tions, the spectator is able to arrive by induction at the intention
that lies behind the original movement. This thought-conveying
quality of movement, Martin, following the Greeks, calls "me¬
takinesis." Martin's account of metakinesis is highly questiona¬
ble, especially so because he does not pay sufficient attention to
the conventions presupposed in the conveying of meanings.
More generally, his theory is open to the objection that all dance
is not in fact an expression of emotion (many works of Balan¬
chine's and Cunningham's are not) and that even when dances
are expressions of emotion they do not communicate these emo¬
tions by arousing them, or their kinesthetic correlates, in the
spectator.
Susanne K. Langer, the American philosopher, taught for
many years at Connecticut College for Women and was closely
associated with that institution's historic role in the development
4 WHAT IS DANCE?

of American modern dance. She possesses a detailed knowledge

of the dance that is rare among aestheticians and has developed
one of the most elaborate and influential twentieth-century the¬
ories of the dance. Langer's complex theory of art is in part a
version of the theory of art as expression. But she specifically
rejects the doctrine which she thinks is widespread in the dance
literature, and especially in the literature of modern dance, that
dance arises in the emotions of the artist, emotions which are
then directly "expressed" in the work of art. In her view, the
gestures of the dance express feelings, but not what the dancer
feels. They are virtual or illusory gestures which are logically or
symbolically expressive but not self-expressions.
For Langer it is crucial to distinguish between the rhythmic
motions or patterns in space that constitute the materials of
dance and the dance itself. These physical materials (which
might constitute a parade) must be transformed by the choreog¬
rapher into an illusion; and following the great eighteenth-cen¬
tury poet, dramatist, and aesthetician Friedrich Schiller, she
thinks it is this illusion that constitutes the work of art. Each art
form creates its own distinctive illusion, and dance creates the
illusion of "interacting forces" or dynamic Powers that seem "to
move the dance itself." These powers create "the illusion of a
conquest of gravity, i.e., of the forces that are normally known
and felt to control the dancer's body." To the primitive or mythic
mind, these powers are realities, not illusions or symbols, and
they are not believed to be created by the dancer at all. Rather,
they are thought to be powers which must be invoked, adjured,
challenged, or placated as the case may be. Dance does not
become an art, however, until these magical and practical beliefs
are replaced by what the tradition descending from Kant and
Schopenhauer calls an "aesthetic attitude." When this attitude is
adopted these dynamic powers are perceived not as superper¬
sonal realities but as artistic illusions or images. This doctrine
permits Langer to make a clear distinction between ritualistic
and artistic or theatrical dance. Langer differs from those who
insist on the necessity of intentionally adopting an aesthetic atti¬
tude or of achieving "psychical" distance, in suggesting that the
art work or aesthetic object itself demands and, indeed, imposes
this relationship on the perceiver.
In his essay "Primitivism, Modernism, and Dance Theory,"
which appears in Section II, Marshall Cohen criticizes Langer's
commitment to the expression theory, even in the attenuated
form in which she maintains it. He also questions whether it is
 WHAT IS DANCE? 5

necessary to identify the dance with an illusion created by phys¬

ical movement rather than with the physical movements them¬
selves (as, indeed, post-modernists like Yvonne Rainer have tried
to do). Finally, he questions whether dance creates the sorts of
illusion, and especially the illusion of the conquest of gravity,
that Langer and many balletomanes allege. This claim is espe¬
cially paradoxical in view of Langer's special admiration for
modern dancers like Mary Wigman who celebrate the qualities
of weight and gravitational pull in their dances.
Andre Levinson, the exiled Russian critic who later pursued a
journalistic career in Paris, argues that dance is neither imitation
nor expression. In Levinson's more formalistic view both these
theories (which, like Selma Jeanne Cohen, he does not carefully
distinguish) assign dance a function outside itself and treat
dance as a "sign." But dance, he argues, is pure form and it is
wrong to think of the dancer's steps as gestures imitating char¬
acter or expressing emotion. It is understandable, then, that Lev¬
inson endorsed the ideals of classical ballet and resisted the inno¬
vations of Duncan, Diaghilev, and Fokine. He attributed to
Mallarme the crucial theoretical distinction between gestures
through which the mime gives expression to emotions or char¬
acter, and what he regards as fundamental, the dancer's steps. In
his essay, "The Spirit of the Classic Dance," Levinson observes
that "it is as though everyone piles upon dance supplementary
burdens in his effort to redeem—even if only in a small way—
the actual movements of the dance." These anti-formalists fail to
appreciate that the beauty of the dance consists precisely in the
contours of the movement itself. Levinson's brand of formalism
provides a compelling theoretical rationale for the work of a cho¬
reographer like George Balanchine, but his ideas remain unper¬
suasive to those who look upon ballet and modern dance as a
narrative art, a form of emotional expression, or a vehicle for
interpreting the natural or social world.
The great twentieth-century poet and critic Paul Valery devel¬
ops a conception of the aesthetic nature of dance in a manner
significantly different from both Langer and Levinson. For Lan¬
ger the origins of dance are intensely practical. Dance is the
envisagement of a world beyond the spot and the moment of
one's animal existence. As we have seen, for the mythic con¬
sciousness this creation is a reality, not an illusion, and the Pow¬
ers that inhabit it must be "invoked, adjured, challenged, and
placated. . .." It is only with the rise of philosophic and scientific
thought that a secularized consciousness recognizes the world as
6 WHAT IS DANCE?

the choreographer's creation, as an illusory world of romance.

This relatively late historical development transforms dance into
an art and renders the spectator's response "aesthetic." For Val¬
ery, by contrast, dance is in its origins and essence impractical.
What may look like dancing in animals is in his view actually a
useful activity and therefore not dancing at all. Man, however,
possesses surplus energy, more energy than his vital organs
require, and he soon discovered that certain of his movements,
by their frequency, succession, or range, gave him a pleasure
equivalent to intoxication. Valery's dancer creates a "world," but
unlike the world of Langer's primitive dancer, it is not one in
which the dancer interacts with superpersonal powers. Rather, it
is a self-contained world, radically opposed to the practical
world. In it the dancer's actions are without aim or conclusion,
and his function is, as Levinson says, "pure." But unlike Levin¬
son, Valery does not insist that the dance itself be purely "for¬
mal" rather than representational or expressive. Even narrative
movement sequences qualify as "dance" provided that they
serve no direct, practical function in the real world.
Langer's theory raises a question that it fails to answer persua¬
sively. Why, without motives of worship or magic-making did
moderns go on dancing at all? Her strained answer is that the
image of Powers is an important legacy and still, in a sense, pro¬
vides them with a world image. For Valery the question does not
arise because the dance has always been non-utilitarian. Dance
creates an inner life consisting of sensations of time and energy
which respond to one another and form a closed world of "res¬
onances." It is this intrinsically valuable world of self-contained
resonances that has always been communicated to the aesthetic
spectator. The problem with Valery's view is, of course, that his
intense anti-utilitarianism makes it impossible to classify the rit¬
ual movements of primitive tribes as dance or to acknowledge
the moral or political aims of many dances that are, nevertheless,
plainly artistic and theatrical. He might argue, however, that
when we view such dances from a purely "disinterested," aes¬
thetic point of view, we see them as merely beautiful, rather than
practical movements.
The selections from Nelson Goodman, the Harvard philoso¬
pher, analyze some of the main types of symbolization or refer¬
ence that occur in dance as well as in the other arts. In particular,
he distinguishes between representation and expression, which,
as we have seen, other writers often confuse. He distinguishes
both of them from exemplification, a type of symbolization that
 WHAT IS DANCE? 7

he feels is important in the arts but that has been neglected by

traditional writers. (Exemplification may be illustrated by the tai¬
lor's swatch which functions as a sample of a bolt of cloth, and
as a symbol of certain properties that the bolt possesses like its
color and its weave.) Goodman does not single out any of these
types of symbolization as the essence of art, or of dance. Indeed
he thinks that the presence of one or another of them varies with
the art, the artist, and the work. In the "Afterword" which Good¬
man has written especially for this volume, he shows how each
of these features characterizes different aspects of his own mul¬
timedia work "Hockey Seen." Goodman's searching analyses are,
however, by no means uncontroversial. He repudiates the tra¬
ditional notion that imitation is the essence of representation, or
even of realistic representation (and by implication, therefore,
the view that dance is an art of imitation). Rather, in his view,
the core of representation is denotation and he believes that
(given an appropriate system of representation) almost any
image can represent anything. Representation is relative and
realism a matter of cultural conventions not natural correspon¬
dence. Whereas anything can denote, or even represent, any¬
thing else, a thing can express only what it possesses or exempli¬
fies and, in particular, what it possesses or exemplifies
metaphorically. Thus, Goodman's own dance expresses conflict
and frustration, features which an art work (as opposed to a per¬
son) can possess only metaphorically. But "Hockey Seen" exem¬
plifies certain abstract patterns which, like a game of hockey, it
literally possesses.
Some will find unduly narrow the restriction of expression to
exemplification that is metaphorical, and others will object to
treating expression purely as a matter of exemplification,
whether literal or metaphorical. For they will think that whether
a work of art is expressive has something to do not only with
properties of the work of art but also with the emotions and feel¬
ings of the artist who created it or with the experiences of the
audience that receives it. However that may be, Goodman has
given a more precise account of Langer's distinction between the
logically expressive and self-expression. At the same time, as we
have seen, he resists Langer's claim that the dance is necessarily
or essentially expressive as well as the claim that works of art are
characteristically approached with an aesthetic attitude, if by this
is meant one that is aimless from a practical point of view or that
is sharply contrasted with an attitude that is cognitive or
scientific.
8 WHAT IS DANCE?

We have observed that the philosophical literature of the

dance is from some points of view a disappointing one. David
Michael Levin, the young American philosopher and dance the¬
orist, attributes this inadequacy in part to the fact that dance has
been traditionally associated with the female principle and that
Western philosophers feel an aversion to it because they suffer
from patriarchal biases. Indeed, to the extent that philosophy has
reflected the West's religious and ethical biases generally, it has
tended to deny the body's sensuous presence. But Levin suggests
that phenomenology may provide the resources for correcting
the inadequacies of our philosophical tradition because it calls
attention to the sensuous human body as it is actually experi¬
enced in living. The phenomenological method, first expounded
by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, places great
importance on elucidating the Lebenswelt, or world of lived expe¬
rience as it is immediately and directly known through pre-
reflective consciousness.
This approach encourages the dance writer to view the per¬
former as a unified "consciousness-body” and to bypass all con¬
siderations of the dance's objectivity or subjectivity (in contrast
to Langer's distinction between the objective materials of the
dance and the illusion these materials project). For example,
Maxine Sheets, in her book The Phenomenology of Dance, writes
that "when we see a dance, we do not see separate objective fac¬
tors with no unifying center. What we see is something which
perhaps can only be empirically written as forcetimespace; an
indivisible wholeness appears before us." The phenomenologi¬
cal method can, as Levin and Sheets suggest, help produce more
exact descriptions of dance as it is actually experienced in live
performance, but its emphasis on non-divisible wholeness also
presents very real problems for the critic eager to distinguish the
dancer from the dance.
Francis Sparshott, the Canadian aesthetician, offers a quite dif¬
ferent explanation for what he takes to be the paucity and inad¬
equacy of the philosophical literature on dance. If an art is to
generate a significant philosophy, it is necessary, in his view,
that the art occupy a culturally central position, or that it be capa¬
ble of being absorbed into a culturally prevalent ideology. He
argues that dance has never held a culturally central position in
the West, and that the main ideologies available to the other arts
have not been available to it. Neither the system of the fine arts
that was developed from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth
century nor the Hegelian system that dominated European
 WHAT IS DANCE? 9

thinking about the arts in the nineteenth century found a sig¬

nificant place for the art of dance. The system of the fine arts,
deriving ultimately from Aristotle, insisted on the importance of
imitation. But, despite Noverre's attempt to argue that dance was
in fact an art of imitation, Sparshott thinks it was generally
regarded as mere movement and not accepted as a form of rep¬
resentational theater. Furthermore, he thinks that the Hegelian
system, which takes beauty to be ideas embodied in forms ade¬
quate to them, could easily have found a central place for dance.
However, because Hegel refused to acknowledge a split between
the rational and the real he always based his schematizations on
something closely observed in history. The lamentable state of
the art of dance in Hegel's lifetime is therefore sufficient expla¬
nation for his failure to assign dance a significant place in his
system. The romantic ballet was born in Paris soon after Hegel's
death but in Sparshott's astringent view neither the romantic
ballet nor any subsequent developments have enabled dance to
assume a privileged place alongside the other major arts. Philos¬
ophers, he says, cannot bestow seriousness; they can only explain
it. Those who think that the dance has in fact assumed an
increasingly important role in our culture since Hegel's time will
look for other explanations of philosophy's inadequacies. Or
they may think that the gravity, brilliance, and resonance of
dance as we now have it are in fact beginning to generate a lit¬
erature that will allow us to reverse Sparshott's severe judgment.
The pages that follow are offered in that hope.
10 WHAT IS DANCE?

JEAN-GEORGES NOVERRE
From LETTERS ON
DANCING AND BALLETS

LETTER I
Poetry, painting and dancing. Sir, are, or should be, no other
than a faithful likeness of beautiful nature. It is owing to their
accuracy of representation that the works of men like Corneille
and Racine, Raphael and Michelangelo, have been handed down
to posterity, after having obtained (what is rare enough) the
commendation of their own age. Why can we not add to the
names of these great men those of the maitres de ballet1 who made
themselves so celebrated in their day? But they are scarcely
known; is it the fault of their art, or of themselves?
A ballet is a picture, or rather a series of pictures connected
one with the other by the plot which provides the theme of the
ballet; the stage is, as it were, the canvas on which the composer
expresses his ideas; the choice of the music, scenery and cos¬
tumes are his colours; the composer is the painter. If nature has
endowed him with that passionate enthusiasm which is the soul
of all imitative arts, will not immortality be assured him? Why
are the names of maitres de ballet unknown to us? It is because
works of this kind endure only for a moment and are forgotten
almost as soon as the impressions they had produced; hence
there remains not a vestige of the most sublime productions of a
Bathyllus and a Pylades.2 Hardly a notion has been preserved of
those pantomimes so celebrated in the age of Augustus.3
If these great composers, unable to transmit to posterity their
fugitive pictures, had at least bequeathed us their ideas and the
principles of their art; if they had set forth the laws of the style
of which they were the creators; their names and writings would
have traversed the immensity of the ages and they would not
have sacrificed their labours and repose for a moment's glory.
Those who have succeeded them would have had some princi¬
ples to guide them, and the art of pantomime and gesture, for¬
merly carried to a point which still astonishes the imagination,
would not have perished.
 JEAN-GEORGES NOVERRE 11

Since the loss of that art, no one has sought to re-discover it,
or, so to speak, to create it a second time. Appalled by the diffi¬
culties of that enterprise, my predecessors have abandoned it,
without making a single attempt, and have allowed a divorce,
which it would appear must be eternal, to exist between pure
dancing and pantomime.
More venturesome than they, perhaps less gifted, I have dared
to fathom the art of devising ballets with action; to re-unite
action with dancing; to accord it some expression and purpose. I
have dared to tread new paths, encouraged by the indulgence of
the public which has supported me in crises capable of rebuffing
one's self-esteem; and my successes appear to authorize me to
satisfy your curiosity regarding an art which you cherish, and to
which I have devoted my every moment.
From the reign of Augustus to our days, ballets have been only
feeble sketches of what they may one day become. This art, born
of genius and good taste, can become beautiful and varied to an
infinite degree. History, legend, painting, all the arts may unite
to withdraw their sister art from the obscurity in which she is
shrouded; and it astonishes one that maitres de ballet have dis¬
dained such powerful assistance.
The programmes of the ballets which have been given, during
the past century or so, in the different courts of Europe, incline
one to believe that this art (which was still of no account), far
from having progressed, is more and more declining. These
kinds of traditions, it is true, are always strongly suspect. It is
with ballets as with entertainments in general; nothing so gran¬
diose and so alluring on paper, and often nothing so dull and ill-
arranged in performance.
I think. Sir, that this art has remained in its infancy only
because its effects have been limited, like those of fireworks
designed simply to gratify the eyes; although this art shares with
the best plays the advantage of inspiring, moving and captivat¬
ing the spectator by the charm of its interest and illusion. No one
has suspected its power of speaking to the heart.
If our ballets be feeble, monotonous and dull, if they be devoid
of ideas, meaning, expression and character, it is less, I repeat,
the fault of the art than that of the artist: does he ignore that
dancing united to pantomime is an imitative art? I shall be
tempted to believe it, because the majority of composers restrict
themselves to making a servile copy of a certain number of steps
and figures to which the public has been treated for centuries
12 WHAT IS DANCE?

past; in such wise that the ballets from Phaeton * or from another
opera, revived by a modern composer, differ so little from those
of the past that one would imagine they were always the same.
In fact, it is rare, not to say impossible, to find genius in the
plans, elegance in the forms, lightness in the groups, precision
and neatness in the tracks which lead to the different figures; the
art of disguising old things and giving them an air of novelty is
scarcely known.
Maitres de ballet should consult the pictures of great painters.
This examination would undoubtedly bring them in touch with
nature; then they should avoid, as often as possible, that sym¬
metry in the figures which, repeating the same thing, offers two
similar pictures on the same canvas. That is not to say that I con¬
demn in general all symmetrical figures or to think that I claim
to abolish the practice entirely, for that would be to misinterpret
my views.
The abuse of the best things is always detrimental; I only dis¬
approve of the too frequent and too repeated use of these kinds
of figures, a practice which my colleagues will feel to be vicious
when they essay to copy nature faithfully and to depict on the
stage different passions with the shades and colours which
appertain to each in particular.
Symmetrical figures from right to left are, in my opinion, only
supportable in the corps d'entrees,5 which have no means of
expression, and which, conveying nothing, are employed simply
to give the premiers danseurs time to take breath; they can have a
place in a ballet general which concludes a festival; further, they
can be tolerated in pas d'execution, pas de quatre, pas de six, etc.,
although, to my mind, it would be ridiculous, in these fragments,
to sacrifice expression and feeling to bodily skill and agility of
the legs; but symmetry should give place to nature in scenes d’ac¬
tion. One example, however slight it may be, will make my mean¬
ing clear and suffice to support my contention.
A band of nymphs, at the unexpected sight of a troupe of
young fauns, takes flight hurriedly in fear; the fauns, on their
side, pursue the nymphs with eagerness, which generally sug¬
gests delight: presently, they stop to examine the impression
they have made on the nymphs, at the same time the latter sus¬
pend their course; they regard the fauns with fear, seek to dis¬
cover their designs, and to attain by flight a refuge which would
secure them against the danger which threatens; the two troupes
approach; the nymphs resist, defend themselves and escape with
a skill equal to their agility, etc.
 JEAN-GEORGES NOVERRE 13

That is what I term a scene d'action, where the dance should

speak with fire and energy; where symmetrical and formal fig¬
ures cannot be employed without transgressing truth and shock¬
ing probability, without enfeebling the action and chilling the
interest. There, I say, is a scene which should offer a ravishing
disorder, and where the composer's art should not appear except
to embellish nature.
A maitre de ballet, devoid of intelligence and good taste, will
treat this portion of the dance mechanically, and deprive it of its
effect, because he will not feel the spirit of it. He will place the
nymphs and the fauns on several parallel lines, he will scrupu¬
lously exact that all the nymphs be posed in uniform attitudes,
and that the fauns have their arms raised at the same height; he
will take great care in his arrangement not to place five nymphs
to the right and seven to the left, for this would transgress the
traditions of the Opera, but he will make a cold and formal per¬
formance of a scene d'action which should be full of fire.
Some ill-disposed critics, who do not understand enough of
the art to judge of its different effects, will say that this scene
should offer two pictures only; that the desire of the fauns
should express one, and the fear of the nymphs depict the other.
But how many different gradations are there to contrive in that
fear and that desire; what oppositions, what variations of light
and shade to observe; so that from these two sentiments there
result a multitude of pictures, each more animated than the
other!
All men having the same passions, differ only in proportion to
their sensibilities; they affect with more or less force all men, and
manifest themselves outwardly with more or less vehemence
and impetuosity. This principle stated, which nature demon¬
strates every day, one should vary the attitudes, diffuse the
shades of expression, and thenceforth the pantomimic action of
each person would cease to be monotonous.
It would result in being both a faithful imitator and an excel¬
lent painter, to put variety in the expression of the heads, to give
an air of ferocity to some of the fauns, to others less passion; to
these a more tender air, and, lastly, to the others a voluptuous
character which would calm or share the fear of the nymphs. The
sketch of this picture determines naturally the composition of
the other: I see then the nymphs who hesitate between pleasure
and fear, I perceive others who, by their contrasting attitudes,
depict to me the different emotions with which their being is
agitated; the latter are prouder than their companions, the for-
14 WHAT IS DANCE?

mer mingle fear with a sense of curiosity which renders the pic¬
ture more seductive; this variety is the more attractive in its like¬
ness to nature. You must agree with me. Sir, that symmetry
should always be banished from dances with action.
I will ask those who usually are prejudiced, if they will find
symmetry in a flock of stray sheep which wish to escape from
the murdering fangs of wolves, or in a band of peasants who
abandon their fields and hamlets to avoid the fury of the enemy
who pursues them? No, without a doubt; but true art consists in
concealing art. I do not counsel disorder and confusion at all, on
the contrary I desire that regularity be found even in irregular¬
ity; I ask for ingenious groups, strong but always natural situa¬
tions, a manner of composition which conceals the composer's
labours from the eyes of the spectator.
As to figures, they only deserve to please when they are pre¬
sented in quick succession and designed with both taste and
elegance.
I am, &c.

(1760, rev. 1803)

Notes

*As a general rule, whenever Noverre uses the term maitres de ballet,
he employs it in its old sense of meaning the person who composes the
dances in a divertissement or ballet. Nowadays, such a person is termed
the choregraphe, while the designation maitre de ballet is applied to the
individual responsible for the training of the dancers and the mainte¬
nance of their technique at the requisite standard of efficiency. [Notes
in this article are by the translator, Cyril Beaumont, 1930.—Eds.]
2Bathyllus and Pylades were two celebrated mimes famous about 22
B.C. Bathyllus of Alexandria, the freedman and favourite of Maecenas,
together with Pylades of Cicilia and his pupil Hylas, brought to a fine
degree of perfection, during the reign of Augustus, the imitative dance
termed Pantomimus, which was one of the most popular public amuse¬
ments at Rome until the fall of the Empire. Bathyllus excelled in the
interpretation of comic scenes, while Pylades was unsurpassed in the
representation of tragic themes. At first, the two actors gave perfor¬
mances in common, then, becoming jealous of each other's fame, they
quarrelled and established rival theatres. Each founded a school and
each had a numerous band of followers whose fierce partisanship led to
many brawls and sometimes bloodshed.
Some account of these actors will be found in Castil-Blaze. La Danse
et les Ballets, 1832, Chapter I. For a description of their performances.
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 15

consult Smith (W.). A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. 2 Vols.

1891. Vol. 2, p. 334, Pantomimus.
3The first Emperor of the Roman Empire. Born Sept. 23rd, 63 B.C. Died
Aug. 29th, A.D. 14.
4A lyrical tragedy in five acts and a prologue, with libretto by Qui-
nault and music by Lully. It was first played before the Court on Jan.
6th, 1663. The first public performance was given at the Academie Roy-
ale de Musique, on April 27th of the same year. It had an immense suc¬
cess due to its many charming airs and the wealth of the mechanical
effects introduced. Its theme was the return of the Golden Age, and it
was intended as a panegyric in honour of Louis XIV.
5An entree is a divertissement executed by a number of dancers.
Compan, in his Dictionnaire de Danse (1787) gives the following defi¬
nition: 'The usual division of all kinds of ballets is five acts. Each act
consists of three, six, nine, and sometimes twelve entrees. The term entree
is given to one or more bands of dancers who, by means of their steps,
gestures and attitudes, express that portion of the whole theme which
has been assigned to them."

SELMA JEANNE COHEN

DANCE AS AN ART
OF IMITATION

In the thirty years since this piece was written, both the author and
the art of dance have changed considerably. The paragraphs set in italics
constitute a sort of critique of what the writer now perceives as some of
the more egregious misstatements in this early effort.
"Rhythm alone, without harmony, is the means of the dancer's
imitations," wrote Aristotle, who then added—a bit grudg¬
ingly—"for even he, by the rhythms of his attitudes, may rep¬
resent men's characters, as well as what they do and suffer."
(Poetics: 1447a).
Yet, until recently, that is just what dance did not do. Aristotle
had dropped the subject without arguing his assertion, and, for
many centuries, the potentialities of his statement were ignored
16 WHAT IS DANCE?

in both theory and practice. The trouble was that dance was only
potentially capable of imitation; technically its means were
inadequate.
"Until recently." Only if we insist that Bathyllus and Pylades were
mimes and not dancers. And if we interpret "recently" rather broadly.
When, in the sixteenth century, some serious thinking about
dance technique had started, theories of the art as imitation
began to stir. But they advocated only the lesser part of Aristot¬
le's claim—that the dancer imitates what men do and suffer.
Even when given an allegorical significance, the closest the con¬
temporary ballets came to the imitation of character was the
depicting of generalized classes of men distinguished by a single
trait, such as desire for power or delight in intrigue.
Pere Claude Menestrier, who wrote in 1682, distinguished a
ballet from a "danse simple" by its imitation of men's actions, of
animals, or inanimate things. Get something composed of sev¬
eral parts, like kinds of music or hours of the day, he told the
choreographer, and then select the most pleasing items, for these
will make the prettiest dances. In suiting the means of imitation
to its object, Menestrier was dogmatic: a dance of winds should
be quick, one of drunkards irregular. Beyond this, he had little
to say about the use of technique—there was so little of it to use.
Since this limited dance vocabulary could not alone tell the audi¬
ence that a dancer represented "faith" or "philosophy," Menes¬
trier recommended appropriate costumes, in addition to the con¬
ventional aid of spoken verses, to define the intention.
There was not, in the seventeenth century, enough codified
range of body movement to make dance itself the means of imi¬
tation of character. Stereotyping was the simple answer for this,
and further theorizing was unnecessary. Consequently, apart
from the works of a few aestheticians who wrote on dance only
incidentally to their concern with the other arts and from the
isolated case of John Weaver whose main interest was panto¬
mime, the practice and idea of dance as imitation slumbered qui¬
etly till the middle of the eighteenth century.
Actually John Weaver was a most important choreographer and
dance theorist, who pre-dated Noverre in using plots drawn from Greek
drama. Weaver's works contained what he called dances "of a panto¬
mimic kind." Where does pantomime end and dance begin? A good
question.
Dance itself, however, had never been more awake. The five
positions of the feet, the foundation of modern ballet, were
named and recognized by 1700; Beauchamps, Pecour, Rameau,
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 17

and Feuillet, through France's Royal Academy, established offi¬

cially the principles of classic technique which dancers absorbed,
enhanced, and turned into a vehicle for virtuoso display. Soon
after Camargo had called attention to the brilliance of the com¬
plicated entrechat over the simple saute and even before Heinel
had done what was apparently the first double pirouette, some
people began to wonder if dance was really meant to develop
simply by multiplication and ornamentation. In 1741 Remond de
Saint-Mard claimed that dance had once depicted something and
not just sparkled. Flis complaints were soon followed by those of
Batteux, Bonnet, Cahusac, Diderot, and Noverre. The call was for
the return of dance to its true function—imitation.
Noverre's demands on the choreographer were far greater
than those of his predecessors. The seventeenth century had
assumed the presence of spoken verses and had depended on
telling costumes to explain the meaning of its ballets. Now Nov¬
erre wanted dance itself to be sufficient for expression. Whereas
Menestrier was satisfied with the imitation of species of things,
Noverre saw ballet in terms of individuals, the actors in a mute
play. His ballets were based, not on the revue-type plan recom¬
mended by Menestrier, but on stories derived from the classics
and especially from Greek tragedy.
Noverre was also concerned with the techniques available for
imitation:

I am of the opinion. Sir, that a maitre de ballet who does not possess
a complete knowledge of dancing can compose in a mediocre man¬
ner only. By dancing I mean the serious style which is the true
foundation of ballets. If he ignore its principles, his resources will
be limited, he must renounce the grand style, abandon history,
mythology and national dances, and confine himself solely to bal¬
lets founded on peasant dances with which the public is surfeited
and wearied_" (Jean-Georges Noverre. Letters on Dancing and
Ballets. Tr. Cyril W. Beaumont, C. W. Beaumont, London: 1930.)

For some time following, choreographers accepted Noverre's

line of thought. A danger, however, beset the path of this liter¬
ary dance genre. It could be carried to such an extreme (as
Vigano was said to have done) that ballets became mere panto¬
mime, practically devoid of dancing. Encouraged by the current
growth of professionalism in dance, a fresh concern with the
attractions of technique dimmed interest in the ballet d'action.
In 1820 Carlo Blasis wrote several lengthy treatises which,
while they assented to the idea of dance as imitation, contributed
18 WHAT IS DANCE?

little to the development of its theory. Yet Blasis on dance tech¬

nique? Here was a tremendous advance over the practical man¬
uals of the 1700's. Blasis described a greater diversity of body
positions, and, with him, the pirouette was found to have a mul¬
tiplicity of possible forms. The lag in theory had again been
accompanied by advance in practice. And again the solidification
of technical innovations was followed by fresh theoretical
insights.
But this time the period of technical growth was of longer
duration. The advent of women's dancing on pointe was stimu¬
lated by the tastes of the Romanticists for ethereal, ghost-like
maidens. The newly enriched ballet technique gave the impres¬
sion of supernatural lightness and grace, and the white-clad
sylph, a type rather than an individual character, was the era's
most popular figure. But when the fashion for Romanticism had
run its course, dance was left with a rich technique—and almost
nothing else. Since the technique itself offered so vast a field for
quantitative development, little effort was made to invest it with
quality, with meaning.
But in the early twentieth century Michel Fokine mourned
that the only difference between a dancer doing thirty-two
pirouettes and an acrobat who did twice as many was that the
acrobat did his with more certainty. The aim of the dancer, he
cried, is not to establish a record; it is to express feeling
beautifully.
Fokine's audience was, for the most part, lethargic, satisfied
with ballet as display. The St. Petersburg productions contained
pretenses of drama, for they were composed of alternating scenes
of conventional mime, which told the story, and divertissements,
which stopped the story to introduce dancing. Dualism had
resulted from the ballet's using means other than dance to
depict sentiments or characters alien to the balletic style. Dainty
feet in pink satin slippers pattered lightly over the stage while
hands signified "I am poor and unhappy.''
The problem was not only with sentiments or characters alien to the
style. Even more basic was the problem of conveying ideas by means of
movement. The ballerina wants to say: "You are a prince and 1 am a
peasant, and because our society forbids the mingling of classes, our
romance is doomed, and you know it.” Can any dance style serve her
needs?
Fokine set out to destroy this firmly entrenched dualism. A
ballet, he argued, must have complete unity of expression. The
choreographer must know many styles so that he may select the
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 19

one that will tell his story without the aid of extraneous, non¬
dance devices. "The best form is that which most fully expresses
the meaning desired, and the most natural that which most
closely corresponds with the idea to be conveyed" (C. W. Beau¬
mont, Michel Fokine and his Ballets. C. W. Beaumont. London:
1945, p. 137).
Noverre had suggested that the choreographer who did not
know all styles of dance would be limiting his potential range of
imitation. Fokine went a step further to claim that the choreog¬
rapher should not only know all styles which he may then
employ as needed, but that he should be able to create new ones.
"Not to form combinations of ready-made and established
dance-steps, but to create in each case a new form corresponding
to the subject, the most expressive form possible for the repre¬
sentation of the period and the character of the nation repre¬
sented—that is the first rule of the new ballet" (Ibid., p. 146).
In these last two paragraphs Fokine moves beyond the demand for
identifiable representation to urge the importance of expressive form.
The distinction should have been noted. The latter, in the words of
Rudolf Arnheim, produces "the kind of stirring participation that distin¬
guishes artistic experience from the detached acceptance of informa¬
tion.” (Art and Visual Perception, Berkeley, 1954, pp. 363-64.)
The modern trend follows the line of Fokine but has become
far more explicit regarding the nature of expressive movement.
Fokine wrote mainly in terms of styles, periods, and national
characters. Contemporaries go further by analyzing the move¬
ment signs of particular emotional qualities.
No. Fokine was already concerned with signs of emotional states, as
was Noverre, for that matter. What changed was the idea of what kinds
of emotion could or should be signified by dance. The "how” of signifying
was equally important. In 1916 Fokine referred to dance as "the devel¬
opment and ideal of the sign.” In 1931, this attitude involved him in an
argument with Martha Graham whose movement impressed him as
lacking in idealization. For Fokine, dance should be at once significant
and beautiful, the latter in both a moral and a pictorial sense. For Gra¬
ham, dance should be a revelation of experience, regardless of how
unpleasant the result might be.
The theory of Rudolf von Laban, for instance, is, because of its
systematic classifications, one of the most important for modern
dance thought.

The moods or expressions of movements have a double source. It

will be easily understood that a body and arm stretched high wide
20 WHAT IS DANCE?

has a different expression from that of a body huddled up on the

floor. It would be wrong, however, to speak of definite moods
expressed by positions, because the dancer can move into any posi¬
tion in very different ways. Suppose he reaches the highly
stretched position one time with a soft floating movement and
another time with an energetic thrust. It is obvious that the mood
of the movement will be different each time. The expression of
movement depends therefore on several factors—space, location,
including shape, and dynamic content, including effort. (Rudolf
von Laban. Modern Educational Dance. London: 1948, p. 44.)

Laban has stimulated much contemporary thought on dance

as imitation.
The dance language has been expanded as choreographers
began to utilize a greater range of movement (e.g., higher exten¬
sions, inward as well as outward rotation), learned to employ
heretofore neglected parts of the body (e.g., torso, hips), and
when they experimented with factors of timing and dynamics,
effort, tension. This enriched vocabulary has provided dance
with an enlarged capacity for expressiveness. There was little
cause for the early critics to praise dance for its powers of char¬
acterization, since its scope was then so restricted. The artificial¬
ity of the balletic codification, in which the limbs are always
turned out, developed for a number of good reasons, physical
and aesthetic, but its prevalence tended to discourage the con¬
cept of dance as imitation by limiting the kinds of subjects sus¬
ceptible to adequate representation. The expansion of the dance
vocabulary has had a humanizing effect. To be sure, the balletic
moods are human. But when isolated from their natural context,
a world in which other moods coexist, they present a picture of
a narrowly contrived society. The classic world was a beautiful
and elegant one and it deserved all the praise allotted to it. But
it could represent few forms of emotional conflict. The technical
scope, the vocabulary of movement, had to be enlarged before
dance could imitate the diversity of real characters with all the
complexity of the emotional drives that make people dramati¬
cally interesting. However, the classic language has been supple¬
mented; it has not been eliminated.
The limitation of the dance vocabulary was not the only factor affect¬
ing the range of characters represented by early ballet. Nor was the
extension of that vocabulary necessarily the cause of the latter's growing
breadth. New concepts of what is socially or artisically acceptable (or
needed), and therefore worthy of imitation, have often stimulated the
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 21

expansion of the dance vocabulary, as new ideas lead to the invention of

new words to convey them.
From Beauchamps to Fokine, ballet, invariably turned out in
the limbs, rigid in the torso, with its emphasis on long, unbroken
line, on lightness and ease, was the only fully developed tech¬
nique available for use. But in the twentieth century, a new
group appeared to construct a contrary language, devoid of turn¬
out, and employing a writhing torso, angular line, and the floor
plane of movement instead of the air which the outmoded
sylphs had inhabited. In violent reaction to the nineteenth cen¬
tury abuses, the moderns rejected the entire ballet vocabulary.
"Ballet.. .the only fully developed technique/' Not at all. The Orient
had quite a few developed techniques to offer, as Ruth St. Denis, Fokine's
contemporary, was to discover.
But they had established another set of limitations. The new
vocabulary made possible the representing through dance of the
less refined emotions that ballet could not handle. But it volun¬
tarily eliminated the moods that ballet could represent so well.
True, the world does contain neurotics who look especially neu¬
rotic when crawling about on the floor. But it also contains well-
adjusted individuals (and they are human individuals, not super¬
natural types) who best express themselves by leaping into the
air with turned out limbs and pointed toes. Aristotle did not
limit the kinds of characters that dancers could represent. Now
that the emotionalism of the revolt is settling, contemporary
dance can be inclusive. It can represent in its own medium a
multitude of characters if it refuses to reject any useful part of
the dance medium either because it is untraditional or because it
belongs to an old tradition.
I'm no longer so sure abut those well-adjusted individuals. Since 1953,
many choreographers have rejected the demands of representing any
kind of characters at all, thus freeing themselves for wide-ranging move¬
ment inventiveness. What this paper failed to do, however, was to take
note of the riches of non-imitative dance already in existence (e.g., Peti¬
pa's formally structured variations).
I think I was in my "modern dance” phase when I wrote this. 1 no
longer subscribe to such exclusiveness.
Dance's sphere of imitation is that of men's characters as well
as what they do and suffer. Within its sphere, the possibilities for
expression are great. Today, for the first time, growth in tech¬
nique has been accompanied—not followed—by growth in the¬
ory of imitation. Dance has found a movement means sufficient
22 WHAT IS DANCE?

to portraying real diversity of character. It remains for the art to

explore the full potentialities of its known resources.
(1953 and 1982)

JOHN MARTIN
From THE DANCE

DANCE AS A MEANS OF
COMMUNICATION
Indubitably no other art form has been so inaptly named as
the "modern dance." Not only is the phrase non-descriptive, but
it is markedly inaccurate, since there is absolutely nothing mod¬
ern about modern dance. It is, as a matter of fact, virtually basic
dance, the oldest of all dance forms. The modern dancer, instead
of employing the cumulative resources of academic tradition,
cuts through directly to the source of all dancing. He utilizes the
principle that every emotional state tends to express itself in
movement, and that the movements thus created spontaneously,
though they are not representational, reflect accurately in each
case the character of the particular emotional state. Because of the
inherent contagion of bodily movement, which makes the
onlooker feel sympathetically in his own musculature the exer¬
tions he sees in somebody else's musculature, the dancer is able
to convey through movement the most intangible emotional
experience. This is the prime purpose of the modern dance; it is
not interested in spectacle, but in the communication of emo¬
tional experiences—intuitive perceptions, elusive truths—which
cannot be communicated in reasoned terms or reduced to mere
statement of fact.
This principle is at least as old as man himself; primitive soci¬
eties, as we have seen, have found it so potent that they have
called it magic and based religious and social practices on it. But
it had never been consciously utilized as the basis of art, so far
as any record exists, until the turn of the present century when
 JOHN MARTIN 23

Isadora Duncan made it the very center and source of her prac¬
tices, and the so-called modern dance was born.

(1946)

_JOHN MARTIN_
From THE MODERN DANCE

METAKINESIS
Movement, then, in and of itself is a medium for the transfer¬
ence of an aesthetic and emotional concept from the conscious¬
ness of one individual to that of another. This should not be as
strange an idea as it seems to be. Back as far as Plato, and perhaps
farther, it has been toyed with by the metaphysical philosophers.
Kinesis is the name they gave to physical movement; and in an
obscure footnote in Webster's Dictionary—so common a source
of reference as that!—we find that there is correlated with kine¬
sis a supposed psychic accompaniment called metakinesis, this
correlation growing from the theory that the physical and the
psychical are merely two aspects of a single underlying reality.
We are not here concerned with theories of metaphysics, and
it makes very little difference what we may choose to believe
about the relation in general between the physical and the
psychical. It is extremely important, however, that we see in the
dance the relation that exists between physical movement and
mental—or psychical, if you will—intention. Metakinesis is per¬
haps a formidable word, but it is the only one the dictionary
yields for the expression of one of the vital points of the modern
dance.
A few minutes ago, it was said that the discovery of movement
as the substance of the dance in the same sense that sound is the
substance of music, was one of the four important discoveries of
the modern dance. The second of these discoveries is that of
metakinesis. Nobody invented it, it has always been true. It was
true when the early man of savagery conveyed his sense of the
24 WHAT IS DANCE?

mystery of death, and when he stirred a whole tribe into warlike

frenzy by leading them into a particular kind of dance. It was
true, and recognised in a degree, in the great days of the Greek
theatre, where movement was an important feature of drama.
Indeed, the Greek tragic chorus, which at moments of highest
tragedy sought refuge in chanting songs of deep fervour and
dancing to them, was used, as Gilbert Murray has said some¬
where, to express the "inexpressible residue of emotion" which
mere rationality—words and pantomime—could not convey. It
was also true during the many years of the classic ballet. Without
it audiences would have had no more delight in watching a bal¬
lerina balance herself on one toe in defiance of gravity than they
would have had in watching feathers float on the air. It was their
own consciousness of gravity which held them to the earth that
made them applaud the feat of some one else in defying it. But
no conscious artistic use was made of metakinesis until the mod¬
ern dance arose. You will still find many dancers who will laugh
at it—while their audiences slip rapidly away into the perfor¬
mances of their colleagues who have not such keen senses of
humour.
The Germans have realised the value of it to such an extent
that they have named their type of dancing in general "expres-
sionistic," or the kind of dancing which expresses through
movement the dancer's feeling.
Because of this close relationship between movement and per¬
sonal experience, temperament, mental and emotional equip¬
ment, it is manifestly impossible for ■every one to be taught to do
the same type of movement. The ideal dance education, there¬
fore, is that which trains the student to find his own type of
movement. Rudolf von Laban, the German theorist, has divided
all people into three general types, according to their style of
movement, much as singers are divided into such general types
as soprano, tenor, bass, etc. He has arrived at certain interesting
conclusions, based on physiological and psychological research,
and coloured always with a sense of metakinesis. Certain indi¬
viduals, he has found, are tall and thin and move in a certain
manner, always more or less alike. These he calls "high dancers."
Others are short and squat and move in another manner. These
he calls "low dancers." Between them are the "middle dancers."
Now the reason they move in certain fashions is not that they
are of a certain stature, and their stature is not what it is because
of their type of movement. Both are the result of some personal,
mental, psychological characteristics. This is a complete verifi-
 JOHN MARTIN 25

cation, as far as it goes, of the metaphysicians' theory that kinesis

and metakinesis are two aspects of a single underlying reality.

EXTENSION OF RANGE
It is easy to see what this metakinetic concept did in the way
of extending the range of the dance. So long as the entire empha¬
sis was laid upon design, the colour of dancing was exceedingly
limited. Design, no matter how well wrought and ingenious, can
never as an abstract element be productive of anything even at
its best beyond pleasure to the eye, a certain aesthetic satisfaction
which results from contact with completeness of form, and to a
degree of kinesthetic satisfaction in vicarious muscular experi¬
ence for its own sake.
These ingredients obviously wear thin very easily. By the time
Noverre came upon the scene in the middle of the eighteenth
century they had already worn so thin that he bent his every
effort toward restoring their lost substance. This he felt could be
done by making the dance an "imitative art" like the drama.
Almost everybody who has come after him has accepted his the¬
ory and continued the campaign of likeness to acting, until the
theory was finally exploded in the experiments of the modern¬
ists, among them Diaghileff.
The added range which was so greatly needed was supplied
by these innovators in a measure by the introduction of panto¬
mime in a more emphasised manner. This theoretically allowed
for the expression of every human emotion and every conceiv¬
able dramatic situation which did not depend upon words. But
the incongruousness of such a theory is apparent. To attempt to
express dramatic ideas and personal experiences while standing
with the feet in the fifth position, moving the arms in arbitrary
arcs, is likely to be absurd. It is like trying to combine pure dec¬
oration and portraiture; to the extent that the result is pure dec¬
oration it is not portraiture and vice versa. Stereotyped move¬
ments can only express stereotyped concepts of emotion. As the
highly individual shadings and gradations of personal emotion
begin to colour these movements, they lose their classical per¬
fection and become bad dancing. Thus the canvas has been
marred two ways: to a certain extent we have limited the integ¬
rity of the emotion to conform to an arbitrary code, and at the
same time we have deviated from the arbitrary code in order to
conform to emotional integrity.
26 WHAT IS DANCE?

Diaghileff evidently realised the fallacy of this theory very

clearly and up to the time of his death worked incessantly to sup¬
plant it with something sound. The glory of the Ballet Russe in
1909 was not due to the discovery of any final form, of any per¬
manent rule of procedure; it was only one more step in the end¬
less progression which constitutes the history of every art.
Though there are those who maintain that the dance has gone
steadily downward since the days of "Scheherazade" and "Cleo¬
patra" and "The Fire Bird," Diaghileff knew better. His later pro¬
ductions employed the services of choreographers, artists, musi¬
cians, who would aid him in the discovery of new forms suitable
to the expression of new ideas. His experiments never achieved
their goal and many of them remained tentative, and what the
possibilities may be in his method of procedure we can only sur¬
mise. Certainly they would seem worth the effort of further pur¬
suit, if any artist can be found capable of pursuing them.
In the meantime, the modern dancer has answered the riddle
by discarding completely the theory of arbitrary forms and
building on the principle that emotional experience can express
itself through movement directly. Thus for the first time it has
become possible to have a creative tragic dance as well as an
abstract lyrical one. The theatre has its tragedies as well as its
comedies, music is full of tragic compositions; but until Isadora
Duncan convinced the world against its will, there was never a
vision of a tragic dance such as the Greeks and their forebears
knew. If she did not see clearly through to its creation, she at
least saw its possibilities and made many glorious, unruly, law¬
less efforts at achieving them.

FORM AND METAKINESIS

Thus far we have discussed purely physical aspects of dance
form. With metakinesis we come to the most intangible as well
as the most important of its considerations. The dancer's ability
or inclination to use the overtones of movements to convey his
intention determines to a very large extent—indeed, almost
entirely—his type of dancing.
At its highest point of development we find the so-called
expressionistic dancing with Mary Wigman as an outstanding
practitioner. This class of dance is in effect the modern dance in
its purest manifestation. The basis of each composition in this
medium lies in a vision of something in human experience
 JOHN MARTIN 27

which touches the sublime. Its externalisation in some form

which can be apprehended by others comes not by intellectual
planning but by "feeling through" with a sensitive body. The
first result of such creation is the appearance of certain entirely
authentic movements which are as closely allied to the emotional
experience as an instinctive recoil is to an experience of fear. In
this process are evolved movements which may never have been
seen before in a dance but which are nevertheless the inevitable
material for this particular composition. When these movements
have been arranged in rhythmic relation to each other, the
arrangement dictated still by the logic of the inner feeling but at
the same time productive of an aesthetic reaction in an onlooker,
the composition is complete. This type of dance is generally of
the utmost simplicity. It cannot permit of ornamentation, for that
would only defeat its purpose of expression. Frequently it estab¬
lishes its rhythms with great clarity and thereafter touches only
the high spots of its design, leaving it to you to fill in the space
and complete the form. When this is accomplished, the highest
type of aesthetic reaction has been produced.
It has sometimes been said of dancing of this sort that it lacks
variety, but this is a misstatement of the case. It may not reveal
its variety to certain spectators who are not equipped to see it.
The man who is looking for routines, for "steps" and "tricks," of
course will not find them, and because he does not know how to
look for anything else he will naturally miss the almost unlim¬
ited variety which is before him.
Metakinesis is sometimes applied literally through panto¬
mime, generally in dances with a literary program. The panto¬
mimic or literary dance is not a pure type of dancing, but is a
leaning toward that subdivision of dancing which we call acting.
In dances of this description the considerations of time and space
patterns are of minor importance. The process of composition
develops through a series of incidents generally concerned with
external agencies. Its form is governed by dramatic laws, and
movement serves a secondary purpose.
At the farthest extreme from the purely pantomimic dance we
find that type of composition which seeks its effects through
abstractions and ignores as far as may be all metakinetic consid¬
erations. Between these types there are to be found any number
of variations, and any of them is good when it produces its effect.
To be sure, no dancer when he sets out to make a dance sits
down and calculates all the various types of patterns and
rhythms and dimensions he must work with. The technique of
28 WHAT IS DANCE?

composition, like other techniques, is of no use until it is learned

and forgotten and some of it has stuck in the process. The part
that is retained is the part that is of service to him; the rest he
need not bother to carry about with him, for he has not made it
his own.
(1933)

SUSANNE K, LANGER
From FEELING AND FORM

VIRTUAL POWERS
... What, then, is dance? If it be an independent art, as indeed
it seems to be, it must have its own "primary illusion." Rhythmic
motion? That is its actual process, not an illusion. The "primary
illusion" of an art is something created, and created at the first
touch—in this case, with the first motion, performed or even
implied. The motion itself, as a physical reality and therefore
"material" in the art, must suffer transformation. Into what?—
Thiess, in the passage just quoted, has given the answer: "Every¬
thing becomes expression, gesture...,."
All dance motion is gesture, or an element in the exhibition of
gesture—perhaps its mechanical contrast and foil, but always
motivated by the semblance of an expressive movement. Mary
Wigman has said, somewhere: "A meaningless gesture is abhor¬
rent to me." Now a "meaningless gesture" is really a contradic¬
tion in terms; but to the great dancer all movement in dance was
gesture—that was the only word; a mistake was a "meaningless
gesture." The interesting point is that the statement itself might
just as well have been made by Isadora Duncan, by Laban, or by
Noverre. For, oddly enough, artists who hold the most fantasti¬
cally diverse theories as to what dancing is—a visible music, a
succession of pictures, an unspoken play—all recognize its gestic
character. Gesture is the basic abstraction whereby the dance illu¬
sion is made and organized.
Gesture is vital movement; to the one who performs it, it is
known very precisely as a kinetic experience, i.e., as action, and
 SUSANNE K. LANGER 29

somewhat more vaguely by sight, as an effect. To others it

appears as a visible motion, but not a motion of things, sliding
or waving or rolling around—it is seen and understood as vital
movement. So it is always at once subjective and objective, per¬
sonal and public, willed (or evoked) and perceived.
In actual life gestures function as signals or symptoms of our
desires, intentions, expectations, demands, and feelings. Because
they can be consciously controlled, they may also be elaborated,
just like vocal sounds, into a system of assigned and combinable
symbols, a genuine discursive language. People who do not
understand each other's speech always resort to this simpler
form of discourse to express propositions, questions, judgments.
But whether a gesture has linguistic meaning or not, it is always
spontaneously expressive, too, by virtue of its form: it is free and
big, or nervous and tight, quick or leisurely, etc., according to
the psychological condition of the person who makes it. This
self-expressive aspect is akin to the tone of voice in speech.
Gesticulation, as part of our actual behavior, is not art. It is sim¬
ply vital movement. A squirrel, startled, sitting up with its paw
against its heart, makes a gesture, and a very expressive one at
that. But there is not art in its behavior. It is not dancing. Only
when the movement that was a genuine gesture in the squirrel
is imagined, so it may be performed apart from the squirrel's
momentary situation and mentality, it becomes an artistic ele¬
ment, a possible dance-gesture. Then it becomes a free symbolic
form, which may be used to convey ideas of emotion, of aware¬
ness and premonition, or may be combined with or incorporated
in other virtual gestures, to express other physical and mental
tensions.
Every being that makes natural gestures is a center of vital
force, and its expressive movements are seen by others as signals
of its will. But virtual gestures are not signals, they are symbols
of will. The spontaneously gestic character of dance motions is
illusory, and the vital force they express is illusory; the "powers"
(i.e., centers of vital force) in dance are created beings—created
by the semblance gesture.
The primary illusion of dance is a virtual realm of Power—not
actual, physically exerted power, but appearances of influence
and agency created by virtual gesture.
In watching a collective dance—say, an artistically successful
ballet—one does not see people running around; one sees the dance
driving this way, drawn that way, gathering here, spreading
there—fleeing, resting, rising, and so forth; and all the motion
30 WHAT IS DANCE?

seems to spring from powers beyond the performers.1 In a pas de

deux the two dancers appear to magnetize each other; the relation
between them is more than a spatial one, it is a relation of forces;
but the forces they exercise, that seem to be as physical as those
which orient the compass needle toward its pole, really do not
exist physically at all. They are dance forces, virtual powers.
The prototype of these purely apparent energies is not the
"field of forces" known to physics, but the subjective experience
of volition and free agency, and of reluctance to alien, compel¬
ling wills. The consciousness of life, the sense of vital power,
even of the power to receive impressions, apprehend the envi¬
ronment, and meet changes, is our most immediate self-con¬
sciousness. This is the feeling of power; and the play of such
"felt" energies is as different from any system of physical forces
as psychological time is from clock-time, and psychological space
from the space of geometry.
The widely popular doctrine that every work of art takes rise
from an emotion which agitates the artist, and which is directly
"expressed" in the work, may be found in the literature of every
art. That is why scholars delve into each famous artist's life his¬
tory, to learn by discursive study what emotions he must have
had while making this or that piece, so that they may "under¬
stand" the message of the work. But there are usually a few
philosophical critics—sometimes artists themselves—who real¬
ize that the feeling in a work of art is something the artist con¬
ceived as he created the symbolic form to present it, rather than
something he was undergoing and involuntarily venting in an
artistic process. There is a Wordsworth who finds that poetry is
not a symptom of emotional stress, but an image of it—"emotion
recollected in tranquillity"; there is a Riemann who recognizes
that music resembles feeling, and is its objective symbol rather
than its physiological effect; a Mozart who knows from experi¬
ence that emotional disturbance merely interferes with artistic
conception. Only in the literature of the dance, the claim to
direct self-expression is very nearly unanimous. Not only the
sentimental Isadora, but such eminent theorists as Merle Armi-
tage and Rudolf von Laban, and scholars like Curt Sachs, besides
countless dancers judging introspectively, accept the naturalistic
doctrine that dance is a free discharge either of surplus energy
or of emotional excitement.
Confronted with such evidence, one naturally is led to
reconsider the whole theory of art as symbolic form. Is dance an
exception? Good theories may have special cases, but not excep-
 SUSANNE K. LANGER 31

tions. Does the whole philosophy break down? Does it simply

not "work" in the case of dance, and thereby reveal a fundamen¬
tal weakness that was merely obscurable in other contexts?
Surely no one would have the temerity to claim that all the
experts on a subject are wrong!
Now there is one curious circumstance, which points the way
out of this quandary: namely, that the really great experts—cho¬
reographers, dancers, aestheticians, and historians—although
explicitly they assert the emotive-symptom thesis, implicitly
contradict it when they talk about any particular dance or any
specified process. No one, to my knowledge, has ever maintained
that Pavlova's rendering of slowly ebbing life in "The Dying
Swan" was most successful when she actually felt faint and sick,
or proposed to put Mary Wigman into the proper mood for her
tragic "Evening Dances" by giving her a piece of terrible news a
few minutes before she entered on the stage. A good ballet mas¬
ter, wanting a ballerina to register dismay, might say: "Imagine
that your boy-friend has just eloped with your most trusted
chum!" But he would not say, with apparent seriousness, "Your
boy-friend told me to tell you goodby from him, he's not coming
to see you any more." Or he might suggest to a sylph rehearsing
a "dance of joy" that she should fancy herself on a vacation in
California, amid palms and orange groves, but he probably
would not remind her of an exciting engagement after the
rehearsal, because that would distract her from the dance, per¬
haps even to the point of inducing false motions.
It is imagined feeling that governs the dance, not real emotional
conditions. If one passes over the spontaneous emotion theory
with which almost every modern book on the dance begins, one
quickly comes to the evidence for this contention. Dance gesture
is not real gesture, but virtual. The bodily movement, of course,
is real enough; but what makes it emotive gesture, i.e., its sponta¬
neous origin in what Laban calls a "feeling-thought-motion,"2 is
illusory, so the movement is "gesture" only within the dance. It
is actual movement, but virtual self-expression.
Herein, I think, lies the source of that peculiar contradiction
which haunts the theory of balletic art—the ideal of a behavior
at once spontaneous and planned, an activity springing from
personal passion but somehow taking the form of a consummate
artistic work, spontaneous, emotional, but capable of repetition
upon request. Merle Armitage, for instance, says: "... Modern
dance is a point of view not a system. .. . The principle under¬
lying this point of view is that emotional experience can express
32 WHAT IS DANCE?

itself directly through movement. And as emotional experience

varies in each individual, so will the outer expression vary. But
form, complete and adequate, must be the starting point if the modern
dance as an art-form is to live." How form can be the starting point
of a direct emotional reaction remains his secret. George Borodin
defines ballet as "the spontaneous expression of emotion
through movement, refined and lifted to the highest plane." But
he does not explain what lifts it, and why.
The antinomy is most striking in the excellent work of Curt
Sachs, A World History of the Dance, because the author under¬
stands, as few theorists have done, the nature of the dance illu¬
sion—the illusion of Powers, human, daemonic or impersonally
magical, in a non-physical but symbolically convincing "world";
indeed, he calls dancing "the vivid representation of a world
seen and imagined" (p. 3). Yet when he considers the origins of
the dance, he admits without hesitation that the erotic displays
of birds and the "spinning games" and vaguely rhythmic group
antics of apes (reported by Wolfgang Kohler with great reserve
as to their interpretation) are genuine dances; and having been
led so easily to this premise, he passes to an equally ready con¬
clusion: "The dance of the animals, especially that of the anthro¬
poid apes, proves that the dance of men is in its beginnings a
pleasurable motor reaction, a game forcing excess energy into a
rhythmic pattern" (p. 55)....
The reason why the belief in the genuinely self-expressive
nature of dance gestures is so widely, if not universally, held is
twofold: in the first place, any movement the dancer performs is
"gesture" in two different senses, which are systematically con¬
fused, and secondly, feeling is variously involved in the several
sorts of gesture, and its distinct functions are not kept apart. The
relationships among actual gestures and virtual ones are really
very complex, but perhaps a little patient analysis will make
them clear.
"Gesture" is defined in the dictionary as "expressive move¬
ment." But "expressive" has two alternative meanings (not to
mention minor specializations) it means either "self-expressive,"
i.e., symptomatic of existing subjective conditions, or "logically
expressive," i.e., symbolic of a concept, that may or may not refer
to factually given conditions. A sign often functions in both
capacities, as symptom and symbol; spoken words are quite nor¬
mally "expressive" in both ways. They convey something the
speaker is thinking about, and also betray that he is (or some-
 SUSANNE K. LANGER 33

times, that he is not!) entertaining the ideas in question, and to

some extent his further psycho-physical state.
The same is true of gesture: it may be either self-expressive, or
logically expressive, or both. It may indicate demands and inten¬
tions, as when people signal to each other, or it may be conven¬
tionally symbolic, like the deaf-mute language, but at the same
time the manner in which a gesture is performed usually indi¬
cates the performer's state of mind; it is nervous or calm, violent
or gentle, etc. Or it may be purely self-expressive, as speech may
be pure exclamation.
Language is primarily symbolic and incidentally symptomatic;
exclamation is relatively rare. Gesture, on the contrary, is far
more important as an avenue of self-expression than as "word."
An expressive word is one that formulates an idea clearly and
aptly, but a highly expressive gesture is usually taken to be one
that reveals feeling or emotion. It is spontaneous movement.
In the dance, the actual and virtual aspects of gesture are min¬
gled in complex ways. The movements, of course, are actual; they
spring from an intention, and are in this sense actual gestures;
but they are not the gestures they seem to be, because they seem
to spring from feeling, as indeed they do not. The dancer's actual
gestures are used to create a semblance of self-expression, and are
thereby transformed into virtual spontaneous movement, or vir¬
tual gesture. The emotion in which such gesture begins is vir¬
tual, a dance element, that turns the whole movement into
dance-gesture.
But what controls the performance of the actual movement?
An actual body-feeling, akin to that which controls the produc¬
tion of tones in musical performance—the final articulation of
imagined feeling in its appropriate physical form. The conception
of a feeling disposes the dancer's body to symbolize it.
Virtual gesture may create the semblance of self-expression
without anchoring it in the actual personality, which, as the
source only of the actual (non-spontaneous) gestures, disappears
as they do in the dance. In its place is the created personality, a
dance element which figures simply as a psychical, human or
superhuman Being. It is this that is expressing itself.
In the so-called "Modern Dance" the dancer seems to present
his own emotions, i.e., the dance is a self-portrait of the artist.
The created personality is given his name. But self-portraiture is
a motif, and though it is the most popular motif of solo dancers
today, and has become the foundation of a whole school, it is no
 i
34 WHAT IS DANCE?

more indispensable to "creative dancing" than any other motif.

Quite as great dance may be achieved by other devices, for
instance by simulating necessary connection of movements, i.e.,
mechanical unity of functions, as in Petroushka, or by creating the
semblance of alien control, the "marionette" motif in all its vari¬
eties and derivatives. This latter device has had at least as great
a career as the semblance of personal feeling which is the guid¬
ing principle of so-called "Modern Dance." For the appearance
of movement as gesture requires only its (apparent) emanation
from a center of living force; strangely enough, a mechanism
"come to life" intensifies this impression, perhaps by the inter¬
nal contrast it presents. Similarly, the mystic force that works by
remote control, establishing its own subsidiary centers in the
bodies of the dancers, is even more effectively visible power than
the naturalistic appearance of self-expression on the stage.
To keep virtual elements and actual materials separate is not
easy for anyone without philosophical training, and is hardest,
perhaps, for artists, to whom the created world is more imme¬
diately real and important than the factual world. It takes preci¬
sion of thought not to confuse an imagined feeling, or a precisely
conceived emotion that is formulated in a perceptible symbol,
with a feeling or emotion actually experienced in response to
real events. Indeed, the very notion of feelings and emotions not
really felt, but only imagined, is strange to most people. ...
The almost universal confusion of self-expression with dance
expression, personal emotion with balletic emotion, is easy
enough to understand if one considers the involved relations
that dance really has to feeling and its bodily symptoms. It is,
furthermore, not only induced by the popular conception of art
as emotional catharsis, but is aggravated by another, equally seri¬
ous and respected doctrine (which is, I think untenable on many
counts, though it is the theory held by Croce and Bergson)
namely that an artist gives us insight into actualities, that he pen¬
etrates to the nature of individual things, and shows us the
unique character of such completely individual objects or per¬
sons. In so-called "Modern Dance" the usual motif is a person
expressing her or his feelings. The absolutely individual essence
to be revealed would, then, be a human soul. The traditional doc¬
trine of the soul as a true substance, entirely unique, or individ¬
ual, meets this theory of art more than halfway; and if the person
whose joys and pains the dance represents is none other than the
dancer, the confusions between feeling shown and feeling repre-
 SUSANNE K. LANGER 35

sented, symptom and symbol, motif and created image, are just
about inescapable.
The recognition of a true artistic illusion, a realm of 'Towers/'
wherein purely imaginary beings from whom the vital force
emanates shape a whole world of dynamic forms by their mag-
net-like, psycho-physical actions, lifts the concept of Dance out
of all its theoretical entanglements with music, painting, comedy
and carnival or serious drama, and lets one ask what belongs to
dancing, and what does not. It determines, furthermore, exactly
how other arts are related to the ancient balletic art, and explains
why it is so ancient, why it has periods of degeneration, why it
is so closely linked with amusement, dressing-up, frivolity, on
the one hand and with religion, terror, mysticism and madness
on the other. Above all, it upholds the insight that dance, no
matter how diverse its phases and how multifarious, perhaps
even undignified its uses, is unmistakably and essentially art,
and performs the functions of art in worship as in play....
The writings of the most thoughtful dancers are often hard to
read because they play so freely across the line between physical
fact and artistic significance. The complete identification of fact,
symbol, and import, which underlies all literal belief in myth,
also besets the discursive thinking of artists, to such an extent
that their philosophical reflections are apt to be as confused they
are rich. To a careful reader with ordinary common sense they
sound nonsensical; to a person philosophically trained they
seem, by turns, affected or mystical, until he discovers that they
are mythical. Rudolf von Laban offers a perfect instance: he has
very clear ideas of what is created in dance, but the relation of
the created "tensions" to the physics of the actual world involves
him in a mystic metaphysics that is at best fanciful, and at worst
rapturously sentimental.3
The chief source of such abortive speculations is the failure to
distinguish between what is actual and what is virtual in the
making of the symbol, and furthermore, between the "virtual"
symbol itself and its import, which refers us back to actuality. But
this telescoping of symbols and meanings, word and world, into
one metaphysical entity is the very hallmark of what Cassirer has
termed "the mythical consciousness"; and that is structurally the
same as the artistic consciousness. It is metaphorical almost from
first to last. But as one remembers that the statements Laban
makes about emotions refer to body feelings, physical feelings that
spring from the idea of an emotion and initiate symbolic gestures
36 WHAT IS DANCE?

which articulate this idea, and that his "emotional forces" are
semblances of physical or magical forces, one can turn his spa¬
cious physical account of the world and its energies into a
description of the illusory realm of "powers," and then his anal¬
yses all make sense.4 Especially his treatment of objects as com¬
plexes of intersecting forces in balletic space5 is a piece of bold
logical construction, for it lets one conceive the entire world of
dance as a field of virtual powers—there are no actualities left in
it at all, no untransformed materials, but only elements, living
Beings, centers of force, and their interplay.
The most important result, however, of recognizing the pri¬
mary illusion of dance and the basic abstraction—virtual spon¬
taneous gesture—that creates and fills and organizes it, is the
new light this recognition sheds on the status, the uses, and the
history of dancing. All sorts of puzzling dance forms and prac¬
tices, origins, connections with other arts, and relations to reli¬
gion and magic, become clear as soon as one conceives the dance
to be neither plastic art nor music, nor a presentation of story,
but a play of Powers made visible. Form this standpoint one can
understand the ecstatic dance and the animal dance, the senti¬
mental waltz and the classical ballet, the mask and the mime and
the orgiastic carnival, as well as the solemn funeral round or the
tragic dance of a Greek chorus. Nothing can corroborate the the¬
ory of artistic illusion and expression here advanced, so forcibly
as an authoritative history of dancing, re-read in the light of that
theory; the following chapter, therefore, will present at least a
few significant facts, historical or current, to substantiate the con¬
ception of dance as a complete and autonomous art, the creation
and organization of a realm of virtual Powers.

THE MAGIC CIRCLE

All forces that cannot be scientifically established and mea¬
sured must be regarded, from the philosophical standpoint, as
illusory; if, therefore, such forces appear to be part of our direct
experience, they are "virtual," i.e. non-actual semblances. This
applies to chthonic powers, divine powers, fates and spells and
all mystic agencies, the potency of prayer, of will, of love and
hate, and also the oft-assumed hypnotic power of one's mind
over another (hereby, I do not mean to call in question the phe¬
nomenon of hypnotizing a subject, but only the concept of a
psychical "force" emanating from the "master mind").
 SUSANNE K. LANGER 37

The assumption of mysterious "powers," or concentrations of

forces not theoretically calculable in mathematical terms, domi¬
nates all prescientific imagination. The world picture of naive
men naturally stems from the pattern of subjective action and
passion. Just as the envisagement of spatial relations begins with
what Poincare called our "natural geometry," so the comprehen¬
sion of dynamic relations starts from our experience of effort and
obstacle, conflict and victory or defeat. The conception of "pow¬
ers" in nature operating like impulses, and of force inhering in
things as strength is felt to be in the body, is an obvious one. Yet
it is a myth, built on the most primitive symbol—the body (just
as most of our descriptive language is based on the symbolism of
head and foot, leg and arm, mouth, neck, back, etc: the "foot¬
hills" of a range, the mountain's "shoulder," the "leg" of a tri¬
angle, the "bottleneck," the "headland," etc.). This envisagement
of the world as a realm of individual living forces, each a being
with desires and purposes that bring it into conflict with other
teleologically directed powers, is really the key idea of all myth¬
ical interpretations: the idea of the Spirit World.
Ernst Cassirer, in his voluminous writings on the evolution of
symbolic forms,6 has traced this principle of "spiritualizing"
(which is not really "anthropomorphizing," since it affects the
image of man himself in strange ways) through the entire fabric
of language, and has shown how human minds thinking with
words have built up their whole world out of "powers," which
are modeled on subjective feelings of potency. Religion, history,
politics, and even the traditional abstractions of philosophy
reflect this fundamental Weltanschauung which is incorporated in
language. The formulation engendered by the subjective model
is really a great metaphor, in which our "natural" conception of
the world is expressed; but where the human mind has only one
symbol to represent an idea, the symbol and its meaning are not
separable, because there is no other form in which the meaning
could be thought and distinguished from the symbol. Conse¬
quently the great metaphor is identified with its meaning; the
feelings of power that serve as symbols are attributed to the real¬
ity symbolized, and the world appears as a realm of potent
Beings.
This conception of nature characterizes what Cassirer calls the
"mythic consciousness." But, as mythic thinking determines the
form of language and then is supported and furthered by lan¬
guage, so the progressive articulation and sharpening of that
supreme instrument ultimately breaks the mythic mold; the
38 WHAT IS DANCE?

gradual perfection of discursive form, which is inherent in the

syntax of language as metaphor is inherent in its vocabulary,
slowly begets a new mode of thought, the “scientific conscious¬
ness," which supersedes the mythic, to greater or lesser extent,
in the "common sense" of different persons and groups of per¬
sons. The shift is probably never complete, but to the degree that
it is effected, metaphor is replaced by literal statement, and
mythology gives way to science.7
The primitive phases of social development are entirely dom¬
inated by the "mythic consciousness." From earliest times,
through the late tribal stages, men live in a world of "Powers"—
divine or semidivine Beings, whose wills determine the courses
of cosmic and human events. Painting, sculpture, and literature,
however archaic, show us these Powers already fixed in visible
or describable form, anthropomorphic or zoomorphic—a sacred
bison, a sacred cow, a scarab, a Tiki, a Hermes or Kore, finally an
Apollo, Athena, Osiris, Christ—the God who has a personal
appearance even to the cut of his beard, a personal history of
birth, death, and glorification, a symbolic cult, a poetic and musi¬
cal liturgy. But in the first stages of imagination, no such definite
forms embody the terrible and fecund Powers that surround
humanity. The first recognition of them is through the feeling
of personal power and will in the human body and their first
representation is through a bodily activity which abstracts the
sense of power from the practical experiences in which that
sense is usually an obscure factor. This activity is known as
"dancing." The dance creates an irpage of nameless and even
bodiless Powers filling a complete, autonomous realm, a
"world". It is the first presentation of the world as a realm of
mystic forces.
This explains the early development of dance as a complete
and even sophisticated art form. Curt Sachs, in his compendious
World History of the Dance, remarks with some surprise: "Strange
as it may sound—since the Stone Age, the dance has taken on as
little in the way of new forms as of new content. The history of
the creative dance takes place in prehistory."8 Dance is, in fact,
the most serious intellectual business of savage life: it is the
envisagement of a world beyond the spot and the moment of
one's animal existence, the first conception of life as a whole—
continuous, superpersonal life, punctuated by birth and death,
surrounded and fed by the rest of nature. From this point of
view, the prehistoric evolution of dancing does not appear
strange at all. It is the very process of religious thinking, which
 SUSANNE K. LANGER 39

begets the conception of "Powers" as it symbolizes them. To the

"mythic consciousness" these creations are realities, not symbols;
they are not felt to be created by the dance at all, but to be
invoked, adjured, challenged, or placated, as the case may be.
The symbol of the world, the balletic realm of forces, is the
world, and dancing is the human spirit's participation in it.
Yet the dancer's world is a world transfigured, wakened to a
special kind of life. Sachs observes that the oldest dance form
seems to be the Reigen, or circle dance, which he takes to be a
heritage from animal ancestors.9 He regards it as a spontaneous
expression of gaiety, non-representative and therefore "intro¬
vert," according to his (rather unfortunate) adaptation of cate¬
gories borrowed from Jung's dynamic psychology. But the circle
dance really symbolizes a most important reality in the life of
primitive men—the sacred realm, the magic circle. The Reigen as
a dance form has nothing to do with spontaneous prancing; it
fulfills a holy office, perhaps the first holy office of the dance—
it divides the sphere of holiness from that of profane exis¬
tence. ...
... What is created is the image of a world of vital forces,
embodied or disembodied; in the early stages of human thought
when symbol and import are apprehended as one reality, this
image is the realm of holiness; in later stages it is recognized as
the work of art, the expressive form which it really is. But in
either case, the several dance elements have essentially construc¬
tive functions. They have to establish, maintain, and articulate
the play of "Powers." Masquerading and miming alone cannot
do this, any more than naturalistic representation of objects can
of itself create or shape pictorial space. But histrionic motifs
assure the illusion, the "dance ecstasy." "It aims simply at
ecstasy," says Dr. Sachs, "or it takes over the form of the mystic
circling, in which power jumps across from those on the outside
to the one on the inside or vice versa ... the people encircle the
head of an enemy, the sacrificial buffalo, the altar, the golden
calf, the holy wafer, in order that the power of these objects may
flow across to them in some mysterious way."10
Whatever motifs from actual life may enter into a dance, they
are rhythmicized and formalized by that very ingression. Within
the Magic Circle every action grows into balletic motion and
accent: the lifting of a child or of a grail, the imitations of beasts
and birds, the kiss, the war whoop. Free dance movement pro¬
duces, above all (for the performer as well as the spectator) the
illusion of a conquest of gravity, i.e. freedom from the actual
40 WHAT IS DANCE?

forces that are normally known and felt to control the dancer's
body. Frank Thiess remarked this fact in his excellent book,
already quoted in the previous chapter. After some pertinent
comments on the excessive use of stretching, leaping, and bal¬
loon-bouncing techniques in otherwise quite empty perfor¬
mances, "in which the ballerinas seek to demonstrate that the
earth's gravitation has practically no hold upon them," he adds:
"None the less, this demand for conquest of gravity was based
on a correct conception of the nature of dance; for its main ten¬
dency is always to surmount the bonds of massive weight, and
lightness of movement is, perhaps, the cardinal demand one has
to make on a dancer.... It is, after all, nothing but the conquest
of material resistance as such, and therefore is not a special phe¬
nomenon at all in the realm of art. Consider the triumph of
sculpture over the stone, of painting over the flat surface, of
poetry over language, etc. It is, then, precisely the material with
which any particular art has to work that is to be overcome, and
to a certain degree is to be rendered no longer apparent."11 Some¬
what later, still in this connection, he designates the toe dance
as "the frozen symbol of this ideal," especially intended to show
that the body has lost nearly all its weight, so that it can be sup¬
ported by the tips of its toes. And here he adds a comment sig¬
nificant for the theory of semblance: "In actuality," he says, "the
toes are securely boxed, the support of the body is the instep. But
that is neither here nor there; the body is supposed to appear
weightless, and thus, from the artistic standpoint, to be so."12
Even the toe dance, so much despised by Isadora Duncan and
by the schools she inspired, is essentially creative, not athletic.
The art of dancing is a wider category than any particular con¬
ception that may govern a tradition, a style, a sacred or secular
use; wider than the cult dance, the folk dance, the ballroom
dance, the ballet, the modern "expressive dance." Isadora, con¬
vinced that the exhibition of personal feeling was the only legit¬
imate theme for terpsichorean art, could not understand her own
reactions to the dancing of Kschinsky and Pavlova, which cap¬
tivated her despite her beliefs and ideals.
"I am an enemy of the Ballet," she wrote, "which I consider a
false and preposterous art, in fact, outside the pale of all art. But
it was impossible not to applaud the fairylike figure of Kschinsky
as she flitted across the stage more like a lovely bird or butterfly
than a human being. ... Some days later I received a visit from
the lovely Pavlova; and again I was presented with a box to see
her in the ravishing Ballet of Gisele. Although the movement of
 SUSANNE K. LANGER 41

these dances was against every artistic and human feeling, again
I could not resist warmly applauding the exquisite apparition of
Pavlova as she floated over the stage that evening."13
How a ballet could be "ravishing," in which every movement
was contrary to art and human feeling, was a problem that she
evidently did not pursue in her theoretical musings. Had she
thought more deeply about her own words, she might have
found the answer, the key to the loveliness of Kschinsky and
Pavlova and their entire "false and preposterous art," and the
very thing her own dance seems to have lacked most grievously:
the dancer as an apparition.
The play of virtual powers manifests itself in the motions of
illusory personages, whose passionate gestures fill the world
they create—a remote, rationally indescribable world in which
forces seem to become visible. But what makes them visible is
not itself always visual; hearing and kinesthesia support the
rhythmic, moving image, to such an extent that the dance illu¬
sion exists for the dancer as well as for the spectators. In tribal
society some dances include all persons present, leaving no spec¬
tators at all. .. .
But a new demand is made on the dance when it is to enthrall
not only its own performers, but a passive audience (rustic audi¬
ences that furnish the music by singing and clapping are really
participants; they are not included here). The dance as a spectacle
is generally regarded as a product of degeneration, a secularized
form of what is really a religious art.14 But it is really a natural
development even within the confines of the "mythic conscious¬
ness," for dance magic may be projected to a spectator, to cure,
purify, or initiate him. Tylor describes a savage initiation cere¬
mony in which the boys solemnly witnessed a dog dance per¬
formed by the older men. Shamans, medicine men, witch doctors
and magicians commonly perform dances for their magical
effects not on the dancer, but on the awed spectators.
From the artistic standpoint this use of the dance is a great
advance over the purely ecstatic, because addressed to an audi¬
ence the dance becomes essentially and not only incidentally a
spectacle, and thus finds its true creative aim—to make the world
of Powers visible. This aim dictates all sorts of new techniques,
because bodily experiences, muscular tensions, momentum, the
feelings of precarious balance or the impulsions of unbalance,
can no longer be counted on to give form and continuity to the
dance. Every such kinesthetic element must be replaced by
visual, audible, or histrionic elements to create a comparable
42 WHAT IS DANCE?

ecstatic illusion for the audience. At this stage, the problems of

the tribal or cult dance are practically those of the modern ballet:
to break the beholder's sense of actuality and set up the virtual
image of a different world; to create a play of forces that confronts
the percipient, instead of engulfing him, as it does when he is
dancing, and his own activity is a major factor in making the
dance illusion.
The presence of an audience gives dance its artistic discipline;
and where this audience commands great respect, for instance
where the dancers perform to royal spectators, choreographic art
soon becomes a highly conscious, formalized, and expert presen¬
tation. It may, however, still be religious; in the Orient it has
never entirely lost its cult significance, although its long tradi¬
tion has brought it, by this time, to a state of technical perfection
and cultural sophistication that our own balletic efforts cannot
match, and indeed, our balletic thinking probably cannot
fathom. "In southeastern Asia," says Dr. Sachs, "where the
wrench dance has moved into a more restricted province, the
limbs are methodically wrenched out of joint. *.
Be that as it may, the separation of stage dancing from the
purely ecstatic took place long ago—probably much longer ago
in some parts of Asia than in Europe—and ever since this schism,
the two kinds of dance have followed different lines of devel¬
opment, and each has been affected in its own way by the great
trauma that Western civilization has of necessity inflicted on all
the arts—secularization.
Why, without motives of worship or magic-making, did peo¬
ple go on dancing at all? Because the image of Powers is still, in
some sense, a world image to them. To the "mythic conscious¬
ness" it presents reality, nature; to a secular mind it shows a
romantic world; to the knowing psychologist this is the infantile
"world" of spontaneous, irresponsible reactions, wish-potency,
freedom—the dream world. The eternal popularity of dance lies
in its ecstatic function, today as in earliest times; but instead of
transporting the dancers from a profane to a sacred state, it now
transports them from what they acknowledge as "reality" to a
realm of romance. There are quite genuine "virtual powers" cre¬
ated even in social dance; artistically they may be trivial—
merely the magnetic forces that unite a group, most simply a
couple, of dancers, and the powers of rhythm, that "carry" the
body through space with seemingly less than its usual require¬
ment of effort—but they are convincing. For this reason even
social dancing is intrinsically art, though it does not achieve
 SUSANNE K. LANGER 43

more than elementary forms before it is put to non-artistic uses—

delusion, self-deception, escape. The dream world is essentially
a fabric of erotic forces. Often the dance technique serves merely
to set up its primary illusion of free, non-physical powers, so that
a daydream may be "started" by the dancer's ecstatic removal
from actuality, and after that the dance becomes confused and
makes way for self-expression pure and simple. Dancing which
ends in making actual indecent passes at the girl, like the Bavar¬
ian Schuhplattler, in hugging and kissing, as the early waltz usu¬
ally did, or even quite innocently in a game of genuine compe¬
tition—trying to catch a ring, trying to escape from a circle,
etc.—such dancing is merely instrumental. Its creativity is the
lowest possible, and as soon as it has served a practical purpose
the dance itself collapses.
But this is an extreme picture of the degeneration of dance due
to secularization. Its normal fate is simply the shift from religious
to romantic uses. Undoubtedly the artistic virtues of some reli¬
giously ecstatic dances, practiced year in, year out by dancing
sects, are no greater than those of the saraband, the minuet, the
waltz, or the tango. In fact, the divine Powers contacted in tra¬
ditional mystic dancing are often but vaguely distinguishable
from the erotic forces, the bonds of love and the communing
selves, or the freedom from gravity, which enthusiastic ballroom
dancers experience.
The most important, from the balletic standpoint, is the last—
the sense of freedom from gravity. This ingredient in the dance
illusion is untouched by the shift from cult values to entertain¬
ment values. It is a direct and forceful effect of rhythmicized ges¬
ture, enhanced by the stretched posture that not only reduces the
friction surfaces of the foot, but also restricts all natural bodily
motions—the free use of arms and shoulders, the unconscious
turnings of the trunk, and especially the automatic responses of
the leg muscles in locomotion—and thereby produces a new
body-feeling, in which every muscular tension registers itself as
something kinesthetically new, peculiar to the dance... .
To make the dance a work of art requires that translation of
kinesthetic experience into visual and audible elements, which I
mentioned above as the artistic discipline imposed by the pres¬
ence of passive spectators. The dancer, or dancers, must trans¬
form the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an
autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play
of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time, without effecting
either a work of plastic art or of "melos." Both space and time, as
44 WHAT IS DANCE?

perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illu¬

sion, serving to beget the appearance of interacting powers
rather than to be themselves apparent. That is to say, music must
be swallowed by movement, white color, pictorial composition,
costume, decor—all the really plastic elements become the
frame and foil of gesture. The sudden effects of pure time or per¬
fect space that sometimes occur are almost immediately merged
again into the life of the dance.
The primary illusion of dance is a peculiarly rich experience,
just as immediate as that of music or of the plastic arts, but more
complex. Both space and time are implicitly created with it. Story
runs through it like a thread, without linking it at all to litera¬
ture; impersonation and miming are often systematically
involved in its basic abstraction, virtual gesture, but dance pan¬
tomime is not drama; the mummery of masks and costumes, to
which its thematic gestures belong, is depersonalizing rather
than humanly interesting. Dance, the art of the Stone Age, the
art of primitive life par excellence, holds a hegemony over all art
materials.
Yet like all art it can harbor no raw material, no things or facts,
in its illusory world. The virtual form must be organic and
autonomous and divorced from actuality. Whatever enters into
it does so in radical artistic transformation: its space is plastic, its
time is musical, its themes are fantasy, its actions symbolic. This
accounts, I think, for the many different notions which dancers
and aestheticians have held as to what is the essence of dance.
Every one of its secondary illusions, has been hailed as the true
key to its nature, assimilating the whole phenomenon of dance
to the realm wherein the given illusion is primary; dance has
been called an art of space, an art of time, a kind of poetry, a kind
of drama. But it is none of those things, nor is it the mother of
any other arts—not even drama, as I think a study of dramatic
creation will presently show. ...
Today, in our secular culture, those artists are the dancers of
the stage, of the Russian ballet and its derivatives, of the various
schools of “Modern Dance/' and occasionally of the revue, when
some number in its potpourri of good and bad entertainment
rises to unscheduled heights, through the inadvertent engage¬
ment of a genius. The work of dance composition is as clear and
constructive, as imaginative and as contrived as any plastic or
musical composition; it springs from an idea of feeling, a matrix
of symbolic form, and grows organically like every other work
of art. It is curious to compare the further words of Mary Wig-
 SUSANNE K. LANGER 45

man, in the essay from which I have just quoted, with the testi¬
monies of musicians on the creative process:
“All dance construction arises from the dance experience
which the performer is destined to incarnate and which gives his
creation its true stamp. The experience shapes the kernel, the
basic accord of his dance existence around which all else crystal¬
lizes. Each creative person carries with him his own characteris¬
tic theme. It is waiting to be aroused through experience and
completes itself during one whole creative cycle in manifold
radiations, variations and transformations/'15
The substance of such dance creation is the same Power that
enchanted ancient caves and forests, but today we invoke it with
full knowledge of its illusory status, and therefore with wholly
artistic intent. The realm of magic around the altar was broken,
inevitably and properly, by the growth of the human mind from
mythic conception to philosophical and scientific thought. The
dance, the most sacred instrument of sorcery, worship, and
prayer, bereft of its high office, suffered the degeneration of all
cast-off rituals into irrational custom or social play. But it has left
us the legacy of its great illusions, and with them the challenge
to an artistic imagination no longer dependent on delusions for
its motive powers. Once more human beings dance with high
seriousness and fervor; the temple dance and the rain dance
were never more reverent than the work of our devout artists.
Serious dance is very ancient, but as art it is relatively new,
except possibly in some old Asiatic cultures. And as art it creates
the image of that pulsating organic life which formerly it was
expected to give and sustain. “The image which has assumed
form gives evidence of the primary vision conceived through the
inner experience. That creation will ever be the most pure and
forceful in its effect, in which the most minute detail speaks of
the vibrating, animated unity which called forth the idea. The
shape of the individual's inner experience ... will also have the
unique, magnetic power of transmission which makes it possible
to draw other persons, the participating spectators, into the
magic circle of creation."16
(1953)

Notes

Compare Cyril W. Beaumont's account of a rehearsal of the Alhambra

Ballet: “The pianist renders the theme of the movement ... while the
dancers perform evolution after evolution which Nijinska controls and
 1
46 WHAT IS DANCE?

directs with dramatic gestures of her arms. The dancers swirl into long,
sinuous lines, melt into one throbbing mass, divide, form circles, revolve
and then dash from sight." (Published in Fanfare, 1921, and quoted in
the same author's A Miscellany for Dancers, p. 167.)
2Rudolf von Laban, who constantly insists that gesture springs from
actual feeling (cf. Welt des Tanzers: Fiinf Gedankenreigen, especially p. 14),
understands nonetheless that dance begins in a conception of feeling, an
apprehension of joy or sorrow and its expressive forms: "At a stroke, like
lightning, understanding becomes plastic. Suddenly, from some single
point, the germ of sorrow or joy unfolds in a person. Conception is
everything. All things evolve from the power of gesture, and find their
resolution in it."
3Cf. op. cit., passim.
4Cf. op. cit. Zweiter Reigen, where a pseudo-scientific discussion of
physical nature ends with the paragraph: "The tensions which we expe¬
rience, suddenly, everywhere, in motionlessness, in the sudden sensa¬
tion of falling, of swinging, are the sparks, the organic parts of a great,
invisible, and for us perhaps terrifying world, of which we are little
aware."
5Tension (Spannung) he describes as "a harmonious, simultaneous self-
awareness, self-perception, self-exploration, self-experiencing of the
infinite transformations and potentialities of transformation in the
world with relation to each other." After this heroic effort at cosmic def¬
inition, he continues: "From this universal process arises something
physically perceivable, a form of being which in this work I call nuclea-
tion (Ballung). This nucleation arises, endures, expires and begets by this
play of tensions the impressions of Time, Space, Power, and the like.. ..
A nucleation derived from the special modes of sympathetic vibrations
of the homogeneous infinite will be sensibly and coarsely received by
the eye. 'Sensibly/ that is to say, is 'making sense.' Our experience inter¬
prets that phenomenon as a space-filling nucleation, a Thing." (p. 6.)
6See especially vols. I and II of Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen;
also Spache und Mythos (Language and Myth), and An Essay on Man, part
I, passim, especially chap. 2, "A Clue to the Nature of Man: the Symbol."
7Cf. his Substance and Function.
8 World History of the Dance, p. 62.
9"The origins of human dancing ... are not revealed to us either in
ethnology or prehistory. We must rather infer them from the dance of
the apes: the gay, lively circle dance about some tall, firmly fixed object
must have come down to man from his animal ancestors. We may there¬
fore assume that the circle dance was already a permanent possession of
the Paleolithic culture, the first perceptible stage of human civilization."
(Ibid., p. 208.)
Dr. Sachs certainly oversimplifies the problem of art and overesti¬
mates the evidence (from Kohler) for the solution he accepts. We do not
know that the apes experience only lively fun as they trot around a post;
perhaps some fickle forerunner of mystical excitement awakens in them
 ANDRE LEVINSON 47

at that moment. Perhaps their antics are merely playful. Perhaps the ten¬
dency to rhythmic tramping was set off by Prof. Kohler's example, and
would never have developed in the jungle unless they watched human
dancers somewhere. We know too little to infer anything from “the
dance of the apes."
10Ibid., p. 57.
nDer Tanz als Kunstwerk, p. 63.
nIbid., p. 67.
I3My Life, p. 164.
14Cf. Rudolf Sonner, Musik and Tanz, p. 9: “In the last analysis dance
always goes back to a religious-ceremonial practical motive. Only in a
late stage do dances descend to a sphere of purely aesthetic hedonism,
in which they lose all serious meaning."
Also Curt Sachs, op. cit., p. 6: "As early as the Stone Age, dances
became works of art. As early as the Metal Ages, legend seizes the dance
and raises it into drama. But when in higher cultures it becomes art in
the narrower sense, when it becomes a spectacle, when it seeks to influ¬
ence men rather than spirits, then its universal power is broken."
i5"The New German Dance," p. 21.
16lbid., p. 23.

ANDRE LEVINSON
THE IDEA OF THE DANCE:
FROM ARISTOTLE TO
MALLARME

"The French are not sufficiently artistic," complained Theo-

phile Gautier in La Presse in 1848, "to be satisfied with the plastic
forms of poetry, painting, music and the dance. They need, in
addition, a concrete significance, action, a logically worked out
story.... If they had the courage they would quote Aristotle
apropos of a well-taken or a bungled cabriole." A complete his¬
tory of choreographic thought as well as an explanation of those
periodic upheavals through which the dance of the theatre has
passed can be found in these jesting words of Gautier. Ever since
48 WHAT IS DANCE?

the students of the Renaissance created the ballet, inspired by the

Orchesis of the Greeks, there have been two elements vying for
supremacy in the dance: movement and story, abstract form and
pure expression, execution and pantomime. Down to our own
day the balance between these two tendencies remains unstable.
From the first treatises of the Italian dancing masters of the Quat¬
trocento to Isadora Duncan swaying in the empty orchestra of the
theatre of Dionysus, the influence of the ancients has dominated
and often confused the study of the subject. The Renaissance
fashioned the ballet on classic models and went back to the
Greeks for rules to govern it. In the palimpsests they found a key
to choreographic beauty. The story about Julius Caesar Scaliger,
humanist philosopher, performing for the Emperor Maximilian
the Pyrrhic war dance which he had reconstructed from ancient
sources is an instance of how the archeologists and scholars have
monopolized the study of the mysterious Greek Orchesis.
Since the only work which could have given us accurate and
technical information about this baffling Orchesis has long been
irrevocably lost (the work of Aristoxenes, who developed the
theory of rhythm), the humanist philosophers were forced to
turn to the rhetoricians and historians for the quotations con¬
cerning the dance that adorn their pages. One constantly
encounters the same passages from Plato, Xenophon, Cassiodo-
rus and from that sparkling account of the Roman pantomime in
which Lucian of Samothrace set down his personal comments
without any attempt at a critical approach to the subject. But the
final authority is always Aristotle, who, in the first chapter of his
Poetics formulated his ideas of the dance, whose purpose he says
is "to imitate character, emotion and action, by rhythmical move¬
ment." This fatal text assigns to the dance an aim outside of itself
and creates confusion between saltatory motion and expressive
or descriptive gesture, using the dance as a substitute for words.
The dance ceases to be a thing in itself. Aristotle declares that it
interprets and imitates life. Lucian repeats his dictum. For the
soaring of the dancer through space, for the inherent beauty of
this divine sport, the philosophers substitute the concrete excel¬
lences of the sign language. From Plutarch to Cassiodorus, there
is little mention of anything but "speaking hands" and "elo¬
quent fingers." Aristotle's definition is at the root of all the bat¬
tles the ballet has fought from Jean-Georges Noverre (1760), who
terms it an art of imitation designed to "copy nature faithfully
and to delineate the emotions upon the stage," down to Michel
Fokine, who, in his turn, championed the dramatic ballet against
 ANDRE LEVINSON 49

the great formal ensembles, stylized and abstract, arranged by

Marius Petipa, the French ballet-master who reigned for half a
century over the Russian dance.
One needs only to open at random the books of Fabrisio
Caroso or Rinaldo Corsa, or the Orchesography of Canon Thoinot
Arbeau (translated into English and edited by C. W. Beaumont)
to find the Aristotelian doctrine arbitrarily superimposed upon
the technical analysis of the branles and pavanes of their time.
Thus Arbeau, having defined the relation between music and
dancing, cannot refrain from adding "but first and foremost, all
experts agree that the dance is a sort of silent rhetoric"; it is "a
speech in dumbshow" which the dancer executes with "her own
feet" (1588). During the reign of Louis XIV, Father Menestrier
attempted to outline an aesthetic of the dance in his treatise On
the Ancient and Modern Ballet, According to the Rules of the Theatre
(1682), relying on the same sources. He does, however, attack the
conclusions of his predecessors and when he proceeds, in accor¬
dance with the Aristotelian method, to study the quantitative
and qualitative elements of the ballet, the learned Jesuit actually
gives an account of the essential attributes of the dance of the
theatre. After the manner of the ancients, he distinguishes three
kinds of movement in the ballet: the motion of the body, the
patterns of the dance and the expression of emotion—in other
words, the dance steps, the path of the dancer upon the plane
surface of the stage and the gestures "for the purposes of imita¬
tion." Menestrier refuses to consider the ballet as mute tragedy
or danced comedy. He understands that it is a composite art that
obeys its own particular rules.
During the 18th century, the style of the danse noble, or court
dance, as it was elaborated by the disciples of Lully, such as Beau¬
champs and Pecourt, achieved the extreme of splendor and
refinement. In this "age of the minuet," the masked dancer, with
his wig and flaring hips, was a living symbol of the taste of the
times. His movements were as stylized as his costume. He
embodied the spirit of the rococo. But at the same time a violent
reaction began to stir in the breasts of the Encyclopedists against
the pure dance, which they termed an art of ostentation, a stilted
show, a mere social accomplishment. They inveighed against the
fixed and "meaningless" rhythms of the sarabande or gavotte.
The whole clan of the philosophers went on the warpath against
the ballets of Rameau, which they said were only a collection of
dance suites, displayed on some allegorical pretext in a pompous
decor. Jean-Jacques Rousseau burst forth against the opera, as
50 WHAT IS DANCE?

Tolstoi did a century later. This "art for art's sake," whose beauty
is pure form, seemed to him a mere routine. Dancing for danc¬
ing's sake, with no purpose, either instructive or constructive,
seemed a futile diversion, while ballets, in which the different
episodes were connected merely by some metaphysical relation,
bored him. Saint-Mars in his Ideas on the Opera enlarged upon
the superiority of pantomime that speaks to the heart, over the
dance that addresses itself merely to the eye. And Cahusac in his
treatise. The Ancient and the Modern Dance, sets out to prove the
superiority of the ancient dance,and particularly the Roman pan¬
tomime, over the French dance. For him, the dancers of the
Opera, in spite of the perfection of their mechanical equipment
were no more than bodies without souls. It remained, however,
for Diderot, in his discourses following The Natural Son, to for¬
mulate most emphatically the point of view of the philosophers
(1757). For him the dance is to pantomime what poetry is to
prose; it is rhythmic pantomime. Diderot maintains that to dance
a minuet, even with infinite grace, where the dancer follows a
path previously laid out, without expressing or imitating any¬
thing, is not dancing any more than to run through solfege is
singing. "A dance is a poem," he concludes, "although, to be
sure, it is the imitation of one through movement." The dance
was still awaiting its genius.
This genius, Voltaire discovered and acclaimed in the person
of Noverre, the greatest French choreographer of history, a dan¬
cer who was at the same time a thinker. His famous Letters on the
Dance (1760), that are at once a satiric pamphlet and a plan of
action, a manual and a profession of faith, confirm the triumph
of the ancient doctrine of Aristotle, the great misconception that
confuses the dance with pantomime and the dance step (le pas)
with gesture. In this work, which Diderot praised as being full
of ideas and written with fire, the theory of the "ballet of action"
is developed. Noverre, in the name of nature and supported by
the example of the Greeks, arrays himself against everything in
the traditional ballet which represents stylization, symmetry,
abstract or decorative arrangement. Twenty years later this mas¬
ter who was a forerunner of the modern ballet in the same sense
that Gluck was the precursor of the music-drama took up the
cudgels again with these words:

Shatter the hideous masks, burn the ridiculous periwigs, do away

with the awkward hoop-skirts, substitute taste for routine; let us
have a costume more distinguished, more accurate and more pic-
 ANDRE LEVINSON 51

turesque; demand action and movement on the stage, soul and

expression in the dance; indicate the abyss that separates the
mechanics of the craft from the creative spirit that would place it
among the imitative arts.

In such words does Noverre define his own course. Through him
the ballet becomes a "living tableau of the emotions, customs and
manners of all the peoples of the world;" through every form of
pantomime it addresses itself to the soul through the medium of
the eye. It is interesting to note that in this descriptive and psy¬
chological definition all idea of the dance itself, even to the very
word, is absent. What had become of it? It had simply become a
means to an end; it was no longer an end in itself. Its indepen¬
dence, its intrinsic aesthetic value had been sacrificed to the
expression of character and sentiment, to the ethos and pathos of
Greek philosophy. To be sure, in the writings of his old age,
Noverre, mellowed by half a century of experience and reflec¬
tion, resigned himself to the idea that "the dance, in the strict
sense of the word, is no more than the art of forming patterns
with grace, precision and facility, to the rhythm and beat of the
music" (1804).* But the impetus had already been given; all the
theatres of the old school, from Naples to Saint Petersburg
adopted the "ballet of action," accepting the Aristotelian sophis¬
try. A new tradition was founded in which emotion prevailed
over the play of pure form, psychological motivation over the
dynamics of movement. And when at the Scala in Milan Salva¬
tore Vigano, a nephew of Boccherini, produced his celebrated
choreodramas. The Titans and The Prometheus, which Stendhal
preferred to the plays of Shakespeare, he was doing no more
than developing upon a somewhat more elaborate musical foun¬
dation the ballet-pantomime of Noverre.
It was not until the great romantic renascence of 1830, of
which Marie Taglioni is the supreme incarnation, that the dance
came into its own again. In The Sylphide, the dance instead of
being subservient to expressive gesture, itself became the inter¬
preter of the emotions and their symbolic equivalent. The classic
step, which even Noverre had called the mechanical and mate-

’fIt is amusing that the veteran Noverre should end by denying the authority
of the Greek theatre, invoked by him in his youth, and should come to pride
himself on having substituted a natural gesticulation for the ignoble sign lan¬
guage of the Romans and the "foolish and unnatural" conventions of the
ancients.
52 WHAT IS DANCE?

rial part of the dance, the severe discipline of stylized movement,

which he termed "sterile academic routine," in short the dancer's
technique came to express the highest things of the soul. In a
constant approach to a geometric purity of design, making a pat¬
tern in space of straight lines and sweeping perfect curves, ideal¬
izing the dancer's body and dematerializing her costume, the bal¬
let blanc is able to transmute the formal poses of the slow dance
movement—the Arabesques of the Adagio—as well as those aerial
parabolas outlined by seemingly imponderable bodies (techni¬
cally known as the grands temps d'elevation) into a mysterious and
poetic language. Those words from Faust, "Alles Vergangliche ist
nur ein Gleichnis,” seem particularly applicable to this highly spir¬
itualized art. And in the same way it is easily understood why
the contemporaries of Taglioni called her a Christian dancer.
The romantic ballet and the spiritual impulse back of it found
no adequate literary expression. Carlos Blasis, who codified the
new laws of the dance, augmented by the great furor of 1830,
remained faithful to the poetics of the 18th century. The only
great critic who commented on the dance spectacles for a period
of thirty years was Theophile Gautier, the librettist of Giselle, and
he was consistently opposed to what he called the "metaphysics
of the ballet." At bottom a pagan, this leader of the "plastic
school of poetry" defended the cause of pure dance. For him the
true, the unique, the eternal subject of a ballet is the dance. It
remains to define exactly what he meant by the word. "The
dance is nothing more than the art of displaying elegant and cor¬
rect designs in positions favorable to the building up of patterns
in line"; it is "essentially materialistic and sensual." Gautier,
moreover, preferred the Cachucha of Fanny Elssler, "the Andal-
ousian of the North" to the seraphic lyricism of Taglioni, "Marie,
pleine de grace." And so it happened that the romantic ballet
had to wait until the period of its decline, when it was on the
verge of falling into an academic routine, to find its philosophic
expression and its aesthetic evaluation in the writings of a great
Symbolist poet, Stephane Mallarme.
Mallarme was a man of exalted spirit, who devoted his life to
a dream of achieving a definitive work that would be an orphic
explanation of the world and would give to our obscure exis¬
tence a clearer meaning. Vainly he sought some clue to this great
work in the dramas and the music of Richard Wagner. But he
caught a glimpse of it in the ballet.
I should like to try to penetrate the thought of Mallarme
through his notes—"pencilled in the theatre" in a prose as
 ANDRE LEVINSON 53

obscure as it is elusive—and to estimate something of the

“visionary accuracy" of his ideas. To do this, I shall have to tran¬
scribe faithfully his laconic and isolated words and arrange them
in some sort of order. "The theatre is a higher spirit," he declares,
and "the ballet is the supreme theatrical form of poetry." The
ballet's function is "symbolic"; each step is "a metaphor," a hier¬
oglyph of a mysterious writing, which one must be inspired to
read. The illiterate ballerina can be the unconscious revealer of
something which she symbolises without understanding what it
is. Only our poetic instinct can decipher her "writing of the
body." Her dance is a "poem freed of all the apparatus of writ¬
ing." The dance steps, pointes and taquetes, allonges or ballons, are
the rites, through which the idea is enunciated, expressing that
which would be inexpressible in any other language. Mallarme
does not neglect pantomime; it also "emanates from the dream."
But he recognizes that there is an essential difference between
the gestures through which the mime expresses his emotion and
the dancer's steps, the alphabet of the inexpressible. Pantomime
and ballet are for him two different and separate forms of art.
The hero of a ballet, who is an object of rivalry between a woman
who walks and a fairy who flies, lives in a double world.
Mallarme reveals to us here at once the typical material of the
romantic ballet and the inspiration of his own poetry. Man in
conflict between reality and his dreams or (to put it in other
words) the mime and the dancing star, the woman who walks
and the dancer who moves on the tips of her toes, or soars in the
air, whichever way it is expressed we have the essence of the
myth, the subject of all the hand-books in turn from Philip Tag-
lioni's Sylphide to Marius Petipa's Bayadera. Mallarme recognized
in the ballet the distinct attributes of two different forms of the
theatre, of two methods of being, placed in juxtaposition or
opposed one to the other. "The dancer who expresses herself by
dance steps understands no other eloquence, even that of ges¬
ture." Her body, almost unclothed in its cloud of tulle, her legs
in their silken sheaths, are no more than "the direct instruments
of an idea." The dance becomes for the spectator with imagina¬
tion the "mysterious and holy interpretation" of universal life
and of our inmost being. These ideas of Mallarme restore to the
opera ballet something of that ceremonial grandeur and exalta¬
tion that the dance rituals of the ancient Orient or the "astro¬
nomic dances" of Egyptian priestesses must have had.
And finally it is once again a poet—the most celebrated of con¬
temporary France—who has described and defined with incom-
54 WHAT IS DANCE?

parable verbal perfection and rare penetration this "mixture of

flesh and spirit" which is the dance. The Soul and the Dance by
Paul Valery is written in the form of a Platonic dialogue between
Socrates and his disciples.* In spite of the fact that the scene is
supposed to represent a Greek festival, the individuals who
appear before the banquet guests present a classic ballet—the
steps of the ballerinas are described with a precision that leaves
no doubt of that. Indeed in mentioning entrechats and battements
Mr. Valery borrows deliberately from the vocabulary of Vestris.
The banquet hall in which Socrates and his friends are feasting
seems to overlook, in spite of the anachronism, the stage of the
Opera. The spectacle opens with an ensemble entrance, half gay,
half solemn. Then Athnikte (who might just as well be called
Pavlova) appears, commencing with a simple march encircling
the stage, which is, however, "altogether divine," calling into
play the highest expression of her art. To queries as to why this
simple march becomes the perfect prototype of all solemn
processions, it is explained that the dancer follows an invisible
pattern, and that the number and length of her steps are coor¬
dinated with her height, which threefold relationship "of these
measurable graces" transforms each movement into a high artis¬
tic accomplishment. Then follows what the ballet dancer would
call the "variation on the points" in which Athnikte gives herself
over to complete movement. She dances a scherzo, running and
jumping upon the "extreme tips of her toes" and then whirls
into the finale, performing a series of great turns. She spins upon
herself, before falling exhausted. The guests demand the mean¬
ing of these "beautiful, harmonious motions," the goal towards
which these "deliciously firm, inexpressibly supple limbs" are
striving, the purpose of this fairy-like gymnastic of the ballet,
this dream implicit with symmetry, order, action and resulting
reaction. One of the interlocutors is bound, at all costs, that the
dancer should represent something. But Socrates answers in
decisive words which are the keystones to the whole arch of the
dialogue. "Do you not realize that the dance is the pure act of
metamorphosis? Marvellous words! In dismissing, summarily,
this common misapprehension, they go straight to the founda¬
tion, to the scheme of the dance and its meaning, which is nei¬
ther expression nor imitation but pure function. In these imag-

*1 have written a brochure analyzing this dialogue from the point of view of
the choreographer (Andre Levinson. Paul Valery, Philosopher of the Dance. Paris,
1927).
 PAUL VALERY 55

ined words of Socrates, the famous and unhappy paradox of

Aristotle seems at last to be reduced to nothing.

(1927)

PAUL VALERY
PHILOSOPHY OF
THE DANCE

Before Mme Argentina captivates you and whirls you away

into the sphere of lucid, passionate life created by her art; before
she demonstrates to you what a folk art, born of an ardent and
sensitive race, can become when the intelligence takes hold of it,
penetrates it, and transforms it into a sovereign means of expres¬
sion and invention, you will have to resign yourselves to listen¬
ing to a few observations on the art of the dance by a man who
is no dancer.
You will have to wait a little while for the moment of the mir¬
acle. But you are quite aware, I am sure, that I am no less impa¬
tient than you are to be carried away by it.

Let me begin at once by telling you without preamble that to my

mind the dance is not merely an exercise, an entertainment, an
ornamental art, or sometimes a social activity; it is a serious mat¬
ter and in certain of its aspects most venerable. Every epoch that
has understood the human body and experienced at least some
sense of its mystery, its resources, its limits, its combinations of
energy and sensibility, has cultivated and revered the dance.
It is a fundamental art, as is suggested if not demonstrated by
its universality, its immemorial antiquity, the solemn uses to
which it has been put, the ideas and reflections it has engen¬
dered at all times. For the dance is an art derived from life itself,
since it is nothing more nor less than the action of the whole
human body; but an action transposed into a world, into a kind
of space-time, which is no longer quite the same as that of every¬
day life.
56 WHAT IS DANCE?

Man perceived that he possessed more vigor, more suppleness,

more articular and muscular possibilities, than he needed to sat¬
isfy the needs of his existence, and he discovered that certain of
these movements, by their frequency, succession, or range, gave
him a pleasure equivalent to a kind of intoxication and some¬
times so intense that only total exhaustion, an ecstasy of exhaus¬
tion, as it were, could interrupt his delirium, his frantic motor
expenditure.
We have, then, too much energy for our needs. You can easily
observe that most, by far the most, of the impressions we receive
from our senses are of no use to us, that they cannot be utilized
and play no part in the functioning of the mechanisms essential
to the conservation of life. We see too many things and hear too
many things that we do nothing and can do nothing with: the
words of a lecturer, for instance.

The same observation applies to our powers of action: we can

perform a multitude of acts that have no chance of being utilized
in the indispensable, or important, operations of life. We can
trace a circle, give play to our facial muscles, walk in cadence; all
these actions, which made it possible to create geometry, the
drama, and the military art, are in themselves useless, useless to
our vital functioning.
Thus life's instruments of relation, our sense, our articulated
members, the images and signs which control our actions and
the distribution of our energies, co-ordinating the movements of
our puppet, might be employed solely for our physiological
needs; they might do nothing more than attack the environment
in which we live or defend us against it, and then their sole busi¬
ness would be the preservation of our existence.
We might lead a life strictly limited to the maintenance of our
living machine, utterly indifferent or insensitive to everything
that plays no part in the cycles of transformation which make up
our organic functioning; feeling nothing and doing nothing
beyond what is necessary, making no move that is not a limited
reaction, a finite response, to some external action. For our useful
acts are finite. They carry us from one state to another.
Animals do not seem to perceive or do anything that is useless.
A dog's eye sees the stars, no doubt, but his being gives no devel¬
opment to the sight. The dog's ear perceives a sound that makes
it prick up in alarm; but of this sound the dog assimilates only
what he needs in order to respond with an immediate and uni-
 PAUL VALERY 57

form act. He does not dwell on the perception. The cow in her
pasture jumps at the clatter of the passing Mediterranean
Express; the train vanishes; she does not pursue the train in her
thoughts; she goes back to her tender grass, and her lovely eyes
do not follow the departing train. The index of her brain returns
at once to zero.
Yet sometimes animals seem to amuse themselves. Cats obvi¬
ously play with mice. Monkeys perform pantomimes. Dogs chase
each other, spring at the heads of horses; and I can think of noth¬
ing that suggests free, happy play more fully than the sporting
of porpoises we see off shore, leaping free of the water, diving,
outracing a ship, swimming under its keel and reappearing in
the foam, livelier than the waves amid which they glisten and
change color in the sun. Might we not call this a dance?
But all these animal amusements may be interpreted as useful
actions, bursts of impulse, springing from the need to consume
excess energy, or to maintain the organs designed for vital
offense or defense in a state of suppleness or vigor. And I think
I am justified in observing that those species, such as the ants and
the bees, that seem to be most exactly constructed, endowed with
the most specialized instincts, also seem to be those most saving
of their time. Ants do not waste a minute. The spider does not
play in its web; it lurks in wait. But what about man?

Man is the singular animal who watches himself live, puts a

value on himself, and identifies this value with the importance
he attaches to useless perceptions and acts without vital physical
consequence.
Pascal situated all our dignity in thought; but the thinking that
raises us—in our own eyes—above our sensory condition is pre¬
cisely the kind of thinking that has no useful purpose. Obviously
our meditations about the origin of things, or about death, are of
no use to the organism, and indeed, exalted thoughts of this kind
tend to be harmful if not fatal to our species. Our deepest
thoughts are those that are the most insignificant, the most futile
as it were, from the standpoint of self-preservation.
But because our curiosity was greater than it had any need to
be, and our activity more intense than any vital aim required,
both have developed to the point of inventing the arts, the sci¬
ences, universal problems, and of producing objects, forms,
actions that we could easily have dispensed with.
And moreover, all this free, gratuitous invention and produc-
58 WHAT IS DANCE?

tion, all this play of our senses and faculties, gradually provided
itself with a kind of necessity and utility.
Art and science, each in its own way, tend to build up a kind
of utility from the useless, a kind of necessity from the arbitrary.
Ultimately, artistic creation is not so much a creation of works as
the creation of a need for works; for works are products, a supply
presupposing a demand, a need.

Quite a bit of philosophy, you may think . .. and I admit that I've
given you rather too much of it. But when one is not a dancer;
when one would be at a loss not only to perform, but even to
explain, the slightest step; when, to deal with the miracles
wrought by the legs, one has only the resources of a head, there's
no help but in a certain amount of philosophy—in other words,
one approaches the matter from far off, in the hope that distance
will dispel the difficulties. It is much simpler to construct a uni¬
verse than to explain how a man stands on his feet—as Aristotle,
Descartes, Leibnitz, and quite a few others will tell you.
However, it seems perfectly legitimate for a philosopher to
watch a dancer in action, and noting that he takes pleasure in it,
to try to derive from his pleasure the secondary pleasure of
expressing his impressions in his own language.
But first, he may derive some fine images from it. Philosophers
have a great taste for images: there is no trade that requires more
of them, although philosophers often hide them under dull-gray
words. They have created famous ones: the cave; the sinister
river you can never cross twice; or Achilles running breathlessly
after a tortoise he can never overtake. The parallel mirrors, run¬
ners passing on the torch to one another, down to Nietzsche
with his eagle, his serpent, his tight-rope dancer. All in all quite
a stock of them, quite a pageant of ideas. Think of the meta¬
physical ballet that might be composed with all these famous
symbols.
My philosopher, however, does not content himself with this
performance. What, in the presence of the dance and the dancer,
can he do to give himself the illusion of knowing a little more
than she about something that she knows best, and he not at all?
He is compelled to make up for his technical ignorance and hide
his perplexity under some ingenious universal interpretation of
this art whose wonders he notes and experiences.
He embarks on the task; he goes about it in his own fash¬
ion. .. . The fashion of a philosopher. Everyone knows how his
 PAUL VALERY 59

dance begins.... His first faint step is a question. And as befits a

man undertaking a useless, arbitrary act, he throws himself into
it without foreseeing the end; he embarks on an unlimited inter¬
rogation in the interrogative infinitive. That is his trade.
He plays his game, beginning with its usual beginning. And
there he is, asking himself:
"What then is the dance?"

What then is the dance? At once he is perplexed, his wits are

paralyzed. He is reminded of a famous question, a famous
dilemma—that of St. Augustine.
St. Augustine confesses how he asked himself one day what
Time is; and he owns that he perfectly well knew as long as he
did not think of asking, but that he lost himself at the crossroads
of his mind as soon as he applied himself to the term, as soon as
he isolated it from any immediate usage or particular expression.
A very profound observation. ...
That is what my philosopher has come to: he stands hesitant
on the forbidding threshold that separates a question from an
answer, obsessed by the memory of St. Augustine, dreaming in
his penumbra of the great saint's perplexity:
"What is Time? But what is the dance?"
But, he tells himself, the dance after all is merely a form of
time, the creation of a kind of time, or of a very distinct and sin¬
gular species of time.
Already he is less worried: he has wedded two difficulties to
each other. Each one, taken separately, left him perplexed and
without resources; but now they are linked together. Perhaps
their union will be fertile. Perhaps some ideas may be born of it,
and that is just what he is after—his vice and his plaything.
Now he watches the dancer with the extraordinary, ultra-lucid
eyes that transform everything they see into a prey of the
abstract mind. He considers the spectacle and deciphers it in his
own way.
It seems to him that this person who is dancing encloses her¬
self as it were in a time that she engenders, a time consisting
entirely of immediate energy, of nothing that can last. She is the
unstable element, she squanders instability, she goes beyond the
impossible and overdoes the improbable; and by denying the
ordinary state of things, she creates in men's minds the idea of
another, exceptional state—a state that is all action, a perma¬
nence built up and consolidated by an incessant effort, compa-
60 WHAT IS DANCE?

rable to the vibrant pose of a bumblebee or moth exploring the

calyx of a flower, charged with motor energy, sustained in vir¬
tual immobility by the incredibly swift beat of its wings.
Or our philosopher may just as well compare the dancer to a
flame or, for that matter, to any phenomenon that is visibly sus¬
tained by the intense consumption of a superior energy.
He also notes that, in the dance, all the sensations of the body,
which is both mover and moved, are connected, in a certain
order—that they call and respond to each other, as though
rebounding or being reflected from the invisible wall of a sphere
of energy within the living being. Forgive me that outrageously
bold expression, I can find no other. But you knew before you
came here that I am an obscure and complicated writer....
Confronted by the dance, my philosopher—or a mind afflicted
with a mania for interrogation, if you prefer—asks his usual
questions. He brings in his whys and hows, the customary instru¬
ments of elucidation, which are the apparatus of his own art; and
he tries, as you have just perceived, to replace the immediate and
expedient expression of things by rather odd formulas which
enable him to relate the graceful phenomenon of the dance to
the whole of what he knows, or thinks he knows.
He attempts to fathom the mystery of a body which suddenly,
as though by the effect of an internal shock, enters into a kind
of life that is at once strangely unstable and strangely regulated,
strangely spontaneous, but at the same time strangely contrived
and, assuredly, planned.
The body seems to have broken free from its usual states of
balance. It seems to be trying to outwit—I should say outrace—
its own weight, at every moment evading its pull, not to say its
sanction.
In general, it assumes a fairly simple periodicity that seems to
maintain itself automatically; it seems endowed with a superior
elasticity which retrieves the impulse of every movement and at
once renews it. One is reminded of a top, standing on its point
and reacting so sensitively to the slightest shock.

But here is an important observation that comes to the mind of

our philosopher, who might do better to enjoy himself to the full
and abandon himself to what he sees. He observes that the danc¬
ing body seems unaware of its surroundings. It seems to be con¬
cerned only with itself and one other object, a very important
one, from which it breaks free, to which it returns, but only to
gather the wherewithal for another flight....
 PAUL VALERY 61

That object is the earth, the ground, the solid place, the plane
on which everyday life plods along, the plane of walking, the
prose of human movement.
Yes, the dancing body seems unaware of everything else, it
seems to know nothing of its surroundings. It seems to hearken
to itself and only to itself, to see nothing, as though its eyes were
jewels, unknown jewels like those of which Baudelaire speaks,
lights that serve no useful purpose.
For the dancer is in another world; no longer the world that
takes color from our gaze, but one that she weaves with her steps
and builds with her gestures. And in that world acts have no
outward aim; there is no object to grasp, to attain, to repulse or
run away from, no object which puts a precise end to an action
and gives movements first an outward direction and co-ordina¬
tion, then a clear and definite conclusion.

But that is not all: in this world nothing is unforeseen; though

the dancer sometimes seems to be reacting to an unforeseen inci¬
dent, that too is part of a very evident plan. Everything happens
as if... . But nothing more.
Thus there is no aim, no real incidents, no outside world....
The philosopher exults. No outside world! For the dancer
there is no outside. ... Nothing exists beyond the system she sets
up by her acts—one is reminded of the diametrically contrary
and no less closed system constituted by our sleep, whose exactly
opposite law is the abolition of all acts, total abstention from
action. He sees the dance as an artifical somnambulism, a group
of sensations which make themselves a dwelling place where
certain muscular themes follow one another in an order which
creates a special kind of time that is absolutely its own. And with
an increasingly intellectual delight he contemplates this being
who, from her very depths, brings forth these beautiful transfor¬
mations of her form in space; who now moves, but without
really going anywhere; now metamorphoses herself on the spot,
displaying herself in every aspect; who sometimes skillfully
modulates successive appearances as though in controlled
phases; sometimes changes herself brusquely into a whirlwind,
spinning faster and faster, then suddenly stops, crystallized into
a statue, adorned with an alien smile.

But this detachment from the environment, this absence of aim,

this negation of explicable movement, these full turns (which no
circumstance of ordinary life demands of our body), even this
 }

62 WHAT IS DANCE?

impersonal smile—all these features are radically opposed to

those that characterize our action in the practical world and our
relations with it.
In the practical world our being is nothing more than an inter¬
mediary between the sensation of a need and the impulse to sat¬
isfy the need. In this role, it proceeds always by the most eco¬
nomical, if not always the shortest, path: it wants results. Its
guiding principles seem to be the straight line, the least action,
and the shortest time. A practical man is a man who has an
instinct for such economy of time and effort, and has little diffi¬
culty in putting it into effect, because his aim is definite and
clearly localized: an external object.
As we have said, the dance is the exact opposite. It moves in a
self-contained realm of its own and implies no reason, no ten¬
dency toward completion. A formula for pure dance should
include nothing to suggest that it has an end. It is terminated by
outside events; its limits in time are not intrinsic to it; the dura¬
tion of the dance is limited by the conventional length of the
program, by fatigue or loss of interest. But the dance itself has
nothing to make it end. It ceases as a dream ceases that might go
on indefinitely: it stops, not because an undertaking has been
completed, for there is no undertaking, but because something
else, something outside it has been exhausted.
And so—permit me to put it rather boldly—might one not—
and I have already intimated as much—consider the dance as a
kind of inner life, allowing that psychological term a new mean¬
ing in which physiology is dominant?
An inner life, indeed, but one consisting entirely in sensations
of time and energy which respond to one another and form a
kind of closed circle of resonance. This resonance, like any other,
is communicated: a part of our pleasure as spectators consists in
feeling ourselves possessed by the rhythms so that we ourselves
are virtually dancing.

Carried a little further, this sort of philosophy of the dance can

lead to some rather curious consequences or applications. If, in
speaking of this art, I have kept to considerations of a very gen¬
eral nature, it has been somewhat with the intention of guiding
you to what we are now coming to. I have tried to communicate
a rather abstract idea of the dance and to represent it above all
as an action that derives from ordinary, useful action, but breaks
away from it, and finally opposes it.
 PAUL VALERY 63

But this very general formulation (and that is why I have

adopted it today) covers far more than the dance in the strict
sense. All action which does not tend toward utility and which
on the other hand can be trained, perfected, developed, may be
subsumed under this simplified notion of the dance, and conse¬
quently, all the arts can be considered as particular examples of this
general idea, since by definition all the arts imply an element of
action, the action which produces, or else manifests, the work.
A poem, for example, is action, because a poem exists only at the
moment of being spoken; then it is in actu. This act, like the
dance, has no other purpose than to create a state of mind; it
imposes its own laws; it, too, creates a time and a measurement
of time which are appropriate and essential to it: we cannot dis¬
tinguish it from its form of time. To recite poetry is to enter into
a verbal dance.
Or consider a virtuoso at work, a violinist, a pianist. Just watch
his hands. Stop your ears if you dare. But concentrate on the
hands. Watch them act, racing over the narrow stage that is key¬
board. Are they not dancers who have also been subjected for
years to a severe discipline, to endless exercises?
Remember that you can hear nothing. You merely see the
hands come and go, stop for a moment, cross, play leapfrog;
sometimes one waits, while the five fingers of the other seem to
be trying out their paces at the other end of the racecourse of
ivory and ebony. You begin to surmise that all this follows cer¬
tain laws, that the whole ballet is regulated, determined. ...
Let us note in passing that if you hear nothing and are unfa¬
miliar with the music being played, you have no way of know¬
ing what point in his piece the performer has come to. What you
see gives you no indication of the pianist's progress; yet you are
quite certain that the action in which he is engaged is at every
moment subject to some rather complex system....
With a little more attention you would discover that this sys¬
tem puts certain restrictions on the freedom of movement of
these active hands as they fly over the keyboard. Whatever they
do, they seem to have undertaken to respect some sort of contin¬
uous order. Cadence, measure, rhythm make themselves felt. I
do not wish to enter into these questions which, it seems to me,
though familiar and without difficulty in practice, have hitherto
lacked any satisfactory theory; but then that is true of all ques¬
tions in which time is directly involved. We are brought back to
the remarks of St. Augustine.
64 WHAT IS DANCE?

But it is easy to note that all automatic movements correspond¬

ing to a state of being, and not to a prefigured localized aim, take
on a periodic character; this is true of the walker; of the absent-
minded fellow who swings his foot or drums on a windowpane;
of the thinker who strokes his chin, etc.

If you will bear with me for a few minutes more, we shall carry
our thought a little further: a little further beyond the customary,
immediate idea of the dance.
I was just saying that all the arts are extremely varied forms of
action and may be analyzed in terms of action. Consider an artist
at work, eliminate the brief intervals when he sets it aside; watch
him act, stop still, and briskly start in again.
Assume that he is so well trained, so sure of his technique that
while you are observing him he is a pure executant whose suc¬
cessive operations tend to take place in commensurable lapses of
time, that is to say, with a certain rhythm. Then you will be able
to conceive that the execution of a work of art, of a work of paint¬
ing or sculpture, is itself a work of art and that its material object,
the product of the artist's fingers, is only a pretext, a stage "prop"
or, as it were, the subject of the ballet.
Perhaps this view seems bold to you. But remember that for
many great artists a work is never finished; perhaps what they
regard as a desire for perfection is simply a form of the inner life
I have been speaking of, which consists entirely of energy and
sensibility in a reciprocal and, one might say, reversible
exchange.
Or think, on the other hand, of those edifices that the ancients
built, to the rhythm of the flute commanding the movements of
the files of laborers and masons.
I might have told you the curious story related in the Journal
of the Goncourt brothers, about the Japanese painter who, on a
visit to Paris, was asked by them to execute a few works in the
presence of a little gathering of art lovers.

But it is high time to conclude this dance of ideas round the liv¬
ing dance.
I wanted to show you how this art, far from being a futile
amusement, far from being a specialty confined to putting on a
show now and then for the amusement of the eyes that contem¬
plate it or the bodies that take part in it, is quite simply a poetry
 PAUL VALERY 65

that encompasses the action of living creatures in its entirety: it isolates

and develops, distinguishes and deploys the essential character¬
istics of this action, and makes the dancer's body into an object
whose transformations and successive aspects, whose striving to
attain the limits that each instant sets upon the powers of being,
inevitably remind us of the task the poet imposes on his mind,
the difficulties he sets before it, the metamorphoses he obtains
from it, the flights he expects of it—flights which remove him,
sometimes too far, from the ground, from reason, from the aver¬
age notion of logic and common sense.
What is a metaphor if not a kind of pirouette performed by an
idea, enabling us to assemble its diverse names or images? And
what are all the figures we employ, all those instruments, such
as rhyme, inversion, antithesis, if not an exercise of all the pos¬
sibilities of language, which removes us from the practical world
and shapes, for us too, a private universe, a privileged abode of
the intellectual dance?

And now let me give you over, weary of words but all the more
eager for sensuous enchantment and effortless pleasure, to art
itself, to the flame, to the ardent and subtle action of Mme
Argentina.
You know what prodigies of comprehension and invention
this great artist has achieved, what she has done for Spanish
dancing. As for me, who have spoken to you only of the dance
in the abstract—and too abundantly at that—I cannot tell you
how much I admire the labor of intelligence with which Argen¬
tina, in a noble and deeply studied style, has revived a type of
folk dance that has been so much cheapened lately, especially
outside of Spain.
I think she has achieved her aim, a magnificent aim, since it
meant saving an art form and regenerating its nobility and legit¬
imate power, by an infinitely subtle analysis both of the
resources of this type of art, and of her own resources. That is
something very close to me, that concerns me passionately. I am
a man who has never seen a contradiction—indeed, I cannot
conceive of one—between intelligence and sensibility, conscious
reflection and its raw material, and I salute Argentina, as a man
who is precisely as pleased with her as he would like to be with
himself.

(1936)
66 WHAT IS DANCE?

NELSON GOODMAN
From LANGUAGES OF ART*

MODES OF SYMBOLIZATION
1. Though this book deals with some problems pertaining to
the arts, its scope does not coincide very closely with what is
ordinarily taken to be the field of aesthetics. On the one hand, I
touch only incidentally on questions of value, and offer no can¬
ons of. criticism. No mandatory judgments are implied concern¬
ing any work I cite as an example, and the reader is invited to
substitute his own illustrations. On the other hand, my study
ranges beyond the arts into matters pertaining to the sciences,
technology, perception, and practice. Problems concerning the
arts are points of departure rather than of convergence. The
objective is an approach to a general theory of symbols.
"Symbol" is used here as a very general and colorless term. It
covers letters, words, texts, pictures, diagrams, maps, models, and
more, but carries no implication of the oblique or the occult. The
most literal portrait and the most prosaic passage are as much
symbols, and as 'highly symbolic', as the most fanciful and
figurative.
Systematic inquiry into the varieties and functions of symbols
has seldom been undertaken. Expanding investigation in struc¬
tural linguistics in recent years needs to be supplemented by and
integrated with intensive examination of nonverbal symbol sys¬
tems, from pictorial representation on the one hand to musical
notation on the other, if we are to achieve any comprehensive
grasp of the modes and means of reference and of their varied
and pervasive use in the operations of the understanding. "Lan¬
guages" in my title should, strictly, be replaced by "symbol sys¬
tems". But the title, since always read before the book, has been
kept in the vernacular. The nonreader will not mind, and the
reader will understand.

"■Selections from Languages of Art included in this anthology have been

adapted by Professor Goodman, who has also added supplementary footnotes
and supplied an Afterword. The supplementary footnotes are marked with an
asterisk. The note, section, and figure numbers often differ from those in the
book.
 NELSON GOODMAN 67

2. Whether a picture ought to be a representation or not is a

question much less crucial than might appear from current bitter
battles among artists, critics, and propagandists. Nevertheless,
the nature of representation wants early study in any philosoph¬
ical examination of the ways symbols function in and out of the
arts. That representation is frequent in some arts, such as paint¬
ing, and infrequent in others, such as music, threatens trouble
for a unified aesthetics; and confusion over how pictorial repre¬
sentation as a mode of signification is allied to and distinguished
from verbal description on the one hand and, say, facial expres¬
sion on the other is fatal to any general theory of symbols.
The most naive view of representation might perhaps be put
somewhat like this: "A represents B if and only if A appreciably
resembles B", or "A represents B to the extent that A resembles
B". Vestiges of this view, with assorted refinements, persist in
most writing on representation. Yet more error could hardly be
compressed into so short a formula.
Some of the faults are obvious enough. An object resembles
itself to the maximum degree but rarely represents itself; resem¬
blance, unlike representation, is reflexive. Again, unlike repre¬
sentation, resemblance is symmetric: B is as much like A as A is
like B, but while a painting may represent the Duke of Welling¬
ton, the Duke doesn't represent the painting. Furthermore, in
many cases neither one of a pair of very like objects represents
the other: none of the automobiles off an assembly line is a pic¬
ture of any of the rest; and a man is not normally a representa¬
tion of another man, even his twin brother. Plainly, resemblance
in any degree is no sufficient condition for representation.1
Just what correction to make in the formula is not so obvious.
We may attempt less, and prefix the condition "If A is a picture,
...". Of course, if we then construe "picture" as "representa¬
tion", we resign a large part of the question: namely, what con¬
stitutes a representation. But even if we construe "picture"
broadly enough to cover all paintings, the formula is wide of the
mark in other ways. A Constable painting of Marlborough Castle
is more like any other picture than it is like the Castle, yet it
represents the Castle and not another picture—not even the clos¬
est copy. To add the requirement that B must not be a picture
would be desperate and futile; for a picture may represent
another, and indeed each of the once popular paintings of art
galleries represents many others.
The plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object,2 must be
a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and that no degree of
68 WHAT IS DANCE?

resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of

reference. Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost any¬
thing may stand for almost anything else. A picture that repre¬
sents—like a passage that describes—an object refers to and,
more particularly, denotes3 it. Denotation is the core of represen¬
tation and is independent of resemblance.
If the relation between a picture and what it represents is thus
assimilated to the relation between a predicate and what it
applies to, we must examine the characteristics of representation
as a special kind of denotation. What does pictorial denotation
have in common with, and how does it differ from, verbal or
diagrammatic denotation? One not implausible answer is that
resemblance, while no sufficient condition for representation, is
just the feature that distinguishes representation from denota¬
tion of other kinds. Is it perhaps the case that if A denotes B, then
A represents B just to the extent that A resembles B? I think even
this watered-down and innocuous-looking version of our initial
formula betrays a grave misconception of the nature of
representation.

3. "To make a faithful picture, come as close as possible to

copying the object just as it is." This simple-minded injunction
baffles me; for the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms,
a complex of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool, and much more. If
none of these constitute the object as it is, what else might? If all
are ways the object is, then none is the way the object is.41 cannot
copy all these at once; and the more nearly I succeeded, the less
would the result be a realistic picture.
What I am to copy then, it seems, is one such aspect, one of the
ways the object is or looks. But not, of course, any one of these
at random—not, for example, the Duke of Wellington as he looks
to a drunk through a raindrop. Rather, we may suppose, the way
the object looks to the normal eye, at proper range, from a favor¬
able angle, in good light, without instrumentation, unprejudiced
by affections or animosities or interests, and unembellished by
thought or interpretation. In short, the object is to be copied as
seen under aseptic conditions by the free and innocent eye.
The catch here, as Ernst Gombrich insists, is that there is no
innocent eye.5 The eye comes always ancient to its work,
obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the
ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart, and brain. It functions not as an
instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a
complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees
 NELSON GOODMAN 69

is regulated by need and prejudice.6 It selects, rejects, organizes,

discriminates, associates, classifies, constructs. It does not much
mirror as take and make; and what it takes and makes it sees not
bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people,
as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or
naked.
The myths of the innocent eye and of the absolute given are
unholy accomplices. Both derive from and foster the idea of
knowing as a processing of raw material received from the
senses, and of this raw material as being discoverable either
through purification rites or by methodical disinterpretation. But
reception and interpretation are not separable operations; they
are thoroughly interdependent. The Kantian dictum echoes
here: the innocent eye is blind and the virgin mind empty.
Moreover, what has been received and what has been done to it
cannot be distinguished within the finished product. Content
cannot be extracted by peeling off layers of comment.7
All the same, an artist may often do well to strive for inno¬
cence of eye. The effort sometimes rescues him from the tired
patterns of everyday seeing, and results in fresh insight. The
opposite effort, to give fullest rein to a personal reading, can be
equally tonic—and for the same reason. But the most neutral eye
and the most biased are merely sophisticated in different ways.
The most ascetic vision and the most prodigal, like the sober por¬
trait and the vitriolic caricature, differ not in how much but only
in how they interpret.
The copy theory of representation, then, is stopped at the start
by inability to specify what is to be copied. Not an object the way
it is, not all the ways it is, nor the way it looks to the mindless
eye. Moreover, something is wrong with the very notion of
copying any of the ways an object is, any aspect of it. For an
aspect is not just the object-from-a-given-distance-and-angle-
and-in-a-given-light; it is the object as we look upon or conceive
it, a version or construal of the object. In representing an object,
we do not copy such a construal or interpretation—we achieve it.8
In other words, nothing is ever represented either shorn of or
in the fullness of its properties. A picture never merely repre¬
sents x, but rather represents rasa man or represents x to be a
mountain, or represents the fact that x is a melon. What could be
meant by copying a fact would be hard to grasp even if there
were any such things as facts; to ask me to copy rasa soandso is
a little like asking me to sell something as a gift; and to speak of
copying something to be a man is sheer nonsense. We shall pres-
70 WHAT IS DANCE?

ently have to look further into all this; but we hardly need look
further to see how little is representation a matter of imitation.
The case for the relativity of vision and of representation has
been so conclusively stated elsewhere that I am relieved of the
need to argue it at any length here. Gombrich, in particular, has
amassed overwhelming evidence to show how the way we see
and depict depends upon and varies with experience, practice,
interests, and attitudes.

4. Brothers and sisters are alike siblings and the difference

between being a brother and being a sister depends solely upon
whether the sibling is male or female. Is it similarly the case that
what is represented and what is expressed are alike denoted, and
that the difference depends solely upon whether what is denoted
is a particular or a property? Or is there some more radical dif¬
ference between the two relations?
Offhand, expression may appear to be less literal than repre¬
sentation. Most often the feeling or emotion or property
expressed is remote from the medium of expression: a painting
may express heat, a musical composition may express color or
fragility. Surely any sort of copying is out of the question here.
Expression is by intimation rather than by imitation. But we have
seen that representation is not imitation either, that no degree of
similarity is required between even the most literal picture and
what it represents.
Perhaps, then, a difference is to be sought in the opposite
direction: perhaps expression is more direct and immediate than
representation. Consonant with this is the idea that an expres¬
sion is causally linked with what is expressed. The expression on
a face, for example, may be the effect of the fear or anger or sor¬
row a person feels, the facial configurations at once arising from
and showing forth that emotion; or James-Lange-like, the emo¬
tion may arise from perception of the bodily expression. In nei¬
ther version will this stand up very long. A pleased expression
may be due to politeness and endured with discomfort; and fear
may give rise to an expression of abject approval that drains
rather than bolsters confidence. An actor's facial expression need
neither result from nor result in his feeling the corresponding
emotions. A painter or composer does not have to have the emo¬
tions he expresses in his work. And obviously works of art them¬
selves do not feel what they express, even when what they
express is a feeling.
 NELSON GOODMAN 71

Some of these cases suggest that what is expressed is, rather,

the feeling or emotion excited in the viewer: that a picture
expresses sadness by making the gallery-goer a bit sad, and a
tragedy expresses grief by reducing the spectator to virtual or
actual tears. The actor or dancer need not feel sad, but succeeds
in expressing sadness just to the extent that he makes me feel sad.
If this view is any more plausible than the first one considered,
it is hardly more defensible. For one thing, whatever emotion
may be excited is seldom the one expressed. A face expressing
agony inspires pity rather than pain; a body expressing hatred
and anger tends to arouse aversion or fear. Again, what is
expressed may be something other than a feeling or emotion. A
black and white picture expressing color does not make me feel
colorful; and a portrait expressing courage and cleverness hardly
produces such qualities in the viewer.
These confused notions of expression are entangled with the
popular conviction that excitation of the emotions is a primary
function of art. Let me enter here a parenthetical protest against
this idea, and against aesthetic theories—such as that of emo¬
tional catharsis—dependent upon it. But I shall come back to this
later in Section 8.
If expression does not differ from representation in being less
a matter of imitation or in being more a matter of causation, is
expression nevertheless a more nearly absolute and invariable
relation? We saw that representation is relative—that any picture
may represent any object. In contrast, it seems that a smiling face
can hardly express grief, a drooping figure elation, a slate-blue
picture express heat, or a staccato and presto passage calm. If the
connection is not causal, at least it seems constant. But this dis¬
tinction evaporates too. When the first fine Japanese films
reached us. Western audiences had some difficulty in determin¬
ing what emotions the actors were expressing. Whether a face
was expressing agony or hatred or anxiety or determination or
despair or desire was not always instantly evident; for even facial
expressions are to some extent molded by custom and culture.
What the insular and amateur spectator may take to be instinc¬
tive and invariable, the professional actor or director knows to
be acquired and variable. If we prejudicially regard the gestures
of a foreign dance as highly artificial, and those of our native
dances as more innate, the perceptive performer or teacher har¬
bors no such delusions; an eminent choreographer and director
writes:
72 WHAT IS DANCE?

Along the way I have often been obliged to teach young men
how to make love, and young girls how to be predatory or flirta¬
tious or seductive, and I've had to advise everybody how to express
anxiety, alarm and endless other emotional states. They may have
felt these things, but the movements for them are complete
strangers.
gestures are patterns of movement established by long usage
among men.... There are many feelings which can be expressed
in so many ways that there is really no one pattern for them. For
example, hope has no shape, nor do inspiration, fear, or love.9

And the anthropologist concurs:

Insofar as I have been able to determine, just as there are no uni¬
versal words, sound complexes, which carry the same meaning the
world over, there are no body motions, facial expressions or ges¬
tures which provoke identical responses the world over. A body
can be bowed in grief, in humility, in laughter, or in readiness for
aggression. A "smile" in one society portrays friendliness, in
another embarrassment and, in still another, may contain a warn¬
ing that, unless tension is reduced, hostility and attack will follow.10
With representation and expression alike, certain relationships
become firmly fixed for certain people by habit; but in neither
case are these relationships absolute, universal, or immutable.

5. A gesture, too, may denote or exemplify or both. Nods of

agreement or dissent, salutes, bows, pointings, serve as labels. A
negative nod, for instance, applies to without normally being
among things disapproved. An orchestra conductor's gestures
denote sounds. They may indeed have and even exemplify some
properties—say of speed or cadence—of the music, but the ges¬
tures are not among their own denotata. The same is true of such
activities in response to music as foot- and finger-tappings, head-
bobbings, and various other minor motions. That these are called
forth by the music, while the conductor's gestures call it forth,
does not affect their status as labels; for labels may be used to
record or to prescribe—"strawberry", "raspberry", "lemon", and
"lime" may tell us what is in or what to put in the several
containers.
Why, though, do these negligible activities become so signifi¬
cant when related to music? Their significance is simply that of
labels applied in analyzing, organizing, and registering what we
hear. Contra theories of empathy,11 these labels need not them¬
selves have any particular properties in common with the music.
Psychologists and linguists have stressed the ubiquitous partici-
 NELSON GOODMAN 73

pation of action in perception in general, the early and extensive

use of gestural, sensorimotor, or enactive symbols, and the role
of such symbols in cognitive development.12 For Jaques-Dal-
croze, the use of these activities for grasping music is a funda¬
mental factor in musical education.13
The dance director unlike the orchestra conductor, gives sam¬
ples. His demonstrations exemplify the requisite properties of
the actions to be performed by his class, whereas his oral instruc¬
tions prescribe rather than show what is to be done. The proper
response to his knee-bend is a knee-bend; the proper response
to his shout "lower" (even if in a high voice) is not to shout
"lower" but to bend deeper. Nevertheless, since the demonstra¬
tions are part of the instruction, are accompanied by and may be
replaced by verbal directions, and have no already established
denotation, they may—like any sample not otherwise committed
as to denotation—also be taken as denoting what the predicates
they exemplify denote, and are then labels exemplifying
themselves.
The action of a mime, on the other hand, is not usually among
the actions it denotes. He does not climb ladders or wash win¬
dows but rather portrays, represents, denotes, ladder-climbings
and window-washings by what he does. His miming may indeed
exemplify activities involved in climbing or window-washing,
as a picture may exemplify the color of a house it represents; but
the picture is not a house, and the miming is not a climbing. The
mime's walks, of course, may exemplify walking as well as
denoting walks, just as "short" exemplifies shortness as well as
denoting short words; but such self-denoting and self-exempli¬
fying symbols are in the minority in pantomime as in English
and in painting. The word "bird" or a picture of a bird, not being
itself a bird, exemplifies no label denoting all and only birds; and
a miming of a flight, not being a flight, exemplifies no label
denoting all and only flights. A word or picture or pantomime
does not often exemplify any label coextensive with it.’*'
Some elements of the dance are primarily denotative, versions
of the descriptive gestures of daily life (e.g., bowings, beckon-
ings) or of ritual (e.g., signs of benediction, Hindu hand-pos¬
tures).14 But other movements, especially in the modern dance,
primarily exemplify rather than denote. What they exemplify,
however, are not standard or familiar activities, but rather

Labels are coextensive if and only if they apply to just the same things.
74 WHAT IS DANCE?

rhythms and dynamic shapes. The exemplified patterns and

properties may reorganize experience, relating actions not usu¬
ally associated or distinguishing others not usually differen¬
tiated, thus enriching allusion or sharpening discrimination. To
regard these movements as illustrating verbal descriptions
would of course be absurd; seldom can the just wording be
found. Rather, the label a movement exemplifies may be itself;
such a movement, having no antecedent denotation, takes on the
duties of a label denoting certain actions including itself. Here,
as often elsewhere in the arts, the vocabulary evolves along with
what it is used to convey.

6. What is expressed is metaphorically exemplified. What

expresses sadness is metaphorically sad. And what is metaphor¬
ically sad is actually but not literally sad, i.e., comes under a
transferred application of some label coextensive with "sad".
Thus what is expressed is possessed, and what a face or picture
expresses need not (but may) be emotions or ideas the actor or
artist has, or those he wants to convey, or thoughts or feelings of
the viewer or of a person depicted, or properties of anything else
related in some other way to the symbol. Of course, a symbol is
often said to express a property related to it in one of these ways,
but I reserve the term "expression" to distinguish the central case
where the property belongs to the symbol itself—regardless of
cause or effect or intent or subject-matter. That the actor was
despondent, the artist high, the spectator gloomy or nostalgic or
euphoric, the subject inanimate, does not determine whether the
face or picture is sad or not. The cheering face of the hypocrite
expresses solicitude; and the stolid painter's picture of boulders
may express agitation. The properties a symbol expresses are its
own property.
But they are acquired property. They are not the homely fea¬
tures by which the objects and events that serve as symbols are
classified literally, but are metaphorical imports. Pictures express
sounds or feelings rather than colors. And the metaphorical
transfer involved in expression is usually from or via an exterior
realm rather than the interior transfer effected in hyperbole or
litotes or irony. A pretentious picture does not express the mod¬
esty that may be sarcastically ascribed to it.
Properties expressed are, furthermore, not only metaphori¬
cally possessed but also referred to, exhibited, typified, shown
forth. A square swatch does not usually exemplify squareness,
and a picture that rapidly increases in market value does not
 NELSON GOODMAN 75

express the property of being a gold mine. Normally, a swatch

exemplifies only sartorial properties while a picture literally
exemplifies only pictorial properties and metaphorically exem¬
plifies only properties that are constant relative to pictorial prop¬
erties.15 And a picture expresses only properties—unlike that of
being a gold mine—that it thus metaphorically exemplifies as a
pictorial symbol. Daumier's Laundress so exemplifies and
expresses weight but not any metaphorical property dependent
upon the physical weight of the picture. In general, a symbol of
a given kind—pictorial, musical, verbal, etc.—expresses only
properties that it metaphorically exemplifies as a symbol of that
kind.

7. Expression, since limited to what is possessed and moreover

to what has been acquired at second-hand, is doubly constrained
as compared with denotation. Whereas almost anything can
denote or even represent almost anything else, a thing can
express only what belongs but did not originally belong to it.
The difference between expression and literal exemplification,
like the difference between more and less literal representation,
is a matter of habit—a matter of fact rather than fiat.
Yet the habits differ widely with time and place and person
and culture; and pictorial and musical expression are no less rel¬
ative and variable than facial and gestural expression. Aldous
Huxley, upon hearing some supposedly solemn music in India,
wrote:

... I confess that, listen as I might, I was unable to hear anything

particularly mournful or serious, anything specially suggestive of
self-sacrifice in the piece. To my Western ears it sounded much
more cheerful than the dance which followed it.
Emotions are everywhere the same; but the artistic expression of
them varies from age to age and from one country to another. We
are brought up to accept the conventions current in the society into
which we are born. This sort of art, we learn in childhood, is meant
to excite laughter, that to evoke tears. Such conventions vary with
great rapidity, even in the same country. There are Elizabethan
dances that sound as melancholy to our ears as little funeral
marches. Conversely, we are made to laugh by the "Anglo-Saxon
attitudes" of the holiest personages in the drawings and miniatures
of earlier centuries.16

The boundaries of expression, dependent upon the difference

between exemplification and possession and also upon the dif¬
ference between the metaphorical and the literal, are inevitably
76 WHAT IS DANCE?

somewhat tenuous and transient. An Albers picture may pretty

clearly exemplify certain shapes and colors and interrelations
among them, while it merely possesses the property of being
exactly 24)4 inches high; but the distinction is not always so eas¬
ily drawn. Again, the status of a property as metaphorical or lit¬
eral is often unclear and seldom stable; for comparatively few
properties are purely literal or permanently metaphorical. Even
for very clear cases, ordinary discourse only sporadically
observes the difference between expression and exemplification.
Architects, for instance, like to speak of some buildings as
expressing their functions. But however effectively a glue factory
may typify glue-making, it exemplifies being a glue factory lit¬
erally rather than metaphorically. A building may express flu¬
idity or frivolity or fervor,17 but to express being a glue factory it
would have to be something else, say a toothpick plant. But since
reference to a possessed property is the common core of meta¬
phorical and literal exemplification, and the distinction between
these is ephermeral, popular use of the term "expression" for
cases of both kinds is not very surprising or pernicious.
Music and dance alike may exemplify rhythmic patterns, for
example, and express peace or pomp or passion; and music may
express properties of movement while dance may express prop¬
erties of sound. With respect to verbal symbols, ordinary usage
is so undiscriminating that a word or passage may be said to
express not only what the writer thought or felt or intended, or
the effect upon the reader, or properties possessed by or ascribed
to a subject, but even what is described or stated. In the special
sense I have been discussing, though, a verbal symbol may
express only properties it metaphorically exemplifies; naming a
property and expressing it are different matters; and a poem or
story need not express what it says or say what it expresses. A
tale of fast action may be slow, a biography of a benefactor bitter,
a description of colorful music drab, and a play about boredom
electric. To describe, as to depict, a person as sad or as expressing
sadness is not necessarily to express sadness; not every sad-per-
son-description or -picture or every person-expressing-sadness-
description or -picture is itself sad.And a passage or picture may
exemplify or express without describing or representing, and
even without being a description or representation at all—as in
the case of some passages from James Joyce and some drawings
by Kandinsky.
Yet though exemplification and expression are distinct from,
and run in the opposite direction from, representation and
 NELSON GOODMAN 77

description, all are intimately related modes of symbolization. In

these varied ways, a symbol may select from and organize its
universe and be itself in turn informed or transformed. Repre¬
sentation and description relate a symbol to things it applies to.
Exemplification relates the symbol to a label that denotes it, and
hence indirectly to the things (including the symbol itself) in the
range of that label. Expression relates the symbol to a label that
metaphorically denotes it, and hence indirectly not only to the
given metaphorical but also to the literal range of that label. And
various longer chains of the elementary referential relationships
of labels to things and other labels, and of things to labels, may
run from any symbol.
To exemplify or express is to display rather than depict or
describe; but as representation may be stereotyped or searching,
and exemplification trite or telling, so may expression be plati¬
tudinous or provocative. A property expressed, though it must
be constant relative to certain literal properties, need not coin¬
cide in extension with any easy and familiar literal description.
Finding a disjunction of conjunctions of ordinary literal proper¬
ties of pictures that is even approximately equivalent to meta¬
phorical sadness would give us a good deal of trouble. The
expressive symbol, with its metaphorical reach, not only partakes
of the greenness of neighboring pastures and the exotic atmo¬
spheres of farther shores, but often in consequence uncovers
unnoticed affinities and antipathies among symbols of its own
kind. From the nature of metaphor derives some of the charac¬
teristic capacity of expression for suggestive allusion, elusive
suggestion, and intrepid transcendence of basic boundaries.
Emphasis on the denotative (representative or descriptive), the
exemplificatory ('formal' or 'decorative'), and the expressive in
the arts varies with art, artist, and work. Sometimes one aspect
dominates to the virtual exclusion of the other two; compare
Debussy's La Mer, Bach's Goldberg Variations, and Charles Ives's
Fourth Symphony, for instance; or a Durer watercolor, a Jackson
Pollock painting, and a Soulages lithograph. In other cases two
or all three aspects, fused or in counterpoint, are almost equally
prominent; in the film Last Year at Marienbad, the narrative
thread, though never abandoned, is disrupted to let through
insistent cadences and virtually indescribable sensory and emo¬
tional qualities. The choice is up to the artist, and judgment up
to the critic. Nothing in the present analysis of symbolic func¬
tions offers any support for manifestos to the effect that repre¬
sentation is an indispensable requirement for art, or is an insu-
78 WHAT IS DANCE?

perable barrier to it, or that expression without representation is

the highest achievement of the human spirit, or that represen¬
tation and expression alike corrupt exemplification, or so on. If
representation is reprehensible or revered, if expression is
exalted or execrated, if exemplification is the essence of poverty
or purity, this must be on other grounds.

8. A persistent tradition pictures the aesthetic attitude as pas¬

sive contemplation of the immediately given, direct apprehen¬
sion of what is presented, uncontaminated by any conceptuali¬
zation, isolated from all the echoes of the past and all the threats
and promises of the future, exempt from all enterprise. By puri¬
fication rites of disengagement and disinterpretation we are to
seek a pristine, unsullied vision of the world. I need hardly
recount the philosophic faults and aesthetic absurdities of such
a view until someone seriously goes so far as to maintain that the
appropriate aesthetic attitude toward a poem amounts to gazing
at the printed page without reading it.
I have held, on the contrary, that we have to read the painting
as well as the poem, and that aesthetic experience is dynamic
rather than static. It involves making delicate discriminations
and discerning subtle relationships, identifying symbol systems
and characters within these systems and what these characters
denote and exemplify, interpreting works and reorganizing the
world in terms of works and works in terms of the world. Much
of our experience and many of our skills are brought to bear and
may be transformed by the encounter. The aesthetic 'attitude' is
restless, searching, testing—is less attitude than action: creation
and re-creation.
What, though, distinguishes such aesthetic activity from other
intelligent behavior such as perception, ordinary conduct, and
scientific inquiry? One instant answer is that the aesthetic is
directed to no practical end, is unconcerned with self-defense or
conquest, with acquisition of necessities or luxuries, with predic¬
tion and control of nature. But if the aesthetic attitude disowns
practical aims, still aimlessness is hardly enough. The aesthetic
attitude is inquisitive as contrasted with the acquisitive and self¬
preservative, but not all nonpractical inquiry is aesthetic. To
think of science as motivated ultimately by practical goals, as
judged or justified by bridges and bombs and the control of
nature, is to confuse science with technology. Science seeks
knowledge without regard to practical consequences, and is con¬
cerned with prediction not as a guide for behavior but as a test
 NELSON GOODMAN 79

of truth. Disinterested inquiry embraces both scientific and aes¬

thetic experience.
Attempts are often made to distinguish the aesthetic in terms
of immediate pleasure; but troubles arise and multiply here.
Obviously, sheer quantity or intensity of pleasure cannot be the
criterion. That a picture or poem provides more pleasure than
does a proof is by no means clear; and some human activities
unrelated to any of these provide enough more pleasure to ren¬
der insignificant any differences in amount or degree among var¬
ious types of inquiry. The claim that aesthetic pleasure is of a
different and superior quality is by now too transparent a dodge
to be taken seriously.
The inevitable next suggestion—that aesthetic experience is
distinguished not by pleasure at all but by a special aesthetic
emotion—can be dropped on the waste-pile of 'dormitive virtue'
explanations.
This clears the way for the sophisticated theory that what
counts is not pleasure yielded but pleasure 'objectified', pleasure
read into the object as a property thereof. Apart from images of
some grotesque process of transfusion, what can this mean? To
consider the pleasure as possessed rather than occasioned by the
object—to say in effect that the object is pleased—may amount
to saying that the object expresses the pleasure. But since some
aesthetic objects are sad—express sadness rather than pleasure—
this comes nowhere near distinguishing in general between aes¬
thetic and nonaesthetic objects or experience.
Some of these difficulties are diminished and others obscured
if we speak of satisfaction rather than pleasure. "Satisfaction” is
colorless enough to pass in contexts where "pleasure" is ludi¬
crous, hazy enough to blur counterinstances, and flexible
enough to tolerate convenient vacillation in interpretation. Thus
we may hope to lessen the temptation to conjure up a special
quality or kind of feeling or to indulge in mumbo-jumbo about
objectification. Nevertheless, satisfaction pretty plainly fails to
distinguish aesthetic from nonaesthetic objects and experiences.
Not only does some scientific inquiry yield much satisfaction,
but some aesthetic objects and experiences yield none. Music and
our listening, pictures and our looking, do not fluctuate between
aesthetic and nonaesthetic as the playing or painting varies from
exalted to excruciating. Being aesthetic does not exclude being
unsatisfactory or being aesthetically bad.
The distinguishing feature, some say, is not satisfaction
secured but satisfaction sought: in science, satisfaction is a mere
80 WHAT IS DANCE?

by-product of inquiry; in art, inquiry is a mere means for obtain¬

ing satisfaction. The difference is held to be neither in process
performed nor in satisfaction enjoyed but in attitude maintained.
On this view the scientific aim is knowledge, the aesthetic aim
satisfaction.
But how cleanly can these aims be separated? Does the scholar
seek knowledge or the satisfaction of knowing? Obtaining
knowledge and satisfying curiosity are so much the same that
trying to do either without trying to do the other surely demands
a precarious poise. And anyone who does manage to seek the
satisfaction without seeking the knowledge will pretty surely get
neither, while on the other hand abstention from all anticipation
of satisfaction is unlikely to stimulate research. One may indeed
be so absorbed in working on a problem as never to think of the
satisfaction to be had from solving it; or one may dwell so fondly
on the delights of finding a solution as to take no steps toward
arriving at one. But if the latter attitude is aesthetic, aesthetic
understanding of anything is foredoomed. And I cannot see that
these tenuous, ephemeral, and idiosyncratic states of mind mark
any significant difference between the aesthetic and the
scientific.
None of this is directed toward obliterating the distinction
between art and science. Declarations of indissoluble unity—
whether of the sciences, the arts, the arts and sciences together,
or of mankind—tend anyway to focus attention upon the differ¬
ences. What I am stressing is that the affinities here are deeper,
and the significant differentia other, than is often supposed. The
difference between art and science is not that between feeling
and fact, intuition and inference, delight and deliberation, syn¬
thesis and analysis, sensation and cerebration, concreteness and
abstraction, passion and action, mediacy and immediacy, or truth
and beauty, but rather a difference in domination of certain spe¬
cific characteristics of symbols.

(1968)

AFTERWORD—AN ILLUSTRATION
One illustration in terms of a particular theatre piece involv¬
ing dance may help relate these selections to each other and to
the whole undertaking of Languages of Art. In the author's multi-
media Hockey Seen: A Nightmare in Three Periods and Sudden Death,
 NELSON GOODMAN 81

the second period is a fast, high-energy movement based on the

swift actions and conflicts of the game.18 The referee's struggle to
keep things under control is a major theme in this period. He
starts and stops the play, separates fighting players, banishes
some to the penalty box, and signals to players and watchers the
infractions committed and the consequent penalties. At one
point, he performs a solo based on these signals.
In terms of the types of reference distinguished in Languages
of Art, this period denotes—depicts, represents—incidents in a
hockey game; not, of course, incidents in any particular game,
but incidents common to hockey games. Representation, con¬
trary to a prevalent opinion, may be either particular, as in a por¬
trait, or general, as in the eagle-picture in a dictionary.
The work as a whole, however, hardly depicts either any par¬
ticular hockey game or hockey games in general but is rather,
like a centaur-picture, a Active representation. We often say that
such a representation depicts a game or an animal that never did
and never will exist. Less inconsistently, we may say that the pic¬
ture or the dance does not represent or denote at all but rather
is denoted by such a predicate as "centaur-picture" or "hockey-
representation".
Of greater import, the work exemplifies, as does a purely
abstract dance, certain movements and patterns of movement,
changes of pace and direction, configurations and rhythms.
Many of these are derived from both the action of hockey and
the vocabulary of dance, but the reference by the work to such
properties is a matter of exemplification not representation.
Moreover, the second period expresses various aspects of com¬
petition, conflict, violence, frustration, and the struggle between
aggression and authority. These properties are not literally
exemplified: no fights, no defeat or victory, no punishment, no
(intended) violence or injury occur on the stage. These are prop¬
erties possessed metaphorically, and referred to, by the work,
and thus expressed by it. The slow-motion third period, with all
the players wearing goal-tender's masks, expresses taut and long-
drawn defensive tensions and perhaps an effort to fend off an
unknown fate by fearsome visages.
The three elementary species of reference: denotation, exem¬
plification, and expression often interact. The representation of
hockey affects the way the action is organized in our perception,
and this influences the features that the work comes to exemplify
and express. Much the same action, divorced from the reference
to hockey, might be seen as exemplifying and expressing quite
 *

82 WHAT IS DANCE?

Photograph by William J. Rynders

"Hockey Seen" (2nd Period). "The second period expresses various

aspects of competition, conflict, violence, frustration, and the struggle
between aggression and authority." (Goodman)

other properties. Furthermore, reference is often through chains

such that each link is reference of one or another of the three
elementary types. For example, the work represents hockey,
which in itself exemplifies ferocity of competition. Thus the rep¬
resentation of hockey refers via hockey to such ferocity. This
indirect reference is not itself denotation or exemplification or
expression but a complex of the first two and is altogether dif¬
ferent from the direct expression of the same ferocity—an
expression that may be missing from an ineffectual work or a
listless performance.
I am not attempting to instruct choreographers or performers
or dance critics, but to provide a framework for a philosophical
account of what they do, and to relate that to what goes on in
the other arts, in the sciences, and in all our activities of making
and remaking our worlds.19

(1981)
 NELSON GOODMAN 83

Notes

‘What I am considering here is pictorial representation, or depiction,

and the comparable representation that may occur in other arts. Natural
objects may represent in the same way: witness the man in the moon
and the sheep-dog in the clouds. Some writers use "representation" as
the general term for all varieties of what I call symbolization or refer¬
ence, and use "symbolic" for the verbal and other nonpictorial signs I
call nonrepresentational. "Represent" and its derivatives have many
other uses, and while I shall mention some of these later, others do not
concern us here at all. Among the latter, for example, are the uses
according to which an ambassador represents a nation and makes rep¬
resentations to a foreign government.
2I use "object" indifferently for anything a picture represents,
whether an apple or a battle. A quirk of language makes a represented
object a subject.
3Not until the next chapter will denotation be distinguished from
other varieties of reference.
4In "The Way the World Is," Review of Metaphysics, vol. 14 (1960), pp.
48-56, I have argued that the world is as many ways as it can be truly
described, seen, pictured, etc., and that there is no such thing as the way
the world is. Ryle takes a somewhat similar position (Dilemmas
[Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1954], pp. 75-77) in
comparing the relation between a table as a perceived solid object and
the table as a swarm of atoms with the relation between a college library
according to the catalogue and according to the accountant. Some have
proposed that the way the world is could be arrived at by conjoining all
the several ways. This overlooks the fact that conjunction itself is pecu¬
liar to certain systems; for example, we cannot conjoin a paragraph and
a picture. And any attempted combination of all the ways would be itself
only one—and a peculiarly indigestible one—of the ways the world is.
But what is the world that is in so many ways? To speak of ways the world
is, or ways of describing or picturing the world, is to speak of world-
descriptions or world-pictures, and does not imply there is a unique
thing—or indeed anything—that is described or pictured. Of course,
none of this implies, either, that nothing is described or pictured. See
further my Ways of Worldmaking (Hackett, Indianapolis, 1978).
5In Art and Illusion (New York, Pantheon Books, 1960), pp. 297-298
and elsewhere. On the general matter of the relativity of vision, see also
such works as R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain (New York, McGraw-Hill
Book Co., 1966), and Marshall H. Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville
J. Herskovits, The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception (Indianapolis
and New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1966).
6For samples of psychological investigation of this point, see Jerome
S. Bruner's "On Perceptual Readiness," Psychological Review, vol. 64
(1957), pp. 123-152, and other articles there cited; also William P. Brown,
84 WHAT IS DANCE?

"Conceptions of Perceptual Defense," British Journal of Psychology Mon¬

ograph Supplement XXXV (Cambridge, England, Cambridge University
Press, 1961).
7On the emptiness of the notion of epistemological primacy and the
futility of the search for the absolute given, see my Structure of Appear¬
ance (2nd edition; Indianapolis and New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Co.,
Inc., 1966—hereinafter referred to as SA), pp. 132-145, and "Sense and
Certainty," Philosophical Review, vol. 61 (1952), pp. 160-167.
8And this is no less true when the instrument we use is a camera
rather than a pen or brush. The choice and handling of the instrument
participate in the construal. A photographer's work, like a painter's, can
evince a personal style.
9Doris Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances (New York, Rinehart &
Co., Inc., 1959), pp. 114, 118.
10From a talk by Ray L. Birdwhistell, "The Artist, the Scientist and a
Smile," given at the Maryland Institute of Art, December 4, 1964.
"See, for example, Theodor Lipps, Raumaesthetik und Geometrisch-
Optische Tduschungen (Leipzig, J. A. Barth, 1897), translated by H. S. Lang-
feld in The Aesthetic Attitude (New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc.,
1920), pp. 6-7: "The column seems to brace itself and raise itself, that is
to say, to proceed in the way in which I do when I pull myself together
and raise myself, or remain thus tense and erect, in opposition to the
natural inertness of my body. It is impossible for me to be aware of the
column without this activity seeming to exist directly in the column of
which I am aware."
12See, for example. Burton L. White and Richard Held, "Plasticity of
Sensorimotor Development in the Human Infant," in The Causes of
Behavior, ed. J. F. Rosenblith and W. Allinsmith (2nd ed., Boston, Allyn
and Bacon, Inc., 1966), pp. 60-70, and the earlier articles there cited; Ray
L. Birdwhistell, "Communication without Words," prepared in 1964 for
publication in "L'Aventure Humaine," and the articles there cited; Jean
Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children (New York, International
University Press, Inc., 1952), e.g., pp. 185ff, 385; and Jerome S. Bruner,
Studies in Cognitive Growth (New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1966), pp.
12-21.1 cannot accept Bruner's trichotomy of symbols into the enactive,
the iconic, and the symbolic, since the latter two categories seem to me
ill-defined and ill-motivated. A classification of symbols as enactive,
visual, auditory, etc., may be useful for some purposes of developmental
psychology; but for our purposes here these distinctions cut across what
seem to me more consequential differences among modes of reference.
13He understands very clearly and takes full advantage of the uses of
muscular movements as elements of teachable symbol systems imple¬
menting the comprehension and retention of music. See especially The
Eurhythmies of Jaques-Dalcroze (Boston, Small, Maynard, & Co., 1918), arti¬
cles by P. B. Ingham (pp. 43-53) and E. Ingham (pp. 54-60).
14The dancer's act of benediction, like its replicas on the stage and in
the church, denotes what is blessed. That the addressee of the dancer's
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 85

gesture is not thereby among the blessed means only that the dancer,
like the novelist, is making Active use of a denoting symbol. But of
course a gesture may, like the word "centaur”, be denotative in character
even though it denotes nothing.
15A property is thus constant only if, although it may or may not
remain constant where the pictorial properties vary, it never varies
where the pictorial properties remain constant. In other words, if it
occurs anywhere, it also occurs whenever the pictorial properties are the
same. The constancy here in question obtains within a given symbol sys¬
tem between the metaphorical extension of the expressed property and
the literal extension of the basic pictorial properties; but a property thus
constant also itself qualifies as a pictorial property.
16In "Music in India and Japan" (1926), reprinted in On Art and Artists
(New York, Meridian Books, Inc., 1960), pp. 305-306.
17A building may "express a mood—gaiety and movement in the
whirly little Comedy Theatre, Berlin—or even ideas about astronomy
and relativity like Mendlesohn's Einstein tower, or nationalism like
some of Hitler's architecture", according to Richard Sheppard in "Mon¬
ument to the Architect?" The Listener, June 8, 1967, p. 746.
18First performed in August 1972 in Cambridge, Mass., and most
recently in August 1980 in Knokke, Belgium, sponsored by the Belgian
radio-television system in conjunction with the Ghent University con¬
ference Art in Culture. Drawings by Katharine Sturgis; author and pro¬
ducer, Nelson Goodman; choreographer, Martha Gray; composer, John
C. Adams; television director, Jozef Cassiers; film director, Jacques Dub-
rulle; performers, Arthur Bridgman, Dante del Guidice, Tom Grune-
wald, Leslie Koval, Nusha Martynuk, Carter McAdams, Myrna Packer,
Harry Streep III.
19See Ways of Worldmaking (Hackett, Indianapolis, 1978).

DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN

PHILOSOPHERS AND
THE DANCE

I have occasionally been asked for references to philosophic

works that deal with the dance. When I reply that philosophers,
especially the older and better-known philosophers of our tra¬
dition, have had very little to say about dancing, I am asked why
this is so. I would like to address myself here to that very difficult
question.
 86 WHAT IS DANCE?

The question “Why?" possibly calls for an interpretation of the

intrinsic nature of the philosophic discipline—an account which
would make it understandable, if not forgivable, why so many
philosophers, even those who have chosen to write on the arts
or in the field of aesthetics, have ignored the art of dance. I
would like to concentrate on this possibility. In so doing, how¬
ever, I realize that, in a certain very precise sense, I am not
answering the whole question.
A "causal" explanation of why philosophy in general has
ignored the dance would necessarily involve me in issues which
are of a broadly scientific nature: political issues, sociological
issues, issues in cultural anthropology, and psychological issues.
Although these matters are not within the compass of my profes¬
sional competence, neither are they entirely beyond my under¬
standing. Consequently, I would like, very briefly, to indulge in
some speculations. I offer them for whatever they are worth.
To begin with, I think it is important to bear in mind the fact
that our Western civilization is fundamentally patriarchal. That
means, in effect, that it is necessarily organized around male
dominance and a corresponding (well-hidden) aversion to the
female principle (in Jungian terms, the anima). What does this
mean? Well, of course, we might notice that most choreogra¬
phers and dance critics (both of whom represent the hidden
power of the "intellectual" side of dance) have been male, while
the dancers themselves (representing the "physical" side), and
also the majority of balletomanes (representing the intuitive and
appreciative side), have been either females or males who are
female-oriented. This is interesting and important, especially
with regard to our "modern" times. But, rather than elaborating
this point, which may in part explain the neglect of philosophers
(most of whom have been male), I would like to delve a little
deeper into the anthropological roots of dance. For there, in
those ancient beginnings of dance, we will find, I think, a much
deeper explanation for this state of affairs.
What I want to suggest is that the origin of dance lies in the
female principle. Before it was cultivated as an art (dance for the
sake of dance), dance took place in a ritually consecrated space.
Dance was originally an ecstatic, mystic celebration, a form of
worship intended to invite the manifestation or embodiment of
primordial and supernatural powers. More specifically, dance
was in its origin an essential part of the ancient fertility rites. As
such, it related the participants to the generosity of Mother Earth
and the spacious, open, benevolent, female side of Father Sky.
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 87

The dancers involved in these rites were not ordinary mortals;

they were sacred vessels, inspired and possessed by the various
deities, both wrathful and peaceful. Over the centuries, this
sacred female principle in dance became increasingly repressed.
Folk dancing, though still vaguely recalling the origins of dance,
sublimated the principle in socially conventional (and more
patriarchally acceptable) styles. Meanwhile, in the courts of
Europe, dance was cultivated, first as a show of social grace (sub¬
limated courtship and flirtation, and regulated communication
between the sexes), and later as a pure spectacle of skill and style.
Eventually (perhaps in the nineteenth century), dance devel¬
oped into an art enjoyed entirely for its own sake. (Could it be
that the possibility of enjoying it for its own sake depended on
its being separated from its disturbing origins?) Dance, as a form
of art, as a spectacle, was put on the stage. Thus it was returned
to its own special space, but by this time the space was secular,
not sacred. So we see that, in the end, the patriarchy won out. A
somewhat compromised victory, of course, since dance not only
has continued to enthrall, but has even flourished. However, it
has continued, I think, more or less on patriarchal terms.
Well, so much for my speculations. Whether they are fantasy
or truth, or perhaps a mixture of the two, they set the stage for a
point which I regard as less controversial but no less thought-
provoking: namely, that the religious and ethical foundations of
our Western civilization are fundamentally hostile to the vital
and intrinsic "demands" of the human body. This hostility takes
many different forms; every dimension of our civilization
expresses and reinforces it, often in disguised and not easily
identifiable ways. Consider, for example, the primary symbol of
the Christian religion—the cross. This powerful symbol presents
as clearly as any symbol could the crucifixion of the human body.
It is not enough that the body is visibly emaciated and starved
(in accordance with the patriarchal ascetic ideal of self-mastery);
no, it must also be visibly punished, finally destroyed. To be
sure, the doctrine of Christianity asserts the resurrection of
Christ's body. But two things need to be acknowledged: first, that
there is no correspondingly visible symbol of the resurrection;
and second, that the resurrected body exists not on Earth but
only in Heaven. I take these points to mean that, in effect, we do
not really believe in the resurrection of the human body. That is
to say, we do not really believe in the holiness of the human body
as it is here and now on Earth. Or, in more practical terms, we
do not really accept the human body. And certainly, we do not
88 WHAT IS DANCE?

allow ourselves fully to recognize the real possibility of "per¬

fecting" it, or bringing it closer to the state of being in which its
intrinsic holiness, its sublime beauty and grace, will manifestly
shine through.
Perhaps you will want to argue that we do, in fact, entertain
some ideal of perfection, and that, moreover, we do attempt to
actualize this ideal. I would agree. But I also want to point out
that this ideal is not at all what I am talking about. For, however
it may appear, it is, in its deepest significance, an instrumental
ideal, a patriarchal and dualistic ideal of mastery, power, and
manipulation. As such, it involves a deep-seated suspicion of,
and an aversion to, the spontaneous libidinal sensuousness of
the human body. (This is the true sense, I believe, of Freud's
"death instinct.") The instrumental perfecting of the body is
entirely in the service of our Western technology. Far from
working toward the liberation of the body, it is, in its essence,
just another, more advanced (and therefore, too, a more carefully
disguised) form of crucifixion. Why this patriarchal rejection of
the sensuous body? What could be the connection between
patriarchal aversion to the female principle (an aversion implicit
in mastery and instrumentality) and our cultural rejection of the
body? I suspect that the rejection arises because, somehow, the
body in its sensuousness (thus, above all, in its play and dance)
is identified with the female principle. More specifically, it is
associated with the intolerable pain and frustration we experi¬
ence over the loss of Mother, the primordial sensuous female
body. The instrumental approach to the body, which emerges as
our cultural ideal, would thus represent an apparently necessary
cultural stage of reaction-formation.
The ideal I have in mind, which radically contrasts with our
instrumental ideal, is perhaps most clearly presented in the sym¬
bol of the healthy bisexual Buddha-body, serenely seated on an
opened lotus flower and radiating neutral (non-dualistic)
warmth, compassion, inner vitality and resolve, and the wisdom
of a matriarchal power which is beyond the dualist aggression
definitive of patriarchal power. Unlike our Christianity, Bud¬
dhism recognizes the intrinsic liberating wisdom of the body—
a wisdom which is supremely manifest in the beauty and grace
of its spontaneous, fully opened, and harmoniously attuned
presence.
Furthermore, Christianity inherited from Judaism a mind/
body (spirit/flesh) dualism, which it decisively intensified and
even enshrined in religious and ethical doctrine. Already, in the
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 89

stern Judaic code of ethical law, there was a fundamental aver¬

sion both to direct, spontaneous libidinal expression and to its cor¬
relative—the direct, mature reception of experience. Postpone¬
ment of gratification, which was a necessary defense during the
early stages of libidinal existence, gradually developed into a
habit and stayed a habit long after its necessity was left behind.
It became, as Freud correctly saw, the internalized rule of the
stern patriarchal superego. Judaism, or at least its dominant
ecclesiastical side, installed the implicit dualism of moral con¬
science on the throne of power, turned shame into guilt, and
aversion into gratification. Henceforth, the ethical life was to be
a life of spiritual discipline; and the body, denied its own intrin¬
sic spirituality, had to be subjugated by the masterful power of
the ethical mind.
It is time that we turn to the substance of philosophy. I want
to show why it is that philosophers could not have written sat¬
isfactorily about dance even if they had chosen to do so. Western
philosophy down through the ages reflects this uncompromising
dualism. In fact, our philosophy does more than reflect it; in the
course of time, philosophers have systematically defended and
exalted it, either by espousing some sort of explicit dualism (Des¬
cartes) or else by advocating some form of reductionism (the ide¬
alism of Berkeley, the materialism of Holbach, the behaviorism
of Quine) in which the dualism is not transcended but merely
suppressed.
Regardless of their school, philosophers have traditionally
misunderstood the nature of the human body. (From what I have
said above, it may be gathered that I do not regard this fact as
accidental!) Broadly speaking, I think we may say that philoso¬
phers have, in one way or another, denied the reality of
the body's sensuous presence. Thus the idealists and many of the
rationalists hold that the sensuous body is reducible to, or gen¬
erated by, or somehow absorbed in, the functioning of mind
(mind in a certain peculiarly "pure" and non-sensuous state).
And when we examine the theories of the materialists, the clas¬
sical empiricists (David Hume, for example) and their descen¬
dants the behaviorists, we find the human body more or less
reduced to the status of a mere thing obedient to purely physical
laws. Nor does the body fare any better among rationalists like
Descartes, whose dualism separated the wayward body so com¬
pletely from the enlightened mind that he was able to assert,
with perfect composure, that the body is nothing more than a
complicated machine. In the rationalism of philosophers like
90 WHAT IS DANCE?

Spinoza, we may be pleased to learn that mind and body are sub¬
stantially identical. But we are also told that the sensuousness of
the body is, in reality, a “confused idea/'
If philosophers cannot even develop an adequate account of
the human body, how can they be expected to say anything true
and interesting about dance? Dance is the fine art and perfection
(or perfect presencing) of the moving human body. This means
that any philosophy of the dance must begin with a satisfactory
understanding of the nature of human movement. As a starting
point, we require a conception which distinguishes the move¬
ment of things from the purposive action, or spontaneously self¬
generated movement, of the human body. But, until fairly
recently, philosophers have had a very distorted conception of
such movement.
Better late than never, the time now seems ripe for a new
approach to the problem. And indeed in keeping with the new
atmosphere of “liberated consciousness" and, in particular, our
heightened cultural awareness of the experienced body, the so-
called analytic philosophers in England and the United States
have begun to concentrate on problems which they usually
group under the appropriately scholastic heading, “theory of
action." However, we have yet to see the fruits of their endeav¬
ors, and we shall have to wait a very long time before they get
around to looking at and talking sensitively about the dance.
Fortunately, there exists another, far more promising coterie of
philosophers—the phenomenologists. Starting with Edmund
Husserl, who fathered phenomenology in the early years of this
century, an extremely revolutionary and profoundly humanistic
philosophical movement got under way. Of those pioneers who
were able to understand what Husserl was doing and who were
able to learn from him, I would distinguish, above all, Martin
Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Thanks to these three giants, each one making his own very spe¬
cial contribution, the human body is finally beginning to receive
its due.
This is not the place to elaborate and defend my bold remarks.
Perhaps it will suffice if I say here first, that phenomenology is
unique in putting an understanding of the human body right in
the center of its field of vision; and second, that the phenome¬
nological approach is so far the only approach which has truly
appreciated the sensuous human body just as it is actually lived,
and which has seriously attempted to articulate this appreciation
as faithfully, as rigorously, and as sensitively as it possibly could.
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 91

The phenomenology of dance ought to be viewed as absolutely

fundamental to our philosophical understanding of the body.
That it does not seem to have been viewed in this light is, how¬
ever, painfully obvious. All I can say here, by way of explana¬
tion, is that phenomenology is still a young discipline whose
latent resources of radicality it takes great insight—and no small
measure of courage—to use providentially.
In no other civilization and in no prior age, has the human
body been so technologized, reified, and endangered in so many
uncontrollable ways. At the same time, the health and material
comfort of the body have never before been so amazingly
ensured. Here and there, the dialectic of these extremes is
encouraging some very deep thinking and therapeutic experi¬
mentation. I see the dance as a treasury of the body's much-
needed wisdom. It is a treasury we have only begun to cherish.
One other factor in the philosophers' neglect of dance should
be noted here. And once again, our attempt to understand refers
us to the larger and more pervasive conditions of our civiliza¬
tion. Philosophers writing in the field of aesthetics have tradi¬
tionally ignored the subject of aesthetic perception in order to
concentrate on the problem of judgment ("good taste") and the
cognitive nature of aesthetic values. Such concentration can, of
course, be justified. Nevertheless, it is too close to the predomi¬
nant concerns of the masterful superego to be free of supervision
and unconscious censorship. Since the art of dance is, ontologi-
cally speaking, the art of the human body; and since what is most
interesting about the human body primarily concerns perception
and its ontology, we can readily understand the neglect. But we
should not tolerate persistent aesthetic blindness. From this
standpoint, phenomenology appears to be especially attractive.
Its adherence to the discipline of "neutralized" (non-dual?)
description, together with its recognition of the fundamental
ontological importance of perception, make it uniquely well-
suited to provide dance with the appropriate ontologically
grounded critical aesthetics.
The question of an appropriate aesthetics for dance prompts
me to a brief delineation of the philosopher's calling, as I see it,
in this regard. The critical task as I conceive it makes strenuous
demands upon the sensibility, the intelligence, and the erudition
of the philosopher. What else do we philosophers deserve to
expect?
An adequate philosophical approach to the work of art should
centrally involve three interdependent and reciprocally enrich-
92 WHAT IS DANCE?

ing levels of critical appreciation and interpretation. The first

level is that of a phenomenological description of the percep¬
tually visible. This sort of description is neither scientifically
objective nor viciously subjective. But it is objective in the sense
that it articulates what is experienced with maximum rigor and
care. And it is also subjective inasmuch as it always insists on
confining itself to the experiential standpoint of the subject.
Among those who have written about dance, Edwin Denby
seems to have achieved something very close, at times, to the
ideal of phenomenological description. Here, for example, is his
description of the Adagio in Balanchine's Concerto Barocco: "At
the climax, . . . against a background of chorus that suggests the
look of trees in the wind before a storm breaks, the ballerina,
with limbs powerfully outspread, is lifted by her male partner,
lifted repeatedly in narrowing arcs higher and higher. Then at
the culminating phrase, from her greatest height, he lowers her.
You watch her body slowly descend, her foot and leg pointing
stiffly downward, till her toe reaches the floor and she rests her
full weight at last on this single sharp point and pauses. It has
the effect at that moment of a deliberate and powerful plunge
into a wound, and the emotion of it answers strangely to the
musical stress. .. ." (See "A Balanchine Masterpiece," in Denby's
Looking at the Dance.)* In another piece, "Flight of the Dancer"
(reprinted in the same volume), Denby gives us a stunning
account of the leap in classical ballet. (Compare it to Kierke¬
gaard's in Fear and Trembling. The similarities are unsettling.) I
wish I could quote the Denby, but its length and intricacy resist
the fragmentation that would result. It must be read to be
believed, for in Denby we have a critic with discriminating sen¬
sibility and two mathematically precise eyes to match.
The second level engages us in historical interpretation; it is
"criticism" in the fullest and truest sense. Every form, or
medium, of art is simultaneously involved in two historical pro¬
cesses. First, there is the immanent dialectic of the history of the
art form itself. Lincoln Kirstein's Movement and Metaphor and
Richard Buckle's Nijinsky are superlative illustrations of studies
in this field. Both of them consider particular dance works in the
light of the history of the dance art in order to make explicit,
through their interpretation, the implicit logic of this unique his¬
tory in its bearing on the works under examination. Fundamen¬
tal to this interpretation is the insight that each distinct art form

In this anthology. Eds.

 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 93

is defined by the historical unfolding of a unique configuration

of technological, epistemological, and ontological problems. At
each point in the endless history of the art, these problems will
take the articulate form of certain specifically appropriate ques¬
tions and difficulties—challenges, if you like. That is, at each
point, these challenges will be faced, made explicit, and some¬
how resolved. But every resolution is only partial: not merely
because art, like perception itself, can never approach these
problems except in terms of a certain perspective, but also
because every solution generates further problems, which are
bequeathed, along with the more felicitous resolutions, to the
next generation of artists. However, beyond the immanent
dialectic there is the cultural context of art, which likewise has a
history. This—which I will call the transcendent dialectic—is
the historical ground within which the art form emerges and dis¬
tinctly figures. The adequate (ideal) historical interpretation of
an art form must take the historical ground into account. It
should interpret this ground itself and articulate the dialectic of
its relationship to the historical figure of the art in question.
Good criticism thus consists in providing works of art with an
interpretation that gives them a place in the living history of our
world. Consequently, it is the responsibility of the critic to be at
one and the same time profoundly conservative and irrepressi¬
bly radical. The critic keeps the work in the cherishing openness
of memory; but in the very act of discovering its dialectical
place—or really, in fact, articulately creating its place—he also
irrevocably surrenders it, problematic and incomplete as it nec¬
essarily is, to the critical judgment of history still in the making.
The third level of interpretation makes manifest the ontology
of the work of art in question. This level is metaphysical, in that
(1) it concerns the very being of the work—that which most fun¬
damentally underlies its presence, its phenomenological modes
of givenness—and (2) it articulates the invisible. What I mean
may perhaps be clarified analogically by reference to linguistics.
According to Noam Chomsky, the object of linguistics is to con¬
struct an adequate theory which will explain the multitude of
natural languages in terms of a deep (transcendental) structure
of grammar, from which the natural languages may be shown to
be derived according to a finite set of transformation rules. Now,
this deep transcendental structure is certainly manifest in the
phenomenon of our natural languages; on the other hand, it is
not immediately accessible: it is, in other words, invisible. Thus
we must ultimately recognize a difference between the visibility
94 WHAT IS DANCE?

of the phenomenon and the invisibility of the noumenon. This

is the ontological difference, I want to suggest, in which the
work of art is eternally kept and treasured.
Hegel's Lectures in the Philosophy of the Fine Arts, Nietzsche's The
Birth of Tragedy, Heidegger's essay, “The Origin of the Work of
Art," and Jean Paris' three Carnegie-Mellon lectures on painting
are paradigms of the sort of interpretive approach I have in
mind. What these paradigms share is a rare concern for the being
of the work of art; the concealed story of its invisible origin and
promise, which is always waiting to be told and retold. For that
telling is the true receiving of the work of art; it is a mindfulness
which understands the work's mute presence and gives to it, in
return, the present of breath.
Dance seems to be especially needful in this regard. Dance is
a very reticent art. It is a sublime art whose fleeting presence is
the gift of an instant infinitely greater than the phenomenal
interlude that so often conceals its treasure. In my essay, “Bal¬
anchine's Formalism" (Dance Perspectives 55),* I started to tell the
concealed story of classical ballet, which Balanchine's radical
“deviations" helped me to read. That is a story about the invisi¬
ble sense—or origins—of beauty and grace, the two conditions
which define the essence of the classical ballet art. But the story
is not complete. And because dance is very much alive today,
many more stories remain to be told.

(1977)

FRANCIS SPARSHOTT
WHY PHILOSOPHY
NEGLECTS THE DANCE

The 1960's saw an immense increase of interest in dance in the

United States—an interest soon reflected in sociological and
anthropological studies that now begin to be plentifully pub¬
lished. This situation drew attention to a strange state of affairs
in aesthetics. A venerable tradition regards dance as one of the

In this anthology. Eds.

 FRANCIS SPARSHOTT 95

most basic of arts, and this tradition was strengthened in the

early years of the present century by evolutionary notions that
remarked the ubiquity of dance in primitive cultures and singled
out dance-like behavior among primates as one of the principal
animal antecedents of human art. But philosophers of art, con¬
tenting themselves with this lip-service, had done little work on
the aesthetics of the art thus determined as fundamental. Exam¬
ples of general points in aesthetics were and are seldom drawn
from dance, and separate articles and monographs on dance aes¬
thetics are few. Moreover, though there is an extensive early lit¬
erature on dance, that literature is little known to the learned
and literary worlds at large. One wonders why this should be so.
One suggestion is that dance is a female art, and our civiliza¬
tion has been patriarchal. But that is not so. World-wide, men
dance as much as women do, and sometimes more. To assert that,
despite this, dance is somehow an expression of the truly femi¬
nine aspects of the human psyche is to remove oneself from the
domain of responsible discourse. And if dance here and now is
in some respects institutionally associated with femininity, that
is a contingent phenomenon calling for historical explanation
rather than itself an explanation for the larger currents of
thought.
Another explanation is that dance is corporeal, and philoso¬
phers fear and hate the body. That may explain why philoso¬
phers are seldom athletes, but dance as an art or arts is not, from
the standpoint of observer or critic, significantly more bodily
and less spiritual than other arts tangibly embodied.
A third suggestion is that examples of dance have not until the
advent of TV and videotape been generally accessible, so that
few philosophers could acquaint themselves with much dance or
rely on such acquaintance in their readers; and that the lack of a
generally readable dance notation rendered dances themselves
ephemeral. That is true, but does not explain what needs explain¬
ing, for aesthetics has never depended on a common stock of spe¬
cific instances.
To be surprised that little has been written on the philosophy
of dance is to be naive about the conditions in which philoso¬
phies of specific arts get written. That an art exists, and that
admired works are created in it, has never sufficed to generate a
philosophy of that art. It is necessary that the art should occupy
at the relevant time a culturally central position, or that the ide¬
ology of the art could be integrated with a culturally prevalent
ideology. Thus, theories of literature abound because poets have
96 WHAT IS DANCE?

been thought crucial figures in the culture of their times, and

because vernacular literatures played key ideological roles in the
rise of European nationalism. Philosophies of music reflect an era
when music was allowed so central a role in education that its
importance became not something to be established but a datum
to be explained. Theories of cinema were developed in acknowl¬
edgement of the fact that the movies for some decades domi¬
nated even sophisticated imaginations, and this domination
needed to be explored from within. But when we turn to dance
we find, first, that for various reasons the ideologies available to
the other arts have not been available to it, so that philosophers
could not bring it into their general theories of the arts; and sec¬
ond, that dance has at no convenient time been a culturally cen¬
tral art. It may attain centrality in small non-literate ("primitive")
societies, but their ways of doing things are not imaginatively
accessible to us—nothing like them belongs anywhere in our
imagined heritage. Dance was also a focus of interest in the per¬
sonal monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but
this association with courts has itself sufficed' to remove it from
centrality in any contemporary western society. Attempts to find
other contexts in which dance as an art might achieve the cen¬
trality one might expect it to possess have not yet succeeded. For
instance, Isadora Duncan and others in the early years of this
century thought dance might be the natural expression of Whit-
manian democracy, the spirit of the healthy individual in open
spaces; but the replacement of the frontier mentality by a disil¬
lusioned one-small-world-ism has woken us from that dream.
Again, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes nearly succeeded in tearing
ballet (still the only highly developed dance in the west) loose
from its monarchical associations and making it a Gesamtkun-
stwerk that would rival Wagnerian opera, but in the end it did
not come about. World War I shifted the balance of artistic
acceptability towards less opulent forms; Wagner was in any case
there first; and, perhaps most important, Diaghilev failed to
establish a strong choreography at the core of his enterprise,
which never fully established itself as dance rather than miscel¬
laneous spectacle. Most recently, a new dance associated with
such names as John Cage and Merce Cunningham has offered
itself as the pure and necessary art of the moving body. But it
turned out that there was no place for it to fill. As art for an alter¬
native culture its place was preempted by the artistically unpre-
cendented and unexpected outbursting of popular musics, a
worldwide cultural revolution whose measure we have yet to
 FRANCIS SPARSHOTT 97

take; and within its own solemn circle of art, as the name of John
Cage reminds us, it did not establish a cultural presence and
function separate from that of avant-garde music, para-theater,
and "art" generally.
The upshot of the history summarized above is that there has
been nothing for a philosophy of the dance to be about. Indeed,
the very idea of an art of dance as such, distinct from mime and
pageantry, is new and perhaps unstable. The prestigious court
ballet of Louis XIV and his predecessors was less like anything
we would call dance than like a pageant or a homecoming
parade. The dances available from classical antiquity as imagi¬
nary exemplars for those who would dignify the dance were
either pure mime, whose values were entirely those of expres¬
sion and communication, or choric maneuverings whose value
lay in the ceremony of which they formed part. The ballet d’action
of Noverre and his contemporaries was again mimetic in its
emphasis. Even Isadora Duncan at one time denounced the idea
of a pure dance, saying that the value of her dances lay in their
fidelity to the music for the sake of which they were created.
Dance as dance, the rhythmically patterned movements of the
body, was at all these times decried as a mere capering. The
objection was not to its physicality but to its lack of meaning.
Natural movements of the living body are motivated; unmoti¬
vated movements are mere swingings, jerkings, twitchings. The
invention of a pure art of dance depends on the development of
a characteristic system of motivation of its own, or something
that will do duty for that. Till then, however many beautiful
dances we have, there can be no philosophy of dance, because
their significances remain indefeasibly miscellaneous. Only their
beauty unites them. Beauty justifies dances, dancers, dancing,
and the dance, but little can be said about it.

In order to vindicate a place for an art (such as dance) among the

serious cultural concerns either of mankind or of our civilization,
one must define a place that only it can fill, or that it fills in a
distinctive way. To do that convincingly, it is advisable to con¬
struct a survey of real or possible arts among which the art in
question is determinately located. Many such "systems of the
arts" have been constructed. Some of these cover the whole
range of human skills or a large part of that range, and others
confine themselves to anatomizing the practices and skills that
we lump together as "art" without relating art as a whole to any
similarly articulated scheme for other areas of human activity.
 J

98 WHAT IS DANCE?

Many such systems, notably that of S. K. Langer, do make a place

for dance. But only two such systems have been so widely
accepted that our own spontaneous thinking still shows their
influence, because they form part of the tradition within which
our minds work. And neither of these two preferred systems
assigns a place to dance. Since philosophers of art, like other phi¬
losophers, spend most of their time (and most of them spend all
their time) examining particular problems within unexamined
frames of reference, these omissions go far to explain why phi¬
losophers neglect the dance. Of course, the prevalence of these
two schematisms is not itself an ultimate datum, but demands
explanation. Such explanation would include a demonstration of
how each schema articulated the most pressing relevant con¬
cerns of the most influential ideologists of its age, and an expla¬
nation of that influence. No such explanation can even be
sketched here; we will only note that the successful promulga¬
tion of a system of the arts from which dance was omitted shows
either that dance was felt to lack significance at the relevant time
or that its significance was not felt to lie within the proper scope
of the system.
The two prevailing schemata of the arts to which I refer are
the system of the "fine arts" as arts of imitation, derived via Aris¬
totle from the Platonic Epinomis and developed in the sixteenth
to early eighteenth century, and the system of the arts articulated
by Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics and found at the basis of
much nineteenth-century writing. Neither scheme commands
the assent of serious thinkers today, but no other scheme of com¬
parable mesmeric power has displaced them, so that they remain
detectable as unquestioned operative assumptions in shaping the
ways we still frame our questions.
The system of the "Fine Arts" is, for our purposes, best exam¬
ined in the shallow but sophisticated version presented by
D'Alembert in his "Preliminary Discourse" to Diderot's Encyclo¬
pedic (1751), where it forms part of a classification of the kinds of
human knowledge.1 "Another kind of reflective knowledge," he
writes, "... consists of the ideas which we create for ourselves
by imagining and putting together beings similar to those which
are the object of our direct ideas" (p. 37). Among these arts of
imitation painting and sculpture are primary because "it is in
those arts above all that imitation best approximates the objects
represented and speaks most directly to the senses" (ibid.); archi¬
tecture does the same sort of thing only not so well; "Poetry,
which comes after painting and sculpture,.. . speaks to the imag-
 FRANCIS SPARSHOTT 99

ination rather than to the senses'7; and music "holds the last
place in the order of imitation" because it lacks a developed
vocabulary, though it is nowadays evolving into a "kind of dis¬
course" expressing the passions of the soul (p. 38). But, signifi¬
cantly from our point of view, "Any music that does not portray
something is only noise" (p. 39). All these arts that "undertake
the imitation of Nature" are called the Fine Arts "because they
have pleasure for their principal object" (p. 43); they could all be
included "under the general title of Painting" because they dif¬
fer from that art only in their means (p. 55), or could be consid¬
ered forms of poetry if "poetry" is taken in its old broad sense of
"invention or creation." In the whole of this discussion, D'Alem¬
bert never mentions dance. Why not? Presumably because what
he is classifying is forms of knowledge. Any dance which is not a
variety of representational theater, and hence a form of "Paint¬
ing," is mere movement in the same way that non-expressive
music is "only noise," hence not a branch of knowledge and not
to be included among the arts. What makes D'Alembert's exclu¬
sion of dance particularly remarkable is that his enumeration of
great artists gives pride of place to those active at the court of
that passionate practitioner and devotee of dance, Louis XIV; he
even mentions Lully, Louis' great ballet impresario, but men¬
tions him only as a musician. Yet the ballets of Louis' court were
great public occasions, assigned high symbolic importance by
their devisers and commentators. How could D'Alembert have
overlooked them? A possible explanation is that opera (in which
dance interludes were a normal component) was originally
devised as a re-creation of Greek tragedy and inherited tragedy's
traditional place among arts that "imitate Nature"; but the court
ballet, in which Prince and nobility took part, found its ancestry
in a different region of Platonic thought, in the choric dances in
which the city expressed its unity and its symbolic equivalence
with the hierarchy of the cosmos. Thus its strictly choreographic
component (always subsidiary in the whole design) was as such
below the level of art, its theatrical component is categorized as
a continuation of painting by other means, and its inner signif¬
icance lies in a mode of imitation radically other than that which
the fine arts exemplify. There was thus no way in which the
court ballet could be assigned a distinctive place among the fine
arts, and its successors suffered the same difficulty.
In face of this exclusion it is easy to see what apologists of
dance should do: they should say that dance stands alongside
painting and poetry as an independent mode of imitation. And
100 WHAT IS DANCE?

so they did. Noverre, among others, took just that line.2 But the
move never won general acceptance, because it was not as “imi¬
tation of Nature" that significant dance was significant.
The other schematism of arts that has dominated our minds is
Hegel's. It goes like this. The fine arts are arts that produce
beauty. Beauty is the adequation of a form to an idea, so that a
fine art embodies ideas in forms adequate to them. As civilization
advances, arts become more refined. Symbolic arts in which
spirit partly informs matter give way to classical arts in which
spirit and matter are perfectly fused, and these in turn yield to
romantic arts in which spirit dominates its material embodiment.
After that, spirit assumes autonomous forms and art as a whole
is superseded. The paradigm of a symbolic art is architecture; of
a classical art, sculpture; the romantic arts are typically painting,
music, and poetry. Sculpture is the central art, the most artistic
of the arts; among romantic arts music is central, the most roman¬
tic, but poetry is the most spiritual and the most advanced.
One might have looked for dance in two places in Hegel's
scheme. On the one hand, since the central place assigned to
sculpture rests on the old thesis that of all natural forms only the
human body, the favorite subject of sculpture, gives natural
expression to "the Idea" because it is the body of the only theo¬
rizing animal, one might have expected dance, which sets actual
human bodies in graceful motion, to join sculpture at the center.
That place had been prepared for it by the Fine Arts schematism,
but Hegel leaves it empty. On the other hand, dance might have
been set alongside architecture as the primitive art, in which the
actual materiality of the body is partly infused with formally sig¬
nificant properties in the same way that an architect gives a sig¬
nificant form to actual materials in all their solid strength. Why
does Hegel refuse to make either of these obvious moves?
So far as Hegel knew, architecture of the appropriate heavy
and symbolizing sort did dominate the early civilizations of
Egypt and India; and sculpture, since Winckelmann, was taken
to epitomize Greek civilization. But no civilized era had
expressed its characteristic orientation in dance. Dance belonged
to savages, and to primitive men whose expression was inarti¬
culate. As a means of expression it is subhuman and pre-artistic.
Apes and peacocks dance. Long after Hegel's death, as we have
seen, such animal behavior would be assigned to the ancestry of
art.
The supposed facts of history may have sufficed, but another
thing that might make dance an unlikely partner for sculpture
 FRANCIS SPARSHOTT 101

would be that the body made by God in His own image must
already be expressive in the only way in which it can be expres¬
sive. The dancer as dancer can express no idea higher than the
personality and full humanity his life should already more fully
and perfectly show. An idealization of gesture could not be more
eloquently expressive of humanity, but only an attenuation and
trivialization.
What, then, of the analogy of architecture? The dancer's agility
and grace imperfectly animate his real corporeal presence, the
sweating and straining body, as an architect imparts an illusory
lightness to the vault that sustains and is confirmed by the loads
imposed on it. Even if no advanced civilization has taken dance
as its central expression, should we not recognize that dance, like
architecture, is an inevitable and basic art—that human beings
will always build, and will always dance, and it will always mat¬
ter to them how they do so? If the origins of dance are prehistoric
and even prehuman, what is at the origin is not necessarily
superseded, or if it is so is superseded only by losing its place at
the focus of concern. It was in this sense that Hegel thought all
art was superseded: science and philosophy must from now on
always be more central to the concerns of humanity, but art has
by no means completed its mission.
Hegel's relegation of architecture to the past corresponds to a
historical fact. The architecture of his day was bankrupt, reduced
to exploiting a repertory of forms of which the original signifi¬
cance was lost, in desperate search for any sort of authentic or
persuasive style. Similarly, nothing in Hegel's day suggested any
inevitable importance for an art of dance. The ballet d'action of
Noverre and his contemporaries had quickly relapsed into the
formalism they had protested against, and the dance of Hegel's
day had nothing more significant to show than Vigano's choreo-
drammi at Milan—magnificent spectacle, but mere spectacle. In
Hegel's terms, spectacle is not art. A modern art, a living art, had
in Hegel's day to be a romantic art; and it was not until the year
of Hegel's death (1831) that the dance of the nuns in Robert le
Diable revealed the possibilities—quickly followed up—of a
romantic art of dance.
Hegel will acknowledge no split between the rational and the
real, and therefore always bases his schematizations on some¬
thing very solid and closely observed in history. Dance in his
place and time offered no such basis to observation, and to have
claimed for it any systematic significance would have been pure
ideology.
102 WHAT IS DANCE?

Dance as romantic art is born in the romantic ballet of Paris

immediately after Hegel's death, and it is this ballet that still typ¬
ifies the art of dance in the general mind. Such a dance, cultur¬
ally prestigious and ideologically significant, might have won a
posthumous place in the Hegelian system. But it did not. As Ivor
Guest shows, the inner meaning of that ballet was a yearning for
the unattainable as symbolized in a man's hopeless love for a
fairy being, an etherealized woman.3 But not only is that sort of
"idealism" a weak escapism, incapable of bearing any but the
most vapid symbolism; more seriously, the artistic fact it corre¬
sponded to was the cult of the ballerina, of Marie Taglioni and
her rivals and successors down to Pavlova—and of the ballerina
as kept or keepable woman, whose body was central only as
fetish for the Jockey Club. The idealization of the feminine is the
degradation of the female. So far from vindicating for ballet a
place among the arts in which the human spirit finds its defining
form, this social attitude excludes ballet from art and confines it
within the luxury trades. Association with ballet has meant the
stigma of spiritual sickness, and for a while it seemed that the
only hope for a serious art of dance was to repudiate ballet
utterly. Unfortunately, no technique of comparable develop¬
ment, and no tradition of comparable weight, existed in the west
or (because of the rigors of training, if nothing else) was import¬
able from the east.
What this all amounts to is that there has not yet been any
available basis for a philosophy of dance. Nor can such a basis be
invented by philosophers. Philosophers cannot invent or bestow
seriousness; they can only explain it.4

(1981)

Notes
‘Jean Le Rond D'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of
Diderot, trans. by Richard Schwab and Walter Rex, Indianapolis, Bobbs-
Merrill, 1963.
2Jean-Georges Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets (1760), trans. by
Cyril Beaumont, New York, Dance Horizons, 1966.
3Ivor Guest, Romantic Ballet in Paris, Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan
University Press, 1966.
4Most of this essay is condensed from a longer paper, "On the Ques¬
tion: 'Why Do Philosophers Neglect the Aesthetics of the Dance?'" to
appear in Dance Research Journal.
 II
The Dance Medium

In his essay "Degas, Dance, Drawing," Paul Valery recounts a

now legendary conversation between the painter Degas and the
poet Mallarme. Degas—who also wrote poetry on occasion—
complained to his friend that writing was an extremely painful
experience for him despite the fact that he was never at a loss for
ideas. "But Degas," replied Mallarme, "you can't make a poem
with ideas.... You make it with words."
Mallarme was not denying that poems can express ideas; he
was merely insisting that for the poet, ideas can only be
expressed through the medium of words. As Aristotle was the first
to point out, every artist works in a particular medium: compos¬
ers in the medium of sound, painters in the medium of canvas
and pigments, etc. G. Baldwin Brown, in his classic study The Art
of the Cave Dweller, argues that serious pictorial art began when
the primitive artist first grappled with the problem of accom¬
modating his mental image of an animal to the actual, physical
surface on which he intended to paint it. Presumably, the prop¬
erties of each medium will determine to a great extent what can
be expressed or represented in that medium. If this is so, it fol¬
lows that some media will be better suited to certain tasks than
others.
What then is the medium of dance and what sorts of subjects,
ideas, and experiences is that medium best equipped to embody?

103
104 THE DANCE MEDIUM

Most people would say simply that the medium of dance is the
human body. That sounds plausible enough; but unfortunately,
the matter cannot be resolved quite so easily. For if we define the
dance medium simply as the body, what are we to make of the
other theatrical elements—costumes, scenery, lighting—that tra¬
ditionally have both adorned and concealed the dancer's body?
Most of the questions examined in this section center on the
nature of the dancer's body. How does it differ from the inani¬
mate raw materials of painting and sculpture? Paul Taylor, for
example, has noted that "dancers are not exactly like tubes of
paint with which to cover the canvas of space. They have char¬
acter and personality which they assert." Havelock Ellis distin¬
guishes between dance and architecture on the ground that the
choreographer often uses his own body as a medium, but the
architect creates an object external to himself. Does this mean
that the choreographer's relationship to his medium is inher¬
ently less objective than that of the architect? Another question
that engages a number of writers in this section is whether or
not choreographers should reveal and acknowledge the basic
properties of their medium.
We've already seen that, for Susanne Langer, the actual phys¬
ical movements of the body are not in and of themselves suffi¬
cient to constitute a work of art; the dancer's body must project
an illusion of "virtual force." Stephane Mallarme, writing about
the dancer La Cornalba, appears to agree with Langer when he
insists that "the ballerina is not a girl dancing . .. she is not a
girl, but rather a metaphor which symbolizes some elemental
aspect of earthly form: sword, cup, flowers, etc." Clearly, for Mal¬
larme, the dancer must transcend the natural body in order to
represent something impersonal and metaphorical.
Thus, it makes perfect sense that Mallarme was a great admirer
of the pioneer modern dancer Loie Fuller who manipulated bil¬
lowing silks through brightly colored lights so as to generate the
illusion that her body had vanished into these free-flowing
materials. And far from constituting an isolated phenomenon in
the history of dance, Fuller represents a major choreographic tra¬
dition: the concealment or transformation of the human body.
Martha Graham's body-concealing costume of stretch jersey for
"Lamentation" and Alwin Nikolais's frequent use of the body as
a sort of mobile projection screen also belong to this time-hon¬
ored tradition. We might even include the earliest court ballets
such as the "Ballet Comique de la Reine" in which the perform¬
ers were costumed in floor-length dresses, arranged into allegor-
 THE DANCE MEDIUM 105

ically evocative floor patterns, and viewed from above—all of

which had the effect of deemphasizing the actual physical prop¬
erties of the individual dancers' bodies.
In his review of the original "Le Sacre du Printemps," Jacques
Riviere, the French editor and essayist, credits the choreographer
Nijinsky with having initiated a counter-tradition in which the
dancer's body is liberated from all such artifices and encum¬
brances. Riviere discusses two different sorts of artifice that cho¬
reographers have traditionally employed to conceal the body.
The first, he associates, appropriately enough, with Fuller: "the
play of lights, floating draperies, veils that envelop the body and
disguise its shape, the blurring of all contours, the dancer's chief
aim is to lose herself in her surroundings."
But even when the dancer has been stripped of these theatrical
accessories, there is still no guarantee that the actual, physical
body will become visible and theatrically legible. For example.
Riviere complains that, in Fokine's "Le Spectre de la Rose,"
"Nijinsky's body literally disappears in its own dance. The only
things that remain visible of that muscular being with its so
strong and prominent features are exquisitely fleeting contours,
constantly evanescing forms."
By contrast, he argues that the angular, geometric severity of
"Le Sacre" reveals the true contours of the dancers' bodies. It is,
he insists, the first choreographic work capable of countering the
vague, amorphous aesthetic of Impressionist painting. Riviere's
description of "Le Sacre" may be difficult to reconcile with the
accounts of other commentators who tend to stress its primal
energy rather than its visual clarity. Many of Riviere's comments
may seem more applicable to a work like Balanchine's "Agon."
Be that as it may. Riviere was one of the first writers to praise
choreographers for revealing rather than concealing the body.
In fact, he accurately anticipates what Lincoln Kirstein would
later write about Balanchine: "He has not been troubled how to
dress dancers, but to undress them so their nudity is most intel¬
ligible. It almost amounts to an anti-theatrical bias." Of course,
the nudity Kirstein speaks of is only metaphorical. The
"undressed" dancers in Balanchine's formalist ballets are dressed
in practice clothes rather than theatrical costumes; but Riviere's
anti-theatrical bias, his desire to reveal the body either as
unadorned object or as sensuous presence, has probably been
carried to its ultimate extreme by the post-modern minimalists
like Yvonne Rainer whose work has on occasion employed com¬
plete nudity.
106 THE DANCE MEDIUM

Some would argue that choreographers who share this "anti-

theatrical" bias are being truer to the underlying nature of their
medium than those who don't. This "purist" doctrine is derived
in large part from the Laocoon, a theoretical treatise by the eigh¬
teenth-century German dramatist and aesthetician, Gotthold
Lessing. Subtitled "An Essay on the Limits of Painting and
Poetry," Laocoon attempts to define the essential nature of these
two arts and to distinguish between them accordingly.
Poetry, Lessing argued, is a temporal art because words are
perceived consecutively, in time. Painting, by contrast, is an art
of space, not time, because its images are assimilated all at once,
in a single "spatial" whole. According to this doctrine, it is the
responsibility of the painter, the poet (and by implication, all
other artists as well) to recognize and work within the limiting
conditions of the medium. This purist doctrine led Lessing to
inveigh against painters who depict allegorical subjects—stories
that unfold in a temporal sequence. Equally objectionable to him
were poets whose imagery was static and "pictorial," rather than
temporal. Thus, according to Lessing, artists must work within
the constraints of their own media and not trespass upon the
domain of the other arts.
What then, according to this purist doctrine, are the limits of
dance? George Balanchine has said that "there are no mothers-
in-law in ballet," suggesting that dance lacks the means of indi¬
cating certain sorts of complex relationships between characters.
In fact, Balanchine even argues that the realm of story and char¬
acter is better left to literature altogether: "The ballet is such a
rich art form that it should not be an illustrator of even the most
interesting, even the most meaningful literary primary source.
The ballet will speak for itself and about itself. ... I am always
sorry when an excellent ballerina depicts with her movements
only some literary theme. The human body, and in particular the
female body, carries in itself true beauty. And one really does not
want to know whom this or that ballerina represents but only to
see the pure beauty of her body, her movements."
But is Balanchine expressing a general truth about the art of
dance or only his own preference for plotless, formalist ballets?
As Selma Jeanne Cohen points out, one of the characters in
Agnes de Mille's "Fall River Legend" is, if not a mother-in-law,
at least a stepmother. But de Mille cannot accomplish this feat of
characterization without the assistance of a theatrical property.
(The father places a white shawl, already associated with the
 THE DANCE MEDIUM 107

mother who has died, around the shoulders of another woman

while his daughter watches.) But even if de Mille had found a
way of characterizing the stepmother through pure movement,
does the Lessing doctrine still imply that her ballet is "impure"
because it attempts something that might have been more easily,
if not more compellingly, evoked in words?
The problem comes down to this: What is a legitimate aspira¬
tion for an artistic medium? Must the medium confine itself to
what it and it alone can do or is that being unnecessarily dog¬
matic and restrictive? Isn't there something to be said for the
pleasure of contrasting the way Martha Graham treats the myth
of the House of Atreus with the very different way Aeschylus
dramatizes these same stories in the Oresteia? Doesn't some of the
magnificence of Limon's "The Moor's Pavane" derive from the
abstract, economical way he distills the sprawling complexity of
Shakespeare's Othello? Some would go further and say that any
effects the medium is capable of generating are legitimate to it.
Why in a more general sense, must only one art tell stories,
depict character, etc.?
It is also worth noting that some modernist artists appear to
believe that each medium has discernible limits, but that pecu¬
liarly compelling aesthetic effects may be achieved by intention¬
ally violating them. Yvonne Rainer for example, once wrote,

I remember thinking that dance was at a disadvantage in relation

to sculpture in that the spectator could spend as much time as he
required to examine a sculpture, walk around it, and so forth—but
a dance movement—because it happened in time—vanished as
soon as it was executed. So in a solo called "The Bells" I repeated
the same seven movements for eight minutes ... in a sense allow¬
ing the spectator to walk around it.

Andre Gide once said that Lessing's book presents one of those
seminal theories that should be either re-affirmed or contradicted
every thirty years. The writings of Clement Greenberg, the con¬
temporary art critic, constitute one of the most adventurous re¬
statements of this purist aesthetic. According to Greenberg, the
quest for purity is one of the hallmarks of modernism. The true
modernist art work must not only conform to the underlying
principles of its medium; it must also actively acknowledge those
limiting principles and jettison anything that might obscure its
essential nature. In the case of painting, this essential nature is
flatness. Therefore, painters must not only refrain from creating
108 THE DANCE MEDIUM

an illusion of three-dimensional space (which would trespass on

the domain of sculpture); they must also find ways of calling
attention to the flatness of the canvas.
In his essay "Balanchine's Formalism/' the American philoso¬
pher David Michael Levin relies on Greenberg's theory of mod¬
ernism to illuminate George Balanchine's singular accomplish¬
ments. According to Levin, the concealed essence of ballet is an
exquisitely delicate tension between weight and weightlessness.
This essence can only be revealed by stripping away the theat¬
rical and representational elements that have traditionally con¬
cealed it. (Hence, Balanchine's ''anti-theatrical'' bias.) In the for¬
malist ballets that result, Balanchine acknowledges the tangible
weight of the body, but only to "suspend" that weight, render¬
ing the body magically weightless.
Needless to say, not all modernists have followed this austere,
purist path. In fact, any comprehensive account of modernism
would have to acknowledge an opposing tendency toward the
re-unification of dance and the other arts. One of the major dis¬
contents of modernity is the pervasive feeling of isolation and
fragmentation; and many artists have turned toward the rituals
of "primitive" societies in search of holistic models. The best
known and most influential proposal for re-capturing the pre¬
sumed unity of primitive ritual through modernist art is Wag¬
ner's theory of the Gesamtkunstxverk, an ideal synthesis of music,
dance, and speech.
As Frank Kermode, the contemporary British literary critic,
argues in his essay, "Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev," it was
a fascination with this ideal of re-unification that led so many
turn-of-the-century poets to rhapsodize over Loi’e Fuller and the
early productions of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Compared with
these multi-sensory spectacles, the poet's medium, language,
appeared bloodlessly abstract, longwinded, and "dissociated"
from the objects it represents. Contrasting dance with written
language, Mallarme insists that the dancer "writing with her
body ... suggests things which the written work could express
only in several paragraphs of dialogue or descriptive prose."
Dancing, Kermode argues, was thought to "achieve naturally
that 'organic unity' which .. . modern poetry can produce only
by a great and exhausting effort of fusion." Loi'e Fuller, as we've
already seen, appeared to become "one" with her materials, and
Diaghilev's ballets were often glamorous and presumably seam¬
less collaborations among the leading painters, composers, and
choreographers of his era. ("Parade" for example, had settings
 THE DANCE MEDIUM 109

and costumes by Picasso, a score by Satie, choreography by Mas¬

sine.) Thus, we might say that primitivist "wholeness" and mod¬
ernist purity constitute two very different conceptions of the
dance medium.
Marshall Cohen, in his essay, "Primitivism, Modernism, and
Dance Theory," argues that neither of these extreme positions
provides an accurate account of the contemporary dance events
we most value. He challenges the claim that the work of the Bal¬
lets Russes constitutes a true realization of the Wagnerian Ge-
samtkunstwerk because it excludes the art of speech. Indeed, in
many of Diaghilev's best-known works, the dancing was clearly
of lesser importance than the costumes and scenery, thereby
undermining any claim of unity and equality among the arts.
And even if these ballets were to achieve the desired degree of
synthesis, they would still be perceived by modern "dissociated"
sensibilities, transforming them into one more eclectic variety of
contemporary art rather than a full-fledged restoration of prim¬
itive wholeness.
Cohen is equally critical of David Levin's attempts to impose
Clement Greenberg's theories on the work of George Balan¬
chine. Levin, he points out, mistakenly argues that Balanchine's
ballets achieve a state of simultaneous weight and weightless¬
ness by disguising the three-dimensionality of the body. Levin
takes Greenberg's ideas about the flatness of contemporary visual
art and applies them much too literally to ballet. But dancing,
Cohen argues, has at least as strong a claim on the third dimen¬
sion as does sculpture. In fact, one of the most characteristic fea¬
tures of Balanchine's choreography is the way it exhibits the dan¬
cer's body in three-dimensional space. And Balanchine's art,
even though it leans in the direction of modernist purity, always
derives its primary inspiration from the music to which it is
choreographed, thus denying it the absolute autonomy that the
doctrine of modernist purity seems to demand.
Whether or not this ideal of purity has ever been achieved by
a choreographer is arguable. Mary Wigman created what she
called "absolute" dances performed in silence with a bare mini¬
mum of theatrical support. But these dances were conceived of
as representations of inner realities. Merce Cunningham often
creates movement that is self-contained, and neither represen¬
tational nor directly dependent upon music. Yet music and decor
remain essential components of Cunningham's mise-en-scene,
even if each maintains its autonomy.
Balanchine, as we have seen, suggests that one of the limita-
110 THE DANCE MEDIUM

of the dance medium is its inability to represent character. Hein¬

rich von Kleist, the nineteenth-century German playwright and
essayist, suggests that another very real limitation of the
medium—and this presumably applies to all of the performing
arts—is the self-consciousness of the human performer. Kleist's
essay is really a meditation on the relationship between grace
and self-consciousness, framed in the form of a parable about the
marionette theatre. One of the speakers in Kleist's tale is a dancer
who greatly admires the movement of puppets. “It is true," he
says, “that the range of their movements is rather limited, but
those which they can command they accomplish with a grace
and ease which every thinking person can only wonder at." The
puppets, unlike the dancers, are “without affectation," their bod¬
ies obey only the law of gravity, “an admirable quality which
one looks for in vain among the majority of our dancers."
According to Kleist, human beings are less graceful than puppets
because “we have eaten of the tree of knowledge." In other
words, self-consciousness prevents us from regaining a state of
grace.
Kleist's parable may seem too abstract at first to be immediately
applicable to theatrical dance; but one need only think of works
like “Coppelia," “The Nutcracker," and “Petrouchka"—not to
mention Oskar Schlemmer's “Triadic Ballet"—all of which cel¬
ebrate the movement of puppets or inanimate objects. But, more
important, Kleist helps us to understand more precisely the
nature of the dance medium by examining the differences
between the dancer's body and other sorts of bodies, both ani¬
mate and inanimate. Unlike the puppet's inanimate body or the
bodies of other animals, the dancer's body is infected with self-
consciousness, and the dancer's training consists at least in part
of learning how to control self-consciousness in order to
approach more closely Kleist's ideal of grace (although, as we
have already seen, John Martin takes a more positive view of the
matter, arguing that the conscious, intentional nature of the dan¬
cer's movement is both different from and superior to mere inan¬
imate motion).
But the performer need not actively imitate a puppet, doll, or
machine in order to approach Kleist's ideal. Dalcroze's eurythm-
ics, which both Nijinsky and Mary Wigman studied, attempts to
alleviate the performer's self-consciousness by minimizing the
reaction time between musical stimulus and bodily response. We
might also think here of Andre Levinson's definition of the ideal
ballerina as “a machine for manufacturing beauty."
 STEPHANE MALLARME 111

In a sense though, all of these attempts by human beings to

rival the unselfconsciousness of the puppet are—at least accord¬
ing to Kleist—misguided, because human beings cannot return
to innocence; we have no choice but to increase our knowledge
and self-awareness.

STEPHANE MALLARME
BALLETS

La Cornalba delights me; she seems almost naked in her dance.

For in an effortless rise and fall, this creature now in flight, now
drowsed in veils, is summoned into the air and seems to hang
there, purely Italian in the soft stretching of her body.
Is that, for lack of any other Poetry, the only memory remain¬
ing from the performance at the Eden theater? By no means! For
what we call Poetry is, on the contrary, abundant there (a most
pleasant interlude for a mind now free of characters in costumes
and dresses, reciting immortal verse). But the magic spell of the
libretto does not come out in the performance. I leaf through the
program and learn that the very stars themselves—which, I am
firmly convinced, should be but rarely disturbed, and even then
only for high reasons of meditative gravity (in this case, accord¬
ing to the accompanying explanation, it is Cupid who moves and
assembles them)—the very stars are present! And now the inco¬
herent, haughty absence of meaning which twinkles in the
alphabet of Night yields and, with a few starry pin-pricks in a
blue curtain, spells out vivianne, the tempting name of the fay
and title of the poem. For, of course, the corps de ballet, grouped
in its entirety around the star (what name could be more suitable
to her!), cannot figure the ideal dance of the constellations. No!
and you can see what a plunge this meant into other worlds,
straight to the depths of art! The snow, too: no dance of white¬
ness back and forth, no waltz can keep each flake alive; and so it
is with the vernal thrust of blossoms. All that which is Poetry—
nature brought to life—leaves the libretto and freezes in card¬
board equipment and in the glittering stagnancy of purple and
yellow muslin. Then again, as far as stage movement goes, I saw
112 THE DANCE MEDIUM

a magic circle which was certainly not drawn by the fay's own
endless round or by her silken cords. Innumerable little clever
details, yet none of which assumes any normal, established func¬
tion in the reproduction. Going back to the "starry" example just
mentioned, has there ever been a more heroic refusal of the
temptation to understand not merely analogies of high serious¬
ness, but also this law: that the chief goal of the dance, apart from
its mechanics, is a mobile, unending, ubiquitous synthesis of the
attitudes of each dance group, a synthesis which they must frac¬
tion ad infinitum? Hence an equal exchange resulting in the de¬
individualization of the coryphee, of the group, of the dancing
entity, which is therefore always a symbol, never a person.
Here is a judgment, here is an axiom for the ballet!
I mean that the ballerina is not a girl dancing; that, considering
the juxtaposition of those group motifs, she is not a girl, but rather
a metaphor which symbolizes some elemental aspect of earthly
form: sword, cup, flower, etc., and that she does not dance but
rather, with miraculous lunges and abbreviations, writing with
her body, she suggests things which the written work could
express only in several paragraphs of dialogue or descriptive
prose. Her poem is written without the writer's tools.
Following a legend came the Fable: not at all in the classical
or deus ex machina tradition, but in a more limited sense: simply
the transposition of human character and gesture to the purely
animal level. This involved a rather facile re-translation of the
human feelings which the fabulist had attributed to his enam¬
ored and winged creatures; here the characters were, indeed,
more perfectly instinctive in their silent leaps than those who
are given a conscious language to speak on the stage. The dance
must be all wings; there must be birds, flights to the never-never
land, and quivering descents like those of arrows. That, precisely
and ideally, is what one should see in a performance of The Two
Pigeons: namely, the predetermined sequence of the fundamental
motifs of the Ballet. It should not be difficult for the imagination
of the spectator to find such connections; but in this case it was
difficult to find even a slight resemblance, and in art it is the
result that counts. Delusion! except for the first act, in which we
saw the love-birds turned, in an attractive incarnation, into mim¬
icking, dancing human beings.

Two pigeons loved with a tender love,

two, or rather several pairs on a roof-top which could be seen,

like the sea, through the archway of a Thessalian farm; and they
 STEPHANE MALLARME 113

were alive, not painted, which made for depth and exquisite
taste. Each love-bird points to the others, then to himself, thus
awakening to language through comparison. And so, little by lit¬
tle, the couple recalls the dove-cote with its pecking, flitting,
swooning little ways; and at last the others, in delightful imita¬
tion, come invading, gliding down upon them from their frolics
in the air. Now the two are children, now birds, now children
once again, depending on our vision of this game of doubles and
exchanges which male and female play henceforth and play for¬
ever—nothing more nor less than the game between the sexes!
But now I must avoid any further consideration suggested by the
Ballet—that catalyst and paradise of all spirituality—because
after this simple prelude, nothing deserved even a momentary
backward glance; absolutely nothing, save the perfection of the
dancers. It would be tiresome to point out the foolish nothing¬
ness which followed the graceful motif of the prelude. One
might mention the wanderer's flight which did, at least, conjure
up that heavenly inability to disappear that keeps the ballerina's
toes delightfully on the stage. And then when home calls once
again, when the sweet, poignant hour of the prodigal has come
(including a celebration), and when the heartrent lovers, all
flight and forgiveness, reunite, there will be ... well, you can
imagine the final triumphant dance hymn, with the fiances
together again in drunken joy after the space between them,
brought about by that unavoidable flight, has been gradually
reduced to nothing! It will be . .. why, as if the whole thing were
taking place right in your own home, ladies and gentlemen, with
an appropriate kiss (quite inappropriate in art); for the Dance is
only the mysterious and sacred interpretation of such a scene.
But then, if we take that view, a little run on the flute will
remind us that our vision is ridiculous in the eyes of our vulgar
contemporaries, whom we must allow for, after all, out of con¬
sideration for the theater's tickets.
There was a very clearly discerned relationship between the
usual lines of the dancer's flight and several choreographic
effects; and there was the (not entirely ingenuous) fitting of the
Fable to the Ballet. Apart from these, there was simply a love
story. During the interlude of this uniquely shreds and patches
performance, the wondrous and matchless virtuosa Mile. Mauri
summed it up, mingling her divination with pure and trembling
animality. At every point she indicated the allusions which had
not yet been brought into perfect focus; and with a touch of her
fingers, just before she took a step, she would call a shimmering
114 THE DANCE MEDIUM

fold forth from her skirt and seem to fly up to the Idea on impa¬
tient wings.
The historical scenic art form is the Drama. The Ballet, on the
contrary, is a symbolic form. The two should be allied, but not
confused. You must not give brusque and common treatment to
two attitudes which are jealous of their respective gifts of silence.
Acting and dancing become suddenly hostile whenever they are
forcibly brought together. For example: when the attempt was
made just now to show forth the single essence of a bird through
twin performers, it was decided (you will remember) to pair a
mime and a ballerina. But they are too unlike! If one is a dove,
why, the other will be ... Lord knows! perhaps the breeze. For¬
tunately, at the Eden theater, the exclusive qualities of the two
art forms were most judiciously observed: the hero living in his
twin worlds—a child still, and yet a man—was set in thematic
opposition to the rival heroine who was both a woman walking
toward him on royal carpets and also the original fay, equally
important with her flutterings. This distinction of each scenic
genre, in contact or opposition with the other, becomes the con¬
trolling feature of the work, and the resulting disparity is used
for its very structure. But a communication between the two still
remains to be found. Ordinarily, the librettist fails to understand
that the ballerina expresses herself with steps, and that beyond
this she has no eloquence, not even that of gesture.
Even if genius should say: “The Dance is a figuration of caprice
in rhythmical flight. Here, with their numbers, are the few basic
equations of all fantasy; and the human form in its most exces¬
sive mobility, in its truest development, cannot escape them,
insofar, of course, as they are a visual embodiment of the idea"—
and now take a glance at any choreographic ensemble, and com¬
pare!—there is still no one who would accept this method of set¬
ting up a ballet. The modern cast of mind is well known, and
even in the case of those whose faculties are exceptional when
used, it must be replaced by some nameless, impersonal, glitter¬
ing glance of absoluteness, like that lightning which has in
recent years enveloped the ballerinas at the Eden theater, fused
its naked electricity with paints of a whiteness beyond the ken
of flesh, and surely made of her that wondrous being who has
drawn back beyond all conceivable living worlds.
At those times when we ordinarily watch the Dance with no
special object in mind, the only way to lead our imagination on
is to stand patiently, calmly watching each of the dancer's steps,
each strange pose—toeing, tapping, lunge, or rebound—and
 JACQUES RIVIERE 115

then ask ourselves: "What can the meaning of it be?" Or, better
still, find inspiration suddenly and interpret it. Doubtless that
will mean living entirely in the world of revery. World suffi¬
cient, nonetheless; nebulous or clear, spacious or limited—any
of these, so long as that illiterate ballerina, flutteringly engaged
in her profession, encloses it with her circlings or bears it off in
flight.
Oh, stranger to me and yet a Friend, as you sit hidden some
evening in the theater: if, at that sorceress' feet (she! all unaware
of sorcery), you will but humbly place the Flower of your poetic
instinct (like those roses which are thrown off and up into visible
higher worlds by a flick of her pale and dizzying satin slippers),
drawing from this alone the true light and revelation of your
numberless secret imaginings, then (in an exchange which
seems to be the secret and revelation of her smile), through her
always ultimate veil, she will give you back your concepts in all
their nakedness, and silently inscribe your vision as would a
Symbol—which she is.
(1886-97)

JACQUES RIVIERE
LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS

The great innovation of Le Sacre du Printemps is the absence of

all "trimmings." Here is a work that is absolutely pure. Cold and
harsh, if you will, but without any glaze to mar its inherent bril¬
liance, without any artifices to rearrange or distort its contours.
This is not a "work of art" with all the usual little contrivances.
Nothing is blurred, nothing obscured by shadows; there is no
veiling or poetic mellowing, no trace of aesthetic effect. The
work is presented whole and in its natural state; the parts are set
before us completely raw, without anything that will aid in their
digestion; everything is open, intact, clear and coarse....
Le Sacre du Printemps is the first masterpiece capable of con¬
fronting those of the Impressionists....
Innovative as the music of Le Sacre du Printemps might be, the
116 THE DANCE MEDIUM

fact that it can be compared to that of Moussorgsky shows that it

has retained a certain link to our past experience, that it is pos¬
sible to find its approximate derivation. The same cannot be said
for the choreography. It no longer has any ties whatsoever to the
classical ballet. Here, everything has been started anew, every¬
thing fashioned on the spot, everything reinvented. The inno¬
vation is so shocking and so crude that the public cannot be
denied the right—of which it moreover has made overly consci¬
entious use—of rebelling against it. Let us therefore try, in the
faint hope of accustoming the public to it, to define this inno¬
vation in some detail.
Once again, in my opinion, it consists in the absence of all arti¬
fices. As regards the dance in general, one might say that there
are two types of artifices. First, those of Loie Fuller: the play of
lights, floating draperies, veils that envelop the body and dis¬
guise its shape, the blurring of all contours; the dancer's chief
aim is to lose herself in her surroundings, to blend her own
movements with movements that are vaster and less well-
defined, to conceal every exact form in a sort of multihued effu¬
sion of which she now is nothing but the indistinct and myste¬
rious center. Quite naturally, she has been led to illustrate
Debussy's "Nuages."
Against this first type of artifice, the Russians openly declared
themselves from the start. They had the body reappear from
under its veils and took it out from that billowing atmosphere in
which it had been immersed; henceforth, our only impressions
were to come from the body's own movements and from the
clearly visible and distinctly outlined figure drawn by the dancer
with his arms and legs. They brought clarity back to the dance.
I well remember those first nights. For me, it was the revelation
of a new world. It was possible, then, to come out of the shadows,
to let every gesture be seen, to spell out everything in full with¬
out any mystery, and yet be profound and pathetic, holding the
spectators' attention as by the most intricate and enigmatic tricks.
I made a discovery in art similar to that of geometry in the sci¬
ences, and the joy that I felt was similar to the satisfaction one
experiences when watching a perfect scientific demonstration.
At each of Nijinsky's whirls, just after he had closed, kneeling
and crossing his hands, the buckle he had opened while soaring
into space, I took an immense pleasure in mentally reviewing the
entire figure described by his movement: alive, pure, precise,
boldly drawn, as if wrenched in one block and by force from the
formless mass of possibilities. There remained no doubts, no con-
 JACQUES RIVIERE 117

fusion, nothing that might cause me to hesitate; rather, I felt reas¬

sured and content, like a man who takes in at one glance a sys¬
tem of mathematical propositions from which all possibilities of
error have been scrupulously eliminated.
Nevertheless, in this dance which to us had seemed so severe,
Nijinsky was able to detect yet another kind of artifice, well
before we had noticed it ourselves, and he accordingly under¬
took to cleanse choreography of it. Having experienced a certain
unease in executing Fokine's creations, he understood that they
still contained a certain artfulness, a certain vacillation, some sort
of inner vagueness that would have to be eliminated at any cost.
Conciseness such as this could still be refined; such exactness
could be carried even further.... From that day on, he would
not rest until he himself had turned the screw, had tightened the
bolts of the choreographic machinery, so that it might function
with absolute precision. Those who find the feeling of some¬
thing being done in a slipshod and so-so fashion extremely dis¬
concerting, will readily understand him.
First, let us determine the nature of this second type of artifice.
What is there that still obscures the dancer even after he has
divested himself of all accessories? The very intensity of his
motion, his passage, his flight across time, the arabesque
described by his movement; "he travels along a road which he
destroys in the very act of his passing; he follows a mysterious
thread that becomes invisible behind him; by his brushing-off
gesture, by those hands that he waves in the air, by the thousand
slow revolutions of his body, he gives the appearance of a magi¬
cian busy at obliterating the traces of his handiwork; he will not
be caught; we shall not be able to hold him fast and pin his arms
to his sides, so as to survey him at leisure from head to foot."*
Something interposes itself between him and us; it is that very
movement of his; we see him move in a world parallel to ours
but different from his; he has lost himself on his own voyage and
we perceive him only through a haze formed by the accumula¬
tion of his gestures and by his ceaseless to-and-fro motion. More
specifically: in the course of his first ten steps, the dancer out¬
lines a figure that immediately thereafter tends to leave him, to
escape, to go off on its own, like a melody which, once one has

•This passage is taken from a note I wrote last year (July 1, 1912) on Fokine
and in which I made several assertions, which today Nijinsky obliges me not to
deny entirely, but rather to surpass, just as he himself, without denying it, has
surpassed Fokine.
118 THE DANCE MEDIUM

found its first notes, continues by itself, making its own impro¬
visations, until it finally imposes itself on the voice that gave it
birth. There is a spring concealed in it that thrusts it from its
position. No sooner have the first movements been created by
the body than it seems as though, having become aware of them¬
selves, they say to their author, "That's enough! Now we do it by
ourselves!" Unchained, they regenerate each other by repetition,
by redoubling, by variation, drawing from themselves an infi¬
nite abundance. The body which at first had dictated their
actions, now serves only as their support; it now is merely asked
to receive and to execute them. Thus, in their hands, the body
loses its own form and articulation. They rearrange it, correct it,
retouch it; they create passages in it where there had been gaps;
they join its members by a graceful and unbroken line; they erase
angles, fill in holes, throw bridges. From head to toe, the body
in some way takes on fluidity and fullness. An added elegance
casually descends and rests upon it. Like a heavily made-up
actor, it is no longer recognizable. The Specter of the Rose offers
the best example for this transfiguration. Nijinsky's body liter¬
ally disappears in its own dance. The only thing that remains
visible of that muscular being, with its so strong and prominent
features, are exquisitely fleeting contours, constantly evanescing
forms. The atmosphere in which he is submerged is dynamic
rather than multicolored, but he is rendered as indistinct by it as
Loie Fuller by her luminous veils. As delightful as the spectacle
may be, there is in the Specter of the Rose a certain inner lack of
truth that can no longer fail to trouble me.
The innovation of Le Sacre du Printemps thus lies in doing away
with dynamic artificiality, in the return to the body, in the effort
to adhere more closely to its natural movements, in lending an
ear only to its most immediate, most radical, most etymological
expressions. Motion has been reduced to obedience; it is con¬
stantly made to return to the body; it is tied to it, caught and
pulled back by it, like someone being caught by the elbows and
prevented from fleeing. This is motion that does not run off, that
has been forbidden to change its own little tune; motion that
must come back to take orders every minute. In the body in
repose, there are a thousand hidden directions, an entire system
of lines that incline it toward the dance. With Fokine, they all
ended in one single movement that joined and exhausted them
all; rather than listening to each one, he listened to them all com¬
bined; he expressed them by substitution, replacing their varied
multitude by a simple and continuous arabesque. In Le Sacre du
 JACQUES RIVIERE 119

Printemps, on the other hand, as many propensities and occasions

as are offered by the body, as many times does the movement
stop and start again; as many possible points of departure the
dancer discovers in himself, as many times does he rise again.
He regains possession of himself at each instant; like a source
that must successively drain all its fountainheads, he recovers his
strength, and his dance becomes the analysis, the enumeration
of all the body's inclinations toward motion that he can find in
it. Here we discover in Nijinsky the same preoccupation as with
Stravinsky: to approach everything according to its own orien¬
tation. His aim is to follow all the inclinations of the body very
directly, regardless of their divergence, and to produce move¬
ment only through them. He cannot pursue them all at the same
time, however, and as soon as he has followed one for an instant,
he suddenly leaves it; he breaks with it and returns to seek
another. A dance simultaneously faithful and cut off! Similar to
our body, all the motions remain in perfect harmony with the
members that execute them; they retain their meaning and con¬
ciseness; they remain joined to them as if linked to them organ¬
ically. And the dancer, when we see him again in memory,
instead of effacing himself behind his gestures, stands out very
clearly among their multitude, like a Hindu deity among its
many arms....
Just now we have examined in what sense Nijinsky reacted
against Fokine; what he rejected and what he destroyed. Now we
must understand the positive aspects of his innovation. What
benefit did he derive from doing away with artifice? To what end
did he break up choreographic movements and groups? What
kind of beauty lies hidden beneath this reduced and dislocated
dance? Without taking into account his marvelous adaptation of
the subject of Le Sacre du Printemps, it is easy to perceive where
his innovation constitutes an improvement over Fokine's dance.
The latter is inherently unsuited to the expression of emotion;
one can read into it nothing but a vague, entirely physical and
faceless joy. Indeed, in the fluid and continuous motions of
which it is composed, as in the large arabesques of the Renais¬
sance painters, the emotive power of the gesture, its secret and
inner force, is diluted and dissolved. On this undefined road on
which the dancer sets out, the emotions find a too easy outlet and
spend themselves in vain. Instead of the emotion being the
object that the movement tries to describe and make visible, it
becomes a mere pretext for erupting into movement, and is soon
forgotten amid the abundance of which it is the source; it quickly
 120 THE DANCE MEDIUM

loses itself among the repetitions it engenders. The body sweeps

everything away; its freedom reaches into the soul, demolishing
its innermost recesses, its resources, and its reserves.
By breaking up movement and bringing it back to the simple
gesture, Nijinsky caused expression to return to the dance. All
the angles, all the breaks in his choreography, are aimed only at
preventing the escape of emotion. The movement closes over the
emotion; it arrests and contains it; by its perpetual change in
direction, it deprives emotion of every outlet and imprisons it by
its very brevity. The body no longer is a means of escape for the
soul; on the contrary, it collects and gathers itself around it; it
suppresses its outward thrust, and, by the very resistance that it
offers to the soul, becomes completely permeated by it, having
betrayed it from without. The restraint imposed by the body
upon the soul conveys upon the body a peculiar kind of spiri¬
tuality that is visible in all its ways. There is a profound and con¬
strained quality in this captivated dance: all that it loses in spirit,
in animation, in capriciousness, it gains in meaning.
Fokine's dance had so little power of expression that, in order
to make the spectator aware of the performers' changes of mood,
they had to resort to facial mimicry; scowls or smiles. By adding
and superimposing this upon the gestures, it merely demon¬
strated their ineffectiveness. It was merely an additional prop¬
erty; another type of resource needed to supplement the poverty
of the language of choreography.
In Nijinsky's dance, however, the face no longer plays a part
of importance; it is merely an extension of the body—its flower.
It is above all the body that speaks. Moving only as a whole, it
forms a block, and its language is a sudden leap with arms and
legs outspread, or a sideways move with knees bent, the head
dropped upon a shoulder. At first glance, it appears less adroit,
less diverse, less intelligent. However, by its compact shifts of
position, its sudden turnabouts, its ways of coming to a stop and
shaking itself frenetically on the spot, it conveys ever so much
more than the eloquent, fast, and elegant speaker represented by
Fokine. Nijinsky's language consists of perpetual detail; he lets
nothing pass; he seeks out all the corners. There is no turn of
phrase, no pirouette, no preterition. The dancer is no longer being
carried away by a trivial and indifferent inspiration. Instead of
lightly touching upon things during the course of his flight, he
lets his full weight fall on them, marking each by his heavy and
complete plunge. He leaps in a bound upon each emotion that
he encounters and wishes to express; he flings himself upon it.
 JACQUES RIVIERE 121

envelops it, and stays for an instant, to imitate it. He forgets

everything so as to assume its likeness for a short while; for some
time, he suffocates it with his form, blinds it by his very being.
No longer obliged to fashion a link between each successive ges¬
ture, nor to think constantly of what is to follow, he leaves noth¬
ing of himself in the transition. He completely abandons himself
to the invitation of the inner object; he becomes unique like the
latter as he designates it by the momentary immobility of his
entire body. Let us remember Nijinsky, the dancer! With what
eloquence he curled himself, like a cat, around emotions! How
he hovered over them closely! How well he knew how to
arrange all his limbs in their image and to make himself their
faithful effigy! He is both an inventor and interpreter. All that
he breaks, all that he takes away from the dance, is done to attain
a realistic and complete—as if opaque—imitation of emotion. He
takes his dancers, rearranges their arms, twisting them; he would
break them if he dared; he belabors these bodies with a pitiless
brutality, as though they were lifeless objects; he forces from
them impossible movements, attitudes that make them seem
deformed. But he does this only in order to draw from them all
the expression they are able to give. And at last, they speak. From
all those bizarre and twisted forms arises a strange materializa¬
tion; they distinctly reveal a thousand complex and mysterious
objects that now need only to be looked at.
Indeed, it has all become clear and easy; it has taken on the
very shape of that which must be understood. Here, before our
eyes, has emotion been designated, held fast, and interpreted.
Here it is, like a large doll, left behind by the dancer while he
goes on. What could be more moving than this physical image
of the passions of the soul. How different this is from their
expression through articulated language. Not that there is any
greater depth, any observance of detail, or any subtleties the spo¬
ken word could not render, but by means of this tangible figure
we are brought closer to them and put into their presence in a
more immediate manner; we are able to contemplate them before
the arrival of language, before they are pressed upon by multi¬
tudinous and subtly varied but loquacious crowds of words.
There is no need for translation; this is not a sign from which
the subject must be interpreted. But though our intelligence fails
to grasp it, we are there; we are present through our body, and
it is the body that understands. A certain predisposition, a certain
inner awareness.. . . Each of the dancer's gestures is like a word
that I could have said. If at times it seems strange, it is so only in
122 THE DANCE MEDIUM

the light of my thoughts, since it immediately enters into my

limbs, into the depth of my organism, in a low, complete, and
perfect harmony. Just as music had us absorb its narrative in
"large, easily manageable pieces," it is thus that we face this
extravagant dance with a peculiar barefaced credulity and with
a feeling of intimacy that "goes beyond words." We stand before
it like children at a puppet show: they don't need to have things
"explained to them"; rather, as the show goes on, they laugh,
they tremble, they understand.
Nijinsky has given the dance a power of interpretation it had
lacked. But would not his effort to relate the dance more closely
to the body, to cause the dance to interflow with and confine it
to the bodily strength of our limbs ultimately risk depriving it
of its beauty and grace? Where, indeed, is there grace in these
mean and clumsy gestures, forever held captive, forever brutally
interrupted whenever they are about to soar forth? There seems
to be something cacophonic in the choreography of Le Sacre du
Printemps.
However, grace does not signify smooth roundedness; it is not
incompatible with angular design. I claim that there is grace
here, and one more profound than that of the Specter of the Rose,
being more closely bound up with its theme. This grace is not of
the independent kind; it does not come from above to alight
upon objects like a bird; it is merely the outward emanation of
an absolute necessity, only the effect of an impeccable inner
adjustment. In the choreography of Le Sacre du Printemps, all has
been perfected with the utmost rigor; in order to arrive at the
motions, as we see them, that compose it, Nijinsky had to culti¬
vate and develop them over a long period of time; he chose them
from among the confused tangle of our instinctive movements;
he preserved them from others; he gave them a slight push and
led them a little farther away from the body than they would
have gone on their own. In short, he patiently gave them their
singular perfection, and from that achievement a new and orig¬
inal harmony was born. As soon as one ceases to confuse grace
with symmetry and with arabesques, one will find it on each
page of Le Sacre du Printemps; in those faces turned in profile over
shoulders turned front, in those elbows held tight to the waist,
in those horizontal forearms, in those hands held open and rigid,
in that trembling descending like a wave from the dancers'
heads to feet; in that shadowy, straggling, and preoccupied
promenade of the Maidens in the second scene. One will find it
even in the dance of the Chosen Maiden, in the short and abor-
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 123

tive tremors that agitate her, in her difficulties, in her frightful

waits, in her prisonerlike and unnatural gait, and in that arm
raised to heaven and waved straight above her head in a gesture
of appeal, threat, and protection.
All during my analysis of Le Sacre du Printemps, I have consid¬
ered the means employed by Stravinsky and Nijinsky as though
they had an intrinsic value of their own, independent of the sub¬
ject to which they are applied. This separation may seem artifi¬
cial, and one may rightfully object that I am trying to see an
entirely new technique in something that has been created for
and is meaningful only with regard to a very specific work. Some
will say that this angular choreography is suited only to repre¬
sent the still unformed and awkward gesticulation of primitive
beings. This muted music can serve only to depict the deep
anguish of spring. One as well as the other is well-suited to the
chosen theme; neither goes beyond it nor can be separated from
it. . . .
(1913)

DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN

BALANCHINE’S FORMALISM

What are the elements that constitute the singular beauty of

classical ballet? One might say: Among other things, certainly, a
tension between weight and weightlessness. But George Balan¬
chine was one of the first to regard this tension as the concealed
essence of the ballet art, and especially as the essence of the phe¬
nomenon of grace. Discriminating this essence as the telos of a
new ballet aesthetic, Balanchine was also one of the first to dem¬
onstrate how it so informs the classical idiom that, when it is
properly isolated, exhibited and—in a word—released, it can be
exquisitely expressive entirely on its own. The expressivity of
classical dance is indeed possible without the various resources
of mimetic and symbolic convention. Or, in other words, classi¬
cal ballet is not essentially mimetic, nor essentially representa-
124 THE DANCE MEDIUM

tional; rather, these functions merely enclose what is of the

essence: the immanent sensuous beauty and grace of the dancing
body.1 Balanchine has mastered the deepest logic of this intrin¬
sic, expressive power of the human body; has followed, in par¬
ticular, its surprising constraints on costume and stage decor. To
release such an essence requires a very delicate touch. For it is
most easily presented in concealment. As we shall see, costuming
and staging can make all the difference.
Modernism, in this context, is the aesthetic principle that
accounts for the privilege being given to the revelation of this
essence, this sort of essence. And modernism demands the exclu¬
sion of every element that might veil, or mute, or distract from
the conditions of the revelation. Formalism is a direct conse¬
quence of this chosen aesthetic. It is not, and never has been, for
Balanchine, an end in itself. The cherished essence of classical
ballet—its syntactical treasures—will remain deeply sublimated,
to the extent that there are any semantic elements in the presen¬
tation of the dance that must be taken as mimetic or in some
other way representational.
The timelessness of Balanchine's miraculous art amounts to
this: that he found the possibility of drama in a ballet form,
which lets the semantical transparencies of modernism articu¬
late, or heighten, the innermost syntactical treasures of classi¬
cism. Or, considering this timelessness in a different focus, it
amounts to the tense simultaneity of the body's weight and
weightlessness. And in this supernatural instant, a sublime
essence is brought to presence: the dancer's capacity to suspend
the natural condition of his body in the very act of acknowledg¬
ing it.

Agon (1957); Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960); Violin Concerto, Duo

Concert ant, Symphony in Three Movements (1972). These are
demanding works that offer a difficult and, for many of us, a per¬
plexing pleasure. These are ballets which preserve the classical
choreographic syntax of movements and attitudes, yet defy a
venerable tradition of staging and costume. Their austere pro¬
duction, so exquisitely reduced and uncomplicated, allows us to
perceive the most elementary, immanent expressiveness of the
classical ballet forms; and somehow, in this very elusive process
of illumination, the phenomenal presence of the forms is richly
altered. Formalism, I want to show, can explain some of George
Balanchine's most memorable and certainly most innovative
ballets.2
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 125

What is this formalism? What is its particular modernity? We

know that the modernist aesthetic has brought to articulation
certain long-suppressed resources in painting and sculpture.
What, then, does it mean to say that Balanchine's experiments
with formalism have similarly demonstrated one of classical bal¬
let's innermost possibilities?
The attempted modernity of Chopiniana, the recent issue of a
misguided ardor, might seem to provide some grounds for
doubting that ballet can tolerate the conditions of formalism. But
we must remember that the New York City Ballet's Chopiniana is
not an original ballet, but only a revised "modern" production
of Fokine's Les Sylphides of 1909. Still, consideration of its aes¬
thetic infelicities might gain us access to the secret ambition—
and clear logic—of Balanchine's art.
In his review of Chopiniana, Dale Harris3 rightly argues that
this production purports merely to divest the original ballet of
those romantic realms of meaning that constitute its historically
right yet—from a metaphysical standpoint—quite "accidental"
decorative scaffolding (principally, the decor and costumes), and
to reveal thereby the hidden beauty of its simpler, quintessential
structure. It has, in fact, robbed the ballet of a most delicate sense
and charm.4 In the case, then, of Les Sylphides, the apparently
superficial embroidery of the ballet—which Rayner Heppenstall
has aptly subsumed under the category "Moonlight and Mus¬
lin,"5 and in which a particular texture and quality of sense are
brought to life—cannot be detached from some apparently "hid¬
den" choreographic structure without fatally touching its pecu¬
liar aesthetic essence. The hidden beauty is just an illusion, for
the essential structure has been so tightly, so rightly, expressed
through the immediate, sentimental intelligibility of precisely
those "decorations." Costumes and decor, we find, cannot always
be subsumed under the category of "mere decoration." (Simi¬
larly, the pedestal of a sculpture and the frame of a painting are
not invariably added as mere decoration. Michelangelo's statue
of Moses requires a pedestal, just as the paintings of Van Eyck
and Corot, for example, works constructed in the knowledge of
their final condition, quite evidently require their frames. But if
we put a pedestal under Robert Morris' polyhedrons or under
some of Henry Moore's huge sculptures; or if we put a conven¬
tional frame around Monet's Water Lilies, we are certainly adding
mere decorations, which would actually subtract from their aes¬
thetic quantity. In the case of Anthony Caro's sculptures, the
presence of a pedestal would contradict their sculptural essence.)
126 THE DANCE MEDIUM

Let us dismiss, then, the problematic Chopiniana, and consider

instead the numerous ballets that exhibit the particular innova¬
tions of Balanchine's aesthetic. My principal contention is that
this master choreographer came to understand, more profoundly
perhaps than anyone before him, the possibility of abstracting
the pure classical syntax of the mobile human body as the defin¬
ing condition, or essence, of the ballet art (the essence toward
which, he thought, his favorite precursors were variously striv¬
ing?); and that, consenting to this possibility, he boldly com¬
pleted the development of a modernist formalism, which would
be phenomenologically adequate—as no other possible aesthetic
could be—to the consummate release and expression of this sub¬
lime, or implicit, essence.6 (I do not mean to suggest that Balan¬
chine never has chosen to set aside this formalism. He has,
indeed, many times preferred to produce ballets in the older,
more "theatrical" style. His traditional ballets—such as the nar¬
rative La Valse— will also be admired and remembered; but sim¬
ply because they are exquisite inventions, and not because they
introduce another possible aesthetic.) More particularly, I would
like to concentrate on the striking affinities I am wont to discern
between Balanchine's altogether original interpretation of the
ballet art and the no less original aesthetic that defines the paint¬
ings and sculptures we shall call, after Clement Greenberg,
"modernist art."
According to Greenberg, modernist painting and sculpture
consummate an intrinsically logical progression of these tradi¬
tional arts, which have passed through four stages: first, a paint¬
erly aesthetic (the theory of Alberti's treatise On Painting of 1435),
committed to the simplicity of actual Mimesis, the faithful rep¬
resentation of the human reality; second, an aesthetic which sub¬
ordinated the demand for exact representation to the demand for
a sensuous yet still lucid figuration (as in Matisse's 1916 The Piano
Lesson and Klee's 1912 Actor's Mask); third, an aesthetic which
kept figuration, but distorted and perplexed it and rendered it
entirely abstract, so that the expressiveness of the art—power¬
fully heightened—became a function, not of some discriminable
symbol or subject-matter faithfully transcribed, but rather of the
sensuous properties of the abstractly presented structure (as in
Picasso's 1912 Torero and de Kooning's 1957 Parc Rosenberg);
finally, an aesthetic which demanded the total annihilation—or
anyway, the precarious suppression—of all figurative tenden¬
cies. We might summarize this progression by saying that an aes¬
thetic of immanence (an aesthetic of self-revealing presence) has
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 127

come to replace the earlier aesthetic of mimetic connotation and

transcendent symbolism. For the modernist aesthetic (exhibited
to various degrees, for example, in the paintings of Jackson Pol¬
lock, Morris Louis, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, and
Frank Stella; the sculptures of Anthony Caro and David Smith)
challenges the work of art to reveal, to make present (I do not
say: to represent) its defining condition as art. It requires more¬
over that the work accomplish this in a self-referential, or reflex¬
ive, manner—solely in terms of the abstract, sensuous properties
residing in, and constitutive of, the structure itself. Thus, for the
modernist aesthetic, the "form" of the work and its "content"
(prepared for its formal role because of its pure abstractness) are
one and the same—identical in the strictest sense of this word.
If the modernist painting or sculpture represents nothing, refers
to nothing outside itself (refers to nothing transcendent), then
the sense that it nonetheless expresses and makes totally present
may be fittingly described as a revelation. Modernist art, to speak
paradoxically, reveals . .. itself! Less paradoxically, it exists solely
for the revelation of its ownmost (and latent, or immanent)
defining conditions. (Needless to say, I am bent on purging the
term "revelation" of every metaphysical association—using it,
indeed, in a specifically Kantian, anti-metaphysical sense. Thus
employed, the term implies a repudiation of all symbolism and
intellectual interpretation and invokes, rather, the significant
qualities that are immanent in the purely sensuous structures of
perceptual experience.)7
But what are the conditions that define its being and its unique
model of phenomenological givenness (or presence)? Greenberg
and Michael Fried have suggested the answer. So too has Martin
Heidegger, in his Holzwege essay entitled "Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes." And it may be significant that here their lines of
thought coincide. A work of art is of course a material object; yet,
at the same time, it also is the negation of this objecthood. So
what the modernist work of art is meant to reveal, what it must
reveal, is precisely this contradiction. And if it suppresses one or
the other of these two modalities of its being, it has simply failed
to articulate the truth about art which seems logically imperative
at this given point in its history.
On Fried's view, the two ineluctable defining conditions of
painting are its flatness and its shape. No painting can conceiv¬
ably exist unless it is reduced to flatness and has assumed a cer¬
tain shape. But, since material objects are also shaped and may
also be flat, painting can defeat, or suspend, its own objecthood
128 THE DANCE MEDIUM

if—and only if—it accomplishes what no mere object can possi¬

bly do: it must somehow materially acknowledge these condi¬
tions, rendering them totally present. Discussing modernist
sculpture, Greenberg writes: "To render substance entirely opti¬
cal, and form, whether pictorial, sculptural, or architectural, as
an integral, part of ambient space—this brings anti-illusionism
full circle. Instead of the illusion of things, we are now offered
the illusion of modalities: namely, that matter is incorporeal,
weightless, and exists only optically, like a mirage."8
Not surprisingly, the role of color has posed a serious problem
for the modernist aesthetic. Painters must take care lest their
colors create an illusion that would prevent the wholly optical
acknowledgment of the painting's flatness. Sculptors risk the
danger that their coloring may create a surface bespeaking the
objecthood of a sculptural mass whose interior it simply conceals:
a surface unable to present itself as a merely optical extension.
Robert Morris, we know, simply relinquished the use of color,
while those sculptors who have dared to use color (David Smith
and Calder) somehow succeeded in negating the very (material)
surface, which color must logically also affirm. If the structure
itself cannot jeopardize this implict mass behind the color sur¬
face, the work will fail to halt its reduction to mere objecthood.
Color similarly imperils modernist painting. The work must
simultaneously acknowledge, or make present, the flatness and
shape which root it in the earth, and yet somehow employ its
color in a purely optical way, so that the space of the painting—
the "world" created through the act of painting—will be truly
accessible (aesthetically intelligible) only to a disembodied eye.
(Unlike the visual illusion that emerges in the painting of a rep¬
resentation on a flat canvas, offering the illusion of a tactile acces¬
sibility, the modernist illusion offers itself as an illusion accessi¬
ble only to the eye, hence only to an eye that does not have a
tactile and mobile support.)
Fried asseverates, moreover, that the imperative defeat or sus¬
pension of objecthood entails that modernist art defeat or sus¬
pend its possible "theatricality."9 Unfortunately, he does not
establish the terms of this entailment with compelling clarity.
The connection, however, can be made. The possibility of "the¬
atre" requires the situatedness of a spectator with regard to the
theatrical object. Thus, the theatricality of the object is possible
only insofar as the spectator can be oriented towards it in a tem¬
poral and spatial perspective. This means that the spectator/
object relationship is to be defined (in part) through a height-
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 129

ened consciousness of the limiting co-ordinates of the spectator's

corporeality and the object's objecthood. Now, it is precisely this
sort of relationship that the opticality of modernist art is meant
to defeat. So Fried is right, after all, in claiming that theatricality
and modernist formalism contradict one another.
We may note a parallel progression toward modernism in the
history of the ballet. In Europe, ballet originated as a species of
court entertainment. Long after it entered the public domain,
however, it continued to be, in essence, a divertissement, a
merely theatrical event. The early ballet consisted of artificial
and rigidly determined dance movements. Gradually, though, it
submitted to the desire for a more stylized, but also more "nat¬
ural," expressiveness.10 Beyond this stage, the ballet has mainly
developed along four distinct routes. Two of these are rather
akin to Abstract Expressionism. The one is certainly theatrical
and, even in its incipient formal abstractness, it sustains the con¬
fident expressiveness of intelligible gestural symbols. (I am
thinking, for example, of the works of Antony Tudor, and of the
sort of productions we associate with Martha Graham.) The other
belongs to those ballets that have tried to mix a formal abstract¬
ness of movement with a theatricality which often substitutes
the expressiveness of stage decor, lighting, and costumes for the
expressiveness of symbols intrinsic to the movements of the
dancers. (Here I am thinking of the Joffrey Ballet's Clowns and
Astarte.) A third, and very different sort of route is represented
by the dance of Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, and per¬
haps Twyla Tharp. This form is entirely abstract; the movement
is very expressive, although it rigorously excludes every quality
of expression not wholly immanent in the dancers' abstract
movements. At the same time, however, the production as a
whole does not exclude theatricality, which is latent in the var¬
ious items (including costumes) that may be employed as props.
In addition, the acceptable dance syntax, here, is unlike the clas¬
sical syntax (however abstract), not only in regard to some of its
formal properties, but also in regard to the extent of its vocabu¬
lary. (So the inventions of Cunningham, Tharp, and Rainer differ
from those of Balanchine, even when they are scarcely more
abstract.) The fourth route, of course, is the one paved and trav¬
eled by George Balanchine.
As a point of departure, let us refer to what Mr. Harris con¬
strues to be the defining condition of that ballet art exemplified
in such works as Les Sylphides. He writes: "It seems to embody an
entire theory about what ballet ought to be, one which, though
130 THE DANCE MEDIUM

capable of easy sentimentalization and by no means without its

limitations, is nevertheless valid: the belief that ballet is a poetic
experience whose purpose is to summon up transcendent long¬
ings through graceful movement." And with regard to Les Syl-
phides in particular, he observes that "Fokine's sylphs have
evolved into powerful and universal symbols."11 Whatever one
may think about the rightness of the attempt to impose a for¬
malist aesthetic on this venerable ballet, one must surely concede
that, from the standpoint of their intention (to release the latent
possibilities which "ensoul" the ballet art), the New York City
Ballet was logically compelled to violate this Fokine aesthetic.
Viewed against the classical tradition, Balanchine's unique aes¬
thetic can seem exceedingly austere. It calls for a "bare-bones"
reduction of the ballet essence. Yes—but only because this asce¬
ticism is designed to release a beauty and a grace which the
older, seemingly richer essence had in principle to suppress.
Whereas the older art sought expressiveness, both in the deco¬
rations of stage and costume and in the familiar symbolism of
immediately intelligible gestures and postures (a symbolism cer¬
tainly meant to evoke "transcendent longings"), the new Balan¬
chine art refuses the expressiveness of stage costumes and
excludes, too, all those resources of corporeal syntax that cannot
achieve their expressiveness without the encumbrance of some
mimetic or transcendent symbolism.
The abstractness of dance formalism does not exclude the sen¬
suous expressiveness of the body. Indeed, this is the only truly
intrinsic expressiveness that is possible in the formal syntax;
what formalism excludes, rather, are such modes of expressive¬
ness and meaning as do not directly reveal their presence
through a wholly abstract, a purely syntactic medium. A form, as
such, may be either representational or abstract, and if abstract,
either abstracted from the semantic materials of a prior represen¬
tation or else originally abstract. A form may be abstract, and
none the less sensuous, insofar as the perception of the form is
capable of inducing modes of kinetic and kinaesthetic pleasure.
So, odd though it may seem, the Balanchine aesthetic has
adopted a profoundly anti-theatrical approach to ballet, amply
demonstrating that the theatricality of stage and costume, as well
as the theatricality of distinctly allusive movement, are not, in
fact, the necessary conditions of drama in a performing art. (I
have described the tendency of Balanchine's works as "anti-the¬
atrical." But I am most definitely not suggesting that his ballets
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 131

mute, or are meant to defeat, the tensions and resolutions of

drama.)
If the failure of Chopiniana was possible only because the New
York City Ballet confused the rightness of sentiment with the
wrongness of sentimentality and, in consequence, excluded
both, still, in the creation of his own ballets, Balanchine himself
has not failed to distinguish between theatrical expressiveness
(the semantics of sentiment and allusion) and “classically pure"
formal expressiveness (modes of corporeal presence which are
latent in, or immanent to, the “classical" syntax of human
mobility).
Such formal expressiveness, however, requires not only that
he suppress the theatricality of stage and costume, but also that
he purge the classical dance syntax of its theatrical allusiveness.
In fine, it requires that he reduce the mimetic “content" of tra¬
ditional ballet movements to the expressive presence of an
entirely abstract syntax. Structure and content, then, become
identical to the degree that each submits to the process of abstrac¬
tion. In some Balanchine ballets—extraordinary works such as
Agon and Violin Concerto—a traditionally expressive “content"
coincides with the expressive presence of structure. Content is
structure. For structure has been allowed to refer exclusively to,
and to reveal, itself: it can speak—we discover—in its own lan¬
guage, a language by no means less poignant, less expressive
than the other, more conventional address. (Sara Leland, who
has danced thirteen years for Balanchine, is quoted as saying in
an interview: “Mr. B. depends on the movement itself to bring
out the quality he wants in a ballet, he does not try to develop
'expression' in the dancers. It is there, he tells us, in the chore¬
ography—we have only to dance the choreography to express
it."12
The kind of movement, then, that can reveal itself is ontolog-
ically distinct from the kind of movement that cannot reveal
itself. The movements of the human body are different in
essence from the movements of inanimate objects. The human
body is through and through intentional; even at rest, it tran¬
scends its objective actuality towards some immanent and virtual
state. So an aesthetic can take it as imperative that, in the art of
dance, the movements of the human body shall exhibit precisely
this ontological distinction. If it is of the essence of the human
body that it is a moving object only in the mode of surpassing
(i.e., simultaneously acknowledging and defeating) its own
132 THE DANCE MEDIUM

objecthood, then it can be, correspondingly, of the essence of bal¬

let that the movements reveal in dance this essential condition.
This is precisely the principle that defines modernism.
To achieve a modernist drama, the syntax of dance must be so
presented that it is aesthetically accessible neither as purely lit¬
eral movement (an objective modification, in Euclidian space, of
the dancer's "real" body) nor as wholly figurative movement (a
subjective qualification of the dancer's formally expressive "phe¬
nomenal" body), but rather as both simultaneously. This possi¬
bility derives from the fact that the human body spans a dynamic
tension betweeri the objectively actual and the inwardly virtual.
Formalism can heighten this tension to the degree that it
achieves a disclosure of the body that demonstrates the dancer's
objective spatialization, at the same time that it suspends, or
annihilates, this condition through the peculiar, deep expressiv¬
ity of a syntax reduced to pure self-reference. The syntax must
utilize and acknowledge the tangible weight, the massive bal¬
ances of the body, but only in order to defeat or suspend them,
and to render the objective body as a magically weightless, opti¬
cally intangible presence. (Actually, as we shall see, this presence
of the dancing body is also a sort of absence, since the sublimity
of grace, unlike the beauty of poise, is up-lifting, and releases the
body from the horizontal space-field of the stage.)
The reader of Nabokov's Ada will find, near the beginning of
the novel, the following curious passage: "Presently the vegeta¬
tion assumed a more southern aspect as the lane skirted Ardis
Park. At the next turning, the romantic mansion appeared on the
gentle eminence of old novels. It was a splendid countryhouse,
three stories high, built of pale brick and purplish stone."13
Nabokov, of course, has used language, here, so that it accuses
itself. The words create, or posit, a world of representational
validity; at the same time, they nullify this world by an acknowl¬
edgment of their act of creation. Similarly, George Balanchine
sometimes deploys the dancer's weight in a way that especially
fits the human body to betray this declaration of objecthood, and
indeed to betray this in the very act of declaring it. The drama
in the metamorphosis of corporeality (objecthood)—the drama
we behold in the sublime immanence of grace—thus replaces
the older ballet intention, transcendence through the grace of
"longing."
Sartre rather briefly discusses the phenomenon of grace.14 It is
much to his credit that he recognized the relevance of this matter
for a complete phenomenology of the human body. And his
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 133

analysis is certainly fascinating. I am convinced, however, that,

in addition to being incomplete, it calls for some rectification. In
Sartre's view, grace "refers obscurely to a transcendent Beyond
of which we preserve only a confused memory and which we
can reach only by a radical modification of our being. ..." I
would like to invoke, here, a grace of whose possibility this most
fastidious of phenomenologists seems only dimly sensible: the
possibility that, in a graceful disposition of the body, in the
radiant immanence of a grace that Balanchine's modernist ballets
exquisitely detail, it is the body itself—but as a sublime and
sacred presence—that is revealed.
We shall find it helpful, at this point, to make use of Kant's
distinction, in The Critique of Judgment, between the beautiful and
the sublime. To Kant, the beautiful is that which, through the
commodiousness of an objectively embodied form alone, can
induce a pleasure whose immediate ground is the harmony of
the understanding (as the faculty of lawfulness, canons of taste)
and the imagination (as the faculty of playful perceptual orga¬
nization). The sublime, on the other hand, is that which induces
a mediated, and more difficult sort of pleasure: that which has its
ground entirely within the subjective conditions of productive
(imaginative) consciousness itself, and for which the sublime is
merely the original occasion. For the sublime, unlike the beau¬
tiful, does not offer an immediately commodious (purposive)
form; on the contrary, it offers something which is manifestly
formless, or which, in any case, defeats the straightforward per¬
ception of sensible form. Thus, the sublime challenges the imag¬
ination to surpass its perceptual rootedness, summons it to strive
for a glimpse of some possible, but very obscure, form. The sub¬
lime, then, requires that the imagination strive to produce,
entirely out of its ownmost latent (or transcendental) resources,
an adequate image of a form that is not at all embodied in the
natural or sensible world. According to Kant, the sublime pre¬
sents the imagination with an occasion to discover, within itself,
and beyond the "pain" of its striving for a higher form, its super¬
natural destination.
Now the art of dance can induce two very different modes of
aesthetic sensibility. The one mode is induced by the beauty of
the natural, or immediately sensible, form of the dance, while
the other mode is induced, rather, by a sublime suspension, or
perhaps defeat, of the immediately sensible form of the dance.
The beauty of dance is the traditional beauty of the phenomenon
of poise (Middle English poisen, peisen, to weigh). Beauty belongs
134 THE DANCE MEDIUM

to the poise, the tensions and equilibrations, of the self-moving

body expressing itself through movements and attitudes, ten-
sional vectors of force, within the horizontal space-field of its
objective stage relationships.15 (This field is principally consti¬
tuted according to the right/left, forwards/backwards, and near/
far schemata.) The beauty of dance resides in the classical man¬
ner of the body's original spatialization of, and thereby its spa-
tialization within, the horizontal field of the stage; it resides, if
you will, in the dancer's poised excursions into the density of an
architectural field of space. This field is traditionally staked out,
in part, by the surrounding objects (which may include other
dancers) in the stage design, and it is around these entities that
the dancer pivots; but the field is also "inflected" by the tradi¬
tional costuming which, in virtue of its circumstantial appropri¬
ateness, further installs the dancer within it. The classical beauty
of dance requires the equipoise, the lucid presence, of the danc¬
ing body.
The sublimity of dance, however, is the sublimity of the phe¬
nomenon of grace. Sublimity belongs to the grace of a body
whose movements and attitudes make it appear no longer to be
inhabiting, no longer to be installed in, the surrounding hori¬
zontal field (the object-coordinated, object-pivoted space of the
stage.)16 In the instant of grace, the dancer seems, rather, to be
up-lifted, to be released into a purely optical space, weightlessly
suspended in the vertical time-field of a supervenient Grace. It
is as if the dancer's body, released from its condition of poised
objecthood, is being rewarded precisely for its ecstatic, and grate¬
fully disciplined, revelation of this very condition.
The Persian dervish poet Rumi tells us that, "Whosoever
knoweth the power of the dance, dwelleth in God."17 In the
myths of cosmology, Grace is a gift from the Sky of God. Grace
acknowledges the supernatural destination of the soul, everlast¬
ingly released from the circumstantial field of Earth. Through
Grace, the soul casts off its autochthonous embodiment (and con¬
sequently its objecthood) and returns to the Sky of God. Thus, in
beholding the spectacle of Grace, our productive imagination
surpasses its sensible ground, and we witness the joining of
Earth and Sky.
We have seen that the graceful dancer appears to be weight¬
less. But now we can also see that Grace is the necessary condi¬
tion for this weightlessness, this unearthly suspension of object¬
hood. For it is precisely from the Sky of God that the
supervenient order of Grace, up-lifting, descends. But why is the
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 135

gift of Grace thus bestowed upon the dancer? Is it not—paradox¬

ically—because, through the skillful body, the dancer is so elo¬
quently praising the gravity of the body, acknowledging in grat¬
itude the Earth of the body? And is it not because, in order to
fully acknowledge this, the dancer has skillfully perfected the
releasing possibilities of the body? The dancer's grace-fulness is
a sublime presence (or, more accurately, a presence/absence),
which belongs to the horizontal field of gratitude, of spatialized
skill, but—at the same time—belongs totally and immortally to
the vertical time-field of Grace, the Sky of God. And finally, we
are in a position to understand the costuming and stage require¬
ments for the modernist presentation of grace. For costuming
and staging are elements that constitute the horizontal field of
space within which the dancer must move. But, if modernism is
to reveal the sublime essence of grace, and not just show the
beauty of poise, the stage-space must be cleared of everything
that would locate the dancer within the binding coordinates of
the horizontal field, thus defeating the possibility of a vertical
release in the Time of Grace.
Modernist ballet certainly preserves the innermost resources
of the older syntax; and it still entertains—through the drama of
tension and the grace of release and resolution. But it gives birth
to its aesthetic presence entirely within the syntax of a constant
tension between the phenomenal body yielding itself to object-
hood and the same body, at the same time, artfully suspending
its objecthood. In the same interview quoted above, Sara Leland
observed that, "In the Balanchine plie, you are perched for
flight." An acute and important point. In the Balanchine plie—
which is, after all, an incontestable acknowledgment, or dem¬
onstration, of the dancer's objective weight and necessary
effort—the choreography has also made present, but at first only
in the tensed mode of suppressed virtuality, the graceful arc of
flight, which is about to suspend the force of gravity on behalf
of its own phenomenal space.
Concepts such as "simultaneity" and "virtuality," which are
indices of temporality, turn out to be fundamental to an under¬
standing of formalist space. Much, certainly, needs to be said
about the properties of formalist time;18 but I shall limit myself
to the observation that Edwin Denby made in an interview
recorded by Arlene Croce and Don McDonagh: "Well, to me the
big difference [between gesture in dance and gesture in mime]
is that a dance gesture is like a dance step—it has a limit in time.
If you enlarge on it, you enlarge on it in relation to a definite
136 THE DANCE MEDIUM

time.... If the various moves the body goes through to make a

step—say it goes through four moves, A-B-C-D, and B, is, say,
one and a half times as long as the others—then if you want to
diminish B, you diminish it still within that musical time. Or
enlarge it. You don't just enlarge it without any relation to any¬
thing in time that the rest of the dance has. But in acting gesture,
there isn't any [such] time. The time is real, it's everyday time. If
you lift up a cup of coffee this way, it means something in every¬
day time that you do it slowly, instead of grabbing it and pulling
it up. But in dance, it might be necessary to lift it up that slowly
simply because that is the time [appropriately] choreographed
for it." And Denby's next remark explicitly distinguishes "for¬
mal" time and "real" time: "When I'm watching dancing, my eye
expects a certain time. More than one's eyes, really. If you start
to believe in a character and a story, inside yourself you shift to
that other time."19 In Balanchine's modernist ballets, a formal—
or abstract—time must replace real time, because it is a factor
altogether fundamental to the possibility of an optical space in
which weight and mass are suspended at the same time that they
are acknowledged.
What made modernist ballet possible, I think, was Balan¬
chine's discovery that there is exquisite drama concealed in the
equilibration of corporeal contraries: the virtual position, which
almost imperceptibly emerges from an actual movement; the
defiant pulse of a self-conscious form, which threatens the
objecthood of perfect poise; the mass, which seems—for one
tensely magic second—to be stolen from the body, as its very
movement denies, through form, the constraints of weight. The
drama does not take place, for us, in an always tangible space; it
exists, rather, in the tensional revelation of a sublime, precar¬
iously optical modality.
Thus, for example, there are moments when we perceive the
weight-presence of the dancers in the intricate pas de deux of Vio¬
lin Concerto very much the way we must perceive the modernist
mass of, say, "Tanktotem IX," a late metal work from the factory
of the sculptor, David Smith.20 At the juncture between plate and
tripod, exactly where we should expect the demonstration of
weight, we discover that the line of the tripod can become,
instead, a purely pictorial element. Opticality has suspended the
natural weight of the steel plate! Since "Tanktotem" in fact
resembles a human body—resembles, even, a dancer in pose—it
is especially rewarding to notice points of correspondence
between this phenomenon at the juncture of plate and tripod.
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 137

and the suspensions of weight that can seem to occur, for vision,
in some of Balanchine's ballets.
The possibility of achieving, through formalism, a purely opti¬
cal reduction of corporeal mass and weight in accordance with
the modernist aesthetic is certainly latent in most of the classical
ballet positions—the attitude croisee, for example, and the height
of the soubresaut, and the arabesque allongee. What so forcefully
strikes me about the first and third positions is, first, the fact that
in both cases, though in different ways, the dancer's vertical leg
is made to seem as if it were carrying a weightless mass. Like the
tripod of Smith's sculpture, this vertical leg is metamorphosed,
and its one and only role is to present to vision the spectacle of
a purely pictorial—no longer material—line. In the attitude cro-
see, this metamorphosis is mainly the harmonic effect of the arms
and the raised leg; whereas, in the arabesque allongee, the secret
of the illusion may be said, rather, to be contained in the
extended torso.
In the attitude, the raised, turned-out leg inscribes a dynamic
plane of space, which reproduces, or translates, and thus
enhances, the centrifugally constituted planes inscribed by the
two arms, so that the juncture of the torso, the elevated leg, and
the vertical leg—a juncture that otherwise would be the center
of dramatic energy—becomes, instead, a point on the periphery
of a radiant force whose center is suspended above the ground.
Thus, the dancer's weight appears to be lifted off the vertical leg
(or, more accurately, the weight appears to depart from the leg
in a breathtaking instant), producing the illusion that this leg is
a pictorial line in a merely optical space. In the pas de deux of
Agon, there is a sustained adagio, within which a similar meta¬
morphosis takes place. The male dancer, on his knees, is bending
forward and extending his arms upward behind him, while the
female dancer executes an arabesque penchie, leaning over him
from behind and joining her hands to his. This time it is the
raised leg, rather than the vertical grounded leg, that creates the
optical paradox. The one raised leg, accentuating the trajectory
of the two pairs of arms, projects the bodies upward and even
seems to lift the dancers off the floor. Thus, the leg steals away
the weight of the two floored bodies—it is as if their substance
has magically evaporated!—and turns them into a purely abstract
structure, itself becoming, within this literally time-less phe¬
nomenon, a purely pictorial structural line.
What, now, is the effect of the torso? In the attitude croisee, it
forms a simple continuation of the line of the vertical leg, so that.
138 THE DANCE MEDIUM

in effect, it suppresses one geometric plane and allows itself to

appear as an event in only two spatial dimensions—an event in
optical space. In the arabesque allongee, the torso—visually
weightless—certainly touches the vertical leg, but touches with¬
out "really" resting upon it. Somewhat as a balloon is connected
to its string, the torso seems to float, meeting the leg only to con¬
trive—for a breathtaking interval—an optical, or flat, pictorial
symmetry. It is as if the leg /torso juncture were the intersection
of two mathematical lines.
And consider the height of the soubresaut. This position, too,
can prove the modernist possibility—another variation of the
optical, or sublime body. The dancer is in a jump-and-fall move¬
ment, and this declares her obedience to objecthood; yet, at the
same time, the articulation she has imposed on her movement
utterly annihilates the body as an object of nature—steals it, I
want to say, from tangible space, and then re-creates it, a purer
form, in the ether of an optical, vertical field. The arms define
the small circular limits of a tilted, but still fairly horizontal
plane; while the line from head to feet presents the segment of
a very much greater circle, whose approximately vertical plane
cuts through the plane of the smaller circle. And we do not
reckon these lines, circles, and planes—need I hasten to add?—
among the common entities that occupy our tangible universe!
Consider, now the sus-sous and the pirouette a la seconde. In the
first disposition of the body, the dancer's feet are tightly closed
and on pointe, and one of the legs hides the other, so that it looks
as though the dancer's body is a weightless extensions mass that
somehow is not a mass: the torso and head are not so much a
distinct quantity supported by the legs, as they are a qualitative
and linear continuation of the legs. In the other example, the
dancer moves dramatically from second position demi-plie (a dis¬
position of the body that forcefully reveals its weight, its object-
hood) into a wondrous turn that seems to suspend this condition.
And to these particular figures and modalities of the body, in
which the dramatic, tensional possibilities of formalism reside,
we should add the great classical leaps, most positions on pointe,
and numerous lifts and dives and portes, performed in
partnering.
My contention is that by means of his choreography (quite
subtle, yet daring innovations on the classical syntax), and no
less by his choices in costumes and staging, Balanchine has
revealed these possibilities in all their lucid beauty, and dem¬
onstrated on the stage of history that the modernist illusion is
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 139

the essence, and even perhaps the perfection, of the classical bal¬
let art.
But, whether or not we hold that the works of Balanchine's
modernism represent the perfection of classical ballet, we cannot
deny that, in these works, a new mode of spatialization has
appeared. That is, we must at least grant that the classical ballet,
as a unique art form, has been metamorphosed, in the Hegelian
sense of being aufgehoben, and that modernist ballets inaugurate
a new moment of ballet history. Lincoln Kirstein has divided the
history of the spatialization of ballet into two modes: originally,
the stage-space was "planimetric" (designed on the flat plane of
the floor for the privilege of a bird's-eye view); and subse¬
quently, it became "stereometric" (designed for a frontal spec¬
tator's view).21 This is an accurate history. But modernist ballets
oblige us to recognize the emergence of a third mode: I shall call
it "optical," for it is akin to the illusionist space of the paintings
and sculptures that established modernism. Ballets made accord¬
ing to the older principles of spatialization constitute a field-
space which, for the eye of the beholder, always seems to be cor¬
poreally accessible. The ballets staged according to the principles
of modernism always seem to exist in a forbidden, unearthly
field, accessible only to the disembodied eye. Thus we see that
the principles of modernism do govern and account for the pecu¬
liarities of stage decor and costuming in many of Balanchine's
ballets.
From the standpoint of ballet formalism, the presence of color
in stage and costume can only be problematic. Balanchine, how¬
ever, understands the perils of color. (Some of his critics, though,
have missed the point of his imperturbably black-and-white
logic.) The perils, it may be gathered, are not unlike the ones we
have already discussed with respect to modernist painting and
sculpture. Unless the colored items (stage decor and costumes,
for example) are used with exquisite care; unless they are mod-
alized with great subtlety, they will sacrifice the grace of opti-
cality for the charming diversions of mere "theatre." (I recall, at
this point, what Kant had to say, in his Critique of Judgement,
about the difference between "Schonheit" and "das Reizende." I do
not share, however, the Kantian thesis that the latter is in any
way aesthetically inferior; it is simply, I believe, a different sort
of art. Likewise, I repudiate Fried's rather Kantian decree that
"theatricality" is an aesthetic deficiency, a weakness. I am unable
to find any ultimate criteria that would elevate the "formal"
above the "theatrical.") Color improperly introduced will simply
140 THE DANCE MEDIUM

destroy the formal drama of the body, which charms by means

of theatrical illusion—when it is corporeal weight that needs
expression; or else it imposes a theatrical presence, a straight-for¬
ward corporeal reality—when it is rather the opticality of the
sublime suspension of weight that asks to be revealed. So if we
allow the possibility of Balanchine's modernism, we must rec¬
ognize that his color asceticism is a matter of aesthetic principle.
The familiar open stage of the Balanchine production, unclut¬
tered by props and scenery and rather uniformly illumined by a
chromatically homogeneous backdrop, is also an aesthetic neces¬
sity within the modernist framework.22 The staging must permit
the expressive energies of the dance syntax to condense and dis¬
perse as fits. Traditional stage decor, on the contrary, tends either
to attract and absorb (into its own reserve of space) such energies
as should condense, or else to obstruct the space of energies that
should magically disperse and up-lift. In fine, it works by a logic
which is independent of the inner imperatives of the dance syn¬
tax itself and which, all too easily, can contradict the modernist
experience. The chromatically simple backdrop, however, pro¬
vides a uniform illumination for the dance events. There is no
painterly light source to constitute an autonomous surrounding
space, possessed of its own discriminations and figurative com¬
positions. (You might ponder, here, the lighting of space in Cara¬
vaggio and Flemish Renaissance paintings.) Thus, the dance
events, instead of being enveloped and partitioned within an
externally generated (real) space, become the constitutive source
at the interior of their own total space.
In Duo Concertant, a spotlight oh the dancers chases away a
powerful negative space—darkness—and encloses them in a
bright chrysalis that condenses their energies at the same time
that it denies the phenomenal space any constructive indepen¬
dence, any aesthetic validity of its own. And if it truly seems that
the dancers are dancing into being a space that their bodies
occupy exhaustively, it can almost seem, too, that the uncanny
causality of this creation is reversible, and the dancers' move¬
ments are just the optical inventions of a supervenient luminos¬
ity. Such a space—a total, surrounding space, which is truly the
invention of the dance movements themselves—will appear as
magically dematerialized, optical. It is nothing at all, in effect,
since it comes into being only at (and only for) the moment
when a human body traverses it. Having in itself neither tem¬
poral nor substantial permanence, it can bestow on the feat that
traverses and occupies it the sudden grace of eternity.
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 141

Such are the necessities of this chosen aesthetic. "Balanchine's

formalism!"—Yes, you might wish to say this. But if there is any
difference between an artist who produces some formalist ballets
and an artist who simply is a formalist, then in the art of George
Balanchine, we shall find, thank goodness, that his genius soars
high above the limits of a parti pris.

(1973)

Notes
'See Andre Levinson, "The Spirit of Classic Dance," Theatre Arts
Monthly, IX/3 (March, 1925), pp. 165-177. Levinson does not fully
espouse ballet formalism; but he does wish to repudiate the notion that
ballet aesthetics must depend on analogies. Ballet, he asserts, is a distinct
and autonomous art form; its aims, principles, and elements cannot be
borrowed from the other arts, nor can they be properly interpreted by
means of the categories that fit other arts. Rayner Heppenstall, however,
was indeed an ardent herald of ballet formalism: "Ballet is not expres¬
sive in literary senses. By its nature, it expresses only itself, which is to
say, certain general qualities of style." See his Apology for Dancing (Lon¬
don, 1936), p. 195. "The dancer," he argues, "must always be concerned,
supremely with muscle, not soul, not expression, not literary signifi¬
cance." Op. cit., p. 125. Heppenstall is pleading, clearly, for a formalism
in ballet semantics. This is not the same as pleading for a sweeping for¬
malism in syntax. And indeed, he did not warmly welcome the syntactic
freedom of modern dance. Ballet must present "the 'significance' of
physical movement, in its own right." Op. cit., p. 126. Thus ballet, pos¬
sessed of its own quite peculiar "expressive functions," must be
regarded as altogether distinct from the narrative arts, and especially
from theatre. Heppenstall's formalism differs from Clive Bell's more
extreme position. For Heppenstall says that, "the whole of life hangs
together so completely, and the Dance is so profoundly rooted in the
whole of life, that Ballet can be fully understood only by reference to
every other order of human activity." Op. cit., p. 147. Compare the fore¬
going with Bell's chapter called "The Aesthetic Hypothesis" in his Art
(New York, 1958), pp. 15-34.
2I wish to distinguish between the ballets that establish Balanchine's
greatness and the ballets that mainly establish the originality of his
genius. The latter are those produced in accordance with the principles
of formalism, whereas the former certainly include numerous works
constructed within the traditional conventions of the art. By no means
am I disposed to argue that the formalist ballets, as such, are superior to
the traditional ones!
3The Harris review, which it is an uncommon pleasure to read in
these times of careless reviews, appeared in Ballet Review, IV/2 (1972),
pp. 25-32.
142 THE DANCE MEDIUM

4Just what Fokine wanted to achieve is stated in "Fokine's Theories

on the Art of Ballet," in Cyril Beaumont's Michel Fokine and His Ballets
(London, 1945), pp. 135-152.
5See Apology for Dancing, p. 51. Note, in this regard, his prophetic state¬
ment: "Ballet may well come to dispense with decor altogether, except
what the lighting can provide." Op. cit., p. 168.
‘Balanchine's indebtednesss to Marius Petipa is, of course, well doc¬
umented. See, for example, Lincoln Kirstein's studies "Balanchine Musa-
gete," in Theatre Arts (November, 1947) and "Balanchine and the Classic
Revival," ibid. (December, 1947). See also Balanchine's own gloss on his
Le Baiser de la Fee (1928), in Stravinsky in the Theatre, edited by Minna
Lederman (New York, 1949). I am not saying that Balanchine invented
the formalist aesthetic, nor am I claiming that he was the first ballet mas¬
ter to move in the direction of modernism. My point is, rather, that Bal¬
anchine was the first to accept it without qualification, and the first to
work out the uncompromising demands, the exacting visual logic, of the
modernist choice. Balanchine discovered how to accomplish the inten¬
tions of modernism.
7The precedent for my usage from Jean-Paul Sartre's discussion of per¬
ception in Being and Nothingness (special, abridged edition, tr. by Hazel
Barnes [New York, 1971] and from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's analyses in
Phenomenology of Perception (tr. by Colin Smith [New York, 1972]) and
"Eye and Mind" (in the anthology The Primacy of Perception [Evanston,
1964]).
8"The New Sculpture" in his Art and Culture (Boston, 1961), p. 144.
Note Heppenstall's kindred position on the distance between ballet and
theatre, op. cit., p. 195.
9See "Art and Objecthood," Artforum (June, 1967), pp. 12-23.
10See "Fokine's Theories on the Art of Ballet," op. cit.
uOp. cit., p. 25.
12Dance Magazine (August, 1972), p. 32. In this respect, Balanchine's
method resembles the reductive, sparse methods of such film directors
as Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson. In Late Autumn and An Autumn
Afternoon, for example, Ozu's method evokes that emptiness, that
silence, that serenity, which, in Zen, is called mu. (See Donald Richie,
"The Later Films of Yasujiro Ozu," Film Quarterly, 13 [Fall, 1959], p. 22.)
Bresson's method seeks in the visibility of the icon the invisible touch
of supernatural grace. Both methods require that the actors sublimate
the natural expressiveness of personality, and that they learn, in effect,
how to eliminate the drama of acting. Bresson states: "It is not so much
a question of doing 'nothing,' as some people have said. It is rather a
question of performing without being aware of oneself, of not control¬
ling oneself. Experience has proved to me that when I was the most
'automatic' in my work, I was the most moving [and expressive]." See
James Blue, Excerpts from an Interview with Robert Bresson (Los Angeles,
1969). See also Roland Monod, "Working with Bresson," Sight and Sound,
26 (Summer, 1957), p. 31. Bresson's theory of acting, like Ozu's, is: "For-
 DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN 143

get about tone and meaning. Don't think about what you're saying; just
speak the words automatically. When someone talks, he isn't thinking
about the words he uses, or even about what he wants to say. Only con¬
cerned with what he is saying, he just lets the words come out. . . ." Bal¬
anchine certainly seems to have given analogous instructions to his
dancers. Consider, further, Selma Jeanne Cohen's study, "Antony Tudor.
Part Two: The Years in America and After," Dance Perspectives 18 (1963).
Lucia Chase is quoted as saying: "Tudor does not explain the feeling he
wants; he shows emotion by motion, by demonstrating the movement.
You have to sense the meaning from him; to find out what he is after,
you have to keep doing the movement until you feel it." (p. 73) Thus,
the dancer, 'as character,' may contribute movement ideas to Tudor cho¬
reography. But as a dancer he is never allowed to 'interpret' a move¬
ment. Margaret Black says: "In Tudor's choreography, you never have
to superimpose feeling. You don't have to make the movement speak; it
does." And Diana Adams elaborates: "Tudor does not want interpreta¬
tion; he wants simplicity of execution. . .. The movement in itself
should suffice, without interpretation being added on to it." (pp. 75-75)
But Tudor's approach to dance movement, while technically similar, in
some measure, to Balanchine's, has a very different intention behind it.
Balanchine's aim is to articulate the maximum degree of sensuousness
in form; Tudor's is, rather, to release that maximum of dramatic energy
which is contained in the tension between the visible expression of the
psyche and its invisible ground.
13Vladimir Nabokov, Ada (New York, 1969), p. 38.
14Op. cit., pp. 376-378.
15For my analysis of the horizontal field of poise and the vertical field
of grace, I am greatly indebted to my colleague, Samuel J. Todes. See his
"Comparative Phenomenology of Perception and Imagination," Parts I
and II, Journal of Existentialism (Spring and Fall, 1966). It is an exciting
fact, though, that Curt Sachs had described the horizontal/vertical axes
of dance many years earlier in his World History of the Dance (New York,
1937), pp. 25-26.
16For a distinction similar to that between the mimetic and the formal,
and for a parallel analysis of their respective illusions, see Sachs, op. cit.,
p. 60 and passim. He distinguishes the "image dance" and the "imageless
dance." In the first, the dancer, as he correctly observes, seems "bound
to the body," whereas in the second, the dancer appears to be "free of
the body." This is akin to saying that mimetic dance mainly exhibits
qualities of poise, while formal dance is especially suited to the showing
of grace.
17Quoted by Sachs, op. cit., p. 4. Note that, according to Christianity,
the body upon which grace is bestowed becomes "the temple of the
Holy" (1 Cor. 6:19).
18And ultimately, something should be said, too, about music, since it
is in this medium that temporality is most immediately constituted in its
sensuous aspect. In his piece on Igor Stravinsky (Ballet Review, III/6),
144 THE DANCE MEDIUM

Dale Harris writes: “The reduced importance of extrinsic forms of

expressiveness, the parallel emphasis on structure, the identification of
subject with form—these Stravinskian qualities have been the chief
influences upon ballet in our time." (p. 6) I would like to add that it is
these same qualities (which plainly constitute a formalism within the
possibilities of the medium of music) that explain, in part, the many suc¬
cesses Balanchine has had in setting his ballets on Stravinsky scores. The
formalism of the one complements and heightens the formalism of the
other.
Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, first performed in 1941, is, in some
respects, a modernist ballet. But in two respects it remains mimetic: First,
the movement of individual dancers and of partners often provides inti¬
mations of the aristocratic manners which were appropriate to Bach's
time. Second—and more importantly—the patterns of the dancers in
their larger groupings often translate abstract musical space into an aes¬
thetically equivalent corporeal stage-space. Chords, for example, and
counterpoint, inversions, and discrete melodic phrases, as well as figures
of musical time, or rhythm, have their unique counterparts in both the
floor-plane and the frontal spatializations of the dance-groupings.
l9Ballet Review, II/5, p. 5. Denby seems close to pointing out how a
choreographer can get theatrical meaningfulness entirely within a formal
time-framework, simply by means of a sudden modification in tempo (see
p.6). For me, one of the most memorable instances of this intention—an
instance which also involves an unexpected break in the formal space
constructions—occurs in Frederick Ashton's Enigma Variations (1968).
There is a moment in the ''Nimrod'' variation when Elgar breaks
through the formal space of arabesques and pas de basques, hesitates, and
then moves toward his friend in a delicate demonstration of affection.
This sudden shift in tempo, which is not only a shift from formal to real
time, but also a moment when the formal space of ballet has yielded to
the natural expressive space of sentirrient, creates a spectacle of exquisite
tenderness and beauty.
20See Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David
Smith (Cambridge, 1971).
21 Movement and Metaphor, (New York, 1970), pp. 10-11. Kirstein's
terms are anticipated by those of Andre Levinson, who distinguishes a
“horizontal" choreographing of the dance, “based on outlines and fig¬
ures marked by the feet of the dancer on the floor" from the later “ver¬
tical" choreographing, “the [frontal] configuration of motion in space."
Op. cit., pp. 170-171.
“In the June 25, 1973, issue of New York, Alan Rich asseverates that
“the principal reason the City Ballet is losing touch with its audience is
that it has been allowed to become a vast blank wall on which Balan¬
chine sketches his infinite variations on a single theme." And, while
admitting that there are very “subtle" differences, which make each of
his ballets unique. Rich contends that “too many Balanchine ballets look
alike." Just how blind can a ballet critic afford to be? To know the con-
 FRANK KERMODE 145

summate Hollywood-style showmanship of which Balanchine is capa¬

ble, one has only to see his Stars and Stripes (1958). In the light of such
proven genius for the dazzling ballet spectacle, Mr. Rich should have
asked himself what aesthetic grounds there could be to explain why Bal¬
anchine did not choose simply to multiply the number of such
spectacles.

FRANK KERMODE
POET AND DANCER
BEFORE DIAGHILEV

Diaghilev figures in the title simply as a terminus; he arrived

in Paris in 1909, and everybody knows what happened. "Le reve
de Mallarme se realise," said Gheon. What dream of Mallarme?
That which found a true theatrical sonority, a stage liberated
from cardboard falsities; which emerged from a confluence of
the other arts and yet remained, as Wagner did not, theatre. The
Ballets Russes demonstrated the correspondence of the arts so
wonderfully that in comparison Wagner's effort was, said Ca¬
mille Mauclair, "une gaucherie barbare.” Diaghilev arrived, not a
moment too soon, in response to prayers from both sides of the
Channel. One could trace the developments in taste which pre¬
pared his reception—not only in the limited sphere of the dance
but in writings on actors (the cult of Duse, for example), in the
fashionable admiration for oriental art and theatre, in avant-garde
agitation for theatrical reform. In March 1908 The Mask, a quar¬
terly dedicated to this end and strongly under the influence of
Gordon Craig, prayed in its opening editorial for a religion that
did not "rest upon knowledge nor rely upon the World" but
rather brought together "Music, Architecture, and Movement"
to heal "the Evil ... which has separated these three Arts and
which leaves the world without a belief." The editor can hardly
have expected his prayers to be answered so soon—not precisely
by the theatrical reforms he had in mind, but by the Russian
dancers, prophets of that Concord and Renaissance he so ear¬
nestly requested. Havelock Ellis, with his usual wide view, put
146 THE DANCE MEDIUM

the situation thus in The Dance of Life (1923): "If it is significant

that Descartes appeared a few years after the death of Malherbe,
it is equally significant that Einstein was immediately preceded
by the Russian Ballet."
Ellis makes Diaghilev a John the Baptist of a "classico-mathe-
matical Renaissance," and the notion that this was a renaissance
of some kind or other was evidently in the air. However, such
credit as is due to its heralds should not all be awarded to the
Russian ballet. There was, obviously, Isadora Duncan; but Isa¬
dora doesn't take us to the root of the matter. Where, for my pur¬
poses, that lies, I can perhaps suggest in this way: what Camille
Mauclair said of Diaghilev was somewhat disloyally said, for he
had used almost the same words years before of the American
dancer Loi'e Fuller. Art, he declared, was one homogeneous
essence lying at the root of the diversified arts, not a fusion of
them; and Loi'e Fuller was it, "a spectacle ... which defies all def¬
inition ... Art, nameless, radiant ... a homogeneous and com¬
plete place ... indefinable, absolute ... a fire above all dogmas."
The language is Mallarmean; as we shall see, it was all but impos¬
sible to write of Lo'ie Fuller otherwise unless you were very
naive. Still, not even Mallarme could start a renaissance single-
handed, and there has to be a word or two here about whatever
it was that predisposed everybody to get excited in this particular
way about dancers.
The peculiar prestige of dancing over the past seventy or
eighty years has, I think, much to do with the notion that it
somehow represents art in an undissociated and unspecialized
form—a notion made explicit by Yeats and hinted at by Valery.
The notion is essentially primitivist; it depends upon the
assumption that mind and body, form and matter, image and dis¬
course have undergone a process of dissociation, which it is the
business of art momentarily to mend. Consequently dancing is
credited with a sacred priority over the other arts, as by Havelock
Ellis (whose essay is valuable as a summary of the theoretical
development I am now discussing) and, with less rhapsody and
more philosophy, by Mrs. Langer in the twelfth chapter of Feel¬
ing and Form and (more flatly) in the opening essay of Problems of
Art. In view of this primitivizing, it is worth remembering that
the increase of prestige was contemporaneous with a major effort
by anthropologists, liturgiologists, and folklorists to discover the
roots of the dance in ritual of all kinds, and also with the devel¬
opment of a certain medical interest in dancing. We are all famil¬
iar with the interest shown by the generation of Valery and that
 FRANK KERMODE 147

of Eliot in these matters; and from Eliot, at the time when he was
busy with Jane Harrison and Frazer we can get some notion of
how they struck the literary imagination. Here, for instance, is a
passage from an uncollected Criterion review of two books on
dancing:

Anyone who would contribute to our imagination of what the bal¬

let may perform in future ... should begin by a close study of danc¬
ing among primitive peoples.... He should also have studied the
evolution of Christian and other liturgy. For is not the High
Mass—as performed, for instance, at the Madeleine in Paris—one
of the highest developments of dancing? And finally, he should
track down the secrets of rhythm in the still undeveloped science
of neurology.

Mr. Eliot found the Noh plays exciting and praised Massine
for providing in the ignorant modern theatre that rhythm
regarded as essential by Aristotle. But the peculiar modern view
could hardly have been developed before dancing became an
accredited fine art; and the date for this seems to be 1746, when
Batteux included it among the five with music, poetry, painting,
and sculpture. The general and developing Romantic tendency
was to give music pre-eminence as being non-discursive, "auton¬
omous" as the word now is, referring to nothing outside itself
for meaning; poems would be like that if there were not a basic
flaw in their medium, the habit that words have of meaning
something in ordinary usage. But some of this prestige was
undoubtedly captured by dancing; it is more "natural" and more
"primitive" than music, more obviously expressive of what Mrs.
Langer calls "patterns of sentience" and "the mythic conscious¬
ness." I use this late terminology because it is careful enough to
avoid certain radical confusions. The dance, though expressive,
is impersonal, like a Symbolist poem that comes off. Miss Deirdre
Pridden1 finds the proper word to be Ortega y Gasset's "dehu¬
manization"; the dancer "vide la danse, autant que faire se peut, de
son humaine matiere." Something might here be said about organ-
icist theories of expressiveness in Modern Dance, opposed not
only to conventional ballet (as Fuller and Duncan and Yeats
were) but sometimes even to the use of music as irrelevant to the
Gestalt of the dance; the source of these theories is Delsarte, but
they have been much refined. However, there is no disagree¬
ment from the fundamental principle that dance is the most
primitive, non-discursive art, offering a pre-scientific image of
life, an intuitive truth. Thus it is the emblem of the Romantic
148 THE DANCE MEDIUM

image. Dance belongs to a period before the self and the world
were divided, and so achieves naturally that "original unity"
which, according to Barfield for instance, modern poetry can
produce only by a great and exhausting effort of fusion.
The nineties poets wrote endlessly about dancers, welcomed
foreign troupes and prepared the way for the serious impact of
the Japanese Noh in the next decade.2 But they also enjoyed the
dancers themselves, and regularly fell in love with them.
Symons and his friends would meet the Alhambra girls after the
show and take them along to the Crown for drink and serious
talk; serious not because of what Symons called the "learned
fury" of these "maenads of the decadence," but in a humbler
way. This was the epoch of the Church and Stage Guild, Stewart
Headlam's club for clergy and actors. Headlam believed "in the
Mass, the Ballet, and the Single Tax" and such was his balleto-
latry that he wrote a book on ballet technique. But he also
believed that the liturgy must not continue to be deprived of
dancing, and so laboured to make the stage respectable, that the
stigma on dancing might be removed. Among the membership
girls from the Empire and the Alhambra preponderated. Head¬
lam was not original in his liturgical views, which may have
gained currency from Anglo-Catholic propaganda for ceremo¬
nies not explicitly forbidden;3 however, he gives one a pretty
good idea of what must have been a common enough belief in
this passage from an article he contributed to his own Church
Reformer (October 1884) in a series on the Catechism:
... to take an illustration from the art of dancing, which perhaps
more than all other arts is an outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual grace, ordained by the Word of God Himself, as a
means whereby we receive the same and a pledge to assure us
thereof; and which has suffered even more than the other arts from
the utter antisacramentalism of British philistia. Your Manichean
Protestant, and your superfine rationalist, reject the Dance as
worldly, frivolous, sensual, and so forth; and your dull, stupid Sen¬
sualist sees legs, and grunts with some satisfaction: but your Sacra-
mentalist knows something worth more than both of these. He
knows what perhaps the dancer herself may be partially uncon¬
scious of, that we live now by faith and not by sight, and that the
poetry of dance is the expression of unseen spiritual grace. "She all
her being flings into the dance." "None dare interpret all her limbs
express." These are the words of a genuine sacramentalist...

The poet is T. Gordon Hake. Headlam knew Symons well, and

also Yeats and many other nineties poets and painters. He seems.
 FRANK KERMODE 149

in his Guild and in writing of this kind, to reflect rather accu¬

rately the liturgical, poetic, and music-hall aspects of this renais¬
sance of dancing. The liturgical ingredient developed luxuri¬
ously in the border country of Anglo-Catholicism; witness R. H.
Benson's essay, "On the Dance as a Religious Exercise," an
account of the Mass as a dramatic dance:

The Catholic ... is not ashamed to take his place with the worship¬
pers of Isis and Cybele, with King David, and with the naked
Fijean, and to dance with all his might before the Lord.

The antiquarian interest culminated in G. R. S. Mead's The

Sacred Dance of Jesus (published in The Quest in 1910, but long
excogitated.) This was Havelock Ellis's chief source, and it is a
work of great and curious learning, written in a long tradition
of attempts to explain Matt. xi. 1.7, "We have piped unto you and
ye have not danced." Mead was most interested in the second-
century Hymn of Jesus, but he deals with the Fathers and with
medieval church dancing, with the liturgies of the Greek Ortho¬
dox and Armenian churches, and so forth. I doubt if Mead is
taken very seriously by modern historians—he isn't cited in the
large bibliography of Backman's Religious Dances (1952)—but for
a while he mattered a lot. Yeats, for example, went to his lectures.
He was by no means the only zealous dance-historian of the
time. Toulouse-Lautrec, who was not interested in these matters,
had an English savant thrown out of a dance-hall for plaguing
him about antiquity; this could have been Mead, but not neces¬
sarily. At a time when it was relatively easy for a dancer to
acquire a reputation for learning, Loi'e Fuller was said on high
authority (Anatole France) to be wise in the history of dancing;
she took as her prototype Miriam, who, according to Philo, as
quoted by Mead, symbolizes perfect sense, as Moses symbolizes
perfect mind.
The presence of the savant in the bal tells us something about
the seriousness with which music-hall dancing was taken on
both sides of the Channel. From Symons and Goncourt one
knows that it was so; and of course this was a period of close
relations between London and Paris. Yvette Guilbert often
appeared in London, Marie Lloyd and others in Paris; it was
fashionable to treat them both as very great artists. This cult of
music-hall has been persistent; there is a classic statement of it
in Mr. Eliot's essay on Marie Lloyd (1932), and it still goes on in
a London which has only one or two feeble surviving halls, con¬
stantly threatened with demolition. Nothing distresses some
150 THE DANCE MEDIUM

English intellectuals more than the closing of a music-hall. This

attitude is a weakly descendant of a positive avant-garde reaction
against commercial theatre in the nineties; failing dance-drama
or uber-marionettes, there were still Marie Lloyd and Little Tich,
defying cultural and social division, freely satirical, speaking
with the voice of the belly. You could talk of Yvette Guilbert,
who, according to Andre Raffalovitch, sang "the sufferings of
those the world calls vile," in the same breath as the Duse.
The Parisian music-halls were certainly not short of a similar
intellectual reclame, and had their place, as part of the metropol¬
itan experience, with all the other pleasures devised for an elite
that took its pleasures seriously—fine clothes, Japanese prints,
neurasthenia. They are as important in the early history of mod¬
ern art as folk-music and primitive painting, with which indeed
they are obviously associated. Our received idea of this world
owes more to Toulouse-Lautrec than anybody else, and there is
no reason to think it very inaccurate. The circus, the vaudeville,
the bal, were serious pleasures; the primitive, the ugly, the exotic
were in demand. The brutal patter of Aristide Bruant, La Goulue
coarsely cheeking the Prince of Wales, the emaciated and psy¬
chopathic May Belfort, the cherished ugliness of Mme Abdala;
all are characteristic. The mood is that of the violent Lautrec
drawings of Guilbert and Jane Avril, of dancers calling them¬
selves Grille d'Egout or La Goulue, of cafe-concerts with such
names as Le Divan Japonais and prostitutes with such noms de
guerre as Outamoro. In this atmosphere all the dancers I am con¬
cerned with did their work, and were treated very seriously.
Of a good many of them it was enough to say, as Symons did
in his excited lines on Nini Patte-en-l'air, that they possessed
The art of knowing how to be
Part lewd, aesthetical in part
And fin-de-siecle essentially.

Symons was one of those Englishmen whose solemn Parisian

pleasures were the admiration of Lautrec—Conder, the strangest
of them, he often drew, superbly drunk in his fine evening
clothes. But Symons was building an aesthetic in which dancing
was to have a central place—the climactic essay is called "The
World As Ballet"—and so his interest was slightly different from
the painter's. Lautrec was equally absorbed by La Goulue and
Jane Avril; but for Symons the former, a Messalina who wore her
heart embroidered on the bottom of her knickers, was less
important than the latter, who demonstrated that the female
 FRANK KERMODE 151

Loi'e Fuller, radically transforming her shape by manipulating the fabric

of her costume with long sticks. "... the woman who seemed to be
doing almost single-handed what Diaghilev was later to achieve with
the help of great painters, musicians, and dancers." (Kermode)

body was "Earth's most eloquent Music, divinest human

harmony."

Some time in the thirties a French exhibition, devoted to life

under the Third Republic, showed Jane Avril and Loi'e Fuller as
representing the Dance. ... Isadora Duncan was a "symbolist"
dancer; but it is sometimes forgotten that she derived much that
was admirable in her dancing from Loi'e Fuller, and this brings
me to the most important of all these names, to the woman who
seemed to be doing almost single-handed what Diaghilev was
later to achieve only with the help of great painters, musicians,
and dancers. ... Consider, for example, the "Fire Dance," a pop¬
ular item from early days. She told the credulous Mr. Tindall of
Pearson's Weekly that this dance had its origin in an accident:
when she was dancing her Salome at the Athenee (1893) she
danced before Herod as "the setting sun kissed the top of Solo-
152 THE DANCE MEDIUM

mon's temple." But it also kissed her garments, and the public,
always vocal, cried out and called it "the fire-dance." In fact this
was merely another attempt to offset the cold electric calculations
of Fuller. The Danse de Feu was lit from below stage, by a red
lantern directed through a glassed-in trap. The effect was strik¬
ing (Pearson's Weekly has some lurid coloured photographs).
Fuller appeared to the music of the "Ride of the Valkyries," shak¬
ing, we are told, and twisting in a torrent of incandescent lava,
her long dress spouting flame and rolling around in burning spi¬
rals. She stood, says Jean Lorrain, in blazing embers, and did not
burn; she exuded light, was herself a flame. Erect in her brazier
she smiled, and her smile was the rictus of a mask under the red
veil that enveloped her and which shook and waved like a flame
along her lava-nakedness. Lorrain goes on to compare her with
Herculaneum buried in cinders (it wasn't, of course), the Styx
and its banks, Vesuvius with open throat spitting fire. Only thus,
he argued, could one describe her motionless, smiling nakedness
in the midst of a furnace, wearing the fires of heaven and hell as
a veil. Gustave Freville called her a nightmare sculpted in red
clay. "The fire caresses her dress, seizes her entirely, and, inex¬
orable lover, is sated by nothing short of nothingness." Years
later Yeats was pretty certainly remembering this dance as well
as Dante and a Noh play when he spoke in his "Byzantium" of
the dance as an emblem of art, caught up out of nature into the
endless artifice of his Byzantium, the endless death-in-life of the
mosaic:
. .. blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave;
Dying into a dance
An agony of trance.
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

The "Fire Dance" had all the qualities Yeats asked of the art, for
not only was the dancer unconsumed, but she also wore the
obligatory enigmatic smile. "From his flame which does not
burn," says Menil in his Histoire de la Dance (1904), "there leaps,
between two volutes of light, the head of a woman wearing an
enigmatic smile." Menil, as it happens, goes on—as Jourdain
did—to question whether all this trickery of silk and electric
light was really dancing at all, and he wonders how, from the
vulgarity of the cheap glare and waving skirt, there could come
this hashish-like experience. Goncourt's reaction was similar:
"What a great inventor of ideality man is!" he moralized, con-
 FRANK KERMODE 153

templating this "vision of what is strange and supernatural" yet

has its origin in common stuff and vulgar lights.
Other dances were greeted with equal rapture. Georges
Rodenbach draws widely on Fuller's repertoire in his poem "La
Loie Fuller," first published in Figaro in May 1896, and warmly
praised by Mallarme. It has fifty-eight lines, and is too long to
quote in full, but here are some samples:

Dechirant I'ombre, et brusque, elle est Id: c'est Vaurore!

D'un mauve de prelude enfle jusqu'au Idas,
S'etant taille des nuages en falbalas,
Elle se decolore, elle se recolore.
Alors c'est le miracle opere comme un jeu:
Sa robe tout a coup est un pays de brume;
C'est de I'alcool qui flambe et de I'encens qui fume;
Sa robe est un bucher de lys qui sont en feu....
Or, comme le volcan contient toutes ses laves,
II semble que ce soit d'elle qu'elle ait deduit
Ces rivieres de feu qui la suivent, esclaves,
Onduleuses, sur elle, en forme de serpents ...
O tronc de la Tentation! O charmeresse!
Arbre du Paradis ou nos desirs rampants
S’enlacent en serpents de couleurs qu'elle tress!...
Un repos.
Elle vient, les cheveux d'un vert roux
Influences par ces nuances en demence;
On dirait que le vent du large recommence;
Car deja, parmi les etoffes en remous,
Son corps perd son sillage; il fond en des volutes ...
Propice obscurite, qu'est-ce done que tu blutes
Pour faire de sa robe un ocean de feu,
Toute phosphorescente avec des pierreries? ...
Brunehilde, c'est toi, reine des Walkyries,
Dont pour etre I'elu chacun se reve un dieu....
C'est fini.
Brusquement Fair est cicatrise
De cette plaie en fleur dont il saigna. L'etreinte
De I'Infini ne nous dure qu'un court moment;
Et I'ombre de la scene ou la fresque fut peinte
Est noire comme notre dme, pensivement.

What Mallarme liked about this was the recognition that Roden¬
bach restores to dancing its ancient character—it provides its
154 THE DANCE MEDIUM

own decor (elle s'etoffe). For Fuller's "imaginative weavings are

poured forth like an atmosphere" in contrast with the short-
skirted coryphees of the ballet, who have no ambiance save what
the orchestra provides.
Everything conspires to bring Fuller's performance into the
position of an emblem of the Image of art, "self-begotten" in
Yeats's favourite word; or like the body of a woman yet not in
any natural sense alive (prodige d'irreel), enigmatic, having the
power of election. The darkness of the stage at the end of the
performance is the natural darkness of the modern soul which
only the Image, hardly come by and evanescent, can illuminate:
"the embrace of eternity lasts us only a short moment." This
power of fusing body and soul, mending all our division, is cel¬
ebrated even in Pearson's Weekly. More completely than any
other dancer before her, Loie Fuller seemed to represent in vis¬
ible form the incomprehensible Image of art in the modern
world,4 as Mauclair said: "The Symbol of Art itself, a fire above
all dogmas." And she remains the dancer of Symbolism, from
Mallarme to Yeats; a woman yet totally impersonal, "dead, yet
flesh and bone"; poeme degage de tout appareil du scribe. "Thanks to
her," said Roger Marx, "the dance has once more become the
'poem without words' of Simonides ... above all one is grateful
to her for giving substance to that ideal spectacle of which Mal¬
larme once dreamed—a mute spectacle, which escaped the limits
of space and time alike, and of which the influence, powerful
over all, ravishes in one common ecstasy the proud and the
humble."
In February 1893, Mallarme went to the Folies-Bergere to see
Loie Fuller. It was an historic evening. Andre Levinson, com¬
plaining in the early twenties of the exaggerated deference paid
in literary circles to the music-hall, credits the Goncourts and
Huysmans with beginning the vogue, but goes on: "One day Ste-
phane Mallarme, aesthetician of the absolute, was seen pencil¬
ling, in his seat at the Folies Bergere, his luminous aperqus on the
so-called serpentine dances of Loie Fuller, fontaine intarissable
d’elle-meme. Since then the whole world has followed ..." What
Mallarme was writing emerges as a passage of prose notably dif¬
ficult even for him, but the centre, indeed the source in most
cases, of contemporary poetic comment on Fuller. Concerning
her, he says, and the way in which she uses the fabrics in which
she is dressed, the articles of contemporary enthusiasts—which
may sometimes be called poems—leave little to be said. "Her
 FRANK KERMODE 155

performance, sui generis, is at once an artistic intoxication and an

industrial achievement. In that terrible bath of materials swoons
the radiant, cold dancer, illustrating countless themes of gyra¬
tion. From her proceeds an expanding web—giant butterflies
and petals, unfoldings—everything of a pure and elemental
order. She blends with the rapidly changing colours which vary
their limelit phantasmagoria of twilight and grotto, their rapid
emotional changes—delight, mourning, anger; and to set these
off, prismatic, either violent or dilute as they are, there must be
the dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice." He goes on to
suggest that in this kind of dancing, in which the dancer seems
to have the power infinitely to expand the dance through her
dress, there is a lesson for the theatre, in which there is always
a banality that rises up between dance and spectator. Loie Fuller
makes one see how the subtleties inherent in the dance have
been neglected. "Some restored aesthetic," says Mallarme, "will
one day go beyond these marginal notes"; but he can at least use
this insight to denounce a common error concerning staging,
"helped as I unexpectedly am by the solution unfolded for me
in the mere flutter of her gown by my unconscious and unwit¬
ting inspirer." And he speaks of the dancer's power to create on
the boards of the stage her own previously unthought-of milieu.
The decor lies latent in the orchestra, to come forth like a light¬
ning stroke at the sight of the dancer who represents the idea.
And this "transition from sonorities to materials ... is the one
and only skill of Loie Fuller, who does it by instinct, exaggerat¬
edly, the movements of skirt or wing instituting a place.... The
enchantress makes the ambience, produces it from herself and
retracts it into a silence rustling with crepe de Chine. Presently
there will disappear, what is in these circumstances an inanity,
that traditional plantation of permanent sets which conflict with
choreographic mobility. Opaque frames, intrusive cardboard, to
the scrap-heap! Here, if ever, is atmosphere, that is nothingness,
given back to ballet, visions no sooner known than scattered,
limpid evocation. The pure result will be a liberated stage, at the
will of fictions, emanating from the play of a veil with attitude
or gesture." He sees the dance of Fuller as "multiple emanations
round a nakedness" which is central, "summed up by an act of
will ecstatically stretched to the extremity of each wing, her sta¬
tuesque figure strict, upright; made dead by the effort of con¬
densing out of this virtual self-liberation delayed decorative
leaps of skies and seas, evenings, scent and foam." And he con-
156 THE DANCE MEDIUM

eludes, "I thought it necessary, whatever fashion may make of

this miraculous contemporary development, to extract its sum¬
mary sense and its significance for the art as a whole."
There is dispute among students of Mallarme as to the place
of dancing in his unsystematic system, and less attention than
might be expected is paid to this tribute to Loi'e Fuller. But there
seems to be no very good reason for discounting what it says:
that she represented for him at least the spirit of an unborn aes¬
thetic; that she offered a kind of spatial equivalent of music; that
she stands for the victory of what he called the Constellation
over what he called Chance, "le couronnement du labeur humain,"
as Bonniet describes it in his Preface to Igitur. Like the archetype
of Art, the Book, Fuller eliminated hasard. Thibaudet, indeed,
believed that the whole concept of the Book owed something to
Mallarme's meditations on the dance; so did Levinson, arguing
that Mallarme glimpsed in the ballet "a revelation of the defin¬
itive (Euvre, which would sum up and transcend man"; so, more
recently, does M. Guy Delfel. The fitness of the dance as an
emblem of true poetry is clear. Valery was expanding the views
of Mallarme when he made his famous comparison between
them (poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking). Mallarme's
growing concern for syntax, so irrefutably demonstrated by L. J.
Austin, does not militate against this view that the dance took
over in his mind some of the importance of music; for syntax is
the purposeful movement of language and such movement has,
in either art, to be assimilated to the necessarily autonomous con¬
dition of the Image. The dance is more perfectly devoid of ideas,
less hampered by its means, than poetry, since it has not the
strong antipathy of language towards illogic; yet it is not abso¬
lutely pure; the dancer is not inhuman. Mallarme deals with pre¬
cisely this point in the opening article of Crayonne au Theatre
(before 1887) when he discusses the ambiguous position of the
dancer, half impersonal; very like the position of the poet ("The
pure work requires that the poet vanish from the utterance" in
so far as he can). But Fuller was more purely emptied of person¬
ality: an apparition, a vision of eternity for Rodenbach; for Mal¬
larme "l'incorporation visuelle de l'idee."
If it seemed necessary, as it did, for poets to reclaim their her¬
itage from music, the dance provided something more exactly
fitting as an emblem of what was aspired to; and in a sense Fuller
can stand for the liberation of Symbolism from Wagner. She is
much more properly the Symbolist dancer than any orthodox
ballerina; and there is a clear discontinuity between the general
 FRANK KERMODE 157

admiration for dancers of French poets earlier than Mallarme

and his praise of Fuller. In Baudelaire the "human and palpable
element" counts for much; in Gautier also. But in the new age,
the age of Mallarme and Yeats, what matters is that the dancer
"is not a woman"; that she is "dead, yet flesh and bone." The
difference constitutes a shift in the whole climate of poetry, rep¬
resented by the shift in English poetic from Symons to Pound,
from Symbolism as primarily an elaborate system of suggestion,
of naming by not naming, to the dynamism of the Vortex and
the Ideogram. For Fuller is a kind of Ideogram: Yincorporation
visuelle de Videe, a spectacle defying all definition, radiant,
homogeneous.
Such, at any rate, was the way those people saw Fuller who
saw her with eyes opened to dance as a majestueuse ouverture on
a reality beyond flux. They saw in her “la voyante de Vinfini."
When Diaghilev came, defying the genres, overwhelming the
senses with music and colour and movement, one or two people
perhaps remembered her as having been the first to do it. I am
convinced that Valery did. Again and again he returns to the
dance as a satisfactory emblem of a desirable poetry. It best illus¬
trates what he calls non-usage—"the not saying 'it is raining'—
this is the language of poetry; and movement which is not
instrumental, having no end outside itself, is the language of
dancing. Poetry, like dancing, is action without an end." As the
dancer makes an image of art out of the quotidian motions of her
body, so the poet must "draw a pure, ideal Voice, capable of com¬
municating without weakness, without apparent effort, without
offence to the ear, and without breaking the ephemeral sphere
of the poetic universe, an idea of some Self miraculously superior
to Myself." The Dance makes of an activity of the body—sweat,
straining muscle, heaving chest—an idea, a diagram of a high
reality. Valery called his dialogue, L'Ame et la Danse, of 1921, "a
sort of ballet of which the Image and the Idea are Coryphaeus in
turn." The dialogue embodies in language of refined wit and
gaudy elegance the essence of our post-Wagnerian aesthetic.
Athikte, the central figure, is usually thought of as a conven¬
tional ballet-dancer; and she does dance on her points. But, as
Levinson said in his pamphlet on the dialogue (Paul Valery, poete
de la danse, 1927) the tourbillon, her ecstatic finale, is not merely a
ballet step, it is the whirling of a mystic's dance. Though Valery
collected ballet photographs, they were of a special sort, chrono-
photographies; the plates were exposed in darkness, the dancers
carrying lights; and the result was a whirl of white lines, a record
158 THE DANCE MEDIUM

of the pattern of aimless poetical acts. In any case, we need not

suppose him so devoted to the ballet as to have forgotten Loi'e
Fuller. He was on the point of refusing the invitation to write
the dance dialogue because he “considered ... that Mallarme
had exhausted the subject" and undertook it finally with the
resolve that he would make Mallarme's prodigious writings on
the subject "a peculiar condition of my work." So I believe that
when he came to write the passage comparing the dancer with a
salamander—living "completely at ease, in an element compa¬
rable to fire"—he was remembering Fuller. The passage culmi¬
nates in a long, rhapsodical speech from Socrates: "what is a
flame ... if not the moment itself? .. . Flame is the act of that
moment which is between earth and heaven . . . the flame sings
wildly between matter and ether ... we can no longer speak of
movement. . . nor distinguish any longer its acts from its limbs."
Phaedrus replies that "she flings her gestures like scintillations
... she filches impossible attitudes, even under the very eye of
Time!" Eryximachus sums it up: "Instant engenders form, and
form makes the instant visible." And when the dancer speaks,
she says she is neither dead nor alive, and ends: "Refuge, refuge,
O my refuge, O Whirlwind! I was in thee, O movement—outside
all things ..." A Bergsonian dancer almost, "revelatrice du reel” as
Levinson says.
The propriety of yoking together Avril and Fuller as I have
done here is now, perhaps, self-evident. Avril is a smaller figure
altogether, but she demonstrates the strength of the link
between dancing and poetry, as well as the important patholog¬
ical element in the dancer's appeal. Fuller deserves, one would
have thought, some of the attention that has gone to Isadora.
Levinson who repeatedly declares his faith in classical dancing
as the one discipline "feconde, complete, creatrice," respected
Fuller, but despised Duncan as having no technique, no beauty,
no suppleness, her feet flattened and enlarged by years of bare¬
foot prancing, her music primitive. The fact is that Duncan was
much more the Tanagra figurine, the dancer from the Pompeian
fresco, than Fuller, who earned these descriptions in her early
days. And Duncan certainly did not submerge her personality in
strange disguises and unnatural lights. The Modern Dance has
developed theories sufficiently impersonal to make it intensely
interesting to Mrs. Langer, creating a symbolic reality indepen¬
dent of nature. But it depends always upon the body—upon the
power of the body not to express emotion but to objectify a pat¬
tern of sentience. Fuller with her long sticks, her strange optical
 FRANK KERMODE 159

devices, her burying the human figure in masses of silk,

achieved impersonality at a stroke. Her world was discontinuous
from nature; and this discontinuity Valery, speaking of his Sym¬
bolist ancestry, described as "an almost inhuman state." She
withdrew from the work; if to do otherwise is human, said Val¬
ery, "I must declare myself essentially inhuman."
This is the doctrine of impersonality in art with which T. E.
Hulme and T. S. Eliot among many others have made everybody
familiar. "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality ... the more perfect the artist
the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers
and the mind which creates." Thomas Parkinson, commenting
on Ortega y Gasset's "dehumanization"—"a point can be
reached in which the human content has grown so thin that it is
negligible"—remarks acutely that the confused reception
accorded to Pound's Pisan Cantos was due to critical shock at their
identification of the sufferer and the creator. Pound, in leaving
off his "ironic covering," simply broke with a rule of poetic that
he himself had done much to enforce. Mr. Parkinson is glad; he
wants to let "the Reek of Humanity" back into poetry, where he
thinks it belongs, and he seems to regard the impersonality doc¬
trine as a lengthy but temporary deviation from some true
"romantic aesthetic." I am not sure that he is right, or how far
he misunderstands the human relevance of what the impersonal
artist attempts. Mrs. Langer could answer him, and I am quite
sure that there Pound does not show the way back to reeking
humanity. In Mr. Eliot, in Valery, we surely are aware of what
Stevens called "the thing that is incessantly overlooked: the art¬
ist, the presence of the determining personality."
However this may be. Fuller's progressive extinction of the
dancing body was a necessary component of her success as an
emblem of the Image, out of nature. The imagination of the spec¬
tator fed upon her, independently of what she intended (she
once caught sight of herself in a glass when dancing, and was
surprised that what she saw bore no relation to her intention).
She is abstract, clear of the human mess, dead and yet perfect
being, as on some Byzantine dancing floor; entirely independent
of normal action, out of time. It is a highflown way of talking
about an affected music-hall dancer with an interest in stage¬
lighting; and, but for the example of Mallarme, we should hardly
venture it. Yet she was not a mere freak; dancers are always striv¬
ing to become, like poems, machines for producing poetic states;
"they labour daily," as Levinson says, "to prevent a relapse into
160 THE DANCE MEDIUM

their pristine humanity." Only when the body is objectified in

this way does it function, in the words of Whitehead, as "the
great central ground underlying all symbolic reference." Also, it
dies; and in so far as it is permitted to appear like something that
does, it cannot represent victory over hasard, perfect being, the
truth behind the deceptive veil of intellect. How is this to be
overcome? "Slash it with sharp instruments, rub ashes into a
wound to make a keloid, daub it with clay, paint it with berry
juices. This thing that terrifies us, this face upon which we lay so
much stress, is something they have always wanted to deform,
by hair, shading, by every possible means. Why? To remove from
it the terror of death, by making it a work of art." So William
Carlos Williams on primitive ways into the artifice of eternity.
Fuller's dehumanization was another way; it is very closely
related to a critical moment in the history of modern poetic, but
it is also, and this is as we ought to expect, rooted in the terror
and joy of the obscure primitive ground from which modern
poets draw strength for their archaic art.

(1958-61)

Notes
1The Art of The Dance in French Literature. London, Adam & Charles
Black, 1952.
2It is quite untrue, by the way, that Fenollosa and Pound 'introduced'
the Noh plays; interest in them is at least as old as this century.
3Mr. Ian Fletcher directs my attention to Sabine Baring-Gould's peri¬
odical The Sacristy (1871-2) where liturgical dancing is discussed with
other matters such as liturgical lights and symbolic zoology, and to later
ecclesiastical contributions.
4I ought to say that this passage will make more sense to anybody who
has read my Romantic Image. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.
 MARSHALL COHEN 161

MARSHALL COHEN
PRIMITIVISM, MODERNISM,
AND DANCE THEORY
"What a charming amusement for your people this is,
Mr. Darcy!—There is nothing like dancing after all.—I
consider it one of the first refinements of polished
societies."
"Certainly, Sir;—and it has the advantage also of
being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of
the world.—Every savage can dance."
Pride and Prejudice

The theory of modern art tends toward two sharply contrast¬

ing ideals. One, deriving from Lessing's Laocoon, insists that each
art maintain a proper relation to the medium in which it works.
This view often incorporates some version of what may be called
the principle of modernism in the arts. According to this prin¬
ciple the most advanced, the most significant, the most self-crit-
ically modern, or simply the most valuable, works of art are those
that do not dissemble the artistic medium in which they are cre¬
ated, or do not trespass on the domain of other artistic media. In
one of its forms the doctrine requires that modernist art confine
itself to exploiting or to exhibiting only those properties that are
essential to a work in the medium it employs. Sometimes, of
course, no special value is attached to works which satisfy the
modernist ideal. To describe a work as modernist in that case
may simply be a way of referring it to a certain style.
The other ideal, which received its most celebrated formula¬
tion in Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstiverk, looks to an art
that will draw on the most potent resources of all the major artis¬
tic media. This second ideal is often associated with some form
of primitivism. A synthesis of the arts is desirable because, only
where it is achieved, can we restore that unity of experience and
idea, or re-establish that fusion of image and reality, which char¬
acterizes primitive art. To be sure, the ideal of the "total work of
art" may rest on other than primitivist foundations—a synthesis
of the arts may be desired not because it restores some primitive
unity but rather because it manifests a transcendental one, or
162 THE DANCE MEDIUM

simply because it is supposed to produce singularly powerful

sensory effects (to be ''cruel"). And it may, of course, be thought
that the usable residue of primitive experience can be recaptured
within the confines of discrete artistic media. When this
approach is taken it is the art of dance that is most often thought
to possess a privileged access to the primitive.
At the present time, the modernist ideals of honesty to mate¬
rials, purification of the medium and even of artistic minimalism
prevail and some of the prestige of the most gifted artists derives
from the belief that their art adheres to these principles. Merce
Cunningham's modernism may appear to provide a counter¬
example to these observations, for he deploys the arts of lan¬
guage, music and sculpture in ftis work and collaborates with
other artisits in a way that is unprecedented since the Diaghilev
era. His ideal is, nevertheless, firmly anti-Wagnerian, for, like
Brecht, he insists on the integrity of the individual arts and
rejects the ideal of fusion. Typically, in his works, the various arts
are simply juxtaposed and they proceed in relative independence
of one another. Indeed, as Roger Copeland has observed, it is not
simply that Cunningham's dancers do not perform to music.
They are required to concentrate in such a way as to be unaf¬
fected by it.1 (This emphasis on the intellectuality of the dancer
is, in fact, a central feature of Cunningham's own reaction
against the primitivist tendencies of classical modern dance.)
Some of Cunningham's followers pursue a more orthodox
approach to the ideals of modernism. They insist that, since
dance is created in the medium of the human body, dance should
confine itself to examining and revealing the qualities of human
movement in greater isolation, for its own sake, and often as it
is exhibited in the most ordinary, least dance-like "tasks." More
importantly, for present purposes, George Balanchine's admirers
have attempted to present him as an artist who has successfully
freed dance from its dependence on dramatic representation and
theatrical mise-en-scene. Abstract possibilities that Marius Petipa
adumbrated in, say, Raymonda, Act III, and La Bayadere, Act IV,
have been pursued and realized with exemplary brilliance in the
most advanced modernist works of Balanchine. In these works.
Symphony in C, Agon, Episodes, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, the
essence of the art of ballet stands revealed.
It has not always been so. Frank Kermode, writing as recently
as the early sixties, remarked that during the last sixty or seventy
years the peculiar prestige of dance had much to do with "the
notion that it somehow represents art in an undissociated and
 MARSHALL COHEN 163

unspecialized form—a notion made explicit by W. B. Yeats and

hinted at by Paul Valery."2 And Richard Wagner thought the
music-drama would, by restoring the undifferentiated unity of
the Greek tragic drama, achieve precisely this result. Others
looked to something more primitive than Greek tragic drama
and were prepared to find a reunification of the arts in places
other than Bayreuth. Unquestionably, views such as these influ¬
enced the symbolists' reception of Loie Fuller, and prepared the
triumph of the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909. The idea that an
integration of the arts is best met in ballet is influential as late as
the mid-thirties. Adrian Stokes, speaking for a significant body
of opinion, observed, "Dramatic action or movement and music
have consistently inspired the one the other in modern Russian
ballet alone. In grand opera, however reformed, they inspire
each other at one moment and handicap at the next. Where the
work of a Gluck or a Wagner is incomplete, the work of
Diaghilev is complete."3 But it is not ballet alone that is viewed
from this kind of perspective. Eric Bentley writes, for instance,
that in Graham we find the fullest realization of the magical
theater of which Gordon Craig and W. B. Yeats and so many oth¬
ers dreamed.4 And Antonin Artaud glimpsed his ideal of total
theater, embodied in a "language before speech," in the work of
the Balinese theater, which he described as "a kind of superior
dance."5
This complex of ideas is not, I think, persuasive. Even if we
found the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk more compelling than we
do, we would have to acknowledge the crucial fact that the art
of dance does not, in general, employ the arts of speech. This is
one reason why cinema and some extensions of traditional thea¬
ter have, more often and more reasonably, been looked to for
plausible realizations of the ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk.6 To be sure,
dance could satisfy this requirement by incorporating sung or
spoken language as it has in Diaghilev's Les Noces and in Martha
Graham's Letter to the World. But even the success of these works
has not pointed the art of dance—or even Diaghilev's or Gra¬
ham's conceptions of it—in the direction of total theater. It
might, of course, be argued that the arts of speech need not be
included in a grand synthesis of the arts. This paradox might be
argued for by primitivists (and some symbolists) on the ground
that dance's non-verbal language of gesture can express mean¬
ings and ideas with greater force, precision and economy than is
possible for abstract "verbal" languages. Ideas of this sort are
unquestionably reflected in Artaud's search for a non-verbal
164 THE DANCE MEDIUM

theater and in Mallarme's observation that the ballerina is not

dancing but writing with her body.7
But the undifferentiated unity of the primitive world (like the
very existence of an emblematic or a transcendental one, which
does equivalent work in some related theories) is itself a myth—
and a modern one. Even if primitive mysteries are re-enacted,
they are experienced by dissociated modern sensibilities and, as
some say, only as an aesthetic phenomenon. The art of dance as
we know and experience it is one among the arts. It does not
displace or incorporate all the other arts, not even all the other
theatrical arts. Certainly, the claim that Diaghilev realized the
Wagnerian ideal is extravagant and misleading and Diaghilev's
contribution does not, in any case, seem as decisive for the aes¬
thetics of dance as it once did. Little of his repertory remains of
value. Parade, for whose special combination of the arts Guil¬
laume Apollinaire coined the term "surrealism," is sometimes
invoked as a brilliant synthesis of the arts. But for Jean Cocteau
and his collaborators Parade was by design an anti-Wagnerian
statement and a repudiation of the "primitivism" of the earlier
Diaghilev repertory. In any case, Leonide Massine's choreo¬
graphic contribution compares unfavorably with the contribu¬
tions of Cocteau, Picasso and Satie and the work remains unsat¬
isfactory from any point of view.8 This is not to say there is
nothing of value in the Diaghilev inheritance, but what there is
certainly does not confirm the view that Diaghilev is complete
where Wagner is incomplete. Petrouchka is certainly an impres¬
sive work (though not the fully-realized masterpiece Stokes and
legend suggest) and, like some of the finer works of Graham, it
permits dramatic representation and even outright storytelling.9
In this respect such works unquestionably resist a certain kind
of purism, but this is far from showing that they aspire to, or
achieve, a full Wagnerian synthesis. In fact, the most fruitful por¬
tion of Diaghilev's legacy, works like Les Sylphides, parts of Fire¬
bird, and Apollo point in the direction of Balanchine's achieve¬
ment. Balanchine's art, at its most characteristic, does indeed lean
toward the purist ideal. In its most original moments it rejects or
attenuates storytelling (though not dramatic implication and
metaphor) and derives its imagery mainly from the music to
which it is set. But this commitment to music in fact provides an
insurmountable obstacle to those who would represent his art,
the greatest realization of the art of dance we know, as an
embodiment of the purist ideal. For the purist ideal requires the
independence (if not necessarily the isolation) of music and
 MARSHALL COHEN 165

drama (they work in two different physical media and are by

nature two separate arts). I would not deny, of course, that dance
can exist independently of music. Doris Humphrey's Water Study
and Jerome Robbins's Moves show that dances of this sort can
achieve remarkable success. We have not been persuaded, how¬
ever, that dances of this sort represent the ideal realization of the
art of dance. Neither primitivism nor modernism in the formu¬
lations with which we are most familiar provides an accurate
account of dance as we have inherited it or as we prefer it.
In what follows I do not pretend to offer anything like a full
discussion of the theory or practice of primitivism or modernism.
Given the many possible forms in which these ideas have been
or could be developed, any such account in the present compass
is out of the question. I do, however, offer a reasonably full dis¬
cussion of what are perhaps the two most elaborate philosophical
discussions of dance to appear in English in recent years, and
these essays are usefully read against the background I have
sketched. Susanne Langer is by no means the unqualified prim-
itivist some (like Frank Kermode) have taken her to be, and
David Levin (unlike those who inspire him) is not a dogmatic
proponent of modernist ideals. Yet primitivist ideas seem to have
misled Mrs. Langer as modernist ones have misled David Levin.
It is a matter of some interest, I think, that their versions of prim¬
itivism and modernism—these two conflicting but intimately
related modern artistic options—have led both of them to very
similar misinterpretations of the dance as we know it. A criticism
of their views should, I believe, contribute to an assessment of
the larger body of ideas with which they are associated. And an
assessment of modernism and primitivism is, I believe, a central
task of contemporary aesthetic theory. T. S. Eliot wrote, "Anyone
who would contribute to our imagination of what ballet may
perform in (the) future ... should begin by a close study of danc¬
ing among primitive peoples .. ."10 We have seen that many of
the prophets of the Gesamtkunstiverk looked into the distant and
even into primitive past for a vision of the artwork of the future.
Susanne Langer, in the relevant chapters of Feeling and Form,
goes further. She thinks we must look to primitive dance for an
understanding of dance in general. Unlike some proponents of
the ideal of total theater, however, she does not hope to recover
the primitive experience of dance and is therefore not drawn to
the theory of the Gesamtkunstiverk as a vehicle of that recovery.
Indeed, contrary to Frank Kermode's suggestion, she supposes
we can only understand the modern art of dance if we under-
166 THE DANCE MEDIUM

stand that the art of dance functions for us in a manner very dif¬
ferent from the way it functions in primitive life.11 Nevertheless,
we shall see that the idea of the primitive misleads Mrs. Langer,
as it has misled the proponents of the ideal of the Gesamtkun-
stwerk, although in a different way.
Mrs. Langer locates the origins of dance in the primitive.
Indeed, in her view, it is the first art and "the most serious intel¬
lectual business of savage life: it is the envisagement of a world
beyond the spot and the moment of one's animal existence, the
first conception of life as a whole—continuous, superpersonal
life, punctuated by birth and death, surrounded and fed by the
rest of nature." But to the "mythic consciousness" these creations
are "realities, not symbols. They are not felt to be created by the
dance at all, but to be invoked, adjured, challenged, placated, as
the case may be. The symbol of the world, the balletic realm of
forces, is the world, and dancing is the human spirit's participa¬
tion in it."12 But Langer does not suppose the present role of
dance is to reconstitute the religious and magical properties
primitive dance possessed. Rather, she aligns herself with the
tradition of Kant and Schopenhauer and insists that, in order to
become an object of aesthetic experience, dance must disengage
itself from precisely those practical and cognitive—that is, from
those non-aesthetic functions—that it served in primitive life.
For Langer, the artist guarantees we can take an aesthetic attitude
toward a work of art by creating an object of a special sort, a "vir¬
tual" object, or an appearance or illusion, that by its very nature
can support only an aesthetic, and not a practical, interest. In her
view, from the physical materials available to an art, the art cre¬
ates its "primary" illusion. As the painter creates the illusion of
space from pigments and canvas, the dancer, working with
movements of the human body, creates "a world of powers,
made visible by the unbroken fabric of gesture." But an art can
never be identified with the materials from which it is made—
for these untransformed materials are not, themselves, the pure
appearances or semblances or illusions that alone constitute art,
and that are alone the proper objects of aesthetic interest. The
aesthetic, as opposed to the mythic consciousness, recognizes
these illusions for what they are, and does not take the world of
illusory Powers to be a reality. The aesthetic object is, by nature,
purely visual.
Critics (the present writer included) have elsewhere objected
to Langer's notion of illusion or "virtual" object, and questioned
whether it is necessary to suppose each art creates objects of this
 MARSHALL COHEN 167

kind to serve as the target of the aesthetic attitude.13 But it is

worth protesting here against the negative view that nothing
which can be characterized in purely physical terms (namely,
bodily movements) can constitute a work of art, as well as against
the positive view that dance is, in fact, an art of illusory gestures.
Langer supposes that real gestures are expressions of emotion.
She thinks, correctly, that dance theorists (especially theorists of
modern dance) have often falsely supposed dances are really
expressions of the dancer's (or of the choreographer's) emotions.
But she wrongly supposes the proper way to correct this mistake
is to declare these expressions of emotion only apparent or illu¬
sory. No doubt, this solution appeals to her because, in her view,
dance like every other art must present some illusion or other.
Why not suppose, then, that dance creates, if not the reality, then
the illusion that emotion is being expressed? Mrs. Langer is
undoubtedly correct in thinking dancers do not always express
emotions, but it is important to insist that they do not always
give the impression of expressing them either. Mrs. Langer has
merely sophisticated and attenuated the expression theory of
dance. She ought to have rejected it outright.
Andre Levinson long ago remarked on the confusion of ges¬
ture with le pas.1* The Rose Adagio or the Act II pas de deux in
Swan Lake may appear to express Aurora's or Odette's emotion
(that is, they may be gestures in Langer's sense) but what emo¬
tion does the Bluebird pas de deux or the dance of the cygnets
express? (To be sure, the dance of the cygnets is designed to
relieve emotion.) And, then, what emotions does Merce Cun¬
ningham express in How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run or Yvonne
Rainer in The Mind Is a Muscle, Part 1 (Trio A)? Indeed, the move¬
ments of these contemporary dances are specifically designed to
purge movement of its emotional valence and, in Langer's terms,
to leave the materials of dance untransformed into gestures, or
the illusion of gestures, or anything else. No doubt there are cer¬
tain kinds of dances in which the inability to transform move¬
ments into gestures does, indeed, amount to failure (though not
necessarily in the failure to create a dance). Performing move¬
ments with the unearned suggestion that they are endowed with
emotional significance is empty rhetoric, and performing them
with the suggestion that they are endowed with symbolic import
is portentousness. These are, respectively, the characteristic vices
of certain schools of dance ("modern" dance) and of certain cho¬
reographers (Robbins at his worst, Maurice Bejart almost always).
I expect it is because we have witnessed these failures and expe-
168 THE DANCE MEDIUM

rienced these vices so often that a taste for non-gestural move¬

ment has become very strong. However that may be, there is no
doubt dances can be constructed that are not gestural in Langer's
sense. In fact, we find dances constructed of movements and
actions and even of gestures (like the gesture of warning or of
recognition), which, since they need not express or appear to
express emotion, would not be gestures in Langer s sense real
ones (Isadora Duncan's?) or apparent ones (of the sort we find in
representational ballets). There is in any case no reason to accept
Langer's residual expressionism, or to suppose that if we concede
that dances can be constructed of non-illusory physical materials,
we will fail to guard against the possibility that someone will
take an impermissible, non-aesthetic interest in them. A more
pertinent worry would be that far too many dances constructed
of pure movement do not support any kind of interest at all.
Even if we waive these objections to the centrality Mrs. Langer
assigns to the role of gesture in dance we shall have to object to
her view that the dance necessarily creates a "world image," and
a world image of a very specific sort. No doubt, her theory marks
an advance on those that would return us to a primitive state of
mind in which we believe the world image is a reality in which
we participate. Mrs. Langer thinks more plausibly that for us
dance merely creates an image of the world, an image to which
we respond aesthetically. But, like her residual expressionism,
her residual primitivisim is unconvincing. For on her view, this
world image descends from, and bears the (sometimes faded)
lineaments of that original primitive world. In Langer's view the
world of dance is a world of "interacting forces" which seem "to
move the dance itself," whether that image is taken for a reality
as by the mythic mind, or acknowledged to be a romantic world
or a world of dreams, as it is by the aestheticizing modern mind.15
Mrs. Langer's characterization of this world is not sufficiently
clear for it to be assessed with confidence. But we can wonder
whether Jooss's The Green Table or Tudor's The Echoing of Trumpets
inhabits a world of romance, or whether Graham's willful hero¬
ines or the contestants in Balanchine's Agon seem to be moved
by invisible forces rather than to be self-moving. Mrs. Langer's
claim becomes somewhat more precise when she says dance
movement creates "the illusion of a conquest of gravity, i.e. free¬
dom from the actual forces that are normally known and felt to
control the dancer's body." 16 This contention, central to Langer's
view of the dance, is surely questionable. No doubt, this kind of
thing is often said of ballet, especially of the Romantic ballet
 MARSHALL COHEN 169

which often invokes a supernatural world of anti-gravitational

fairies, sylphs and wilis. Even here, of course, this is not the illu¬
sion that is always sought. We are all too aware of the pull of
gravity on Hilarion as he is danced into the abyss by the wilis.
Even more obviously, it was one of the major objectives of the
classical modern dance to acknowledge, and even to insist on,
the gravitational pull on the dancer's body. Isadora Duncan, no
doubt as part of her largely misconceived polemic against ballet,
observed that "all movement on earth is governed by the law of
gravitation, by attraction and repulsion, resistance and yielding;
it is that which makes the rhythm of dance."17 Graham's floor
work was essential to her dance aesthetic, and the relation to
earth was a major theme of Humphrey's. (In Circular Descent, for
example, "she allowed the body to sink into the restful earth and
to halt the endless battle against gravitation, and against all
opposition.")18 And it is central in Mary Wigman, the modern
dancer whose genius Mrs. Langer paradoxically seems to admire
most. (A typical description reports Wigman "tended to kneel,
crouch, crowd; her head was often downcast and her arms were
rarely lifted high.") Against all this evidence, why does Mrs.
Langer persist in her view? Only, so far as I can see, because of
her residual primitivism. The world created by the modern dan¬
cer, even if it is no longer believed in, must nevertheless present
itself as a world of mysterious and invisible "powers," "a Spirit
World," free of all physical determination. Mrs. Langer's com¬
mitment to her theory seems to overcome her own taste in dance
and, one must suppose, the evidence of her senses.
Even in the case of ballet, as I have suggested, Mrs. Langer's
theory is unacceptable. There are, to be sure, moments and even
sustained passages in which we might want to agree that the
dancer appears to defy the laws of gravity. A good example
might be the Bournonville dancer's grand jete en avant en attitude
in which, after a quick thrust upwards of the front leg, the back
leg shifts high in attitude to "ride" the jump in the air before the
front leg is lowered to land, giving the illusion of suspension in
the air for several seconds.19 But illusions of this kind are not
essential to ballet and they do not even have priority among the
illusions and images ballet projects. Many of the images are not
illusory at all: we simply see the dancer performing the classical
pas and enchainements composed of them. We admire the dancer's
speed, grace and fluidity; these are non-illusory features of the
dancer's movements and poses. And even where the aesthetic
effect of a ballet does depend on an illusion, it may not depend
170 THE DANCE MEDIUM

on the illusion or on the visual qualities of the image alone. Aes¬

thetic pleasure is not simply pleasure in the contemplation of
images, and dance is not a purely visual art. Our pleasure in bal¬
let is often, in part, a pleasure in the dancer's virtuosity and this
requires that we have reason to believe the image is created in a
certain way. Fred Astaire, dancing on the wall and across the
ceiling in Royal Wedding, creates the illusion of a more extreme
violation of the laws of gravity than anything we know in tra¬
ditional ballet. But since we do not believe Astaire was actually
photographed dancing on a wall (we are not so sure in the case
of Donald O'Connor's "Make 'em Laugh" in Singin' in the Rain)
this anti-Bazinian cinematic trick gives us none of the pleasure
we derive from "antigravitational" illusions in classical ballet. It
was only when Giselle substituted pointes for flying wires that
Romantic ballet became a sublime art.20
Ballet is not, then, a purely visual art and its images are not
necessarily illusory. Ballets may, in fact, require nothing more
than an arrangement of the special array of movements conse¬
crated by this art and its traditions. This sort of point is often
insisted upon by modernism, but modernism in many of its man¬
ifestations yields doctrines as unacceptable as those associated
with primitivism. It is to one such theory that we now turn.
In his important essay on "Balanchine's Formalism," David
Levin attempts to account for Balanchine's peculiar genius by
assimilating his achievement to the modernist aesthetic.21 Levin's
conception of modernism is derived from Clement Greenberg's
influential account. In Greenberg's analysis, however, modern¬
ism is identified with a number of distinguishable ideas and it
will be useful to separate them out. Sometimes Greenberg asserts
that the identifying feature of modernist art is its refusal to dis¬
semble the medium. Modernism does not use art to conceal art,
but rather to call attention to it. Modernism in this sense requires
"frankness."22 Unlike the old masters, Edouard Manet "declares"
the surfaces on which he paints, and the Impressionists leave no
doubt that the colors they use are made of real paint and come
from pots and tubes. Ballets are modernist in this sense when
they do not dissemble the movements of the dancer's body (and
try to create the illusion that the dancer is really a swan or a blue¬
bird). Modernist ballets would acknowledge that the Swan
Queen is really a dancer and that her attempts to free her legs
from drops of water are made with petits battements as the male
bluebird's motions are constructed out of brises voles and cabrioles
(Langer's non-gestural mere twisting and turning in the air?).
 MARSHALL COHEN 171

But in this sense it is easy to exaggerate the extent to which ballet

ever seriously dissembled the medium. Even in the most repre¬
sentational of traditional ballets one is meant to remain aware
that roles are danced by dancers whose movements are drawn
from the repertory of classical technique. To be sure, in some of
Balanchine's storyless ballets there is little dissembling at all.
But, to my mind, this is a less radical innovation than it may
seem. How crucial, after all, are the dissemblings in Raymonda,
Act III, and La Bayadere, Act IV? Although Levin sometimes
invokes this conception of modernism, it is not the one that
seems mainly to concern him.
Sometimes Greenberg means by modernism not a refusal to
dissemble the medium, but a refusal to trespass on the domain
of another medium.23 This is the requirement not of frankness,
but of propriety. A painting might, for example, meet the
requirement of frankness and freely acknowledge the medium
in which it is created. But it might be thought to trespass on the
domain of literature by telling a story or, as Greenberg thinks
traditional painting did, on the domain of sculpture by creating
the illusion of three-dimensional space. In order to meet the
requirement of propriety, modernist painting had to eschew cre¬
ating the illusions of three-dimensional tactility and of weight.
Painting had to become purely "optical."24 It is this feature of
opticality that Levin fixes on as the distinctive characteritstic of
Balanchine's modernism. I shall want to question whether Bal¬
anchine's ballets do, in fact, possess this characteristic. But, even
if they did, it would not follow that they did so because Balan¬
chine was conforming to the modernist canon of propriety. After
all, dancing's claim on the third dimension is at least as strong
as sculpture's; there is no plausible reason why propriety
requires that dance defer to sculpture and confine itself to the
realm of the purely optical. Matters are complicated, if not
thrown into a hopeless state of confusion, by Greenberg's
announcement that the new "constructivist" sculpture which he
admires is, like modernist painting, itself essentially optical. But
he admits that insofar as this is so "the prohibition on one art's
entering the domain of another is suspended."25 If modernist bal¬
let is to espouse the ideal of "opticality," the canon of propriety
will have to be suspended for it as well, and for the same reason.
Plainly, the operative theory here is not that each art must con¬
fine itself to its distinctive domain, but rather that sculpture and
dancing must investigate further the nature of that "opticality"
which painting, the avant-garde modernist art, first pursued. But
172 THE DANCE MEDIUM

this is a very different demand from the demand for propriety.

Its theoretical foundations are obscure, its credentials in modern¬
ist theory dubious and its applicability to ballet, even to Balan¬
chine's ballet, implausible. Something like it may be true of the
"two-dimensional" effects Nijinsky sought in L'Apres-Midi d'un
Faune. But this is a very special case and it certainly does not pro¬
vide a paradigm of Balanchine's practice.
A third characterization of modernism brings us closer to the
main body of Levin's essay. Sometimes Greenberg identifies
modernism with the requirement neither of frankness nor of
propriety (modernism's transformation of the genre theorist's
decorum) but with what we may call minimalism.26 This version
of modernism excludes, in addition to everything that falls into
the domain of another art, everything that is inessential to the
art in question. According to minimalism, each art must confine
itself to exhibiting its own essential qualities. Modernism in this
sense requires that the work of art "reveal," or "make present,"
the defining conditions for a work of its kind, that is to say, the
minimal conditions for being a work in that medium. In what
follows we shall identify modernism with minimalism in the
sense suggested. In order to understand Levin's view of Balan¬
chine's modernism it will be useful to quote the passage from
Levin's essay in which he shows how Greenberg's younger col¬
league, Michael Fried, applies this modernist doctrine to paint¬
ing. This will provide the key to Levin's own doctrine of mod¬
ernist dance. "On Fried's view" he writes, "the two ineluctable
defining conditions of painting are its flatness and its shape. No
painting can conceivably exist unless it is reduced to flatness and
has assumed a certain shape. But since material objects are also
shaped and may also be flat, painting can defeat, or suspend, its
own objecthood if—and only if—it accomplishes what no mere
subject can possibly do: it must somehow materially acknowl¬
edge these conditions, rendering them totally present."27 By
revealing this "contradiction" the object establishes its claim to
be a work of art.
We may now consider what I take to be Levin's application of
this argument to the case of dance. (Some improvisation is nec¬
essary, as Levin is not explicit at every point.) The minimal defin¬
ing condition for dancing is a configuration of physical move¬
ments. But, since inanimate objects are also capable of physical
movements, dancing must defeat, or suspend, its own physicality
and it can do this if—and only if—it accomplishes what no inan¬
imate object can accomplish: it must somehow acknowledge its
 MARSHALL COHEN 173

own physicality and render it totally present. Modernist dance

accomplishes this task by acknowledging the tangible weight
and mass of the body but only in order to defeat them, to render
the objective body as a magically weightless, optically intangible,
presence. In this way the work of art is shown to be a material
object and at the same time the "negation" of that objecthood. In
order to achieve this suspension of objecthood the dancer's space
must be cleared of everything that would locate dance within the
binding coordinates of the horizontal field. The failure to do so
would prevent the unearthly suspension of objecthood and the
possibility of a vertical release into "the sky of grace." It is to
help in achieving this minimalist illusion of pure opticality and
weightlessness (and now, not to achieve frankness or to maintain
propriety, though, given an appropriate understanding of min¬
imalism, they may follow of necessity) that the semantic allu¬
siveness and mimetic gestures of traditional ballet are repudiated
in favor of a purely abstract, syntactic symbolism, and that the
architectural field of space, traditionally staked out with objects
and other dancers' bodies and inflected with color and costume,
is avoided. For mimesis and architecture tie the dancer to the
horizontal field of beauty and prevent the dancer's vertical
release into the realm of the sublime. Something very like the
freedom from gravity that for Langer has characterized dance
from primitive times and that she associates with its invocation
of a world of spirits is viewed by Levin as the minimalist essence
of the most advanced modernist art, an art whose essence
requires a return to "the sky of God." Unfortunately, I do not
believe anything like this view is true, even when it is radically
restricted as it is with Levin to the single case of Balanchine's art.
I shall not, here, attempt to criticize Levin's philosophical
assumptions in any detail, although the question must at least be
raised why the exhibition of movements which present them¬
selves as distinctively human should be sufficient to create ballet
or why the intentionality that for Levin characterizes human
movement should reveal itself in the illusion of weightlessness
or of optically intangible presence. After all, Greenberg finds
precisely these qualities in modernist paintings and sculptures.
Why, then, can they not be engendered by the movements of
non-human, or even by the movements of inanimate, bodies
(mobiles)? We shall confine ourselves here, however, simply to
questioning whether Balanchine's art, even in its purest exam¬
ples, is in fact endowed, and uniquely endowed, with the qual¬
ities Levin discerns.
174 THE DANCE MEDIUM

It is certainly true that Balanchine tends to avoid storytell¬

ing—though even in such central “modernist" works as Apollo
storytelling is crucial. But it is far from true that he avoids
mimetic gesture or dramatic implication. Perhaps his most ubiq¬
uitous form of mimesis is found in the imitations and transfor¬
mations of historical forms of dance—Agon, Liebeslieder Walzer,
Stars and Stripes, Who Cares? and Square Dance among others. And
it has often been remarked that his pas de deux constitute an elab¬
orate examination of the relations between the sexes, presenting
us with a highly distinctive view of women.28 This is hardly
accomplished by the exclusion of mimetic gesture. Then, too,
Balanchine's allusion to the types of human temperament, to the
destiny of individuals, to human isolation, triumph and apothe¬
osis, cannot be and has not been missed.29 If Balanchine makes
little use of scenery it is certainly untrue that he refuses to relate
dancers to one another in a space that seems corporeally acces¬
sible. A major characteristic of Balanchine's choreography is the
lucid articulation of physical space—often by great Petipa-like
diagonals or by the positioning of discrete groups of dancers
against whose locations the trajectory of other dancers is traced
or from whose configurations smaller groups of dancers emerge
(his familiar “daisy chains, London bridges and turnstile forma¬
tions").30 Often the effect of this organization is precisely to bind
the dancer to what Levin calls the horizontal space of the stage
that the dancer characteristically assaults with his brilliant attack
and devours with his speed.
Indeed, it is the speed and physical presence of the Balanchine
dancer, rather than her weightlessness (or the tensions gener¬
ated by that weightlessness), that has usually impressed Balan¬
chine's commentators. It would perhaps be frivolous, though I
think it is significant, to mention that Balanchine found a place
in his company for Gloria Govrin, who gave the illusion that she
was about to ascend into the sky of God no more than the earth-
bound figures of Ivesiana do. If these examples are thought to be
eccentric, no one can, I think, make such an objection to Arlene
Croce's observation (offered without philosophical parti pris) that
in the third statement of the theme in The Four Temperaments the
weight on the dancer's one supporting pointe “looks crushing."31
I do not want to suggest that crushing weight is a quality Bal¬
anchine favors, but neither is the quality of weightless opticality
on which Levin himself puts such (crushing) weight.
To these observations Levin would reply it is not his view that
the dancer simply creates the illusion of weightlessness or of
 MARSHALL COHEN 175

pure opticality. Rather, the dances create a "tense simultaneity"

of weight and weightlessness. He points in one place to the Bal¬
anchine plie in which, despite the dancer's obvious objective
weight and effort, Balanchine makes present "at first only in the
tensed mode of suppressed virtuality, the graceful arc of flight,
which is about to suspend the force of gravity . . ,"32 Quite aside
from the doubts one may harbor about whether the dancer in the
"arc of flight" actually appears weightless, it is necessary to ask
the following questions: are the characteristics here cited really
specific to the Balanchine plie, or do they not characterize the
Bournonville plie equally well? And are they in fact characteristic
of the Balanchine plie? We should remind ourselves that the
third girl in The Four Temperaments, turned in deep plie with the
other foot held in passe position, reminded Croce of "the bass
fiddle the forties jazz player spins after a chorus of hot licks."33
Even if we were to accept Levin's description of the Balanchine
plie, why should we single out this particular moment to carry so
heavy a philosophical burden? By what criterion does Levin sin¬
gle it out, or is this a case of selective vision with Heidegger and
Clement Greenberg serving as the main selectors? Again, Levin
asks us to consider the situation in which the dancer moves dra¬
matically from second position in demi-plie (a disposition of the
body that forcefully reveals its weight, its objecthood) into a
wondrous turn that seems to suspend this condition.34 In this
case we must observe, in the first place, that the alleged impres¬
sions of weight and weightlessness are not simultaneous but suc¬
cessive. More important, perhaps, is the fact that even if the won¬
drous turn is thought to create the impression of weightlessness
it certainly does not create the impression of "pictorial flatness"
or of "pure opticality." (Roger Copeland has remarked to me that
in actual practice the illusion of weightlessness almost invariably
induces a kinetic and tactile response in the perceiver that inter¬
feres with a purely "optical" appreciation.) Balanchine's dancers
are, significantly, turners more than they are jumpers, and these
turns establish and insist on the dancer's plasticity, on the fact
that the dancer occupies three dimensions. So, too, many of Bal¬
anchine's characteristic formations emphasize the three-dimen¬
sionality of the dancer. The three muses are posed in arabesque
around Apollo and the ballerina's leg, lifted high in attitude,
hooks her partner's neck and head in the Agon pas de deux. Even
Lincoln Kirstein with his talk of "the aria of the aerial"35 observes
that in Balanchine the dancer's silhouette must not be papery,
but solid, read in three dimensions. He traces the standards of
176 THE DANCE MEDIUM

plastic legibility and expressiveness that govern ballet to that

Renaissance sculptural tradition in which "the principle of con-
traposto, a three-quarter view opposition of limbs" dictates "the
placement of members as an active spiral, denying any flattening
symmetrical frontality."36 Unquestionably the ideals of Giovanni
da Bologna and Jean Goujon have been modified and to some
extent displaced by subsequent cultural and artistic develop¬
ments. But Balanchine is still to be understood in relation to this
tradition and not as a balletic equivalent of David Smith and con¬
temporary constructivism.
As I see it, Balanchine does not create the dance equivalent of
the purely optical illusions of certain types of modernist painting
and sculpture. Rather, Balanchine perpetuates classical ballet's
idealization of the human body, though he idealizes it in a spe¬
cialized, perhaps as many have suggested in a specifically Amer¬
icanized, way. (It must be admitted, of course, that one man's
Americanization is another man's dehumanization.) Indeed, it is
reasonable to speculate that a large part of the great popularity
film, photography and dance enjoy at the present time derives
from the fact that these arts have not "suspended" the object-
hood of the human body, or treated it as part of a purely "abstract
syntax."37 Even if Levin were more nearly accurate in his descrip¬
tion of Balanchine's dances than I think he is, his interpretation
of Balanchine as a minimalizing modernist would be wholly
unacceptable for another reason suggested earlier on. The
essence of Balanchine is the setting of dances to music. The look
of a Balanchine ballet can never be considered in abstraction
from the music to which it is set and no consideration of the look
of a Balanchine ballet could in itself account for the power of
Balanchine's art. Balanchine's dancers do not create the illusion
that they are free from the force of gravity; rather they give the
impression that their movements are determined by, and reveal
the structure of, the music to which they are danced.
Neither the doctrines generated by primitivist commitments
nor those elaborated in response to modernist ideals provide an
adequate account of the central manifestations and achievements
of dance as we know it. Still less, can the character of that art be
discovered by considering the nature and possibilities of any
particular physical medium, or by imagining how a combination
of all the major arts would look. If some of the prestige of twen¬
tieth-century dance derives from the assumption that it satisfies
one or another of these ideals, its achievements are great enough
to survive a more accurate description of its formal nature and
 MARSHALL COHEN 177

its historical qualities. The immensely difficult task of accurate

description and adequate theorizing largely remains to be done.
(1981)

Notes
‘Roger Copeland: "The Politics of Perception," The New Republic
(November 17, 1979), p. 28.
2Frank Kermode: "Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev," in Puzzles and
Epiphanies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 2.
3 Adrian Stokes: Russian Ballets (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), p. 114.
4Eric Bentley: In Search of Theater (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p.
58.
5Antonin Artaud: The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press,
1958), p. 58.
6Susan Sontag: "Film and Theater" reprinted in Gerald Mast and Mar¬
shall Cohen (eds.). Film Theory and Criticism, second ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 375.
7Bradford Cook (tr.): Mallarme: Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), p. 62.
8E. T. Kirby (ed.): Total Theater: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P.
Dutton and Co., 1969), p. xxiv.
9David Vaughan: "Fokine in the Contemporary Repertory," Ballet
Review 7, nos. 2 and 3 (1978-79), p. 22.
10T. S. Eliot: quoted in Kermode, op. cit., p. 3.
“Ibid., p. 2.
12Susanne K. Langer: Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner
and Sons, 1953), p. 190.
13Marshall Cohen: "Appearance and the Aesthetic Attitude," The Jour¬
nal of Philosophy LVI, no. 23 (November 5, 1959), pp. 921-924. Samuel
Bufford, "Langer Evaluated: Susanne Langer's Two Philosophies of Art,"
reprinted in George Dickie and Richard Sclafani (eds.). Aesthetics, A Crit¬
ical Anthology (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977), pp. 168-78.
14Andre Levinson: "The Idea of the Dance: From Aristotle to Mal¬
larme" Theater Arts Monthly (August 1927), p. 576.
15Langer, op. cit., p. 201.
I6Ibid, p. 194.
17Walter Terry: The Dance in America, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and
Row, 1971), p. 43.
18Ibid, p. 108.
19Henry Haslam: "How To Perform Bournonville," Ballet Review 2, no.
6, p. 23.
20Peggy Van Praagh and Peter Brinson: The Choreographic Art (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 33.
21David Michael Levin: "Balanchine's Formalism," Dance Perspectives
55 (Autumn 1973), pp. 29-48. Reprinted in Salmagundi, special issue on
Dance (Spring-Summer 1976), pp. 216-236.
178 THE DANCE MEDIUM

“Clement Greenberg: "Modernist Painting/' in Gregory Battcock: The

New Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1966), p.
163.
“Clement Greenberg: "The New Sculpture," Art and Culture (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1961), p. 139.
24Ibid„ p. 144.
“Ibid., p. 143.
“Clement Greenberg: "After Abstract Expressionism," Art Interna¬
tional VI (October, 1962), p. 29. For a fuller discussion of Greenberg's
views see my "Notes on Modernist Art," New Literary History III (1971-
72), pp. 220-23.
“Levin, op. cit., p. 33.
“Arlene Croce: Afterimages (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 127.
My obligations to this work go well beyond the footnotes I have
supplied.
29Ibid„ pp. 185-190.
“Roger Copeland: "Balanchine—Ballet's First Modernist," The New
York Times (Arts and Leisure), January 15, 1978.
31Croce, op. cit., p. 188.
“Levin, op. cit., p. 42.
“Croce, op. cit., p. 188. *
“Levin, op. cit., p. 46.
“Lincoln Kirstein: "Classic Ballet: Aria of the Aerial," Playbill (New
York: American Theater Press, Inc., May 1976), pp. 3ff.
“Lincoln Kirstein: "The Classic Ballet: Basic Technique and Terminology"
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 5.
“Roger Copeland: "Photography and the World's Body," The Massa¬
chusetts Review (Winter 1978), pp. 797ff.

HEINRICH VON KLEIST

PUPPET THEATRE

During the winter of 1801 which I spent in M... I met one

evening in the public gardens a certain Herr C., who had
recently been engaged as premier danseur in the opera there, and
enjoyed an extraordinary popularity.
I told him that I had been surprised to see him several times
already in a marionette-theatre, which they had rigged up in the
 HEINRICH VON KLEIST 179

market place, and which delighted the crowd with its burlesque
plays, songs and dances. He declared that the miming of these
puppets gave him great pleasure, and he made it clear that he
thought a dancer who wanted to educate himself could learn a
great deal from them.
His manner of saying this seemed to me to show that it was
more than a passing whim, and I sat down beside him in order
to question him more closely as to his reasons for this extraor¬
dinary statement. He asked me if I did not think that some of the
dance movements of the puppets, especially of the smaller ones,
were very graceful. I admitted that it was so; a group of four
peasants whom I had seen doing a round dance in quick tempo
were as charming as a picture of Teniers.
I questioned him about the mechanism of these figures, and
inquired how it was possible to control each separate limb and
central point as the rhythm of their movement or the dance
rhythm demanded, without holding myriads of strings on your
fingers.
He replied that I must not imagine each limb was disposed and
moved individually by the puppeteer at every moment of the
dance. Every movement, he said, has its own center of gravity; it
was only necessary to control this from the inside of the puppet;
the limbs were only pendulums which followed mechanically
without any further action on the part of the operator. He added
that this movement was a very simple one; whenever the center
of gravity was moved in a straight line the limbs would describe
a curve, and often, as a result of a slight involuntary shock, the
whole would achieve a sort of rhythmic movement which resem¬
bled dancing.
This remark seemed to me to throw some light on the pleasure
which he claimed to find in the marionette-theatre. But I was still
far from suspecting the conclusions he was about to draw from
it.
I asked him if he thought the puppeteer who operated the
puppets ought to be a dancer himself, or at least to have some
conception of the beauty of the dance. He replied that however
easy the mechanical side of any occupation might be it did not
follow that it could be performed entirely without feeling. The
line described by the center of gravity was a very simple one, he
said, and in most cases straight. In the case of a curved line, the
line of the curve would seem to be only of the first or at the most
of the second degree, and even in the latter case only elliptical;
180 THE DANCE MEDIUM

a form of movement absolutely natural to the extremities of the

human body on account of the joints, and so presenting no great
difficulties to the puppeteer. But from another point of view
there was something very mysterious about this line. For it was
no less than the path of the dancer's soul, and he doubted if there
were any other way of discovering it than that the puppeteer
should place himself at the marionette's own center of gravity,
in other words that he should dance.
I retorted that it had been described to me as a rather dull,
mechanical occupation, like turning the handle of a hurdy-
gurdy. "Not at all," he said. "I would rather say that the move¬
ments of his fingers have a kind of artistic relation to the puppets
to which they are attached, almost of the same nature as numbers
have to their logarithms or the asymptote to the hyperbola." He
admitted, however, that this last fraction of soul might be with¬
drawn from the marionette, and its dance transposed into the
realm of purely mechanical forces and, as I had pictured it, be
produced by turning a handle. I expressed my surprise that he
should pay so much attention to this mere-travesty of fine art,
invented for the amusement of the masses. It was not only that
he seemed to think it capable of development, but he even
seemed himself to take a great interest in it. He smiled and said
he ventured to assert that if a mechanic could be found to con¬
struct a marionette according to his specifications he would make
it perform a dance which not one of their most accomplished
dancers, even Vestris himself, would be able to equal.
"Have you ever heard," he went on, while I gazed in silence
at the ground, "have you ever heard of the artificial limbs made
by English artificers for poor wretches who have lost a leg?" I
said I had never come across any such thing.
"That is a pity," he returned, "for if I were to tell you that it is
even possible to dance with them I am afraid you would not
believe me. Yes, really, they can dance. It is true that the range
of their movements is rather limited, but those which they can
command they accomplish with a grace and ease which every
thinking person can only wonder at."
I replied lightly that in that case he had found his man; for the
artificer who was capable of constructing such a remarkable leg
would certainly have no difficulty in putting together a whole
marionette according to his requirements.
He seemed to reflect on this, and I went on: "What kind of
demands would you actually make on his ingenuity?" "Nothing
 HEINRICH VON KLEIST 181

out of the common," he replied: "Symmetry, flexibility, light¬

ness, but all in a higher degree, and above all a more natural
disposition of the centers of gravity."
"And what advantage would these puppets have over living
dancers?"
"What advantage? First of all, my friend, a negative one,
namely, that they would always be without affectation. For affec¬
tation sets in, as you know, when the soul, the vis motrix, is else¬
where than at the center of gravity, during its movement. Now
since the puppeteer can only have control over this center of
gravity through the medium of his wires or strings, all the other
limbs are, as they should be, inert, mere pendulums, obeying
only the law of gravity; an admirable quality which one looks
for in vain among the majority of our dancers.... Just watch P.,"
he went on, "when she is playing Daphne, and looks back at
Apollo who is pursuing her; her soul is in her vertebral column,
and she bends as if she were going to break in two, like a naiad
of the Bernini school. Or look at young F., as Paris, standing
among the three goddesses and handing the apple to Venus; his
soul—it is really horrible to see—is in his elbow...." He broke
off, then added: "Such mistakes are unavoidable, since we have
eaten of the tree of knowledge. The gates of Eden are barred
against us and the angel drives us on. We must make a journey
round the world and see whether we can perhaps find another
place to creep in at."
I laughed. It is true, I thought, the mind can't go wrong if it is
nonexistent. But I noticed he had something more to say and
begged him to continue.
"Another advantage of the puppets," he said, "is that they are
not subject to the law of gravity. They know nothing of that
worst enemy of the dancer, the inertia of matter; for the force
which lifts them into the air is greater than that which binds
them to earth. What wouldn't our good G. give to be sixty
pounds lighter, or to be assisted in her pirouettes by a corre¬
sponding weight? Puppets only use the ground as fairies do;
brushing it lightly in order that the momentary check may give
a new impulse to their bounding limbs. We use the earth to rest
on, to recover from the exertions of the dance, a moment which
is clearly not in itself dance, and with which there is nothing to
be done but to make it disappear as quickly as possible."
I said that however clear his paradox might be he would never
persuade me that there could be more grace in a mechanical doll
182 THE DANCE MEDIUM

than in the structure of the human body. He replied that a

human being was simply incapable of rivalling the marionette
in this respect. Only a god could measure himself against matter,
in the field of dance; and this was the point, he said, where both
ends of the world's circle fit into each other.
I was still more astonished and could think of no answer to
such extraordinary statements.
"It seems," said he, taking a pinch of snuff, "that you have not
read carefully the third chapter of the first book of Moses, and
anyone who is not familiar with that first period of human cul¬
ture cannot be expected to talk intelligently about a later one,
least of all about the last." I said that I recognized what a dis¬
turbing effect consciousness had upon the natural grace of
human beings. A young man of my acquaintance had, as it were,
lost his innocence before my very eyes, in consequence of a sim¬
ple remark, and despite all his efforts could never get back again
into Paradise. "But what conclusions would you draw from
that?" I added. He asked what strange occurrence I was alluding
to. *
"About three years ago," I said, "I was bathing with a young
man whose whole person seemed to exhale an extraordinary
charm. He must have been about sixteen at the time, and the
favor he found with women had as yet only called forth in him
the faintest traces of vanity. We happened not long before to
have seen in Paris the youth who is pulling a thorn out of his
foot; the cast of this statue, as you know, is to be found in most
German collections. My young friend caught sight of himself in
a mirror just as he was putting his foot up on a stool to dry it,
and this reminded him of the statue. He smilingly drew my
attention to the resemblance. As a matter of fact I had just made
the same discovery myself; but either because I wanted to put his
charm to the test, or perhaps to act as a slight curb on his vanity,
I laughed and said it was only his fancy. He blushed and lifted
his foot again, so as to convince me; but his attempt very natu¬
rally failed. After a third and fourth attempt he became quite
embarrassed; ten times he tried, but it was no use. He was inca¬
pable of reproducing the original movement. Worse still, the
movements he made had something so comic about them that I
could hardly keep from laughing.
"From that day, indeed from that very moment, a curious
change took place in the young man. He would spend the whole
day in front of the mirror, and one by one his charms began to
 HEINRICH VON KLEIST 183

fade. An invisible, tangible force seemed to spread itself like an

iron net over his free, unselfconscious gestures, and within a
year he had completely lost the extraordinary charm which had
delighted everyone who saw him. I still know someone who was
present on that unhappy occasion and who would confirm every
word I have said."
"I think," said Herr C., "that I must take this opportunity to
tell you another story: you will readily see the connection. Once
when I was travelling in Russia I happened to be staying on the
estate of a Lithuanian nobleman whose two sons were great fenc¬
ing enthusiasts. The elder one, in particular, who had just come
back from college, prided himself on his performance, and one
morning, directly I went into his room, handed me a rapier. We
fought, and as it happened I beat him. Perhaps his excitement
got the better of his prudence; in any case every thrust of mine
went home, and at last his rapier flew out of his hand into a cor¬
ner of the room. Half-joking and half vexed, he announced as he
picked it up that he had met his master. But, he said, 'everything
in the world has its master, and I will now show you yours/ The
brothers burst out laughing and shouted: 'Come along, come
along to the wood-house,' and taking me by the hand they led
me up to a bear which their father was having trained in the
yard. I was surprised to see the bear standing on its hind legs
with its back against the post to which it was tied, and its right
paw raised ready to strike; it was in fencing position. I really
thought I must be dreaming, face to face with such an opponent.
But Herr von G. cried: 'Make a pass at him! Make a pass at him!
and see if you can hit him.' When I had recovered a little from
my astonishment I did make a pass at him. But the bear, with a
very slight movement of his paw, parried the stroke. I tried to
upset him by some feints, but the bear did not stir. Then I made
a sudden cunning pass at him, which would have got a man
straight in the chest; but the bear with a quick movement of his
paw parried the blow. By now I was almost reduced to the con¬
dition of young Herr von G. The bear's solemnity robbed me of
my presence of mind. Passes and feints followed each other, the
sweat poured down; it was all of no use. Not only did the bear
parry all my thrusts, as if he had been a world fencing champion;
but, unlike any human fencer, he was never taken in by my
feints. He just stood gazing into my eyes as if he could read my
soul in them. He stood with his paw raised; and if my thrusts
were not serious he never moved. Do you believe this story?
184 THE DANCE MEDIUM

"Absolutely!" I cried, delighted, "I would believe the first

stranger who told me so plausible a story, and how much more
you!"
"Well, then, my friend," said Herr C., "you have all that you
need to enable you to understand me. In the organic world we
see that grace has greater power and brilliance in proportion as
the reasoning powers are dimmer and less active. But as one line,
when it crosses another, suddenly appears on the other side of
the intersecting point, after its passage through infinity; or as the
image in a concave mirror, after retreating into infinity, sud¬
denly reappears close before our eyes, so, too, when knowledge
has likewise passed through infinity, grace will reappear. So that
we shall find it at its purest in a body which is entirely devoid
of consciousness or which possesses it in an infinite degree; that
is, in the marionette or the god."
"You mean," I said rather tentatively, "that we must eat again
of the tree of knowledge in order to relapse into the state of
Innocence?"
"Certainly," he replied. "That is the last chapter of the history
of the world."

(1810)
 Ill
Dance and
the Other Arts

The earliest Italian and French court ballets, the Elizabethan

court masques, the most celebrated works of the Ballets Russes,
and many of the so-called "happenings" of the 1960's all have at
least one thing in common: they all attempted to synthesize sev¬
eral individual arts into a composite whole. Although the dream
of uniting (or, as some writers have claimed, re-uniting) the sep¬
arate arts can be traced back to Renaissance theories of opera, the
best known and most ambitious proposal for this sort of theat¬
rical synthesis is Wagner's theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk or
"total work of art." Wagner called his Gesamtkunstwerk the "art
work of the future"; but, ironically, he conceived of it as an
attempt to revive the essence of classical tragic drama, or what
he called "the great Unitarian art work of Greece." Wagner, like
the Renaissance neo-classicists before him, takes his cue from
Aristotle's Poetics which argued that Greek tragic drama com¬
bined six basic elements: plot, character, diction, thought, music,
and spectacle.
Wagner, though, concentrates on the re-unification of three
major elements: music, dance, and speech. In a prose style more
rhapsodic than discursive, he insists that
The arts of Dance, of Tone, and Poetry thus call themselves the
three Primeval Sisters.... By their nature they are inseparable

185
186 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

without disbanding the stately minuet of Art; for in this dance,

which is the very cadence of Art itself, they are so wondrous closely
interlaced with one another....

Unfortunately, the seamless unity he advocates is more easily

achieved in theory than in practice. (Mallarme complained that,
in Wagner's operas, both dance and poetry are give short shrift.)
But no matter how far Wagner himself may have fallen short of
his own ideal, the theory itself continues to exercise a tremen¬
dous fascination for modern artists and intellectuals. Frank Ker-
mode, as we have already seen, points out that both Loie Fuller
and the early Ballets Russes extravaganzas were hailed as "true"
realizations of the Gesamtkunstwerk, out-Wagnering Wagner.
But neither Fuller nor Diaghilev attempted a reconciliation of
dance and speech. Fuller in fact argued that "motion and not lan¬
guage is truthful." And when Cocteau tried to convince
Diaghilev that the French and American managers in "Parade"
should speak through megaphones, the impressario replied that
spoken language had no place in the work of the Ballets Russes.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the sort of unity and equal¬
ity among the arts that Wagner advocates has never existed, not
even in "the great Unitarian art work of Greece." Aristotle, after
all, lists the six constituent elements of tragic drama in order of
descending importance, with music and spectacle (under which
dance movement is subsumed) ranked lowest.
But for many twentieth-century figures, the true appeal of the
Gesamtkunstwerk lies not in the integration of the arts per se, but
rather in its promise of a return to primitive origins, to the sort
of ecstatic, ritualistic experience from which the separate arts
presumably evolved. Dance is often hailed as the oldest and most
primitive of the arts (both R. G. Collingwood and Havelock Ellis
will make that claim in different ways in this anthology). And
thus it is toward dance—especially the modern dance—that
many proponents of the Gesamtkunstwerk turn. That, certainly, is
the way Eric Bentley, one of America's finest critics and theore¬
ticians of the drama, responds to the work of Martha Graham.
Bentley argues that this desire to re-create a theatre of primi¬
tive, wordless ecstasy is a peculiarly modern impulse. (Presum¬
ably, only the inhabitants of urban, secular societies feel the
pressing need to re-awaken some sense of wholeness and animal
vitality.) "It seems curious at first," notes Bentley, "that the result
of 'scraping back' should be a modern style, that you should go
to the beginning in order to find the end, but such is the way
 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS 187

now to the only true modernity." Writing in the early 1950's, he

insists that "Graham is the dancer of the age of anxiety. But she
is not content, like, say, Jerome Robbins in his ballet on this
theme, to discourse about anxiety. ... We can only express neu¬
rosis in art by conquering it, if fragmentarily, if momentarily....
And health is found at the very foundation or nowhere. Down
through the cerebral nervosities to the primal energies, that is
Martha Graham's journey." Sounding more than a bit like a rad¬
ical Freudian, a Wilhelm Reich, or a Norman O. Brown, Bentley
suggests that, for those who wish to correct the "neurotic" char¬
acter of modern civilization, language itself is part of the prob¬
lem, and that much of the appeal of modern dance derives from
the fact that it often seems not only non-verbal, but anti-verbal.
Of course, Bentley, like many other twentieth-century theatre
people, is enthusiastic about modern dance for another, more
purely aesthetic reason: it provides a bold, colorful, highly the¬
atrical alternative to the prosaic style of surface realism that dom¬
inates the commercial stage. "If we need something to offset our
realistic theatre, undoubtedly the dominant theatre of our age,"
writes Bentley, "... then we should thank Martha Graham. She
is the fullest realization we know of that magical theatre of
which Craig and Yeats and so many others have dreamed." Yeats
wrote a number of short dramas that he called "Plays for Danc¬
ers" and Gordon Craig, the visionary designer-director who was
for a time romantically involved with Isadora Duncan, once
wrote that "the actor is for me only an insufferable difficulty....
(Actors) must cease to speak, and move only, if they want to
restore art to its old place. Acting is action—and dance the poetry
of action."
The contemporary distrust of language suggests at least one
reason why a complete theatrical synthesis is not likely to be
achieved any time soon. But Constant Lambert, the British com¬
poser and longtime musical director of the Sadler's Wells Ballet,
points out another, very different problem with the Wagnerian
ideal. He argues that when the separate arts have fully realized
the unique potential of their own media, they cannot be happily
or successfully married to one another: "A speech from Hamlet
or The Duchess of Malfi ... , or one of Keats's odes," he writes,
"can only lose by any association with music because they are
already complete works of art in themselves. If the music paral¬
lels their concentration and richness, it will only distract our
attention from the words; if it remains in the background allow¬
ing the words to speak for themselves, then it is superfluous.
188 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

Exactly the same situation can be observed in the world of

ballet."
The greatest dance scores of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky can¬
not—should not—attempt to stand on their own in the concert
hall. (Many of us would, of course, disagree with this particular
claim.) But Lambert does not intend these remarks pejoratively.
On the contrary, he insists that the dance scores of Tchaikovsky
and Stravinsky are exemplary because they appreciate the differ¬
ence between direct or present action and recollected or imagi¬
nary action. In the dance, he says, we are solely concerned with
present action: "Choreography by its very nature is denied the
oblique approach to narrative or action open to the writer or
(concert hall) composer." Thus, the ideal musical accompaniment
for dance will avoid any sense of vagueness, mere suggestion, or
recollection; it will create instead a vivid sense of present action.
But is it true that choreography can never take an "oblique"
approach to action? What about Balanchine's "Serenade" or Rob¬
bins's "Dances at a Gathering," works that hint subtly and indi¬
rectly at narrative complications amid an otherwise formal struc¬
ture? Furthermore, Lambert's insistence that the ideal music for
dance convey a sense of present action would seem to rule out
many scores by both Debussy and Ravel that have inspired great
works of choreography. Certainly, according to Lambert's
extremely strict criterion of acceptability, Balanchine should
probably never have choreographed "Episodes" to Webern. One
also wonders what he would say about the choreography of
Merce Cunningham where sound ,and movement are intended
to make (often) conflicting claims on our attention.
Lambert examines one other controversial question: How
closely should the dancing follow the music? He takes a firm
stand against the tradition of "music visualization" and is
opposed to the sort of slavish correspondence between music
and movement advocated by Dalcroze. "The dance," he says,
"should not be a translation of the music, but an interpretation
of it." Even in the early 1930's, when this article was written, it
was already evident to Lambert that George Balanchine is the
exemplary choreographic interpreter of music, the master of con¬
trapuntal complexity.
Like Lambert, Etienne Decroux, the renowned French mime
and teacher of Marcel Marceau, is anti-Wagnerian; in fact, he is
an uncompromising advocate of modernist "purity." In his con¬
versation with Eric Bentley included in this section, he argues
that "the law of art is not addition, but subtraction. To add is to
 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS 189

make a mess, to restore the original 'togetherness' or disorder of

the world. What is rich in art? Not a mixture. A purity. A single
thing—which penetrates deeply." Thus pantomime should not
translate or interpret a preexisting work of dramatic literature:
"it should renounce the privilege of sheltering behind the great
names of writers."
When Bentley suggested to Decroux that pantomime is often
difficult to distinguish from dance, the renowned mime replied
that he saw the two arts as virtual opposites. Dance, he said, is
abstract and based on music; pantomime concrete and based on
the direct observation of daily life. Every one of the mime's ges¬
tures must have a real-life counterpart, whereas dance is too
abstract to be read in this literal way. The dancer can be com¬
pared to a man "out for a walk," someone taking a stroll; but the
mime is a man walking somewhere specific, a man with a desti¬
nation. The dancer, unlike the mime, belongs to a world wholly
mastered by man: when dancers on stage pretend to carry a
grand piano, they make no attempt to indicate its real weight;
but the mime will insist on displaying the strain that the object
occasions. Decroux of course, is talking about ballet, not about
modern or post-modern dance, both of which often assume an
entirely different attitude toward "effort" (indeed, in some post¬
modern dances, the performers might well be asked to move a
real grand piano).
But in arguing for the clearest possible distinction between
dance and pantomime, Decroux echoes Mallarme who wrote in
Ballets: "Acting and dancing become suddenly hostile when they
are brought forcibly together.... Ordinarily, the librettist fails
to understand that the ballerina expresses herself with steps, and
that beyond this she has no eloquence, not even that of gesture."
Clearly, Decroux and Mallarme both have reservations about the
way mime was employed in nineteenth-century narrative ballets
(for example, the sequence at the beginning of the second act of
"The Nutcracker" when the Prince describes in mimed gesture
the battle between the mice and the lead soldiers).
George Bernard Shaw, who was an extraordinarily perceptive
critic of music and drama as well as a great playwright, takes a
very different view of the ideal relationship between pure dance
and pantomimic gesture. An avowed enemy of both escapist
diversion and "art for art's sake"—indeed, of any divorce
between "art" and "life"—Shaw detested the "brainless artifi¬
ciality" of the ballet he saw as a music critic in London during
the 1890's. He proposed that self-indulgent displays of technical
190 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

virtuosity be replaced by a more representational form of dance-

drama. “Why not then/' he suggests, “call in the services of a
dramatic story-teller .. . and make a clean sweep of all the merely
habitual business that has no purpose and no meaning?"
Clearly, Shaw has more in common with Noverre, Fokine, or
even the early partisans of modern dance than with a formalist
like Andre Levinson—although, to be precise, Shaw is not rail¬
ing against formalism per se, but rather against “meaningless"
displays of technique and the reduction of dancers to the status
of trained seals. Granted, he would probably have objected just
as vehemently to the most complex, formalist ballet of Balan¬
chine's; but no formalist of Balanchine's stature was at work in
London in the late nineteenth century. Put another way, the
essential concern of the ballets Shaw wrote about was not shape,
line, and color, but rather acrobatic feats. Thus Shaw advises the
dancer to “move us; act for us; make our favorite stories real for
us; weave your grace and skill into the fabric of our life; but don't
put us off for the thousandth time with those dreary pirouettes
and entrechats and whatd'yecallems."
It is instructive to compare Shaw's essay with Bentley's,
because, as theatre people, both write about dance from the van¬
tage point of dramatic literature. Bentley speaks for those who
are dissatisfied with the realistic drama and who propose that the
theatre move in the direction of the wordless, more abstract
modern dance. Shaw, dissatisfied with the remoteness of nine¬
teenth-century ballet from social reality, encourages it to move
in the direction of the realistic drama (that is, toward the sort of
drama that he himself would soon be writing). Shaw is suggest¬
ing, at least implicitly, that the academic vocabulary of steps be
supplemented with expressive and mimetic gesture, although it
isn't entirely clear whether he is advocating the sort of conven¬
tionalized mime then in use in the Russian Imperial ballets of
Petipa or whether he would prefer the sort of gesture derived
from Delsarte that found its way into the early modern dance.
In the introduction to Section II, we saw that Lessing insisted
on a strict differentiation between the spatial and the temporal
arts. Painters were advised to avoid subjects involving the pas¬
sage of time because their medium is spatial. One might reason¬
ably assume—on Lessing's advice—that dancing would consti¬
tute a most unlikely subject for painters. Why, then, does dance
figure so prominently in the paintings of Picasso, Toulouse-Lau¬
trec, and, above all, Edgar Degas? Theodore Reff, the art historian
and critic, answers this question by examining the many reasons
 RICHARD WAGNER 191

for Degas's life-long infatuation with ballet. Degas, he points

out, had always been fascinated by the pictorial potential of
beings in motion—whether dancers, pedestrians crossing Pari¬
sian streets, or race horses galloping at Longchamp. Degas had
studied (and even copied) Muybridge's famous sequence photo¬
graphs of horses in motion.
But ballet held a particular attraction for him, Reff suggests,
because it is in the nature of ballet movement to appear at once
dynamic and poised (a quality that reminded Degas of the clas¬
sical Greek sculpture he so dearly loved). Furthermore, Degas
believed passionately that art and conscious effort are inherently
superior to nature and spontaneity. And thus, the very artificial¬
ity of classical ballet, the dancer's willed triumph over the nat¬
ural inclinations of the body, confirmed his own prejudices in
favor of art over nature. But Degas's keen eye also allowed him
to penetrate the artificial aura projected by the dancer in perfor¬
mance, so as to reveal the contrast between the drudgery of the
dancer's daily existence and the magic of her momentary glory
on stage.

RICHARD WAGNER
From THE ART-WORK OF
THE FUTURE

... The three chief artistic faculties of the entire man have
once, and of their own spontaneous impulse, evolved to a trini¬
tarian utterance of human Art; and this was in the primal, earli¬
est manifested art-work, the Lyric, and its later, more conscious,
loftiest completion, the Drama.
The arts of Dance, of Tone, and Poetry: thus call themselves the
three primeval sisters whom we see at once entwine their mea¬
sures wherever the conditions necessary for art manifest them¬
selves. By their nature they are inseparable without disbanding
the stately minuet of Art; for in this dance, which is the very
cadence of Art itself, they are so wondrous closely interlaced
192 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

with one another, of fairest love and inclination, so mutually

bound up in each other's life, of body and of spirit: that each of
the three partners, unlinked from the united chain and bereft
thus of her own life and motion, can only carry on an artificially
inbreathed and borrowed life—not giving forth her sacred ordi¬
nances, as in their trinity, but now receiving despotic rules for
mechanical movement....
This is Art the free. The sweet and forceful impulse in that
dance of sisters, is the impulse of Freedom; the love-kiss of their
enlocked embraces, the transport of a freedom won.
The solitary unit is unfree, because confined and fettered in un-
Love; the associate is free, because unfettered and unconfined
through Love....
Each separate faculty of man is limited by bounds; but his
united, agreed, and reciprocally helping faculties—and thus his
faculties in mutual love of one another—combine to form the self-
completing, unbounded, universal faculty of men. Thus too has
every artistic faculty of man its natural bounds, since man has not
one only Sense but separate Senses; while every faculty springs
from its special sense, and therefore each single faculty must find
its bounds in the confines of its correlated sense. But the bound¬
aries of the separate senses are also their joint meeting-points,
those points at which they melt into one another and each agrees
with each; and exactly so do the faculties that are derived from
them touch one another and agree. Their confines, therefore, are
removed by the agreement; but only those that love each other
can agree, and "to love" means: to' acknowledge the other, and
at like time to know one's self. Thus Knowledge through Love
is Freedom; and the freedom of man's faculties is—All-faculty.
Only the Art which answers to the "all-faculty" of man is,
therefore, free; and not the Art-variety, which only issues from a
single human faculty. The Arts of Dance, of Tone, of Poetry, are
each confined within their several bounds; in contact with these
bounds each feels herself unfree, be it not that, across their com¬
mon boundary, she reaches out her hand to her neighboring art
in unrestrained acknowledgment of love. The very grasping of
this hand lifts her above the barrier; her full embrace, her full
absorption in her sister—i.e., her own complete ascension
beyond the set-up barrier—casts down the fence itself. And
when every barrier has thus fallen, then are there no more arts
and no more boundaries, but only Art, the universal, undivided.
It is a sorry misconception of Freedom—that of the being who
would fain be free in loneliness. The impulse to loose one's self
 RICHARD WAGNER 193

from commonalty, to be free and independent for individual self

alone, can only lead to the direct antithesis of the state so arbi¬
trarily striven after: namely to utmost lack of self-dependence.
Nothing in Nature is self-dependent excepting that which has
the conditionments of its self-standing not merely in itself, but
also outside of itself: for the inner are first possible by virtue of
the outer. That which would separate itself must, necessarily,
first have that from which to separate. He who would fain be
nothing but himself, must first know what he is; but this he only
learns by distinguishing from what he is not: were he able to lop
off entirely that which differs from him, then were he himself
no differentiated entity, and thus no longer cognisable by him¬
self. In order to will to be the whole thing which of and in him¬
self he is, the individual must learn to be absolutely not the thing
he is not; but the thing that is absolutely what he is not, is that
thing which lies apart from him; and only in the fullest of com¬
munion with that which is apart from him, in the completest
absorption into the commonalty of those who differ from him,
can he ever be completely what he is by nature, what he must be,
and as a reasonable being, can but will to be. Thus only in Com¬
munism does Egoism find its perfect satisfaction.
That Egoism, however, which has brought such immeasurable
woe into the world and so lamentable a mutilation and insincer¬
ity into Art, is of another breed to the natural and rational ego¬
ism which finds its perfect satisfaction in the community of all.
In pious indignation it wards off the name of "Egoism" from it,
and dubs itself "Brotherly-" and "Christian-" "Art-" and "Artist-
Love"; founds temples to God and Art; builds hospitals to make
ailing old-age young and sound—and schools to make youth old
and ailing; establishes 'faculties/ courts of justice, governments,
states, and what not else?—merely to prove that it is not Egoism.
And this is just the most irredeemable feature of it, and that
which makes it utterly pernicious both to itself and to the gen¬
eral commonalty. This is the isolation of the single, in which
each severed nullity shall rank as something, but the great com¬
monalty as naught; in which each unit struts as something
special and "original," while the whole, forsooth, can then be
nothing in particular and for ever a mere imitation. This is the
self-dependence of the individual, where every unit lives upon
the charges of his fellows, in order to be "free by help of God";
pretends to be what others are; and, briefly, follows the inversion
of the teaching of Jesus Christ: "To take is more blessed than to
give."
194 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

This is the genuine Egosim, in which each isolated art-variety

would give itself the airs of universal Art; while, in truth, it only
thereby loses its own peculiar attributes. ...
.. . Thus the Poetic art can absolutely not create the genuine
art-work—and this is only such an one as is brought to direct
physical manifestment—without those arts to which the physi¬
cal show belongs directly. Thought, that mere phantom of real¬
ity, is formless by itself; and only when it retraces the road on
which it rose to birth, can it attain artistic perceptibility. In the
Poetic art, the purpose of all Art comes first to consciousness: but
the other arts contain within themselves the unconscious Neces¬
sity that forms this purpose. The art of Poetry is the creative pro¬
cess by which the Art-work steps into life: but out of Nothing,
only the god of the Israelites can make some-thing—the Poet
must have that Something; and that something is the whole
artistic man, who proclaims in the art of Dance and Tone the
physical longing become a longing of the soul, which through
its force first generates the poetic purpose and finds in that its
absolution, in its attainment its own appeasing.
Wheresoever the Folk made poetry—and only by the Folk, or
in the footsteps of the Folk, can poetry be really made—there did
the Poetic purpose rise to life alone upon the shoulders of the
arts of Dance and Tone, as the head of the full-fledged human
being. The Lyrics of Orpheus would never have been able to
turn the savage beasts to silent, placid adoration, if the singer
had but given them forsooth some dumb and printed verse to
read: their ears must be enthralled by the sonorous notes that
came straight from the heart, their carrion-spying eyes be tamed
by the proud and graceful movements of the body—in such a way
that they should recognise instinctively in this whole man no
longer a mere object for their maw, no mere objective for their
feeding, but for their hearing- and their seeing-powers—before
they could be attuned to duly listen to his moral sentences.
Neither was the true Folk-epic by any means a mere recited
poem: the songs of Homer, such as we now possess them, have
issued from the critical siftings and compilings of a time in
which the genuine Epos had long since ceased to live. . .. But
before these epic songs became the object of such literary care,
they had flourished mid the Folk, eked out by voice and gesture,
as a bodily enacted Art-work; as it were, a fixed and crystallised
blend of lyric song and dance, with predominant lingering on
portrayal of the action and reproduction of the heroic
dialogue. .. .
 RICHARD WAGNER 195

The Opera, as the seeming point of reunion of all the three

related arts, has become the meeting-place of these sisters' most
self-seeking efforts. Undoubtedly Tone claims for herself the
supreme right of legislation therein; nay, it is solely to her strug¬
gle—though led by egoism—towards the genuine artwork of the
Drama, that we owe the Opera at all. But in degree as Poetry and
Dance were bid to be her simple slaves, there rose amid their
egoistic ranks a growing spirit of rebellion against their domi¬
neering sister. The arts of Dance and Poetry had taken a personal
lease of Drama in their own way: the spectacular Play and the pan¬
tomimic Ballet were the two territories between which Opera
now deployed her troops, taking from each whatever she
deemed indispensable for the self-glorification of Music. Play
and Ballet, however, were well aware of her aggressive self-suf¬
ficiency: they only lent themselves to their sister against their
will, and in any case with the mental reservation that on the first
favorable opportunity they each would clear themselves an
exclusive field. So Poetry leaves behind her feeling and her
pathos, the only fitting wear for Opera, and throws her net of
modern Intrigue around her sister Music; who, without being
able to get a proper hold of it, must willynilly twist and turn the
empty cobweb, which none but the nimble play-sempstress her¬
self can plait into a tissue: and there she chirps and twitters, as
in the French confectionary-operas, until at last her peevish
breath gives out, and sister Prose steps in to fill the stage. Dance,
on the other hand, has only to espy some breach in the breath¬
taking of the tyrannizing songstress, some chilling of the lava-
stream of musical emotion—and in an instant she flings her legs
astride the boards; trounces sister Music off the scene, down to
the solitary confinement of the orchestra; and spins, and whirls,
and runs around, until the public can no longer see the wood for
wealth of leaves, i.e., the opera for the crowd of legs.
Thus Opera becomes the mutual compact of the egoism of the
three related arts. To rescue her supremacy. Tone contracts with
Dance for so many quarters-of-an-hour which shall belong to the
latter alone: during this period the chalk upon the shoe-soles
shall trace the regulations of the stage, and music shall be made
according to the system of the leg-, and not the tone-, vibrations;
item, that the singers shall be expressly forbidden to indulge in
any sort of graceful bodily motion—this is to be the exclusive
property of the dancer, whereas the singer is to be pledged to
complete abstention from any fancy for mimetic gestures, a
restriction which will have the additional advantage of conserv-
196 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

ing his voice. With Poetry Tone settles, to the former's highest
satisfaction, that she will not employ her in the slightest on the
stage; nay, will as far as possible not even articulate her words
and verses, and will relegate her instead to the printed text-book,
necessarily to be read after the performance, in Literature's dec¬
orous garb of black and white. Thus, then, is the noble bond con¬
cluded, each art again itself; and between the dancing legs and
written book. Music once more floats gaily on through all the
length and breadth of her desire. This is modern Freedom in the
faithful counterfeit of Art!...
Thus supplementing one another in their changeful dance, the
united sister-arts will show themselves and make good their
claim; now all together, now in pairs, and again in solitary splen¬
dor, according to the momentary need of the only rule- and pur¬
pose-giver, the Dramatic Action. Now plastic Mimicry will listen
to the passionate plaint of Thought; now resolute Thought will
pour itself into the expressive mold of Gesture; now Tone must
vent alone the stream of Feeling, the shudder of alarm; and now,
in mutual embrace, all three will raise the Will of Drama to
immediate and potent Deed. For One thing there is that all the
three united arts must will, in order to be free: and that one thing
is the Drama: the reaching of the Drama's aim must be their com¬
mon goal. Are they conscious of this aim, do they put forth all
their will to work out that alone: so will they also gain the power
to lop off from their several stems the egoistic offshoots of their
own peculiar being; that therewith the tree may not spread out
in formless mass to every wind of heaven, but proudly lift its
wreath of branches, boughs and leaves, into its lofty crown....

(1849)
 ERIC BENTLEY 197

ERIC BENTLEY
MARTHA GRAHAM’S
JOURNEY

What is Martha Graham's place in our theater? It would be idle

to pretend that the hopes of ten and twenty years ago have been
realized, that modern dance has been accepted and established
like ballet, much less that is has made any impact upon the dra¬
matic theater. It is the poor relation among the theater arts; actors
are paid at least when they work, but modern dancers have to
make their living in some other profession. To the public, mod¬
ern dance has as yet a hazy existence, is probably confused with
gym lessons in girls' colleges, and is certainly associated with a
horse-tail hair-do and square shoulders; it is to theater what spir¬
itualism is to religion: a suburban, low-heeled, pretentious, but
not really dangerous rival. Judging by a recent experiment in
New York—Mourning Becomes Electra as a dance drama—I should
judge that its procedures cannot be taken over by actors and sub¬
stituted for dialogue; Decroux's claim that dance is distinct from
pantomime was made good. Nor have attempts to use modern
dance within the framework of drama been much more success¬
ful. No wonder it has been whispered that Miss Graham's art
will go down to the grave with her.
I don't know what one can say about this opinion except that
it will become true if enough people repeat and believe it. Even
so, when a given form of an art dies, there is no knowing what
elements from it may nourish other forms and survive in them;
the wind bloweth where it listeth. There is certainly a case for
trying to define the theater of Martha Graham while it is still
there to define. Even if her influence were over, it would remain
important that she herself exists.
Havelock Ellis spoke of dances pantomimic and ecstatic, and
we may speak of theater generally under the same two heads.
The pantomimic theater depicts life, holds the mirror up to
nature. The ecstatic theater affirms life and celebrates nature—
by awakening in us the vital, natural forces. The one shows life
as it has become—what we call psychology and sociology. The
other is concerned with life still unlived, unindividuated, pri-
198 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

mordial, life unfiltered, still in the wellspring. This other theater

has been forgotten. Or if not forgotten, remembered only by the¬
orists like Nietzsche or by creative artists like Wagner and
O'Neill, who for different reasons never succeeded in reviving
it. None of these men was primitive enough, had direct enough
access to the depths. Martha Graham has the edge over them in
that dance is of itself more primitive than literature or opera.
True, dance energy can be sublimated into Mozart operas or even
into Shavian discussion plays, but that is only to say you can't
banish dance from the theater altogether. It would be natural to
suppose it would come back naked after a period in operatic or
literary dress. Nearly half a century ago Jane Harrison said that
as our life becomes more and more artificial and we live more
and more at second hand, we feel a growing need for that direct
contact with life which is felt in dance. She had explained in
advance the origin of modern dancing—which, translated into
the terms of dramatic criticism, is a revival of ecstatic theater. If
we need something to offset our realistic theater, undoubtedly
the dominant theater of our age, if we need reminding of
another possibility, if it is desirable to keep another, the other,
sort of theater alive, then we should thank Martha Graham. She
is the fullest realization we know of that magical theater of
which Craig and Yeats and so many others have dreamed.
The ecstatic theater takes the form of modern dance, the pan¬
tomimic theater takes the form of realistic drama. But how rela¬
tive our conception of realism is! Less realistic than our drama,
modern dance is more realistic than ballet. Within the field of
dance criticism it is the hard realists who defend Graham, the
aesthetes who defend Balanchine. Edwin Denby writes:

Judged by what I look for in ballet. Miss Graham's gesture lacks a

way of opening up completely, and her use of dance rhythm seems
to me fragmentary. It does not rise in a long sustained line and
come to a conclusion. I find she uses the stage space the way the
realistic theater does, as an accidental segment of a place; not the
way the poetic theater uses the stage—as a space complete in itself.

A realist would reply that theater is indeed a "segment" of the

world, though not an accidental one, and that it is both intelli¬
gent and "poetic" to suggest that the lines of a stage design con¬
tinue outside the theater. Here and now I am more concerned
with another remark of Denby's. He says that Miss Graham
"began with the decorative attitudes and the connecting walks
Martha Graham in "Cave of the Heart" (1947). "If we need something
to offset our realistic theater, undoubtedly the dominant theater of our
age, if we need reminding of another possibility, if it is desirable to keep
another, the other, sort of theater alive, then we should thank Martha
Graham. She is the fullest realization we know of that magical theater
of which Craig and Yeats and so many others have dreamed." (Bentley)

199
200 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

of Denishawn 'exotica'; her formal point of departure was an

actor's loose gesture sequence, not a dancer's logically sustained
dance sequence." The parti pris here is given away by the ascrip¬
tion of the epithet "loose" to an actor's gestures and the epithet
"logical" to a dancer's steps. More serious is the preceding clause.
"Decorative attitudes" and "connecting walks" and "exotica"
suggest triviality. It is for those who have let Graham's art work
on them to report how much more than "exotic" is the unfamil¬
iar element in it; "exotic" is the word we give to originality that
we fail to recognize. How much more her walks do than "con¬
nect" is apparent to every sensitive witness of the first minute of
her Joan. Ballet-dancers would do well to learn from Miss Gra¬
ham the virtues of omission: when a plain walk is right and
expresses everything that is to be expressed, more than a walk
would be wrong.
As for "decorative attitudes," what Graham has done for them
is enough in itself to stamp her a genius. She can stand or sit
doing nothing and keep our attention, not by "personality" in
the ruined, everyday sense, not by her private ego, let alone her
sex appeal or charm (also in the ruined sense), not wholly by her
beauty either, but by a personality that she achieves on stage by
sheer concentration of purpose. Admittedly this is in part a mat¬
ter of beauty. But Graham's beauty is of a formidable sort, enig¬
matic, ambiguous. Sometimes, especially in photographs, she
looks like the standard glamorous woman of these United States.
Yet above the standard American mouth, set in the unnaturally
motionless mask of her upper face, are the perturbed eyes of the
American intelligentsia, luminous centers of un-American activ¬
ities. There are times when one hates Martha Graham's face.
Because there is no drama without contrast, beauty has to be
ambivalent to be dramatic.
Martha Graham's attitudes would only seem "decorative" to
someone who does not look for their meaning because he is sunk
in the formalism (or anti-realism) of the ballet. What gives life to
an attitude? Is it not the dramatic quality we call "projection"?
At the crudest level what gives projection is the projecting por¬
tion of the body, a fact wittily exploited by Mae West. Although
Miss Graham exploits her physique more fully than Miss West,
it is her peculiar glory to suggest by the physical so much of the
non-physical. Hence the relevance of the most spiritual part of
the body, the face, and of the most spiritual part of the face, the
eyes.
 ERIC BENTLEY 201

There was a time when the face was not important, even to an
actor. He kept it hidden under a mask. In modern times, how¬
ever, the face has increasingly become the center of theatrical
action, and the cinema has offered us faces eighteen feet high,
with features as large as our arms and legs. Only the ballet-dan¬
cer has kept a semblance of the mask by the impassivity—delib¬
erate or involuntary—of her face. Ballet-dancing evinces one of
the leading characteristics of decadence: making one part of an
organism develop inordinately while letting the rest fall into
desuetude. A race of ballet-dancers would eventually be all legs;
the fixed expression on the face would be detachable, as with
Cheshire cats. On the nonballet stage, with the spread of realism,
attention has come more and more to be focused on the face.
There are, of course, not only degrees of realism, but also
kinds. We customarily think of realism as the mimicking of
externals, yet Stanislavsky wrote of Chekhov's spiritual realism,
and Stark Young has eloquently described a similar inwardness
and passion in the realism of Duse. If the opposite of realism is
formalism, or love of patterns for their own sake, Martha Gra¬
ham is rather to be classed with Chekhov and Duse. The nature
of her medium makes her—or helps her to be—less psycholog¬
ical. She is concerned with the inner life, but not with individual
psychology. Just as music-drama has best been able to project cer¬
tain instinctual types (Orpheus, Don Juan, the Flying Dutch¬
man), so the dance-drama of Martha Graham approaches female
archetypes: Herodias, Judith, Joan. Just as music undercuts psy¬
chology and takes us down to the subsoil in which psychology
has its roots, so Graham's dance portraits present only the
dynamic variations of feeling that underlie our motives and deci¬
sions. Hence it is her most nearly perfect compositions, such as
Herodiade, that most defy analysis. Unless I am mistaken, it
would be foolish to read such a piece as allegory and say "this
means Herodias is plotting mischief" and the like. Miss Graham
is creating an Urwelt from which mischief could indeed come,
but which has itself no moral or psychological bias; great good
could come from it too.
Realistic compared with the ballet, unrealistic compared with
modern drama, Martha Graham is certainly—and, at her best,
single-mindedly—concerned with reality. Reality is both exter¬
nal and internal, and if it is chiefly the internal that she sees, we
shall ask how well she sees it rather than demand that she sees
the external too. Of a work of art we demand that it be all true.
202 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

not that it be all the truth. It must be what the artist sees when
looking with all his might through the spyglass of his medium.
There are some who would be happier if Miss Graham would
dance more decoratively, just as there must be others who would
wish her to drop the larger movements of the dance and limit
herself to the smaller movements of life. They wish the one or
the other on grounds of style. They want her more realistic or
less so. She must refuse to comply, not on grounds of style, but
on grounds of meaning. Whatever the resultant style, she must
interpret life. Seeing her early career, critics expressed their
amazement at her ruthlessness in eliminating movements and
postures that said nothing. In modern fashion, she brought back
into art much of the unevenness of life; hence her syncopated
rhythms and spasmodic moves. By this time her system of con¬
tractions and releases is indeed a system, and her wearier works,
like Judith, are more of an inventory than an invention. None the
less, in the Joan we still find her, in Stark Young's words, "scrap¬
ing back to the design," going back to the beginning. And that,
in the theater today, is the unum necessarium. Such an example,
from a great performer and creator—Chaplin, Decroux, Gra¬
ham—is all we can expect and more than we deserve.
It seems curious at first that the result of "scraping back"
should be a modern style, that you should go to the beginning
in order to find the end; but such is the way now to the only true
modernity. That a sprinkling of false modernities should overlay
and to some extent disguise and distort the true meaning of Gra¬
ham's work is confusing but unavoidable. None of us keeps clear
either of infections or of false remedies. Even Martha Graham is
not a goddess.
She is a priestess. A present-day priestess of an ancient cult.
Notoriously, she is the dancer of the age of anxiety. But she is
not content, like, say, Jerome Robbins in his ballet on this theme,
to discourse about anxiety with the resources of top-drawer inge¬
nuity. Nor is it enough to see neurosis from the vantage-point of
neurosis as Robbins, in more earnest vein, occasionally may be
said to have done. That is no vantage-point at all. We can only
express neurosis in art by conquering it, if fragmentarily, if
momentarily. The only vantage-point to view sickness from is
health. And health is found at the very foundations or nowhere.
Down through the cerebral nervosities to the primal energies,
that is Martha Graham's journey. If we accompany her, even part
of the way, must we not benefit?
(1952)
 CONSTANT LAMBERT 203

CONSTANT LAMBERT
MUSIC AND ACTION

Music, though the most subtle of all arts in its powers of sug¬
gestion, is the most clumsy in its powers of definition. It can sug¬
gest some nostalgic half-shade of emotion with an almost math¬
ematical precision denied to literature, yet it is incapable of the
simple distinction between "He said" and "He thought" without
which the art of the novel would be impossible. (Even in the
works of writers like Joyce and Faulkner, who exalt the interior
monologue at the expense of the action, the distinction between
the two is as firmly established as in the case of Dickens.) But
although music is incapable of making this distinction in so
many words, or rather so many notes, it would be a great mistake
to imagine that this distinction does not exist.
We use the word "music" to cover the world of ordered sound
in general, often without realising that music can be divided into
as many distinct branches as literature—poetic drama, prose
drama, novels, belles-lettres, travel books and the like. No one
would dream of making a play out of Sir Thomas Browne's Urn
Burial or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, yet some of the recent cho¬
reographic assaults on famous pieces of music have not been less
absurd in their misunderstanding of medium. The crude distinc¬
tion between music actually written for the stage and music writ¬
ten for the concert-hall is naturally appreciated; but it is not so
often realised that a similar distinction can exist as regards two
pieces of concert-hall music—I mean the difference between
what may be called direct or present action, and what may be
called recollected or imaginary action.
The difference can most clearly be seen if we compare two
pieces apparently in the same genre and sharing certain similar¬
ities of style: Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherazade and Balakireff's
Thamar, two evocative orchestral works both of which were
eventually turned into ballets. I am not alone in considering
Balakireff's work greatly superior from the purely musical point
of view, and I expect many will agree with me in preferring Fok-
ine's choreography and Bakst's decor in Thamar to their work in
Scheherazade, considered again as separate artistic elements. Yet
Scheherazade, is to me the more successful and satisfying ballet of
204 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

the two, for the simple reason that the music has the direct two-
dimensional quality of present action, while Balakireff's work
has the more subtle quality of imagined or recollected action.
The success is all the more remarkable when we remember that
the scenario of Thamar follows closely the Lermontoff poem
round which Balakireff wrote his symphonic poem, while the
scenario of Scheherazade has nothing in common with the stories
round which Rimsky-Korsakoff wrote his symphonic suite. The
point, I think, is this: Rimsky-Korsakoff's formal outlook being
as simple and direct as the narrative methods of the Arabian
Nights themselves, his music lends itself to any tale of a type sim¬
ilar to those he actually chose to illustrate. Balakireff, on the
other hand, approaches his subject with something of the formal
subtlety of a Conrad, and hence even the most painstaking real¬
ization of his tale does a certain violence to the musical content.
There is in Thamar none of the obvious physical climax which
lends itself so successfully to action in the closing scene of Sche¬
herazade. Instead we are given an emotional summing-up after
the action is over. As a result the actual murder of the Prince on
the stage is too strong an action for the music, while on the other
hand the epilogue is choreographically speaking too weak.
Conrad, to whom I have compared Balakireff, provides us with
a particularly good example of the difference between direct and
recollected action which it is so important for the choreographer
to realise when dealing with music. It is a platitude to point out
that although Conrad's plots, considered as a dramatic frame¬
work, are melodramatic, his books are never melodramatic
because of his oblique approach to the more theatrical incidents.
When, however, he tried to turn his novels and tales into plays
they became just melodramas and rather bad ones at that. It is as
though some one had re-written a Greek tragedy and shown us
the messenger's speech in terms of action; made us see Jocasta
committing suicide, Oedipus gouging his eyes out. Such a play
would be an outrage on taste, but is it less of an outrage when
Massine represents the personal tragedy which lies behind the
slow movement of Tchaikovsky No. 5 by a bogy-man with pan¬
tomime wings breaking in on a pair of lovers? Choreography by
its very nature is denied the oblique approach to narrative or
action open to the writer or composer. Hence the necessity for
the choreographer and scenario-writer to exercise the utmost dis¬
crimination and reticence in the choice of a ballet theme.
To return to Thamar, which provides a peculiarly apt test-case
 CONSTANT LAMBERT 205

for our argument. Though less suited to action than Scheherazade

because of its emotional-cum-formal subtlety, it is, on the other
hand, well suited to action because of its narrative time-sense. It
cannot be emphasised too strongly that although the composer
is forced to adopt time as his medium he does not always
approach time in the same way. Sometimes his themes succeed
each other in dramatic sequence like the acts of a play, sometimes
their sequence and their position in time is dictated by purely
formal reasons. In a symphonic poem by Liszt or Strauss the for¬
mer is the case. The triumphant apotheoses or pathetic death-
scenes which end their works are definitely the last act of the
play and represent the final word on the subject in hand. But this
is not so in the case of a Mozart symphony. We have it on his
own authority that Mozart conceived a symphony in its full form
in one moment of time. It stands to reason, then, that the return
of a theme in his works can have no narrative or dramatic sig¬
nificance. The recapitulation balances the exposition, much as a
tree on one side of a picture might balance one on the other. We
do not look at a picture "reading from left to right" as in a society
photograph, but take in its design as a whole; and though we
inevitably have to listen to a Mozart symphony from left to right,
as it were, we should try as far as possible to banish this aspect
of the work from our minds and try to see it as the composer
conceived it, in one moment of time.
The trouble with any choreographic interpretation of a classi¬
cal symphony (as opposed to a romantic symphonic poem) is that
the dancing is bound to emphasise the least important aspect of
the music—its time-sequence. Let us suppose that a choreogra¬
pher wished to set Mozart's G minor quintet as a ballet. (A hid¬
eous thought, but not more hideous than many recent choreo¬
graphic conceptions.) Any one who appreciates this masterpiece
must also appreciate the fact that the final movement, though
more light-hearted in tone than the rest of the work, represents
not a final "winning through" or "triumph over adversity" but
a facet of experience only, no more important than the others
through its being placed at the end. But if it were presented on
the stage we would be bound to feel during the finale that after
a mauvais quart d'heure the dancers were cheering up consider¬
ably. Perverse though the idea may seem, a complicated tableau-
vivant would actually be a closer interpretation of Mozart's
thought than any ballet.
It is true that there are many symphonies of a later date into
206 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

which narrative element and dramatic time-sequence enter and

which therefore are more suited than Mozart's symphonies to
choreographic interpretation. In fact it may safely be said that
the worse the symphony the more likely it is to make a good
ballet. But that does not alter the fact that the symphony, of all
musical forms the most concentrated, intellectual, and with¬
drawn from present action (as opposed to emotional retrospect),
is of all musical forms the least suited to physical or dramatic
expression.
That certain symphonic movements are "danceable" is really
beside the point. A poem may be musical in the extreme and yet
be totally unsuited to musical setting (the greater part of Keats
for example). The choice of music for dancing may well be com¬
pared to the choice of words for music. The most suitable poems
for music are either short lyrics definitely written for the pur¬
pose, such as the songs in the Elizabethan dramas which impose
their own treatment, or rather loosely written poems with more
poetic suggestion than form, such as the poems of Walt Whit¬
man. Fletcher's "Sleep" from The Woman Hater is a moving poem
when read in the study, but it is doubly moving when heard in
Warlock's setting. Whitman's poems, or rather rough drafts for
poems, become complete works of art only when supported by
the music of Delius or Vaughan Williams. In each case the poem
gains. But it is obvious that a speech from Hamlet or The Duchess
of Malfi, an intellectual non-lyrical poem by Donne, or one of
Keats's odes can only lose by any association with music because
they are already complete works of art in themselves. If the
music parallels their concentration and richness it will only dis¬
tract our attention from the works; if it remains in the back¬
ground allowing the works to speak for themselves then it is
superfluous.
Exactly the same situation can be observed in the world of bal¬
let. Tchaikovsky's short dance tunes or variations may be com¬
pared to madrigal verse. They "dance themselves" in the way an
Elizabethan lyric "sings itself." For all their charm they are only
heard to full advantage when in collaboration with the dance.
(Imagine the flat effect of a concert performance of the brilliantly
conceived Blue Bird numbers.) The music of the impressionist
composers (in which I would include, of course, early Stravin¬
sky) provides the equivalent of the loosely written vers libre of
the Whitman type, even when it is specifically written for stage
action. That is to say it has more pictorial suggestion than form
 CONSTANT LAMBERT 207

and does not achieve artistic completeness until defined and

pinned down by action. Petrouchka is meaningless in the concert-
hall unless one knows the ballet; L'Oiseau de Feu is only possible
when reduced to suite form and even then loses half its effect.
One is in no way decrying these composers by pointing this
out. Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky are undoubtedly the two great¬
est composers the ballet has seen, the one representing the clas¬
sical opera side of ballet, the other the music-drama side. They
would indeed have failed as ballet composers were their work to
be satisfying in the concert-hall. But a Beethoven symphony, like
a speech in Hamlet or an ode by Keats, satisfies us completely in
its present form. Any action which might accompany it would
either be an irritating distraction or a superfluous echo.
That the greatest of stage composers were thoroughly con¬
scious of the difference between real and imagined action,
between statement and reflection can be seen clearly if we look
at the work of two composers who divided their attention
equally between the concert-hall and the theatre, Mozart and
Tchaikovsky. While it would not be quite true to say that the
essential style of their music changes when they write for the
theatre, it is certainly true that the physique of their music
changes. I can think of no tune in any Mozart opera which Moz¬
art could have used as the first or second subject in a symphony,
and the same is true of the tunes in Tchaikovsky's ballets. In such
a dance as the pas de deux in Lac des Cygnes, Act II, the very shape
of the fiddle solo is determined by the "lifts" in the choreog¬
raphy. We find no such melodic figuration in his symphonies,
still less in any classical symphonies. It is most interesting to
compare the minuets Mozart actually wrote for dancing with the
symphonic minuets in which the dance form merely crystallises
some phase of emotion and does not call to action. It is even
more interesting to compare the valses in Tchaikovsky's ballets
with the valses in his Third and Fifth symphonies.
Impure symphonist though he was, Tchaikovsky only once
included in his symphonies a movement more suited to the the¬
atre than the concert-hall. I refer to the finale of the Second Sym¬
phony, a straightforward peasant dance which, apart from some
sequential passages of development, is no more symphonic in
style than the Kazatchok of Dargomizhky which it emulates. This
movement, by the way, was the only piece of symphonic music
(technically speaking) ever used by Diaghilev. The phrase "sym¬
phonic suite" as applied to Scheherazade has very little meaning.
208 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

and it is worth noticing that the first movement, which most

nearly approaches to symphonic style, was used as an overture
only.
To say to the choreographer that he should restrict himself to
ballet music written specifically as such by a master of the art like
Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky is obviously a vain counsel of perfec¬
tion. To start with, the supply of such music is by no means equal
to the demand. The days when the greatest composers turned
naturally and easily to ballet seem to be gradually passing (it is
a sign of the times that Stravinsky should have written only one
true piece of ballet music since the war—Le Baiser de la Fee), and
a large number of the ballets written by contemporary compos¬
ers approach the art from far too literary and operatic a point of
view. This is particularly true of the miming scenes where the
average composer tries to suggest in the score each inflection of
the action. He would be well advised to take a leaf out of Tchai¬
kovsky's book. Tchaikovsky's miming scenes are always admi¬
rable because he is content to establish only the general atmo¬
sphere of the scene, and does not try to emphasise imaginary
words in operatic recitative style. How tiresome by contrast is the
opening of The Three-Cornered Hat where the music underlines
every little detail in the scenario. Falla's ballet (admittedly a first-
rate work when viewed as a whole) does not get really going
until the dance of the neighbours, which though inessential
from the dramatic point of view is good theatre for the simple
reason that it is good ballet.
The supply of true ballet music, then, being so inadequate it is
only natural that at least half the ballet repertoire should be
founded on music written for its own sake. When this music is
suited to the dance in texture and rhythm, and not too intro¬
spective or philosophical in mood, it can often be as satisfactory
as ballet music written for the purpose: witness Les Sylphides
among classical ballets, and Cotillon among modern ballets. But
the question of arranging ballets to classical or non-dramatic
music immediately raises the most important problem of all for
the choreographer: How closely should the dancing follow the
music?
There seems to be a growing theory that dancing which rep¬
resents visually the formal devices and texture of the music must
of necessity be pleasing to the musical mind. Nothing could be
further from the truth. I am sure there must be innumerable
musicians beside myself who experience the same feeling of
exasperation when the choreographer turns the stage into a vast
 CONSTANT LAMBERT 209

lecturer's blackboard and, by associating certain dancers with

certain themes, proceeds to underline obvious formal devices in
the music which any one of average intelligence can appreciate
with half an ear. Literal translations from one language into
another are always unsatisfactory and usually ridiculous. "Sym¬
phonic" ballets are no exception to this rule. Moreover, the cho¬
reographer is debasing his art if he thus makes dancing a mere
visual expose of the music. The dance should not be a translation
of the music but an interpretation of it. It should not slavishly
imitate the musical texture but should add a counter-subject of
its own. Choreography which does this is truly contrapuntal,
whereas choreography which interprets a fugue in the Dalcroze
manner is merely a species of choreographical "vamping," far
more harmonic than contrapuntal in feeling.
It is significant that Balanchine, who undoubtedly has the
greatest technical knowledge of music among present-day cho¬
reographers, is also the most free in his treatment of the music.
He is one of the few choreographers with the intelligence to
realise that visual complexity is not the most suitable accompan¬
iment to aural complexity. The reverse, surely, is the case. (I am
not speaking now of dramatic, narrative ballets where the purple
patches in the choreography must inevitably coincide with the
purple patches in the story and music.) A complicated fugue
occupies, or should occupy, so much of our aesthetic concentra¬
tion that we cannot assimilate an equal elaboration of physical
design at the same time. On the other hand a simple valse tune
lends itself to the richest and most complex design on the stage.
I hope I may be pardoned a personal reference in pointing to
two highly successful examples of the choreographic counter¬
point I am trying to define. One was Ashton's treatment of a
three-part fugato in Pomona as a lyrical dance for a solo dancer;
the other was the astonishing choreographic fugue which Nijin-
ska arranged to a purely homophonic passage in the finale of
Romeo and Juliet. We can find examples of the same kind of thing
even in the ballets of Massine, who for all his brilliant and
indeed unsurpassed sense of purely choreographic design shows
only a mechanical and superficial appreciation of musical design.
The finales of Amphytrion and Le Pas d'Acier, for example, where
he erects a choreographic structure of remarkable complexity on
a comparatively simple musical basis, are to my mind far more
successful than the finale of Choreartium, which rivals the music
in complexity but never in intensity. These two ballets, however,
were composed before he had started the vogue for "symphonic"
210 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

ballet, which marks the nadir of the collaboration between music

and the dance.
In a brief essay such as this it is impossible to do more than to
adumbrate a few lines of approach to a highly controversial sub¬
ject which as yet has received little serious attention. I have not
attempted to propound anything in the nature of an aesthetic
theory. The art of ballet is still too young for that. Ballet did not
reach its Wagnerian stage until the pre-war Diaghilev days, and
though it has made up since for lost time it is still inclined to lag
behind. It will lag farther behind if choreographers, instead of
finding new forms inspired by their own medium, pin them¬
selves to forms which belong essentially to another medium,
forms, moreover, which (save in a few rare instances) have
already outlived their period of aesthetic significance.
(1936)

ERIC BENTLEY
THE PURISM OF
ETIENNE DECROUX

FIRST POSTULATE.

If a good play releases before me its powerful flow of verbal water, I am in

a state of literary receptivity.
Let a mime appear all of a sudden, and I will judge him queer.
If, when he has begun to "lead me into" his performance, the word again
has its turn, it is its turn to be queer.
Hence: one must not place Pantomime and the Word side by side in time
when both are richly active.

SECOND POSTULATE.

But can one mix them? Yes, when both are thin—for then one completes
the other. Deprived of their music the words of a pleasant song seem thin; the
same with the music of the same song deprived of its words.
Hence: one can mix words and pantomime on condition that they be thin.

THIRD POSTULATE.

But cannot one of them manifest itself richly? Yes, to the extent that the
second manifests itself thinly.
 ERIC BENTLEY 211

IN OTHER WORDS:
When two arts are active together, the one must retreat when the other
advances, and vice versa.
The poems of Verlaine which have most profited from music are precisely
those which are least satisfactory when simply read.
The actor should abstain from all gesture when he speaks rich verses.
Conversely, a considerable pantomimic activity may happily accompany
words, thin words.
But instead of its being a man accompanying words with gestures, it will
be a man accompanying his gestures with words . . . and hence thin ones.
But not being aware of the possibilities of Pantomime, no actor can write
words that are deliberately thin and good— that is, whose thinness is
proportionate to the envisaged richness of Pantomime.
Hence, for a long time yet. Pantomime should not insinuate itself into
works of dramatic literature; it should renounce the privilege of sheltering
behind the great names of writers.
—ETIENNE DECROUX

It is usually hard to meet the French on anything like intimate

terms. They do not wish to have lunch with you. They make an
appointment for the midafternoon, perhaps they drink an aper¬
itif; after which they consider their duty done and never see you
again.
Barrault is to be seen for a moment in his dressing-room with
the autograph-hunters at his heels and the smile of dutiful, har-
rassed royalty on his lips.
With Decroux it is different. When you are introduced to him
after a performance, he assures you that, while shaking hands
and passing the time of day are all very well, one must sit down
in peace and for a lengthy session if one intends to get any¬
where. I went to his small apartment in the quatorzieme a couple
of times and stayed several hours each time.
I was particularly interested in the purism of Decroux, accord¬
ing to which the theater arts should be separated rather than
combined. I mentioned his note on Pantomime and the Word as
cited above. Decroux appealed to the well-established view that,
in Reinhardt's words, it is to the actor and no one else that the
theater belongs. Yes, I said, but the actor is not merely a mime,
he also speaks. Decroux replied without fuss that this was pre¬
cisely the trouble. When an actor speaks he shares the responsi¬
bility for his performance with the author of his words; in fact,
he becomes the author's slave. "The poet's lines follow one
another inexorably like the trucks of a freight train. The poor
actor can't squeeze himself in between them. You understand.
212 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

don't you, how in the end the slave revolts? The cry of the actor
against literature is the cry of the native against imperialism, of
the Indian against England... ." Decroux explained to me his
view of a theater without words. It will be all acting. Although
costume, lighting, and setting cannot, like words, be totally elim¬
inated, they will be drastically cut down. The result will be
essential theater.
I asked if there was anything behind this view except an
intense love of pantomime. He said there was. He thought that
what I called "purism" was the correct view of art in general. "In
the world outside, I grant you, in the universe, things are not
separated; they exist in a jumble, together. But man does not
accept this situation. L’homme aime la difference—man likes differ¬
ence. Man as scientist admits that things are 'together' in the
world, but in the laboratory he separates them. Man as artist
refuses even to admit things are 'together7 in the world. He is
Prometheus, and protests against the nature of things. He lives
by the pretense that things are separate in the world too. He lives
by separation. The law of art is not addition, but subtraction. To
add is to make a mess, to restore the original 'togetherness' or
disorder of the world. What is rich, in art? Not a mixture. A
purity. A single thing—which penetrates deeply. A single thing
that leads to all things." A fervor pressed upon the natural
gentleness of Decroux's voice whenever he brought before his
inner eye the vision of life as "difference." "Think of love, the
love of man and woman. How different are the sex organs of
man and woman, how wonderful their union, what a miracle of
nature, how they fit together! Now think of the union of like and
like—homosexuality! It exists—but it is inconceivable!" And
when his American pupil Alvin Epstein came into the room,
Decroux said: "Didn't we decide, Ahlveen, that the law of differ¬
ence is a law of economy? That life is too economical to repeat
itself? That even a machine never repeats itself, one part never
duplicates the work of another?" The thought would wander all
round the intellectual globe before returning to theater and pan¬
tomime. The idea was plain. Each art has its own territory and
should stick to it. The opposite of Wagnerism.
I raised the objection that the art of dance, for example, was by
its very nature dependent on another art (that of music). And,
secondly, wasn't dance very close to pantomime, couldn't the
two be said to overlap? Decroux was firm. "I will take your first
point first. Your 'example' is too carefully chosen: it is the only
one you could find. And what must we conclude? Only that
 ERIC BENTLEY 213

dance is the weakest of the arts, the one that can't exist alone—
like potatoes, the weak vegetable, a parasite on meat! As to your
second point, you have fallen into a cardinal error in thinking
of pantomime and dance as akin. They are opposites. Dance is
abstract and based on music. Pantomime is concrete and based
on life. Dance flows like a stream; pantomime moves with the
natural plunge and lunge of the muscles. Dance is soaring and
vertical, pantomime earth-bound and horizontal. The dancer
works with the leap, the mime with the walk. The dancer deals
in symmetric patterns, exact repetitions, regular rhythms, as
music enjoins; the mime in asymmetry, variation, syncopation,
the rhythmic patterns of speech and natural body movement.
Dance comes from excess of energy. When a bear paces to and
fro in his cage, he is finding the symmetric patterns of the dance
in the usual way. A dancer is a man taking a walk—because his
energies are not used up by his work—whereas a mime is a man
walking somewhere, to a destination. Pantomime is the energy it
takes to turn the water-wheel; dance is the gay, spectacular
splash of the excess water, the water the wheel does not need.
Watch dancers on the stage pretending to carry a grand piano.
They rejoice in the hollowness of the pretense. They trip along.
The piano has no weight. Now watch mimes going through the
same act. They present precisely the weight of the piano by indi¬
cating the strain it occasions." As his way is, Decroux let the sub¬
ject broaden out. The classic dancer and the mime, he main¬
tained, belonged to two diametrically opposite types of man:
I'homme du salon and Vhomme du sport. The former belongs to a
world that has been mastered by man. Things are done to him.
Thus, he does not walk, he is walked: all the normal symptoms of
the adventure that walking is are eliminated; what we see is an
imposed pattern. "When a sportsman walks, on the other hand,
you see what walking is. Just watch his legs and the way his arms
move in concert with them! Your ballet-dancer, like your homme
du salon in general, has been trained not to make these move¬
ments; your mime is trained, on the other hand, to display,
exploit, and accentuate them—that is, to give them style."
I found these remarks pertinent to the general reconsideration
of realism which is afoot today, but when I suggested that pan¬
tomime was a more realistic art than dance, Decroux was not par¬
ticularly pleased. He hastened to state a case against realism (or
what he takes for such). "You remember Flaubert's choisir pour
simplifier?" he asked. "Art should not be too present. Poetry is
absence. That is why memory is a good poet. Memory is at a dis-
214 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

tance, subtracting, adding, assembling. Art is like a dream." I

recalled that when Decroux's troupe presents a factory, they
make out of it a tenuous abstract beauty, deliberately forgoing
the grease and sweat, the human concreteness of it. I recalled
that, in one of his demonstrations, Decroux had made much of
the rendering of spiritual facts by physical means. "It is the
mind's dearest luxury," he said, "to imagine a world without
causality—to defy gravity, for instance. The law of life is shock,
impact—thus unbroken fluidity of movement suggests the
unreal, the spiritual." And instead of leaving this realm to the
dancers, Decroux has worked out ways of eliminating contrac¬
tions—and all jerks and thrusts—from body movement. This is
his contribution to that transfiguration of life on the stage which
is the professed aim of "magical" theater. As Decroux talked, I
thought of Gordon Craig's conception of a stage on which the
entrances and exits of characters would be unremarked. A world
without causality.
From time to time I returned to the topic that interested me
most, Decroux's purism. I sought new points of attack. For
instance: "What do you do with Shakespeare, Racine, and the
rest?" Decroux did not wish to be so crude. "Let's not talk about
sheer good and sheer bad," he said. "There is a hierarchy of the
higher and lower. We need the lower in art because the higher
is so good we can't stand much of it. Mixed works of art are cer¬
tainly to be classified as lower. As theater men Shakespeare and
Racine are too literary. A work of high art is suited only to its
own proper end. Thus a theatrical work is suited to acting and
not to reading. A play should be unreadable." A further com¬
plaint of Decroux's against language was that it consists of arbi¬
trary noises and symbols that have to be learned. "What we
could use on the stage is vocal mime—sounds like cries and
sighs—only more highly developed—which are in themselves
expressive."
This is Decroux at his most uncompromising. At other times
he makes concessions. "There is more fundamental Pantomime,"
he has written, "in the diction of a Lucien Guitry than in the
gesticulations of a pupil of the Youth Hostels or in the cabrioles
of a dancer." At the end of the statement introducing this article,
the mime's renunciation of literature is said to be indicated "for
a long time yet," but not forever, not in principle. In a relenting
mood Decroux said to me: "History is a zigzag. There are times
to be rebellious and avant-garde, times to hold on and be conser¬
vative; times when one should argue for synthesis, times when
 BERNARD SHAW 215

one should argue for separation...The slave's cri de coeur

against the master, he conceded, is no objective statement of the
facts.
As I left for the last time, he pressed my hand and smiled. "I
fear that there has been un petit peu d’egoisme in my talk to you,"
he said. "I wanted to deposit my thought in you as in a museum."
I reminded him that what I wrote would be simply my impres¬
sions and not a scientific record. (No notes had been taken dur¬
ing the conversations. If they had been, the talk would have
been different, and probably inferior. The letter killeth.) "The
only way you'll get your views into print as you want them is by
writing them down yourself," I said. "Why don't you do so?"
"You remember what Lenin said when he broke off The State
and Revolution in the middle?" Decroux said, acknowledging the
pretentiousness of the analogy with a twinkle. "'It is better to
make the revolution than to write about it.' Some day, perhaps.
For the present I am busy with my troupe."
(1950)

BERNARD SHAW
From MUSIC IN LONDON
1890-94

What is wanted to make the ballet more popular is not its

wholesale adulteration with comic opera, but its internal reform.
It should be recognized that the stock of movements out of
which the principal dancers make up their solos is so limited that
the frequent playgoer soon learns them off by heart, and comes
to regard the solo as a dreary platitude, only to be endured when
the dancer has extraordinary charm of person and brilliancy of
execution. In order to get even a very conventional round of
applause, and that, too, from people who obviously have no
more sense of dancing than the oratorio audiences who applaud
interpolated high notes have of music, a principal dancer must
spoil her solo by a silly, flustering, ugly, teetotum spin, which
216 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

no really fine dancer should condescend to. Then there is the

corps de ballet, consisting of rows of commonplace dancers, indi¬
vidually uninteresting (from the artistic point of view), but use¬
ful for the production of lines and masses of color in rhythmic
motion—for realizing, in short, the artistic conception which
was in Mr. Swiveller's imagination when he described the dance
as “the mazy." Now in planning the evolutions of the corps de
ballet, nothing is easier than to ring the changes on mere drill, or
harder than to devise really artistic combinations and develop¬
ments. The natural result is a tendency to give us an intolerable
deal of drill with each halfpennyworth of poetic color and
motion. The last scene of a ballet is generally a bore, to which
some sort of non-artistic interest is occasionally imparted by such
desperate devices as making successive squads of girls represent
different nations, or different uniforms in the services, or differ¬
ent periods of civilization, or what not, with the result, gener¬
ally, of making the whole affair twice as stale and tedious. All
such mechanical efforts to make lifeless entertainments attractive
invariably lead to frightful expenditure, the last thousand
pounds of which rarely produce sixpenn'orth of effect. Why not,
then, call in the services of a dramatic story-teller, with the req¬
uisite sense of the poetry of motion and movement and spectacle,
and make a clean sweep of all the merely habitual business that
has no purpose and no meaning? The monotony and limitation
of the dancer's art vanishes when it becomes dramatic. The
detestable bravura solos which everybody hates, and which
belong to the same obsolete phase of art as the eighteenth-cen¬
tury florid arias written for the singing virtuosi of the Italian
stage by Hasse, Porpora, and Mozart in his boyhood, would soon
fall into disuse and ridicule; and we could say to our prima bal¬
lerina assolutissima, when she attempted a "variation," "Spare
us, dear lady. Dont do it. Our cherished Cavallazzi, a superb dan¬
cer, never does it. It was not that sort of thing that made the
success of Yolande, of Asmodeus, of Excelsior, or of any of the
ballets that are still borne in mind years after their withdrawal.
Hundreds of forgotten assolutissimas have done it just as well as
you are going to do it; and none of them are remembered save
those who stamped themselves on our memories in their dra¬
matic moments. Move us; act for us; make our favorite stories real
to us; weave your grace and skill into the fabric of our life; but
dont put us off for the thousandth time with those dreary
pirouettes and entrechats and arabesques and whatd'yecallems."
 THEODORE REFF 217

That is the cry of humanity to the danseuse, the ballet-master,

and the manager....
(1893)

THEODORE REFF
EDGAR DEGAS AND
THE DANCE

... If the evolution of Degas' vision of the dance is relatively

easy to trace, the reasons for his attraction to it in the first place
are more complex and obscure. Surprisingly, though this was by
far the most important of his themes, no searching explanation
of its interest and meaning for him has been offered; and he him¬
self seemed to discourage further thought, maintaining that the
dance was merely "a pretext for painting pretty costumes and
representing movements." Yet such an explanation, however
incompletely it is given here, inevitably sheds light on both the
social and the personal grounds of his art.
To a nineteenth-century Parisian, especially one with Degas'
middle-class background, the ballet was a familiar part of the
contemporary scene. His father, a wealthy banker, was an enthu¬
siastic patron of the Opera and introduced him to it at an early
age. Some of the Opera's musicians were good friends of Degas,
who portrayed them in 1868-69 in L'Orchestre de VOpera, the ear¬
liest picture in which he showed dancers in traditional costume.
Thus the ballet was an appropriate choice for a young artist
drawn to themes of modern urban life; and it was in this sense
that Edmond de Goncourt, a pioneer in the literary depiction of
such themes, understood Degas' pictures when he first saw them.
"Yesterday I spent the whole day in the studio of a strange
painter called Degas," he noted in his journal for February 13,
1874. "After a great many essays and experiments and trial shots
in all directions, he has fallen in love with modern life, and of
all the subjects in modern life he has chosen washerwomen and
218 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

ballet dancers. When you come to think of it, it is not a bad

choice. It is a world of pink and white, of female flesh in lawn
and gauze, the most delightful pretexts for using pale, soft tints."
Characteristically, Goncourt dwells on the aesthetic aspects of
Degas' dance pictures, ignoring their content and meaning; aris¬
tocratic in manner and elegant in taste, he responds solely to
their subtle coloring and delicate textures. Yet for this very rea¬
son he is able to appreciate the novelty of a complex design like
the Corcoran Gallery's Ecole de danse, a variant of which he saw
in Degas' studio that day: "There was the green room with, out¬
lined against the light of a window, the curious silhouette of
dancers' legs coming down a little staircase, with the bright red
of a tartan in the midst of all those puffed-out white clouds...."
What Edmond de Goncourt failed to note in Degas' rehearsal
pictures, Ludovic Halevy, a different kind of writer and a close
friend of the artist, certainly grasped. This was the pictorial wit
and irony with which Degas observed the world behind the
scenes at the Opera, a world inaccessible to the public but much
frequented by writers, journalists, and men-about-town. It was
this smart world that Degas, alone among the Impressionists,
though he was soon followed by Forain and others, made his
own both socially and artistically, identifying this insider's view
of the reality behind the theatrical illusion with his own disil¬
lusioned brand of urban realism. Here he could observe the
young dancers struggle for professional success or maneuver, at
the prompting of ambitious mothers, to capture a husband or
"protector" among the gentlemen who circulated freely back-
stage. And like Halevy himself, in the novel La Famille Cardinal,
which he illustrated in numerous monotypes about 1878-79,
Degas conceived of such observations as the very essence of his
wordly realism, a little heartless, yet just....
The struggles of the young dancers—or "rats," as the very
young ones were commonly called—their unceasing efforts to
master a difficult art, their daily round of exercises and lessons,
clearly fascinated Degas, who must have compared these stren¬
uous efforts with his own as an artist. In literally hundreds of
paintings, drawings, and prints, he shows dancers straining and
twisting at the practice bar, or rubbing aching muscles and joints,
or bent over double to tie a slipper, or in unguarded moments of
fatigue stretching or yawning or scratching themselves.... It
was just this dichotomy in Degas' vision of the ballet and the
theater that appealed to his wordly contemporaries, writers such
as Champsaur who, in L'Amant des danseuses, describes pictures
 THEODORE REFF 219

based on Degas of the dancer on stage “in the splendor of her

somewhat artificial beauty, in her glorification under electric
lights," but also backstage, "breathless with fatigue, her features
sagging, the muscles of her calves and thighs bulging, the lines
of her body graceless and almost brutal. ..." Like the laundress
pressing down hard on her iron or yawning, overheated and
exhausted, like the street-walker waiting on the cafe terrace in a
torpor, the dancer in Degas' work is often an embodiment not of
feminine charm but of the lower-class woman's struggle for sur¬
vival, burdened and deformed by her labors. Yet nothing is more
characteristic of his achievement than the way in which he
extracts from such scenes of awkwardness and distress—and
here the pictures ... of a bather precariously balancing herself
as she washes or lying in a strangely undignified position on the
floor also come to mind—images of transcendent beauty. To cre¬
ate beauty out of urban dreariness was essential to his naturalist
conception of modern art.
The ballet, then, had a dual attraction for Degas: it was at once
realistic and artificial, like the Opera or the theater itself. He
could respond with equal interest to the pathos of the dancer's
daily existence and the magic of her momentary glory on stage.
This double-edged awareness is, of course, implicit in any under¬
standing of the theater as a social milieu and also informs images
of it by other artists—among his predecessors, Daumier and
Gavarni; among his followers, Forain, Lautrec, and the early
Picasso. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centu¬
ries, artists and writers found inspiration in the vivid forms of
urban entertainment, delighting in the transformations wrought
by decors, costumes, and artificial lights, and at the same time
identifying themselves with the entertainers as talented per¬
formers who, like themselves, led a marginal and precarious
existence. What is unique in Degas' art is his emphasis on the
dance. Though he also created memorable images of the theater,
the orchestra, the cafe-concert, and the circus, he is above all
"l'amant des danseuses," and this more specialized interest, too,
reveals important features of his artistic personality.
The classical ballet was for Degas a supreme example of for¬
mal, disciplined, even artificial beauty. The dancer's steps, the
movements of her body and arms and logs, down to the smallest
inflections of her hands and feet, were part of an elaborate cer¬
emony, mastered through years of exercise and rehearsal, and
were thus a living demonstration of the superiority of art to
nature. To the creator who never tired of saying, "No art is less
 220 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

spontaneous then my own; what I do is the result of reflection

and study of the great masters," the classical ballet, whose steps
had been invented and named at the court of Louis XIV and had
changed little in the following two centuries, despite the inno¬
vations introduced in the Romantic period, was bound to seem
an ideal source of inspiration. It is the conventional and classical
aspect of the ballerina's appearance and performance that distin¬
guishes Degas' Danseuses a la barre of 1876 from the young cou¬
ples in modern dress dancing informally in Renoir's exactly con¬
temporary Moulin de la Galette. In their stylized, almost
ceremonial movements. Degas' dancers are in fact closer in spirit
to the Salome who moves like a toe-dancer before Herod in Gus¬
tave Moreau's famous picture, also of 1876. That Degas had been
influenced by Moreau in the 1850s, long before he became a col¬
league of Renoir's, merely confirms biographically what is evi¬
dent visually in his dramatic conception of the dance.
So convinced was Degas that art is essentially artifice, an
emblem of the mind triumphant over mere matter, that he could
paint even those pictures of the ballet which seem most natural¬
istic, the pictures of exercise, instruction, and rehearsal, entirely
from memory and imagination. Despite their appearance of
authenticity, they were created in the studio, with a few note¬
book sketches, some drawings made from models, and a prodi¬
gious visual memory as his sole source of documentation....
According to Degas himself, he did not always possess even that
much visual information; writing to Albert Hecht, an influential
friend, about 1882, he asks: "Do you have the power to have the
Opera give me an admission pass for the day of the dance exam¬
ination?. .. . I've done so many of these dance examinations,
without having seen them, that I'm feeling a little ashamed
about it." We are uncertain how literally to take such a confes¬
sion, coming from an artist who enjoyed saying provocative
things and who seems not to have painted a dance examination
either before or after 1882. But at the very least it hints at the
distance between appearance and reality in even the most seem¬
ingly authentic of his dance pictures.
However appealing as a spectacle of formal, stylized character,
the ballet would never have interested Degas if its essence were"
not the human figure in motion. The wax-work dancers he saw
at the Musee Grevin, though life-size and utterly realistic in atti¬
tude, costume, and setting, could hardly have satisfied him,
though they may well have inspired his own subtly modeled
and realistically clothed figurine, the Petite danseuse de quatorze
 THEODORE REFF 221

arts, which he showed in 1881, one year before the Musee Grevin
opened. It was because the living dancers moved, and in
rhythmic patterns determined by the music and a long choreo¬
graphic tradition, that he was so much drawn to them. All beings
in motion fascinated him, from pedestrians crossing streets in
Paris to race horses galloping at Longchamp; and when, at the
end of his long life, virtual blindness forced him out of his stu¬
dio, he spent hours walking or riding on omnibuses, finding
consolation in sensations of ceaseless change. The movements of
horses particularly interested him, and he was one of the first
artists to grasp the significance of Eadweard Muybridge's instan¬
taneous photographs of them, which he copied and used as
models for his equestrian paintings from about 1880 on. Even in
his earlier pictures,... he displays an uncanny ability to capture
the phases of a horse's walk or canter. But as in the case of the
dancers, it was because these were harmonious movements,
orderly and rhythmic as a result of long training, that they
appealed so much to Degas. We have only to compare the pat¬
terns of repeated movement in the Danseuses se baissant and in
Trois jockeys of the same date to realize how closely related the
two phenomena were in his mind. In many ways the thorough¬
bred race horse was the ballet dancer's natural counterpart; as
Paul Valery put it, "No animal is closer to a premiere danseuse, a
star of the corps de ballet, than a perfectly balanced thorough¬
bred, as it seems to pause in flight under the hand of its rider,
and then trips forward in the bright sunshine. Degas painted it
in a single line of a poem: 'Tout nerveusement nu dans sa robe
de soie.'" That the poem Valery quotes, a sonnet entitled "Pur
sang," is one of eight, of which almost all the others are devoted
to dancers or the dance, confirms the close association of the two
themes in Degas' imagination.
The ballets Degas saw at the Opera of his day were rarely clas¬
sical in content, but despite their exotic or folkloric subjects and
settings, he invariably showed the dancers in their traditional
white tutus, which had been introduced in the Neoclassical
period. (Only in he Ballet de "Robert le Diable" does he show them
in the nuns' habits they wore in that production.) And in treat¬
ing the lessons, exercises, and rehearsals that were his principal
motifs, he naturally portrayed the young "rats" in their required
practice costumes, with somewhat longer white tutus and flesh-
colored tights, to which he added colorful sashes and black vel¬
vet chokers as accents. This time-honored aspect of the ballet
undoubtedly also appealed to the mature Degas, a man of
222 DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

strongly conservative character who cherished old customs and

attitudes. More than that, the classical ballet had for him the
deeper significance of resembling and thus evoking the truly
classical art of ancient Greece. In the modern dancers' move¬
ments, daringly expanded as they had been by the great stars of
the Romantic period, he could hardly have seen many traces of
those noble, stately rhythms he so much admired in ancient stat¬
ues and reliefs, yet he persuaded himself that he did. When he
was asked by the American collector Mrs. Havemeyer, "Why,
monsieur, do you always do ballet dancers?" he replied at once,
"Because, madame, it is all that is left of the combined move¬
ments of the Greeks." If we substitute "synthetic" for "com¬
bined," a better translation of the word "combine" that Degas
probably used, we understand more easily what he meant: he
could find in the ballet—and transpose into his own art—those
images of the human body in motion, at once dynamic and
poised, that seem to synthesize the very essence of a movement,
as in classical statues. And if we examine a pastel such as Danse
grecque. . . , with its graceful poses like those in Greek sculpture,
or a drawing such as Groupe de cinq danseuses avec paysage classique
in the Arthur Peto Collection, with its Acropolis-like setting, we
realize why, on this level, too, the often mediocre ballet at the
Paris Opera of his time could nevertheless hold him in thrall.
There were, no doubt, other reasons than those already given
for Degas' life-long fascination with the dance; with an artist of
his complexity, a single explanation is rarely adequate. The
female dancers (he never painted the male ones) were youthful,
graceful, charmingly dressed, and may well have had a senti¬
mental appeal for him, one that remains unacknowledged in his
unidealized and largely unerotic images of them. Certainly he
was closely acquainted with the many dancers who posed for
him and whom he helped to improve their positions at the
Opera; and according to a studio legend that need not be true to
be revealing, he followed one of them across the ocean to New
York. He himself hints at a sentimental, though somewhat dis¬
illusioned, attitude to them in a letter to the sculptor Paul-Albert
Bartholome; lamenting his loneliness and lack of affection, he
adds: "And even this heart (his own) is somewhat artificial. The
dancers have sewn it into a bag of satin rose, of slightly faded
satin rose, like their dance slippers." Later he concealed such
feelings beneath a benevolent paternalism, indulging the young
dancers' whims, enjoying their pranks, and supporting their
efforts. But not entirely; for in pictures such as Danseuse: Scene de
 THEODORE REFF 223

ballet he continued to juxtapose very suggestively the dark scroll

of a double bass thrusting upward from an unseen orchestra and
the light form of a dancer hovering on stage, as he had in several
earlier ballet scenes—a juxtaposition whose meaning is made
more explicit in Lautrec's poster of Jane Avril at the Jardin de
Paris, also of the early 1890s. But we have already considered
enough reasons for Degas' interest in the ballet, enough theories
and arguments; for no one believed more strongly than he that
"there is no arguing among the muses. They work all day, very
much on their own. In the evening, work finished, they get
together and dance."

(1978)
 t

,
 IV
Genre and Style

The American humorist Robert Benchley once said that there are
two categories of people: those who believe that people can be
divided into two categories and those who don't. Robert Ben¬
chley notwithstanding, most critics and historians of the dance
remain firmly committed to the practice of categorization.
Indeed, throughout most of this century, they have routinely
divided Western, theatrical dancing into two sometimes antago¬
nistic genres, ballet and modern dance. More recently, during
the last fifteen or twenty years, a third major designation, that of
post-modern dance, has been added. (Non-theatrical dancing—
that is, social and ritualistic dance—will be considered in the
final section of this book.)
Of course no one—not even the most overzealous pigeon-
holer—pretends that every individual example of theatrical
dance can be easily and unambiguously assigned to one of these
three genres. Where, for example, does one put the work of
Twyla Tharp? Or Merce Cunningham, who is a transitional fig¬
ure between modern and post-modern dance, not belonging
wholly or comfortably to either category.
Obviously, a serious "taxonomy" of the dance will require that
we further divide these genres into subgenres (within the genre
of ballet, for example, we will have to distinguish between clas¬
sical ballet and post-Fokine "modern" ballet). Granted, an

225
226 GENRE AND STYLE

attempt to accommodate every difficult case may lead us in the

convoluted direction of Shakespeare's Polonius who speaks of
"tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-
pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,"
etc.
But does the very existence of "difficult cases" mean that the
classification process itself is of little or no value? Some—most
prominently, the Italian aesthetician Benedetto Croce—argue
that every work of art is a "difficult" case, and that even to think
in terms of genre or style is to misrepresent the unique and irre¬
ducible nature of each aesthetic object. For Croce, the ideal art
criticism would consist almost entirely of monographs about
individual works of art.
But are individual works of art that much more resistant to
classification than living things? Few would deny the value of
biological categories such as family, genus, and species (in fact,
Darwin might never have formulated his theory of evolution
had it not been for the classification of plants and animals in the
eighteenth century). The only danger in subjecting works of art
to a similar system of classification is that the critic may evolve a
purely mechanical approach for arriving at critical judgments
(for instance, "modern dance is such and such; therefore, the
work before me is a 'good' modern dance to the extent that it
possesses these characteristics . ..")
Yet far from blinding us to the uniqueness of an individual
work of art, familiarity with the general category to which a par¬
ticular work belongs may, in some instances, be an indispensable
aid in fully appreciating that work. For example, as we have
already seen, David Michael Levin argues that Balanchine's for¬
malist dances all reveal the hidden essence of classical ballet and
it is difficult to imagine someone fully appreciating certain
works of Balanchine's without a knowledge of the genre to
which they belong. Twyla Tharp's original "Deuce Coupe" for
The Joffrey Ballet also takes a familiarity with the genre of ballet
for granted when it examines the "syntactical" similarities
between classical ballet and contemporary social dances.
Assuming then that considerations of genre are more than just
critical conveniences, we still face the problem of deciding
which sets of shared characteristics constitute genres. There are,
after all, an almost unlimited number of ways in which individ¬
ual dances might be classified. We could, for example, distin¬
guish between dances that are purely formal in nature and those
that are representational or expressive, those that project some
 GENRE AND STYLE 227

sort of illusion and those that are rigorously anti-illusionistic,

those that rely heavily on costumes, scenery, and lighting and
those that do not.
All of these distinctions are important and all enter into criti¬
cal discussion at some time or other, but most dance writers pre¬
fer to consider these differences subsidiary to more fundamental
discriminations based on the nature and quality of the move¬
ment itself. Does that imply that the basic movement 'Vocabu¬
laries" of ballet, modern, and post-modern dance possess some
sort of natural or objective status? Is there, in other words, any
sort of direct aesthetic equivalent for the biological genus or
species?
The literary critic Northrop Frye, in his influential study The
Anatomy of Criticism, argues that there are four fundamental lit¬
erary genres: comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire, and that they
correspond to the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and
winter respectively. (For example, the weddings that conclude
many Shakespearian comedies are literary residues of ancient
fertility rites associated with the coming of spring.) Can similar
claims be made for dance?
Certainly, the early proponents of modern dance believed that
they had discovered (or more correctly, re-discovered) the natu¬
ral way of dancing. But what about ballet, which the early mod¬
erns rejected as arbitrary and unnatural? One of the major con¬
tentions of those who write about ballet in this section is that the
classical ballet "vocabulary" is not arbitrary, that it constitutes
the "natural" way of dancing on a proscenium stage. For exam¬
ple, Lincoln Kirstein, the American writer and General Director
of the New York City Ballet, insists that "The root of ballet train¬
ing in the five academic foot positions established some three
centuries ago is not arbitrary. These determine the greatest fron¬
tal legibility and launch of the upper body in silhouette, framed
in a proscenium." The classical ballet vocabulary, he adds,
"depends on muscular and nervous control deriving from four
centuries' research into a logic combining gross anatomy, plane
geometry, and musical counterpoint." "Legibility" is a word that
occurs again and again in Kirstein's writings. He sees ballet as
the dance form most fully committed to the values of theatrical
legibility, and the fundamental principle promoting this goal of
maximum visibility is that of en dehors, the balletic turnout.
"Turning out," writes Adrian Stokes, the British art critic and
balletomane, "means that the dancer, whatever the convolutions
of the dance, continually shows as much of himself as possible
228 GENRE AND STYLE

to the spectator/' Stokes goes on to examine the intimate con¬

nection between en dehors and the five academic positions upon
which all balletic training rests. These basic positions allow the
dancer to move freely to the left and right without compromis¬
ing the body's openness.
Ballet, argues Stokes, is the most "externalized" form of dance,
and consequently the most peculiarly European and Western.
Elaborating on a distinction first established by Andre Levinson,
Stokes contrasts the externalized, open nature of ballet with the
progressive, inward spirals of Spanish dancing, which betray its
non-Western, Oriental origins. The inwardness of such dancing
creates an intensification of mystery, an intimation of something
unknowable; but the openness of ballet by contrast, connotes
perfect clarity and intelligibility. (Kirstein carries this impulse
toward extroversion and outwardness even further, arguing that
the classical dancer simulates a conquest of aerial space. The dan¬
cer in other words, not only turns out from the center of his or
her being, but moves actively up and away from that center.)
Akim Volinsky, who wrote about dance and painting at the
turn of the century in Russia, attaches both a metaphysical and
an evolutionary significance to the verticality of classical ballet.
According to Volinsky, it is the human being's upright posture
that distinguishes him most noticeably from those lesser animals
that walk on all fours. "With the vertical," notes Volinsky,
"begins the history of human culture and the gradual conquest
of heaven and earth." Verticality is endowed with moral con¬
notations as well: to be "upright" or "straight" is to be open and
virtuous. Furthermore, a vertical line "aspires upwards." When
we witness the vertical line of classical ballet, we experience a
peculiarly human feeling of exultation.
Unlike Kirstein and Stokes, Volinsky emphasizes the potential
"expressivity" of classical technique. That makes him a direct
counterpart of his countryman, Michel Fokine, the great Ballets
Russes choreographer and father of what we now think of as
"modern ballet." But Volinsky argues that the classical vocabu¬
lary itself is already deeply expressive, whereas Fokine believed
that expressivity could only be achieved through internal
reform. His best known manifesto of reform is probably his 1914
letter to the London Times in which he argued that mechanical,
ready-made combinations of steps should be replaced by chore¬
ography freshly designed for each occasion, that the corps de
ballet should not be used merely as a backdrop for the pyrotech¬
nics of the soloists, that the ballet dancer's mimetic and expres-
 GENRE AND STYLE 229

sive capabilities not be limited to the face and the hands ("man
can and should be expressive from head to foot"), and that danc¬
ing should be integrated with the other arts. (Fokine re-formu-
lated the ideal of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk for the Ballets
Russes.)
Despite the far-reaching nature of these proposed reforms,
Fokine remained an advocate of evolution, not revolution.
Unlike Isadora Duncan and the forerunners of modern dance, he
did not repudiate the classical vocabulary outright: "If I do not
agree with this style of dancing," he wrote in his essay "The
New Ballet," "it does not mean that I ignore the school. On the
contrary, I think that in order to create anything of value, one
must study and pass through a proper school which, however,
should not be confined to the study of fixed poses and steps."
This helps explain why both Stokes and Kirstein agree that
there is no inherent incompatibility between Fokine's quest for
a greater expressivity and the academic substructure of classical
ballet. For example, when Nijinsky turns his feet "in" rather
than "out" in Fokine's "Petrouchka," the choreographer is, in
effect, acknowledging (rather than merely ignoring) the foun¬
dations of classicism. Stokes in fact writes that " ... it was
because of the power exhibited by this wider expressiveness that
we learned to love its source, the classical ballet."
The same, of course, cannot be said of Isadora Duncan and the
other forerunners of what we now refer to as modern dance. To
Duncan, the classical "vocabulary" was merely an arbitrary and
unnatural assortment of poses wholly unsuited to the expression
of personal emotion. (In the excerpt from his book The Modern
Dance contained in Section I, John Martin argued that "to
attempt to express dramatic ideas and personal experience while
standing with the feet in fifth position, moving the arms in arbi¬
trary arcs, is likely to be absurd.")
Echoing Noverre, Duncan insisted that to find the original
source of the dance, "we must go to nature"; and she came to the
odd conclusion that the solar plexus is the natural, "central
spring of all movement." By contrast, "The ballet school," she
writes in her autobiography, "taught the pupils that this spring
was found in the centre of the back at the base of the spine.. ..
This method produces an artificial, mechanical movement not
worthy of the soul."
"Soul" is a key concept in Duncan's vocabulary. In fact, she
often seems to proceed on the assumption that the dancer need
only nourish her soul and the body will automatically follow in
230 GENRE AND STYLE

good stead. And despite all her talk about "natural" ways of
moving, Duncan's vision of the body remains peculiarly refined,
upright, and highly sublimated. The "true" American dance, she
writes, "will contain no jazz rhythm, no rhythm from the waist
down.... This dance will have no hint in it either of the servile
coquetry of the ballet or the sensual convulsion of the South
African Negro. It will be clean."
Rayner Heppenstall, the British essayist and balletomane, crit¬
icizes Duncan for failing to find a theatrically legible form
through which her soulful feelings could be objectified and
externalized: "None of her movements," he writes, "is precise,
sharp, clean, bright. There is no control. There is no line. Every¬
thing is fluid, formless, natural, free, without style, melting
away.. .." This may sound suspiciously like the knee-jerk reac¬
tion of any die-hard balletomane confronted with a form of
dance not based upon the classical vocabulary. But Heppenstall's
reservations about Duncan cut considerably deeper than that; for
they are moral as well as aesthetic in nature. Duncan's brand of
"self-expression" connotes for Heppenstall an unhealthy exhi¬
bitionism and self-centeredness. He believes that the emotional
life of a healthy culture, by contrast, is regulated by impersonal
forms and conventions. Thus the inability or unwillingness of
dancers like Isadora Duncan to work within the impersonal,
objective, inherited conventions of ballet is evidence of a dan¬
gerous egocentrism, a rejection of the shared, public nature of
society itself.
Lincoln Kirstein makes the closely related argument that mod¬
ern dance is inherently more limited and ephemeral than ballet
because it lacks the transcendent, "timeless" element of an inher¬
ited, classical foundation. It depends too heavily on the "person¬
ality" of its creator. Noting that few modern dance companies
have survived the death or retirement of their founders, he
maintains that "self-expression triumphed without providing
either a cohesive teaching method or a repertory past individual
utterance." (Heppenstall, Stokes, and Kirstein all proceed on the
assumption that ballet is the only form of theatrical dance that
can achieve the degree of impersonality they advocate; but it is
worth remembering that Mallarme and many of the figures that
Frank Kermode discusses in "Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev"
credited the pioneer modern dancer Lo'fe Fuller with a compa¬
rable transcendence of personality.)
Needless to say, the formlessness and theatrical illegibility that
Heppenstall associates with Isadora Duncan does not character-
 GENRE AND STYLE 231

ize modern dance as a whole. Indeed, it makes perfect sense that

the work of Duncan and her contemporaries was originally
described not as modern dance, but variously as “free dance,"
"expressive dance," or even "barefoot aesthetic dance." The des¬
ignation "modern dance" is usually and more properly reserved
for choreographers such as Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and
Doris Humphrey who emerged during the period between the
two world wars.
In "Mind and Medium in the Modern Dance," Katharine Ever¬
ett Gilbert, the American aesthetician, examines the nature of the
transition between these two stages in the evolution of modern
dance. Gilbert shares HeppenstalTs reservations about Duncan
and all that she represented, but restates them in language
derived from Lessing, suggesting that Duncan failed to pay
proper attention to the medium in which she worked. Duncan,
she suggests, was more concerned with "inspiration" and with
the origin of movement than with the actual, physical movement
that resulted. "Isadora's soul," she writes, "expressed itself
fiercely without systematic submission to the conditions of a
medium."
Gilbert credits the Hungarian-born choreographer and
pioneer of dance notation, Rudolf von Laban with having for¬
mulated the necessary "grammar of motion" that enabled mod¬
ern dance choreographers to channel their private emotions into
objectified form. In contrast to Duncan, who emphasized the
organic flow of energy undisciplined by any sort of constraint or
physical restriction, Laban introduced the all-important princi¬
ple of tension and opposition. (Similarly, Graham stressed the
tension between contraction and release, and Doris Humphrey
the opposition between "fall" and "recovery.")
Mary Wigman, his most celebrated pupil and the principal
pioneer of modern dance in Europe, says that Laban taught her
"to keep the balance between my emotional outburst and the
merciless discipline of a superpersonal control." Of course, the
fact that Wigman attached more importance than Duncan to for¬
mal conventions does not mean that she attached any less impor¬
tance to the communication of emotion. In fact, Wigman's essay
"The Philosophy of Modern Dance" is a straightforward version
of the expression theory discussed in Section I:

The primary concern of the creative dancer should be that his audi¬
ence not think of the dance objectively ... in other words, separate
itself from the very life of the dancer's experiences;—the audience
232 GENRE AND STYLE

should allow the dance to affect it emotionally and without reserve.

It should allow the rhythm, the music, the very movement of the
dancer's body to stimulate the same feeling and emotional mood
within itself, as this mood and emotional condition has stimulated
the dancer . . . the expression without the inner experience in the
dance is valueless.

(Wigman, by the way, was a close friend and associate of the

expressionist painter, Emile Nolde.)
Is there any single characteristic shared by those choreogra¬
phers who created "modern" dances between the late 1920's and
the 1940's—something that might enable us to speak of a genre
of modern dance? Many critics would cite a common emphasis
on the externalizing and communicating of inner experience.
John Martin, for example, defined modern dance in precisely
this way. Graham spoke of "making visible the interior^ land¬
scape" and Doris Humphrey described modern dance as "mov¬
ing from the inside out." (Remember that Stokes, Kirstein, and
Heppenstall by contrast, all argued that ballet is unconcerned
with inner experience.)
But Merce Cunningham, a former member of the Graham
company, rejected this reliance on inner experience and emo¬
tional expressivity, thereby initiating yet another stage in the
evolution of modern dance. Cunningham purged his choreo¬
graphy of expressive and symbolic elements, making movement
once again an end in itself (an attitude that brings him closer in
many ways to Balanchine than to the earlier practitioners of
modern dance). And indeed, Cunningham's choreography pos¬
sesses many balletic qualities that earlier modern dance stren¬
uously avoided: lightness, verticality, fast, tricky footwork, a
cool, often ironic tone. Rather than moving subjectively "from
the inside out," Cunningham's choreographic decisions are often
dictated by impersonal devices (tossing coins, rolling dice, con¬
sulting the I Ching).
Surely Cunningham's most radical innovation was to "free"
choreography from any dependence on music. Movement and
sound simply occupy the same space and the same time without
directly affecting one another. But Cunningham is no "purist"
attempting to reduce the art of dance to its minimalist essence.
In fact, no one since Diaghilev has persuaded so many leading
composers and painters to create musical scores, costumes, and
scenery for the dance. But as Roger Copeland points out, Cun¬
ningham's collaborations are Brechtian and dissociated, whereas
Diaghilev's were Wagnerian and unified. (The movement, the
 GENRE AND STYLE 233

sound, and the decor in Cunningham's works are all conceived

independently of one another and are not intended to "fuse"
into a seamless whole. The space between them is essential.)
Copeland also examines the similarities between Cunning¬
ham's sensibility and those of the painters and sculptors with
whom he has collaborated most often. Jasper Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg, both of whom served at various times as artistic
directors of the Cunningham company, were the painters most
instrumental in repudiating the inward, subjective nature of
abstract expressionism, substituting a more impersonal and
objective mode of image-making. Cunningham's rejection of the
expressionistic and subjective elements in modern dance is
directly analogous. Unlike Mary Wigman, he places a high pre¬
mium on objectivity.
"Objectivity" is an even more important concept for Yvonne
Rainer, a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater and one
of the most influential practitioneers of what has come to be
known as "post-modern" dance. Like Merce Cunningham, the
post-modern choreographers were deeply influenced by the
objective, impersonal theories and practices of the contemporary
art world (particularly the work of so-called minimalists and
conceptualists).
In her essay, "A Quasi-Survey of Some Minimalist Tendencies
... Yvonne Rainer examines a number of parallels between
her own choreography and the work of minimalist sculptors.
Rainer coins the term "found movement" to describe the pedes¬
trian, un-stylized movement vocabulary that distinguishes post¬
modern dance from other forms of theatrical dance. Like their
art world equivalent, the mass-produced "found object," found
movements are not subjectively "shaped" by the artist's person¬
ality; they are merely transplanted from their everyday, utilitar¬
ian environment into an "art context" (where their sole function
is to be perceived).
Another parallel between Rainer's choreography and much
contemporary painting and sculpture is that she avoids certain
time-honored modes of illusionism (in her case, this means
refusing to conceal effort, or to make the body appear either
lighter or heavier than it actually is). We might compare her atti¬
tude toward the physical materials of the dance medium with
that of Susanne Langer who argues that
in watching a dance, you do not see what is physically before
you—people running around or twisting their bodies; what you
see is a display of interacting forces ...
234 GENRE AND STYLE

Rainer on the other hand, insists that "it is important to distin¬

guish between real energy and what I shall call apparent
energy." (We might also compare Rainer's attitude toward illu¬
sion in dance with the modified illusionism that David Michael
Levin claims for Balanchine whose work, he says, acknowledges
the actual, physical weight of the body, but only for the purpose
of then rendering it magically weightless.)
One of the concepts that appears most often in discussions of
post-modern dance is that of "the task" or "task-like" movement.
Tasks are found movements of a distinctly goal-oriented variety
(in Rainer's "Parts of Some Sextets," the task was to carry bulky
mattresses from one point to another; in Trisha Brown's "Walk¬
ing on the Wall," performers in body harnesses undertook the
task of walking across the walls of a room parallel to the floor).
The "dance" in each of these instances consists of whatever
movements are needed to accomplish the task and the length of
time the performer takes to complete the task is determined by
objective conditions beyond the performer's (or the choreogra¬
pher's) subjective control. In these situations, says Rainer,
action or what one does, is more interesting and important than the
exhibition of character and attitude, and that action can best be
focused on through the submerging of the personality; so ideally,
one is not even oneself, one is a neutral doer.

Tom Johnson's "Running Out of Breath," first performed by

Kathy Duncan, is included here as an illustration of the way in
which these ideas about found movement, impersonality, anti-
illusionism, and tasks actually function in performance. Here,
the task is to literally (not figuratively) run out of breath while
reciting a verbal text that focuses the audience's attention on the
actual, physical changes the performer undergoes in the process.
"Running Out of Breath" is typical of post-modern dances in
a number of ways: it does not require a "trained" performer, its
movement is pedestrian, it takes place in objective or clock time,
it is rigorously anti-illusionistic, the choreography is dictated by
the task assigned to the performer, and as with much concep¬
tually oriented art, the essence of the work can be appreciated in
verbally paraphrased form (or from reading Johnson's scenario).
The post-modern emphasis on "impersonality" might seem in
a sense to bring us full circle, back to the balletic virtues extolled
by Stokes, Heppenstall, and Kirstein. But most balletomanes find
post-modern dance too austere and lacking in virtuosity for their
tastes. One understands why that is so after reading Yvonne Rai-
 GENRE AND STYLE 235

ner's postscript to her description of "Parts of Some Sextets"

from 1965:

NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic

and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendence of the star
image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no
to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no
to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccen¬
tricity no to moving or being moved.

Clearly, post-modern dance—at least in its early minimalist man¬

ifestations—ran the risk of purifying itself right out of existence.
This sort of austere puritanism led the composer Steve Reich to
quip that "For a long time during the 1960's, one would go to
the dance concert where no one danced, followed by the party
where everyone danced."
"What is needed now," Reich writes, "is not a return to the
modern dance of the 1930's, or 1940's, or 1950's, but rather a
return to the roots of dance as it is found all over the world; reg¬
ular rhythmic movement, usually done to music." Reich dem¬
onstrates how the same minimal components of post-modern
dance can become the building blocks for a more expressive,
kinetically exhilarating form of choreography. He sees Laura
Dean (who has choreographed to his music) as a possible harbin¬
ger of this new movement. (Twyla Tharp's evolution from min¬
imalist austerity to balletic virtuosity suggests yet another way
out of this cul-de-sac.)
Thus far, we have been proceeding on the assumption that
most Western theatrical dances can be assigned with a fair
degree of accuracy to one of three major genres. But as Selma
Jeanne Cohen points out, contemporary developments have
greatly complicated the problem of classification. Many major
ballet companies now include modern dance works in their rep¬
ertories, and today's dancers have usually trained in a variety of
techniques, both balletic and modern. Certainly it is no longer
possible to define as "ballet" any work performed by dancers
who have been trained in an academic method based on the five
positions. Consider a dance like The Moor's Pavane. Is it a modern
dance when it is performed by the Limon Company and a ballet
when it is performed by the Joffrey?
Then there is the troublesome concept of style. Ballet and
modern dance, Cohen points out, are frequently referred to as
styles; but she prefers to regard them—as we have in this anthol-
ogy—as genres (which may then encompass any number of
236 GENRE AND STYLE

styles). “Style" may describe the way an individual dancer inter¬

prets a work or it may connote characteristics shared by members
of a company. Collective styles are often attributed to national or
racial determinants. For example, we routinely speak of British
"reserve," Russian "flamboyance," or American "athleticism."
Ballet companies and their styles often become objects of
national pride and in the last generation a number of distin¬
guished figures, Lincoln Kirstein preeminent among them,
devoted themselves to the development of an American ballet
tradition with a distinctive American style. For him, and for
many others, the New York City Ballet is the quintessence and
triumph of that style.
R. P. Blackmur, the renowned literary critic, agreed that the
New York City Ballet is a quintessential^ American phenome¬
non, but he took a much less favorable view of what that style
represents. He accuses the dancers of being cold, bloodless tech¬
nicians, all too representative of American culture as a whole.
"We Americans," he complains, "have the technique to bring
something to performance so well that the subject is left out."
Anna Kisselgoff, chief dance critic of the New York Times, char¬
acterizes style succinctly as "an attitude imposed upon tech¬
nique." But she insists that the style we associate with the danc¬
ing of particular companies derives from the individuals who
have shaped the artistic identities of those companies and not
from some dubious national stereotype. Rejecting the claims
made by Kirstein and Balanchine, she argues that there is no
peculiarly American style in classical ballet. Our three major bal¬
let companies all dance in distinctively different styles. The New
York City Ballet dances the way it does not because it is in New
York or the United States, but because it is headed by George
Balanchine. If Balanchine had formed his company in England
she suggests, it might well be dancing the very same way.
One of the most perplexing questions related to the issue of
style in dance derives from the confusion surrounding the terms
"classicism" and "romanticism." In all the other arts, classicism
and romanticism are sharply contrasted with each other. Roman¬
ticism is defined as an early nineteenth-century reaction against
the smug rationalism and formal rigidity of eighteenth-century
neo-classical art. By definition, romanticism comes after, and
attempts to repudiate, the assumptions of classicism. But dance
historians tell us that the great "classical" ballets of Petipa
("Swan Lake," "The Sleeping Beauty") follow, chronologically.
 GENRE AND STYLE 237

the great "romantic" ballets ("La Sylphide," "Giselle"). How is

this confusion to be resolved?
Lincoln Kirstein offers the most persuasive solution. "The clas¬
sic dance," he writes, "is not merely a department of theatrical
dancing opposed to the 'romantic/ but rather a central line, or
governing attitude which links the purest developments in tra¬
ditional stage practice, whatever the epoch." Classicism thus
refers to the vocabulary and underlying structure of the dance,
not its subject matter or historical period. This approach allows
us to view romanticism as a stylistic development of classicism
rather than as an opposing style. Ballets such as "La Sylphide"
and "Giselle" are very much a part of the more general romantic
movement in early nineteenth-century Europe. (The denial of
gravity and the rejection of Newtonian mechanics are leading
romantic themes in many of the arts.) But these ballets utilized
the classic dance vocabulary. Of course, they also made new con¬
tributions to that slowly evolving vocabulary. Dancing on pointe
for example, which originally embodied the romantic ballerina's
quest for the ethereal, has now become a basic attribute of classic
dancing.
 Ballet

LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
CLASSIC BALLET:
ARIA OF THE AERIAL

A recent writer in a counter-culture weekly suggests (more in

sorrow than anger) that, for our 'Seventies, dancing as a popular
cult overtakes rock-music of the 'Sixties. This may or may not be
as true of regional as of urban America, but on a grass-roots level,
local proliferation of holiday "Nutcrackers" on some professional
basis is astonishing. Parallel to this is the increased presence of
"Dance" in colleges with residencies for well-known companies.
The number of young people now aspiring to become dancers
approaches actors, singers or musicians, a condition unthinkable
twenty years ago, while there is a new paying public which
hopefully organizes economic support, even state and civic aid.
Dance includes separate families for teaching and perfor¬
mance: "ballet," "ethnic," "social" and "modern." For ballet,
there is a single canon of instruction comparable to that which
equips pianists, violinists and singers in fingering or voice con¬
trol. Different emphases obtain but the alphabet taught is uni¬
versally legible from long tradition, demanding the same crite¬
ria. "Ethnic," which includes social styles (more for fun than
show), encompasses folk-dance, recreation for amateurs and
source-material for theater. Formerly "national" dances, stage-
versions of Spanish, Slav or "oriental" were instructed, but today
these, as balance or alternative to academic ballet, are largely
replaced by "modern."
During the 'Thirties when "modern-dance" first asserted itself,
an inheritance from Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn fragmented
into main lines of apostolic succession. Forty years later, energy
is lodged in the repertory of Martha Graham, her immediate
heirs and theirs. Increasingly, with a use of the ballet bane and

238
 LINCOLN KIRSTEIN 239

borrowings from ballet-trained instructors, “modern-dance" has

lost some of its early antagonism to classic ballet. Stylistic lines
blur and fuse. However, important polarities exist, so it may be
useful to fix parameters of Ballet and Modern. Cursory definition
involves oversimplification; generally it can be stated that ballet¬
training and performance accentuates the area of air, denial of
gravity by leg-work in beats and jumps; brilliant multiple turns;
speed in the stage-traverse; pointe (toe)-shoes; virtuoso acrobatics
(attracting large audiences to opera-houses) accompanied by
orchestras of symphonic dimensions.
"Modern-dance" came into being partly as a reaction against
such factors, with a basic rationale accentuating the solar-plexus
as source of contraction and release; a response to earth's gravity
and pull; "psychology-through-movement" with ideas from
myth and social-protest. Stemming from Bennington College,
then spreading to state normal-schools where it began to replace
"Phys. Ed" (physical education) as a more aesthetic body-build¬
ing, "modern-dance" acquired the fervor of a crusade, vaunting
ethical superiority over "mere" (mindless) entertainment.
Along with such protestant policy, there were other determi¬
nants. Ballet instruction was then not widely available nor per¬
formances visible. Conditions of labor and production costs were
prohibitive for unpaid volunteers. A modesty of visual and musi¬
cal accompaniment made virtues of necessity, fast elevated into
articles of faith. It was proclaimed that main differences between
"modern" and ballet were between "principles" and "tech¬
nique," as if one lacked skill, the other morality. Both had both.
Rather, difference was and is between accidental idiosyncrasy
against tradition, personalism versus collectivity, discontinuity
as opposed to an unbroken line. "Modern-dance" opted for self-
expressive "originality," defined by a few notable heterodoxies.
Self-expression triumphed without providing either a cohesive
teaching method or a repertory past individual utterance. "Mod¬
ern-dance" lies among the minor verse of theater. When one
counts how few "major" poets (or anything else) there are, how
"major" so many "minor" ones, this seems no aesthetic limita¬
tion, although it may prove both a temporal and popular one.
No matter how close "modern-dance" approaches widespread
acceptance, however flexible or eclectic its expanded idiom,
essential contrareity remains. "Modern-dance" choreographers
can compose for ballet-trained professionals with few limita¬
tions, but "modern-dancers" cannot slip from one technique to
the other, lacking academic classic training. Few modernists start
240 GENRE AND STYLE

aged eight or nine, which is mandatory for ballet as for piano or

violin virtuosi. Admittance to ballet-schooling (at its most
responsible), is not licensed by simple ambition, but through
expert opinion. Severe physical preconditions determine the
ultimate chances of a classical professional; such "elitist" limita¬
tions need not deter "modern." In ballet, as far as doing-one's-
own-thing goes, there is little scope for "originality" or impro¬
visation. "Modern-dancers," since they start so much later, with
minds more developed, are free to intellectualize impulses
which have no bearing on acrobatic efficiency depending on
synthetic method. "Modern-dance" training is based on a few
isolated concepts tailored first to their unique inventors and
restricted by such stylization, then adapted by a more or less lib¬
erated succession to their own peculiar needs and possibilities.
Ballet's vocabulary, by which strong executants magnetize big
audiences, depends on muscular and nervous control deriving
from four centuries' research in a logic combining gross anat¬
omy, plane geometry and musical counterpoint. Its repertory is
comparable to opera, symphony and classical drama. "Modern-
dance" may be equated with the collected works of contempo¬
rary prose or verse writers. It has still to be proven that subse¬
quent performances lacking their originators may long hold the
intensity of their originals. "Modern-dance" is no longer a van¬
guard of reform. Far livelier in its current effect on both ballet
and "modern" are influences from popular music, jazz and its
mutations. Here, its risk lies in the very timeliness of novelty;
transient slang fixated on a given epoch.
The root of ballet-training in the five academic foot-positions
established some three centuries ago is not arbitrary. These
determine the greatest frontal legibility and launch of the upper
body as silhouette framed in a proscenium. Ballet-repertory was
calculated for opera-houses with orchestra-pits, and balconies
rendering the stage-floor a virtual backdrop for half the public.
It is not the only form of theatrical dance; it is the most spectac¬
ular. Extreme acrobatism entails hazard which, overcome, sparks
the most ardent audience detonation. Its filigrain of discrete
steps; its speed, suavity, and flagrant tenderness; its metrical syn¬
copation and asymmetry make visual superdrama on the broad¬
est spectrum. In "modern-dance," focus is elsewhere. From its
start, it was on and in central somatic areas of the body, rather
than extension of peripheries. A prime distinction exists
between occidental and oriental dancing: open against closed.
 LINCOLN KIRSTEIN 241

centripedal against centrifugal; kinetic against (dominantly)

static; fast against slow. This is oversimplification, but a like par¬
allel might be set for ballet against “modern": aerial versus
terrestrial.
From Denishawn down to today, the orient, both in move¬
ment and morality, strongly influenced "modern-dance." From
ideas via Emerson, Whitman and Nietzsche invoked by Isadora
Duncan, with Denishawn's experience of Japan and India, first
intellectual, then ethical superiority was claimed from religious
precedent and temple practice. Ballet, with its vulgar connota¬
tions of frivolous luxury, sexual-toy or musical bagatelle (until
Diaghilev) offered a likely target for self-educated amateurs. Isa¬
dora was a puritan; she feared seduction of her students by the
charms of Russian ballet. In the wake of war and disaster, Ger¬
man and Austrian poets, painters, musicians and dancers of the
Twenties and early Thirties proposed valid experiment which
gained prestige as a passionate vanguard. Serious ballet had been
lacking in their countries for nearly a century. American tours
by Mary Wigman, Kurt Joos, Harald Kreutzberg corroborated
and encouraged our own modernists. But, as Diaghilev himself
said—the Germans had learned how to move as they forgot how
to dance.
At the same time, classic ballet received fresh impetus with the
arrival in New York of Diaghilev's heirs. America had seen no
Russian dancers since 1917. Through painting by Matisse and
Picasso, concerts by Stravinsky and Prokoviev, audiences were
eager and prepared for "modern" ballets by Massine, Nijinska
and Balanchine. This repertory was as much novelty as "modern-
dance" and bore slight kinship to Pavlova's Dying Swan. How¬
ever, the new ballets spoke with a Parisian accent and further
spurred an opposition which was not only struggling for pro¬
gressive form, but also a nascent national expression. From such
tensions "American Ballet" was born.
It is not too much to claim that its present popularity began in
commercial theater, on Broadway and in Hollywood. The strong¬
est exterior influence on the development of the academic dance
has derived (and still does, largely through Stravinsky) from jazz
rhythm, beat, the shifting pulse and syncopation of styles and
steps from ragtime to rock. "Modern-dance" unquestionably
extended possibilities. Unorthodox use of the body in ballet,
from Nijinsky and his successors was more an inversion of aca¬
demic positioning than any radical extension of technique. The
Nijinsky in "Petrouchka" (1911). "Unorthodox use of the body in ballet,
from Nijinsky and his successors, was more an inversion of academic
positioning than any radical extension of technique." (Kirstein)

242
 LINCOLN KIRSTEIN 243

rehabilitation of theatrical elegance from commonplace habit

came through Kern, Gershwin and Rodgers. Balanchine's insis¬
tence on the then-unknown credit "Choreography by" in 'Thir¬
ties musicals gave a new coinage to the classical line, at once
sleek, rangy, athletic and modish, whose prototypes were more
Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire than ex-imperial ballerinas.
That ballet has gained a mass-audience is evident. That "mod¬
ern-dance" has its own is plain. What continues to distinguish
the two are elements which have always been present and do not
change. In ballet what attracts its public is a sharper focus on the
execution of steps, clear components of dance-speech, not nec¬
essarily at top speed nor unbroken flow, but which proclaim
capacity in flexibility, lightness, power, brilliance off the floor.
Ballet simulates a conquest against gravity of aerial space. Grace
and elegance are involved but in unwavering control, the con¬
vincing wizardry in ease which at once conceals and demon¬
strates effort. In "modern-dance" the torsion of exertion, the
moist anguish of psychological contest supplies pathos. The style
in its tragic or mythic aspect stays agonized and intimate. Ballet
is open, broad, grandiose, courtly and considerate, not of the
exposed self, but of skill in steps and partners in a company.
Psychic nuance, the visceral unconscious, upon which "modern-
dance" depended remains its prime self-limiting material. How¬
ever, as it has developed through a third or fourth generation,
present champions are prompted by pop-music as well as Bach
and Handel, for satire and comedy, increasingly a reaction from
the solemn tyranny of their progenitors. But lacking any abso¬
lute acrobatic proficiency, it is doubtful whether continued use
of the term "modern" holds much permanent contemporaneity.
Its attraction becomes time-bound, a nostalgic mode, like "art-
nouveau," "art-deco," "modern-art."
Dame Marie Rambert proposes that classic ballet offers a ser¬
vice parallel to bel-canto voice-production for trills and roulades.
For her, "La Bella Danza" is not a nineteenth-century stylization
nor a period fashion, but a steadily expandable vocabulary of
spectacular action, propelling unique and extreme capacities of
the dancer's instrument. For the ballet-artist, mastery of steps
infers domination of space, as much above the floor as upon it.
Limits-explored are not those of extreme emotion, but of expres¬
sive motion. Determined and defined, ballet is a continuous aria
of the aerial.

(1976)
244 GENRE AND STYLE

ADRIAN STOKES
From TONIGHT THE BALLET

THE CLASSICAL BALLET

The classical technique may not provide the reader's chief
interest in the modern ballet: but he will now see that the clas¬
sical technique underlies, and indeed defines, dancing which is
ballet dancing. And it follows that anyone who has taken suste¬
nance from the ballet spectacle and who, by the same token, can¬
not stomach the German schools of the "free" dance, will have
interest and reverence at least for the classical technique. More¬
over, it is probable that the frequenter of the ballet, in the pro¬
cess of becoming an enthusiast, will choose, rather than avoid,
the nights on which Swan Lake or Sylphides or Casse-Noisette or
Coppelia or Giselle are performed, the five classical ballets which
have been constantly performed in London during the last few
years.
The bearing of the classical dancer, we have said, is character¬
ized by compactness. The thigh muscles are drawn up, the torso
rests upon the legs like a bust upon its base. This bust swivels
and bends but, in most adagio movements at any rate, the shoul¬
ders remain parallel to the pelvis bone. Every bend, every jump
is accomplished with an effect of ease and of lightness. Perhaps
nothing is more typical of the brilliancy of ballet than the man¬
ner in which the ballerina turns her head in a pirouette. Her eyes
are fixed upon a point in space; as she turns, her head revolves
last and comes round first with the eyes fixed on the same point.
Thus by the fixed eyes that revolve in a flash back to the same
position and fix the audience again, the volition as well as the
actuality of speed, accuracy and brilliance is expressed.
The "turning out" of the classical dancer's thighs, legs and
feet, give the broad base-line for jumping and turning and
enable a balance that could not otherwise be attained. All the five
positions are "turned out": the second and fifth positions allow
the dancer to move sideways easily without turning the body.
"Turning out" is the essence of ballet and we must pause to
examine its aesthetic significance. Hitherto I have attempted to
argue on general grounds that ballet is the most "externalized"
form of the dance, an embodiment of the ideals of the European
 ADRIAN STOKES 245

theatre. It will now be possible to make the conception more pre¬

cise by treating it in terms of "turning out." For "turning out"
means that the dancer, whatever the convolutions of the dance,
continually shows as much of himself as possible to the specta¬
tor. When he stands in the first position facing the front, we see
his feet and his legs in profile. The ballet dancer is, as it were,
extended. We realize it best in the adagio, a supreme test for the
ballerina. When, facing us, she bends forward over her front leg
in an arabesque, the foot of the raised rear leg is turned out and
tilted upward. A downward pointing foot not only would make
an ugly line but would spoil the effect of openness, of disclosure
and of that suspension slightly above the ground by which
objects are best defined. Again, when the free leg is extended in
front and is brought round in the execution of a grand rond de
jambe to the second position en Vair, leg and foot are once more
turned outwards. The late Monsieur Andre Levinson, famous as
a ballet critic, had a special affection for this position. It typified
for him the openness of the dance. In all such convolutions of
the adagio the ballerina is showing the many gradual planes of
her body in terms of harmonious lines. While her arms and one
leg are extended, her partner turns her slowly round upon the
pivot of her straight point. She is shown to the world with the
utmost love and grace. She will then integrate herself afresh,
raise herself on the points, her arms close to her body in the fifth
position en bas, her feet close together, the one slightly in front
of the other. It is the alighting of the insect, the shutting of
wings, the straightening into the perpendicular of feelers and of
legs. Soon she will take flight and extend herself again. Mean¬
while she shows us on the points what we have not seen in the
arabesque or developpe, two unbroken lines from toes to thighs.
Compare this sublime fulfilment, this perfect intercourse
expressed in planes, with the progressive spirals of Spanish
dancing that betray its oriental ancestry or with the coils of mes¬
meric tension which the Indian or Javanese dancer builds up and
with the same form expends. The uniform outwardness of ballet
avoids such alternations. If it is less intense, it is no less pro¬
found: for ballet is adjusted to the planes of the stage, composes
into a precise picture, a precise sphere of feeling which the imag¬
ination grasps entire.
As a rule, the dances of other civilizations seem to us to express
foremost the absorption of strength, the building up of a reserve
of vitality, a kind of inner recreation. There are dances that
denote the expenditure of energy: but one is still conscious that
246 GENRE AND STYLE

behind the movements of such dances the dancer is drawing to

himself the strength of the outside world, appropriating the life
of animals or of the fields, or feeding upon a cultural heritage,
himself its god. Such dances symbolize an intensification of the
human mystery, the rapt human power of absorption alternating
with expenditure. The more typical European forms of the dance
are exactly the opposite: they show a dissolution of mystery, they
express passion in terms of an uniform corporeal outwardness.
The ballerina's body is etherealized. She seems scarcely to rest
upon the ground. She is, as it were, suspended just slightly above
the earth so that we may see her better. She seems cut off from
the sources of her being, or rather, those dark internal sources
are shown by her as something light and white, brittle as are all
baubles, all playthings that we can utterly examine; yet, at the
same time, so perfect is her geometry that we feel this plaything
which our minds may utterly possess, to be as well the veriest
essence. Her partner guides and holds her. And he—he then
watches her pas with upraised hand, he shows her off. He has
the air of perpetual triumph, and when the time comes for his
own variation he bounds, leaps, bounces and rejoins the ballerina
in the wings amid applause. Such is the abstract of the pas de
deux, the crux of ballet.
In the allegro, ballet dancers move, and they move lightly and
fast. Outside of ballet there is no true allegro in dancing, no fast
travels that are executed with the utmost lightness and ease. All
the same, a similar corporeal outwardness, we have said, is char¬
acteristic of the most typical European dances. As well as in the
stately measures of palaces, ballet has its origin in dances of the
people. The English country dances, dances for the village cou¬
ples (whereas Morris dances, probably of oriental or Moorish
ancestry, were performed by a squadron of men), some hundred
years after reaching the English court, invaded the continent at
the beginning of the eighteenth century. These contredanses as
they were called in France, have a good deal to do with the
development of ballet. It is probable that they assisted the
growth of allegro. Certainly, except for the minuet, and for the
gavotte which was considered scandalously vivacious when first
introduced, slowly-trodden measures began to decline.
But apart from any historical proof, I would claim that ballet
is the stylized, cultural form of the European dance (if one may
entertain that conception for a moment) because ballet expresses
through the agency of the human body, the very same mode of
projecting feeling that characterizes all the greatest European
 ADRIAN STOKES 247

visual art. The same fixity without distortion and without stern¬
ness, the same outwardness, is the hall-mark of our art, a steady
revelation that calls to mind the open face of the rose or smooth
mountains in unbroken sunlight. All art is the conversion of
inner states into outward objective form. But whereas the objec¬
tive form is the constant in art, the degree of outwardness
thereby expressed varies a good deal. It is the pleasure of many
visual arts to intimate, by means of the objective form, an inner
state: whereas, in the highest achievements of European visual
art, that same inner intensity is entirely transposed into some¬
thing smooth, gradual yet immediate: time and succession are
converted into spatial forms, not merely symbolized by spatial
forms. We like to have the mystery cleared, to see our feelings
laid out as something concrete and defined. We would win for
self-expression the homogeneity and the soft light of stone,
stone with its gradual, even-lighted surfaces. Watching the clas¬
sical ballet I am constantly reminded of Agostino di Duccio's low
reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini, figures seemingly
pressed from the round into relief, preserving many values
which could be seen in a statue only if we walked round it. The
values of the round are expressed frontally by these gradual sur¬
faces. Like the limbs of the dancer, those of these fifteenth cen¬
tury figures are turned outwards; otherwise no synthesis could
have been made of their various facets. And again, as in ballet,
none of these forms are abrupt or contorted. We witness at Rim¬
ini the gradual and glowing face of the stone. In ballet the
human passions are expressed by the gradual uncontorted curves
and straight lines of the extended human body. There is no
residuum, no veil. The human body is purged of atmosphere. All
is shown. When the ballerina extends her leg in a developpe we
contemplate the essence of the European stage, a form of the the¬
atre that is wedded to such display. This exhibition of graduated
limbs is an act of virtuosity; for "turning out" is not "natural"
but is accomplished by the dancer with an air of exuberant ease.
Ballet is full of virtuoso effects. The male dancer performing tours
en I'air like an animated helicopter. So be it.
The character that I have called typical of European visual art
and of the European theatre, is, of course, primarily a Mediter¬
ranean product which the Renaissance consolidated. For better
or for worse modern Europe is the inheritor of the Italian Ren¬
aissance. We now know how greatly and how long a typical
invention of that time in the visual arts like perspective, can be
misused or used meaninglessly. But perspective in the first place
248 GENRE AND STYLE

was developed by the Renaissance artist to allow him to repre¬

sent those many facets of the human form and of landscape and
to order them in space. It may be objected that subsequent devel¬
opments in the visual arts of Europe do not emphasize the non-
contorted, if virtuoso, outwardness by which I lay so great store.
Nevertheless, though it pass from one art to another, somewhere
it always exists. There are many virtues in Baroque and Rococo
architecture, but superficially, at any rate, these architectures do
not exhibit the extreme spatiality noted above. All the same, it
was from the attitude of seventeenth and eighteenth century
deportment that the five positions of ballet dancing were taken.
In Rameau's eighteenth century handbook we may read how to
make a bow and why it would be ill-bred to turn in the foot. In
making his salutations the eighteenth century gentleman grace¬
fully showed himself, not only his front, but the sides of his legs
and part of the back in the obeisance. He steps forward and he
steps backwards, he shows himself in different perspectives.
Such were the origins of the classical ballet as we have it today.
"When you are able to make a graceful bow,", says Rameau, "you
unconsciously acquire a taste for dancing."
It may seem that these cultivated artificialities are not a very
intense expression. That is true. Nor was there much intensity in
ballet before 1780. Ballet is the last integral manifestation of the
Renaissance spirit... .
There is now in London a large and enthusiastic ballet audi¬
ence. It was created by Diaghilev himself or by the esteem
which, since his death, ballet still holds. This audience would
not enjoy classical ballet as they do had they not been introduced
to it via the modern ballet or the prestige which Diaghilev gave
it. Pavlova's company, it is true, never departed far from classical
ballet. The public at large, however, went to see Pavlova, not her
ballets. But whatever Diaghilev put on the stage heightened our
awareness of ballet in general. First of all there was Fokine who
re-created in his ballets and concentrated the classical pas, har¬
nessed them to a direct expressiveness hitherto reserved for
mime.
All the same the Fokine ballets and the ballets of Diaghilev's
later periods as well, were, in a sense, a diffusion of pure danc¬
ing, a diffusion that embraced the painters, particularly the great
Bakst, and the composers. Both in the choregraphy and in these
other arts the classical ballet with its abstract, self-contained
dances, was harnessed to a wider expressiveness. It was in terms
of this wider expressiveness that a contemporary content could
 ADRIAN STOKES 249

be treated: and it was because of the power exhibited by this

wider expressiveness that we learned to love its source, the clas¬
sical ballet. Diaghilev, not Pavlova, taught us to love classical bal¬
let, to appreciate fully Pavlova herself.
And then there was Stravinsky. Oiseau de feu! What can we
conceive to provide a more comprehensive image of the ballet,
the classical ballet! Fire and bird-like movements (the pointe is
like the tip of a wing) are in combination an extract of the ballet
soul: it was in the music, in the decor as well. Then Petrouchka,
the animated marionette, not the object of farce as Coppelia, but
the figure of a great and profound tragedy. The music is a mas¬
terpiece. Some critics have complained that the music over¬
whelms the dancing. There are ballet purists who always would
have music subservient to dancing, commissioned to supply a
very definite role as a mere accompaniment to the dance. These
purists have much in common with Mary Wigman. There is
room in ballet for every kind of relationship between music and
dancing: the one kind enhances the others, just as the modern
and classical ballets enhance one another. A well-devised ballet
programme today gives us at least three varieties of this relation¬
ship: and that variety is part and parcel of our pleasure.
In Scheherazade and Sacre du Printemps, Diaghilev showed that
symphonic music itself could be employed for ballet. There was
no moonlight in the later ballets. A lyrical content was preserved
with the help of the wry yet exuberant tricks of the music of Les
Six. In Les Matelots, for instance, a ballet which has suffered so
many unfortunate imitations at the hands of English chore-
graphists, the more lyrical passages are entrusted to the wheez-
ings of the trombone: but remember that the stage above is full
of sunlight. This music and Massine's choregraphy provided that
element of toughness, of wryness, necessary as fibre to the mod¬
ern lyrical mood, a plant that extracts a soft brilliance from the
glare and brass of full daylight.
In Massine's and Balanchine's ballets the classical pas are
sometimes used, less to interpret a general idea as in Fokine's
work, more to express character or situation. It is a half-ironic use
of classical pas which yet retain the loveliness of their emblem¬
atic geometry. This characterization in really good ballets is swift
and witty, profound, memorable. It is not a travesty so long as
even the simplest classical pas are used to delineate a situation
expressively. In The Good-Humoured Ladies, one of Massine's ear¬
liest works, the ladies course round the stage with grands jetes,
thus expressing their confusion, their sense of imbroglio. Lifar s
250 GENRE AND STYLE

characteristic variation in Les Matelots (Lifar's part was taken by

Lichine in the 1933 season) was at root a classical dance. In La
Pastorale, the tall Doubrovska as the queen of film stars used to
pass her developpes over the head of her cavalier. That was a witty
and memorable movement, a disdainful adjustment of a classical
pas to current vulgarity, a complete expression of Hollywood sit¬
uations in terms of ballet. By itself such a movement might seem
a travesty of ballet; but the serious beauty of dancing and of the
classically trained dancers, the beauty and brilliance of the decor
and much of the music, existed as well in these ballets. It was
ballet, the ballet style. And then, perhaps, after the interval we
were treated to Swan Lake or to Sylphides. We enjoyed each of
them, Matelots and Swan Lake, to the full, and each of them partly
because of the other. They were entirely different variations
upon the same theme; and we realized how fruitful, how vital
was that theme, the ballet style. Thus Diaghilev could employ
ballet to realize the most improbable conception: there was so
much glory behind him. At the same time the purists grumbled.
Still, Levinson admitted that the 1925 season was saved because
in the midst of these innovations Diaghilev recalled Maestro
Cecchetti, most famous of teachers, and put him again in charge
of the troupe. The dancers performed their classical exercises
each day with renewed vigour. "Diaghilev makes pebbles with
gold," Levinson complained after watching Les Biches or some
such ballet. And if Diaghilev did so, what a relief it was, what a
proof of omnipotence, since everyone except the very best artists
is always trying to make gold with pebbles. (Though to attempt
to make gold with pebbles is a preferable activity in my view to
the one of those London choregraphists, who, mistakenly endea¬
vouring to emulate this period of Diaghilev's ballets, imagine
that they contrive art in their making pebbles from pebbles.)
There are many fine old royalists—and I am not at all sorry
that it is so—who will quarrel with me for not having dealt with
the classical ballet at the beginning of this book and for not hav¬
ing confined myself to the classical ballet. Well, I have given my
explanations. But let me now express again an unqualified love
for the classical ballet. There is something hellenic about it, all
the more noticeable seeing that the classical ballet is the form
imposed upon a northern romanticism. This hellenism is deeply
founded and therefore entirely unlike the superficial hellenism
of Isadora Duncan's dancing. Ballet tends to revert to the treat¬
ment of classical subjects with which it started. The open, physical
and graceful attitudes of the marble Greek gods in whom emo-
 ADRIAN STOKES 251

tion is shown as an outward-turned body, was dramatized by the

classical technique. One witnesses in ballet the release of power,
not its integration, just as in the eighteenth century a man intro¬
duced himself, showed himself, by turning his feet outwards and
by the wide sweep of his arm and by the slow inclination of his
body. But the classical ballet as we know it today, the ballet in
which the classical technique, and particularly the allegro which
is so lacking in other forms of the dance was developed to its
uttermost, dates from the Romantic Age.
La Sylphide, a ballet which provided Taglioni with her most
famous part, was first produced in 1832. Tights had been adopted
some thirty or forty years before, freeing the dancers' legs for
leaps. About the same time the power to turn out the foot and
the whole leg up to the thigh at an angle of ninety degrees
became de rigueur. Before 1780 or so dancers had been content to
turn out at an angle of forty-five degrees only.1 The successes of
Camargo, however, have been attributed to the fact that she was
exceptionally well 'turned out' for that period....
Marie Taglioni was, so to speak, the product of the same line
of thought as had produced these developments, just as Liszt, the
unrivalled pianist, was the product of the age which perfected
the piano and produced the quintessential piano music. La Syl¬
phide was both the first Romantic ballet and the first ballet in
which most of the classical technique was exploited as we know
it today. The romantic ballet is the classical ballet, we have said.
"Another point of interest concerning this ballet" (La Sylphide),
writes Mr. Beaumont in his A Short History of Ballet, "is that the
white muslin costume designed by Eugene Lami for Mile. Tag-
lioni-tight-fitting bodice leaving the neck and shoulders bare,
bell-shaped skirt reaching midway between the knee and the
ankle, pale pink tights and satin shoes—became the accepted
uniform for the dancer of the pure classical ballet." This is the
ballet blanc of pale tights and white ballet skirts, indicating to
some people a rather faded mythology, especially if they have
never seen a proper ballet but only some of the semi-ballet inter¬
ludes of pantomime or of music-hall. This mythology, in classical
ballet at any rate, will not seem faded to those who come to it
from the modern ballet; for the latter will have taught them to
appreciate the ageless and always emblematic qualities of ballet's
geometry, seen at its purest when performed in the traditional
costume.
Amid the glories of the Russian Imperial schools, amid the
snows of the North, served by the tumultuous glint of Russian
252 GENRE AND STYLE

art, the classical ballet reached its height. Would that we might
see the three acts of Swan Lake instead of a one-act resume!
Petipa, a Marseillais by birth who in his early days danced in
Paris with Carlotta Grisi, the original Giselle, and with Fanny
Elssler, was the choregraphist in chief of this great period in Rus¬
sia during the last half of the nineteenth century. According to
Levinson, however, it is an entire mistake to attribute Swan Lake
to Petipa as the programmes always do, at any rate that part of
the ballet which we are accustomed to see. The choregrapher was
Petipa's understudy, Ivanov, who was responsible also for Casse-
Noisette.
I have stated that in classical ballet the music was composed to
order at the precise directions of the choregrapher. This is not
necessarily anything against it as music. The requirements of
particular dances have inspired the best composers at all periods.
In the early days there were the gaillarde, pavane, volte, cour-
ante, canaries, allemande, gavotte, bourree, passepied, rigaudon,
passecaille and sarabande. Indeed, these court measures pro¬
vided forms for a considerable part of seventeenth and eigh¬
teenth century music. Handel and Gluck wrote gavottes and sar-
abandes as songs in their operas. The minuet which Haydn and
Mozart introduced as the third movement of a symphony, was a
dance invented by Beauchamps, Louis XIV's ballet master and
the original formulator of the five positions. He is believed to
have evolved the minuet from a folkdance from Poitou.
An interesting treatise might be written on the influence of
European dancing upon European music. Early nineteenth cen¬
tury music in particular reflects the vast influence of national and
peasant dances, and it was at this time too that the waltz spread
like fire. The waltz obtains an apotheosis in ballet. All these
dances and the music they inspired added greatly to the variety
of the ballet spectacle. For side by side with the dances evolved
out of the classical exercises, the intrinsic ballet so to say, there
has always existed in classical ballet many popular dances which
could be added at will and which, in varying degrees, were
translated into terms of the ballet technique. Popular and folk-
dances, especially since the time of Taglioni, have often served
as the basis of a ballet. Upon such a basis, as upon its own intrin¬
sic movements, classical ballet builds an architectonic that
closely resembles the structure of a symphony. Modern ballet is
constructed in a similar way. One of the great pleasures of a good
ballet is therein to witness symphonic structure as something
plastic.
 ADRIAN STOKES 253

Some popular steps like the ancient pas de basque belong to the
intrinsic ballet. One cannot make any absolute distinction since
nearly all the movements of classical ballet may be derived from
some popular or court dance, two categories which are interre¬
lated in their turn. No definition of a living art can be absolute.
The obvious adapted importation, however, is generally called a
"character" dance in classical ballet: such, for instance, are the
frequent Spanish, Hungarian, Polish and Russian dances. For
these dances, though they be reduced to terms of the stage, still
retain their national style. The waltz, on the other hand, which,
upon its first inception from the Bavarian liindler, grew rapidly
into a cosmopolitan dance, has become part and parcel of ballet.2
Even the French classical-romantic ballet, like the earlier the¬
atre ballet and like the court ballet that preceded it, was largely
composed of 'character' dances. Moresque or grotesque dances,
too, have existed in ballet since the earliest days, since the sev¬
enteenth century masques and the earlier Italian intermedi.
And so, when all is said and done, it is impossible to isolate
the "intrinsic classical ballet." Yet the great style itself which
orders each assimilation is immediately recognizable, and we
find it just as much in those modern ballets which, from the old
point of view, are composed very largely of "character" dances.
We possess a great definition of this style in the ballet music of
Tchaikovsky, a definition that can never be obscured. If music
owes a great deal to dancing, the ballet style itself, the style of
an evanescent art, owes its one and only permanent consolida¬
tion to Tchaikovsky, composer of the scores for Swan Lake, The
Sleeping Princess and Casse-Noisette. A Tchaikovsky ballet is ballet
twice over, ballet redoubled. For this music, apart from its con¬
text, that is to say, apart from any particular dance upon which
Petipa or Ivanov had decided, is always impregnated with the
spirit of the classical dance in general. More than anything else
it has made that conception, the classical ballet, a definite and
unescapable thing.
If you prod a piece of liver preparatory to cooking, it seems to
bite back on the fork with a curious stringy bite. I can think of
no sensation more different than the one Tchaikovsky's ballet
music inspires. It is something white, firm yet crisp, which you
cannot prod with the mind. It contains a white or silvery lan¬
guor, a vast silvery thunder, stage thunder perhaps, though not
the stage thunder of tea-trays but of the Tsar's packed sideboards
of silver. Ballon is for ever enshrined in this music, so are the
ephemeral, cygnet dart-points of the fouettes in the pas de quatre
254 GENRE AND STYLE

of Swan Lake, and a host of other movements. A Tchaikovsky

waltz emits that glaucous brilliance by which this dance is glo¬
rified in ballet. There is something almost terrible in the climax
of such music. But watch the stage: dancers never totter: at this
moment they are more superb than ever: the final note reveals
an attitude, an universal precision, a closure of virtuosity that is
itself an acclamation.
With what fierce springs this music unwinds itself, how
superbly it dawdles and fondles the adagio of the pas de deux, how
brisk yet tender are the variations, and overwhelming to all but
the dancers are the coda and the presto! This music of the severely
classical dance is itself a modern ballet: for, just as in modern
ballet everyday movements are englamoured, defined by syn¬
chronization as well, so in the ballet music of Tchaikovsky the
very noises of the streets, the very tooting of horns, every noise
and music that stumbles, is raised to the crystal pitch of the ballet
blanc, translucent and transparent, clear yet refractive.
The ballet blanc of Tchaikovsky! As I write I see the corps de
ballet of Casse-Noisette in steel-blue ballet skirts amid a snow ten
times more profuse than the fall Petrouchka can command. They
are waving branched sticks with baubles at their ends. This corps
de ballet is the snow itself which Clara must traverse with the
Nut-cracker before she can gain the kingdom of the Sugar Plum
fairy. The light, silent yet careering flakes spread and mass with
a continuity unusual in ballet, and therefore insistent, running
to the stiff notes of wood-wind and brass: then, at the conclusion
of this exhausting dance, the corps de ballet stand or lie piled up,
waving still their white brilliant blobs as the curtain descends
and rises and descends.
One has watched at twilight an almost invisible and ghostly
winter's rain become illumined and compact. The rain had
turned to snow. Flakes whirled and then fell slowly, for they
were light.
Ballet etherealizes movement: the undulations, never tortuous,
are those of snow or the swan's white neck.

(1935)

Notes

‘They were content also with raising their straightened legs at not
more than an angle of forty-five degrees for classical pas. Indeed, it is
doubtful whether Camargo found it necessary to wear knickers when
 A. K. VOLINSKY 255

dancing. By 1800 dancers raised their legs ninety deggrees for a move¬
ment such as the developpe. This advance is to be associated with a
change of costume. As long as for their classical pas ballerinas were
wearing voluminous eighteenth century skirts, a greater agility was
impossible. The earlier history of ballet can be most tersely written as a
history of costume. It was Camargo who, in the first place, somewhat
shortened the skirt and adopted the heelless shoe.
Sometimes the variations in a ballet take their names from the music
alone. Thus the naming of the Waltz and Mazurka in Sylphides refers
solely to Chopin's music and not to the dances set to this music.

A. K. VOLINSKY
From THE BOOK OF
EXULTATION

THE VERTICAL: THE FUNDAMENTAL

PRINCIPLE OF CLASSIC DANCE
In ballet, ballerinas commonly dance on their toes. At first
sight this deportment seems both unnatural and senseless. To
understand so important an aspect of ballet, one must investigate
the nature and meaning of the vertical in human life.
What is a vertical line? It is an upward-aspiring straight line.
Things lie and stretch themselves along the earth, horizontally;
or they soar away from it and free themselves of unnecessary
supports. Man is so formed that impressions take shape in his
mind in different ways, depending on whether he sees some¬
thing lying or standing, horizontal or vertical. In the first case,
the psychic sensation is restful and regular, without strong emo¬
tion; in the other, his soul is made to feel exalted. If I were to see
a tree trunk floating in a river, in my mind's eye I would swim
alongside it, as it does, quietly and still. One has only to see the
same trunk set upright, aspiring from earth to the sky, and the
soul is grasped by an involuntary impulse in a heavenward striv¬
ing. A slithering snake awakens one impression; when it raises
itself, another. A bear, too, changes when it rises swiftly and
256 GENRE AND STYLE

fearlessly confronts a menacing danger; and a gorilla ceases to

resemble an ape when, staggering with exertion, it holds itself
upright on its hind legs. High churches, obelisks, columns,
mountains draw the soul upward. As man's eyes glide from
below to above, earthbound and often pressingly heavy feelings
and thoughts follow irresistibly.
Once man crept on all fours and lived in the trees as the apes
do now. He lived horizontally then, without raising his glances
to the stars, and he thought horizontally, too, about hunting his
helpless prey over trees and ground. After a development pro¬
cess of many thousands of years, he came down from the trees,
stood upright and straight on his legs and freed his arms for a
deliberate battle with his environment. This was the moment of
the greatest bloodless revolution in the history of mankind. Man
ceased to be horizontal and became vertical. From this time on
he is identified as a man, not an ape or a primate resembling
man. At the same time, he acquires dominion over nature and
becomes its master. This lordship is the result of the fact that man
becomes conscious of his liberated arms and Jiands, he engages
them usefully, and perfects his means of battle. He sharpens
stone, manufactures arrows, stretches the bow, tosses boomer¬
angs, which return to him, after birds, employs a lever, builds a
hut, entices animals into traps, and so on. With the vertical
begins the history of human culture and the gradual conquest of
heaven and earth.
This is how the problem was viewed, too, by the Italian phy¬
sician Moscatti, who lectured on the natural superiority of hori-
zontality to verticality. Women, he maintained, would give birth
more easily were they to move on all fours. Moscatti's discourse
was taken up sympathetically by Immanuel Kant, the founder of
modern critical philosophy. He agreed with Moscatti's supposi¬
tion that to crawl is more natural, but emphatically asserted
standing upright as an act of the spirit that overcomes the natural
state and raises man above nature... .
The Greeks clearly set the vertical in opposition to the bent
and crooked, not only in the geometrical but in the comprehen¬
sive spiritual meaning of the word. To see straight, to speak
straight—all this is at once pictorially sensible and heroic. An
upright city is a city of good and high morals that rests firmly on
its foundation in a state of political and economic welfare. ...
This is the meaning of the vertical in its widest sense. All peo¬
ples agree about its worth. In their languages the way of saying
 MICHEL FOKINE 257

"straight" always means "honest." With every step the English

take, they appeal to the "upright"; the Romans demanded that
the heart burn as a flame, high and heavenward. Mountainward
tend our souls—that is the sense of the Latin sursum corda.
Ancient and modern are one in this perception of life. Antiquity
understood all this even more deeply than we do. In our times,
this type of word usage all too often is turned to allegory, that
is, to a picturesque but not full-toned manner of expression.
Only in ballet do we possess all aspects of the vertical in its
exact mathematically formed, universally perceptible expression.
Everything in ballet is straight, upright, as a taut string that
sounds a high note. Of course. I'm speaking of classic dance and
not character or social dance, which purposefully and in keeping
with their character permit all manner of crookedness. But in
ballet, everything—the dances on the ground and in the air—is
the direct heritage passed down to us by the sublime, proud, and
pure antiquity....
(1925)

MICHEL FOKINE
LETTER TO “THE TIMES,”
JULY 6TH, 1914

To the Editor of "The Times."

Sir—I am extremely grateful to the English Press for the atten¬
tion which it has given to the "Russian Ballet," now appearing
at Drury Lane Theatre, but at the same time I should like to point
out certain misconceptions which exist as to the history of the
ballet and the principles on which it is founded.
The misconceptions are these, that some mistake this new
school of art, which has arisen only during the last seven years,
for the traditional ballet which continues to exist in the Imperial
theatres of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and others mistake it for
a development of the principles of Isadora Duncan, while as a
matter of fact the new Russian ballet is sharply differentiated by
258 GENRE AND STYLE

its principles both from the older ballet and from the art of the
great dancer.

THE OLD CONVENTIONS

The older ballet developed the form of so-called "classical
dancing," consciously preferring to every other form the artifi¬
cial form of dancing on the point of the toe, with the feet turned
out, in short bodies, with the figure tightly laced in stays, and
with a strictly-established system of steps, gestures, and atti¬
tudes. Miss Duncan rejected the ballet and established an
entirely opposite form of her own. She introduced natural danc¬
ing, in which the body of the dancer was liberated not only from
stays and satin slippers, but also from the dance-steps of the bal¬
let. She founded her dancing on natural movements and on the
most natural of all dance-forms—namely, the dancing of the
ancient Greeks.
The new ballet, which also rejects the conventions of the older
ballet, cannot nevertheless be regarded as a follower of Miss
Duncan. Every form of dancing is good in so far as it expresses
the content or subject with which the dance deals; and that form
is the most natural which is most suited to the purpose of the
dancer. It would be equally unnatural to represent a Greek
Bacchic dance with ballet-steps on the point of the toes, or to
represent a characteristic Spanish national dance by running and
jumping in a Greek tunic and falling into attitudes copied from
paintings on ancient Greek vases. No one form of dancing
should be accepted once and for all. Borrowing its subjects from
the most various historical periods, the ballet must create forms
corresponding to the various periods represented. I am not
speaking of ethnographical or archaeological exactitude, but of
the correspondence of the style of the dancing and gestures with
the style of the periods represented. In the course of the ages
man has repeatedly changed his plastic language and expressed
his joys and sorrows and all his emotions under a great variety
of forms, often of extreme beauty. For man is infinitely various,
and the manifold expressiveness of his gestures cannot be
reduced to a single formula.
The art of the older ballet turned its back on life and on all the
other arts and shut itself up in a narrow circle of traditions.
According to the old method of producing a ballet, the ballet-
master composed his dances by combining certain well-estab-
 MICHEL FOKINE 259

lished movements and poses, and for his mimetic scenes he used
a conventional system of gesticulation, and endeavoured by ges¬
tures of the dancers' hands according to established rules to con¬
vey the plot of the ballet to the spectator.

THE NEW IDEAS

In the new ballet, on the other hand, the dramatic action is
expressed by dances and mimetic in which the whole body plays
a part. In order to create a stylistic picture the ballet-master of
the new school has to study, in the first place, the national
dances of the nations represented, dances differing immensely
from nation to nation, and often expressing the spirit of a whole
race; and, in the second, the art and literature of the period in
which the scene is laid. The new ballet which recognizing the
excellence both of the older ballet, and of the dancing of Isadora
Duncan in every case where they are suitable to the subject to be
treated, refuses to accept any one form as final and exclusive.
If we look at the best productions of sculptural and pictorial
art from the point of view of a choreographer of the old school
thoroughly versed in the rules of traditional gesticulation and of
dancing with the toes turned out we shall find that the marble
gods of Greece stood in entirely wrong attitudes; not one of them
turned his toes out or held his hands in the positions required
by the rules of ballet dancing. Equally faulty from the old-fash¬
ioned ballet-master's point of view are the majestic statues of
Michael Angelo and the expressive figures in the paintings of
the Renaissance, to say nothing of the creations of Raphael and
of all modern art from Rodin down. If we are to be true to the
rules of the older ballet we must turn our backs on the treasures
of beauty accumulated by the genius of mankind during thou¬
sands of years, and declare them all to be wrong.
If we look from the point of view of the natural dancing of
Miss Duncan, the fantastic attitudes of statues which adorn the
temples of India, the severely beautiful figures of ancient Egypt,
Assyria, and Babylon, the poetic miniatures of Persia, the water¬
colours of Japan and China, the art of prehistoric Greece, of the
popular chap-books and broadsides of Russia—all alike are far
removed from the natural movements of man, and cannot be rec¬
onciled with any theory of free and natural dancing. And yet
they contain an immense store of beauty, an immense variety of
taste, and are clear expressions of the character and ideals of the
260 GENRE AND STYLE

various nations which produced them. Have we any right to

reject all this variety for the sake of adherence to a single for¬
mula? No.

THE FIVE PRINCIPLES

Not to form combinations of ready-made and established
dance-steps, but to create in each case a new form corresponding
to the subject, the most expressive form possible for the repre¬
sentation of the period and the character of the nation repre¬
sented—that is the first rule of the new ballet.
The second rule is that dancing and mimetic gesture have no
meaning in a ballet unless they serve as an expression of its dra¬
matic action, and they must not be used as a mere divertissement
or entertainment, having no connection with the scheme of the
whole ballet.
The third rule is that the new ballet admits the use of conven¬
tional gesture only where it is required by the style of the ballet,
and in all other cases endeavours to replace gestures of the hands
by mimetic of the whole body. Man can be and should be expres¬
sive from head to foot.
The fourth rule is the expressiveness of groups and of ensem¬
ble dancing. In the older ballet the dancers were ranged in
groups only for the purpose of ornament, and the ballet master
was not concerned with the expression of any sentiment in
groups of characters or in ensemble dances. The new ballet, on
the other hand, in developing the principle of expressiveness,
advances from the expressiveness of the face to the expressive¬
ness of the whole body, and from the expressiveness of the indi¬
vidual body to the expressiveness of a group of bodies and the
expressiveness of the combined dancing of a crowd.
The fifth rule is the alliance of dancing with other arts. The
new ballet, refusing to be the slave either of music or of scenic
decoration, and recognizing the alliance of the arts only on the
condition of complete equality, allows a perfect freedom both to
the scenic artist and to the musician. In contradistinction to the
older ballet it does not demand "ballet music" of the composer
as an accompaniment to dancing; it accepts music of every kind,
provided only that it is good and expressive. It does not demand
of the scenic artist that he should array the ballerinas in short
skirts and pink slippers. It does not impose any specific "ballet"
conditions on the composer or the decorative artist, but gives
complete liberty to their creative powers.
 MICHEL FOKINE 261

These are the chief rules of the new ballet. If its ideals have
not yet been fully realized, its purpose has at any rate been
declared plainly enough to split not only the public and the
Press but also the members of the St. Petersburg ballet, into two
opposing groups, and has led to the establishment of that "Rus¬
sian Ballet" which visits all foreign countries and is often mis¬
taken for the traditional Russian Ballet which still continues its
existence in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
No artist can tell to what extent his work is the result of the
influence of others and to what extent it is his own. I cannot,
therefore, judge to what extent the influence of the old traditions
is preserved in the new ballet and how much the new ideals of
Miss Duncan are reflected in it. In accordance with the principles
of the new ballets which (together with the old ballet, Le Lac des
Cygnes) constitute the repertory of the "Russian Ballet" at Drury
Lane I was not only under the influence of the artists of the his¬
torical periods represented, but deliberately sought that influ¬
ence. When I composed an ancient Greek ballet I studied the art¬
ists of ancient Greece; when I produced Le Coq d'Or I studied the
old Russian chap-books and broadsides; and when I produced
Scheherazade, Cleopatra, Le Spectre de la Rose, and the Polovtsian
dances in Prince Igor, in each case I made use of different mate¬
rials appropriate to the ballet in hand.
Yours faithfully,
Michel Fokine
(1914)
 Modern Dance

ISADORA DUNCAN
THE DANCE OF
THE FUTURE

A woman once asked me why I dance with bare feet and I

replied, “Madame, I believe in the religion of the beauty of the
human foot/' The lady replied, “But I do not," and I said, “Yet
you must. Madam, for the expression and intelligence of the
human foot is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of
man." “But," said the lady, “I do not believe in the evolution of
man"; at this said I, “My task is at an end. I refer you to my most
revered teachers, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel."
“But," said the lady, “I do not believe in Darwin and Haeckel."
At this point I could think of nothing more to say. So you see
that to convince people, I am of little value and ought not to
speak. But I am brought from the seclusion of my study, trem¬
bling and stammering before a public and told to lecture on the
dance of the future.
If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we
find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the
dance of eternity, and has been and will always be the same.
The movement of waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the
same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire
of the ocean what was its movement in the past and what will
be its movement in the future. We realize that the movement
peculiar to its nature is eternal to its nature. The movement of
the free animals and birds remains always in correspondence to
their nature, the necessities and wants of that nature, and its cor¬
respondence to the earth nature. It is only when you put free
animals under false restrictions that they lose the power of mov¬
ing in harmony with nature, and adopt a movement expressive
of the restrictions placed about them.

262
 ISADORA DUNCAN 263

So it has been with civilized man. The movements of the sav¬

age, who lived in freedom in constant touch with Nature, were
unrestricted, natural and beautiful. Only the movements of the
naked body can be perfectly natural. Man, arrived at the end of
civilization, will have to return to nakedness, not to the uncon¬
scious nakedness of the savage, but to the conscious and
acknowledged nakedness of the mature Man, whose body will
be the harmonious expression of his spirtual being.
And the movements of this Man will be natural and beautiful
like those of the free animals. ...
The school of the ballet of today, vainly striving against the
natural laws of gravitation or the natural will of the individual,
and working in discord in its form and movement with the form
and movement of nature, produces a sterile movement which
gives no birth to future movements, but dies as it is made.
The expression of the modern school of ballet, wherein each
action is an end, and no movement, pose or rhythm is successive
or can be made to evolve succeeding action, is an expression of
degeneration, of living death. All the movements of our modern
ballet school are sterile movements because they are unnatural:
their purpose is to create the delusion that the law of gravitation
does not exist for them.
The primary or fundamental movements of the new school of
the dance must have within them the seeds from which will
evolve all other movements, each in turn to give birth to others
in unending sequence of still higher and greater expression,
thoughts and ideas.
To those who nevertheless still enjoy the movements, for his¬
torical or choreographic or whatever other reasons, to those I
answer: They see no farther than the skirts and tricots. But
look—under the skirts, under the tricots are dancing deformed
muscles. Look still farther—underneath the muscles are
deformed bones. A deformed skeleton is dancing before you.
This deformation through incorrect dress and incorrect move¬
ment is the result of the training necessary to the ballet.
The ballet condemns itself by enforcing the deformation of the
beautiful woman's body! No historical, no choreographic reasons
can prevail against that! ...
... My intention is, in due time, to found a school, to build a
theatre where a hundred little girls shall be trained in my art,
which they, in their turn, will better. In this school I shall not
teach the children to imitate my movements, but to make their
own. I shall not force them to study certain definite movements;
264 GENRE AND STYLE

I shall help them to develop those movements which are natural

to them. Whosoever sees the movements of an untaught little
child cannot deny that its movements are beautiful. They are
beautiful because they are natural to the child. Even so the move¬
ments of the human body may be beautiful in every stage of
development so long as they are in harmony with that stage and
degree of maturity which the body has attained. There will
always be movements which are the perfect expression of that
individual body and that individual soul; so we must not force
it to make movements which are not natural to it but which
belong to a school. An intelligent child must be astonished to
find that in the ballet school it is taught movements contrary to
all those movements which it would make of its own accord.

This may seem a question of little importance, a question of dif¬

fering opinions on the ballet and the new dance. But it is a great
question. It is not only a question of true art, it is a question of
race, of the development of the female sex to beauty and health,
of the return to the original strength and to natural movements
of woman's body. It is a question of the development of perfect
mothers and the birth of the healthy and beautiful children. The
dancing school of the future is to develop and to show the ideal
form of woman....
(1902 or 1903)

ISADORA DUNCAN
I SEE AMERICA DANCING

In one of his moments of prophetic love for America Walt

Whitman said,
"I hear America singing," and I can imagine the mighty song
that Walt heard, from the surge of the Pacific, over the plains,
the Voices rising of the vast Choral of children, youths, men and
women singing Democracy.
 ISADORA DUNCAN 265

When I read this poem of Whitman's I, too, had a Vision: the

Vision of America dancing a dance that would be the worthy
expression of the song Walt heard when he heard America sing¬
ing. This music would have a rhythm as great as the undulation,
the swing or curves, of the Rocky Mountains. It would have
nothing to do with the sensual tilting of the Jazz rhythm: it
would be the vibration of the American soul striving upward
through labour to Harmonious life. No more would this dance
that I visioned have any vestige of the Fox Trot or the Charles¬
ton—rather would it be the living leap of the child springing
toward the heights, toward its future accomplishment, toward a
new great vision of life that would express America. ...
I often wonder where is the American composer who will hear
Walt's America singing, and who will compose the true music
for the American Dance; which will contain no Jazz rhythm, no
rhythm from the waist down; but from the solar plexus, the tem¬
poral home of the soul, upwards to the Star-Spangled Banner of
the sky which arches over the great stretch of land from the
Pacific, over the Plains, over the Sierra Nevadas, over the Rocky
Mountains to the Atlantic.
I pray you. Young American Composer, create the music for
the dance that shall express the America of Walt Whitman, the
America of Abraham Lincoln.
It seems to me monstrous for anyone to believe that the Jazz
rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm express the South Afri¬
can savage. America's music will be something different. It has
yet to be written. No composer has yet caught the rhythm of
America—it is too mightly for the ears of most. But some day it
will gush forth from the great stretches of earth, rain down from
the vast sky spaces of stars, and the American will be expressed
in some mighty music that will shape its chaos to Harmony.
Long-legged strong boys and girls will dance to this music—
not the tottering, ape-like convulsions of the Charleston, but a
striking upward tremendous mounting, powerful mounting
above the pyramids of Egypt, beyond the Parthenon of Greece,
an expression of Beauty and Strength such as no civilization has
ever known. That will be America dancing.
And this dance will have nothing in it either of the servile
coquetry of the ballet or the sensual convulsion of the South
African negro. It will be clean. ...

(1927)
266 GENRE AND STYLE

ISADORA DUNCAN
RICHARD WAGNER

It seems to me that the compositions of Wagner cannot be con¬

sidered as the work of one artist or as the expression of one coun¬
try. They are rather the entire revolt and all the feeling of an
epoch, expressed through the medium of Richard Wagner.
That is why it seems so petty to have wished to abandon this
music during the war; for the work of Wagner flows through
every drop of blood in every artist of the world, and his mighty
rhythm has become part of every heart-beat of each one of us.
For Wagner is more than an artist: he is the glorious far-seeing
prophet, liberator of the art of the future. It is he who will give
birth to the new union of the arts, the rebirth of the theatre, trag¬
edy and the dance as one.
He was the first to conceive of the dance as born of music. This
is my conception of the dance also, and for it I strive in the work
of my school. For in the depths of every musical theme of Wag¬
ner, dances will be found: monumental sculpture, movement
which only demands release and life.
It is of this music that critics are wont to say, "It is not written
for the dance"; but it is from this music that the dance, so long
lifeless in the embryo, is being born again. In comparison with
this new-born dance, the posed attitudes of the dancers of the
Opera appear to us like the figures in the wax-works museums.
The theatre will live again in all its glory only when the dance
once more takes its true place, as an integral and inevitable part
of tragedy. It is because I believe this that I have dared to dance
to the music of Wagner—yes, that I have raised my hands,
vibrant with ecstasy, to the harmonious chords of Parsifal.
Do you understand the gigantic task that is imposed on us,
before we can wrench from this music the torrential movement
that must come—the glorious child-birth of the Dance?

(1921)
 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 267

RAYNER HEPPENSTALL
From APOLOGY FOR
DANCING

THE SEXUAL IDIOM

I never saw Isadora Duncan dance. That, I believe, may well
be my best qualification for writing about her. For it seems that
nobody who did see her was able to tell about her sanely. I know
the music she interpreted. There are hundreds of photographs
and drawings of her interpreting that music. Her autobiography
is there, and her many articles on the Art of the Dance, for any¬
body to read. There are the many writings of those who saw and
knew her, varying in waftiness and hysteria, from those of Mary
Desti and Sewell Stokes to the brief obituary panegyric of Max
Eastman. Above all, there are the many new schools of dancing
which derived their forms and their energy from Isadora and
which are, for the present day, much more important than she.
These I have watched and read, heard and seen, and I have
seen Nicolas Legat (who was asked, in 1905, to join Isadora) frisk
about with imaginary skirts, lift up swooning arms and speak the
word "pornographique" most expressively. Evidently, if I had
seen Isadora Duncan dance, there would have been no chance of
critical sanity. With such a woman, you must either be outraged,
or laugh, or fall cataclysmically in love; and find yourself in Jer¬
icho, anyway. I fancy I should have fallen in love. With such a
woman and therefore with the art of such a woman.... It was
all one. The art was the woman. It was the embellishment and
justification of her extraordinary womanhood.
And the woman—which is to say, the little girl—was born
under Aphrodite. She says, into the bargain:
If people ask me when I began to dance I reply, “In my mother's
womb, probably as a result of the oysters and champagne—the
food of Aphrodite."

She was born, too, beside the sea, and her 'first idea of move¬
ment, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the
waves'—from which Aphrodite rose. Her antecedents were just
what they should have been: American Rationalism, of the
268 GENRE AND STYLE

plains and the skyscrapers, the America of Walt Whitman, entan¬

gled round a hot core of renegade Irish Catholicism. The family
was poor. There were three brothers and sisters, Augustin, Eliz¬
abeth and Raymond. The mother was a grass widow. Conditions
which make, altogether, for an oddly passionate family unity....
And the mother played Schubert and Chopin, and they read
romantic poetry.
Isadora danced, as we say, from the cradle. Growing up, there
was local enthusiasm and misfortunes, provincial tournees,
Augustin Daly, New York, and then the whole family betook
itself to Europe, on a cattle-boat, to London, first, with Chelsea
garrets and all the proper appurtenances of struggling art. Days
spent in the British Museum, copying figures from the Grecian
urns, from which Raymond Duncan eventually worked out a
system of eight positions as seemingly fundamental as the five
positions of Ballet. ... Encounters, gradually, with the great:
with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Ellen Terry, Sir Henry Irving.... A
tour with Sir Frank Benson playing the first fairy in A Midsum¬
mer Night's Dream, for it “seemed that theatre managers were
unable to understand. ..
In fact, at that time, it was difficult for me to understand why,
when I had awakened a frenzy of enthusiasm and admiration in
such men as Andrew Lang, Watts, Sir Edwin Arnold, Austin Dob¬
son, Charles Halle—in all the painters and poets whom I had met
in London—the theatre managers remained unmoved, as if the
message of my Art were too spiritual for their gross materialistic
comprehension.
t

Thence to Paris, to similar unremunerative or insufficiently

remunerative frenzies of enthusiasm and admiration.... And
Isadora, though fluttered by the great Rodin's sculpturous
advances, tried herself out, there, with remarkably elaborate
deliberation, for so young a virgin, on two lovers, both of whom,
however, were scared and fled.
Off to Germany, then, to Berlin, and to Vienna, with Loie
Fuller; to Hungary, where the first more or less satisfactory lover
was found, in a young actor, Romeo; and back to Germany, to
Munich, to start the legend of “die gottliche, heilige Isadora";
away to Florence, back to Berlin and its pseudo-Hellenism, away
to Venice. .. . And then to Greece, the Glory that was Greece, the
home of sea-born Aphrodite and the kin of Aphrodite, Apollo,
Dionysus, greater than Apollo, and the haven of Isadora's most
expansive visions and yearnings. . ..
 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 269

I urge a high admiration for the energy and consistency with

which Isadora sustained the phantasy of that Grecian excursion
(with the presence of the family, who must have been rather
nice, though they were evident humbugs, to keep up the neces¬
sary semblance of a sense of humour). She was a whole woman,
most whole, perhaps, in her grand-manner follies and vulgari¬
ties, and she responded wholly to her blood's images of Aphro¬
dite and Apollo, Dionysus, Minerva, Zeus. The pictures of her,
with arms straining aloft, at the Parthenon, are never altogether
cheap, however ridiculous they may seem. Stupidly, perhaps,
and certainly with a great deal of confusion, she was submitting
herself with all the profundity of her womanhood, to a real if
forgotten splendour. She was seeking contact, in the deep pas¬
sivity of racial experience, with the energies that had produced,
as well as some of the greatest art, the richest and most satisfying
of all our mythologies. But Isadora Duncan was the complete
eclectic. She had no intellectual control over her experience, to
keep it, in a possible metaphor, from evaporating. And a new
phantasy presented itself, as the old one came to a circumstantial
end. Isadora studied Gluck, read Kant (just as though an Isadora
might have something to do with Pure Reason) and Nietzsche,
who drew the diffuse and incoherent mass of Grecian images to
the focus of the single myth of Dionysus; and then went off to
Bayreuth, to replace the satin slipper with the transparent tunic,
in Wagner's heavily languorous Venusberg.
It would be difficult to find two divinities more essentially
remote from each other than the Hellenic Aphrodite and Wag¬
ner's sonorously lavish Teuton Venus; but the name, the cognate
persons of Love Incarnate in Woman's Form, was enough for Isa¬
dora, and she shifted her allegiance with no great effort. Her
own erotic state changed as easily. In Bayreuth, she was adored
by Heinrich Thode, with a cerebral passion to which her
response, as she records it, is illuminating.
The rehearsal at Bayreuth began. With Thode I sat in the dark¬
ened theatre and listened to the first notes of the Prelude of Parsifal.
The feeling of delight through all my nerves became so poignant
that the slightest touch of his arm sent such thrills of ecstasy
through me that I turned sick and faint, with the sweet, gnawing,
painful pleasure. It revolved in my head like a thousand whirls of
myriad lights. It throbbed in my throat with such joy that I wanted
to cry out. Often I felt his slight hand pressed over my lips to
silence the sighs and little groans that I could not control. It was as
if every nerve in my body arrived at that climax of love which is
270 GENRE AND STYLE

generally limited to the instant; and hummed with such insistence

that I hardly knew whether it was utter joy or horrible suffering.
My state partook of both, and I longed to cry out with Amfortas, to
shriek with Kundry.
Each night Thode came to Philip's Ruhe. He never caressed me
as a lover, never sought even to undo my tunic or touch my breasts
or my body in any way, although he knew that every pulse of it
belonged only to him. Emotions I had not known to exist awoke
under the gaze of his eyes. Sensations so ecstatic and terrible that I
often felt the pleasure was killing me, and fainted away, to awaken
again to the light of those wonderful eyes. He so completely pos¬
sessed my soul that it seemed it was only possible to gaze into his
eyes and long for death. For there was not, as in earthly love, any
satisfaction or rest, but always this delirious thirst for a point that I
required.
I completely lost my appetite for food, and even for sleep. Only
the music of Parsifal brought me to the point where I dissolved into
tears and wept, and that seemed to give some relief from this exqui¬
site and terrible state of loving which I had entered.

The obvious comment, I suppose, is that Heinrich Thode's

behaviour, in keeping the proudly sensual Isadora, for so long,
in that feverishly and pervertedly heady state of being, was
almost unbelievably naughty: excusable, if at all, only on the
ground that Thode was, at the time, working on his St. Francis
and, quite evidently, needing his inspiration for Santa Clara.
More interesting, though, is the fact that Isadora could suffer this
state, gladly, for so long, and that she could still write it up with
such evident relish, twenty years after. Isadora Duncan was a
powerful and rich being, if ever any woman was, but her power
and her richness were essentially passive. Her essential nature
was rather to draw in, to absorb and assimilate—a kind of pas¬
sional as well as intellectual Eclecticism—than to expand, to give
out abundantly, as her extravagance and her thoroughly uncon¬
trolled dancing seem to show. The catalogue of her lovers is not,
in itself, uninteresting. But the significant thing is the infinite
variety of her total response to them. For each of her lovers, she
changed colour; she changed form, completely. She was alto¬
gether fluid and able to be transformed by any powerful man's
will, transformed wholly. Yet she was choosing her submissions.
Each submission was a manifestation of the passive female
power. She was absorbing and assimilating the rich wills of her
men.
At the same time, there is a curious unreality about all her
accounts. I have spoken of phantasies. I should have spoken
 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 271

rather of the forms of one great polymorphous phantasy: which

was Isadora Duncan's most substantial reality. Her nature never
took form. It was as vast and changing and as finally unchange¬
able as the sea. It was a phantasy which Isadora sustained
throughout her life, which endures in her legend and which she
herself never understood at all. Even after the death of her chil¬
dren and after a run of loves which would have served to mature
any half-dozen normal women, there is still, to the end, an
extraordinarily adolescent flavour about Isadora's erotic nature
and understanding. Her lovers, certainly, were never real men.
From Romeo to Sergei Essenin, from Gordon Craig to the inex¬
haustible spring of wealth, to Lohengrin, and from Walter Rum-
mel to the last stevedore, they were all visions and phantasies
themselves and fuel to feed the one great phantasy. Isadora Dun¬
can was a woman of amazingly rich and open erotic nature. She
was also, very definitely, a sensationist. She was also an exem-
plarily glamorous mother. She was also an exhibitionist in the
grand manner. In her schools, where the bodies of young girls
were to be wrought to a beauty the world had not known, there
was also something of Sappho and the Isle of Lesbos. But it is the
phantasy which dominates. The phantasy embraces and assimi¬
lates all these things. They are facets, only of the phantasy.
And Isadora's life was Phantasy throughout. It never came to
any true form at all, though Isadora was a whole being, and
responded wholly, in each one of her phases. Her transforma¬
tions were whole transformations. But the whole pattern of her
life is as extravagant, as flamboyant, as lawless, as its substance,
its single incidents. If it flowered, its flowers were of nothing
more substantial than the stuff of methyl flames, wavering, dis¬
appearing in the light, evanescent in the haze through which
Isadora looked out on the world and never able to achieve, or
even to conceive, the peace, the stillness, into which life must
subside when it will form into the round assurance of bloomed
fruit. Evidently, Isadora Duncan was a beautiful woman, but
even her own physical woman's beauty seems unformed, hazy,
fluid: the kind of beauty that is frail in all its heavy lushness,
changing from moment to moment and open, vulnerable, to
every brief mood.
What has all this to do with the Dance, though? Evidently, a
great deal. .. . Quite evidently in Isadora's own case and quite as
much, if less evidently, with every form of the Dance-Isa¬
dora's dancing is the restless physical movement of her phan¬
tasy. But a phantasy is not only a fluid, a formless thing, rejecting
272 GENRE AND STYLE

clarity. It is also a private thing. It is also an internal thing. As

soon as it loses its private nature, by formulation and commu¬
nication, and becomes externalised and takes form, it ceases to be
a phantasy. It becomes a myth. And a myth is a verbal entity. The
communication of phantasies, their translation into Myth, is the
origin of Literature. The Dance can have nothing to do with
phantasies. It can have nothing to do with anything private and
internal. Nor can it have any honest commerce with verbal enti¬
ties. And the Dance's end is always to be precise in its forms. Its
desire is Clarity. Isadora Duncan was not concerned to dance, not
concerned with any clarity of plastic forms. She was concerned
with the Dance only as part of her primarily sexual phantasy.
She was concerned, also, as she thought, with Expression. She
thought she was expressing herself, her fluid self, in the Hera-
clitean flux of restless half-forms. But the Dance cannot express
a phantasy. Its first end is not Expression at all, or expression
only of itself, of certain general qualities of style and of a pas¬
sionate clarification. She thought she was recreating, for her self-
expression, the forms of the Greek Dance. But forms of the Dance
have force only for the community in which and by which they
were evolved and created. They themselves become phantasy
and formless to an age in which they need to be recreated, nos¬
talgically, yearningly, from museum images. She thought, after
reading Nietzsche, that her art was Dionysian. But the Dance of
Dionysus, before and above everything else, was a free expres¬
sion of the ecstasy of the whole community, not an exhibition,
to the rest of the community, of one member's private ecstasy.
Its forms are valid only as communal ritualia. In the rhythmical
movements which Isadora Duncan executed in public, she was
not even articulating, expressing, communicating a phantasy. A
phantasy is not capable of communication, except by translation
into myth and by relation with precise forms. She was only
exhibiting signs of the ecstasy she felt in her private contempla¬
tion of the phantasy. Which, of course, excited the onlookers
enormously... . They wanted to share the ecstasy itself.
Isadora's Art was, in effect, then, merely an art of sexual dis¬
play, and I would stress the "merely." Isadora was not conscious
of the fact. Nor, I suppose, were most of the spectators. She and
they thought they were enjoying a spiritual experience. Perhaps
they were, but it was only in the mass stimulation of private
phantasies. There was no communication, or no communication
in terms exact enough to be terms of art. Isadora thought she
served all the gods, both ancient and modern: Apollo and Dion-
 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 273

ysus, the power-gods of European Royalty, the freedom-gods of

America and the compassion-gods of Revolutionary Russia. In
reality, she remained faithful to her stars. She served Aphrodite
only. Her art was aphrodisiac.
But all art is aphrodisiac, surely? No, all art is antiaphrodisiac.
All art engages sexual impulses (if only by deliberately elimi¬
nating them). It may even be that art is greater or lesser art
according, precisely, to the strength and range of sexual
impulses that it engages. But its function, as art, is to neutralise,
to release, its engagements. In a Freudian term, art is always Sub¬
limation. The need of the artist is to bring some intolerable pres¬
sure of passional experience—which will always be experience
sexually charged, if not itself primarily sexual, since the pas¬
sional being is primarily sexual—to the condition that I tried to
describe, after Walter Pater, as the Condition of Music. A config¬
uration of sexually charged experience is brought to the condi¬
tion in which it can be contemplated as pure form, and a Cathar¬
sis is effected, a purgation of precisely those impulses or passions
most strenuously engaged. The apparent process is usually a sub¬
stitution of symbols for the passional realities, hypnotic and
magical symbols to which the passional charge can be trans¬
ferred, leaving no loose unresolved emotion, and which can be
contemplated as formalised outward entities.
This is the mechanism of dreams according, more or less, to
Freud. It is also the mechanism by which myths are produced,
out of the intolerable pressure of primitive man's passional expe¬
rience, out of pure erotic Phantasy. Initiation, the adventure of
virginity, becomes an adventure, a dark and difficult entry, to the
jewelled cave, ablaze with light, the Trophonian cave, Aladdin's
cave; and modern man will endorse the myth's compulsion, its
relation to his own phantasy. This is art, which transforms a sur¬
plus of sexual impulses into aesthetic contemplation. The mate¬
rials of art may, however, be used in a contrary way. Stories, nov¬
els, pseudo-myths, are written and published, in vast quantities,
weekly, whose sole function is in the stimulation of jaded or
repressed sexual impulses. There are pictures, sometimes very
finely painted pictures, whose intention and effect is the stimu¬
lation of sexual impulses, where these are jaded or repressed.
There is the music of Wagner and Scriabin. But that which
excites, instead of transforming and releasing, is Pornography,
not Art, according, precisely, to the extent of its capacity for exci¬
tation. And it derives from feeble or stifled impulses, which need
aggravation, instead of over-powerful impulses, which need
274 GENRE AND STYLE

redirection and release. This distinction between Art and Por¬

nography is not an academic one; and it need not be stressed, I
hope, that it is a distinction of which the censor, who bans James
Joyce and encourages Ethel M. Dell, is not aware. Nor is it, of
course, a distinction which disallows Pornography under all
circumstances.
All this shows up more clearly in the Dance than elsewhere. I
have already said something, in dealing with Tradition, about
what I am calling the Sexual Idiom of Ballet. I pointed out, for
instance, that a woman on her points, "because of change in sig¬
nificant line and stress and action, ceases to be significantly a
woman. She becomes an idealised and stylised creature of the
Theatre." And there is a kind of eternal virginity about her. She
is inaccessible. She remains unravished. Or, in another light,
another metaphor, I said:

Major works of art, in any medium, are epicene. The Condition

of Music is a Neutralisation. And this shows clearer ... in Ballet,
because the elements, the artistic material, is human bodies. In Bal¬
let, the human organism is not only producer and consumer, but
the goods, also, and aesthetic goods, like the angels, have no sex....
Aggressive masculinity or aggressive feminity is as destructive of
the essential stylistic conditions of Ballet as flaunted inversion
is. . . . Appeal, of any kind, ... is out of place. Style—with Ripe¬
ness—is All.

And Style, in human movement, is fundamentally that substi¬

tution of symbols for realities, the production of ideal forms out
of the natural animal movements of the human body. To dance,
to move flauntingly and with potent rhythmical compulsion, is
to project a state of organic excitement which, by the nature of
the organism, is necessarily sexual or sexually charged. Ballet, by
the force and technique of Tradition, by its intricate channels of
convention, makes these states of organic excitement impersonal
and transforms them, through its precise plastic forms, to states
of artistic creation, the vicarious excitement of onlookers to states
of aesthetic contemplation. Ballet is supremely the negation of
Phantasy. Ballet is altogether concrete, outward, precise and
sheer.
But Isadora Duncan would have none of these precise forms,
this transformation. She wished to retain, as valuable in itself,
the primary state of excitement, the personal ecstasy, and exhibit
her state—communicating nothing but the excitation itself and
perhaps something, vaguely, of its quality, its general tone—in
 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 275

movements which, she clamoured, must be free, their only sem¬

blance of form proceeding from the actual phase of her master
phantasy. Look at the countless drawings and photographs of
her.... She leaps along, knees thrusting upward in an agitation
of the loins, head either plunging down to knees or flung back
in taunting pride or turned in the glad terror of amorous flight.
In her more serious dances, her arms cease to float caressingly
but strain upward, trembling, in the infinity of desire or are
flung wide in the infinite welcome of the matriarchal bosom, or
are turned in, hands pressed over breast in spiritual hurt. Or she
glides onward, in a tranced lento cantabile, in the plangent dream
of fulfilment. And always, to end the exhibition, she strains her¬
self upward, again, at the heavens, the hazy Cosmos, the ether
streaming behind the stars. Or she falls in ecstatic swoon to the
floor and lies panting, in a flaccid lush supinity. None of these
movements is precise, sharp, clean, bright. There is no control.
There is no line. Everything is fluid, formless, natural, free, with¬
out style, melting away, "with its own excitation, momently to
mist." The only dancing is the dancing of a mist of loose drifting
emotion. It was not an exhibition of dancing. It was a display of
Womanhood, of the female principle as a hovering gaseous
abstraction, as Womanhood might be before it crystallised into
functions and social forms, seeking, swooning into, and yet
resisting forms.
And that is what Isadora was concerned with, not the Dance.
This is not authoritative. I did not see Isadora dance. The material
is there for anybody's reconsideration. This case is an imagina¬
tive reconstruction, only, not dogmatic statement. It is so over¬
whelmingly evident, though. With the amazing physical and
passional energy that she had, she wished to create, not new
forms for the Dance, but new glamours for Womanhood; not
finer art for the Theatre, but finer theatrical means for height¬
ening the Female Mystery. She was not a dancer, but a sort of
prophet. She thought she was both. She thought the Dancer was
the greatest prophet. She speaks, always the "message" of her
Art, and she speaks of her Art as "spiritual." She was concerned
with the inward ineffable content. She was the glamorous
matriarch, affirming, in herself, the glory of the primeval womb.
She was, in fact, a bit of a feminist, a good deal of a suffragette.
She wasted a lot of enthusiasm, for instance, on Emancipation,
on "the right of women to bear children outside marriage," and
so on. All of which, evidently, has rather more to do with Mrs.
Pankhurst and the Masculine Protest than with dancing (or, for
276 GENRE AND STYLE

that matter, with children)-But Isadora was of her genera¬

tion, and her generation acclaimed her. She attracted to herself
all the frustrations, yearnings, hysterias, of her generation. Many
were found to acknowledge her prophetic nature. And that is
where she ceases to be a great woman, an amazing femme fatale,
a cause celebre, a case, and becomes a nuisance. For, since her
death, in the Dance, the Prophetic Nature has acquired an alarm¬
ing popularity.
Isadora Duncan was—so—the female counterpart of David
Herbert Lawrence, in Literature. Whether she was as great a per¬
son, it is difficult to say. Also, Lawrence often attempted art, as
well as grim and cosmic Pornography. And it is certain that Isa¬
dora's work was inferior, as well as less durable. Lawrence used
a medium which forced him to some precision. In Isadora's
medium, of free movement, there was no range of such precise
symbols as words to limit the glamorous-ineffable-vague. But the
similarity between the two cases is close.
I spent long days and nights in the studio seeking that dance
which might be the divine expression of the human spirit... . For
hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded between my
breasts, covering the solar plexus. My mother often became
alarmed to see me remain for such long intervals quite motionless
as if in a trance—but I was seeking, and finally discovered, the cen¬
tral spring of all movement, the crater of motor power, the unity
from which all diversions of movement are born, the mirror of
vision for the creation of the dance—it was from this discovery that
was born the theory on which I founded my school. The ballet
school taught the pupils that this spring was found in the centre of
the back at the base of the spine. From this axis, says the ballet mas¬
ter, arms, legs, and trunk must move freely, giving the result of an
articulated puppet. This method produces an artificial mechanical
movement not worthy of the soul. I, on the contrary, sought the
source of the spiritual expression to flow into the channels of the
body, filling it with vibrating light—the centrifugal force reflecting
the spirit's vision. After many months, when I had learned to con¬
centrate all my force to this one Centre, I found that thereafter
when I listened to music the rays and vibrations of the music
streamed to this one fount of light within me—there they reflected
themselves in Spiritual Vision, not the brain's mirror, but the
soul's, and from this vision I could express them in Dance.

This is Isadora (wherever she borrowed her terms) finding her

way to the deep centre, the core, the dark source of all being,
which Lawrence, also, demanded that we seek and live by. Both
these modern prophets had the most unflinching belief in the
 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 277

positive power of the solar plexus and the unabateable flame in

the womb. Each of them was concerned, above all, to assert the
ideal ultimate of his own sexual principle, though both, sexually,
were unhappy and forced to retreat into a phantasy: Isadora the
matriarch (would-be) and Lawrence the would-be patriarch, the
Masculine Protest and the Oedipus Complex. Both travelled over
the world, endlessly seeking self-fulfilment in alien images of
the self-ideal. Both found their only conceivable images in dead
races, in museums: Isadora among the monuments of the Glory
that was Greece, and Lawrence, with his wider field of reference,
among the Etruscans.
Both, in their questing, were anarchists, preachers of chaos, of
a return to the gaseous mindlessness of the world's uncreated
state. Both were anti-social. Both hated the conditions which had
produced them and sought, not to change Civilisation's forms,
but to escape into the primeval womb of Civilisation. Yet both
returned to their place of birth. Lawrence came, at the end, to
know that the only place of his salvation was his place of birth.
He could not altogether desert the womb. And, after embracing
every revolution and aristocratic counter-revolution in the world
of her time and of the old world, Isadora yearned back to her
origin and clamoured for the Dance of America.

In one of his moments of prophetic love for America, Walt Whit¬

man said, "I hear America singing," and I can imagine the mighty
song . . . from the surge of the Pacific, over the plains, the Voices
rising of the vast Choral of children, youths, men and women sing¬
ing Democracy_I, too, had a Vision: the Vision of America danc¬
ing a dance that would be the worthy expression of the song. ... It
would have nothing to do with the sensual lilting of the Jazz
rhythm: ... no rhythm from the waist down; but from the solar
plexus, the temporal home of the soul, upwards to the Star-Span¬
gled Banner of the sky which arches over that great stretch of land
from the Pacific, over the Plains, over the Sierra Nevadas, over the
Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic.
I pray you. Young American Composer, create the music for the
dance that shall express the America of Walt Whitman, the America
of Abraham Lincoln_It is too mighty for the ears of most. But
some day it will gush forth from the great stretches of earth, rain
down from the vast sky spaces of stars, and the American will be
expressed in some mighty music that will shape its chaos to
Harmony.
And this dance will have nothing in it either of the servile
coquetry of the ballet or the sensual convulsion of the South Afri¬
can negro. It will be clean. I see America dancing, beautiful, strong.
278 GENRE AND STYLE

with one foot poised on the highest point of the Rockies, her two
hands stretched out from the Atlantic to the Pacific, her fine head
tossed to the sky, her forehead shining with a crown of a million
stars.
Why should our children bend the knee in that fastidious and
servile dance, the Minuet, or twirl in the mazes of the false senti¬
mentality of the Waltz? Rather let them come forth with great
strides, leaps and bounds, with lifted foreheads and far-spread
arms, dancing the language of our pioneers, the fortitude of our
heroes, the justice, kindness, purity of our women, and through it
all the inspired love and tenderness of our mothers.
When the American children dance in this way, it will make of
them Beautiful Beings worthy of the name of Democracy.
That will be America dancing.

It will, indeed. It does seem, often, as though America has no

antiseptic, at all, against the Bigger and Better, the Louder and
Funnier. The important point is, though, that Isadora's Vision is
paralleled with visions of New Britain, everywhere in Lawrence,
till Mellors, Lady Chatterley's game-keeper lover, put the British
Proletariat into scarlet tights, that would show the curve of leap¬
ing buttocks and the endless rippling of male muscle. But was it
not, in both cases, personal regression to the womb? Salvation in
the Derbyshire game-keeper, mastering the British Aristocracy,
was the vision of David Herbert Lawrence, envisaging, from the
womb, his own rebirth among his own people. And Isadora's
was the Dance of America. America Dancing was the vision of
Isadora Duncan Reborn. The two of them embodied, finally, the
whole regressive lassitude of their generation.
They were types of the lassitude. Their generation found a
focus in them, for all its own regressive phantasies, and yearned
to them, with their greater fullness and courage and heaviness.
Both attracted to themselves great numbers of hysterical people.
Both lived in a haze of adulation. Both were hunted down, at
first, as pornographers (which they were, but in my special
sense, only). Both have subsequently become text-books of sex¬
ual behaviour, Mrs. Grundies of the days before the Deluge. The
similarity extends into the minutest details of the legend. Law¬
rence is remembered as one who healed the commonplace. Peo¬
ple have rhapsodised on his way of washing dishes. Isadora,
according to Sewell Stokes, was lovely, perhaps most lovely,
when she snored, and Mary Desti sees her getting drunk as a
lovely slow flowering into heavenly beatitude and beneficence,
expanding, "like a flower, showering love on the whole world."
 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 279

Both, in fact, were more significant, finally, as persons than as

artists. Both were archetypal persons, incarnating and thereby
alleviating major dissatisfactions of their age. Lawrence is the
more compelling. And the cause is almost wholly in his medium.
I do not know—nobody will ever know—whether Isadora Dun¬
can may not have had as delicate sensibility, as great a spiritual
nature, as D. H. Lawrence. Perhaps she had. But the significant
thing is that the use of words, symbols more or less exact, forced
Lawrence to clarification of his vision and phantasy and spiritual
perception. Whatever the value of his message, he did "put it
across." But what has a message to do with the Dance? What has
physical movement to do with expressing the spiritual? If "spir¬
itual" means anything, it can only be used of dancing which is
as formally clear as Music must always be, of bodily movement
which has attained the final clarity of spirit. Spiritual values are
the gradual distillation of a long process of Tradition. Isadora
Duncan wanted to manufacture them impromptu, out of brief
ecstasies, trailing clouds of loose emotional glory. She was striv¬
ing to recreate the Light that Never Was through a body that all
too substantially is.
In their negative significance, also, in the efficiency of their
anti-Traditionalism, Lawrence and Isadora are set apart by the
nature of their media. Lawrence rejected the Intellect. Isadora
rejected Ballet. And, in the two fields of Literature and the
Dance, the two things are cognate. Ballet, as pure technique and
as pure stylistic employment of technique, is very like what pure
Intelligence is in Literature, what pure syntactical and metrical
logic and form are in the making of Literature. Lawrence, in
rejecting Intellect, used Intellect. He denounced pure Intelli¬
gence, renounced its possibilities for evil, in the most admirable
employment and enjoyment of pure Intelligence. Finally, he did
great service to Intellect, enriching it, and so to Literature, as a
whole and with all it touches. Isadora could use no such means.
She denounced Ballet, verbally, and danced her own way. If she
had mastered Ballet, as Lawrence mastered pure Intelligence, she
could have enriched it and done service to the Dance as a whole.
Merely rejecting Ballet, she remains irrelevant to the Dance,
except in negative senses.
But perhaps we should look more closely at Isadora's relations
with Ballet. The actual detail of Isadora's life has not been
retraced beyond the return from the Grecian excursion to Bay¬
reuth. Apart from the first Russian excursion, the direct confront¬
ing of Ballet, it is not necessary to retrace it any further. On the
280 GENRE AND STYLE

one hand, it is fairly familiar: the various lovers, the death of the
children, the pitiful long mother-lover relation with the adoles¬
cent hooligan and rare poet, Sergei Essenin, the defection and
final timely-tragic true femme-fatale death with her dancing
shawl. On the other hand, it is irrelevant. In 1905, when she first
went to Russia, Isadora Duncan was as nearly formed as she ever
would be: which is to say, she was entered into the thick of her
phantasy. And her art did not change, afterwards, so far as one
can see. She relinquished it and returned to it, only, grew fat and
grew thin, abandoned to it one new grief or joy and another and
all the final lassitude. And she tried, continually, to form great
schools, which never took the form she wanted them to. Contact
with Isadora seemed to be enough to set her pupils off, having
discovered their solar plexus, to vaunt their own prophetic
natures and spiritual missions. And that is all. But the direct con¬
fronting of Ballet is important, to an Apology for Dancing. Isa¬
dora Duncan's objections to Ballet are pattern-objections for
nearly all the modern world. This whole chapter should be read
as a general defence of the Dance against the,"spiritual" dancers,
the inward dancers, the free, the natural, the prophetic and the
aesthetic dancers, the personal phantasists and exhibitionists. We
can look at Isadora's protest against Ballet, and then we can
come, casually enough, to those mushroom forms of the Dance
which were fertilised by her or in any of many ways reflect her
significance.
The arrival in St. Petersburg was well timed. On January 5th,
1905, Nicolas II, cowering in the Winter Palace, permitted his
guard to shoot down a mass of workers who had gathered with¬
out weapons, in the square below, to petition His Imperial Maj¬
esty for bread. Isadora Duncan arrived at dawn the following
day, and was greeted by a long procession of coffin-bearers, up
so early to bury their comrades before the disaffected city was
awake. Isadora wept, in the black Russian dawn. If she had not
seen it, she says, all her life would have been different. There,
before this seemingly endless procession, this tragedy, she
vowed herself and her art to the service of the people and the
down-trodden. Ah, how small and useless now seemed all her
personal loves and sufferings! How useless even her art, unless
it could help this. ... So Isadora Duncan drove on to her palatial
suite at the Europa and cried herself to sleep. Soon her room was
filled with flowers. Two nights later, she appeared before the
elite of St. Petersburg, in the Salle des Nobles, and was acclaimed
by the Grand Duke Michel. Kchessinskaya called on her, to wel-
 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 281

come her, on behalf of the Russian Imperial Ballet, and then Pav¬
lova. Isadora was ravished by the artistry of these two heavenly
beings, creatures of the Classical Tradition, the Dancer at his
highest pure glamour. Then Pavlova took her to supper, after
Giselle, with Bakst, Benois, Diaghilev and all the elect spirits of
the Russian Intelligentsia. And Isadora (forgetting everything
but her line of talk) proceeded to inveigh against Ballet.
She wanted Nature. She wanted the surge and lapping of the
waves. She wanted the sapling trees, swaying in the breeze. She
wanted to express—to be—these. She believed that the dawn
and the sunset and the infinite wastes of the stars were lovelier,
more rich in significance, than the choregraphic forms of Ballet.
And so they are. In themselves they are more beautiful and more
richly significant—at any rate, more impressive—than anything
to be seen in a theatre. But that is hardly the point. To strive to
recreate them, in human movement, in the Theatre, is not greatly
different from wanting to recreate oak panelling in glazed wall¬
paper, silk hats in ash-trays or votive candles in the glowing of
electric-light bulbs. The beauty of any natural happening or nat¬
ural thing is its identity, its particularity, its unique and inimi¬
table quality. And in its native context.... We don't want a clas¬
sical Adagio on the high hill. We don't want the movement of
lapping waves in the Theatre. In the Theatre, the theatrical—and
only the theatrical—is natural. If you wish to reject the theatrical,
then you must reject the Theatre. That is what Isadora did not
understand. It is what the innumerable schools of free, soulful,
natural and prophetic dancing do not understand. It is also, I am
afraid, what a good many contemporary choregraphers, within
Ballet, do not understand. They want to run everything into a
formless whole. They want to run together the natural glamours
of the Open Air (the poetical glamour of situation) and the arti¬
ficial glamours of the Theatre and make themselves one compre¬
hensive Fairyland.
So, while enjoying in the highest degree the glamours of the
Theatre, Isadora Duncan was able to turn out this line of talk.
She was able to say that
The school of the ballet to-day, vainly striving against the natural
laws of gravitation or the natural will of the individual, and work¬
ing in discord in its form and movement with the form and move¬
ment of nature, produces a sterile movement which gives no birth
to future movements, but dies as it is made.
The expression of the modern school of ballet, wherein each
action is an end, and no movement, pose or rhythm is successive
i
282 GENRE AND STYLE

or can be made to evolve succeeding action, is an expression of

degeneration, of living death. All the movements of our modern
ballet school are sterile movements because they are unnatural:
their purpose is to create the delusion that the law of gravitation
does not exist for them.

And so on.. . . And finally this . ..

To those who nevertheless still enjoy the movements, for histor¬
ical or choreographic or whatever other reasons, to those I answer:
They see no farther than the skirts and tricots. But look—under the
skirts, under the tricots are dancing deformed muscles. Look still
farther—underneath the muscles are deformed bones. A deformed
skeleton is dancing before you. This deformation through incorrect
dress and incorrect movement is the result of the training necessary
to the ballet.
The ballet condemns itself by enforcing the deformation of the
beautiful woman's body! No historical, no choreographic reasons
can prevail against that!
It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beau¬
tiful ideals of man. What ideals does the ballet express?
No, the dance was once the most noble of all arts; and it shall be
again. From the great depths to which it has fallen, it shall be
raised. The dancer of the future shall attain so great a height that
all other arts shall be helped thereby.
To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in
art—this is the mission of the dancer and to this I dedicate my life.

When, in fact, they were not merely temperamental, Isadora's

objections to Ballet were moral, not aesthetic. At her most serious
(getting out of her phantasy), she was concerned with what is
humane, what ought to be, what improves and uplifts, in the
most obvious senses; and, if you have moralistic feelings first,
whether particularly, about dancing, or generally, about living,
then you must, ultimately, reject Ballet and follow on from Isa¬
dora. If you are concerned, however, with beauty and sheerness
and the subduing power of movement that is superhuman
enough to be slightly terrifying, then Ballet will seem to you the
only dancing. Supposing Isadora—on "deformation"—to be
right in more than an infinitesimal degree (which, of course, she
is not), it will seem to you proper that human bodies should
sweat and ache, in the Classroom, and even become, for ordinary
human purposes, constricted, reduced, perhaps, even ugly, so
long as movement in the Theatre is more beautiful, sheer and
compulsive. Reverting, again, to Tradition_ A definitely
"immoral" aspect is heightened in all art—in all life, for that
Isadora Duncan in "La Marseillaise" (1915). "The school of the ballet of
today, vainly striving against the natural laws of gravitation or the nat¬
ural will of the individual, and working in discord in its form and move¬
ment with the form and movement of nature, produces a sterile move¬
ment which gives no birth to future movements but dies as it is made."
(Duncan) "When, in fact, they were not merely temperamental, Isadora's
objections to Ballet were moral, not aesthetic ... if you have moralistic
feelings first, whether particularly about dancing, or generally, about
living, then you must, ultimately reject Ballet and follow on from Isa¬
dora. If you are concerned, however, with beauty and sheerness and the
subduing power of movement that is superhuman enough to be slightly
terrifying, then Ballet will seem to you the only dancing." (Heppenstall)

283
J

284 GENRE AND STYLE

matter—by the strong operation of Tradition. Tradition is some¬

thing, always, of its own nature, to be struggled against. That is
a large part of its function. The value of Tradition is fundamen¬
tally in the rich and fruitful conflicts and tensions set up
between itself and the free human being. That is why continuous
Religious Tradition, for instance, is spiritually necessary. And
when either side yields or is violated, life becomes very poor and
weak. By a violation of Tradition, we get Hollywood ethics and
the welter of nasty Nonconformist sects. On the other hand,
when the free individual life lets Tradition drain off all its ener¬
gies, we get the hideous spectacle presented, almost unani¬
mously, by the older generation in polite society. We get the
incredible symbolic figure—it still exists, though!—of the with¬
ered old lady, with her scrutinising lorgnette. In Religion, we get
a self-contained and inwardly sufficient churchy pietism which
must certainly be as distasteful to God as it is to the unwithered
creature. We get the Royal Academy. We get the verse of Mr.
Alfred Noyes. And these things, also, have their equivalents in
the Dance.
But, even in purely physical terms, there is no strong beauty
without strong tensions and conflicts. The leaping of a powerful
animal is beautiful, but it is a beauty which soon reduces, when
repeatedly presented, in different sets of conditions, to a com¬
monplace. Its trajectory, for instance, is not much different from
that of an alighting bird, a javelin or a cannon-ball. I think the
loveliest single movement I ever saw—certainly the most
"unnatural," certainly terrible, certainly immoral—was that of a
chained and ravenous animal. The chain being equated, I sup¬
pose, with Tradition.... On a very hot day, in the Schwarzwald,
it was a lean and exasperated Great Dane, sheltering and swel¬
tering in the barn-door of an inn, with its unusually long chain
coiled by it. As two of us, tired and thirsty, came up to the inn
(we had not seen the dog), it came out at us with a terrific howl,
four or five yards out, two or three yards up, was caught and
swung round in mid-air, at the length of its chain, and dragged
back, by the tremendous recoil of its own power, with an amaz¬
ing luscious planetary curve, crashing and shrieking against the
barnwall, making the whole building and the baked earth shud¬
der. No doubt, it was painful for the dog. It was also frightening
for two human beings. But the pain and the fright did not last
long. The moment's grip and rip of terrible beauty is
indestructible.
 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 285

Or is that only "the curious local callousness of the artist"? Am

I, in any case, taking too much trouble over Isadora? Was she not
just a rather silly, rather vulgar, rather adorable woman, pos¬
sessed of enormous energy? She is dead and done with. Let her
rest. And so on.... But Isadora Duncan's importance for the
present situation in the Dance cannot be exaggerated. It is not so
much her direct influence, though the young Michel Fokine was
given a tremendous initial impetus by her theories. It is rather
that the same vicious demands of the age which brought her to
the surface are also dominating Ballet, independently. Ballet
people, when they speak of her now, and of her successors,
laugh at her and at them, heartily enough. But it remains fact
that, for the most part, they themselves are demanding, from the
Dance, just the same kinds—and sometimes, even, inferior
kinds—of extrinsic and illegitimate satisfactions. Pure Style is at
a discount, everywhere, in Ballet no less than in the innumerable
kinds of Free Dancing. ... In the meantime, the schools of Free
Dancing themselves are numerous enough and dangerous
enough. Every small-town teacher of dancing has her own par¬
ticular brand of Freedom. And I believe that there are even more
small-town teachers of dancing in America than in this country.
America, certainly, produced Ted Shawn, and, if you do still
think that Ballet is cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd and bound up with
dead conventions, or suspect that Free Dancing may be either
dancing or free; if you believe that Sturm und Drang is nobler
than Moonlight and Muslin, or can argue that self-expression is
different from exhibitionism; if, in fact, you would assert the
claims of the Soul ... then you should not miss the earliest
opportunity that presents itself of watching this gentleman
dance. Ted Shawn and his Ensemble of Men Dancers, done up
in jock straps and shaven chests, almost fulfil, I should imagine,
Isadora's vision of America Dancing. It is true that these limber
lads, when they came to London, did not impress the Great Brit¬
ish as they have impressed the Great American Public, so that to
be heartily rude about them is unnecessary, as well as not cricket.
But what our surprisingly sceptical critics did not well under¬
stand is that the perspiration of these young huskies is the ulti¬
mate essence of all Freedom in the Dance. If you want precision,
speed and beautiful line—which is to say, if you will have danc¬
ing-then you must get it through all the rigours of the classical
Ballet technique. Reject these, in favour of no matter what
Romanticism, and, finally you will get Mr. Shawn, standing up
286 GENRE AND STYLE

and lying down, suffering, agonising inwardly, sweating, with

cumulative profusion, for twenty minutes or so, to communicate,
through his eyes and hair, the intestinal passion of a spurious
John Brown in the face of an altogether non-existent or at least
invisible Glory. Even within the apparent confines of Ballet,
sweat down a monster like Union Pacific, and you will get some¬
thing like Mr. Shawn's March of the Proletariat, repeated later,
with the addition of hats and an impression of clothes, as Cutting
the Sugar Cane.
That dancing is no concern of the Ted Shawns of this world is
shown clearest, perhaps, in the one important Ballet movement
these dancers have adopted: a leaping circle of grands jetes—in
which, however, the arms, pressed romantically back, behind the
face (which they should frame), would break the heart of the
most indifferent sculptor, let alone any Master of Ballet. And
this, I suppose, is what all criticism of Free Dancers reduces to;
that they do not dance. But let me not be thought to be blind to
admirable effort. I have the greatest respect for the work of Mar¬
garet Morris, for instance, though she derives from Isadora more
directly than any other school. Her remedial work, her work in
athletic training, is, some of it, excellent. And I should be happy
to see her courses substituted in public elementary schools, for
the physical jerks—all too literally, jerks—of the present Gov¬
ernment syllabuses. More than that.... Isadora Duncan was
partly right in her argument that the Ballet training has a ten¬
dency to deform, at least, the bodies of children. A too early start
in Ballet is vicious, in the case of all but the strongest children.
Yet, if we are to have great dancers, there must be some training
from the earliest years. And, if a national scheme were worked
out, incorporating a good deal of Margaret Morris's work, there
would, at the school-leaving age, be such a wealth of material for
the true schools of the Dance as has never been dreamt of. Even
Dalcroze Eurhythmies has its pedagogic justification. Only, these
kinds of work, in practice, are useless for the Theatre.
And the work of Kurt Jooss—to some extent, also, that of the
Central Europeans proper—escapes most of my criticisms of Free
Dancing. The Jooss Dancers are fundamentally concerned to
evolve a technique for the Theatre, not to exhibit themselves.
Though there is not the cumulative force of centuries of Tradi¬
tion, yet there is, here, something of the impersonality of Ballet
itself. The basic argument against Kurt Jooss is, simply, that he
has not made up his mind whether it is Drama or the Dance that
 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 287

he is concerned with. And that is an argument against most spe¬

cifically modern work in the World of Ballet, too... .
A certain Impersonality—which means, in essence. Responsi¬
bility—must also be allowed to such as La Argentina (Antonia
Merce), though they dance alone and are celebrated, primarily,
as unique theatrical personalities. Dancers of markedly national
character cannot be accused of exhibitionism. However individ¬
ual their techique, they have, behind them, a Tradition older
than that of true Ballet, which preserves their work from the
indulgence of private Phantasy. Argentina is quite spurious, in
some senses. The work she arranges to the music of Granados,
Albeniz, de Falla (themselves rather spurious composers), is not
nearly what it pretends to be. But she has, I think, a finer sense
of the Theatre than any other dancer I have seen. Her personality
has been worth all that miraculously careful stage-management.
And her tricks cannot cover over that impressive strangeness of
the forms of the Spanish Dance, which consists in an intricate
fusion of Eastern and Western characteristics: the incoiling cas-
tanet-hypnotic incantatory structure of the Eastern Dance over¬
laid, as it seems, with the flaunting outwardness of the West, of
the Bases of Ballet, with the two interplaying as intimately as the
elements of a split personality. Still, failing a real Flamenco on
his native heath, I prefer my Spanish entirely Westernised and
stylised, in Ballet, where it entered in Petipa's hey-day and
where, more recently, it has found a new importance as the evi¬
dent basis of Massine's peculiar heroic manner.
But then the whole simple truth about Free Dancing, is that
there can be no such thing as Free Dancing. The human body is
one mass of resistances, which are only partially broken down
by a life's devotion to sustained principles of muscular tech¬
nique. The Dancer must always be concerned, supremely, with
muscle, not soul, not expression, not literary significance. Let me
repeat the most fundamental grounds of my position.

Man, in his natural state, plainly, is a thoroughly unsatisfactory

piece of work: in form, in moving, far from express and admirable,
as a rule, and much less like an angel, in action, then a well-bred
whippet is. . . . And Ballet, fundamentally, is an attempt to defeat
this fact, to reveal Man as, also, "an infinite reservoir of possibili¬
ties," which, however, needs Tradition and Organisation, as the
commoner kind of reservoir needs filters and drain-pipes.... It is
a struggle between a wastefully complex muscular system.
288 GENRE AND STYLE

designed for a limited range of animal acts and offices, and the
economy, the simplicity, in line and mass, of the postures and
movements—the Physical Ideas—to which his body, as a material
of Art, aspires. And the result is not a triumph of Mind over Matter,
but the emergence of non-cerebral Matter into such a condition of
subtlety and sensibility that it can itself be called Mind.

For all Art, all Creation, is the end of a powerful and sustained
love-pact between the Artist and his Material: his words, his
musical tones, his pigments. There is courtship, long and diffi¬
cult and delicate wooing, and the final-seeming creative act of
love, which is never final. It shows clearest, perhaps, in Sculp¬
ture. The sculptor has to know every grain, every fibre, every
substantial principle—the textures, the hot and cold, the humid¬
ities, the masses, the qualities of biting back on the chisel: all the
resistances and all the potentialities—of the single block of wood
or stone, before he can be fully ready and fit for the fruitful act
of loving rape which satisfies himself and fulfils the material. It
is the pattern of sexual love. It is the pattern of religious expe¬
rience, where the soul is possessed and enjoyed and fulfilled by
God.
The Dancer is hermaphrodite, in this. He commits rape and
begets lovely forms in his own body, with continual increase of
power. His material, the field of his creative experience, is his
own muscular and nervous being. And his fulfilment is in the
externalised joy of movement, the release, the building up of
inherent tensions into a powerful system of release. This is the
only true freedom. It is the kind of joy and freedom we call danc¬
ing. Not the joy of an inward, an unprojected ecstasy, which can
only be communicated through erotic empathy and sympathy
between the Dancer and the onlooker... . This is not Freedom.
It may be a good kind of licence, but Freedom is a more difficult
thing. It has to be achieved, as the end-product of a long and
usually painful process. ...

(1936)
 KATHARINE EVERETT GILBERT 289

KATHARINE EVERETT
_GILBERT_
MIND AND MEDIUM
IN THE MODERN DANCE

Comparing small things with great, we may say that the ren¬
aissance of the modern dance resembles in various general
respects the classical Renaissance in Italy. One of these respects
is the emphasis on humanism and a return to nature. At both times
humanism has almost implied in itself a return to nature because
man was thought of as in harmony with the physical universe,
enjoying, reflecting, and focussing the world around him. Set¬
ting forth the first principles of the modern dance, Mary Wig-
man (born 1886) says: "Since I am expected to speak of the dance
as I perceive, love, and understand it, I do not wish to start with
art. ... I wish to speak of him on whom art depends for suste¬
nance, who portrays and demands art. I refer to the human
being." The verbal opposition in this sentence between art and
the human being is intended merely as an opposition between
an art that has cut itself off from its human root and so has
become academic and mechanical, and an art that acknowledges
and even claims its human root and is therefore vital. Dead art
has meant to the pioneers of the modern dance "impersonal and
graceful arabesques," "the superstitious execution of a mere for¬
mula," the "servile coquetry" of the academic ballet, a decorative
schema or abstract design, in a word, the exploitation of a rep¬
ertory of cliches. The living art which these pioneers advocate
and teach must express human emotion and speak the language
of natural feeling.
Already as early as 1760 the French maitre de ballet and writer
on the dance, Noverre, had stated the need of restoring the
dance to man and nature. He thus furnished, a century and more
in advance, certain features of the program of the choreography
of 1900. He says:
Steps, the ease and brilliancy of their combination, equilibrium,
stability, speed, lightness, precision, the opposition of the arms
with the legs—these form what I term the mechanism of the dance.
290 GENRE AND STYLE

When all these movements are not directed by genius and when
feeling and expression do not contribute their powers sufficiently
to affect and interest me, I admire the skill of the human machine,
I render justice to its strength and ease of movement, but it leaves
me unmoved. . ..
Dancing is possessed of all the advantages of a beautiful lan¬
guage, yet it is not sufficient to know the alphabet alone. But when
a man of genius arranges the letters to form words and connects
the words to form sentences, it will cease to be dumb; it will speak
with both strength and energy; and the ballets will share with the
best plays the merit of affecting and moving.

The book from which this excerpt is taken. Letters on the Imitative
Arts in General and on the Dance in Particular, is the first item in the
select bibliography of the founder of the systematic theory of the
modern dance, Rudolf von Laban, for his work. Die Welt des Tan-
zers. In a sense, Noverre might himself be called the founder of
the modern movement.
The general demand for a return to natural human feeling,
common to all the moderns, shows various phases. These phases
can be distinguished and will here be evaluated on the basis of
the treatment of mind and medium.
The first extreme reaction from the frigidity of the ballet is suf¬
ficiently represented by the views of Isadora Duncan (1878-
1927). She put “soul” back into the dance at approximately the
moment when William James was deleting it from psychology.
“Soul” signified to her two things: (a) a value, raising to the dig¬
nity of a major art what had dropped to the level of mere virtu¬
osity and amusement; and (b) an arche or principle, i.e., the
authentic basis for an art-form built out of the stuff of movement.
(a) In the simple philosophy, more mythology than science,
guiding her reform, Isadora Duncan at times placed soul as the
bearer of worth in contrast to the body, the heavy element pull¬
ing man down to earth. The highest class of dancers, she writes,
understands that
the body, by force of the soul, can ... be converted to a luminous
fluid. The flesh becomes light and transparent. .. . When, in its
divine power, it completely possesses the body, it converts that into
a luminous cloud and thus can manifest itself in the whole of its
divinity. This is the explanation of the miracle of St. Francis walk¬
ing on the sea. His body no longer weighed like ours, so light had
it become through the soul.

At such moments she thinks of the perfecting of her art as

involving the conquest of body with its crassness and slavery to
 KATHARINE EVERETT GILBERT 291

the force of gravity. After the necessary preliminary discipline

of the gymnasium, she writes, "the body itself must be forgot¬
ten." As a great dancer, she believed, of course, in the glory of
the body. But she confusedly associated the feeling of soaring
and of dominating her physical medium with the virtue of holi¬
ness. She seems often to overlook the beauty of the body per se
and to find beauty in expression of soul.
(b) In the second place, Isadora Duncan, here reflecting from
afar the Plato whom she admired, identified the spring of motion
with the soul. In outlining the proper instruction of the child in
the dance, she says that first attention must be given not to drill
in patterns of movement but to the cultivation of the soul, which
will then naturally express itself in appropriate movement. "The
only power that can satisfactorily guide the child's body is the
inspiration of the soul." Isadora's language is vague, but she
obviously envisaged a line dividing man's spiritual inside, quick
and energetic, from his derivative and instrumental outside. She
sought not only value and dignity for her art (the dance, she
said, must choose between being religion and merchandise), but
spontaneity and creativeness. She charged that those who tried
to adopt her method, copying the mere externals of her move¬
ments, failed—"not understanding that it was necessary to go
back to a beginning." The analogy between her views of the pri¬
macy of the soul in movement and the teaching of the Phaedrus
and the Laws in this respect is too obvious to escape notice. "Self-
motion is the very idea and essence of the soul.... For the body
which is moved from without is soulless." It will be recalled that
the first illustration given by Ernst Cassirer in his Philosophie der
Symbolischen Formen of a notion wavering in ancient Greek
thought between the twilight of mythology and the clear light
of reason is that of the arche. It stands, he says, for the moment
of transition from the mythical notion of "beginning" to the
philosophical notion of "principle." Isadora's "soul" is such a
twilight symbol.
The mythical habit appears also in Isadora's references to the
bond connecting humanity and nature. The human soul was, she
thought, a mirror and symbol of the World-Soul. "Where," she
inquires, "are we to look for the great fountainhead of move¬
ment?" And she answers that since a moving human being is not
apart from organic and inorganic nature, "his movement must
be one with the great movement which runs through the uni¬
verse; and therefore the fountainhead for the art of the dance
will be the study of the movements of nature." The dancer
 4

292 GENRE AND STYLE

moved by spiritual stirrings has heard, she says, an inward

music, "an expression of something out of another, a profounder
world." The "holy" dancer, Isadora's ideal, mirrors cosmic
motion: "her movements will become godlike, mirroring in
themselves the waves, the winds, the movements of growing
things, the flight of birds, the passing of clouds, and finally the
thought of man in his relation to the universe." She once
declared that the gestures of Duse elevated the actress to partic¬
ipation in the circling of the spheres.
The free improvisations of Isadora Duncan (to quote Serge
Lifar) "had a word to say" to the world of dance, but did not
inaugurate a new era. The conception she advocated was too
tightly bound to her own fascinating personality for transmis¬
sion, and exhausted itself in lyrical effusion. She had insisted on
the beginning of movement without providing sufficiently for
the middle and end. She perhaps fertilized the Russian ballet,
but she had no lineal descendants in her own manner.
In the second phase of the modern dance movement, attention
shifts from mind to medium. In the floating dream and unavail¬
able ecstasy of Isadora Duncan, there was no work of art with
determinable ratios and proportions, no universal language with
grammar and vocabulary, no method or technique that could be
taught to others, allowing the art to be propagated and so start
or join a tradition. The German pioneer of the modern dance
movement, Rudolf von Laban (born 1879), undertook to formu¬
late a grammar of motion and a system of notation. For him the
value of the new form could not be located in soul alone. A sys¬
tem of intelligible relations was indispensable, a firm frame for
creativeness in this new kind.
Von Laban's grammar of motion deals with both the content
and form of dance movements. First, as to the content. Now on
any theory, ancient or modern, the movement of living bodies is
the material out of which the dance is constructed, but the will
to restore the dance to "nature" and the "human being" makes
movement in the modern dance teleological instead of mechan¬
ical. The ballet is condemned for being a combination of sense¬
less motions—spins as of a top, bounces as of a ball, ascents and
floatings as of a balloon; the reformed dance, on the contrary, is
to be developed out of mind-informed and goal-directed move¬
ments, in a word, out of gestures. Von Laban defines the dance
as a sequence of gestures rounded into an artistic whole.
Instances of gesture would be the greeting of friendship or the
withdrawal of indignation.
 KATHARINE EVERETT GILBERT 293

Gesture in its turn breaks down for our modern analyst into
parts; but intention and significance must be present in the parts
as they animate the whole. A gesture, then, may be divided into
tensions, or Spannungen, or rather it is the passage from tension
to release, or from release to tension. A Spannung appears to be
like what the psychologist Bentley calls a "vital indicator, which
announces the position of the organism upon matters at issue."
It is the minimum act by means of which a mind or psyche
asserts the fact and mode of its distinction from death, or brute
matter. Spannung is obviously a correlative term—it always
stands over against the moment of release or conciliation. As
thus part of a polar situation, Spannung recalls the dimensions of
feeling worked out by Wundt. Wundt noted that feeling swings
between Spannung and Beruhigung, also between Spannung and
Losung. Von Laban's thinking is not scientific, so that the parallel
with the terms used by these psychologists cannot be pressed. It
is true, however, that modern dancers voluntarily raise the "vital
indicator," or sense of life and force, so that a movement's defi¬
ance of gravity and the earth-drag can be clearly shown.
To illustrate the rise of the tensions that constitute gesture and
which are, therefore, close to the formative influence of the
human dance, von Laban describes the alteration in a man's pos¬
ture, when, after sleep or inattention, he suddenly becomes
charged through and through in a joyous upward swing. The
head lifts, the facial muscles tense, expression breaks, as it were,
through a veil, the whole body, repudiating its submission to
gravity, accents its own power, arching the feet and rounding
the chest. One arm is raised, as if to contradict gravity, the other
arm and a backward-thrust leg maintaining the delicate balance.
If now, a motivated passage occurs by means of which this Span¬
nung is exchanged for another in which the extended arm is
placed athwart the chest, the head slightly lowered, the balance
of the body eased backward, an expression of thoughtful benev¬
olence substituted for that of dynamic assertion, a gesture pat¬
tern, that is, the germ of the dance, has been exhibited.
The sequence of gestures, or again, the sustained rhythm of
tension and swing, requires a proper receptacle to contain it.
This receptacle is the so-called Raumkorper. The spatial body,
which is to be the place of a meaningful sequence, must itself
harmonize with the expression of opposition and reconciliation;
it must even take part in that expression, for it functions in the
dance as well as contains it. Not thus functional is the three-
dimensional space in which the ballet dancer cuts his figures.
294 GENRE AND STYLE

What surrounds him is an indifferent environment, not a plastic

partner. Order in space means for him a track on the floor, a col¬
lection of linear figures, the so-called five positions orienting the
only accepted relations of his two feet to each other, and his own
three dimensions. How, for the modern dance, the spatial body
joins in, becomes internal to, the choreic process may be clarified
by a comparison. In discussing the drawing of mammoths in the
prehistoric caves of France and Spain, Baldwin Brown notes the
very great importance of the first attempt to accommodate a
sketched animal to the space which includes it. When, as in the
Dordogne caves, the interest was confined to the presentation of
the mammoth only, with no feeling for the relation of its form
to the proportions of the wall or ceiling, art did not yet exist.
With conscious proportioning of the animal to fit nicely into the
shape and size of the field, genuine aesthetic concern begins.
The proportions and relations of the total space, then, are
made real for the dancer by the way in which, within it, groups
are balanced, or swept toward, or away from, each other. Diag¬
onal lines tracked out are oriented in respect to indicated right
lines and angles. A solo dancer sometimes appears to make lines
roll around his body. He remains constantly aware of the axes
around which planes are shifting or masses revolving. "The
Raumkorper, the space-body," says Elizabeth Selden, "is to the
dancer as substantial and real as his physical body."
But the formal part of medium is defined by von Laban not
only through the organization of total space, but in terms of the
system of motions anatomically possible to the individual dan¬
cer. This system he determines as a twenty-faced crystal, or ico¬
sahedron. Von Laban reckoned that the obliquely extended arms
and legs of a dancer placed within the three planes that contain
him, first, the vertical, up-down plane, second, the lateral, right-
left plane, and third, the suspended, front-to-back-at-waist plane,
would trace the axes of this twelve-cornered die. If one, then,
thinks of the dancer's movement as rotating on these axes, one
deduces the desired serial order. Since this geometrical form was
to be interpreted, not primarily as the boundary of a body in
repose, but as the law of the dancing process, von Laban devel¬
oped quasi-musical scales, one of six double swings for men (the
B scale), and one of twelve single swings for women (the A
scale). One scale embodied in the icosahedron is identical with
the sequence of parades in fencing. ...
The directions in which the crystallized human thrusts him¬
self forth have their intrinsic emotional charges. As the larger
 KATHARINE EVERETT GILBERT 295

space was made pathic and organic by men and women wheel¬
ing and counterpointing within it, so, for one man, upward
implies lightness and merriment; downward, strength and heav¬
iness; inwardizing, bashfulness or tightness; expansion, happi¬
ness and confidence; motion backward expresses fear or self-
defense; and a forward march, attack, greeting, or welcome.
A dance script is not external to the formal aspect of medium,
because the demand that movement relations be identifiable by
fixed signs reacts upon the choreographer. He must make a clear
and distinct form, if the pattern is to be converted into sign-lan¬
guage. Von Laban devised a system of notation by means of
which dance forms could be preserved and passed from group to
group for repetition and criticism. The simple signs he uses indi¬
cate direction, extent, intensity, and time-value of movements of
specific parts of the body. The script is recorded on a staff of five
lines and four spaces, like that of music. The movements of the
lower part of the body and the legs are indicated by signs within
the staff; the movements of the upper part and the arms by signs
outside. The staff is further parcelled out: the position of the feet
is indicated in the two inner or middle spaces, the movements
of the legs in the air by the two outer spaces. Immediately out¬
side the staff are recorded the movements of the torso; signs for
arm movements are to be found a slight distance away. Wedges
tell the dancer whether to go forward or backward, right or left.
Every lengthening of signs retards, every abbreviation acceler¬
ates, the movement; proportion of length of signs indicating
whether two, three, or four fold. Variations and combinations of
these basic signs give the dancer the necessary instructions for
the turns, transfers, gestures, jumps, amount of stress and expan¬
sion of movements, repetitions, parts of the floor to be used, etc.
Thus far we have attempted no more than historical exposition
of the initial forms assumed by two elements indispensable to all
arts, mind and medium, at the beginning of the modern dance
movement. America made mind lyrical, but attempted no struc¬
tural analysis of medium. ...
There is a close connection between the interpretation of the
dancer as "complete" and the interpretation of him as a "com¬
municant." One might call the dancer the typical speaker, or user
of language, if speech and language did not normally connote
exclusively words read and spoken. Gesture is for von Laban the
original and archetypal language, of which all other languages
are later and more limited branches. The ideal pattern according
to which the mind gives and receives meaning is total bodily
296 GENRE AND STYLE

gesture—expressive movement. The dancer, then, may be

defined as the one who has the maximum power of exchanging
meaning with the rest of the world. He might be named the com¬
municant, per se. To every level of living creature belongs a typical
pattern of movement, symbolizing the cognitive relation set up
between speaking center and responding environment. The
hard cohesion of a stone speaks self-concentration and world-
exclusion. We might perhaps say that the stone has the typically
Forsytean (von Laban's word is nehmend) disposition. The linear
up-stretching and down-drooping of a plant symbolize the
desire for light and the droop of sorrow. Its mood is supplication.
The lower animals move, on the whole, horizontally, seeking
nourishment on their own flat and earthly level—hunters. Man's
motions are typically centripetal; they pass out in all directions
from a center—loving and giving, like Friday's child. The dan¬
cer's intelligence is aware of, and reacts to, every variant of
approach and withdrawal, swinging and reaching, pushing and
pulling, folding and unfolding, that makes up the world process.
He stands at the cross-roads of in-working and out-going streams
of power.
The two chief properties of the dancer's mind are brought
together by von Laban in the sentence: "The phenomena of the
world are to the dancer crystallizations of gesture-might." Less
competent perception, he believes, stops with limiting surfaces,
inert masses, and surface relations. But the gesturing man reads
off the true nature of things in the manifold transformations of
tension-form. The dancer as such, then, being the supreme agent
of gesture, classifies entities according to their content of ges¬
ture-power.
The philosophy of Mary Wigman, the first and chief follower
of von Laban, has much in common with her master's. She
emphasizes the Raumkorper, the determinant tensions and crys¬
tallizations in the choreic medium, the unitary mode of appre¬
hension, the archetypal language power of the dancing being.
Surely in all this body of ideas there is more concern for pattern
and medium than in the rhapsodies of Isadora Duncan....
We noted that Mary Wigman roots the dance in living expe¬
rience, but "experience" immediately becomes cosmic in scope
for her. On the other hand, John Martin also invokes experience
as the matrix of the art. But his conception of experience is akin
to John Dewey's—the development of all the elaborations of
human behavior out of crude beginnings in the satisfaction of
survival needs. Biological truth is what we must study. The pro-
 KATHARINE EVERETT GILBERT 297

cess of eating, for example—the assault upon the environment

for the satisfaction of hunger, the appropriation of food, and the
subsequent assimilation of it to the bodily tissues—furnishes the
type we require. Our organs exist to keep us alive and happy.
In this "radically empirical" doctrine of the basic nature of the
dance, what is mind and what is medium? The medium is "expe¬
rience"—experience as human movement, because, as Martin
says, the movement of behavior is only another name for expe¬
rience. The parts of this material often listed in the manuals of
the modern dance are as follows: "walking, strutting, running,
leaping, hopping, skipping, galloping, turning, sliding, rolling,
crawling, bending, stretching, balancing, folding, unfolding,
soliciting, repelling, etc." This is a selection from the complete
series of significant human movements, coined in the mint of the
necessity of man's adaptation to his environment. For a more
comprehensive study of the range of expressive movement, the
empirical student would turn to Darwin's The Expression of the
Emotions or the psychologist Allport's recent work. Studies in
Expressive Movement.
The mind for the empiricist—it is itself almost the same as
motor experience. The dancer is he who feels the primary human
urges and knows how to move for satisfaction and expression.
As we all know, the empiricists of Dewey's faith object to a rad¬
ical separation of the mind from its object, or its environment, or
from the material on which it works. At the beginning of his
book. Art as Experience, Dewey takes the position, for example,
that the Parthenon is not so much the embodiment of architec¬
tural beauty shining on a hill as the fulfillment of the civic and
religious needs of the Athenian citizens. In other words, mind
and medium here tend to lose their clear distinction from each
other, as they did in the earlier mystic forms of dance theory.
For the theory of the modern dance the mind has thus far
played three distinguishable roles: (1) that of soul, value-bearer
and spring of motion; (2) the complete man and the archetypal
communicant; (3) the empirical self—or better, biological organ¬
ism. Medium has assumed two forms (since Isadora's "soul"
expressed itself freely without systematic submission to the con¬
ditions of a medium): (1) the Raumkorper and icosahedron, and
(2) the complete set of empirical motion-modes. Let us now try
to bring these two elements into relation to each other. While
both concepts, mind and medium, are indispensable in aesthetic
analysis, they must come together in the crucial aesthetic fact:
the work of art. Not mind and not medium alone, but the result
298 GENRE AND STYLE

of the operation of the artist's mind on the artist's medium pro¬

duces the thing of value. It is the dance-form brought into inde¬
pendent being by the interaction of the two elements, and show¬
ing the characters of both, which puts to the proof the
interpretation of mind, medium, and their mutual relations. Art
is that activity, Aristotle says, which produces something distinct
from the act of producing it. Unlike moral prudence, which is an
activity continuous with its issue—wise human conduct art
realizes itself in something other than itself. Doubtless, Aristotle
was thinking in this particular context of a craftsman such as the
builder of a house, where it is easy to interpose a space between
the mind that makes and what it produces. But his principle sug¬
gests one valuable general criterion of aesthetic excellence. The
dance as work of art must be, among other things, an artificial
creature, which will poise itself in external space-time to be
looked at. It must be able to be the object of theoria. The function
of art, Ruskin said, acknowledging the Aristotelian origin of the
idea, is to secure man the happiness that may be defined as the
energy or fulfillment of contemplation. But Aristotle's total treat¬
ment of the arts is flexible and sensitive to the various situations
in which art finds itself. He even sets a definite problem sug¬
gested by the tendency of self-subsistence to disappear in the art
of music. The relation between music and its soul-intention, we
may paraphrase him as saying, is immediate; that between paint¬
ing and its soul-intention is mediate, because painting employs
external signs—figure and color. Figure and color are a stage
removed from emotion, because not motion, he implies. The fig¬
urative arts employ a somewhat arbitrary language; music is
almost communication purified of a medium, because music is
motion and the feelings or ideas imitated (as Aristotle says) are
also motion. Like knows like intuitively. "Why do rhythms and
tunes, which after all are only voice, resemble moral characters,
whereas savours do not, nor yet colors and odours? Is it because
they are movements, as actions also are?" There is, as it were, for
Aristotle, an underground passage connecting the mobile energy
of the soul and the mobile energy of music that gives the one.
quick access to the other. He is interested apparently in the prob¬
lem of what he calls the differences of imitative capacity, or what
we should probably call natural expressiveness in the different
arts. Of course, he is also interested in showing what arts are
most useful in moral education.
Thus Aristotle set a standard for critical justice to the inevitable
double orientation of art—toward independent status as analyz-
 KATHARINE EVERETT GILBERT 299

able structure, the object of theoria, and toward psychic expres¬

sion, with a leaning toward practical involvement. “In any art,
the more artistic [the work] is, the more form is there, i.e., the
more measurable, definable, calculable, is it—the more rational
or intellectual. Yet on the other hand, everybody since the world
began has associated with art strength of feeling and uncon¬
sciousness of effort. A great piece of music can be taken to bits
like a clock; a great poem, compared with any other piece of lan¬
guage, is intensely artificial; yet the amount of feeling which
they represent is stupendous when compared with the song of a
bird or a simple story." The complete loss of either pole for any
alleged art or case of art is fatal to its specific value as art.
Now the arts vary intrinsically in the distance they normally
interpose between the object and the human response, and so in
their satisfaction of the obligation to theoria. As Aristotle said that
music made an immediate transit to the hearer, without delay by
signs, so Mr. Edward Bullough treats the dance as (to use his
phrase) running a special risk of a loss of distance, because of the
physical presence of living human beings as vehicles. He even
hints that the decline of the status of the dance among the arts
since Greek days may be due to its tendency to let distance
disappear.
To measure the total resistance of the dance to "distancing" it
is necessary to add together the factor pointed out by Aristotle
in music, motion, to that pointed out by Bullough, presentment
of the actual living body. In the dance the contemplative attitude
is retarded by the constitution of the medium, namely the
rhythmic movements of the actual human body. To the testi¬
mony leading to this conclusion of the ancient philosopher and
the contemporary psychologist may be added the professional
word of a maitre de ballet, Serge Lifar. He declares that the dance
is the most bete (dependent on the exploitation of the full animal
body) of all the arts.
If immediacy is one characteristic property of the dance as
such, the problem before us is: Is this general property aug¬
mented in the modern dance? The first answer would seem to be
No. Certainly both von Laban and Wigman lay stress on the
requirements of the dance as a work of art, and on the distinction
between dance as an inclusive human type and as formed struc¬
ture. Moreover, the trend toward abstraction in the modern
dance would, it would seem, weaken the sense of a moving
human presence. For example, Mary Wigman might be said per¬
haps to lose qua dancer her specific human character and to meta-
300 GENRE AND STYLE

morphose into a bare space-tension. She is, one might suggest, a

sort of animated brush stroke, painting in three dimensions the
interesting intelligible constitution of a spatial volume. Or to use
another figure, one might say that the dancer demonstrates effec¬
tively the processes of crystallization. The formulae of certain
geometrical relations are through art made visible and vivid by
active instruments—instruments which happen also to be living
bodies. Indeed, such an idea is actually stated by Merle Armitage
in a book on Martha Graham: "[In the dance] Mathematics,
Geometry, and Numbers become neural and are projected as
emotive patterns which live in space as well as in time."
Abstraction not only minimizes the sense of human presence,
it might be argued, but also substitutes pattern for passion. The
abstract pattern of the dance is built as an architect builds, it
would seem, with something of the cool attitude of the architect.
A figure or phrase being devised, this may then be repeated,
reversed in direction, accumulated by the employment of further
parts of the body, and by contrasts in tempo. It becomes, again,
we might say, such an architectonic whole as a fugue or a sonata,
which we think of as built up by similar methods out of voices,
themes, and movements. The modern theorists, being interested
in the autonomy of their art, do not, on the whole, admit that a
dance, which they might name "Counterpoint" or "Canon," is
an interpretation of a musical composition. Rather they insist
that the choreic counterpoint or canon or arabesque is a parallel
phenomenon, constructed by combining in proportionate ways
the original "music" of the body. In this attitude they have the
support, of course, of the history of the interrelations of music
and the dance. Much of the liveliness and variety which gives
charm to the sonata and symphony is the result of the assimila¬
tion of dance measures—the minuet, polonaise, sarabande, etc.,
so that the dance may claim equal primacy with music. Bach's C
Minor Passacaglia, for instance, derived from a dance form. Doris
Humphrey has recently constructed a modern dance which she
calls by this name and which uses a two-piano arrangement
based on Bach's music. It is easy to point out the large use of pre¬
classic forms among the moderns. Though obviously the sub¬
stance of even these formal dances is a vehicle of some general
mood, as is a fugue or a sonata, still because pantomine—realistic
suggestion—is practically ruled out, these dances may illustrate
what "abstraction" in the modern dance means. It means essen¬
tially the deletion of mimicry.
 KATHARINE EVERETT GILBERT 301

We recur to the problem of degree of distance. While abstract

modern dances evoke emotion very little compared with a sec¬
ond large group of modern dances, immediately to be noted,
they are more moving than the classical ballet, and thus increase
the "risk" of the general dance beyond its already considerable
tendency to allow "psychical distance" to disappear. It is easy to
see why this is true. The general spirit of the modern dance,
being a "return to nature" and "common humanity," even a
pavane or a polonaise becomes through it recharged with our
contemporary attitudes and with natural human sentiment.
Again, abstraction in the sense of realization through bodily
movement of space-relations is almost a stripping of human
behavior to its primitive dynamic elements. If space is to be re¬
created by the dancer in terms of tensions and resolutions, let us
suppose, if we will, that the dancer evaporates into a space ten¬
sion. He will, even so, be a fighter or a lover, an embodiment of
fear, or a builder of group solidarity. Let a choric group work
together to show how a python-soul constructs a labyrinth, a
spell-binding will draws a magic circle, witchery makes zig-zag
intercrossing lines, as a result the line, circle, network, or diag¬
onals created may actually be more starkly pathic than the con¬
fessed dramatic pantomine, because the simplified meaning of
movement may be revealed without the dilution of associative
content. This reminds us of Aristotle's description of music,
music as a motion awakening soul as motion, like to like, without
a detour through representation of objects.
The modern dance, however, uses pantomime or dramatic
action as well as abstraction. In this latter favored form the
intrinsic emotional appeal of the dance leaps to new heights. The
material preferred is religious ritual, particularly primitive, and
political, even revolutionary comment. Witness the titles: by
Wigman: Dance to the Virgin Mary; Sacrifice, which includes (a)
Dance for the Sun, (b) Summons of Death, (c) Dance for the
Earth, (d) Dance to Death; The Celebration, which includes (a)
The Temple, (b) The Mark of Darkness, (c) Festive Clamour;—
these by Martha Graham: Vision of the Apocalypse; A Project for
a Divine Comedy; Primitive Canticle; Primitive Mysteries, which
includes (a) Hymn to the Virgin, (b) Crucifixes, (c) Hosanna: Bac¬
chanalia; Dithyrambic; Incantation; Satyric Festival Songs; and
American Provincials, which includes (a) Act of Piety, and (b)
Act of Judgment. Under social comment, we may list the follow¬
ing by Graham: Immigrant, including (a) Steerage, (b) Strike;
302 GENRE AND STYLE

Sketches from the People; Frontier; by Margaret Sage: Song of

Labor and Revolutionary Hymn; by Jooss: The Green Table and
The Big City; and by Doris Humphrey: With My Red Fires. In
this phase of the modern dance, the powerful passions linked
with religion, revolt, war, and lust are fully exploited by the
present-day choreographers. That in these cases distancing
would tend to be cut down is obvious.
To all those who emphasize the life-furthering aspect of art,
its Dionysian element, and who distrust its formalism and arti¬
ficiality, its Apolline element, the drift of the modern dance
would seem a desirable aesthetic tendency, an accentuating of its
already prerogative position among the expressive arts. Such
persons are more interested in what mind—especially feeling—
contributes than what medium demands. These make the dance
a full-bodied and forceful communication about the social fun¬
damentals. All other arts are taken, in this view, as specialities of
gesture-language—poetry, for example, is fundamentally the
behavior of the tongue, larynx, etc. Loss in force, but gain in del¬
icacy of idea, accompanies for them the ri§e of painting, sculp¬
ture, music, and literature. The return of the dance, then, to pri¬
mal urges is no more than the recollection and reaffirmation of
all art's birth-right....
(1941)

MARY WIGMAN
MY TEACHER LABAN

. .. Laban started to work intensely on his dance notation, the

one thing to which he was absolutely faithful and for which he
wrestled like Jacob with the angel. No error, no disappointment,
no failure could ever keep him from pursuing this work. His
gymnastic system based on the function of the joints and on the
tension and relaxation of the human body's musculature was the
first result of his research. His swing scales, by then properly
 MARY WIGMAN 303

defined, were the basis for his "Theory of Harmony of

Movement."
I became the first victim to help prove his theoretical findings.
Each morning he knocked on the door of my room: "Here comes
the choreographer!" Laban stood there carrying an old-fashioned
valise stuffed full with drawings and notes. When the wobbly
kitchen table did not provide enough space for his papers, he
spread them around the floor: from crosses to tiny human bodies
and back again to crosses, stars and curves, signs and hastily
scribbled notes were all over the room, leaving only a small
space for my practical demonstrations. This was his great dream
to be realized: an analysis of movement and the experiment of
translating it into signs as a cross-, bar-, or point-system, in a
series of lines or curves. He repeatedly designed, and rejected,
always starting again from the beginning.
When the deep-breathing exercise was over, never quite to
Laban's satisfaction, we turned to the development of his move¬
ment scales. They were most exactly tested for their relationships
to each other, to be later demonstrated in their unshakable one¬
ness of force, time, and space. The first of these scales consisted
of five different swinging movements leading in a spiral line
from downward to upward. The organic combination of their
spatial directions and their natural three-dimensional qualities
led to a perfect harmony. The different movements not only
flowed effortlessly from one to the other, they seemed to be born
of each other.
It also was hard work for me! Every movement had to be done
over and over again until it was controlled and could be ana¬
lyzed, transposed, and transformed into an adequate symbol. I
have always had a pronounced sense for rhythm and dynamics,
and my belief in living a movement and not just doing it was
strong. Therefore my individual way of expression and reaction
must have been as much torture to Laban as his indefatigable
attempts to achieve objectivity were to me.
To point out the dynamic value of these movements they were
given by him names like pride, joy, wrath, and so on. I needed
little more than to hear the word "wrath" and I immediately
threw myself into a colossal rage. The swinging virtually
exploded in space. The endlessly repeated movements became
more or less mechanical. I was simply delighted to do them once
in a different, more personal way. Laban's wrath was even more
vehement than mine. He jumped up as if bitten by a tarantula.
304 GENRE AND STYLE

hammered with his fists on the table so that the papers whirled
around the room. He shouted: “You clown, you grotesque mon¬
ster, with your terrific intensity you ruin my whole theory of
harmony!" He was furious about what he called my super-self¬
expression, declaring that the movement itself was wrath and
needed no individual interpretation.
Did I comprehend at all at that time what Laban had in mind?
I was young and impatient, I wanted to dance, I wanted to create
and communicate something that concerned other people too.
What was a theory to me?
I believe the foundations of my career as a dancer as well as a
dance pedagogue were laid in those few weeks. Objectivity and
responsibility, patience, endurance, and self-discipline! How I
needed them when I worked on my solo program, when my
enthusiasm, my impatience, my passion for expression carried
me away; when I was tempted to ignore all difficulties and com¬
plications; when it was so easy and seemed so right to jump over
empty spots, to glide around dangerous corners, or to fill unex¬
pected holes with hastily improvised movements, so I might go
on and lose no time on the necessary but often so tiresome tran¬
sitions. Or, when I was working with a group of young dancers,
fascinated and absorbed by the dance idea I wanted to work out
with them, their far too individual reaction and interpretation,
their misunderstanding of my intentions, even their sponta¬
neous enthusiasm, might have made me lose track of what I had
in mind. If I were to get impatient or lose my temper, they would
be terrified, would not react any more, and I could not go on
with my work.
Only then I understood Laban's fury and my own terror of it,
and also understood the young dancers who believed they were
doing their best, just as I had done and felt when I was Laban's
pupil. What a struggle, what an inner fight! But what a wonder¬
ful fight from beginning to end! I had learned my lesson. I knew
that, without killing the creative mood, I had to keep the balance
between my emotional outburst and the merciless discipline of
a super-personal control, thus submitting myself to the self-
imposed law of dance composition.
I remember my first solo program at the civic theatre in
Zurich. After many trials and failures, it turned out to be a great
success. Laban came backstage to congratulate me. He smiled
and, being the great improviser he was, bent his knee: "Dear
Wigman, though there was only one really harmonious move¬
ment in your whole program, I admit that you are a dancer, you
 MARY WIGMAN 305

may even be a great dancer." Today I would like to bend my

knee before him and thank him for what he was to me and for
what he gave me.

(c. 1970)

MARY WIGMAN
THE PHILOSOPHY OF
THE MODERN DANCE

The dance is one of many human experiences which cannot be

suppressed. Dancing has existed at all times, and among all peo¬
ple and races. The dance is a form of expression given to man
just as speech, philosophy, painting or music. Like music, the
dance is a language which all human beings understand without
the use of speech. Granted, the dance is as little an everyday
expression as music: the man who begins to dance because of an
inner urge does so perhaps from a feeling of joyousness, or a
spiritual ecstasy which transforms his normal steps into dance
steps, although he himself may not be conscious of this change.
In short, the dance, like every other artistic expression, pre¬
supposes a heightened, increased life response. Moreover, the
heightened response does not always have to have a happy back¬
ground. Sorrow, pain, even horror and fear may also tend to
release a welling-up of feeling, and therefore of the dancer's
whole being.
There is something alive in every individual which makes him
capable of giving outward manifestation (through the medium
of bodily movement) to his feelings, or rather, to that which
inwardly stirs him.
Our own times confirm this definite principle.
We speak of the rediscovery and the reconquering of the body.
We cannot deny that there is a definite cult of "body-conscious¬
ness" today. The interest in body-movement from sport to the
art of dancing is wakened, keen and living.
It behooves us now to inquire whether this interest is merely
306 GENRE AND STYLE

an ephemeral mood, a transient fad, or whether it is actually a

timely expression reflecting our own artistic life.
I believe that the latter is true. Do we not already speak of the
technical age of the machine? And paradoxical as it may sound,
between that which we designate as “technical," and that which
we call the "modern dance," there is a definite correlation which
is not fortuitous. It should not be a matter of wonderment or con¬
fusion to say that our technical age engendered the dance-moti¬
vated being. When we now consider that the primitive force or
rhythm is behind the motor; that every machine breathes and
symbolizes harnessed rhythmic force, and at the same time,
when we recall that the impetus of the dance is also rhythm, we
then have a definite foundation, a common nexus between the
seemingly opposed expressions of life and forms of art.
It is this rhythmical expression in, and toward, life, which
inculcates within the young people of today a positive conscious¬
ness for the dance. The use of rhythmical bodily movement as a
medium of art-expression has become natural to, and is taken for
granted by, the dance-conscious people of today....
The primary concern of the creative dancer should be that his
audience not think of the dance objectively, or look at it from an
aloof and intellectual point of view,—in other words, separate
itself from the very life of the dancer's experiences;—the audi¬
ence should allow the dance to affect it emotionally and without
reserve. It should allow the rhythm, the music, the very move¬
ment of the dancer's body to stimulate the same feeling and emo¬
tional mood within itself, as this mood and emotional condition
has stimulated the dancer. It is orily then that the audience will
feel a strong emotional kinship with the dancer: and will live
through the vital experiences behind the dance-creation. Shock,
ecstasy, joy, melancholy, grief, gayety, the dance can express all
of these emotions through movement. But the expression with¬
out the inner experience in the dance is valueless.
A definite change in dancing, particularly in Germany, has
been taking place these past twenty years. The revised mode of
terpsichorean expression we designate as the "modern dance" in
contrast to the "classic dance" or the ballet.
The ballet had reached such a state of perfection that it could
be developed no further. Its forms had become so refined, so sub¬
limated to the ideal of purity, that the artistic content was too
often lost or obscured. The great "ballet dancer" was no longer
a representative of a great inner emotion (like the musician or
poet), but had become defined as a great virtuoso. The ballet-dan-
 ROGER COPELAND 307

cer developed an ideal of agility and lightness. He sought to con¬

quer and annihilate gravitation. He banned the dark, the heavy,
the earthbound, not only because it conflicted with his ideal of
supple, airy, graceful technique, but because it also conflicted
with his pretty aesthetic principles.
Times, however, became bad. War had changed life. Revolu¬
tion and suffering tended to destroy and shatter all the ideals of
prettiness. Traditions, aged and cherished, were left behind.
How could these old and broken-down traditions remain firm
throughout this awful period of destruction? ...
(1933)

ROGER COPELAND
MERCE CUNNINGHAM
AND THE POLITICS
OF PERCEPTION

"You wonder what to look at. I wonder how to live.

Same thing."
Michelangelo Antonioni, "Red Desert"

"The history of the arts is tantamount to the

discovery and formulation of a repertory of objects on
which to lavish attention."
Susan Sontag, "The Aesthetics of Silence"

"Now that Rauschenberg has made a painting with

radios in it, does that mean that even without radios, I
must go on listening even while I'm looking, every¬
thing at once in order not to be run over?"
John Cage, "On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, And His
Work"

In 1950, the filmmaker Hans Namuth persuaded a reluctant

Jackson Pollock to execute one of his famous "action paintings"
308 GENRE AND STYLE

on a canvas of glass while the camera recorded Pollock's frenzied

gyrations from underneath. Although neither of them realized
it at the time, their collaboration had resulted in one of the
world's most significant dance films. For it demonstrated (in a
way the paintings alone rarely do) that the fundamental impulse
behind abstract expressionism was the desire to transform painting
into dancing. Pollock wasn't the only abstract expressionist who
thought of his art in "dancerly" terms: Arshile Gorky hired a
Hungarian violinist to inspire his students while they painted.
One of Franz Kline's masterpieces from 1950 is called "Nijinsky
(Petrushka)."
Still, it's only after watching Namuth's film of Pollock paint¬
ing that one can fully comprehend the truth of Harold Rosen¬
berg's assertion that at the dawn of the abstract expressionist
movement:

the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another

as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to
reproduce, re-design, or "express" an object, actual or imagined.
What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

Abstract expressionism can be thought of as the culminating

phase of modern art's love affair with the primitive. Ecstatic
dancing is, of course, a central element in many of those rituals
we think of as "primitive." And Pollock's conception of paint-
ing-as-dancing evolves directly out of those works he executed
in the 1940's, works which took their primary inspiration from
images of primitive ritual and mythology. But now, rather than
reproducing the iconography of primitive art, he attempted to
work himself into a virtually "primitive" state of consciousness.
Pollock wanted to express himself (his innermost self) in the
most spontaneous, unmediated manner possible. His conception
of painting-as-dancing could well have been inspired by Hav¬
elock Ellis who wrote "dancing ... is no mere translation or
abstraction from life, it is life itself." Yeats, in Among School Chil¬
dren, alluded to that same sacred bond between the dancer's life
and the dancer's art when he asked, "How can we know the dan¬
cer from the dance?" Pollock wanted us to ask the very same
question of his work: "How can we know the painter from the
painting?"
Ecstatic dancing provides a provisional solution to the "prob¬
lem" of steadily increasing self-consciousness as well as the fear
of becoming too "civilized" for one's own good. Jacob Wasser-
man exaggerates only slightly when he writes in The World's lllu-
 ROGER COPELAND 309

sion, "To dance means to be new, to be fresh at every moment, as

though one had just issued from the hand of God." (Nor should
we ignore the purely "therapeutic" and cathartic possibilities of
dance. Dancing is a relatively safe form of intoxication. The har¬
rowing private lives of Pollock, Gorky, and Rothko illustrate that
they were all too familiar with the less healthy varieties.)
Ultimately, Pollock discovered the wisdom of Martha
Graham's oft-quoted aphorism, "Movement does not lie."
Needless to say, no one watching Namuth's film has ever mis¬
taken Pollock for a Graham dancer; but Graham's variety of mod¬
ern dance has much in common with abstract expressionism:
both were Jungian, gravity-ridden, and emotionally over¬
wrought. Compare the titles of the major works that Pollock and
Graham created in the 40's. Pollock painted "She Wolf," "Pasi-
phae," "Guardians of the Secret," and "The Totem, Lesson I."
Graham danced works bearing equally incantatory titles: "Cave
of the Heart," "Errand into the Maze," and "Night Journey."
Nor were they alone in rejecting the rational niceties of mod¬
ern civilization. In the late 40's and early 50's, Existentialism
with its emphasis on "risk"—was emerging as a fully fledged
philosophy of life. Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift
were creating screen characters full of inner anguish and inarti¬
culate sensitivity. Mailer was just beginning a career devoted to
the proposition that violent action is more authentic than polite,
rational discourse. And Dylan Thomas was drinking himself to
death in public.
Then in 1953, Robert Rauschenberg, a student of Josef Albers,
created his "Erased DeKooning" in which he literally erased a
painting by the famed abstract expressionist. Rauschenberg's
gesture was probably too playful to be considered a passionate
declaration of war on abstract expressionism; but it was, at the
very least, an ironic dismissal of all that existential angst and
public airing of matters more appropriately dealt with on the
analyst's couch (Pollock often communicated with his Jung¬
ian analyst by painting for him). In 1957 (less than a year after
Pollock's death) Rauschenberg created "Factum"—his notorious
"double paintings"—one of which was created spontaneously in
the manner of an abstract expressionist work, the other a metic¬
ulously recreated duplicate. His point: the product is not neces¬
sarily dependent on the process.
It's not surprising that Rauschenberg received very little
encouragement from the art world at this time, immersed as it
was in the abstract expressionist ethos. What is surprising
310 GENRE AND STYLE

though, is that one of his earliest admirers was a former Graham

dancer with whom he became associated at Black Mountain Col¬
lege in 1953. The dancer's name was Merce Cunningham and the
most significant thing about his association with Graham was the
fact that it had ended. The dances Cunningham was now cho¬
reographing were much more balletic than Graham's; they were
fast, light, ironic in tone, and virtually devoid of "expressive" or
symbolic elements.
Even more unusual was Cunningham's insistence on
"freeing" choreography from a dependence on music. In Cun¬
ningham's work, movement and sound existed independently of
one another; choreography and music were both performed in
the same space and time, but without affecting (or even acknowl¬
edging) one another. And most eccentric of all was Cunning¬
ham's use of chance procedures to "dictate" his choreographic
sequences. Beginning in 1951 with his "16 Dances for Soloist and
Company of Three," Cunningham decided to determine the
arrangement of sequences by tossing coins, thereby invoking a
wholly "impersonal" (and more objective) sense of order, rather
than digging deeper and deeper into some subjective inner
sanctum.
Thus Cunningham's repudiation of Graham and modern dance
directly paralleled Rauschenberg's repudiation of abstract expressionism.
And appropriately, Rauschenberg designed the majority of Cun¬
ningham's settings and costumes for the next 16 years (in 1966
Jasper Johns, another painter who was instrumental in forging a
cooler, more impersonal style of object making, became Cun¬
ningham's artistic director).
All the while Cunningham's chief musical collaborator was, of
course, John Cage. Much has been written about Cunningham's
career-long collaboration with Cage. But despite Cage's undeni¬
able influence on Cunningham (especially concerning his use of
chance), the fact of the matter is that Cunningham's sensibility
is actually much closer to that of Rauschenberg's and Johns'.
Cage sees chance as a means of negating the ego and ultimately
of overcoming the separation that the mind creates between
itself and the world. But Cunningham's art, like Rauschenberg's,
always insists on maintaining an ironic detachment from the
world, especially from the "natural" world. Discussing the role
of ecstasy in dance, Cunningham wrote in 1955, "What is meant
is not license, but freedom, that is, a complete awareness of the
world and at the same time a detachment from it."
 ROGER COPELAND 311

Now, at this point we should probably pause to ask ourselves

why Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and Johns felt compelled to
reject this ethos of personal commitment and involvement. Why
this emphasis on detachment, playing it cool, this aversion to
intoxication? Again, it's necessary to compare Cunningham and
Rauschenberg with Pollock and Graham. Both abstract expres¬
sionism and modern dance proceeded from Freud's belief that
below the "cultural” ego lies the "natural" id (or in Jung's ver¬
sion, "the collective unconscious"). In order to re-establish con¬
tact with the natural and uncorrupted regions of the self, one
must suspend rationality. But as de Chirico was among the first
to point out, even the subconscious is in danger of becoming
fully "acculturated" amidst the sensory overload environments
of 20th century consumer society. It's no coincidence—I don't
think—that Cunningham's aesthetic was forged in the mid-50's
when the new medium of television was rapidly becoming an
American institution. In an environment designed to stimulate
wholly artificial desires—the "needs" of a consumer society—we
have no way of knowing that what feels natural isn't really the
result of subliminal cultural conditioning. This is the intellectual
climate in which semiological studies have thrived in recent
years; the semiologist proceeds on the assumption that "natural¬
ness" is a bourgeois myth and that mass media have conditioned
us to accept culturally-created needs as natural desires.
Especially in an age of abundance, the danger exists that we
will confuse purchasing power with real freedom, while all the
while our most fundamental perceptual habits have been con¬
ditioned by forces we neither recognize nor control. Or so the
argument goes. (Marcuse's One Dimensional Man and Jacques
Ellul's The Technological Society provide what are probably the
most persuasive presentations of this potentially paranoid idea.)
Amidst this climate of suspicion, artists like Cunningham and
Rauschenberg have set out to critically examine that which "feels
natural" rather than simply surrendering to it. Their motivations
may not be as overtly political as those of a Jean-Luc Godard, but
their attitude toward "naturalness" is much the same. And I sus¬
pect they would both endorse Ad Reinhardt's direct challenge to
the abstract expressionist ethos: "One must never let the influ¬
ence of evil demons gain control of the brush."
Modern dance is especially relevant here; for the pioneers of
this form—from Isadora Duncan through Martha Graham—
have always considered themselves apostles of freedom. To
312 GENRE AND STYLE

them, being free meant liberating oneself from the stuffy con¬
ventions of Puritanical culture. But for Cunningham, Rauschen¬
berg, and the extraordinary community of composers, painters,
and dancers with whom they collaborated, true freedom has
more to do with seeing (and hearing) clearly, than with moving
freely. Likewise, social mobility—regardless of whether it's hor¬
izontal or vertical—does not, in and of itself, constitute "free¬
dom." (Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein both realized this when
they advocated "doing nothing"—a detached contemplation of
the world, rather than active involvement in it.)
But can we really extract a "politics" of perception from Cun¬
ningham's work? I think so. Here's a quote that tells us more
about Cunningham than almost everything that's been written
about him in the last 20 years:
So long as the expression "Gesamtkunstwerk" (or "integrated work
of art") means that the integration is a muddle, so long as the arts
are supposed to be "fused" together, the various elements will all
be equally degraded, and each will act as a mere "feed" to the rest.
The process of fusion extends to the spectator who gets thrown into
the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the
total work of art. Witchcraft of this sort must of course be fought
against. Whatever is intended to produce hypnosis, is likely to
induce sordid intoxication, or creates fog, has got to be given up.
Words, music, and setting must become more independent of one another.

The writer is none other than Bertolt Brecht; and his is perhaps
the last name one would expect to arise in connection with Cun¬
ningham. Yet Brecht, in 1930 had anticipated Cunningham's rev¬
olution in his essay, "Notes on the Opera."
Brecht is here rejecting Wagner's theory of the integrated art
work; and for Brecht it was no coincidence that Wagner occupied
such a privileged place in the cultural life of Nazi Germany. To
Brecht, the Nuremberg Rallies were one great Wagnerian opera:
the masses mesmerized, the Fiihrer unified with his followers.
Brecht's alternative is intentional dis-unity, a separation of the
elements which ultimately serves to keep the audience at a
respectful distance, to prevent them from passively absorbing (or
being absorbed into) the spectacle around them.
No one—and that includes Brecht himself—has carried this
principle of separation as far as Merce Cunningham. In Cun¬
ningham's work, every collaborative element maintains its
autonomy. The choreography, the score, the settings are all cre¬
ated in isolation and often don't encounter one another until the
 ROGER COPELAND 313

Merce Cunningham's “Tread" (1970, decor by Bruce Nauman). “Often

the setting, lighting, or even the score for a Cunningham work serve to
impede our more direct, 'uncomplicated' perception of the choreog¬
raphy." (Copeland)

very first performance. This is the aesthetics of peaceful co-exis¬

tence: sound, movement, and setting all inhabit the same space
without affecting what one another do.
Note that for Brecht, the ultimate goal of this dis-unity is to
preserve the spectator's perceptual freedom.1 And often, the set¬
ting, lighting, or even the score for a Cunningham work serve
to impede our more direct, “uncomplicated" perception of the
choreography. For "Tread" (1970), Bruce Nauman designed a
row of standing fans lined up downstage directly between the
audience and the dance. In "Walkaround Time (1968), Jasper Johns
designed a series of moveable plastic boxes which served a sim¬
ilar function. Ditto for Frank Stella's brilliantly bright rectangles
of colored cloth moved around on aluminum frames for Cun¬
ningham's "Scramble" (1967).2In "Winterbranch" (1964), Rausch-
314 GENRE AND STYLE

enberg's lighting plot contained chance elements which often

left large areas of the stage in almost total darkness.
Cunningham was the first choreographer to achieve (or even
attempt to achieve) the aims of the Russian Formalist Victor
Shklovsky (a major influence on Brecht) who wrote that art is the
effort to "remove the automatism of perception, to increase the
difficulty and length of perception ." No one would hesitate to dis¬
cuss the political implications of Shklovsky's statement (pro¬
duced in 1917, in the wake of the October Revolution) or the
political implications of Brecht's theory of opera: so why are we
so wary of attributing similar motives to Cunningham? The
problem is twofold: On the one hand, we're so eager to credit
Cunningham with having liberated dance from the burden of
having to project various sorts of meaning (narrative, symbolism,
personal expression, etc.) that we fail to properly consider the
meaning of this liberation. And the second part of the problem
derives from the fact that even our most accomplished dance crit¬
ics continue to employ an essentially descriptive approach to
dance writing which is blissf ully ignorant of the intellectual tra¬
ditions that converge in Cunningham's work.
Here for example is Marcia Siegel on Cunningham's concert at
The Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1972.

Two of his three new works ("Landrover" and "TV Rerun") . ..

involved a minimum of pop-art gadgetry, and they looked so bare
and complete that I really got involved in them. Bizarre decors and
sonic environments lend theatricality and sometimes fun to Cun¬
ningham's dances, but his unadorned works are as starkly satisfy¬
ing to me as a tree against a February hillside.

After this audible sigh of relief (which is shared by all those who
prefer trees in February to the "pop-art gadgetry" of America's
most advanced visual artists), Ms. Siegel goes on to complain
about the third work on the program:

"Borst Park", the last of the new works, seems of lesser importance,
containing less dancing and more tricks than I care for.

Even Arlene Croce, by far the most perceptive and erudite of

America's working dance critics, had this to say about a recent
work, "Exchange":

I wish I had been able to watch it more closely, but my concentra¬

tion broke about halfway through under the battering of David
 ROGER COPELAND 315

Tudor's score.. .. How can you watch a dance with V2 Rockets

whistling overhead?

She concludes by criticizing the non-dance elements of Cun¬

ningham's work for often being so "interfering and dictatorial."
Several weeks later, Croce elaborated on this complaint when
she made a passing reference to an older Cunningham work in
which John Cage reads aloud from his writings while Cun¬
ningham dances:

When Merce Cunningham and John Cage combined forces in

"How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run" . . . they kept the words and the
dancing on separate planes, and the result was that Cage distracted
us every time he opened his mouth.

As Brecht once put it, this is reproaching the linden tree for not
being an oak.
To many people, there's something downright unnatural about
this perverse desire to complicate or postpone the more imme¬
diate sensory pleasure that dance can provide. After all, don't
people dance (and watch dance) to re-establish contact with their
bodies, to reassert the "natural" part of their being? And what
troubles them about Cunningham is his critique of "the natural,"
his desire to root the natural out of his dancing.
I have no way of proving that Cunningham has been directly
influenced by Shklovsky or Brecht, but Cunningham himself
willingly acknowledges his debt to another great negator of the
natural, Marcel Duchamp. In fact, the setting for his "Walka-
round Time" was an outright homage to Duchamp—an assem¬
blage of clear plastic rectangles imprinted with the iconography
of Duchamp's masterpiece, "The Large Glass." In addition, the
section of "Walkaround Time" in which Cunningham crouches
down, stripping off one set of tights and pulling on another, was
conceived as a visual allusion to Duchamp's "Nude Descending
a Staircase"; and Cunningham has referred to those portions of
the choreography adapted directly from his technique class as
"readymades." (And of course, Duchamp is generally considered
to be the primary influence on both Rauschenberg and Johns.)
Duchamp was the great grand-dada of what we now call "con¬
ceptual art"; and it was Duchamp's readymades which first illus¬
trated the truth of Shklovsky's and Brecht's contention that art is
essentially a matter of dislocating the perceptions. Put another
way, the experience of art is not dependent upon physical labor,
316 GENRE AND STYLE

craft, inspiration, or self-expression; it may consist of nothing

more than the act of estranging a familiar object from its natural
context. (Duchamp's famous urinal ceases to be functional in its
new museum context: it now exists only to be looked at.) The
notion that art is not a matter of "making," but of "looking" is
especially difficult to apply to dance—for most people still think
of dancing as something one does, rather than something one
looks at. Of all the arts, none remains as rooted in ritual as dance;
and ritual, by definition, is a purely participational activity
which is not designed to be looked at by detached spectators.
Significantly, it was also Duchamp who anticipated Rauschen¬
berg's and Johns' repudiation of abstract expressionism when he
derisively dismissed as "olfactory" those artists who wallow in
the aroma of wet paint and wield their brushes in a sort of spacey
stupor. To Duchamp, this sort of impulsive, spontaneous behav¬
ior was "animal like." And he wrote that "the direction in which
art should turn is to an intellectual expression, rather than to an
animal expression."
Now, it's one thing to expunge natural or "animal" expression
from the inanimate arts of painting and sculpture (that was Raus¬
chenberg's and Johns' central achievement); it's infinitely more
difficult to expunge it from the bodily art of dance. But this is
precisely what Cunningham has accomplished.
His critique of the natural begins by severing the traditional
link between music and choreography. Schopenhauer saw in
music an objectification of those blind, instinctual forces that ani¬
mate behavior. And for a pioneer of modern dance like Isadora
Duncan, dance was conceived of as the art of responding intui¬
tively to musical inspiration:

"Listen to the music with your souls," she told her students. "Now
while listening do you not feel an inner self awakening deep
within you—that it is by its strength that your head is lifted, that
your arms are raised, that you are walking slowly toward the
light?"

It is not the force of musical inspiration that sets Cunning¬

ham's dancers in motion, but rather an act of deliberation. In
fact, sometimes in works such as "Variations V" (1965), the tra¬
ditional relationship between music and dance is exactly
reversed. Here the stage is wired with electronically sensitive
antennae and photoelectric cells which produce sounds as the
dancers sweep past them. Not only do Cunningham's dancers
 ROGER COPELAND 317

not perform to music; they must concentrate in such a way so as

not to be affected by it. No doubt, this is part of what the
renowned Cunningham dancer, Carolyn Brown, meant when
she said that Cunningham technique is “designed to develop
flexibility in the mind as well as in the body/'
An equally important aspect of Cunningham's critique of the
natural is his much misunderstood use of chance procedures for
dictating choreographic sequence. Although the two are often
confused with one another, Cunningham's use of chance is dia¬
metrically opposed to the sort of improvisation which lies at the
heart of abstract expressionism. Cunningham is not attempting
to break through the resistances of the intellect so as to unleash
''natural'' impulses buried within him. Quite the contrary: he uti¬
lizes utterly impersonal mechanisms (coins, dice, the I Ching,
etc.) so as to avoid what might otherwise “come naturally." This
is why so many dancers complain that Cunningham's choreog¬
raphy is often excruciatingly difficult—if not impossible—to
perform: it doesn't come naturally to the human body.
And here lies another major distinction between Cunningham
and the early modern dancers—from Duncan through
Graham—who repudiated what they perceived to be the unnat¬
ural (and orthopedically unhealthy) postures of ballet in favor of
movements more in keeping with the natural inclinations of the
body. Cunningham was among the first modern dancers to cross
the ideological picket lines in order to study ballet with George
Balanchine. When everyone else in the Graham-dominated
world of modern dance was carrying the weight of the universe
on his or her shoulders and affirming the elemental force of grav¬
ity (modern dance can be thought of as a love affair with the
floor), Cunningham was perfecting his lightness and speed.
Cunningham often initiates movement with an abrupt and
ferocious intensity, only to reverse directions just as suddenly.
Duchamp once wrote, “I force myself to contradict myself to
avoid conforming to my own taste." And Cunningham's style—
with its remarkably rapid reversals of direction, its continual
arresting of impulse—probably comes as close as anyone ever will
to embodying the principle of self-contradiction in movement.
“The trouble is," says Cunningham, echoing Duchamp, “we all
tend to fall back on our old habits. Dancing is very tiring: and
when you're tired you just do the easy thing, the thing you
know" (the thing that feels natural).
In addition, the Graham dancer was often taught to view the
318 GENRE AND STYLE

floor metaphorically as "the earth." "Your spine," Graham told

her students, "is the line connecting heaven and earth." Accord¬
ing to Tony Smith, Pollock conceived of his canvases in much
the same way:

His feeling for the land had something to do with his painting can¬
vases on the floor. I don't recall if I ever thought of this before
seeing Hans Namuth's film. When he was shown painting on glass,
seen from below and through the glass, it seemed that the glass was
the earth, that he was distributing flowers over it, that it was
spring.

But in Cunningham's work, the stage space never seems even

metaphorically natural. If anything, it resembles the cool, ultra¬
clean, impersonal environment of the modern museum. Like the
art objects which inhabit the space along with them (for "Rain¬
forest" in 1968 Andy Warhol designed free-floating, silver-
mylar, helium-filled pillows), Cunningham's dancers are discreet
and self-contained, pure surfaces. If Pollock sought to transform
painting into dancing, then Cunningham sought to transform
the dancer into an art object.
Partnering is usually impersonal and asexual. Dancers are
often handled by one another like inanimate objects (this is espe¬
cially true in works like "Tread" and "How To Pass, Kick, Fall,
and Run"). The effect often suggests a speeded-up, deadpan par¬
ody of "touchie-feelie" encounter group exercises.
Edwin Denby has described Cunningham's style as "extreme
elegance in isolation." One senses in Cunningham more than a
trace of that "air of coldness, that determination not to be
moved" which Baudelaire once cited as a chief characteristic of
the dandy. And his own dancing—even at its most frantic—
always exudes a slight aura of aloofness, an almost prissy stiff¬
ness which resists any sort of "natural" Dionysian abandon. In
fact, Cunningham savagely parodies Graham's Dionysian pre¬
tensions in the hilarious "Bacchus and Cohorts" section of "Antic
Meet" (1958). (Even when Cunningham's movement seems
unmistakably "animal-like"—in "Rainforest" or the famous
"cat" solo—he never appears to be representing an animal, but
rather borrowing its heightened powers of sensory alertness.)
In "Crises" (1960), the dancers wore elastic bands around var¬
ious parts of their bodies. By inserting a hand or an arm through
the stretch band around another dancer's wrist or waist, the per¬
formers could temporarily link themselves together without sac-
 ROGER COPELAND 319

rificing their freedom as individuals. Freedom is the key word

here. As Carolyn Brown has noted, everyone on stage in a Cun¬
ningham piece is always a soloist.
Not only is everybody a "soloist" in Cunningham's choreog¬
raphy, every section of every body can become a soloist as well;
for Cunningham often sets the head, arms, torso, and legs mov¬
ing in opposition to one another. As early as 1953, Cunningham
had choreographed a piece ("Untitled Solo") in which the move¬
ment for each of several subdivisions of the body was deter¬
mined separately and by chance. Thus the atomized body
became a microcosm of the company-at-large.
The "isolation" (of one part of the body from another) is to
Cunningham technique what the contraction (based on the more
organic rhythm of breathing) is to Graham. These are the two
fundamental building blocks out of which their respective styles
are constructed. Simone Forti, a dancer whose natural and
organic inclinations are at odds with Cunningham's, writes in
her Handbook in Motion:

I started going to the Merce Cunningham school. I remember

watching my teachers, and feeling that I couldn't even perceive
what they were doing, let alone do it... An important element of
the movement seemed to be the arbitrary isolation of the different
parts of the body. I recall a statement I made in exasperation one
day in the studio. I said that Merce Cunningham was a master of
adult, isolated articulation. And that the thing I had to offer was
still very close to the holistic and generalized response of infants.

Note too her nostalgia for the spirit of abstract expressionism: in

response to the emergence of artists like Rauschenberg, she notes
mournfully:

... at just this same time Abstract Expressionism seemed to stop.

I've always wondered at its sudden end. Like a sudden death. Or a
sudden glimpse of a precipice, and then everybody stopped. And
no one talks about it. It's like a collective blind spot. Yet even to
this day the sight of a De Kooning can radically change my
breathing.

Cunningham may be a master of isolation, but ironically, he

has also managed to mastermind some of the most glamorous
collaborations between celebrated painters, composers, and danc¬
ers since the days of Diaghilev s Ballets Russes. In addition to
Cage, Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, Cunningham has per-
320 GENRE AND STYLE

suaded Robert Morris, Frank Stella, Christian Wolff, La Monte

Young, and Earle Brown to compose scores and design settings
for his company. They are the Picassos, Cocteaus, Stravinskys,
and Saties of our era. But the similarities between Cunningham
and Diaghilev end there. Diaghilev was animated by the Wag¬
nerian dream of synthesizing the separate arts into a unified
whole. Camille Mauclair, a Parisian art critic, wrote this rhap¬
sodic praise of the Ballets Russes in 1910:

This dream-like spectacle beside which the Wagnerian synthesis is

but a clumsy barbarism, this spectacle where all sensations corre¬
spond, and weave together by their continual interlacing . . . the
collaboration of decor, lighting, costumes, and mime, establishes
unknown relationships in the mind.

But just as Brecht rejected the Wagnerian melting pot, so does

Cunningham repudiate Diaghilev's synthesis. By contrast, Mar¬
tha Graham speaks for both Diaghilev (whose productions had
assimilated the influence of Isadora) and the pioneer modern
dancers when she writes (in her Notebooks): "What is the begin¬
ning? Perhaps when we seek wholeness—when we embark on
the journey toward wholeness." Cunningham's rejection of
"wholeness" initiates the era of post-modern dance3 (in much the
same way that Robert Venturi's rejection of "the international
style" in modern architecture—which also promoted unity and
wholeness—initiated a post-modern movement there as well).
What I'm calling post-modernism effectively marks the end of
that longstanding tradition in mpdern art and poetry which
sought to transcend dualities—a Dionysian tradition that
extends from Nerval and Nietzsche through D. H. Lawrence and
Artaud. "Only connect!" wrote Forster in Howard's End. To which
Cunningham might respond, "It's more important—at this point
in time—that we dis-connect, at least as long as we live in a soci¬
ety whose perceptual habits have been conditioned by commer¬
cial television where the boundaries between the most diverse
phenomena begin to break down and become blurred." Accord¬
ing to this line of reasoning, any sense of "wholeness" experi¬
enced in the modern world is nothing more than a dangerous
illusion. Wholeness, like innocence, cannot be regained. Rather
than lamenting fragmentation and Eliot's "dissociation of sensi¬
bility," Cunningham encourages us to savor the experience of
"non-relatedness." And how significant that a dancer would cel¬
ebrate the potential virtues of fragmentation, for dance has
 ROGER COPELAND 321

always been thought of as a sort of universal language which

transcends the impurities and dualities of speech. That's one rea¬
son both Mallarme and Yeats were so infatuated with the
pioneer modern dancer Loie Fuller. And to reject "the whole" is
(etymologically speaking) to reject "the holy." Cunningham was
the first choreographer to fully secularize the dance, to "de-prim-
itivize" it.
Throughout his career, Cunningham has made a practice of
excerpting fragments from different works in his standard rep¬
ertory and "splicing" them together in a form he calls "Events."
("Splicing" strikes me as the most appropriate word for describ¬
ing Cunningham's relation to the raw material of these events
because he approaches his older works the way a film editor
approaches his daily rushes: cutting, assembling, and re-assem-
bling the fragments at will.) For almost ten years now, the vast
majority of Cunningham's public performances have been
devoted to these events, rather than to his titled, finished works.
The events provide perhaps the ultimate example of Cunning¬
ham's determination to avoid completion and "wholeness."
It is precisely this aspect of Cunningham's achievement which
makes him so much a creature of the intellectual moment we are
now living through. In a very real sense, the most sophisticated
French critical thought now finding its way into English (the
work of Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida) is just beginning to catch up
with the revolution Cunningham pioneered over twenty years
ago. A recent work of literary criticism like Barthes' S/Z (with its
emphasis on keeping the text open, on avoiding a unified, defin¬
itive reading) could just as easily be a description of Cun¬
ningham. "The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to
make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the
text," writes Barthes. This is an excellent description of what
happens to us when we experience a piece by Cunningham. The
on-stage activity does not respect the traditional hierarchies of
organization according to which dancers located downstage cen¬
ter automatically command our attention in a way that the danc¬
ers upstage left or right do not.4 Cunningham refuses to tell us
what to look at or listen to. We may decide to "background" or
"turn off" a sound so as to focus more intently on the movement.
(Perhaps it's significant that Mark Lancaster's setting for one of
Cunningham's most recent pieces, "Tango," is a television set
broadcasting a live picture, but with the sound turned off.) Or
we may cultivate a skill John Cage calls polyattentiveness
322 GENRE AND STYLE

the simultaneous apprehension of two or more unrelated phe¬

nomena. (David Tudor, who's composed many scores for Cun¬
ningham, often listens to several radios while he practices at the
piano.)
Above all, the relations we establish between diverse stimuli
are flexible; we can radically alter our mode of perception several
times in the course of a single performance.5
Cunningham provides us with a do-it-yourself survival kit for
maintaining our sanity, or at least perceptual clarity (which may
be the same thing) in the modern city where everything seems
to clamor for attention. This is the moral dimension of Cun¬
ningham's work; for there's a profound connection between
what we choose to look at and the way we live our lives. It's
precisely this aspect of Cunningham's accomplishment that most
dance critics have not yet come to terms with. In 1968, Arlene
Croce wrote about the difficulties that Cunningham's work poses
for her:

I thought, watching Merce's dances, that I was being subjected to a

theory about dancing. I was too worried about the theory to look
at the dancing ... I don't remember just when it was that I stopped
making a terrific mental effort to understand Merce and just began
enjoying him. Today it seems just as preposterous to make a mental
effort over Merce as it does over Fred Astaire.

No one sees movement more clearly than Croce; and she has
provided us with some wonderfully precise descriptions of what
Cunningham's dances look like. Applied to the work of some
choreographers, this essentially descriptive approach is perfectly
adequate. Unfortunately, it doesn't even begin to convey the sig¬
nificance of someone like Cunningham. True, Cunningham's
work may not symbolize anything; but it does serve an end
beyond itself: that of perceptual training. The importance of
Cunningham's work lies not only in what we're given to see and
hear, but in the way we see and hear what we're given. In the words
of Peter Brook, the work of Merce Cunningham is "a continual
preparation for the shock of freedom."

(1979)

Notes

‘Brecht, of course, is primarily concerned with what he considers to

be the undesirable consequences of emotional identification, illusion-
 ROGER COPELAND 323

ism, and the willing suspension of disbelief—conditions that rarely arise

in the (inherently) more abstract world of dance. The brand of empathy
that most directly unites the dancer and his or her audience is kinetic
responsiveness. John Martin, for example, writes of "the inherent con¬
tagion of bodily movement which makes the onlooker feel sympatheti¬
cally in his own musculature the exertions he sees in somebody else's
musculature." It's precisely this sort of kinetic empathy which is "inter¬
fered with" in much of Cunningham's work.
2It's especially instructive to compare the visual obstacles in these
works with the setting for Alwin Nikolais' "Gallery" which also consti¬
tutes a barrier of sorts between the dancers and the audience. But Niko¬
lais' barrier serves an illusionistic end; it promotes the trompe l'oeil from
which the dance derives its effect. Cunningham's settings, on the other
hand, promote an analytical scrutiny that is anti-illusionistic.
3There's a genuine problem of terminology here. The term "post¬
modern" usually refers to the next generation of post-Cunningham
dancers: Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs
and a number of other choreographers who were associated with the
experimental dance workshops at the Judson Memorial Church in the
mid 60's. And what distinguishes many of the choreographers I've just
mentioned from Cunningham is their ambivalence—if not outright hos¬
tility—toward technical virtuosity (which remained a sine qua non of
Cunningham's work). One of the messages that emerged from the Jud¬
son years was that no movement—no matter how "pedestrian," is, in
and of itself, "dancey" or "undancey." So for many of the Judsonites,
the difference between dance and non-dance has nothing to do with the
movement itself, but depends rather on the context in which the move¬
ment is perceived. Dance might thus be defined as any movement designed
to be looked at. And this concern with the movement's perceptual context
is a direct outgrowth of Cunningham's insistence on the perceptual
detachment of the audience. Perhaps I'm still abusing the term post¬
modern by applying it to Cunningham; but it seems to me that the Jud¬
son generation's break with Cunningham is much less drastic than
Cunningham's break with Graham—in fact, it's more like an organic
evolution.
4It's entirely appropriate that one of Jasper Johns' target paintings
appears on the famous poster he designed for the Cunningham com¬
pany. Johns asks us to distribute our visual attention evenly throughout
each circular band of the image, despite the fact that we've been condi¬
tioned to zero-in on the target's bullseye. Writing about Johns' painting
"Target with Four Faces," Leo Steinberg suggests that "Johns puts two
flinty things in a picture and makes them work against one another so
hard that the mind is sparked. Seeing then becomes thinking"—a
description that applies equally well to Cunningham's separation of the
elements.
5Those eager to explore the many parallels between Cunningham's
collaborations and the "de-constructive" theories of Barthes, Derrida,
{

324 GENRE AND STYLE

and Lacan might begin by comparing the arbitrary, malleable relation¬

ship between auditory and visual stimuli with the equally arbitrary
nature of the linguistic sign, the freely "floating” signifier. Furthermore,
Cunningham's egalitarian distribution of bodies and objects throughout
the performance space corresponds quite closely to Barthes' de-con-
structed text with its interchangeable fragments or "lexias," its "multiple
entrances and exits," and its cacophony of separate "voices."
 Post-Modern
Dance
YVONNE RAINER
A QUASI SURVEY OF SOME
“MINIMALIST” TENDENCIES
IN THE QUANTITATIVELY
MINIMAL DANCE ACTIVITY
MIDST THE PLETHORA, OR
AN ANALYSIS OF TRIO A

Objects Dances
eliminate or minimize
1. role of artist's hand phrasing
2. hierarchical relationship of parts development and climax
3. texture variation: rhythm, shape, dynamics
4. figure reference character
5. illusionism performance
6. complexity and detail variety: phrases and the spatial field
7. monumentality the virtuosic movement feat and the
fully-extended body

substitute
1. factory fabrication energy equality and “found"
movement
2. unitary forms, modules equality of parts
3. uninterrupted surface repetition or discrete events
4. nonreferential forms neutral performance
5. literalness task or tasklike activity
6. simplicity singular action, event, or tone
7. human scale human scale

325
326 GENRE AND STYLE

Although the benefit to be derived from making a one-to-one

relationship between aspects of so-called minimal sculpture and
recent dancing is questionable, I have drawn up a chart that does
exactly that. Those who need alternatives to subtle distinction¬
making will be elated, but nevertheless such a device may serve
as a shortcut to ploughing through some of the things that have
been happening in a specialized area of dancing and once stated
can be ignored or culled from at will.
It should not be thought that the two groups of elements are
mutually exclusive ("eliminate" and "substitute"). Much work
being done today—both in theatre and art—has concerns in
both categories. Neither should it be thought that the type of
dance I shall discuss has been influenced exclusively by art. The
changes in theatre and dance reflect changes in ideas about man
and his environment that have affected all the arts. That dance
should reflect these changes at all is of interest, since for obvious
reasons it has always been the most isolated and inbred of the
arts. What is perhaps unprecedented in the short history of the
modern dance is the close correspondence between concurrent
developments in dance and the plastic arts.
Isadora Duncan went back to the Greeks; Humphrey and
Graham1 used primitive ritual and/or music for structuring, and
although the people who came out of the Humphrey-Graham
companies and were active during the thirties and forties shared
sociopolitical concerns and activity in common with artists of the
period, their work did not reflect any direct influence from or
dialogue with the art so much as a reaction to the time. (Those
who took off in their own directions in the forties and fifties—
Cunningham, Shearer, Litz, Marsicano, et al.—must be appraised
individually. Such a task is beyond the scope of this article.) The
one previous area of correspondence might be German Expres¬
sionism and Mary Wigman and her followers, but photographs
and descriptions of the work show little connection.
Within the realm of movement invention—and I am talking
for the time being about movement generated by means other
than accomplishment of a task or dealing with an object—the
most impressive change has been in the attitude to phrasing,
which can be defined as the way in which energy is distributed
in the execution of a movement or series of movements. What
makes one kind of movement different from another is not so
much variations in arrangements of parts of the body as differ¬
ences in energy investment.
 YVONNE RAINER 327

It is important to distinguish between real energy and what I

shall call "apparent" energy. The former refers to actual output
in terms of physical expenditure on the part of the performer. It
is common to hear a dance teacher tell a student that he is using
"too much energy" or that a particular movement does not
require "so much energy." This view of energy is related to a
notion of economy and ideal movement technique. Unless oth¬
erwise indicated, what I shall be talking about here is "apparent"
energy, or what is seen in terms of motion and stillness rather
than of actual work, regardless of the physiological or kines¬
thetic experience of the dancer. The two observations—that of
the performer and that of the spectator—do not always corre¬
spond. A vivid illustration of this is my Trio A: Upon completion
two of us are always dripping with sweat while the third is dry.
The correct conclusion to draw is not that the dry one is expend¬
ing less energy, but that the dry one is a "non-sweater."
Much of the western dancing we are familiar with can be char¬
acterized by a particular distribution of energy: maximal output
or "attack" at the beginning of a phrase,2 followed by abatement
and recovery at the end, with energy often arrested somewhere
in the middle. This means that one part of the phrase—usually
the part that is the most still—becomes the focus of attention,
registering like a photograph or suspended moment of climax.
In the Graham-oriented modern dance these climaxes can come
one on the heels of the other. In types of dancing that depend
on less impulsive controls, the climaxes are farther apart and are
not so dramatically "framed." Where extremes in tempi are
imposed, this ebb-and-flow of effort is also pronounced: in the
instance of speed the contrast between movement and rest is
sharp, and in the adagio, or supposedly continuous kind of
phrasing, the execution of transitions demonstrates more subtly
the mechanics of getting from one point of still "registration" to
another.
The term "phrase" can also serve as a metaphor for a longer or
total duration containing beginning, middle, and end. Whatever
the implications of a continuity that contains high points or focal
climaxes, such an approach now seems to be excessively dramatic
and, more simply, unnecessary.
Energy has also been used to implement heroic more-than-
human technical feats and to maintain a more-than-human look
of physical extension, which is familiar as the dancer's muscular
"set." In the early days of the Judson Dance Theatre someone
328 GENRE AND STYLE

wrote an article and asked “Why are they so intent on just being
themselves?" It is not accurate to say that everyone at that time
had this in mind. (I certainly didn't; I was more involved in
experiencing a lion's share of ecstacy and madness than in
"being myself" or doing a job.) But where the question applies,
it might be answered on two levels: 1) The artifice of perfor¬
mance has been reevaluated in that action, or what one does, is
more interesting and important than the exhibition of character
and attitude, and that action can best be focused on through the
submerging of the personality; so ideally one is not even oneself,
one is a neutral "doer." 2) The display of technical virtuosity and
the display of the dancer's specialized body no longer make any
sense. Dancers have been driven to search for an alternative con¬
text that allows for a more matter-of-fact, more concrete, more
banal quality of physical being in performance, a context
wherein people are engaged in actions and movements making
a less spectacular demand on the body and in which skill is hard
to locate.
It is easy to see why the grand jete (along with its ilk) had to
be abandoned. One cannot "do" a grand jete; one must "dance"
it to get it done at all, i.e., invest it with all the necessary nuances
of energy distribution that will produce the look of climax
together with a still, suspended extension in the middle of the
movement. Like a romantic, overblown plot this particular kind
of display—with its emphasis on nuance and skilled accomplish¬
ment, its accessibility to comparison and interpretation, its
involvement with connoisseurship, its introversion, narcissism,
and self-congratulatoriness—has finally in this decade exhausted
itself, closed back on itself, and perpetuates itself solely by con¬
suming its own tail.
The alternatives that were explored now are obvious: stand,
walk, run, eat, carry bricks, show movies, or move or be moved
by some thing rather than onself. Some of the early activity in
the area of self-movement utilized games, "found" movement
(walking, running, etc.), and people with no previous training.
(One of the most notable of these early efforts was Steve Paxton's
solo. Transit, in which he performed movement by "marking" it.
"Marking" is what dancers do in rehearsal when they do not
want to expend the full amount of energy required for the exe¬
cution of a given movement. It has a very special look, tending
to blur boundaries between consecutive movements.) These
descriptions are not complete. Different people have sought dif¬
ferent solutions.
 YVONNE RAINER 329

Since I am primarily a dancer, I am interested in finding solu¬

tions primarily in the area of moving oneself, however many
excursions I have made into pure and not-so-pure thing-moving.
In 1964 I began to play around with simple one- and two-motion
phrases that required no skill and little energy and contained
few accents. The way in which they were put together was inde¬
terminate, or decided upon in the act of performing, because at
that time the idea of a different kind of continuity as embodied
in transitions or connections between phrases did not seem to be
as important as the material itself. The result was that the move¬
ments or phrases appeared as isolated bits framed by stoppages.
Underscored by their smallness and separateness, they projected
as perverse tours-de-force. Everytime “elbow-wiggle" came up
one felt like applauding. It was obvious that the idea of an
unmodulated energy output as demonstrated in the movement
was not being applied to the continuity. A continuum of energy
was required. Duration and transition had to be considered.
Which brings me to The Mind Is a Muscle, Trio A. Without giv¬
ing an account of the drawn-out process through which this 4%-
minute movement series (performed simultaneously by three
people) was made, let me talk about its implications in the direc¬
tion of movement-as-task or movement-as-object.
One of the most singular elements in it is that there are no
pauses between phrases. The phrases themselves often consist of
separate parts, such as consecutive limb articulations—"right leg,
left leg, arms, jump," etc.—but the end of each phrase merges
immediately into the beginning of the next with no observable
accent. The limbs are never in a fixed, still relationship and they
are stretched to their fullest extension only in transit, creating
the impression that the body is constantly engaged in
transitions.
Another factor contributing to the smoothness of the conti¬
nuity is that no one part of the series is made any more important
than any other. For four-and-a-half minutes a great variety of
movement shapes occur, but they are of equal weight and are
equally emphasized. This is probably attributable both to the
sameness of physical "tone" that colors all the movements and
to the attention to the pacing. I can't talk about one without talk¬
ing about the other.
The execution of each movement conveys a sense of unhurried
control. The body is weighty without being completely relaxed.
What is seen is a control that seems geared to the actual time it
takes the actual weight of the body to go through the prescribed
330 GENRE AND STYLE

motions, rather than an adherence to an imposed ordering of

time. In other words, the demands made on the body's (actual)
energy resources appear to be commensurate with the task—be it
getting up from the floor, raising an arm, tilting the pelvis, etc.—
much as one would get out of a chair, reach for a high shelf, or
walk down stairs when one is not in a hurry.3 The movements
are not mimetic, so they do not remind one of such actions, but
I like to think that in their manner of execution they have the
factual quality of such actions.
Of course, I have been talking about the "look" of the move¬
ments. In order to achieve this look in a continuity of separate
phrases that does not allow for pauses, accents, or stillness, one
must bring to bear many different degrees of effort just in getting
from one thing to another. Endurance comes into play very
much with its necessity for conserving (actual) energy (like the
long-distance runner). The irony here is in the reversal of a kind
of illusionism: I have exposed a type of effort where it has been
traditionally concealed and have concealed phrasing where it
has been traditionally displayed.
So much for phrasing. My Trio A contained other elements
mentioned in the chart that have been touched on in passing,
not being central to my concerns of the moment. For example,
the "problem" of performance was dealt with by never permit¬
ting the performers to confront the audience. Either the gaze was
averted or the head was engaged in movement. The desired
effect was a worklike rather than exhibitionlike presentation.
I shall deal briefly with the remaining categories on the chart
as they relate to Trio A. Variation was not a method of develop¬
ment. No one of the individual movements in the series was
made by varying a quality of any other one. Each is intact and
separate with respect to its nature. In a strict sense neither is
there any repetition (with the exception of occasional consecu¬
tive traveling steps). The series progresses by the fact of one dis¬
crete thing following another. This procedure was consciously
pursued as a change from my previous work, which often had
one identical thing following another—either consecutively or
recurrently. Naturally the question arises as to what constitutes
repetition. In Trio A, where there is no consistent consecutive
repetition, can the simultaneity of three identical sequences be
called repetition? Or can the consistency of energy tone be called
repetition? Or does repetition apply only to successive specific
actions?
 YVONNE RAINER 331

All of these considerations have supplanted the desire for

dance structures wherein elements are connected thematically
(through variation) and for a diversity in the use of phrases and
space. I think two assumptions are implicit here: 1) A movement
is a complete and self-contained event: elaboration in the sense
of varying some aspect of it can only blur its distinctness; and 2)
Dance is hard to see. It must either be made less fancy, or the fact
of that intrinsic difficulty must be emphasized to the point that
it becomes almost impossible to see.
Repetition can serve to enforce the discreteness of a move¬
ment, objectify it, make it more objectlike. It also offers an alter¬
native way of ordering material, literally making the material
easier to see. That most theatre audiences are irritated by it is not
yet a disqualification.
My Trio A dealt with the "seeing" difficulty by dint of its con¬
tinual and unremitting revelation of gestural detail that did not
repeat itself, thereby focusing on the fact that the material could
not easily be encompassed.
There is at least one circumstance that the chart does not
include (because it does not relate to "minimization"), viz., the
static singular object versus the object with interchangeable
parts. The dance equivalent is the indeterminate performance
that produces variations ranging from small details to a total
image. Usually indeterminacy has been used to change the
sequentialness—either phrases or larger sections—of a work, or
to permute the details of a work. It has also been used with
respect to timing. Where the duration of separate, simultaneous
events is not prescribed exactly, variations in the relationship of
these events will occur. Such is the case with the trio I have been
speaking about, in which small discrepancies in the tempo of
individually executed phrases result in the three simultaneous
performances constantly moving in and out of phase and in and
out of synchronization. The overall look of it is constant from
one performance to another, but the distribution of bodies in
space at any given instant changes.
I am almost done. Trio A is the first section of The Mind Is a
Muscle. There are six people involved and four more sections.
Trio B might be described as a variation of Trio A in its use of
unison with three people: they move in exact unison thruout.
Trio A' is about the efforts of two men and a woman in getting
each other aloft in various ways while repeating the same diag¬
onal space pattern throughout. In Horses the group travels about
332 GENRE AND STYLE

as a unit, recurrently repeating six different actions. Lecture is a

solo that repeats the movement series of Trio A. There will be at
least three more sections.
There are many concerns in this dance. The concerns may
appear to fall on my tidy chart as randomly dropped toothpicks
might. However, I think there is sufficient separating out in my
work as well as that of certain of my contemporaries to justify an
attempt at organizing those points of departure from previous
work. Comparing the dance to Minimal Art provided a conve¬
nient method of organization. Omissions and overstatements are
a hazard of any systematizing in art. I hope that some degree of
redress will be offered by whatever clarification results from this
essay.
(1966)

Notes
‘In the case of Graham, it is hardly possible to relate her work to any¬
thing outside of theatre, since it was usually dramatic and psychological
necessity that determined it.
2The term "phrase" must be distinguished from "phrasing." A phrase
is simply two or more consecutive movements, while phrasing, as noted
previously, refers to the manner of execution.
3I do not mean to imply that the demand of musical or metric phras¬
ing makes dancing look effortless. What it produces is a different kind
of effort, where the body looks more extended, "pulled up," highly
energized, ready to go, etc. The dancer's "set" again.

TOM JOHNSON
RUNNING OUT OF BREATH

INTRODUCTION
Considering the difficulties of communicating a dance on a
printed page, it may be helpful if I explain where Running Out of
Breath came from. Several of my pieces deal with similar situa¬
tions, but they have usually been designed for musicians rather
than dancers. One example is the "Unaccompanied Aria" from
 TOM JOHNSON 333

The Four Note Opera. In that case a mezzo must sing for several
minutes, without any accompaniment, and has to try to stay
exactly on pitch. In the lyrics to the aria the singer explains the
problem and expresses her trepidation. Ultimately she must sing
the final note, at which point the piano comes in and everyone
finds out whether she is still on key. Singers are a cautious lot,
and generally they end up right on, but the risk is always there.
More recently Jon Deak asked me to write a piece for him, and
I came up with Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for Solo String Bass.
Here the problem is that the performer must play difficult, spe¬
cifically notated music on his instrument, while simultaneously
delivering a spoken monologue. Even a performer as fine as
Deak is likely to miss a few notes or become a little tongue-tied
once in a while. As the text explains, that is why the piece is
called Failing, and that is what it is about.
In the summer of 1976 I saw a way of putting a dancer in a
similarly precarious position, so I worked out a text (which may
also be considered a score) for Kathy Duncan that I called Run¬
ning Out of Breath. Like the other pieces, it sometimes seems
manipulative, if not actually diabolical, and I used to question
the ethics of such pieces. But the effect of actual performances is
always a stimulating joining of art and life, and the performer
always comes off as an admirable, courageous soul, rather than a
tool, so I stopped worrying about it. Meanwhile the bulk of my
work has been much more abstract, frequently formalistic, and
more or less unrelated to this approach.

STAGING NOTES
In Kathy Duncan's original performance at the Byrd Hoffman
Studio in New York, on November 19,1976, she wore a tank top,
gym shorts, and sneakers. She adhered to the basic image of sim¬
ply running, though her changes of direction were often unpre¬
dictable. It is helpful if the dancer has good stamina and can
maintain a brisk pace throughout, as Duncan does, but that is not
essential. The important thing is that the dancer push to the lim¬
its of his/her energy, as suggested by the text. The comments in
the final paragraph should be adjusted to fit whatever symptoms
the performer is actually experiencing. If due to a cramp, injury,
or complete exhaustion, the performer is unable to finish the
dance, he /she should simply stop, say "I'm sorry, that's as far as
I can go," and exit. The dance will then end in defeat rather than
334 GENRE AND STYLE

triumph, but its most important feature, literal truth, will be

preserved.

TEXT-SCORE
In this dance solo I am required to run quickly around the
space while delivering this memorized text. Naturally, if I con¬
tinue running and reciting, I am gradually going to run out of
breath. And that's what the piece is about, and that's why it's
called. Running Out of Breath.
Of course, there is nothing unusual about running out of
breath. Everyone knows what it feels like. It happens in almost
any dance and any strenuous physical exercise. It is a universal
experience, common not only among humans, but among all
mammals. Birds, reptiles and amphibians all seem to run out of
breath too. Maybe even fish and insects know what it feels like
to run out of breath. So why am I wasting your time and my
energy, just to run out of breath?
Well, I have some ideas of my own about that, but for the
moment I must continue to deliver this memorized text, and
according to it, the purpose is simply to observe someone else
run out of breath. Of course we have all done that before, too,
but in this context, where there is really nothing else to watch,
or listen to or think about, it is possible for the audience to focus
its entire attention on the act of watching someone run out of
breath. How long does it take? Does it happen quickly or rather
gradually? Do we tend to breathe faster and harder ourselves
when watching someone else breathe faster and harder?
Maybe you will find these questions interesting, maybe you
won't. Anyway, on a sort of philosophical level, that's what the
piece is about. Meanwhile, there are other considerations. Partic¬
ularly for me. For instance, will I be able to make it though the
dance? So far, I am about half way through my memorized text.
If I have been moving at a moderately fast pace, I should still be
able to deliver complete phrases without breathing. Gradually,
however, it will get harder and harder. If I don't pace myself
about right, I may get a cramp or something, and have to stop. If
I take it too easy, on the other hand, I may not really run out of
breath.

Of course my vanity is at stake here. I don't want to appear

weak or short-winded, and I am tempted to cheat a little in order
to make a better impression. There are several ways of doing this.
 TOM JOHNSON 335

For instance, turning, flailing movements may look like they

take more energy than just running back and forth. So if I do
mostly movements that look more strenuous than they are, I can
get through the piece fairly easily. Another way to cheat would
be to deliver the text at a fast pace. If I talk fast enough, the piece
will only last four or five minutes, and I won't have time to get
really out of breath. Another way to cheat would be to sneak two
or three breaths between sentences. With enough practice I
could learn to do that without anyone noticing, and I would get
through in fine shape, and the audience would be quite
impressed at my endurance.
But there is an obvious problem with all of these methods of
cheating. Johnson slyly inserted a paragraph in the text describ¬
ing all of the most obvious ways to cheat, so that the audience is
going to be checking up on me. And if they catch me moving
too easily or talking too fast or sneaking extra breaths, they will
know immediately that I am cheating and will decide that I
didn't do a good, honest performance of the piece.
So the only way to perform this piece really effectively is to go
all out, set a brisk pace, and hope I make it to the end. Actually
there is not much danger now, for I am close to the end of my
text already. It is a challenge to deliver the final sentences of the
text and make them comprehensible, when I have to pause so
often to take a breath. But I can make it to the end. I will make
it to the end.
By now you're probably wondering why I'm going through
this struggle. My lungs ache. My legs feel like lead. My body
feels like jelly. After all, it's not my piece. I'm only the performer.
But there are a number of reasons why I wanted to do it. It works
on a number of levels, most of which have been outlined above.
But perhaps most important, I am proving to myself that I can
meet the challenge.
(1976)
336 GENRE AND STYLE

STEVE REICH
NOTES ON MUSIC
AND DANCE

For a long time during the 1960s one would go to the dance
concert where no one danced followed by the party where
everyone danced. This was not a healthy situation. Usually rock
and roll in a dance concert is not the answer though it might be
(and actually was) the first superficial answer one might come up
with. The real answer is to create a genuinely new dance with
roots that go back thousands of years to the basic impulse at the
foundation of all dance; the human desire for regular rhythmic
movement, usually done to music.
The avant-garde dance of the 1960s focused on non-dance
movements to be performed in concert situations. Walking, run¬
ning, working with objects, and performing specific tasks were
among the genuinely new alternatives to the modern dance of
expressive movements of an earlier generation. The basic idea of
the Judson dance group (Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, et al.), as
well as the contribution of Simone Forti, could be summed up
as: any movement is dance. This is the precise equivalent to the
basic idea of the composer John Cage: any sound is music.
There is, however, another and primary sense of these words
where one can say that all sounds are obviously not music, all
movements are not dance, and most children can usually tell the
difference.
What is needed now it not a return to the modern dance of the
1930s, 1940s, or 1950s, but rather a return to the roots of dance
as it is found all over the world; regular rhythmic movement,
usually done to music.
While the Judson group was the dance equivalent to the music
of John Cage (even more so, curiously, than Merce Cun¬
ningham—think of Paxton's "Satisfyin' Lover," the walking
piece; and Cage's 4'33", the silent piece), presently what is
needed is the dance equivalent to recent music composed exclu¬
sively with the regular rhythmic repetition of a single musical
pattern. Laura Dean is the first choreographer/dancer to work
exclusively with such extreme regular rhythmic repetition as a
 STEVE REICH 337

fundamental technique, and soon, hopefully, there will be

others.
Somehow in recent years movements in music have preceded
similar developments in dance. Hopefully in the future they will
occur simultaneously.
In the last few years there have been and still are a number of
dance performances (largely by those formerly associated with
the Judson group) based on improvisation and group dynamics.
The momentary state of mind of the individual or group during
performance creates or strongly influences the structure of the
dance. Now we have an alternative to this where the pre-deter-
mined rhythmic structure of the dance creates or strongly influ¬
ences the state of mind of the performers while performing.
While this alternative is new for us at this particular time it has
existed in other cultures for thousands of years.
Unfortunately there may soon be a number of choreographers
who will present imitation Oriental, African or American Indian
dances. This exoticism will be as vulgar and inappropriate as its
musical equivalent (sitars in the rock band, "Indian style" mel¬
odies over electronic drones, etc). What is needed is not exoti¬
cism but rather a return to the roots of dance common to all cul¬
tures performed by members of this culture within the context
of our own high-art tradition.
When I was in Ghana in 1970, I found there was a clear dis¬
tinction between social popular dances and high-art religious
dances. These obvious differences were in the formal or informal
movement and dress of the performers as well as the location,
time of day, and social-religious context of the performance, but
all of the dances, popular and classical, had a strong rhythmic
pulse.
For music and dance to go together they must share the same
rhythmic structure. This common rhythmic structure will deter¬
mine the length of the music and dance as well as when changes
in both will occur. It will not determine what sounds are used in
the music nor what movements are used in the dance.
In 1944 John Cage wrote, "... a dance, a poem, a piece of
music (any of the time arts) occupies a length of time, and the
manner in which this length of time is divided ... is the work's
very life structure. . .." In the same article he said, "Personality
is a flimsy thing on which to build an art. Cage understood that
rhythmic structure was impersonal and thereby universal, i.e.
understood by all. He also understood that a rhythmic structure
did not dictate particular sounds for a piece of music, nor a set
338 GENRE AND STYLE

of movements for a dance. Those elements were the manifesta¬

tions of personality. What Cage put less emphasis on in the
1940s, and apparently still less as time went on, was the under¬
lying impetus for dance; the natural human desire for regular
rhythmic movement. He also turned away from the reality that
people do in fact dance to the music—that music can and does
supply rhythmic energy for dance.
What is needed is a genuinely new Western high-art dance
with movements natural to the personality of someone living
here and now, organized in the clear (i.e. universal) rhythmic
structure, and satisfying the basic desire for regular rhythmic
movement that has been and will continue to be the underlying
basic impetus for all dance.
(1973)
 Style
SELMA JEANNE COHEN
From NEXT WEEK,
SWAN LAKE: REFLECTIONS
ON DANCE AND DANCES

PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION
... Although the primary element involved with stylistic dis¬
tinctions in dance is, and should be, the nature of the movements
performed by the dancers, another set of factors tends to enter
in—types of plot, relative importance of decor and costumes,
kind of staging, among the most obvious. But even when writers
pay lip service to these various components, discussions of styles
of dance have been most often grossly oversimplified. We had
romantic ballet in the early nineteenth century and classical bal¬
let in the later nineteenth century. What we had in the seven¬
teenth and eighteenth centuries was called ballet then, though
some now try to view it as a kind of "pre-ballet," thus avoiding
the curious situation of having a classic style both precede and
follow a romantic one.
In the twentieth century we have had ballet and modern
dance. The latter, once conceived as applying to almost anything
that was not ballet, has now been given a reprieve by being
divided into modern and post-modern, while Cunningham, who
belongs chronologically between the two, seems to be left in
limbo as belonging to neither (though the art historians would
have saved him with the designation of "late modern"). Now,
however, the post-modern label, which originally covered the
aesthetic of the Judson Dance Theatre and their followers of the
1960s, is applied to a most heterogeneous assemblage of choreog¬
raphers, who sometimes seem to have only the label in common.

339
340 GENRE AND STYLE

The easy way to see contemporary dance is in terms of broad

categories: ballet, modern, and (often with a slight sneer) Broad¬
way-musical-type dance. This has frequently been done, and it
has caused considerable distortion and confusion, raising my
favorite question of recent years: Where do we put Twyla Tharp?
Attempts at more specific formulations have not always suc¬
ceeded either; for example the designation of "multi-media art¬
ist." This certainly applies to Alwin Nikolais, whose works of
movement, sound, shape, and color utilize electronic sound
devices, films, slide projections, a varied assortment of stage
properties (e.g., masks, screens, ropes), and dancers....
Nelson Goodman has noted that "an obvious style, easily iden¬
tified by some superficial quirk, is properly decried as a mere
mannerism. A complex and subtle style, like a trenchant meta¬
phor, resists reduction to a literal formula. . . . The less accessible
a style is to our approach and the more adjustment we are forced
to make, the more insight we gain and the more our powers of
discovery are developed."1
But caution is necessary here. Ballet and modern dance have
often been considered as styles, the former simple and the latter
complex (or vice versa). They are not styles at all in Goodman's
sense of the term, which refers to properties manifested by a
work that are characteristic of an author, period, region, or
school. Rather, they are genres, broader categories, or types, that
may encompass a number of styles, any of which may then be
found simple or complex. Once such styles have been defined,
we must still beware of the possibility of borrowings among
them and even of the potentiality of a style taking on some of
the properties previously linked exclusively to a genre other
than the one with which it is usually associated. This does not
necessarily result in a "merging" of the genres; that would occur
only if their respective qualities should exist in the new work in
such an ambiguous balance that they negate one another. Any
real genre is usually characterized by the presence of more than
a single quality, though conceivably some one quality may be
discovered to be its sine qua non, while others may be somewhat
modified without endangering the identity of the type. Perhaps
the time has come for a test.
Ballet seems the logical place to start because on the surface it
is so clearly accessible; we start children with ballet before we
take them to operas or symphony concerts. T. S. Eliot was aware
of a paradox: "The ballet is valuable because it has, uncon¬
sciously, concerned itself with a permanent form; it is futile
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 341

because is has concerned itself with the ephemeral in content."

He found it "a liturgy of very wide adaptability" that had not
been used to its full potential.2 But we may take his clue and look
for the form that underlies the obvious specifics.
By "ballet" let's say we mean what is usually considered its
quintessential style, classical, if by "classical" we mean pure. Lin¬
coln Kirstein once defined style as a moral virtue manifested in
the conquest of untidy egotism; ballet as "a clear if complex
blending of human anatomy, solid geometry and acrobatics,
offered as a symbolic demonstration of manners. .. ."3 To John
Martin it was "a glorification of the person as person, the pre¬
sentation of its ideal essence freed from the encumbrances of a
rationalistic universe of cause and effect."4 Adrian Stokes sug¬
gested deftness and economy or neatness; Edwin Denby cited
lightness, elevation, and ease. Kirstein qualified: "clean and
open, grandiose without affectation, noble without pretension."5
All of which sounds suspiciously like our old friend grace. But
we should try to be more specific.
The answer is simple, of course; we've known for many years
that classical style is movement based on the five positions of the
feet. But we are looking for the principle that is manifested in
the five positions, and that is the principle of outwardness, of en
dehors. Generally this is taken to refer to the rotation of the legs
in the hip socket, popularly known as "the turnout," and it is
logical to consider this first, not only because it accounts for
those five positions, but because it constitutes the major physical
task to be accomplished by the ballet student. Without the rota¬
tion a great part of the classical vocabulary is out of reach, its
major feats—shoulder-high extensions that do not disturb the
equilibrium, multiple pirouettes, intricate entrechats—are diffi¬
cult if not impossible to execute.
If this outwardness were limited to the legs, however, the
body as a whole would look incongruous. In the full classical
style, the entire person appears in extroversion—open to other
bodies, open to the surrounding space. But not vulnerable,
because the rib cage is held erect, confidently; the arms seem
buoyantly lifted away from the body, the head appears to float
atop a long, vertical, relaxed spine.
Outwardness is not practical for the affairs of everyday life. It
does not facilitate progress in a direct, forward line, as in run¬
ning to catch a bus; it makes the body occupy more space, which
is inconvenient in a crowded elevator. Yet it is quite reasonable
for a style that developed in a royal court, where to move in an
342 GENRE AND STYLE

ordinary manner would have been considered demeaning. The

idea was to look noble rather than serviceable. The en dehors
facilitates useless actions; it creates a state of dancing. The clas¬
sical ballet style—brilliant and elegant—does not exist without
it.
Yet the en dehors, while it is essential to classical ballet, is not
unique to it. Outwardness also characterizes India's Bharata
Natya where the legs are fully turned out and the torso is held
high as in ballet, but contrary to ballet the dancer remains almost
constantly in demi-plie, her whole foot on the floor, often stamp¬
ing into the floor. The acknowledgment of weight in the lower
body seems to contradict another classical balletic quality, which
is a prevalent upward thrust. For Volynsky, "with the vertical
begins the history of human culture and the gradual conquest of
heaven and earth."6 The ballerina raises herself to greet the gods.
The Hindu view is different; its gods come down to visit mortals.
In classical ballet if the supporting knee is bent, it is usually
only as a preparation for a rising movement. Most often the
entire body is stretched; the variety and range of jumps are tre¬
mendous, and they are often extended by lifts. Pointe work, a
natural extension of the upward thrust, was originally developed
to enhance the portrayal of the ethereal sylph, but—like the aris¬
tocratic association of the turnout—the connotation is dispensa¬
ble. Length of line and brilliance are enhanced by the use of
pointes. Yet we can recognize classical style even when there are
no jumps or lifts and no pointe work. We would not recognize
it, though, if it failed to exhibit that sense of upward reaching, if
it failed to stress verticality, which Volynsky called the line of
exultation.
Lightness, so frequently considered an attribute of classical
style, is often associated with verticality and with reason, since
it relates to the height of the placement of the center of gravity
in the body. It was essential for the fairy creatures of the roman¬
tic ballet and to some other character types in dramatic works
(the slippery Younger Sister in Pillar of Fire is an example). There
are also more abstract contexts where allegro movement is
exploited for its own sake, and the impression of speed is
enhanced—and also made physically possible—by the accom¬
panying lightness of the body, the feet seem to flutter in the air
(as Merrill Ashley's do in Square Dance).
Male dancers, including those who excel in elevation, seldom
produce an appearance of sheer lightness, for the man more
often stresses vigor and a firmness of stance and tread that show
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 343

him to be in command of the situation. Yet we do not find him

unballetic; he is not a stevedore type. The attack is strong but not
heavy. Further, it never intrudes on, never distorts, the clean line
of the movement. Actually, the emphasis was not always quite
so far on the side of strength. Bournonville, in the mid-nine¬
teenth century, included among his virtues as a dancer a manly
joie de vivre. Today the Bournonville jump, a model of elasticity
and lightness, stands as a charming souvenir of another era.
Nowadays even the woman does not always want to exhibit
lightness. Sometimes the reason is dramatic—as in the case of the
vicious females who exult in their prowess in Robbins' The
Cage—but sometimes it is simply a matter of desired movement
quality—as the opening of the Balanchine/Stravinsky Symphony
in Three Movements where even the girls' long flowing hair
accentuates their sensuous weightedness.
Is virtuosity necessary? That may be going too far; skilled
movement might be sufficient if by virtuosity we mean the all-
out, knock-'em-dead kind. Nor need ballets be works of virtu¬
osity, exhibiting the skills that are their subject matter. But evi¬
dence of skill, of control beyond the ordinary, must—I think—
be visible in the performance. Andre Levinson wrote that "the
very illusion of this enchanting art—which seems to ignore all
natural laws—depends on an intelligent ordering of physical
effort. The [classical] dancer then is a body moving in space
according to any desired rhythm."7 That intelligent ordering,
manifested in every move, signifies the dancer's mastery; it cre¬
ates the illusion that he is exempt from the restrictions of natural
laws. Such laws account for the basic incompetence of the
untrained body; it is seldom capable of maintaining an exact
rhythm or following a completely straight line or moving in
exact coordination with a group. All dancers have to do these
things, but classical style demands them more stringently. It
evokes Valery's idea of another state of existence.
An additional quality that has been assigned to classical style
is clarity. No extraneous actions detract our attention from the
shape the dancer wants us to see, from the rhythm he wants us
to feel. Frequently, this entails movement that is goal-oriented:
reaching the exact point in space at the exact point in time is
important; the resulting shape is frequently held for a while so
that it can be fully enjoyed. This does not mean that movements
have to be simple; they may be extraordinarily complicated, full
of intricacies and surprises (the Bournonville dancer bounces
along a circular path to the left and suddenly reverses direction
344 GENRE AND STYLE

in a diagonally-directed grand jete). The richest styles have a

clarity that is not immediately perceivable, which is true in all
the arts but is especially challenging in dance, since—until video
discs become common property—we cannot keep looking back
at the work to discover the structural secret that illuminates it
all. Still, an underlying kinetic logic tends to make itself felt,
even when it resists conscious definition.
Clarity is relevant, not only to the movements of an individual
dancer, but to the configurations of an ensemble as well. Balan¬
chine's Le Tombeau de Couperin depends for much of its effective¬
ness on the dancers' precision in maintaining a series of intricate
designs of lines and semi-circles and waving paths. The Rock-
ettes present a similar case of reliance on accurate formations,
which means that we have another instance in which a property
is essential, but not unique, to ballet.
Concomitant to clarity is the self-revealing nature of classical
style; it may, of course, reveal something beyond itself (though
some theorists wish that it would not), but it always calls atten¬
tion to its kinetic qualities; the ballerina's eye follows her flow¬
ing arm or looks down at her nimble feet; the man admires his
partner's pirouettes or extends the line of her arabesque with his
arms. Movement is displayed. Sometimes what is displayed is
fantastic virtuosity, but not always. Balanchine's dancers some¬
times, as in Chaconne, just walk—simply, and not at all simply,
they walk. How beautiful a walk can be when it is not trying to
get somewhere! Luminous, Volynsky would call it. Valery said
of the dancer (who was surely a ballet dancer) that "she teaches
us that which we do, showing clearly to our souls that which our
bodies accomplish obscurely."8 This seems essential to the clas¬
sical style.
One more factor may be considered. "A machine for manufac¬
turing beauty," said Andre Levinson of the ballet dancer, pro¬
voking a good deal of indignation from those who wanted to
preserve her humanity. But Levinson was not alone in his con¬
viction that the discipline undergone by the performer resulted
in her forgoing a natural method of functioning in order to take
on an aesthetic mode: "To discipline the body to this ideal func¬
tion, to make a dancer of a graceful child, it is necessary to begin
by dehumanizing him, or rather by overcoming the habits of
ordinary life... . The accomplished dancer is an artificial being,
an instrument of precision... ."9 Most theorists, disliking the
term "dehumanize," prefer "impersonal," but I suspect they
mean approximately the same thing. Martin spoke of an "ideal
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 345

essence." That the exercises of the ballet dancer have been lik¬
ened to ritual is no accident. Kirstein recalls Colette's Cheri,
taunting his icy wife: "It's as if I'd married a ballet-dancer. Nine
o'clock sharp, the Class: it's sacrosanct."10 Or Violette Verdy com¬
menting on Rudolf Nureyev and the first position: "It's like the
Sign of the Cross everyday."11 This is curiously reminiscent of
that other dance form characterized by en dehors: Bharata Natya
was designed for use in the temple. Such techniques mold the
dancer to conform to the image—long, lithe, and with hidden
strength—regardless of his real personality. The dancer always
appears as a persona.
These qualities the classical dancer embodies with grace. Grace
makes steps appear effortless, and—as if to prove that these
incredible turns and extensions are really no trouble at all-
grace connects them in a seamless flow, with no stops for deter¬
mined preparations, and throws in a few broderies for good mea¬
sure. Any sign of the practical, of the merely utilitarian, is for¬
bidden. The classical style may be the highest manifestation we
know of the image of grace.
If we look closely at all these properties no one appears to be
sufficient in itself to qualify the style as classical ballet and no
one is unique to this style. Nevertheless, their combination does
create something unique. How many of them must be present
and in what proportion should, I believe, be left unspecified.
Why restrict possibilities? Apart from en dehors which, I suspect,
must dominate any manifestation of classicism, the other quali¬
ties can, and certainly have, fluctuated considerably in the extent
of their pervasiveness. I would hesitate, however, to term any of
them completely optional, and I have not listed them (again
excepting en dehors) in an order that I consider indicative of their
relative importance. In fact, the degree of importance assumed
by any of them might be taken as a key to the definition of a
ballet style.
A choreographer who wants to work within the classical style
accepts these constraints, which still offer him a considerable
number of choices regarding relative emphasis. Many areas of
choreographic choice remain free, undefined. Classical rhythms
tend to be regular but are not necessarily so. Unison movement
and symmetry tend to characterize ensembles, though any bal¬
anced and ordered arrangement would be consistent with the
other elements of the style. The nature of some works makes
them more demanding of such uniformity. Some of our younger
critics, observing the Bournonville festival in Copenhagen in
346 GENRE AND STYLE

1979, found that they tired of poses which were always repeated
or reversed symmetrically; it was all so predictable. But for Bour-
nonville dancing is joy, and joy means that life is in harmony
with nature and society; it is symmetrical. The balletic genre can
take on a number of divergent qualities without violating its
essential nature, but not an unlimited number of divergent
qualities.
As yet nothing has been said about the ballet vocabulary, that
codified collection of steps with French names that many little
girls and some little boys learn after school. Appropriately per¬
formed, the vocabulary displays the qualities of classical style.
But style is a matter of structure and quality that can be mani¬
fested without the use of particular steps—though not without
the use of particular kinds of steps. On the other hand, some
steps can be performed in terms of other styles. There is nothing
irrevocably balletic about failli-assemble, as Humphrey proved in
her Bach Partita, where it is performed with the stress on the
landing into the floor instead of the rising from it.
Which brings us to the question of “modern dance/' An easy
way out is to say that it lacks the balletic qualities; but so do many
other forms of dance—tap, for example, and hula. Furthermore,
some works labelled modern dance exhibit some of the qualities
we have just assigned to ballet.
The latter was not always true, for the genre was founded at
the end of World War I in a spirit of revolt. Mary Wigman stated
her position: “Mannered and stilted [the ballet] could never tell
what I had to say which was purely personal."12 Miriam Winslow
elaborated, defining the enemy form as “an attitude of imper¬
sonal presentation of movements designed by other persons to
express beauty and truth (emotions and ideas) with the object of
pleasing the onlookers." Modern dance, on the contrary, made
the individual the center; it was “based upon the dancer's rela¬
tionship to time and space, to life itself."13 The object was not to
please, but to provoke and enlighten.
If modern dance is so truly personal, then it is bound to be
heterogeneous. Can we find any common qualities? It depends
on where we look.
For Humphrey it was “moving from the inside out"; for
Graham it was “visualizing the interior landscape." Martin
called it “the materializing of inner experience." Clear enough—
for the 1930s and 1940s. Then in the 1950s Cunningham came
along to negate the very core of identity claimed by his imme¬
diate predecessors. He denied that dance was about personal
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 347

experience; it was, rather, about movement in time and space.

Then came the defection of the Judson group, who agreed with
Cunningham's disdain of representation but added their own
rejection of skilled movement. The fragmentation accelerated:
conceptual dance, multi-media productions, a return to Graham's
archetypal images but without her narrative structures, a return
to Humphrey's lyricism but with even, balletic flow replacing
her irregular breath rhythms. All these have been called "mod¬
ern dance."
What is modern dance? When I first worked on this problem
of genres I read a paper on the subject at a conference where I
first, rather neatly, defined ballet. When the moment came to do
the same for modern dance, I was happily able to say that my
time was up. Now, I fear, my time has come.
Lincoln Kirstein defined modern dance as "a loose idiom of
idiosyncratic, free-form movement, identified with careers and
contributions of half a dozen individuals, all in their prime in
1935."14 Jose Limon, who had just begun to choreograph in 1935
and who considered himself a modern dancer, wrote in 1966 that
the modern dance is "a state of mind, a cognizance of the neces¬
sity of the art of the dance to come to terms with our time."15 But
"free-form movement" is too vague to be useful, and Jerome
Robbins' Age of Anxiety (1950), an exploration of the insecurity
of the individual in contemporary society, certainly endeavored
to cope with "our time" though it was called ballet.
Let's go back to movement. Watching ballet dancer Paolo Bor-
toluzzi in Limon's The Moor's Pavane, Anna Kisselgoff com¬
mented that his performance appeared "very much like kicking
a football on a baseball diamond."16 She attributed the stylistic
failure to lack of both proper technical training and conviction
in the ideology that sparked the birth of modern dance. Graham
had once told Kisselgoff that the nature of the problem was
indeed twofold: the ballet dancer lacked the necessary state of
mind, but also tended to "learn by line instead of volume." Paul
Taylor also suggested the latter kind of problem: "Ballet dancers
are trained to concentrate on making shapes, rather than on what
produced the shape."17 Laura Dean remarked that what she is
concerned about is "not what the body does, but where the
energy goes, with what quality it goes."18 Erik Bruhn had also
essayed The Moor's Pavane, but drew a somewhat different con¬
clusion about the kind of adjustment he had to make to meet the
requirements of a modern dance role: "It's a question of manip¬
ulating your weight. As the movements are generally earth-
348 GENRE AND STYLE

bound, you have to find a different 'center/ You have to feel

downwards, without looking as if you are digging into the
ground/'19
Effort as opposed to the ballet dancer's ease? That may be part
of if, but more broadly it might be viewed—and this is what
some of the early moderns preferred—as an admission of
humanity. Unlike the depersonalized ballerina—her struggles in
the classroom stored away so that only the happy results are
seen—the modern dancer reveals the process behind the move¬
ment. Limon used to speak of the drama of the modern dancer's
jump. The ballet dancer soared without apparent effort—lovely!
But how much more moving was the sight of a man, heavy and
tense, raising himself, with willful determination, into the realm
of the spirit.
Further possibilities have been suggested, the most common
of them, perhaps, the negation of en dehors, the stress of turning
inward, of the body folding in on itself. But insistence on this
would eliminate most of the happier moments of the modern
dance—Graham's ecstatic Diversion of Angels, for example, where
a contraction sometimes leads not to an agonized closing but to
a rapturous extension of body and limbs into aerial space. Senta
Driver has suggested the addition of off-balance movements,
twisting, and spiraling as elements much used by the modern
dance.20 She does not, however, urge that these be considered
essential to modern dance; only that they are characteristics
sometimes found in modern dance and hardly ever found in
ballet.
In movement we seem to find a broadening of the scope of the
acceptable palette, a kind of permissiveness that in turn allows a
greater range of qualities of being represented, of feelings
expressed. Limon spoke with grandeur of saints and demons;
now, Trisha Brown matter-of-factly tells the audience how she
went about composing the dance as she performs it. Perhaps this
is not a single genre . ..
If we do want to try to find a continuum, we must remember
that any rigidity of formulation would contradict the outlook of
the founders of the modern dance and immediately eliminate
them as proper exhibitors of its qualities. We must also resist the
temptation to make modern dance simply counter the properties
of classicism, point by point. After all, ballet has been around for
more than 300 years, and the full extent of the qualities by which
it is known now evolved only gradually. The earliest date usu¬
ally set for the modern dance is the beginning of the twentieth
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 349

century, when Duncan with her natural movement and Deni-

shawn with its exoticism broke with the forms of conventional
ballet. Some, however, would trace the origin of the genre that
we now recognize back no further than the expressionism of
Graham and Humphrey that emerged in the late 1920s. Around
1950 the nature of the modern dance changed radically with the
advent of the chance techniques of Cunningham, and again a
decade later with the ordinary movement presentations of the
Judson group, and yet again with the appearance of such sym¬
bolist choreographers as Meredith Monk and Kenneth King.
Today even the "post-modern" designation is risky, since we
seem already to have a second generation of innovators, many of
whom have adopted some of the qualities associated with the
Rainer aesthetic but rejected others. Sally Banes suggests that the
new virtuosity is nonillusionistic, "the gulf between artist and
spectator has been irrevocably bridged."21 But I would not dare
claim that anything about the modern dance is irrevocable; the
future may hold many surprises. Meanwhile we have a past and
a present diverse and rich enough to occupy our minds for quite
some time. Can we identify the modern dance as a single entity?
If we cannot define a core, perhaps we can distinguish some
outer limits, and we might try to do this in terms of tendencies
that veer more in one direction than another. Generally, these
tendencies might be viewed as an emphasis on path rather than
goal in space; on weight rather than lightness in the body; on
sharpness of accent rather than flow; on asymmetrical rather
than balanced design; on exposure rather than concealment of
process. But the situation has evolved with the years. The use of
weight was far more important to the expressive phase of the
modern dance than it is to the formal styles of today. The expo¬
nents of everyday movement continue to stress weight, but for
non-dramatic reasons: they want to call attention to the shapes
of the ordinary. Taylor often combines weight with flow that sel¬
dom stops at a defined position in space; Tharp juxtaposes weight
and agility. Percussive accent and asymmetry have been sub¬
merged in Dean's repetitive spinning of matched figures, but she
maintains the sense of weight and concern for path. We have
various species of modern dance.
We also have modern ballet, a style that Deborah Jowitt once
described as prettier than early modern dance but less polite
than early ballet.22 However, she wrote this around 1970 when
the prevalent type consisted of a basically classical vocabulary
attacked with some of the qualities associated with modern
350 GENRE AND STYLE

dance, especially weight and sharpness. The altered dynamic

was frequently justified by dramatic content, for early modern
ballet took after early modern dance in its concern for expres¬
siveness, though its themes tended to be less cosmic.
By 1980, however, modern ballet was something else again.
Jennifer Dunning defined the school of Glen Tetley, Jiri Kylian,
and Choo San Goh as "fast-paced, streamlined exercises in per¬
petual motion."23 The new style uses balletic turnout but scorns
its traditional lightness for aggressive rather than delicate speed.
Virtuosity, which was often highlighted at climactic points by
the classical style, is now pervasive, thrilling chiefly by its accu¬
mulations—more dancers leaping higher and faster and stronger
until the momentum wears itself out. Volynsky's exultation is
replaced by exhaustion. Calling this a hybrid form clarifies noth¬
ing; it is a style of its own.
We are also developing a new kind of company, one that per¬
forms works drawn from the repertories of both ballet and mod¬
ern dance choreographers. And why not? A symphony orchestra
does not limit itself to playing only a single musical genre. But
in dance such diversity has seldom worked. Bodies trained in
one manner of moving find it difficult to break long-standing
habits. Also it seems that the cultivation of physical habits
engenders psychological attitudes as well. This was most appar¬
ent in the early days of the modern dance when a real dichotomy
existed: the ballet dancers felt themselves disciplined instru¬
ments of precision; their counterparts considered themselves
freely creative and self-expressive individuals. They moved dif¬
ferently, felt differently.
The way the human being moves exemplifies certain manners
of dealing with time, space, and energy—which amounts to
exhibiting manners of dealing with the world in which we live,
since those elements constitute the system of constraints with
which we all have to cope. In this sense we necessarily relate to
the dancer as a person. He displays a way of dealing with the
world that we find congenial or admirable or distasteful. But if
the manner is neutral, bland, the style is dull, we feel no involve¬
ment. For the dancer to execute the visible dimensions of the
prescribed steps is not enough; that is only part of the style. The
style lies also in the attitude toward the movement, which is also
an attitude toward life.
Rayner Heppenstall stated that the classical style of ballet
reflects what is "thought most significant in the culture of the
West." He specified the qualities he considered distinctive: extro-
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 351

verted, expansive, centrifugal, objective. With these properties,

he asserted, ballet needs no representational interest; it need not
compete with drama. In itself, the style is "one epitome of the
total history of the West," with its respect for tradition, for order,
for "clarity of spirit." Ballet, he noted/'expresses only itself,
which is to say, certain general qualities of style."24
Still he found these qualities metaphorically representational,
an attitude that led David Michael Levin to assert that Heppen-
stall was pleading for a limited formalism, that of semantics,
rather than for a "sweeping formalism in syntax." For Heppen-
stall the tensions of ballet subsist in the struggle between tradi¬
tion and the free human being, between the demands of imper¬
sonality and precision and the individual free will; these reflect
the tensions of life. For Levin, on the countrary, the opposing
drives are self-referring. Stressing the tension between weight
and weightlessness as "the essence of the ballet art," Levin found
that when this essence is "properly isolated, exhibited, and—in
a word—released, it can be exquisitely expressive entirely on its
own."25 Without mimesis, without "symbolic convention," the
style is significant. Such arguments were not advanced with
regard to the early modern dance, though they have become
prevalent with regard to its later manifestations.
Does this mean that eventually, as the talk was going a few
years ago, the two genres might merge? Certainly we have seen
signs of growing similarity as both ballet and modern dance con¬
centrate on themes of pure movement. We find such titles as
Choo San Goh's Momentum, Glen Tetley's Circles, Douglas
Dunn's Gestures in Red, and Molissa Fenley's Energizer, the first
two called ballet, the last two modern dance. But representation
or lack of it is a critical determinant, not of a genre of dance, but
of a species within such a genre. The central factor must relate
to the movement; can the movement qualities be merged?
In the 1970s Clive Barnes called attention to the trend in mod¬
ern dance of incorporating elements of technical display, which
had always distinguished the ballet. Now, while no style can be
simultaneously predominantly light and weighted, goal-ori¬
ented and path-focussed, there is nothing in the nature of mod¬
ern dance that invariably prohibits the exhibition of technical
skill. However, skill does weaken a dramatic work when it
detracts attention from emotional expressiveness (which is also
true of ballet) or when it is used with qualities that are antithet¬
ical to the genre. The trouble with some recent performances of
early modern dance works stems especially from the latter of
352 GENRE AND STYLE

these: the lithe bodies of today's dancers fail to attack their move¬
ments with sufficient force, with sufficient weight, for that par¬
ticular style. The result is not a merging but an incongruity.
Aware of the danger, Graham changed the costumes for her
revival of Primitive Mysteries, adding a ruffle to the formerly plain
skirt, a softening that would have clashed with the austere, angu¬
lar performance of 1931, but that was entirely appropriate to the
milder approach of the dancers of 1964. Lightness and the early
modern dance simply cannot be merged.
Lightness, however, suits Cunningham, though he uses it in
an unballetic way. Arlene Croce has suggested that, for aerial
movement, he substitutes "incredibly rapid shifts of weight and
direction, and packed staccato changes of pace on the ground."26
He modifies other classical qualities as well. The dancer estab¬
lishes a still, vertical center but quickly moves off it into perilous
off-balance positions, into asymmetrical configurations. Some¬
times the Cunningham phrase takes on some of the smoothness
of balletic flow; at other times, like a good image in metaphysical
poetry, heterogeneous movements seem linked together by vio¬
lence; at still other times the flow appears simply discursive.
Cunningham dancers tend to be balletically precise, skilled,
impersonal. When a critic admitted that he was confused by
David Vaughan's apparently equal enthusiasm for Cunningham
and Ashton, Vaughan remarked that he found their work
equally marked by purity, austerity, clarity, and rigor.27 Perhaps
we would be better off in describing dance works if we looked
for such qualities instead of grabbing for the nearest available
label. Labels are useful when they lead the viewer to what is
actually present in the dance, but misleading when they call
attention exclusively to traits that it shares with others of some¬
what the same ilk, often to the detriment of the very properties
that distinguish it as an especially important creation.At
their greatest, both ballet and modern dance comprise a number
of subtle and complex styles that urge us to relinquish our neat,
comfortable havens of fixed categories for the hazardous but
rewarding shores of the aesthetically unknown....
(1982)

Notes

'Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978),

p. 40.
 SELMA JEANNE COHEN 353

2T. S. Eliot, "A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry," in Selected Essays 1917-

1932 (New York: Harcourt, 1932), p. 34.
3Lincoln Kirstein, "What Ballet Is About," in Three Pamphlets Collected
(Brooklyn: Dance Horizons, 1967), pp. 6-7.
‘John Martin, Introduction to the Dance (New York: W. W. Norton,
1939), p. 212.
5Lincoln Kirstein, "Ballet Alphabet," in Three Pamphlets, p. 20.
6Akim Volynsky, "The Book of Exultation," Dance Scope 5, no. 2 (1971),
18.
7Andre Levinson, "The Spirit of the Classic Dance," in Selma Jeanne
Cohen, ed.. Dance as a Theatre Art (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974), p. 116.
8Paul Valery, "Dance and the Soul," in Dialogues, trans. William
McCausland Stewart. Bollingen Series 45, vol. 4 (New York: Pantheon,
1956), 38.
9Levinson, "The Spirit of the Classic Dance."
‘“Kirstein, "What Ballet Is About," p. 32.
“Violette Verdy, "Speaking of Nureyev," Ballet Review 5, no. 2, 47.
12Mary Wigman, The Mary Wigman Book, ed. and trans. Walter Sorell
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), pp. 28, 30.
‘“Miriam Winslow, "A Dancer's Critique of Dance," in Frederick Rand
Rogers, Dance: A Basic Educational Technique (New York: Macmillan,
1941), p. 85.
“Kirstein, "What Ballet Is About," p. 53.
“Jose Limon, "An American Accent," in Selma Jeanne Cohen, ed.. The
Modern Dance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), p.
20.
“Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times, 24 August 1975.
17Paul Taylor interviewed by Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice, 23 April
1979.
“Laura Dean interviewed by John Gruen on "The Sound of Dance,"
WNCN, New York, 11 May 1980.
“Erik Bruhn quoted in John Gruen, Erik Bruhn (New York: Viking,
1979), p. 218.
20Senta Driver interviewed by Jack Anderson, New York Times, 25 Feb¬
ruary 1979.
21Sally Banes, '"Drive/ She Said: The Dance of Molissa Fenley," The
Drama Review 24 (1980), 14.
“I have used Ms. Jowitt's apt remark a number of times, but neither
of us can now remember exactly when it appeared in the Village Voice.
“Jennifer Dunning, New York Times, 11 February 1980.
24Rayner Heppenstall, Apology for Dancing (London: Faber and Faber,
1936), pp. 145, 113, 195.
“David Michael Levin, "Balanchine's Formalism," Dance Perspectives
55, 30.
“Arlene Croce, untitled contribution in Merce Cunningham et al„
"Time To Walk in Space," Dance Perspectives 34, 25.
354 GENRE AND STYLE

^David Vaughan, "Ashton vs. Cunningham?" Dancing Times (August

1979), p. 707.

R. P. BLACKMUR
THE SWAN IN ZURICH

Standing alone in the bar of Covent Garden at the second

interval (my companion was elsewhere for the moment) I found
myself filling with the warmth made by the Sadler's Wells Ballet:
warmth and sweetness and ease, nowhere embittered by any
redundant sauce of expertness and nowhere laid waste by effi¬
ciency, and altogether I felt very free. Freedom is what one feels
in intimacy when there is no need to worry about any of the
labors of translation we call understanding; and here I had been
made intimate with a style—in this case a style of theatrical
dancing—so that it became a part of my own meaning. I had
known the skills of this dancing all my life, and from the belated
presence of past lives as well. My mind ran to Tokyo and the
great Kabuki theatre where just a month before I had seen a day
of plays with the sense of intimacy and little chance for the labor
of understanding but had been pressed by color and movement,
especially in the dance scenes (as in the whole fourth act of a
play called, for short, "Onna Seigen"). In the Kabuki theatre
there was clearly style; the style assaulted and intruded on me,
with knives that left no wounds; the style was its own meaning,
but like everything which, being unfamiliar, seems stylized, was
no part of my own meaning. I knew only what I missed, just as
one may be aware only of what has been forgotten. It was a
world of brilliant impersonations where since I did not know the
persons I could enjoy chiefly the alien brilliance. Here in Covent
Garden I was at home—rather an older one than Hawthorne
thought of—but there were other and more expert Americans
than I here, who were at home only in the sense of being abroad
together. Two of them stood behind me, pressing their opinions
into the form of reactions: "... and the ensemble has no tech¬
nique—or what there is, is sloppy. Fonteyn is all right, but for
 R. P. BLACKMUR 355

the rest—these people should see the City Center a few times/'
His friend answered in mollifying confirmation.
Hearing this—something to the effect, "Yes; it is true they
have no style"—I wondered what they would think of the Rus¬
sian ballet with its ragged and athletic exuberance, and indeed I
wondered how I felt about it myself—aside from the great noise
of it with which London burred and bristled. Would I say of the
Russians, Yes; it is true they are a fortress state and they have no
style?—But the second bell had sounded, just as my companion
returned with her English warmth—which no doubt in expert
American opinion might also have been called sloppy—and
with its aid I was able to recover in good part the warmth and
sweetness of the Sadler's Wells Ballet—but only in good part, for
there was a triangular piece of my mind which retained the
prompting of opinion and fussed with what style was and par¬
ticularly what American style was. It fussed and bored so
brownly, and kept on so, that at dinner afterward—as I remem¬
ber, it was a Greek dinner with egg-lemon soup, vine leaves, and
resinous wine at the Akropolis restaurant, surely all appropriate
to the subject—I got myself sworn at least to surround, if I could
not define, American style, and I supposed, so swearing, that I
might be surrounding my own otherwise indefinable self. At
any rate, for six months afterwards, and with the pressure of the
three previous months, I set against everything American I could
remember and see and be, whatever luck and travel threw in my
way which might surround—which might illuminate—the lim¬
its and scope of American style. I was an American self-conscious
because of the rest of the world, a thought which seemed a little
too characteristic until I remembered that Hazlitt had defined
the Englishman best in his "Notes of a Journey through France
and Italy." When we are abroad we bring with us the conspicu¬
ous part of what we left behind, and can sometimes learn to see
it, as in Cairo when I found that the Cairenes had no difficulty
in singling me from the British by my American walk, I got a
sight of my own legs going ahead of me never since lost. One's
gait, when not an oppression, is a part of one's perfectible role.
In harness racing there is a difference in gait between the 2:12
and the 2:15 horses which is radical but not unequal. In ballet,
then (and if so, of course in other things as well), might there
not be a radical difference in gait between the City Center and
the Sadler's Wells company which would be one indication of
the difference between the American and the British national
styles?
356 GENRE AND STYLE

In London, with only memories of New York, Boston, and Bar

Harbor to prompt me, I knew only there was a difference in
speed: the Americans were much faster than the British ever
wanted to be. The Americans kept their eyes on the ball, and
were stripped for nothing but action. The British were rather
absent-minded because they had so much else than the ball to
attend to, and gave no effect at all—not even the slenderest bal¬
lerina—of being stripped. In them, stripping would have
depleted the quality of their action. In the Americans, only the
stripping made action possible. In Zurich—where I went to lec¬
ture the following week—these sentiments were fortified and
developed, for it happened I got there on the afternoon of the
last night of a series of performances of the City Center Ballet,
and of course (at a price which annoyed and in pretense out¬
raged him) the concierge procured me a seat on the aisle in the
seventh row. It seemed to me, but not from the almost entirely
Swiss audience, that I was about to confront a company of very
old friends, of whom I might therefore find a sudden distrust—
a distrust which might sharpen my eyes through the double blur
of London and Zurich... .
... Of European theatre audiences there is none so incurious
as the Swiss; which is perhaps an effect of their keeping history
so in its place (say with Zwingli and Calvin) as almost to do with¬
out it. Even the Swiss houses do not give you curious regard;
they seem to have no history in conduct of their own; and if you
find the Swiss watching you in public it is not from curiosity or
practical interest but out of that decorum which requires an exer¬
cise of the eyes. If Balanchine should look through the peephole
in the curtain, though he might be pleased with the solid occu¬
pancy, he must surely shudder—it was so far from a warm house.
The question of warmth disappeared with the Bach-Balan-
chine “Concerto Barocco" into the terrifying vision of profi¬
ciency beyond conceivable impulse, and exactly equal to the rea¬
son which propelled it. One felt like tap dancing in a smaller and
smaller space until one's self disappeared, and one understood
at last what Kirstein and Balanchine must have been up to, some¬
time around 1935, when they had Paul Draper at work tapping
to Bach. It is not necessary to think of the Dehumanization of Art
but it is advisable to take a sidelong look at that thought; the
dehumanization was an international game, but America in New
York had her own development of that game. It was a magnifi¬
cent technique for expunging the psyche—who is slow, and
stubborn, and always purposeful with however much uncer-
 R. P. BLACKMUR 357

tainty—from the body which danced. I saw at once (or in the

intermission after I had seen what this company could do with
Britten-Robbins' "Fanfare") that here was high art (which may
as well ignore as affirm the psyche) made out of American habits
and predispositions into an almost totally characteristic, and
indeed almost "closed" performance. We Americans have the
technique to bring something to performance so well that the
subject is left out. There is nothing we throw away so quickly as
our donnees; for we would make always an independent and
evangelical, rather than a contingent, creation. This is why other
people in the world in part take us up and in part repudiate us;
and it is why they find us both abstract and hysterical: we throw
away so much and make so much of the meager remainder. We
make a great beauty, which is devastated of everything but form
and gait.
... The Americans did not like the softness of the Sadler's
Wells girls. They missed the hardness of the American girls,
hardness of flesh, of face, and the scrupulousness of motion so
hard it inched on the brittle—as if every gesture were secretly
fractured, but finely joined. There was also the hardness of pace
or gait. What is so hard as hysteric exactness, unless it be abstract
exclusiveness? And what, when one has learned them, comes so
to be the habit of demand? My American friends were out of
their habit and thought the intimate order they saw was sloppi¬
ness where rather it might be called a different optimum of pre¬
cision. In their habit they were used to American hardness and
no doubt thought the London bobbies too gentle for effective
police-work; they expected to be bitched instead of welcomed.
This hardness of ours runs along the whole road: an external
hardness which comes from wearing our cultural skeletons on
the outside. The English are soft on the outside (they call it being
empirical, or making arrangements) and complain of the French
logic that misses so much of what is sweet and gets into an exter¬
nal muddle; but French logic has nothing in the capacity of miss¬
ing compared to the American logic of hysteria. What the City
Center lacked in its excess of virtue was what I missed in them.
There were all those beautiful legs and no one in the company
who could walk except Diana Adams and none but her with a
proper face. All the rest of the girls made up a ballet of pinheads.
I do not speak of what these girls actually were off stage, which
is very attractive, or what they would be like in love, but of what
they really were under the transforming powers of their tech¬
nique or—so far as it is the same thing—their style in the dance.
358 GENRE AND STYLE

In that reality they had no faces and no legs that were inhabited.
Some kind of sex was missing here—the tenderness—the pred¬
atoriness—the sexuality itself. To look at their faces was to look
at what under other circumstances they would be if only the
technique of the psyche echoed in the technique of their bodies.
The men were a little better than the girls, as if their technique
required some stigma—some echo—reflected in the face. But the
girls were echoless technique. This was not so in Covent Garden.
Of those girls I knew many faces, and of all of them I knew what
their legs did as a grand exercise of all my sentiments—the very
exercise, as it is the very knowledge, which can never be made
perfect by any technique of body or any technology of sensibil¬
ity. Technique has ultimately to do only with performance, and
to the degree that a particular stage of technique is depended on
alone it will exclude, because it thinks it stands for, what ought
to be performed. We Americans—and in our ballet as much as
anywhere—tend to stop when we have reached "technical" per¬
fection; that is, we decide on our perfections ahead of time. This
should, I think, be called whoring before the arts with only half
our natural skills and wiles. What is forgotten is that all true
techniques draw on the chthonic for their substance—as the best
carpenter scribes with his eye and knows his square is in its live
part a magical instrument; as a gesture comes to birth beyond,
and with, every skill of nerve and muscle—and likewise draw on
the heavenly only for the last form: which is the other end of
the chthonic—But how shall the great initial beauty of the City
Center be brought so far?
Only, I suppose, by meditations analogous to those which
prompted the question. My way to bed—after going backstage
for a moment to admire the private beauty of the American girls:
and so to reassure myself of all possibilities—led from the foot
of the lake along the Limat Quai to the third bridge where across
the river stands the Hotel zum Storchen. The night was soft Sep¬
tember with only the inner articulate skeleton of chill. I could
not see the snowy mountain which I saw every clear day from
my balcony up the river and far beyond the head of the lake, but
it was enough in me from this day and from others in other years
so that I knew it was there, and it gave me a remote resistless
strength. I could not tell what it might not do to me. I could not
see. I could not tell. Below the rail along the parade I could not
see nor tell but knew the quiet swift sweep of the Lamat River:
"wide water without sound," as Wallace Stevens says, but here
also all a-flowing. By a pair of steps to a float stood a man all dark
 R. P. BLACKMUR 359

but his face, which gathered darkness to its white, his shoulders
in the last stages of irresolution. At any moment he will go away,
I thought, as I passed to leeward of him. The airs were soft that
blew around him. A hundred yards down river they blew round
me, leaving a caress of chill on cheek and shoulder. Below me
was one of the swan pens, and a swan, head under wing, drifting
swiftly on the current that eased through the outer half of the
pen. As the body came just short of the lower barrier, the head
came nearly erect from under the wing, the renerved swan gave
two thrusting paddle strokes—enough to carry it almost to the
upper barrier. There, already drifting, the head went under the
wing again for four or five seconds of sleep. Of the hundred odd
swans who live on the Limat Quai, this one alone, at least on this
night, was with skill deeper than any technique rehearsing in
gesture the quality of its life in the quantity of the element it
lived in. In the meaning was the precision, in repetition never
altogether the same, always a little loose, unique only in the
instance. As hysterical, as abstract, as anything New York ever
happened on, yet a progressive echo of nature and of herself in
nature, this swan was in analogy a model of how the break¬
through into style might be accomplished, without loss of quan¬
tity or quality of the impact of what was meant to be controlled.
But there is no sense exaggerating the value of a swan, least of
all in Zurich. In Berlin ten days later there was again the City
Center Ballet and a very different foil to put against them, in the
same theatre on successive days, the Ximenez-Vargas Spanish
Ballet from Madrid, which I have heard spoken of as very low
stuff indeed as ballet goes. The same theatre, but you would not
have thought so from the feeling of the house. For the Ameri¬
cans the house was bland, friendlier than Zurich and more aris¬
tocratic than bourgeois, but on the whole more correct than wel¬
coming; hospitality was a grace one had learned to practice solo,
on either side of a barrier, nothing mutual. For the Spanish all
was heat and rejoicing of participation and release into (not
from) common action. People pounded and yelled, not for admi¬
ration of technical energy, but for the deep skills of life bursting
into momentary form; and indeed the audience had to be dark¬
ened out of the house into the light rain. The contrast is worth
making clear. There was no lack of admiration for the Americans
and it was in no way perfunctory, but one was not related to
what one admired, and very little of the self was involved in the
admiration. As in the kinds of love, the Americans might express
a form of eros and might even reach for agape but there was in
360 GENRE AND STYLE

their dancing none of the warm vibrancy of philia, of which the

Spanish had so much, and without which eros is hysterical and
agape abstract and hence persuade something less than the full
self. Thus seen in the Spanish contrast, the sense of American
hardness was reinforced with the sense of American abstract¬
ness: as if Lincoln Kirstein's boys and girls danced in organized
abstraction fits. Again, only Diana Adams kept enough warmth
in her while dancing to supply her face with life. If there was
unity in their dancing it was the American unity which is
achieved by cutting away; unity by privation or deprivation;
unity by technique—by action precipitated in the kaleidoscope
and learned in the muscles which could operate without the
pressure of the person. Where other faces than Adams' were vis¬
ible it was by intrusion—as the boys looked like college boys
with crew cuts and the girls showed as puny in the face. Yet the
legs were very beautiful in abstraction, quite beyond participa¬
tion, with movements that could be repeated endlessly the
same.... We are like a complex of new physical and spiritual
forces let loose with our laboratory managers always a little
behind in the understanding of the forces, in either their likely
behavior or their possible aspirations. That we run to abstraction
and hysteria is almost appropriate in the present phase of our
natures. The ballet is only one extreme. Abstraction is where we
ignore behavior and hysteria is where we replace it; both are
modes appropriate for daily creation but there is more than the
usual uncertainty about them that their creations, however beau¬
tifully articulated and however technically—even technologi¬
cally—exact, will conform to anything like enough of the native
impulses which taken in balance—in experience together—lead
to purpose or choice or the delineation of these. There is no con¬
formity which is exclusive, no order which is complete, and
there is no conforming order worth mustering which does not
invite, for its life, the constant and random supply of fresh dis¬
order. Chaos is not what we must exclude; it is what we do not
know, or ignore, of the behavior which, in all the versions of
space and time we can manage, forms our lives, and order is how
we arrange them with the behavior of lives past or to come. This
is why society is immortal and immoral, and in the stature of our
genius we give forms to how it is that this is so to the individual
mortal and moral man. This is the role of man as virtuoso as it is
the role of nature as herself, for she is nothing but the play of
that role just as we are much less than ourselves if we do not play
it.
 ANNA KISSELGOFF 361

It is in this high language that I would have us look at the

ballet and its styles in the present western world, and it is simi¬
larly that I would have us look at our other arts and faculties. If
we cannot or will not from some superior compulsion correct
ourselves to common experience we can at least understand our¬
selves in terms of the behavior we believe not to be ours; and if
we cannot be intimate with ourselves (short of some new dis¬
pensation on intimacy) we can look at the swan in Zurich. ...

(1958)

ANNA KISSELGOFF
THERE IS NOTHING
“NATIONAL” ABOUT
BALLET STYLES

One idea that dies hard is that there are national styles of bal¬
let. Within this line of thinking, the English are reserved in their
dancing, the Russians are dramatic, the French have flair if not
form, the Danes are charming and the Americans infuse their
ballet dancing with an ingrained athleticism and exuberance.
No one will deny that distinctions of ballet style exist country
to country. Certainly, Britain's Royal Ballet dances with reserve.
The startling, high leg extension of the Bolshoi's Nadezhda Pav¬
lova or the New York City Ballet's Colline Neary will never be
found in a Royal Ballet ballerina.
But whether the Royal Ballet's reserve stems from so-called
British understatement is open to debate. National stereotypes of
any sort are an unreliable basis for generalization. Is "prim and
proper" still the image of a Britain with a self-described dissolute
upper class and a much-advertised mod explosion. As for charm¬
ing Denmark, it boasts the most liberal pornography laws in the
world.
Nonetheless, traditional ballet literature has suggested that
national characteristics always make themselves felt in the high
362 GENRE AND STYLE

art of classical ballet: subconsciously, the gait of a young Italian

sunning himself in the piazza is bound to suffuse the dancing of
an Italian prima ballerina.
Yet, such determinist formulas fail to recognize that style in
ballet, as in any art, is a direct result of creative influence. Rather
than fall back upon dubious national stereotypes to explain why
one ballet company accents its movements differently from
another, why not admit that each style derives from the individ¬
uals who have shaped that company?
Indeed, there is no "American style" in classical ballet; the
three major American companies all differ in their styles. The
New York City Ballet, for example, dances the way it does
because that is how George Balanchine wants it to dance; had he
formed a company in England, it might be dancing the same
way. Similarly, the Joffrey Ballet's style was fashioned by Robert
Joffrey, and American Ballet Theater's by its early creative influ¬
ences—that is Michel Fokine and Antony Tudor. And although
Ninette de Valois was the organizing force behind the Royal Bal¬
let, it was Frederick Ashton who molded its style. Elsewhere the
esthetic of the Royal Danish Ballet was indelibly marked by one
man, the 19th-century choreographer, August Bournonville.
Human rather than mystical national forces have also molded
Soviet ballet; its style was shaped both by a political policy that
required dramatic realism and by a heritage of classical training
that was modernized by such teachers as Agrippina Vaganova.
It could be argued, of course, that Ashton's work looks
"English" because he is a product pf his English upbringing. As
it happens, Ashton was born in Ecuador and educated in Peru.
Like Ninette de Valois, Margot Fonteyn, Alicia Markova and
Robert Helpmann, the other figures crucial to the Royal Ballet's
early history, he spent his formative years outside England. In
1934, Ashton's choreography for the Gertrude Stein-Virgil
Thomson opera, "Four Saints in Three Acts," proved how easily
he would have found a place in the American avant-garde of the
1930's. It is doubtful that Ashton, had he remained in the United
States, would have seemed more British to Americans than
Antony Tudor, an English choreographer whose works became
the mainstay of American dramatic ballet.
These is no question that Ashton's sensibility is English as far
as the content of his works is concerned. But the Ashton style—
that is, the way he wanted dancers to move—is something else.
Style is essentially an attitude imposed upon technique.
 ANNA KISSELGOFF 363

The Ashton style, for example, can be traced to a two-tiered

Russian model. On one level, the very "British" Royal Ballet con¬
siders itself the heir to the old Maryinsky tradition. On another
plane, it sees itself in the line of descent from Diaghilev's Ballets
Russes. From the Maryinsky, it drew a stylistic ideal—the style
that Pavlova and Karsavina brought to the West before the Soviet
era expanded the old Russian classical style into a more flamboy¬
ant one with a greater acrobatic plastique.
The typical British fidelity to the "correct" Russian style was
recently voiced again in the June issue of the British magazine
Dance and Dancers. Reviewing Suzanne Farrell in Balanchine's
"Chaconne," John Percival wrote: "Balanchine apparently
encourages Farrell to concentrate on speed and on those incred¬
ibly high extensions. In the process, some disconcerting things
happen.... I imagine many people would be horrified at the
way strict academic style is distorted for the particular virtues
emphasized."
At the same time that the Royal kept faith with the Maryinsky
model, Ashton also made clear his dislike for rigid classicism.
The way he loosened up an academic style is close to what was
done by such Diaghilev choreographers as Fokine and Bronis¬
lava Nijinska. Ashton is closer to Nijinska, his mentor, than to
Balanchine.
This difference exists, quite simply, because Balanchine has
gone beyond the "correct" style in classical ballet. But rather
than distort it, he has extended it. Those who believe in national
styles will tell you that the special attack, speed and heightened
silhouette of Balanchine's style reflect the vitality and rhythms
of American life. Yet, by Balanchine's own account, the crucial
artistic encounter of his career was his meeting with Stravinsky
in Europe in 1928. The neoclassicism and pared-down style of
the Stravinsky of that time determined the neoclassic, stream¬
lined look that Balanchine developed later in his own work.
Undoubtedly, this is the direction his style would have taken
wherever he settled. The sun in the piazza does not always filter
into the theater.
(1976)
364 GENRE AND STYLE

LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
From BALLET ALPHABET

CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC BALLET

CLASSIC BALLET
The classic dance is not merely a department of theatrical¬
dancing opposed to the "romantic," but rather a central line, or
governing attitude which links the purest developments in tra¬
ditional stage practice, whatever the epoch. To be sure, purity is
comparative. In the vocabulary of step and gesture accumulated
over the last five hundred years, there have been many "impure"
influences, affecting the idiom from individual personalities,
from exotic or national dances, from circus, music-hall and ball¬
room. But in the large residual body of expression, there is a
basic-speech, founded on the five absolute positions, which dem¬
onstrate the human body on the stage in its grandest develop¬
ment by activity which is possible only in terms of dance, with¬
out reference to mimetic or associative gesture. As the residual
information of medical practice is materia medica,—so in dancing
it is materia choreographica. Its basic kinetic speech praises the
body as free agent in air whose broadest extensions or highest
leaps are its extreme lyric definition. The classic style is clean and
open, grandiose without affectation, noble without pretension.
Any idiosyncratic comment on it appears as offensive manner¬
ism, which, however charming in a character-dance, destroys the
linear purity of classicism.
"Classicism," wrote Andre Levinson, speaking of the ballerina
Trefilova (ca. 1929), "tends towards geometric formula, but at the
supreme moment, breaks and avoids it." Experiments in optics
show that the line of least visual resistance is not necessarily the
shortest distance between two points, but rather a long, easy
curve which the eye may pursue with a gentle flow. This
extended line is the property of every classic ballet position from
arabesque and attitude to the more freely plastic ports de bras.
The classic dance may be rapid, but never brusque, jagged or
broken. The classic line is sustained, serene and melodic, whose
mercurial grace never disturbs its formal consistency unless it is
 LINCOLN KIRSTEIN 365

dissolved on the metallic surface of technical incompetence or

instinctive bad taste.

ROMANTIC BALLET
The term "romantic" as applied to ballet is a misnomer. Famil¬
iarly, it is a style of dancing as exemplified by revivals of Giselle
(Coralli: 1841) or Les Sylphides (Fokine: 1909). Yet both ballets are
familiarly labeled ballets classiques, although Fokine's is subtitled
"a romantic revery" and is indeed an atmospheric pastiche of
Taglioni's La Sylphide (P. Taglioni: 1830). In each case romanti¬
cism becomes not an opposition to, but a stylistic department of,
classicism.
By "romantic" we generally understand an attitude in reaction
to neo-classic Greek revivals of the late-eighteenth century and
the republican Roman frigidity of Directory and Empire. Under
Napoleon, dancers in Paris and Milan wore "Greek" tunics, not
far from what Isodora Duncan would have considered "natural."
But neo-classicism exhausted itself as a merely decorative style
without reference to the life of its time. It was replaced by what
came to be known as the "Gothick," but which was no more
Gothic, as we understand it, than was its predecessor essentially
antique. In philosophy, it was a shift from the finite, rational,
orderly and demonstrable based on arbitrary archaeological
precedent to the vague, atmospheric, warm, remote and infinite.
The novels of Walter Scott and Monk Lewis, with their wild and
loosely constructed plots, the tortured compositions of the paint¬
ers Delacroix and Gericault, the verses of Byron and Victor Hugo,
the dancing of Taglioni and Elssler on their elevated toe-points,
were the facts of this revolution in action.
Taglioni embraced the colder aspect of romantic dancing, the
marble maiden, the virgin lover, the human angel, the pure eva¬
nescent, ephemeral longed-for-eternal-feminine. Elssler embod¬
ied the warmer role; the exotic gypsy-hearted dashing earthforce
of vague Central Europe, mysterious Spain, forbidding Scotland.
National dances were the decorative frames for her characteriza¬
tions. Romantic ballet did not forswear reality, since the neo¬
classic theatre itself had had little pretensions to realism. It
merely denied logic, reason or formal design. Its principle was
without ethic,—emotional and decorative. It disappeared (ca.
1850) because it could not survive the departure of its original
exponents, and since it had even less connection with the life of
366 GENRE AND STYLE

its epoch than its predecessor, and was as well completely lack¬
ing in moral ideas. It had become instead of a comment on life
through art, merely an outworn theatrical parody or pastiche of
literature, painting and itself.
Hence the so-called Romantic ballet is not a department of the
dance, but merely a localized theatrical echo of a transient influ¬
ential literary and artistic movement.
(1939)
 V
Language, Notation,
and Identity

Dance writers frequently refer to "movement vocabularies" or to

the "language of dance." But do various dance forms really con¬
stitute "languages" in any sort of rigorous sense? The answer to
that question will of course depend upon how we define "lan¬
guage." Another question: do we possess, or are we capable of
developing, a system of notation that will permit us to record the
essential features of individual dances? These are some of the
major issues examined by the articles in this section. R. G. Coll-
ingwood, the distinguished English exponent of the expression
theory of art, argues that all art is a form of language. In his view
language is any controlled and expressive bodily activity. Every
kind of language, including verbal language (to which he
assigns no primacy or priority), is a specialized form or offshoot
of an original language of total bodily gesture. In this sense
dance is the mother of all language and all other "languages" are
merely subdivisions of this original language. Collingwood, one
of the most sophisticated exponents of the expression theory of
art, also holds that "the [linguistic] expression of emotion is not,
as it were, a dress made to fit an emotion already existing, but an
activity without which the experience of that emotion cannot
exist." He takes it to follow that there is no way of expressing
the same emotion in two different media. What is expressed in
"dance" can be expressed only that way.

367
 368 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

Joseph Margolis, the contemporary American philosopher,

challenges the thesis that art is linguistic or quasi-linguistic in
nature. Margolis plainly takes discursive, verbal language as the
model and argues that in order to show that dance or any of the
other arts is a language we would have to demonstrate that it
meets the minimal requirements for being a language. In his
opinion one would have to establish that these arts generate
meanings by the use of rule-like or rule-governed conventions
and that they include among their features a relatively stable
vocabulary, a finite grammar, and criteria for identifying well-
formed “sentences." If these characteristics are not present there
is little point in claiming, as Collingwood does, that art is lan¬
guage, or dance the mother of all languages. Margolis notes that
those who argue that art is a language frequently fail to distin¬
guish between the natural sequences and correlations that a lan¬
guage might conventionally exploit and those that it actually
does exploit. Another confusion is especially important for the
issue of artistic expression. From the fact that works of art have
expressive qualities, comes the tendency, to infer that they
express (that is, convey as language meaningfully conveys) some
v experience or quality.
Margolis concludes by discussing the issues involved in Nel¬
son Goodman's having called his book Languages of Art. Margolis
points out that Goodman's concern is "more with the properties
of a musical score by which Beethoven's Fifth could be identified
than with the properties of Beethoven's Fifth." That is, in his
opinion, Goodman is more interested in the problem of whether
there is a kind of language or notation in which it is possible to
characterize the essential features of works of art than he is in
the question whether the works are themselves linguistic in
nature. In fact, Goodman does not believe that art is a language
or even that art is a symbol system. He does suggest that works
of art are symbols that function in linguistic and nonlinguistic
systems. But it is to the problem of notation that we now turn.
Fernau Hall is concerned mainly with the aesthetic conse¬
quences of ballet's historic failure to develop an adequate and
generally accepted notation. Ballet's illiteracy is responsible, he
thinks, for the poverty of ballet's traditions. Although painting's
traditions go back tens of thousands of years, the earliest ballet
to survive more or less intact goes back to 1786 and our knowl¬
edge of ballet's past even after that date is profoundly impover¬
ished and uncertain (we have no works of Salle, Noverre, Vi-
gano). In this situation choreographers must more or less create
 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY 369

from scratch and (in marked contrast to music) there is no reg¬

ular progress. Hall believes that a decisive contribution to the
development of an adequate dance notation was made by Joan
and Rudolph Benesh, with important consequences for the art of
dance. A library of choreographic scores can be created in which
dance students and choreographers will be able to study the his¬
tory of their art and analyze the features of particular works of
art. Hall proposes an attitude toward the past comparable to the
one T. S. Eliot advocated in "Tradition and the Individual Tal¬
ent": the truly original choreographer is more likely to find
inspiration in traditional figures than he is in the work of his
contemporaries. In addition, by incorporating notation into the
creative process, the choreographer, like the composer, can view
his entire composition at one time. This will permit him to say
things that would be impossible if he had to work entirely from
memory. The advent of a usable choreographic notation should
encourage the development of an art of greater subtlety, com¬
plexity, and originality.
Nelson Goodman is less concerned with the aesthetic conse¬
quences of a dance notation than with the question whether it is
in principle possible to develop such a notation. He asks whether
dance is more like painting, for which there could be no such
notation, or more like music, for which we possess a relatively
adequate one. Goodman distinguishes between autographic and
allographic arts and works of art. A work is autographic if, as in
painting, printmaking, and sculpture, its genuineness depends
upon the history of its production; allographic if genuineness is
independent of the history of production. For example, a genu¬
ine impression of an etching must have been printed from the
creator's original plate. There is no alternative. In contrast, a gen¬
uine instance of a novel need only be "spelled" correctly. A copy
of a cheaply produced, unauthorized edition is as genuine an
instance of a novel as the author's original manuscript. For allo¬
graphic arts a test to determine the genuineness of an instance
of a work is available, a test which does not require determining
how and by whom the work was produced. A test of this sort is
provided by a suitable notational system. For texts (like those of
a novel) or for scores (musical or choreographic) the test of gen¬
uineness is correct spelling in this notation; for performance, the
test is compliance with what is correctly spelled. In Goodman's
view the definitive identification of works is possible only where
a notation has been established. Goodman has no sympathy with
those pessimists who think that because of its subtlety or com-
370 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

plexity there is no hope of notating dance or with those optimists

who think that a notation can be devised for almost anything.
The significant theoretical issue is whether we can provide in
terms of notational language real definitions that will identify a
dance in its several performances and independently of any par¬
ticular history of production. It seems clear to Goodman that the
requisite classification exists. For, prior to any notation, he thinks
that we make reasonably consistent judgments as to whether per¬
formances by different people or companies are instances of the
same dance. We say that both Martha Graham and Janet Eilber
have given performances of Graham's "Lamentation" or that
both the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater have
danced Balanchine's "Theme and Variations." Since we already
make this distinction between what is constitutive and what is
contingent in such performances the essential presupposition for
the possibility of a dance notation is met. Whether such a nota¬
tion is practically feasible is another question to which Good¬
man's answer is less decisive. But it seems to him that Labano-
tation meets the main syntactic and semantic requirements of a
notational system, and he is especially impressed by the newer
Eshkol-Wachsman system. Of course some writers have greater
doubts than Goodman about the possibility of an adequate dance
notation (see, for example, "The Identity Crisis in Dance" by
Adina Armelagos and Mary Sirridge, cited in the Bibliography).
Jack Anderson, the journalist and dance critic, suggests that
there may be less agreement than Goodman supposes about
which features of dance are constitutive and which are contin¬
gent. Anderson makes a distinction between "materialists" and
"idealists." For the materialist, and Anderson (like Goodman) is
plainly sympathetic to the materialist, a dance is an assemblage
of specific steps, and these steps are the essence of the dance. The
ideas or interpretations that animate a performance of "Giselle"
may differ widely, but we witness an authentic performance of
"Giselle" if, and only if, the standard choreography is observed.
For the idealist, however, dances exist, or at least can exist, as
scenarios or as generalized production notions, and the specific
dance movements may be altered so long as the essential concep¬
tion of the dance is expressed or its essential effects achieved. For
the idealist, the crucial thing is not that the ballerina perform the
thirty-two fouettes in "Swan Lake," but that she do something
that creates a similar effect of brilliant and haughty virtuosity. It
is clear that the materialist will generally be sympathetic to the
ideal of notating choreographic texts and preserving what he
 ROBIN G. COLLINGWOOD 371

takes to be the essence of the dance. For the idealist, notation

may be objectionable because from this point of view it confuses
the inessential with the essential and conspires to perpetuate the
one along with the other. Anderson is not sufficiently clear about
whether he thinks all ballets are materialist by nature or whether
some are in fact idealist. His main practical aim is, however, to
warn us against the growing tendency to treat materialist ballets
as idealist ones. The ballerina who omits the thirty-two fouettes
has omitted something essential.

ROBIN G. COLLINGWOOD
From THE PRINCIPLES
OF ART

LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES

We have been using the word "language" to signify any con¬
trolled and expressive bodily activity, no matter what part of the
body is involved. There is a tendency to think that there is only
one such activity, or at least one which enormously outdistances
any other in expressiveness, namely speech, or the activities of
the vocal organs. Sometimes it is suggested that there is a phys¬
iological reason for this supposed fact, namely, that by using our
vocal organs we can perform a variety of actions more subtly dif¬
ferentiated, and therefore more suitable for development into a
language, than by using any other combination of organs. It
seems more than doubtful whether either the original belief, or
the reason given for it, it true. Probably any one of a number of
kinds of bodily action is as suitable for expressive use, intrinsi¬
cally, as any other; and the pre-eminence of one over the rest
would seem to depend on the historical development of this or
that civilization. All speakers do not use all parts of the vocal
machinery alike. Germans speak more with the larynx, French¬
men more with the lips. It is very probable that, because of this
difference, Frenchmen have a finer control over lip-movements
and Germans over throat-movements; but it is certainly not true
372 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

that the difference itself is based on a physiological difference

independent of it and prior to it, a difference of organic structure
in virtue of which Germans are more sensitive in the larynx and
Frenchmen in the front of the mouth. Had that been the case,
these special sensitivities would be biological characteristics,
inherited like skull-shape and pigmentation; and the ability to
speak French or German in the proper way would depend on the
speaker's pedigree. This is notoriously not the case. The group¬
ings recognized by physical anthropology do not coincide with
those of cultural anthropology.
If Frenchmen find lip-movements more expressive than
throat-movements, and Germans the opposite, the same kind of
difference may exist as between movements of the vocal organs
and various other kinds of movements. A dispute between Ital¬
ian peasants is conducted hardly more in words than in a highly
elaborated language of manual gesture. Here again, there is no
physiological basis for the difference. Italians do not possess
more sensitive fingers than northern Europeans. But they have a
long tradition of controlled finger-gesture, going back to the
ancient game of micare digitis.
Vocal language is thus only one among many possible lan¬
guages or orders of languages. Any of these might, by a partic¬
ular civilization, be developed into a highly organized form of
emotional expression. It is sometimes fancied that although any
one of these languages might express emotion, vocal language
has an exclusive, or at least a pre-eminent, function in the expres¬
sion of thought. Even if these were, true, it would not be of inter¬
est at the present stage in our discussion, for we are now dealing
with language as it is before being adapted to serve the purposes
of thought. As a matter of fact, it is probably not true. There is a
story that Buddha once, at the climax of a philosophical discus¬
sion, broke into gesture-language as an Oxford philosopher may
break into Greek: he took a flower in his hand, and looked at it;
one of his disciples smiled, and the master said to him, "You
have understood me."
Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the pecu¬
liarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that
it can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye.
Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make
us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not;
essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and
larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still far¬
ther away from the fundamental facts about speech when we
 ROBIN G. COLLINGWOOD 373

think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting

that what writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent is only
a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo
and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or
reader, unless the words are to fall flat and meaningless, must
speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed book
is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine
music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the
speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression.
All the different kinds of language have a relation of this kind
to bodily gesture. The art of painting is intimately bound up
with the expressiveness of the gestures made by the hand in
drawing, and of the imaginary gestures through which a spec¬
tator of a painting appreciates its "tactile values." Instrumental
music has a similar relation to silent movements of the larynx,
gestures of the player's hand, and real or imaginary movements,
as of dancing, in the audience. Every kind of language is in this
way a specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may
be said that the dance is the mother of all languages.
This is what justifies the paradox of the behaviourists, that
thought is nothing but the movements of the vocal organs which
are commonly said to express it. For thought we must read in the
present context emotion, and emotion at the imaginative level,
not the merely psychic. For the vocal organs we must read the
entire body; since speech is only one form of gesture. As thus
corrected, the doctrine is true in this important sense: that the
expression of emotion is not, as it were, a dress made to fit an
emotion already existing, but is an activity without which the
experience of that emotion cannot exist. Take away the language,
and you take away what is expressed; there is nothing left but
crude feeling at the merely psychic level.
Different civilizations have developed for their own use dif¬
ferent languages; not merely different forms of speech, distin¬
guished as English from French and so on, but different in a
much deeper way. We have seen how Buddha expressed a philo¬
sophical idea in a gesture, and how the Italian peasant uses his
fingers hardly less expressively than his tongue. The habit of
going heavily clothed cramps the expressiveness of all bodily
parts except the face; if the clothing were heavy enough, only
those gestures would retain their expressiveness which can be
appreciated without being seen, such as those of the vocal
organs; except so far as the clothes themselves were expressive.
The cosmopolitan civilization of modern Europe and America,
374 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

with its tendency towards rigidly uniform dress,* has limited

our expressive activities almost entirely to the voice, and natu¬
rally tries to justify itself by asserting that the voice is the best
medium of expression.
But different languages are not related to one and the same set
of feelings like his different suits of clothes to one and the same
man. If there is no such thing as an unexpressed feeling, there is
no way of expressing the same feeling in two different media.
This is true both of the relation between different systems of
speech and of the relation between vocal language and other
forms of language. An Englishman who can talk French, if he
reflects on his own experience, knows very well that he feels dif¬
ferently when he talks a different tongue. The English tongue
will only express English emotions; to talk French you must
adopt the emotions of a Frenchman. To be multilingual is to be
a chameleon of the emotions. Still more clearly is it true that the
emotions which we express in music can never be expressed in
speech, and vice versa. Music is one order of languages and
speech is another; each expresses what it does express with abso¬
lute clarity and precision; but what they express is two different
types of emotion, each proper to itself. The same is true of man¬
ual gesture. Contempt may be expressed by shouting an insult at
a man or by snapping your fingers under his nose, as joy may be
expressed in a poem or a symphony; but with a difference; the

"■Even so, dress is a kind of language; but when it is rigidly uniform the only
emotions which it can express are emotions common to those who wear it. The
habit of wearing it focuses the attention of the wearer on emotions of this kind,
and at once generates and expresses a permanent "set" or habit of consciously
feeling in the corresponding way. Rupert Brooke noticed that Americans "walk
better than we; more freely, with a taking swing, and almost with grace. How
much of this," he adds, "is due to living in a democracy, and how much to
wearing no braces, it is very difficult to determine" (Letters from America, p. 16).
Dropping the uniform carries with it a curious breach in the emotional habit;
Mulvaney found that on discarding his trousers and donning a loin-cloth he
began to feel like an Indian native (Kipling, The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney).
The consciousness of sharing uniform dress with a circle of others is thus a
consciousness of emotional solidarity with them; and this, on its negative side,
takes the form of emotional hostility towards persons outside that circle. To
illustrate this from the history of parties and classes is superfluous. It may be
worth while to point out that in the liberal political theory, where rivalry
between policies is dissociated from emotional hostility between the persons
supporting them, it is essential that parties should not be distinguished by uni¬
forms. Put your parties into uniform, and the difference of their policies
becomes at once a less important division between them than their emotional
hostility.
 ROBIN G. COLLINGWOOD 375

precise kind of contempt which is expressed in the one way can¬

not be expressed in the other.
Now, if a person acquires the ability to express one kind of
emotions and not another, the result will be that he knows the
one kind to be in him, but not the other. These others will be in
him as mere brute feelings, never mastered and controlled, but
either concealed in the darkness of his own self-ignorance or
breaking in upon him in the shape of passion-storms which he
can neither control nor understand. Consequently, if a civiliza¬
tion loses all power of expression except through the voice, and
then asserts that the voice is the best expressive medium, it is
simply saying that it knows of nothing in itself that is worth
expressing except what can be thus expressed; and that is a tau¬
tology, for it merely means "what we (members of this particular
society) do not know we do not know," except so far as it sug¬
gests the addition: "and we do not wish to find out."
I said that "the dance is the mother of all languages"; this
demands further explanation. I meant that every kind or order
of language (speech, gesture, and so forth) was an offshoot from
an original language of total bodily gesture. This would have to
be a language in which every movement and every stationary
poise of every part of the body had the same kind of significance
which movements of the vocal organs possess in a spoken lan¬
guage. A person using it would be speaking with every part of
himself. Now, in calling this an "original" language, I am not
indulging (God forbid) in that kind of a priori archaeology which
attempts to reconstruct man's distant past without any archaeo¬
logical data. I do not place it in the remote past. I place it in the
present. I mean that each one of us, whenever he expresses him¬
self, is doing so with his whole body, and is thus actually talking
in this "original" language of total bodily gesture. This may seem
absurd. Some peoples, we know, cannot talk without waving
their hands and shrugging their shoulders and waving their
bodies about, but others can and do. That is no objection to what
I am saying. Rigidity is a gesture, no less than movement. If there
were people who never talked unless they were standing stiffly
at attention, it would be because the gesture was expressive of a
permanent emotional habit which they felt obliged to express
concurrently with any other emotion they might happen to be
expressing. This "original" language of total bodily gesture is
thus the one and only real language, which everybody who is in
any way expressing himself is using all the time. What we call
speech and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which
376 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

have undergone specialized development; in this specialized

development they never come altogether detached from the par¬
ent organism.
This parent organism is nothing but the totality of our motor
activities, raised from the psychical level to the conscious level.
It is our bodily activity as that of which we are conscious. But
that which is raised from the psychical level to the conscious
level is converted by the work of consciousness from impression
to idea, from object of sensation to object of imagination. The
language of total bodily gesture is thus the motor side of our total
imaginative experience. This last phrase was used in Chapter VII,
§ 6, as a name for the work of art proper. We are now beginning
to see that the theory of art which is going to emerge from Book
II will either consist in, or at least involve, the identification of
art with language.
(1938)

JOSEPH MARGOLIS
ART AS LANGUAGE'

The elementary question posed by the thesis that there are lan¬
guages of art or that works of art are linguistic or quasi-linguistic
utterances of some sort is just this: What are the minimal require¬
ments of a language? Admittedly, the question is controversial—
as may be seen in trying to decide whether Wittgenstein's
sketches of seemingly minimal languages are viable and if so,
what they entail. Be that as it may, there are some relatively
indisputable features of a genuine language; which, once can¬
vassed even informally, threaten the thesis in question. For
example, languages are conventions of some sort: whatever the
vehicles of meaning may be, they are said to have meaning, or
to mean what they do, by virtue of rule-like or rule-governed
conventions,1 This consideration alone rules out the tantaliz-

Professor Margolis has adapted his essay for inclusion in this anthology.
 JOSEPH MARGOLIS 377

ingly appealing thesis that art is "the language of emotions," in

the sense in which, because of natural causal connections, a work
of art produces in an audience a sense of emotional experience
the artist himself originally grasped as capable of being excited
in himself and others by the work he has devised. There are vari¬
ations on the thesis, but by and large it trades on some theory of
"natural meanings" construed in causal terms. It was apparently
the view of Roger Fry2 and is variously described (and partially
but not completely dismissed) by E. H. Gombrich3 as a theory of
mere "natural resonance" or "emotional contagion." The ulterior
question of whether artists may rightly be said to create in the
manner indicated is an important one, which we may waive
here, since the difficulties concerning conventionality are of a
deeper sort.
Now, in the sense that languages are conventional, their dis¬
tinctive structures and processes are conventional as well. But
any minimal language contains at least a vocabulary and a gram¬
mar and provides for some form of selectively linking elements
of a vocabulary and other morphemic components, in accord
with grammatical rules in order to form admissible sentences.
We may be as generous and as open as we please here regarding
surrogates of vocabularies, grammars, well-formed sentences;
but there can be no point to speaking of a language without some
explicit attention to these features or to arguably suitable surro¬
gates. It was, in fact, Susanne Langer's inability to specify a
vocabulary, conventionally sorted, recognizable and teachable
that finally washed out her otherwise interesting thesis.4 It is not
in this connection necessary, it should be said, that the putative
vocabulary of art be fixed, as in the manner of discursive lan¬
guages; what is necessary is that there be designata for relevant
symbols or symbolic forms marked. Even for what Langer
chooses to call "presentational" symbols, however, in terms of
which, say, musical forms are taken to be symbolic of the emo¬
tions with which they are isomorphic—or, "morphologically
similar"5—two essential difficulties remain: one, that isomorph¬
ism is not a sufficient condition of anything's functioning sym¬
bolically; and two, that isomorphism (or even resemblance) can¬
not even be specified without the provision of a rule in terms of
which relevant correspondences may be sorted. The point has
been elaborately made by Nelson Goodman6 and, earlier, in a
more informal way, by C. L. Stevenson.7 In fact, as Stevenson
very usefully implies, it is only by assuming the extraordinarily
generous (but very nearly vacuous) sense of a 'sign' that Charles
378 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

Morris once favored that the theory of presentational symbols

(in the form sketched) has any prospect of being confirmed—the
sense, namely, in which anything discriminated may be a sign
(even as iconic sign) of itself, and the sense in which, in any
"sign situation," whatever leads us to take account of something,
existent or not, itself or something else, thereby functions as a
sign.8 Again, despite their obvious appreciation of the pitfalls of
Langer's thesis, it is rather difficult to be sure that E. H. Gombrich
and Ruth Saw have—in their respective, recent efforts to support
some version of the theory of art as language—actually managed
to escape it. What Gombrich confuses, following C. E. Osgood's
notion of "semantic space"—no matter how cautiously he pro¬
ceeds—is the difference between there being natural associations
(as by testing among alternatives to be matched—say, gay and
sad sensations and bright and dark colors) that may serve as the
basis of a conventional idiom of emotions and the specification
of a vocabulary that conventionally exploits such associations.
Ruth Saw seems to have followed Gombrich in neglecting this
point as well.9
It is, ironically, just the inventiveness of art forms that betrays
the hopelessness of the thesis. For, works of art are not simply
novel expressions of some sort in a language; they institute new
conventions that are not readily collected as admissible expres¬
sions formed from a relatively stable vocabulary and finite gram¬
mar. It is one of the firmest contributions of the new linguistics
that a so-called natural language (that is, a language that is spon¬
taneously learned by children growing up in a human society,
from the fragmentary linguistic behavior they confront) must
have a finite grammar capable of "generating" (in effect, describ¬
ing or accounting for the grammatical structure of) an infinite set
of eligible or well-formed sentences.10 Nothing remotely like a
finite and common grammar has ever been plausibly formulated
for the various arts—certainly not for the whole of the fine arts,
or for any of the arts distinguished by medium, period, school,
style, artists, or in any other comparable way. The best that we
have been able to do in this regard is to specify the relatively
common properties of any constellation of works of art that have
been thought worth discussing together. Only if such common
properties could, in addition, be construed in terms of the fea¬
tures of a common language could the thesis in question hope to
be supported.
There are, then, at least two sorts of confusion that infect the
art language theory. One, already remarked, fails to distinguish
 JOSEPH MARGOLIS 379

between what a language might exploit among natural

sequences, by way of a convention, and what conventionally is
provided for in an actual language. To appreciate the point is to
see at a stroke that it hardly supports the claim merely to show
that conventional symbols are often used in works of art—for
instance, to represent the Passion of Christ. Here, a rudimentary
linguistic complex—or, at any rate, a complex that is a fair ana¬
logue of a linguistic element—has actually been incorporated
into a work of art. No one would wish to deny this.11 But it goes
no distance at all toward showing that all works of art, even
when they lack such representational functions, may properly be
construed in terms of a vocabulary, a grammar, and determinate
and well-formed sentences. The other confusion is important for
a different reason—because it goes to the heart of the issue of
artistic expression. There is an understandable, but not for that
reason defensible, tendency to construe the fact that works of art
have expressive qualities as signifying or entailing that works of art
express (that is, convey, as language meaningfully conveys) utter¬
ances about some experience or quality or the like. Here, the sensi¬
tive language theorist is likely to insist that this concept of art
fails to do justice to the claim that art is the language of the emo¬
tions. Thus, Ruth Saw rightly insists: "A language of the emo¬
tions, then [that is, speaking of the fine arts] is not a language
devised to convey information about emotions.... What is
decidedly and undoubtedly 'good enough' in the attempts of
human beings to communicate their emotional states to one
another is the whole world of poetry, plays, music, painting,
dancing, and sculpture." She continues, searching for the correct
formula:

A communicates emotion to B in these circumstances: A makes an

object, visible or audible, that seems to him an appropriate expres¬
sion of his emotional state, presents it to B who takes it as the
appropriate correlate of the emotional state into which it causes
him to pass. A and B each assumes that he is experiencing an emo¬
tion similar to the other's.12

Now, Saw is quite clear that to describe "art as communicating

emotion" in this sense is not sufficient to entail that "art is lan¬
guage."13 But what she apparently fails to see is that she has not
even adequately provided for art's communicating emotion in
any way that could possibly support the thesis that art is lan¬
guage or symbolic system. For, since there are no governing con¬
ventions to which A and B subscribe, they can only discover (by
380 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

means other than "reading" the work of art) that they have sim¬
ilar emotions under relevantly given conditions and then decide
(in a way that parallels representation) to regard the work as sig¬
nifying this or that emotion. So the work can be made to sym¬
bolize a given emotion and thus come to be used linguistically
or quasi-linguistically; and a work of art may be said to "com¬
municate" emotion if, in suitably causing an emotion in one, it
causes an emotion somehow appropriately similar to the emotion
the artist intended to provide a correlate for—but that is the
sense in which artists may, if they wish, exploit mere "natural
signs". There seems, therefore, no way to recover the original
claim in an interesting way.
Here, we may add the observation that, in construing works
of art as expressive, as having expressive qualities, we are doing
no more than attributing intentional properties of a certain sort to
works of art. In holding, for instance, that cats have a certain
characteristic way of expressing annoyance, we are by no means
holding that the expression is conventional, though of course it
will be intentional in the sense that a certain bit of cat-behavior
may rightly be said to express annoyance or have the property
of expressing annoyance. Similarly, though perhaps unexpect¬
edly, even a work of art, which essentially depends on exploiting
conventions of various sorts, many conceivably have an expres¬
sive property that is not conventional. It seems perfectly possible,
for example, that a given piece of music (if the theory of natural
resonance has any plausibility at all) may exhibit a certain natu¬
ral expressiveness—for instance, natural gaiety; it will do so
because it is a conventional object but not necessarily because the
property it possesses it possesses only conventionally. This
shows, then, the important difference between conventionally
representing emotions and being a natural sign of emotions—in
speaking about which we regularly equivocate when we speak
about expression. The theory of expressive qualities is not, as
such, a theory about language at all, though it may (or may not)
be a theory about communciation; and the theory of the lan¬
guage of art is not, as such, a theory about properties in the usual
sense, though it must be a theory about communciation. For
these reasons, it is also quite possible that a work of art exhibit
an expressive quality of a conventional sort without serving a
linguistic or quasi-linguistic function in so doing. For instance, a
dance step may exhibit a certain characteristic romantic languor
without representing, referring to, exemplifying, or symbolizing such
languor. Finally, a work of art may represent or symbolize given
 JOSEPH MARGOLIS 381

expressive qualities or the like without having or possessing con¬

gruent expressive qualities.14 For example, a drama might well be
a representation of Christian piety without possessing the
expressive quality of Christian piety.15
Without doubt, the principal theory of art that conflates the
distinction between a (minimal) language and the (semilinguis-
tic) sign or semiotic function of bodily expression (whether nat¬
ural or conventional) is that of R. G. Collingwood.16 Since his the¬
ory leads him to hold that "the dance is the mother of all
languages,"17 he both obscures the potential importance of the
natural expressiveness of the body for the development of nat¬
ural language—a connection most influentially explored by
Wittgenstein18—and conflates the distinction between language
proper and either natural signs (as of grief or pain or hunger) or
conventional signs (symbols) that may even employ natural
signs intermittently within a system of conventionalized move¬
ments. It is not to the point that a sustained use of bodily move¬
ments to which we may assign relatively determinate designa-
tive and referential functions (symbols) presupposes genuine
linguistic ability. Sometimes, as in the case of the chimpanzee,
the linguistic competence of human trainers may be sufficient to
account for first providing representational symbols that the
chimpanzee can then acquire and use; also, the chimpanzee may
thereby proceed, to some extent at least, to acquire the barest
rudiments of language; and it may also be possible (as David Pre¬
mack seems to believe) that the chimpanzee is natively capable
of producing relatively discrete symbols prior to the develop¬
ment of anything that could be characterized as fully linguistic
behavior.19 In any event, Collingwood does not address such dis¬
tinctions at all. Instead, he merely says that he is using "the word
'language' to signify any controlled and expressive bodily activ¬
ity"; that any form of expressive bodily gesture is to be counted
a language, and that, in that sense, "dance is the mother of all
languages."20 On the strength of this passage from expressive ges¬
ture (symbolic, because "controlled" or deliberate) to language,
Collingwood concludes that "Art must be language."21 His
remarks, therefore, hardly bear on the thesis here advanced; they
merely recommend a peculiarly loose and generous use of the
term "language."
It is also important, in speaking of the minimal conditions of
language, to make provision for the performance of speech acts
of distinctive kinds—as of asserting, querying, commanding,
advising, and the like; and, consequently, to make provisions for
382 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

assigning truth values or compliance values or the like to sen¬

tences or utterances used in performing such acts.22 But there
seems to be no plausible sense in which the artist "uttering" his
work of art straightforwardly performs a speech act or an act suit¬
ably analogous to a speech act. In the context of a wide-ranging
discussion of problems of meaning in the arts, Goran Hermeren,
for one, is candidly puzzled by the issue. Thus Hermeren says:

Personally, I am inclined to deny that an artist in a painting can

state beliefs or promise to do things in the same sense of "state"
and "promise" as he can state or promise to do things by uttering
certain words in certain kinds of situations. However, this is a com¬
plex issue, and it cannot be discussed here.... It is controversial
how far the analogy between art and languages is illuminating, but
the concepts of art, language, proposition, stating, etc., are still too
unclear to permit a rational discussion of this problem at the pres¬
ent moment.23

But, of course, apart from our intuitions—which must simply be

ranged against those who are willing to construe art as lan¬
guage—the very concept of a speech act (that is, of illocutionary
acts, of full-fledged speech acts that require the use of language)
presupposes that we have at our disposal sentences formed from
a lexicon of expressions and facilitating morphemes and the like,
in accord with a grammar; for, otherwise, there simply are no
utterances to be used in performing any speech acts. This avenue
of defense, then, also proves to be a dead end.
Another way of viewing the bearing of speech acts (or ana¬
logues of speech acts) on the analysis of works of art is this. Con¬
strue expression as the performance of some suitably character¬
ized speech act by a speaker; and a work of art, as the vehicle of
what the speaker expresses. Thus, for instance, on Ernest Jones's
interpretation of Hamlet, Shakespeare may be said to have
expressed a good deal about his Oedipal feelings in writing Ham¬
let. On the thesis that the artist has expressed himself or his feel¬
ings or the like, to say that the work expresses the man or his
feelings or the like justifies us in inferring from the properties
of the work to the feelings of the artist. In that sense, the work
may be said to "imply" what we properly infer. This is a vexed
thesis that trades on G. E. Moore's well-known use of 'imply'; it
also underlies John Hospers's thesis about implied truths in fic¬
tion and Morris Weitz's thesis about works of art embodying
truth claims.24 The trouble, in a nutshell, is that the expressive
function (no matter how it is articulated) is an ulterior function
 JOSEPH MARGOLIS 383

that, under certain circumstances, may be assigned to works of

art, that need not, qua art, exhibit such function. That is, works
of art are not as such "utterances" used in performing speech acts
or analogous acts of expressing oneself; they are distinctive
objects possessing what properties they possess (including
expressive qualities) that, on an ulterior theory, we may interpret
further as "utterances" so used. Whatever the internal difficulties
of accurate interpretation along these lines, the thesis does not
show that works of art are essentially, as such, the vehicles of
acts of expression but only that, within limits and for ulterior
purposes, they may be so viewed. Also to admit this much is not
to admit that art is language; only that a work of art may provide
evidence about an artist's state of mind and that the relationship
of evidence to inference may be reversed, on an imposed theory,
and put in terms of the implications of initial acts of expression.25
Finally, reference to the current literature occupied with our
issue cannot possibly be complete without some mention of Nel¬
son Goodman's recent book. Though he speaks of "languages of
art," Goodman cautions us, on the opening page of his Introduc¬
tion, that "'Languages' in any title should, strictly, be replaced
by 'symbol systems'. But the title, since always read before the
book, has been kept in the vernacular. The nonreader will not
mind, and the reader will understand .. ."26 So Goodman does
not hold that art is language. He holds, rather, that the arts are
symbol systems and that languages are symbol systems "of a par¬
ticular kind", that satisfy at least the "syntactic requirements of
disjointness and differentiation"27—roughly, the requirement
that replicas of given marks or inscriptions (what, more famil¬
iarly but by way of an ontology unacceptable to Goodman, is
expressed by the type-token distinction) are syntactically equiv¬
alent to one another and that, as a consequence of being "char¬
acter-indifferent", "no mark may belong to more than one char¬
acter",-28 and the requirement that it is theoretically possible that,
for any given mark or inscription that does not belong to two
given characters, it may be determined that the mark does not
belong to the one character or does not belong to the other.29 I
waive here all discussion of the difficulty of applying Goodman s
criteria of notationality to actual languages and bodies of art.30
Now, the odd thing about Goodman's account is that Good¬
man goes to great lengths to explicate the nature of notational
schemes, that is, symbol systems of a special sort that permit us
to identify works of art and their properties; but he has very little
to say about works of art as themselves symbols of some sort. It is
384 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

almost as if Goodman's concern is more with the properties of a

musical score by which Beethoven's Fifth could be identified
than with the properties of Beethoven's Fifth. He does, however,
hold that the arts do function as symbols and supports the thesis
by claiming that "works of art or their instances perform one or
more among certain referential functions: representation,
description, exemplification, expression."31
A word first about Goodman's views regarding the notation of
artworks, an issue of some complexity that we cannot fully
explore in the present context.32 It is Goodman's contention that
the dance is (what he calls) an allographic rather than an auto¬
graphic art, that is, an art specimens of which (in accord with two
rather different, by no means coextensive, accounts that he
offers) are either incapable of forgery or numerically identifiable
without reference to their "history of production."33 The use of
the term "forgery" may mislead us, since it is etymologically
linked to a certain kind of manufacture, as by forge. What Good¬
man clearly has in mind, however, is that, in music and dance,
as opposed to the so-called autographic arts (painting, for
instance), it is not true that "the most exact duplication" of a
given work can still be counted as not "genuine."34 Nevertheless,
just as an exact copy of a Diirer print, pulled from the original
plate as accurately as you please, may still be unauthorized by
Diirer—hence, not genuine (forged, or pirated)—so, too, a dance
may be unauthorized, pirated, ungenuine intended, say, to be
performed only by authorized, ritually clean dancers. There is no
plausible way in which if the one i$ conceded, the other can be
denied (except ad hoc, to confirm the very thesis at stake). But
then, the relevance of the "history of production" for allegedly
allographic art cannot be denied. In fact, all the arts have auto¬
graphic features, both with respect to genuineness and history of
production; no arts can be satisfactorily individuated on Good¬
man's allographic grounds—not even music;35 and no conceptual
problems arise regarding individuating works in ways that
depend on intentional factors and factors bearing on the history
of production.
The fact is that Goodman himself insists that autographic
works (paintings and sculptures, for instance) are capable of
being systematically sorted in terms of numerical identity, in the
absence or on the inapplicability of allographic constraints—
essentially, in the absence or on the inapplicability of employing
a notation like a score. So the applicability of scoring (Labano-
tation, say) does not altogether preclude ascriptions of the
 JOSEPH MARGOLIS 385

ungenuine and does not provide (without autographic adjuncts)

sufficient grounds for the individuation and reidentification of
would-be allographic works. Perhaps, bearing in mind music
and dance, a better way of putting the point is to say that natural
notations that do effectively individuate artworks do not meet
Goodman's extraordinarily strict conditions of "notationality"—
no natural language or notation does or can36—and such nota¬
tions invariably incorporate some reference to productive intent
or origin.37
The trouble regarding Goodman's second issue is that,
although in performing the functions mentioned, works of art
are admittedly performing certain symbolic functions, it is by no
means obvious that every work of art (or, characteristic works of
art) must, because it is a work of art, perform any particular such
function. We must be careful here. Goodman both acknowledges
and insists that "a symbol may be a representation even if it
denotes nothing at all."38 So he is not holding that, as symbols
works of art need be denotative in any sense—or, correspond¬
ingly, need perform any other particular symbolic function. If,
on the other hand, he concedes (he does not seem explicitly
either to affirm or deny) that a work of art may be such though
it perform no symbolic function whatsoever, then he must be
holding that, in addition to what minimally makes a work of art
what it is, works of art may perform certain distinctive symbolic
functions.39 If, then, it could be shown that these functions can¬
not convincingly be taken to be essential to (or even strongly
characteristic of) art, Goodman's entire thesis collapses. This, of
course, is not at all to deny the importance of analyzing such
symbolic functions wherever they occur; it bears only on the the¬
sis that art is language or symbolic in nature.
As it happens, the counterargument is quite straightforward.
About representation, Goodman says, "Nothing is intrinsically a
representation; status as representation is relative to symbol sys¬
tem. A picture in one system may be a description in another;
and whether a denoting symbol is representation depends not
upon whether it resembles what it denotes but upon its own
relationships to other symbols in a given scheme."40 Since the
question of whether a given work of art is or is not a represen¬
tation or description is alway eligible and may well be decided,
on the evidence, in the negative, it cannot be supposed that
works of art always or characteristically perform such functions.
But the decisive difficulty of Goodman's account lies in what he
has to say about the nature of expression: "what is expressed is
386 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

metaphorically exemplified," "whereas almost anything can

denote or even represent almost anything else, a thing can
express only what belongs but did not originally belong to it.
The difference between expression and literal exemplification,
like the difference between more and less literal representation,
is a matter of habit—a matter of fact rather than fiat."41 But Good¬
man has already held that "exemplification is possession plus
reference. To have without symbolizing is merely to possess....
[A] swatch [of cloth] exemplifies only those properties that it
both has and refers to."42 So, although a work of art may be made
to exemplify any suitable property that it possesses, it surely pos¬
sesses any such property regardless of whether or not it is con¬
strued as exemplifying it, say, in being—rather like a swatch of
cloth—a sample of such property. Hence, although Goodman
holds that expression and not merely exemplification is refer¬
ential in nature (and, as such, depends on a symbol system),
there is no good reason to deny that works of art often simply
possess expressive qualities—without representing, describing,
or exemplifying anything—and, in possessing expressive quali¬
ties, may be said (elliptically) to express those qualities. For exam¬
ple, a dance movement may be naturally expressive and, because
it is, it may be deliberately used ("controlled," in Collingwood's
terms) as expressive, or used even to designate some expressive
mood or other. In the first case, it may fairly be said to function
in a symbolic way, as expressive, without in the least involving
a referential, or exemplificatory, function of any sort. The quib¬
ble is important, because in accommodating Goodman's distinc¬
tion, we see that, for an enormous range of so-called expressive
qualities, the distinction does not apply, would be utterly gra¬
tuitous if insisted on, and in being applied falsifies the nonrefer-
ential nature of much art. In effect, Goodman has conflated the
possession of properties with the performance of certain linguis¬
tic or symbolic acts or functions.43 For, it is not the same thing to
hold that a work of art that possesses certain (expressive) quali¬
ties may, if we wish, thereupon be construed as expressing those
qualities and to hold that, in possessing certain (expressive) qual¬
ities, a work of art cannot but express those qualities. But if so,
his original thesis, that works of art are symbols, fails. A fortiori,
the thesis cannot be made to entail that an artwork must exem¬
plify its own expressive qualities.
There seems to be no other promising way in which to defend
the claim that art is language or that works of art are linguistic
or symbolic utterances of some sort—which is not to deny that
 JOSEPH MARGOLIS 387

works of art may be made to perform linguistic or symbolic func¬

tions or that particular works may possess the property of serv¬
ing some linguistic or symbolic function. We must conclude on
the evidence, then, that the thesis is false. Also, nothing need be
added regarding those fine arts that use language as a medium,
simply because the medium is language: novels and poems are
language or characters in symbol systems not because they are
works of art but because they are formed in and of language.
Their existence complicates the analysis of the thesis but does
not require adjustment on essentials.
(1974)

Notes
‘Cf. H. P. Grice, "Meaning," Philosophical Review, 66 (1957), 377-88.
Grice has adjusted his theory of meaning many times to accommodate
serious internal difficulties. Nor is it clear that his essential thesis regard¬
ing speakers' intentions is ultimately tenable. I have discussed this in
"Meaning, Speakers' Intentions, and Speech Acts," Review of Metaphys¬
ics, XXVI (1973), 681-95. But, in any case, Grice's emphasis on distin¬
guishing the conventionality of meaning ("meanings"; that is, "non¬
natural meaning") is useful.
2Cf. Art History as an Academic Study (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer¬
sity Press, 1933).
3"Art and the Language of Emotions," Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, Suppl. Vol. XXXVI (1962), 215-34.
4Cf. Ernest Nagel's review of Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), Journal of Philosophy, 40
(1943), 325-26.
5Cf. Philosophy in a New Key.
6Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).
7"Symbolism in the Nonrepresentational Arts," in Language, Thought,
and Culture, ed. Paul Henle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1958); also, Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of
Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), chap. 7.
8Cf. C. W. Morris, "Aesthetics and the Theory of Signs," Journal of Uni¬
fied Science, 8 (1939), 131-50.
9Cf. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York: Pantheon, 1960),
chap. 4; also Ruth L. Saw, "Art and the Language of the Emotions," Pro¬
ceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. XXXVI (1962), 235-46; and
Ruth L. Saw, Aesthetics (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971), chap. 6.
10The force of this thesis of so-called generative grammar is one of the
principal concerns of Noam Chomsky, for instance; cf. Language and
Mind, enlarged edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1972).
388 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

Thus formulated, the thesis does not (yet) broach the much-disputed
issue of innatism.
nThe issue is explored further, below.
12Aesthetics, pp. 158-59.
13Ibid., p. 168.
14But see, below, remarks on Nelson Goodman's thesis.
15The distinction required is, it should be said, adumbrated in Steven¬
son, "Symbolism in the Nonrepresentational Arts." Cf. also Goran Her-
meren's discussion of Beardsley's view of depicting. Representation and
Meaning in the Visual Arts (Lund: Laromedelsforlagen, 1969), pp. 29-33.
l6R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1938), chaps. 11-12.
17Ibid„ p. 244.
18Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
19David Premack has argued persuasively, though cautiously, that
chimpanzees do appear to be capable of rather developed symbolic
activity and understanding; and that they clearly are able to master cer¬
tain significant preconditions of genuine language—in particular,
"same"-"different" predicative contrasts, representations as such, "rela¬
tions between relations" (syntactic relations). He is inclined (now), hav¬
ing confirmed this much empirically, to resist exaggerated linguistic
claims for chimps. Cf. David Premack, Intelligence in Ape and Man (Hills¬
dale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1976), particularly, pp.
133-34; and David Premack and Guy Woodruff, "Does the Chimpanzee
Have a Theory of Mind?" The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, I (1978), 515-
26; also, Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (eds.). Speaking of
Apes (New York: Plenum Press, 1980). The linguistic ability of chimpan¬
zees is still not entirely clear.
20Collingwood, The Principles of Art, pp. 241-44.
21Ibid., p. 273. His clearest statement on language is the following:
"Bodily actions expressing certain emotions, in so far as they come
under our control and are conceived by us, in our awareness of control¬
ling them, as our way of expressing these emotions, are language ...
language is simply bodily expression of emotion, dominated by thought
in its primitive form as consciousness" (p. 235).
“Cf. for instance J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962); and William Alston, Philosophy of Language
(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964).
23Representation and Meaning, p. 96. It may be mentioned that, although
any theory of language must provide for speech acts, a speech-act model
of a theory of meaning is inherently weak. Cf. Joseph Margolis, "Mean¬
ing, Speakers' Intentions, and Speech Acts."
24See Joseph Margolis, Art and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands:
Elumanities Press, 1980), chap. 12, for a detailed discussion of these
views.
 JOSEPH MARGOLIS 389

“This view is not unsympathetic to Alan Tormey's recent remarks

about acts of expression; cf. The Concept of Expression (Princeton: Prince¬
ton University Press, 1971), chap. 3, particularly p. 93. Tormey's own
theory of expression, in chap. 5, is justifiably restricted to expressive
properties, which, as we have seen, do not concern the question of art
as language.
“Goodman, p. xii.
“Ibid., pp. 40n„ 225f.
“Ibid., pp. 131-33.
“Ibid., pp. 135-36.
“See, however, Margolis, Art and Philosophy.
31Ibid., p. 256.
32I discuss the issue at some length, specifically with respect to the
dance, in "The Autographic Nature of the Dance," Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, XXXI (1981), 419-27.
“Goodman, pp. 113-98.
“Ibid., p. 113.
“The point is that, in music, it is conceptually impossible to specify
distinctions of pitch independently of distinctions of tempo; neverthe¬
less, Goodman claims the first services numerical identity, but the sec¬
ond does not (p. 185).
“Cf. Goodman, chap. 4.
“.This, for example, is the upshot of Adina Armelagos and Mary Sir-
ridge's "The Identity Crisis in Dance," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criti¬
cism, XXXVII (1978), 129-39. They explicitly note: "... dance is a process-
art. At least part of the creative process is crucial to the identification of
the work." (130). Cf. also Margolis, "The Autographic Nature of the
Dance."
“Ibid., p. 226.
39Cf. Joseph Margolis, "What Is When? When Is What? Two Questions
for Nelson Goodman," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXXIX
(1981), 266-68.
“Ibid., p. 226.
41Ibid., pp. 85, 89.
“Ibid., p. 53.
“A somewhat fuller account of these and related distinctions is pro¬
vided in my "Numerical Identity and Reference," The British Journal of
Aesthetics, 10 (April 1970), 138-46.
i
LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

FERNAU HALL
DANCE NOTATION AND
CHOREOLOGY

To anyone approaching the study of ballet with knowledge of

other arts, what stands out most clearly is the poverty of its tra¬
ditions. In painting the artist of today is aware of predecessors
going back tens of thousands of years to the anonymous geniuses
who worked in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira. Traditions are
not so long in arts dependent on notation, but an epic poem like
Gilgamesh takes us back about 5,000 years, and even in music we
are aware of a European tradition going back over five hundred
years and incorporating scores of masterpieces in an enormous
variety of styles.
What we find in ballet is pathetic by comparison. The earliest
ballet to survive more or less intact dates from 1786—Galeotti's
Amors og Ballet-mesterens Luner; unfortunately this is no more
than a suite of divertissements. (In fact Galeotti, over a very long
lifetime, composed a large number of ballets with ambitious
themes such as those of Dido (1777) and Romeo and Juliet (1811);
but his successor in Copenhagen—Bournonville—took care that
all of these were dropped, and only one trifle preserved.) Then
there are fragments of La Fille Mai Gardee, also choreographed in
1786 (by Dauberval in Bordeaux). A version of this by Didelot
was preserved in Russia and various versions of the latter are still
to be seen from time to time in Russia and elsewhere, though
unfortunately the staging of a completely new version of this
ballet by Ashton for the Royal Ballet makes the fate of what sur¬
vives in old dancers' memories very precarious. (Ashton's ver¬
sion has many merits: the trouble is that it may well replace the
historic one, instead of taking its place alongside it.)
We have to move forward many years before we meet any fur¬
ther ballets surviving into the twentieth century. The work that
launched the Romantic Ballet was La Sylphide, choreographed by
Filippo Taglioni in 1832; this was lost, but by a lucky chance the
great Bournonville staged his own version in Copenhagen in
1836—a version probably much better than the original—and
this has been preserved with remarkable fidelity (along with a
 FERNAU HALL 391

number of other Bournonville ballets) by the Royal Danish

Ballet.
Of all the works of Bournonville's great contemporary Perrot
only one survives—Giselle—and that was his very first major
work. (He first worked on this ballet anonymously, composing
the title role for Carlotta Grisi, but the ballet we know is derived
from a version entirely revised by him in Russia.) Giselle has been
preserved with great fidelity in Russia; no matter how far-reach¬
ing the changes in other ballets, Giselle was always regarded as
sacrosanct and even the Bolshoi version is remarkably faithful.
An Italo-Russian version of Coppelia survives—we have no way
of knowing how much (if any) of the original French choreog¬
raphy of 1870 remains—but only two other important ballets
survive from the nineteenth century. The Sleeping Beauty and
Swan Lake, both with music by Tchaikovsky. (The Nutcracker is
only of musical interest: choreographically it is a nullity, apart
from the great pas de deux.) Don Quixote, which survives in Gor¬
sky's version of the Petipa original, is little more than a series of
bravura entrees, with little relation to the Cervantes novel; and
the surviving Petipa ballets such as Raymonda and La Bayadere are
very conventional. There we have the sum total of the so-called
"classics" surviving into the twentieth century: nothing by such
geniuses as Salle, Noverre and Vigano, and very little by anyone
else but Bournonville and Petipa.
Even in ballets produced in the twentieth century—in fact
within living memory—the losses have been very serious; for
ballets which have in them choreography worthy of the name
(i.e. freshly composed dance-images, as distinct from enchaine-
ments of classroom steps) suffer very badly in transmission. Any
dancer working without guidance from the choreographer tends
to change the choreography insensibly from week to week,
moulding the line and the rhythms into patterns which are com¬
fortable for him to perform; and when the role is handed over
(usually by one dancer teaching it to another) the changes are
often enormous; moreover they are cumulative, so that after a
few years the choreographer (if still alive) can hardly recognize
his handiwork. The ballet-master getting to work on the results
of this transmission from dancer to dancer, and seeking to liven
up something which seems to him rather pointless (because
badly danced, or untrue to the original), is very likely to make
further changes. One can see the end-product of this process
very clearly in a ballet like Les Sylphides, for the versions of the
various solos and group dances differ a good deal from company
392 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

to company. (Here we have a combination of many factors: faulty

transmission from dancer to dancer, alterations by ballet-masters,
and a muddled heritage from various versions by Fokine.) In the
great Tudor ballets—above all in Dark Elegies, composed from
start to finish in imaginative dance-images—the changes in the
absence of the choreographer have been particularly debilitat¬
ing, though some very fine artists like Gillian Martlew and Anna
Truscott do wonders with what survives.
The losses caused by imperfect transmission (or complete fail¬
ure of transmission) are serious enough; but perhaps even more
serious is the depressing effect on new choreography of the
weakness of the balletic heritage at any time. In fact every so
often the art of ballet has to be re-created almost from scratch
after a period of decadence in which people almost forget that
ballet ever was a major art. (We are just now emerging from such
a period; fortunately it has been a relatively short one because in
ballet as in the other arts the pace of change has speeded up.)
Any artist (and above all any artist working in the theatre, where
problems of co-ordination between the arts are unusually exact¬
ing) needs a wide background of knowledge: in fact if he is
really original, he is more likely to find the sort of stimulus he
needs in the work of artists who lived centuries ago than in that
of his immediate predecessors, whose work will in all probabil¬
ity seem to him impossibly dreary and stale. But in ballet this can
happen only to a very small extent: the works which survive are
those which happened to suit the widely varying tastes of a
series of generations, not the tough, spiky masterpieces— the
equivalents of the poems of Donne, the late quartets of Bee¬
thoven, the paintings of Bosch. A young composer, for example,
can learn a great deal about orchestration by studying the scores
of a composer like Rimsky-Korsakov: not so the young
choreographer.
In the absence of a notation choreography has inevitably
failed to achieve the same sort of development in subtlety and
complexity that has been going on in music ever since it has
been written down: working on paper the composer can keep
the whole of his composition in view at one time, both horizon¬
tally and vertically, and so he can say things that would be
impossible if he had to work entirely from memory. Of course
great things are possible without notation, as is proved by the
achievements of Indian classical instrumentalists, singers and
dancers who improvise within strict rules; but these artists are
inevitably confined to what is possible within the range of their
 FERNAU HALL 393

own achievements as executants, and also to what is possible in

collaboration with a drummer. Western ballet has muddled
through to a strange position half-way between the Western and
Eastern modes: like Eastern music and dancing it is transmitted
by memory only, but it is not improvised and like Western music
it relies to a major extent on the composer passing on his ideas
to others for execution.
The harsh facts of time and money are here of crucial impor¬
tance. In fact there is the most extreme and crippling conflict
between the artistic needs of the choreographer and almost any
ballet company's available resources of money and rehearsal
time. Tudor took two years to create Dark Elegies, gradually
evolving the new kind of dance-image needed to express what
he had in mind; and even at the first night (in 1937) the ballet
was by no means complete. He was only able to work in this
way—a way necessary to him, and in fact to any choreographer
attempting something comparable—because the company with
which he worked (the Ballet Club, or Ballet Rambert as it was
known at its annual West End seasons) was not run on commer¬
cial lines: the dancers who appeared at the Mercury Theatre
twice a week were paid only their fares. This could not go on
indefinitely and when Tudor set up his own company he was
quite unable to stage the ambitious new works he had in mind.
A generation earlier Diaghilev was able to allow Nijinsky the
scores of rehearsals he needed for his revolutionary works
L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune and The Rite of Spring, because of the
availability of large subsidies from wealthy patrons; but that, too,
could not and did not last.
Nowadays a company like the Royal Ballet's touring company
or the Ballet Rambert, giving seven performances a week, can
manage only a relatively small number of hours of studio work
each week—and most of that goes in classes and rehearsals
needed to fill gaps in ballets in the repertoire; a choreographer
working on a new ballet is lucky if he is given half-a-dozen
hours a week—and possibly not one of those hours with his full
cast. A company based on Covent Garden, giving about four per¬
formances a week, is somewhat better off, but even here the time
available is extremely limited. In fact a choreographer is likely
to spend at least half the very limited time available to him sim¬
ply teaching the steps and has not much time for polishing them
and producing the dancers. This puts a great premium on cho¬
reography so conventional (i.e. based on familiar classroom pat¬
terns) that dancers can pick it up quickly and build it up in ways
394 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

familiar to them from class work and from other equally conven¬
tional ballets, so that it will look effective on stage. In fact it is
hard to imagine anything remotely equivalent to Dark Elegies
being staged in England today: a choreographer might dream
about it, but he would be unwise to put too much of his creative
energies into the dream. (It is significant that Tudor never staged
the Proust ballet he dreamed about for a long time: after he had
been working for Ballet Theatre for several years, and might
have been able to stage it, he had moved on a long way artisti¬
cally and the project repelled him.)
All the factors crippling the development of ballet with which
we have been concerned are connected in one way or another
with ballet's illiteracy. It remained illiterate not because choreog¬
raphers and ballet-masters were unaware of the importance of
notation: on the contrary, attempts to invent a satisfactory system
of dance notation can be traced back to the beginning of the fif¬
teenth century—in fact to the very beginnings of ballet. Some
inventors showed a great deal of ingenuity and their inventions
were used for a time, mainly by themselves; but they did not
survive the death of their inventors and there was no regular
progress. Meanwhile music notation became standardized and
gradually developed from century to century in harmony with
the development of music—and in fact it made this development
possible. Music notation took its place at the very core of all
study of music and all composition, whereas dance notation
remained on the fringe of ballet. In the late eighteenth century
we find the great choreographer and theoretician Noverre reject¬
ing notation out-of-hand, because it provided no record of many
important aspects of choreography.
Noverre was quite justified in his attitude: the notations devel¬
oped up to then could not record any of the subtleties which
made his choreography dramatically expressive and in fact they
assumed the use of conventional classroom steps in a conven¬
tional way, so that they were no more than an aid to the ballet-
master's memory. In the nineteenth century various attempts
were made to develop more comprehensive systems—among
them the Stepanov system, an adaptation of music notation,
which Sergeyev used to jog his memory when he revived Rus¬
sian ballets for the Vic-Wells Ballet and the International Ballet.
Then in the middle twenties of the present century Laban devel¬
oped a system which incorporated his theories about modern
dance; based on the icosahedron, it used symbols to represent
various directions in space (up, forward, down, etc.). This was
 FERNAU HALL 395

suited to the dance of the period, but in recent years attempts to

adapt it to ballet have come up against great obstacles; for here
great precision is needed and even the simplest poses and steps
are in fact of great complexity.
The problem which baffled the inventors of systems of dance
notation, century after century, was that they had to record
something far more complex than music or speech: they had to
set down in two dimensions, on paper, the movements of all
parts of the body in three dimensions of space and one of time.
It is possible to invent a system of notation giving a complete
record of all movement, and also to invent one which is simple
and practical. What seems impossible is to reconcile these two
contradictory requirements. To achieve completeness a great
many symbols are needed, and these make any such notation
very slow to write and read—in fact quite unsuited to the tough
conditions of work in a ballet company where time is always in
short supply. Such complexity makes the notation useless for
choreographers (who need something which suggests in a clear
and simple way the actual movement in space) and makes it
intolerable to dancers (who are rarely intellectuals). In the early
years of this century, the Stepanov notation was taught at the
Maryinsky, but the dancers hated it, and forgot it as soon as
possible.
This was the situation which confronted Joan and Rudolf
Benesh in 1947 when they set to work on dance notation. That
they succeeded where so many other brilliant people had failed
was probably due to two things: they started with a correct
understanding of the very complex nature of the problem, and
they brought together a wide variety of talents and experience
(in addition to inventiveness and originality): in fact the prob¬
lems they faced were (like many others which have baffled sci¬
entists for years) too complex for any one person to solve. Joan
Benesh was a dancer, producer and choreographer; Rudolf
Benesh was a very unusual combination of painter (with a spe¬
cial feeling for line and a fondness for drawing dancers) and
musician.
They adopted two principles as fundamental. First, the system
of notation had to begin and remain essentially visual (without
the efflorescence of symbols which made previous systems
impractical); and, second, it had to be integrated with music
notation, taking advantage of the centuries of development of
the latter and simplifying the work of relating the dancing to the
music. They held fast to these guiding principles through all the
396 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

years of development as they moved on from recording the

movements of one dancer to the scoring of complete ballets. In
fact the two principles helped them to maintain the essential
combination of simplicity and completeness and at the same time
to make the whole system homogeneous. (Any one problem
could be solved in a variety of ways—but only one solution was
true to the basic pattern, and to find this solution often
demanded months or even years of work.)
But the germ-invention came very quickly to Rudolf Benesh
after the problem had been posed to him by Joan Benesh. The
germ-invention had the simplicity of genius: as with so many
great inventions, it looks quite obvious by hindsight. Rudolf
Benesh took the five-line stave of music, and imagined a dancer
standing in front of it, as if it were a wall. Simple marks on the
stave recorded the positions of the hands and the feet and made
it possible to reconstruct the line of the body very accurately so
long as the dancer remained in the plane of the "wall" and did
not bend his arms or legs. If he bent his arms or legs, crosses
indicated the position of elbows or knees. And if he moved out
of the plane of the "wall," simple changes in the signs indicated
extension in the third dimension, in front of or behind the
"wall."
This was only the beginning. The Beneshes then found that
they could draw movement-lines, uniting an infinite number of
positions of the limbs and showing the exact path of movement
in space: this was something completely new in notation, mak¬
ing it possible to compress an enormous amount of information
into one simple line easily drawn and easily read; in fact the
movement-lines were just as important as the original germ-
invention. Now it was possible to make a single but precise and
complete record of the dancing of a single person no matter what
technique or style was used or how unconventional the dance-
images; and this in turn made it possible to build up a full score
without generating a mass of symbols so complex that no one
could read them. In fact the Beneshes had to develop systems for
showing, at each moment in time, the movements of the limbs,
trunk, head, etc. of each person on the stage; the rhythm of his
movements, and their relationship with the rhythm of the music;
his position on the stage; the direction he faced and the direction
he moved—two quite distinct things; his spatial relationship to
the other dancers; and many other things. By this time Joan
Benesh had joined the Royal Ballet, and she tried out all their
 FERNAU HALL 397

solutions of the various problems on ballets in the repertoire

(which covered a variety of styles).
A great deal has happened since those early pioneering days.
The Benesh Notation is now established as an important element
within British ballet, and is spreading to other countries. It is
taught to the students in the schools associated with the two
leading British companies (the Royal Ballet and the Ballet Ram¬
bert) and notators are at work in companies in eight countries
apart from Britain. The work is naturally most advanced in the
Royal Ballet, which has two staff notators.
From the point of view of a company like the Royal Ballet
notation is of vital importance because it speeds up and makes
far more accurate the revival of a ballet that has been dropped
from the repertoire or has to be transferred to another section of
the company. In fact the scores are so accurate and so easily read
that notators who do not know a ballet can produce it from the
score—as happened recently when a staff notator of the Royal
Ballet's touring company produced Sylvia for this company. In
future years, when enough dancers trained in notation have
joined a company, the producers will be able to hand out parts
for the dancers to learn in the same way that producers of plays
hand out scripts to the actors.
The eventual impact on choreography is likely to be of great
importance and is bound to be a complex one. The choreogra¬
pher can work out his ballets on paper before reaching the
rehearsal room, trying out various ways of making his effects and
evolving structures in space and time far more complex than
those possible when (as in the past) he had to rely on his memory
and that of the dancers. One thing at least is certain: he is likely
to make a more subtle use of music. Already one can see some
possibilities for the future in the compositions of students at the
Royal Ballet school, produced as an integral part of their studies
of notation itself and based on close analysis of the music by
means of a rhythm notation developed for this purpose. The cho¬
reographic score taken to rehearsal can incorporate the results of
trials on dancers and the choreographer can concentrate on pro¬
duction, using assistants to teach the movements: this will make
it possible for a choreographer to achieve far more original and
expressive images within the time available.
But the indirect results of the rise of notation are likely to be
equally far-reaching. Now, at last, it is becoming possible for
young choreographers to master their craft by analysing the
398 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

works of the great masters of the past and present, just as young
film directors do at great film schools such as the one at Lodz,
cradle of a number of great Polish directors. At present young
choreographers show a sadly limited notion of the nature and
potentialities of choreography and their attempts at producing
original work, breaking away from what they know, tend to be
pathetically empty—being no more than experiments for the
sake of experiment.
What we are concerned with here is something so new that
when an Institute was formed to foster its development a new
name had to be coined: choreology. The Institute of Choreology
was, in fact, formed in July of 1962, with a number of objects—
among them the formation of a library of choreographic scores
(not only of important ballets, but also of traditional classical and
folk dances of the East and West); study and analysis of scores;
and the fostering of training in composition.
Choreology—the study of all forms of dance through nota¬
tion—is still only in its early stages; but enough work has
already been done to give hints of the sort of discoveries that
will be made. When Joan Benesh notated Petrushka she discov¬
ered aspects of Fokine's choreography which had never been
suspected before, because they could only emerge when the
"polychory" (choreographic counterpoint) was spread out on a
page. Looking at the score of the Finale of the dance of the
nurses, coachmen and grooms in Scene 4, she found this pattern:

Bar 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Men a ab cdd'e fggh i a a
Women ABCCDDEFggAB

Against musical phrases of fourteen bars the men and women

dance in phrases of twelve bars, but the men start two bars ahead
of the women and keep this separation through this section of
the dance. Though the men and women have different steps fit¬
ted to the music in different ways, their dances combine together
in a delightfully satisfying manner, partly because they have the
same structure within the phrase (apart from the choreographic
cadence h, i which is not found in the women's dance). What is
more (and this is a stroke of genius) Fokine unites the two
phrases with a repeated pattern of steps g, g which is performed
both by the men and the women at relatively the same point in
their respective phrases.
 NELSON GOODMAN 399

The importance of this sort of analysis for aspirant choreog¬

raphers is obvious: by combining their studies with exercises in
composition (on paper and with dancers) they can move forward
towards a professional mastery of their art which up to now has
been possible only for the isolated genius. Knowledge and train¬
ing cannot, of course, provide a substitute for talent; what they
can do is help the choreographer to make the most of his talent—
and this is what the art of ballet desperately needs at the present
time, when the fashionable styles of recent decades are clearly
moribund and there is a real chance of new and creative styles
emerging.

(1964)

NELSON GOODMAN
From LANGUAGES OF ART

THE ROLE OF NOTATIONS

1. A problem concerning authenticity is raised by the rather
curious fact that in music, unlike painting, there is no such thing
as a forgery of a known work. There are, indeed, compositions
falsely purporting to be by Haydn as there are paintings falsely
purporting to be by Rembrandt; but of the London Symphony,
unlike the Lucretia, there can be no forgeries. Haydn's manu¬
script is no more genuine an instance of the score than is a
printed copy off the press this morning, and last night's perfor¬
mance no less genuine than the premiere. Copies of the score
may vary in accuracy, but all accurate copies, even if forgeries of
Haydn's manuscript, are equally genuine instances of the score.
Performances may vary in correctness and quality and even in
'authenticity' of a more esoteric kind; but all correct perfor¬
mances are equally genuine instances of the work.1 In contrast,
even the most exact copies of the Rembrandt painting are simply
imitations or forgeries, not new instances, of the work. Why this
difference between the two arts?
400 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

Let us speak of a work of art as autographic if and only if the

distinction between original and forgery of it is significant; or
better, if and only if even the most exact duplication of it does
not thereby count as genuine.2 If a work of art is autographic, we
may also call that art autographic. Thus painting is autographic,
music nonautographic, or allographic. These terms are introduced
purely for convenience; nothing is implied concerning the rela¬
tive individuality of expression demanded by or attainable in
these arts. Now the problem before us is to account for the fact
that some arts but not others are autographic.

2. Why, then, can I no more make a forgery of Haydn's sym¬

phony or of Gray's poem than I can make an original of Rem¬
brandt's painting or of his etching Tobit Blind? Let us suppose that
there are various handwritten copies and many editions of a
given literary work. Differences between them in style and size
of script or type, in color of ink, in kind of paper, in number and
layout of pages, in condition, etc., do not matter. All that matters
is what may be called sameness of spelling: exact correspondence
as sequences of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks. Any
sequence—even a forgery of the author's manuscript or of a
given edition—that so corresponds to a correct copy is itself cor¬
rect, and nothing is more the original work than is such a correct
copy. And since whatever is not an original of the work must fail
to meet such an explicit standard of correctness, there can be no
deceptive imitation, no forgery, of that work. To verify the spell¬
ing or to spell correctly is all that is required to identify an
instance of the work or to product a new instance. In effect, the
fact that a literary work is in a definite notation, consisting of
certain signs or characters that are to be combined by concaten¬
ation, provides the means for distinguishing the properties con¬
stitutive of the work from all contingent properties—that is, for
fixing the required features and the limits of permissible varia¬
tion in each. Merely by determining that the copy before us is
spelled correctly we can determine that it meets all requirements
for the work in question. In painting, on the contrary, with no
such alphabet of characters, none of the pictorial properties—
none of the properties the picture has as such—is distinguished
as constitutive; no such feature can be dismissed as contingent,
and no deviation as insignificant. The only way of ascertaining
that the Lucretia before us is genuine is thus to establish the his¬
torical fact that it is the actual object made by Rembrandt.
 NELSON GOODMAN 401

Accordingly, physical identification of the product of the artist's

hand, and consequently the conception of forgery of a particular
work, assume a significance in painting that they do not have in
literature.3
What has been said of literary texts obviously applies also to
musical scores. The alphabet is different; and the characters in a
score, rather than being strung one after the other as in a text,
are disposed in a more complex array. Nevertheless, we have a
limited set of characters and of positions for them; and correct
spelling, in only a slightly expanded sense, is still the sole
requirement for a genuine instance of a work. Any false copy is
wrongly spelled—has somewhere in place of the right character
either another character or an illegible mark that is not a char¬
acter of the notation in question at all.
But what of performances of music? Music is not autographic
in this second stage either, yet a performance by no means con¬
sists of characters from an alphabet. Rather, the constitutive
properties demanded of a performance of the symphony are
those prescribed in the score; and performances that comply with
the score may differ appreciably in such musical features as
tempo, timbre, phrasing, and expressiveness. To determine com¬
pliance requires, indeed, something more than merely knowing
the alphabet; it requires the ability to correlate appropriate
sounds with the visible signs in the score—to recognize, so to
speak, correct pronunciation though without necessarily under¬
standing what is pronounced. The competence required to iden¬
tify or produce sounds called for by a score increases with the
complexity of the composition, but there is nevertheless a theo¬
retically decisive test for compliance; and a performance, what¬
ever its interpretative fidelity and independent merit, has or has
not all the constitutive properties of a given work, and is or is
not strictly a performance of that work, according as it does or
does not pass this test. No historical information concerning the
production of the performance can affect the result. Hence
deception as to the facts of production is irrelevant, and the
notion of a performance that is a forgery of the work is quite
empty.
Yet there are forgeries of performances as there are of manu¬
scripts and editions. What makes a performance an instance of a
given work is not the same as what makes a performance a pre¬
miere, or played by a certain musician or upon a Stradivarius vio¬
lin. Whether a performance has these latter properties is a matter
402 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

of historical fact; and a performance falsely purporting to have

any such property counts as a forgery, not of the musical com¬
position but of a given performance or class of performances.
The comparison between printmaking and music is especially
telling. We have already noted that etching, for example, is like
music in having two stages and in being multiple in its second
stage; but that whereas music is autographic in neither stage,
printmaking is autographic in both. Now the situation with
respect to the etched plate is clearly the same as with respect to
a painting: assurance of genuineness can come only from iden¬
tification of the actual object produced by the artist. But since the
several prints from this plate are all genuine instances of the
work, however much they differ in color and amount of ink,
quality of impression, kind of paper, etc., one might expect here
a full parallel between prints and musical performances. Yet
there can be prints that are forgeries of the Tobit Blind but not
performances that are forgeries of the London Symphony. The dif¬
ference is that in the absence of a notation, not only is there no
test of correctness of spelling for a plate but there is no test of
compliance with a plate for a print. Comparison of a print with
a plate, as of two plates, is no more conclusive than is comparison
of two pictures. Minute discrepancies may always go unnoticed;
and there is no basis for ruling out any of them as inessential.
The only way of ascertaining whether a print is genuine is by
finding out whether it was taken from a certain plate.4 A print
falsely purporting to have been so produced is in the full sense
a forgery of the work.
Here, as earlier, we must be careful not to confuse genuineness
with aesthetic merit. That the distinction between original and
forgery is aesthetically important does not, we have seen, imply
that the original is superior to the forgery. An original painting
may be less rewarding than an inspired copy; a damaged original
may have lost most of its former merit; an impression from a
badly worn plate may be aesthetically much further removed
from an early impression than is a good photographic reproduc¬
tion. Likewise, an incorrect performance, though therefore not
strictly an instance of a given quartet at all, may nevertheless—
either because the changes improve what the composer wrote or
because of sensitive interpretation—be better than a correct per¬
formance.5 Again, several correct performances of about equal
merit may exhibit very different specific aesthetic qualities—
power, delicacy, tautness, stodginess, incoherence, etc. Thus
 NELSON GOODMAN 403

even where the constitutive properties of a work are clearly dis¬

tinguished by means of a notation, they cannot be identified
with the aesthetic properties.
Among other arts, sculpture is autographic; cast sculpture is
comparable to printmaking while carved sculpture is comparable
to painting. Architecture and the drama, on the other hand, are
more nearly comparable to music. Any building that conforms to
the plans and specifications, any performance of the text of a
play in accordance with the stage directions, is as original an
instance of the work as any other. But architecture seems to differ
from music in that testing for compliance of a building with the
specifications requires not that these be pronounced, or tran¬
scribed into sound, but that their application be understood. This
is true also for the stage directions, as contrasted with the dia¬
logue, of a play. Does this make architecture and the drama less
purely allographic arts? Again, an architect's plans seem a good
deal like a painter's sketches; and painting is an autographic art.
On what grounds can we say that in the one case but not the
other a veritable notation is involved? Such questions cannot be
answered until we have carried through some rather painstaking
analysis.
Since an art seems to be allographic just insofar as it is amen¬
able to notation, the case of the dance is especially interesting.
Here we have an art without a traditional notation; and an art
where the ways, and even the possibility, of developing an ade¬
quate notation are still matters of controversy. Is the search for a
notation reasonable in the case of the dance but not in the case
of painting? Or, more generally, why is the use of notation
appropriate in some arts but not in others? Very briefly and
roughly, the answer may be somewhat as follows. Initially, per¬
haps, all arts are autographic. Where the works are transitory, as
in singing and reciting, or require many persons for their pro¬
duction, as in architecture and symphonic music, a notation may
be devised in order to transcend the limitations of time and the
individual. This involves establishing a distinction between the
constitutive and the contingent properties of a work (and in the
case of literature, texts have even supplanted oral performances
as the primary aesthetic objects). Of course, the notation does not
dictate the distinction arbitrarily, but must follow generally—
even though it may amend—lines antecedently drawn by the
informal classification of performances into works and by prac¬
tical decisions as to what is prescribed and what is optional.
404 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

Amenability to notation depends upon a precedent practice that

develops only if works of the art in question are commonly
either ephemeral or not producible by one person. The dance,
like the drama and symphonic and choral music, qualifies on
both scores, while painting qualifies on neither.
The general answer to our somewhat slippery second problem
of authenticity can be summarized in a few words. A forgery of
a work of art is an object falsely purporting to have the history
of production requisite for the (or an) original of the work.
Where there is a theoretically decisive test for determining that
an object has all the constitutive properties of the work in ques¬
tion without determining how or by whom the object was pro¬
duced, there is no requisite history of production and hence no
forgery of any given work. Such a test is provided by a suitable
notational system with an articulate set of characters and of rel¬
ative positions for them. For texts, scores, and perhaps plans, the
test is correctness of spelling in the notation; for buildings and
performances, the test is compliance with what is correctly
spelled. Authority for a notation must be found in an antecedent
classification of objects or events into works that cuts across, or
admits of a legitimate projection that cuts across, classification by
history of production; but definitive identification of works,
fully freed from history of production, is achieved only when a
notation is established. The allographs art has won its emanci¬
pation not by proclamation but by notation.

3. The possibility of a notation for the dance was one of the

initial questions that led to our sthdy of notational systems.
Because the dance is visual like painting, which has no notation,
and yet transient and temporal like music, which has a highly
developed standard notation, the answer is not altogether
obvious; and ill-grounded negatives and irresponsible affirma¬
tives have been put forth about equally often.
The ill-grounded negatives rest on the argument that the
dance, as a visual and mobile art involving the infinitely subtle
and varied expressions and three-dimensional motions of one or
more highly complex organisms, is far too complicated to be cap¬
tured by any notation. But, of course, a score need not capture all
the subtlety and complexity of a performance. That would be
hopeless even in the comparatively simpler art of music, and
would always be pointless. The function of a score is to specify
the essential properties a performance must have to belong to the
 NELSON GOODMAN 405

work; the stipulations are only of certain aspects and only within
certain degrees. All other variations are permitted; and the dif¬
ferences among performances of the same work, even in music,
are enormous.
The irresponsible affirmative answers consist of pointing out
that a notation can be devised for almost anything. This, of
course, is irrelevant. The significant issue is whether in terms of
notational language we can provide real definitions that will
identify a dance in its several performances, independently of
any particular history of production.
For such real definitions to be possible there must, as we have
seen, be an antecedent classification of performances into works
that is similarly independent of history of production. This clas¬
sification need not be neat or complete but must serve as a foil,
a scaffolding, a springboard, for the development of a full and
systematic classification. That the requisite antecedent classifica¬
tion exists for the dance seems clear. Prior to any notation, we
make reasonably consistent judgments as to whether perfor¬
mances by different people are instances of the same dance. No
theoretical barrier stands in the way of developing a suitable
notational system.
Practical feasibility is another matter, not directly in question
here. The antecedent classification is so rough and tentative that
the decisions to be made are many, intricate, and consequential.
And inadvertent violation of one of the syntactic or semantic
requirements can easily result in a non-notational language or a
system that is no language at all. Bold and intelligent systema¬
tization is called for, along with a good deal of care.
Among notations that have been proposed for the dance, the
one called Labanotation6 after the inventor, Rudolf Laban, seems
deservedly to have gained most recognition. An impressive
scheme of analysis and description, it refutes the common belief
that continuous complex motion is too recalcitrant a subject-mat¬
ter for notational articulation, and discredits the dogma that suc¬
cessful systematic description depends in general upon some
inherent amenability—some native structural neatness—in what
is described. Indeed, the development of Laban's language offers
us an elaborate and intriguing example of the process that has
come to be called "concept formation".
How far, though, does the system meet the theoretical require¬
ments for a notational language? I can answer only tentatively,
from an inadequate knowledge of the system. That the characters
406 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

are syntactically disjoint seems clear. * Satisfaction of the require¬

ments of finite differentiation is less easily ascertained; but Laban
avoids a good many pitfalls here. For example, one naturally
looks for a violation in the directional indications, since if every
different angle of a line stands for a different direction, neither
the syntactic nor the semantic requirement of differentiation is
fulfilled. But in Labanotation, direction of facing is indicated by
a "direction pin" in any of eight positions disposed at equal
intervals around the full horizontal circle (Figure 1); and a direc¬
tion halfway between any two proximate directions among these
eight is indicated by combining the signs for the two (e.g., as in
Figure 2).

Fig- 1 Fig. 2

This device admits of no further iteration to indicate directions

between two proximate directions among the sixteen. Elsewhere
in the system, differentiation is often achieved just as decisively
as here. One is alerted for trouble by such a statement as: "The
relative length of the direction symbol shows its time value"; but
here, as in music, time is divided into beats, and the least differ¬
ence in duration provided for in the language is presumably the
same as in standard musical notation.7

*The reader need not be fully conversant with the several technical terms
occurring in these paragraphs. Briefly, features of a symbol system apart from
its interpretation are syntactic; features dependent upon interpretation of the
system are semantic. An alphabet is normally 'syntactically disjoint and differ¬
entiated that is consists of distinct characters; a column of mercury on the
other hand does not thus divide into distinct characters. The numbers on the
dial of a pill counter are 'semantically disjoint and differentiated' as well, while
an ungraduated thermometer is not. Language—e.g., English—is syntactically
but not semantically 'disjoint and differentiated'; its words are made up of let¬
ters from the alphabet but there is no like segregation of its field of application.
For further explanation, see Languages of Art, chapter 4.
 NELSON GOODMAN 407

Like standard musical notation, Labanotation provides for

more and less specific scoring, and so violates the condition of
semantic disjointness. The ad lib signs and the explicit license to
describe in detail or leave open certain aspects of a movement8
have much the same effect as do the free-cadenza and figured-
bass notations in music. The result is that identity of a work will
not be preserved in every chain of alternating steps between
scores and performances. The flexibility offered may be wel¬
comed by the choreographer or composer, and does not affect
score-to-performance steps; but it leaves the performance-to-
score steps insufficiently determined until the specificity of the
scoring is stipulated. Labanotation as a whole is a discursive lan¬
guage comprising several notational subsystems; and in some
cases, a class of performances may be a work relative to one but
not another of these notational systems.
So far, I have been considering only the basic vocabulary.
Some of the other symbolism introduced cannot be embraced in
any notational system. A prime example is the use of words or
pictures to indicate physical objects involved in the dance.9 If
object-words in general are admitted, then semantic disjointness
and differentiation are sacrificed and we have a discursive lan¬
guage. If object-sketches in general are admitted, then syntactic
differentiation goes by the board, too, and we do not even have
a language. One remedy would be to restrict the admitted words
or pictures very severely in appropriate ways. Another, sug¬
gested earlier for tempo-words in music and stage directions in
the drama, would be to treat these characters not as integral parts
of a score at all but as supplementary and nondefinitive.
Whether this is fitting depends upon whether (as seems fair
enough) a performance employing different objects or even none
is an instance of the same dance, just as a performance of Hamlet
in modern dress and without scenery or accessories is an instance
of the same play.
All in all, Labanotation passes the theoretical tests very well—
about as well as does ordinary musical notation, and perhaps as
well as is compatible with practicality. I am not saying that we
have here a good or effective notational system for the dance,
that the decisions embodied in it are sound or happy or consis¬
tent. Such an appraisal by a layman would be impertinent and
worthless. By extensive use, the language may be found unsat¬
isfactory or become traditional enough to acquire authority. If
this or another language becomes standard enough, its under¬
lying analysis of movement into factors and particles will pre-
408 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

vail; arbitrary decisions will blossom into absolute truth, and

expedient units for discourse ripen into the ultimate components
of reality—awaiting revolution.
Labap conceived his system as a notation not merely for dance
but for human movement in general, and went on to develop
and supplement the system as a means for analyzing and classi¬
fying all human physical activities. The need for some such sys¬
tem is especially apparent, for example, in industrial engineer¬
ing and in psychological experimentation. Whether the
experimenter or the subject repeats his behavior on a second
occasion depends upon the criteria of identity of behavior that
are applied; and the problem of formulating such criteria is the
problem of developing a notational system. As for nonhuman
movement, a zoologist has recently proposed an entertaining
and illuminating method of codifying the various gaits of.
horses.10
(1968)

Notes
'There may indeed be forgeries of performances. Such forgeries are
performances that purport to be by a certain musician, etc; but these, if
in accordance with the score, are nevertheless genuine instances of the
work. And what concerns me here is a distinction among the arts that
depends upon whether there can be forgeries of works, not upon
whether there can be forgeries of instances of works. See further what
is said in section 2 concerning forgeries of editions of literary works and
of musical performances.
2This is to be taken as a preliminary version of a difference we must
seek to formulate more precisely. Much of what follows in this chapter
has likewise the character of an exploratory introduction to matters call¬
ing for fuller and more detailed inquiry in later chapters.
3Such identification does not guarantee that the object possesses the
pictorial properties it had originally. Rather, reliance on physical or his¬
torical identification is transcended only where we have means of ascer¬
taining that the requisite properties are present.
4To be original a print must be from a certain plate but need not be
printed by the artist. Furthermore, in the case of a woodcut, the artist
sometimes only draws upon the block, leaving the cutting to someone
else—Holbein's blocks, for example, were usually cut by Lutzelberger.
Authenticity in an autographic art always depends upon the object's
having the requisite, sometimes rather complicated, history of produc¬
tion; but that history does not always include ultimate execution by the
original artist.
 NELSON GOODMAN 409

5Of course, I am not saying that a correct(ly spelled) performance is

correct in any of a number of other usual senses. Nevertheless, the com¬
poser or musician is likely to protest indignantly at refusal to accept a
performance with a few wrong notes as an instance of a work; and he
surely has ordinary usage on his side. But ordinary usage here points
the way to disaster for theory.
6Laban was working on the matter in Vienna as early as the 1920's.
He published Choreographic (Jena, Eugen Diederichs, 1926); Effort, with
F. C. Lawrence (London, MacDonald & Evans, Ltd., 1947); and Principles
of Dance and Movement Notation (London, MacDonald & Evans, Ltd.,
1956). A convenient and well-illustrated exposition by Ann Hutchinson
is available in a paperback book, Labanotation (Norfolk, Conn., New
Directions, 1961), which is cited in the next three footnotes. One of the
competing systems has been proposed by Rudolf and Joan Benesh in An
Introduction to Dance Notation (London, Adam & Charles Black, Ltd.,
1956). I leave it as an exercise for the reader to compare the Laban and
Benesh systems in the light of the principles set forth in the present
book.
A very impressive system of notation for dance and movement in
general has been developed by Noa Eshkol and Abraham Wachsman at
the Research Center for Movement Notation in Tel Aviv. This system
seems to offer important advantages, and deserves close study. It is set
forth in Movement Notations (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1958) and
in a number of other publications. [I was not familiar with this system
when I wrote Languages of Art.]
7Or less. The least duration indicated by any of the characters actually
presented or mentioned in Labanotation (p. 52) is one-sixteenth of a beat,
probably because at even the slowest normal tempo, that is the shortest
time in which a dancer can be expected to execute a distinct and recog¬
nizable unit of movement. But so long as a limit is set, just where does
not matter.
8For use of the ad lib signs, see Labanotation, pp. 88, 187. On permitted
variance in specificity of scoring, see e.g., pp. 59, 262. In such passages
we find, I think, the significance of the introductory statement: "Laban¬
otation allows for any degree of specificity" (p. 6). Read as meaning that
the system allows for specification to within any given degree of preci¬
sion whatsoever, this statement would imply lack of differentiation.
Incidentally, Labanotation seems to be redundant, although whether
alternative symbols are actually coextensive is not always clear from the
exposition (e.g., see p. 144). We have seen that coextensive characters in
music sometimes differ in meaning through entering into parallel com¬
pounds that differ in extension; so far I have not discovered any ana¬
logue of this in Labanotation.
9Labanotation, pp. 179-81.
10See Milton Hildebrand, "Symmetrical Gaits of Horses," Science, vol.
150 (1965), pp. 701-78.
410 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

Eshkol and Wachsman (see note 6 above) have applied their system
of notation to animal movement in The Golden Jackal (Movement Nota¬
tion Society, Holon, Israel).

JACK ANDERSON
IDEALISTS, MATERIALISTS,
AND THE THIRTY-TWO
FOUETTES

"If in the Black Swan pas de deux the ballerina cannot ade¬
quately perform all thirty-two fouettes, may she replace them
with other brilliant steps?"
Balletgoers occasionally ponder this question after perfor¬
mances and, for practical reasons, dancers must ponder it, too. A
scholarly friend once observed that more than practicality is
involved here, for behind the question lies the whole problem
of the identity of a dance.
Like a poem, a dance is something everyone can recognize, but
no one can define. The definitions advanced often seem com¬
monplace, even banal: thus, almost everyone would agree that a
dance is an art work involving movement through space and
time. From all the possible movements of which persons are
capable, someone selects the limited number of movements
which comprise a particular dance. But having summarized the
obvious, difficulties still arise, since one can regard the move¬
ments in any dance in two distinct—and, at their extremes,
nearly irreconcilable—ways. For convenience, I shall call these
positions the Idealist and the Materialist, and I use the terms
solely in the sense I define here, without reference to other
meanings they may possess in philosophy or theology.
Idealist dancegoers regard a dance as the incarnation in move¬
ment of ideas or effects; typically, Idealists may not mind that in
different productions of what is ostensibly the same ballet steps
are changed, provided that the alterations express the same idea.
 JACK ANDERSON 411

produce the same effect, or illumine the work's central concept.

The Materialist, in contrast, regards a dance as an assemblage of
specific steps (or, in the case of improvisatory or indeterminate
pieces, specific instructions for deliberately unforeseeable steps)
from which ideas or effects may be derived. Therefore the Mate¬
rialist can maintain that it is possible for two productions of the
same work to employ identical steps and yet be different in
effect—a familiar example being the way in which some baller¬
inas offer a birdlike Odette, while others emphasize her human¬
ity. To cite a more recent example, there is Emilia in Limon's
"The Moor's Pavane." In conversation, Pauline Koner, the role's
creator, said that she deplores those dancers who stress what one
critic admiringly calls Emilia's "evil abandon," for both she and
Limon wanted Emilia to be a warm-hearted confidante. But a
Materialist spectator might countenance such an interpretation,
provided that steps remain unaltered, for the interpretation
would suggest that the steps are capable of many emotional
colorations, just as in the theater Hamlets have ranged from pale
neurasthenics to stalwart men of action.
In the past, choreographers and balletmasters were frequently
Idealists in practice, staging for local companies their own ver¬
sions of ballets which other choreographers successfully
mounted elsewhere. Necessity may have been partly responsi¬
ble: before the age of air travel, choreographers could not whiz
from city to city. Nor did there exist any compact record of a
ballet comparable to a score or a playscript. So Bournonville
staged his own "La Sylphide" in Copenhagen, while early
"Giselle"s were produced in Italy and America which apparently
did not employ the Paris choreography.
However, following the rise of the Diaghilev Ballet and mod¬
ern dance came emphasis upon the Materialist position. A dance
was increasingly regarded as a sequence of specific steps chosen
by a specific choreographer. Fokine might tinker with his steps
from season to season, modernist exponents of "self-expression"
might alter their choreography nightly, but all would rage if
they caught someone else trying to do his unauthorized version
of "their" dances. Conscientious balletmasters started sorting out
their memories with the result that, despite emendations, several
older works came to be viewed in Materialist terms—among
them the Bournonville "La Sylphide," the Coralli-Perrot-Petipa
"Giselle," the Ivanov-Petipa "Swan Lake," and the Petipa "The
Sleeping Beauty." Interest developed in notation—and in the
copyright laws.
412 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

Nevertheless, Idealism again flourishes. As before, expediency

may be partly responsible. There exist many fine companies and
star performers. What we lack are fine choreographers. We do,
though, possess adroit second-rank choreographers, while sev¬
eral top stars also interest themselves in stage production. Con¬
sequently, companies find it convenient to produce ballets
derived from existing sources which may attract audiences
because of the familiarity of their theme or score and which con¬
tain big leading roles which can be performed by the local stars
and can also be learned by any guest stars who come to town.
While the results may be pleasant, the practice may conceivably
threaten the integrity of choreographic works.
Before indulging in dire speculations it might be useful to
examine how works exist in repertoires. Most contemporary bal¬
lets are regarded in Materialist terms. Who would think of doing
"his own" version of, say, "Undertow" or "Ballet Imperial"?
Tudor and Balanchine themselves may constantly fuss with their
ballets: Tudor may assign one ballerina a double role in "Under¬
tow," while Balanchine may redo the mime and scrap the decor
and even the very title of "Ballet Imperial." But, as the authors
of the works, their changes are comparable to a poet's revisions.
No one else, though, would dream of touching these ballets.

In total contrast are works which exist not as carefully pre¬

served choreography, but as scenarios or generalized production
notions. The most familiar example of this sort of ballet is "La
Fille Mai Gardee." Dauberval's choreography was forgotten long
ago. What survives is the idea of a certain kind of ballet in which
certain kinds of things happen and, in our time, the Ashton, Bal-
achova, and Mordkin-Nijinska-Romanoff versions have fleshed
out that idea in different ways. Yet even when the accompanying
music varies, the results are identifiable as "Fille."
More common are works which exist because of an idea which
is coupled with a musical score, particularly when no single
treatment of these ballets has managed to supersede previous
versions (as the Ivanov-Petipa "Swan Lake" superseded Reisin-
ger and Hansen) or to intimidate other choreographers from
attempting their own versions. Examples include "Sylvia,"
"Daphnis and Chloe," "The Rite of Spring," "Romeo and Juliet,"
"Cinderella," "The Miraculous Mandarin," "Don Juan," and
"The Prince of the Pagodas." Related to this type of production
are hypothetical reconstructions of older ballets (such as any¬
one's "Pas de Quatre" and the Gsovsky and Lacotte restorations
 JACK ANDERSON 413

of Taglioni's "La Sylphide"), as well as "Coppelia" and "The

Nutcracker," for which, in effect, no standard choreography now
exists, although it should be theoretically possible to find people
who could produce older versions of both.
Significantly, most examples of Idealist principles in dance are
narrative or thematic, since these works can be summarized in
verbal concepts which any choreographer can ponder. Yet, even
though abstract dance is almost inevitably the product of Mate¬
rialist thinking, there have been instances of an Idealist
approach to abstraction: after the success of Balanchine's "Agon"
several European choreographers did their own "Agon"s, using
Stravinsky's music and the general concept of a contest, and cer¬
tain basic categories of abstraction seem to be dominant from sea¬
son to season. Presently, the ballet of dreamy-lovers-and-Roman-
tic-music has largely replaced the neat-geometrics-to-Baroque-
concerti which flourished a few seasons back.
Judging from European critics and the few works shown here,
it would seem that among current choreographers John Neu-
meier is emphatically Idealist. His ballets often employ existing
scenarios, or Neumeier will take a familiar scenario and twist it
to emphasize fresh, but thematically related, ideas, as when
(according to reports) in his "Daphnis and Chloe" schoolchil¬
dren visit the archaeological site where the events of the legend
may have occurred and then become involved in a reenactment
of the legend. Neumeier's speculations sometimes presuppose
considerable audience sophistication. His "Baiser de la Fee" vir¬
tually assumes familiarity with the sensibilities of Tchaikovsky
and H.C. Andersen, the scenario of Balanchine's "Baiser," and
the characteristics of Balanchine's choreographic style. It is
refreshing when a choreographer assumes that an audience is
intelligent. But what we have seen of Neumeier's works are
more interesting for their ideological superstructure than for
their actual choreography.
Whatever one thinks of them, their existence poses no threat.
But Idealist principles can menace works which have heretofore
occupied an honored place in a repertoire. The classics—first
"Swan Lake" and "The Sleeping Beauty," and now "Giselle"—
are gradually eroding. The influence of Soviet ballet may be
partly responsible, for the Russians since Gorsky have stressed
ideas for dancing and remain fond of separating the functions of
scenarist and choreographer. Such modern ballets as "Spartacus"
and "The Stone Flower" have been repeatedly rechoreographed,
each time by someone who tries to reveal more clearly than his
414 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

predecessors the essence of the scenario and score. Similarly, the

Soviets use the classics as though they were the dance equiva¬
lents of Greek myths, the stories of "Swan Lake" and "The Sleep¬
ing Beauty" serving each new choreographer in the same way
that the Electra myth has served playwrights from Aeschylus to
O'Neill.
A few non-Soviet modern ballets have also been so regarded.
Some years ago when Festival Ballet revived Fokine's "Scheher¬
azade" with moderate success, a critic wrote that he thought
greater success might have been possible if the ballet had been
rechoreographed, the critic apparently considering "Schehera¬
zade" not as steps by Fokine, but as an idea for a ballet. For sev¬
eral years the Royal Danish Ballet tried to get Ashton to rehearse
his "Romeo and Juliet." When attempts failed, the company this
season presented a totally new "Romeo" by Neumeier. My point
has nothing to do with the strengths or weaknesses of Neu-
meier's ballet (several Danish critics admire it): what does fasci¬
nate me here is that the company seems to treat "Romeo and
Juliet" not as a specific ballet by Ashton (or by Neumeier either,
for that matter), but as an idea for a certain kind of ballet (by any
appropriate choreographer) which the Danes ought to produce.

Idealists often accuse Materialists of pedantry for their concern

with the establishment of a choreographic text. They like to
remind Materialists that choreographers change their ballets and
that many old ballets are works by several choreographers (or by
a choreographer and his assistants), and they will argue that
since certain variations were designed to feature the specialties
of particular dancers, it should therefore be permissible for other
dancers to introduce their own specialties into these passages.
Idealists are correct in claiming that in watching dance we do
not always notice steps as detachable entities. As a dancegoer, I
confess that I cannot supply the technical names for most of the
steps I see, and I can describe few passages of choreography from
memory in elaborate detail. Nor can I recall many passages from
Shakespeare by memory. But if substantial changes were made
during a performance of Shakespeare's language or someone's
choreography, I might feel uneasy. For the changes would sug¬
gest that, for whatever reason, a particular work was being
remade.
Several Idealist arguments appear less weighty when one
examines how the other arts deal with comparable issues. Cer¬
tain poets have constantly rewritten poems, and their revisions
 JACK ANDERSON 415

are often included by publishers in variorum editions. Choreog¬

raphers have likewise changed their dances; frequently, these
changes are small, but they can also be extensive. Which version
is the "true" version? Since all are by the same choreographer,
they might all be called "true." A greater problem is that of
determining which is "best," especially since dance companies
(and theatrical and musical organizations) cannot publish alter¬
nate readings in a variorum. If the choreographer is also the com¬
pany director, he will probably declare that, despite possible pro¬
tests to the contrary, his latest version is best. But if the
choreographer is not in charge of the company—or, more dras¬
tically, if he happens to be dead—then the artistic director, like
a scholar studying quartos and folios, must pick and choose
among alternates.
That some variations were designed to display their original
performers should not deter anyone else from preserving their
steps. Artists are inevitably inspired, or limited, by the inter¬
preters they have at hand and tailor their works accordingly.
Some passages in Shakespeare are probably phrased as they are
because of Burbage's abilities, while the operatic repertoire con¬
tains several roles for decidedly odd voices: in "The Magic Flute"
alone are such curiosities as the Queen of the Night and Sarastro.
But if the creative artist happens to be talented, he does more
than devise stunts: from the idiosyncrasies of his performers he
invents steps which are both appropriate and beautiful. It is,
after all, Odile, not Odette, who does the fouettes. Therefore the
choreography's very peculiarities may constitute a genuine artis¬
tic challenge to succeeding interpreters.
As for multiple authorship, only obdurate upholders of the
purist view that an art work is necessarily the product of a single
genius should find it troublesome that ballets may have passages
by several choreographers. Many old master paintings contain
the brushstrokes of both the master and his students, and suc¬
cessful theatrical collaborations extend from Beaumont and
Fletcher to Kaufman and Hart.
However, the performing arts must resolve problems related
to a particular kind of multiple authorship. During some, but by
no means all, past periods, performers could add ornaments to
the music they played or the choreography they danced. Should
performers today add comparable ornaments? If so, how many?
And of what kind? In dealing with these questions one should
remember that the personal touches were only ornaments: dec¬
orations added to an existing structure, not a substitution for that
416 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

structure—an extra trill in the music or turn in the choreog¬

raphy, but no wholesale rewriting. The story is told of the
soprano who auditioned for Rossini by singing a heavily orna¬
mented version of one of his own arias. "Very nice," the com¬
poser remarked. "Who wrote it?" Rossini later explained that,
while he expected his music to be embroidered, he did not want
it distorted out of recognition.
At least, since that soprano was Rossini's contemporary, her
ornamentations probably contained no gross anachronisms.
Adding ornaments becomes more difficult today when one has
to make sure that they harmonize with the original. Among the
peculiarities of Cranko's "Swan Lake" was the fact that the new
choreography did not always blend with the bits retained from
Ivanov-Petipa. To avoid comparable discrepancies, musicians
study tables of ornamentation and sometimes, instead of invent¬
ing their own ornaments or cadenzas, play the conjectural ones
suggested by scholars. Therefore, perhaps dancers today ought
to be chary about embroidering steps, even where dancers of an
earlier generation might have embroidered freely.

A related problem of authorship is peculiar to dance. Since

dances are passed down by memory and memories are faulty,
gaps exist in some ballets which have to be filled. Thus parts of
our Bournonville stagings derive from Hans Beck and Harald
Lander. If Beck and Lander, why not Nureyev or MacMillan?
The question admits of no conclusive reply, but several factors
may be taken into account. Obviously, if gaps exist, they must be
filled—preferably with style and taste. In some circumstances,
totally new dances may be added to expand a ballet, but they
should not displace old choreography. The Royal Ballet was rep¬
rehensible when it supplanted Petipa's "Swan Lake" pas de trois
with an Ashton pas de quatre (attractive though it was); it is no
longer reprehensible now that it dances both divertissements.
Yet even when old choreography is retained, too many inter¬
polations may destroy the character of a work; and the more time
that elapses between the date of the original and the date of the
interpolations, the greater danger there is of this occurring, since
gaps in time also imply gaps in sensibility. Take Bournonville's
"La Sylphide," for example. Modern producers wonder whether
there should be a solo for Effie. Adding one probably does no
mischief, since it can never take more than a few minutes. But
what about a full-scale duet for James and the Sylph? A Dance
 JACK ANDERSON 417

Magazine critic writes that "La Sylphide" is "unsatisfactory"

because it lacks "a proper pas de deux." But is what would be
proper for Petipa or Balanchine also proper for Bournonville?
The very lack—indeed, the impossibility—of physical contact
between the principals is part of Bournonville's conception and
contributes to the individuality of his ballet. To add a pas de
deux might blunt that individuality: when Lander added such a
duet for his Ballet Theatre production, some viewers thought the
results, though tasteful, made the ballet ponderous. In the same
way, despite the arguments that heroes in classical ballets should
get chances to dance, the melancholy solos which recently have
been devised for the princes in the Tchaikovsky classics not only
look disquietingly alike, they usually look uninteresting. Curi¬
ously, cutting scenes entirely often produces less artistic trouble
than replacing old choreography with new or adding extra cho¬
reography to an existing scene: almost nobody pines for the res¬
toration of "Giselle"'s happy ending, while the supposedly com¬
plete Russian "La Bayadere" lacks the fifth act which Petipa
originally choreographed.
Staging ballets might be less vexing if dance possessed a uni¬
versally accepted system of notation. Yet there are dancegoers
who may secretly rejoice that such a system does not exist. These
fans insist that, rather than consisting of steps which may pro¬
duce effects, a dance consists primarily of effects embodied in
steps. Therefore steps may be altered if comparable effects are
gained. According to this theory, one might contend that while
Camargo, in her time, astounded audiences with entrechat
quatre, any revival of a Camargo ballet (granting, for purposes
of argument, the possibility of such a thing) should contain not
entrechat quatre, which no longer astounds, but some other
flashy step. This would then be called preserving the ballet's
spirit, if not its letter.
But would it be? For who today can view the eighteenth cen¬
tury so unaffected by the artistic and social upheavals which
have transpired since then that he can create choreography
which would in all ways be equivalent to genuine choreography
of the period? And just what shall our modern Carmago do, if
not entrechat quatre? Thirty-two fouettes, perhaps? An obvious
anachronism! Yet what step would not be? However, in our
Camargo revival, if all the steps were preserved as they existed
in her time, then the entrechat quatre—simply for being unlike
the others—might still possess theatrical potency of a kind.
418 LANGUAGE, NOTATION, AND IDENTITY

It is dangerous to believe that we know for sure what the "rear'

effects of a dance are supposed to be, for the kinds of effects we
treasure may be partially determined by the taste of our age. Not
long ago, sincere commentators argued that because Bach was
hampered by the provincial musical forces he had at hand, the
best way to achieve the true effects of the Bach cantatas was to
utilize symphony orchestras and huge mixed choirs. Today, the
vogue is for chamber orchestras, ancient instruments, and small
all-male choirs, as we now consider sweet radiance more impor¬
tant than massive solemnity. Who knows what we shall feel a
decade hence?
Similarly, in dance we have at different times prized different
effects. At one time Odette's mimed account of her tribulations
was dropped from the second act of "Swan Lake," perhaps
because producers considered it stilted. Now it is back, possibly
because the sheer multiplicity of Odette's gestures (even if one
cannot literally "read" them all) conveys a sense of dramatic
urgency. To achieve another effect, Benno no longer participates
in the "Swan Lake" adagio. This traditional bit was changed only
recently—but the change is well-nigh universal. Presumably the
reason for dropping Benno is that it seems odd for a third person
to intrude upon a love scene; besides, Benno was only put there
in the first place to assist the aging Pavel Gerdt in handling the
ballerina. Yet Ivanov, being a genius, made Benno's presence
part of the beauty of that scene, for Odette was then able to
swoon in a more ecstatic manner than she has been able to do
now that a single man must hold her, let her go, and then also
catch her.
Perhaps, someday, someone will want to rehabilitate Benno.
(He has already turned up in the Ballets Trockadero de Monte
Carlo travestie production.) But will people remember the cho¬
reography? At least, despite vagaries of taste and textual corrup¬
tions, scores exist for Bach. Still, some Idealists would regret the
development of dance notation, since they fear that notation
might stunt the organic growth of dance by making dance
become cut and dried and, finally, mummified.
Arid choreography is always deplorable, but notation need not
bring it about. Notation might even encourage individuality.
With the standard repertoire notated, producers could feel free
to stage that traditional choreography as they pleased—setting
"Swan Lake," for instance, in any historical period or in outer
space—for the Materialist approach to production implies that at
various times the same choreography can be used to produce
 JACK ANDERSON 419

quite different effects, just as Shakespeare's words have been sub¬

jected to Christian, Freudian, Marxist, and existentialist interpre¬
tations. Moreover, with standard choreography notated, a cho¬
reographer might be emboldened to create a totally new and
different ballet based upon a classic story, just as a playwright
might reinterpret a classic myth. One trouble with even our most
radical revisions of the classics is that they seldom are radical
enough. Thus every "Swan Lake" contains a semblance of Iva¬
nov's second act as an obeisance to tradition. But with Ivanov
notated, an innovator could choreograph a "Swan Lake" which
in no way resembled Ivanov stylistically, just as O'Neill's con¬
ception of Electra is stylistically different from that of Sophocles.
Our present willingness to tolerate extensive changes in extant
works may be a hangover from the old attitude that dance is not
really an important art—that, finally, it does not matter what is
danced, provided the results are diverting. Yet in our century
dance has gained enormous artistic significance, and so what is
danced surely matters as much as how it is danced. If no two
productions of any work in the performing arts can ever be
exactly the same, the work itself should possess some sort of solid
identity and integrity.
Until the time when dance acquires a sense of its own identity,
we are left with our original question about the Black Swan: To
fouette or not to fouette?
Idealists will not hesitate to permit the ballerina to substitute
steps, while Materialists would caution against the substitution.
Conceivably, the ballerina, reluctant to look less than dazzling,
might go ahead and change the steps anyway. Even so, her artis¬
tic conscience ought to be reminding her that she still remains
at least thirty-two fouettes short of perfection.
(1975)
,

'

M
 VI
Dance Criticism

The word "criticism" is commonly applied to many different

sorts of writing about the arts. Some of this writing is primarily
theoretical and some primarily historical. But in the context of
this chapter, we shall define criticism as writing that emphasizes
the description, interpretation, and evaluation of particular
works of art—which is not to imply that the theoretician and the
historian won't also refer to particular works of art, but they do
so for significantly different reasons.
The theoretician's primary task is to formulate underlying
principles, general rules that apply to broad categories of aes¬
thetic experience. Individual works of art may well prove indis¬
pensable to the theoretician, but he will employ them chiefly to
illustrate and test these general principles. The historian may
focus more directly than the theoretician on particular works of
art, but his chief objective will be to reconstruct the work in its
original historical context, evaluating it according to the prevail¬
ing standards of its own period, rather than the historian's per¬
sonal standards or those that obtain during his lifetime. The
critic, by contrast, will often be called upon to evaluate older
works according to his personal standards which originate in the
present.
By distinguishing criticism from theory and history in this
way, we do not mean to imply that criticism can (or should) ever

421
422 DANCE CRITICISM

be wholly divorced from the concerns of history or theory. The

critic who writes about a revival of "Giselle" without any knowl¬
edge of the historical conventions that inform the ballet is at an
obvious disadvantage. (The suggestion that the critic should
approach every work of art as "innocently" as possible is very
difficult to defend.)
Similarly, if a critic intends to use words such as "represent,"
"express," or "symbolize" in a responsible manner, he should (at
least ideally) be fully aware of the theoretical issues they raise
and the questions they beg. Indeed, most of the "abstract" issues
raised in other sections of this book (questions about whether or
not the dance medium is defined by some essential limitation,
the criteria used for assigning individual dances to genres, the
difficulties of deciding whether or not a reconstruction of an
older work constitutes an authentic instance of that work)—
these and countless other theoretical issues have immediate,
practical consequences for the working critic. But the critic will
raise these issues for the purpose of illuminating particular
works of art, rather than as ends-in-themselveg.
Of course, the differences in method and philosophy that dis¬
tinguish individual critics from one another are just as signifi¬
cant (and numerous) as the differences that distinguish critics
from historians and theoreticians. In their classic study Theory of
Literature, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren distinguish between
"intrinsic" and "extrinsic" criticism. Intrinsic critics (most prom¬
inently, the so-called "new critics" who dominated literary scholar¬
ship in this country during the 1940's and 50's) sought to con¬
centrate the critic's attention on the formal properties of the art
object itself rather than on the life of its creator or the subjective
responses of its perceiver.
By concentrating on what they took to be the work itself (the
actual words of the text) rather than on the historical context in
which it was created or the "intentions" of its creator, the new
critics sought to ensure that the work retained its aesthetic auton¬
omy, and that it not become merely a tool for illuminating the
private life of the artist or the social history of his era. Extrinsic
critics, by contrast, argue that information about the work's
sources, the historical conventions it utilizes, or the intentions of
its creator do not necessarily distract attention from the aesthetic
properties of the work. Quite the contrary: knowledge of this
sort is often essential to an adequate understanding of the art
object.
 DANCE CRITICISM 423

Critics also differ according to the relative degree of emphasis

they assign to description, interpretation, and value judgment.
Some critics strenuously resist the temptation to "rank" works of
art, believing that such exercises amount to little more than sub¬
jective expressions of taste and that preferences of this sort are
ultimately beyond dispute ("de gustibus non est disputandum").
Northrop Frye has written derisively of "the literary chit-chat
which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an
imaginary stock market." But many critics argue that judgments
of value are unavoidable and that they constitute the ultimate
responsibility of the critic. (The English word "criticism" is, after
all, derived from the Greek word krinein which means "to
judge.") Evaluation, such critics argue, is not a hopelessly subjec¬
tive enterprise. Hierarchies can be erected in a spirit of "disin¬
terestedness" that transcends purely private preferences. Mat¬
thew Arnold, for example, defined criticism as "the disinterested
endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and
thought in the world."
Critics often differ widely in their approach to interpretation
as well. Some critics conceive of their task as a form of "specu¬
lative play" and encourage highly personal, sometimes willfully
extravagant "readings" of works, provided that these readings
are not at odds with the empirical properties of the art object.
Others approach interpretation by way of a hermeneutical sys¬
tem (the Marxist, the Freudian). But those who wish to keep the
critic's attention focused more squarely on the "objective" prop¬
erties of the work, will argue, as did T. S. Eliot, that "interpre¬
tation ... is only legitimate when it is not interpretation at all,
but merely putting the reader in possession of facts which he
would otherwise have missed."
The function of criticism also varies widely depending on the
publication (and public) the critic writes for. Some people insist
on a distinction between criticism and reviewing. Walter Kerr,
for example, has argued that the reviewer writes for an audience
that has not yet seen the work under discussion, whereas the
critic addresses a more specialized audience already familiar
with the work. The reviewer thereby functions to a greater
extent than the critic as a "consumer guide"; his primary respon¬
sibility is to describe the work in question and to offer an opin¬
ion of its worth. The critic, because he is less burdened by the
purely "journalistic" responsibilities of the marketplace, is freer
to interpret the work and to discuss the issues that it raises.
424 DANCE CRITICISM

These distinctions—between reviewers and critics, between

intrinsic and extrinsic approaches to criticism, between critics
who interpret works in unabashedly subjective ways and those
who don't—apply as much to dance criticism as to the criticism
of any other art. But there is no denying the fact that dance crit¬
icism is younger and less diversified than the criticism of most
of the other arts. Certainly, the student of twentieth-century
dance criticism is not confronted with anything even vaguely
comparable to the rather bewildering array of "schools"—Freud¬
ian, Marxist, Mythic, Formalist—that characterize the criticism of
an art such as literature (and dance criticism is virtually
untouched by more recent critical methodologies in the other
arts based on interpretive strategies imported from linguistics,
structuralism, and semiology).
Thus, compared with the labyrinthine complexities of recent
literary or art criticism, the existing body of dance criticism
appears either embarrassingly naive or refreshingly straightfor¬
ward. These differences are not difficult to account for. Unlike
painting, literature, and sculpture, dances do not "sit still," per¬
mitting the critic to scrutinize them in a spirit of leisurely
detachment. The literary critic can stop at will to re-read a diffi¬
cult passage; the art critic can examine a painting from various
distances or walk all the way around a work of sculpture. But the
dance critic must make do with a fleeting burst of sensory
impressions.
Of course, this is the situation that prevails, to a greater or
lesser extent, in all of the performing arts (which are, by defini¬
tion, temporal and perishable). The theatre critic John Mason
Brown once remarked that "to many people, dramatic criticism
must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles." But the drama
critic, unlike the dance critic, often has access to a text; and when
the time comes to provide the reader with a sense of this text, he
need only quote directly from it. (The critic of the visual arts has
even fewer problems in this regard, since his commentary can be
accompanied by a photograph of the object under discussion.)
Perhaps these difficulties explain why dance criticism places
as much emphasis as it does on description (often at the expense
of interpretation and evaluation). To the critic of literature or
painting, "mere" description may seem rather pedestrian and
unambitious. But for the dance critic, "mere" description is not
only the most difficult task; it is also one of the most valuable—
in so far as the dance critic is helping to establish the physical
 DANCE CRITICISM 425

reality of the dance (or, at the very least, lending some degree of
permanence to an otherwise elusive and ephemeral event).
The challenge facing the dance critic is threefold: the enor¬
mously difficult task of seeing the movement clearly in the first
place; then, the almost equally challenging task of remembering
what he sees; and, finally, the nearly impossible task of describ¬
ing what he has seen in a manner that will be comprehensible
to the reader (especially one who hasn't already experienced the
work being discussed). Lincoln Kirstein once lamented the fact
that "even the most detailed and rhapsodic appreciations are
usually unintelligible unless you have seen the ballet." Indeed,
one of the cruel paradoxes of dance writing is that a literal,
moment-by-moment account of what strikes the eye and ear is
destined to lose the reader in a thicket of undifferentiated detail.
"To write descriptions of dancing," notes Kirstein, "is even more
aimless than to paint pictures of music."
And yet, all of the writers anthologized in this section have
managed to surmount these considerable obstacles. Significantly,
almost all of them are, or at least have worked as, journalists
(which is to say, they must address a broad-based public of non¬
specialists, many of whom have not seen the dance under dis¬
cussion). Here we encounter another notable difference between
dance criticism and the criticism of literature or painting (where
the most influential and widely respected critics have been
scholars rather than journalists). No doubt, this is a consequence
of the high premium good dance criticism places on description,
the journalist's forte.
The essays in this section have been arranged chronologically
so as to illustrate what we believe to be the general direction
contemporary dance criticism has travelled (one that closely par¬
allels the development of "new criticism" in literature). In the
course of the last fifty years, dance criticism has developed a
steadily improved capacity for precise descriptions of the body
in motion. To observe this evolution, one need only compare the
writing of Theophile Gautier, probably the most highly regarded
dance critic of the nineteenth century with his twentieth-cen¬
tury counterparts, Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce.
Gautier, a renowned poet and novelist, an accomplished jour¬
nalist, an amateur painter, and the librettist for both "Giselle"
and "La Peri," would appear to be ideally suited for the job of
dance critic. And at least by nineteenth-century standards, he
was. Gautier provides the reader with extremely vivid visual
426 DANCE CRITICISM

analogies for the dance—images the work evokes in his mind s

eye—but alas, he gives us very little sense of what the dance
actually looked like (for instance, “Mile. Taglioni reminded you
of cool and shaded valleys, where a white vision suddenly
emerges from the bark of an oak to greet the eyes of a young,
surprised, and blushing shepherd").
The virtual absence of precise physical descriptions in nine¬
teenth- and early twentieth-century dance criticism is particu¬
larly disappointing to dance historians who must rely upon eye¬
witness accounts of choreography as an aid to reconstruction.
This is especially true of works choreographed prior to the exis¬
tence of film, videotape, or adequate notational systems. All too
often, today's criticism becomes tomorrow's history.
Gautier may tell us less than we would like to know about
nineteenth-century choreography, but he never disguises the
fact that he is primarily interested in writing about the dancers,
rather than the dances they perform. In his review of Fanny Elss-
ler in "The Tempest," he candidly admits "the literature of legs
[that is, choreography] is hardly a subject for discussion; let us
come at once to Fanny Elssler." But when he does, Gautier offers
us some extraordinarily perceptive comments about the differ¬
ences between Elssler and her rival, Marie Taglioni:

Mile. Taglioni is a Christian dancer, if one may make use of such

an expression in regard to an art proscribed by the Catholic faith:
she flies like a spirit in the midst of transparent clouds of white
muslin with which she loves to surround herself; she resembles a
happy angel who scarcely bends the petals of celestial flowers with
the tips of her pink toes. Fanny is a quite pagan dancer; she
reminds one of the muse Terpsichore, tambourine in hand, her
tunic, exposing her thigh, caught up with a golden clasp; when she
bends freely from her hips, throwing back her swooning, volup¬
tuous arms, we seem to see one of those beautiful figures from Her¬
culaneum or Pompeii. ...

Unlike most of Gautier's dance criticism, Andre Levinson's

essay about Isadora Duncan is not a review of a particular per¬
formance, but rather an overview of Duncan's career, an attempt
to trace her lineage and assess her ultimate significance. Levin¬
son began writing about dance in Russia around the turn of the
century, but emigrated to Paris after the revolution. He is one of
the few dance writers who deserves to be called a "scholar-jour¬
nalist." (The short reviews he published in Parisian dailies con¬
stitute some of the most erudite dance journalism ever written.)
 DANCE CRITICISM 427

Levinson, whose formalist views were discussed in the introduc¬

tion to Section I, is usually thought of as a die-hard classicist who
resisted the innovations of Fokine and Diaghilev. One would
therefore expect him to come down equally hard (or harder) on
the anti-balletic ambitions of Isadora Duncan; but his attitude
toward her in this essay is more complicated than that. He credits
her with having created a "new beauty," but he argues that the
sources of this beauty are not to be found, as is commonly
believed, in antiquity. Rather, Duncan generates an aura that
owes more to the English Pre-Raphaelite artists than to those of
ancient Greece. Levinson also emphasizes the mimetic and fig¬
urative nature of Duncan's dances as well as her ability to endow
movement with an illusionistic power of suggestion: "the figur¬
ative strength of her gestures is such that the audience can see
the sacrificial flowers and vessels in her hands." His descriptions
of Duncan in performance help us to understand Susanne Lan-
ger's theory that dance creates an illusion of "virtual forces."
Carl Van Vechten is often referred to as the father of American
dance criticism, and his work is included here not for its endur¬
ing influence, but rather for the key role it played in the devel¬
opment of dance criticism in America. Until quite recently, jour¬
nalistic dance criticism was not written by specialized dance
writers like Andre Levinson in Paris, but rather by music critics.
Van Vechten's career is emblematic in this regard. He was hired
by the New York Times in 1906 as an assistant music critic, and
most of his earliest dance assignments came to him by default.
(This is still the situation that prevails at many American
newspapers.)
But Van Vechten educated himself "on the job" and quickly
became known as America's foremost dance journalist, a repu¬
tation that he maintained throughout the 1920's. His concise,
five-hundred-word portrait of Anna Pavlova illustrates just how
much a superior journalist can accomplish in a (very!) limited
amount of space. To Van Vechten, writing in 1920, Pavlova con¬
stituted the last of the great classic dancers, a living link to the
pre-Fokine era. As for her association with Diaghilev, Van
Vechten notes that "with the modern movement in dancing,
with which she mistakenly allied herself at one time in her
career, she has nothing whatsoever to do."
After Van Vechten, the next important figure to emerge in
American dance criticism was John Martin, who wrote for the
New York Times between 1927 and 1962, seminal years in the his¬
tory of modern dance. Martin was the very model of the partisan
428 DANCE CRITICISM

critic. His flag-waving efforts on behalf of modern dance were

instrumental in winning wider audiences for this new American
art form (in this sense, he anticipates the equally partisan cam¬
paign on behalf of post-modern dance conducted by Jill John¬
ston at the Village Voice in the mid 1960's).
Both Martin and Van Vechten made enormous contributions
to the early stages of dance criticism in this country, but it is not
until the advent of Edwin Denby that American dance criticism
achieves a level of distinction comparable to that which prevails
in criticism of the other arts. The poet Frank O'Hara once said of
Denby, “He sees and hears more clearly than anyone else I have
ever known." And indeed, the first thing one notices about Den-
by's criticism is the unprecedented clarity and precision with
which he describes the exact contours of the body in motion.
Denby's celebrated description of the adagio section in Balan¬
chine's "Concerto Barocco" is probably the most frequently
quoted passage in contemporary dance criticism; and it illus¬
trates, quite vividly, his critical method:

The correspondence of eye and ear is at its most surprising in the

poignant adagio movement. At the climax, for instance, against a
background of chorus that suggests the look of trees in the wind
before a storm breaks, the ballerina, with limbs powerfully out¬
spread, is lifted by her male partner, lifted repeatedly in narrowing
arcs higher and higher. Then at the culminating phrase, from her
greatest height he very slowly lowers her. You watch her body
slowly descend, her foot and leg pointing stiffly downward, till her
toe reaches the floor and she rests her full weight at last on this
single sharp point and pauses. It has the effect at that moment of a
deliberate and powerful plunge into a wound, and the emotion of
it answers strangely to the musical stress.

Note that Denby provides us with a "close reading" of the

dance (a precise description of what the bodies are actually
doing) as well as a much more subjective description of the feel¬
ings and images the movement evoked in him. It is probably no
coincidence that so much of Denby's best writing was evoked by
the choreography of Balanchine. Balanchine's choreography
facilitates "seeing" and Denby rises admirably to the challenge.
In other words, a connection exists between Balanchine's desire
to focus the audience's attention on the complexities of move¬
ment itself (which he accomplishes by eliminating the theatrical
"inessentials") and Denby's ability to pay such close attention.
 DANCE CRITICISM 429

But Denby's approach to dance writing is anything but strictly

formalist. In fact, he is particularly good at describing the ways
in which a choreographer like Balanchine can explore a subject
or tell a story obliquely, without resorting to the literalness of
mime. For example, he says of a section in "Agon": "It recalls
court dance as much as a Cubist still life recalls a pipe or guitar."
Clearly, for Denby, even a cool, formalist ballet like "Agon" has
a subject—in this case, "young people competing for fun at the
brief height of their power and form."
Although Denby wrote about all varieties of theatrical dance,
he remained principally a balletomane. Deborah Jowitt on the
other hand, who has been writing dance criticism for the Village
Voice since 1967, responds sympathetically (and perceptively) to
modern and post-modern dance as well as to ballet. Unlike the
other articles in this section which focus either on particular
works or particular performers, Jo witt's essay about Martha Gra¬
ham is a more specialized analysis of the choreographer's move¬
ment "vocabulary," of its sources, and of the way it has evolved
over the years. Jowitt stresses the bold eclecticism with which
Graham draws on the straight, narrow look of American Indian
dancing, the archaic style of Egyptian friezes, Siamese and Cam¬
bodian knee-walks—combining and transforming these influ¬
ences so as to produce a style that looks "wildly original."
Jowitt is, by her own admission, reluctant to rank or "grade"
works of art hierarchically. By contrast, Arlene Croce, founder of
Ballet Review and dance critic for the New Yorker, proceeds on the
assumption that evaluative judgments are the sacred responsibil¬
ity of the critic. The criteria by which she declares that some
dances are superior to others are especially evident in her re¬
examination of Balanchine's "The Four Temperaments," written
almost thirty years after the work was premiered. Croce appeals
to what is sometimes called "the verdict of the ages," the assump¬
tion that the best work is the most lasting work. (And critics like
Croce, when evaluating new work, will attempt to think and feel
beyond their immediate reactions to the work in an effort to pre¬
dict whether or not it will last.)
Thus Croce compares "The Four Temperaments" with another,
and for her, lesser, Balanchine work of the 40's, "Danses Concer-
tantes." "A masterpiece," she writes, "doesn't so much transcend
its time as perpetuate it; it keeps its moment alive. In 'The Four
Temperaments' ... the moment is luminously there. In 'Danses
Concertantes,' the moment eludes me."
430 DANCE CRITICISM

In what she calls the opening "statement" of the ballet, Croce

describes the way in which a ballerina "lifts and lowers the free
foot, curls it around the standing leg, and carefully flexes it
before arching to full point. We see in short, a foot becoming a
point—nature being touched to artificial life." And for Croce,
this moment sums up the "story" of "The Four Temperaments":
the molding of the classical dancer's body as a symbol of the pro¬
cess by which human beings are transformed into archetypes.
This is, of course, an unabashedly "subjective" interpretation of
"The Four Temperaments," but Croce is always careful to but¬
tress her "reading" of the ballet with a detailed and more imper¬
sonal description of what the dancers are actually doing.
Croce's interpretation of "The Four Temperaments" may help
explain why she has not been particularly sympathetic to post¬
modern dance, a genre that often eschews the very process that
Balanchine seems to be celebrating, the transformation of the
natural body by classroom technique. But Croce has written
enthusiastically on numerous occasions about Twyla Tharp, who
began her choreographic career as a post-modernist unsympa¬
thetic to technical virtuosity, but then gradually re-incorporated
technically based dancing (without sacrificing the braininess and
conceptual rigor of those early, minimalist works).
Croce particularly admires Tharp's ability to transform "non-
theatrical" subject matter so as to make it theatrically legible (a
process similar to that depicted in "The Four Temperaments").
In her review of the original version of "Deuce Coupe," Croce
discusses Tharp's use of contemporary teenage social dancing
and concludes, "no one but Twyla Tharp would have known
how to make these dances legible in the theatre. A hundred kids
going berserk at a school prom is a powerful but not necessarily
a theatrical spectacle. To be realized on the stage, such potency
has to be objectified.... In the process, it becomes beautiful, but
'beauty' isn't the choreographer's object—clarity is."
And clarity—the ability to see clearly—is (clearly) what distin¬
guishes critics like Denby, Jowitt, and Croce from the rest of us.
They exemplify what John Ruskin must have meant when he
wrote:
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see
something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people
can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one
who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all
in one.
 THEOPHILE GAUTIER 431

THEOPHILE GAUTIER
FANNY ELSSLER IN
“LA TEMPETE”

Mile. Fanny Elssler has made her reappearance in the part of

Alcine in La Tempete. The ballet La Tempete is a ballet, that is the
most favourable remark that can be made about it. Furthermore,
it has the advantage of spoiling one of the finest themes for an
opera that could ever be imagined. It is not quite clear in this
piece why Prospero should be replaced by Oberon; Oberon is
inseparable from A Midsummer Night's Dream, he cannot move
without his wife, Titania; Alcine, that bewitching creation of
Ariosto, appears quite out of her element in the isle of The Tem¬
pest, beside Caliban, and I doubt very much whether Fernando
can make him forget that brilliant knight, Roger. But we shall
not prosecute too far our observations regarding the intrinsic
merit of the theme; the literature of legs is hardly a subject for
discussion; let us come at once to Fanny Elssler. Much applause
bursts forth and the gauze curtain parts to reveal the captivating
enchantress, and no one has any doubt but what the virtuous
Fernando will soon be unfaithful to the memory of Lea, Ober-
on's ward.
Fanny Elssler's dancing is quite different from the academic
idea, it has a particular character which sets her apart from all
other dancers; it is not the aerial and virginal grace of Taglioni,
it is something more human, more appealing to the senses. Mile.
Taglioni is a Christian dancer, if one may make use of such an
expression in regard to an art proscribed by the Catholic faith:
she flies like a spirit in the midst of the transparent clouds of
white muslin with which she loves to surround herself, she
resembles a happy angel who scarcely bends the petals of celes¬
tial flowers with the tips of her pink toes. Fanny is a quite pagan
dancer; she reminds one of the muse Terpsichore, tambourine in
hand, her tunic, exposing her thigh, caught up with a golden
clasp; when she bends freely from her hips, throwing back her
swooning, voluptuous arms, we seem to see one of those beau¬
tiful figures from Herculaneum or Pompeii which stand out in
Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. “Mile. Taglioni is a Christian dancer
... she flies like a spirit in the midst of the transparent clouds of white
muslin with which she loves to surround herself .. . Fanny is quite the
pagan dancer; she reminds one of the muse Terpsichore . .. (Gautier)

432
 THEOPHILE GAUTIER 433

white relief against a black background, marking their steps with

resounding cymbals; Virgil's line:
Crispum sub crotalo docta movere latus,
involuntarily springs to the mind. The Syrian slave whom he
loved so much to see dancing beneath the pale arbour of the lit¬
tle inn would have had much in common with Fanny Elssler.
Undoubtedly, spiritualism is a thing to be respected; but, as
regards dancing, we can quite well make some concessions to
materialism. After all, dancing consists of nothing more than the
art of displaying beautiful shapes in graceful positions and the
development from them of lines agreeable to the eye; it is mute
434 DANCE CRITICISM

rhythm, music that is seen. Dancing is little adapted to render

metaphysical themes; it only expresses the passions; love, desire
with all its attendant coquetry; the male who attacks and the
female who feebly defends herself is the basis of all primitive
dances.
Mile. Fanny Elssler has fully realised this truth. She has dared
more than any other dancer of the Opera; she was the first to
transport to these modest boards the audacious Cachuca, without
its losing any of its native zest. She dances with the whole of her
body, from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. Thus
she is a true and beautiful dancer, while the others are nothing
but a pair of legs struggling beneath a motionless body!
(1837)

THEOPHILE GAUTIER
REVIVAL OF “LA SYLPHIDE”

It must be stated that the Opera lacks ballets and does not
know how to find employment for its army of dancers and pretty
supers; it appears that the literature of legs is the most difficult
of all styles, for no one can succeed at it.
The revivals of La Lille Mai Gardee, La Somnambule, and Le Car-
naval de Venise have only attained a comparative success, without
any effect on the box-office receipts.
To see these old-fashioned pieces which delighted our fathers,
and whose melodies, ground out by barrel-organs at every street-
corner, lulled us to sleep in our earliest years, one became con¬
scious of a kind of bitter-sweet emotion, as though, in rummag¬
ing in a corner of some dusty drawer, one came across some iri¬
descent skirts, a few pieces of discoloured lace, a broken fan,
with an episode from Rousseau's Confessions painted on one side
and a pastoral on the other, forgotten relics of a grandmother or
a great-aunt, long since departed.
But this altogether poetic sentiment, although not without its
fragrance, does not suffice to fill the auditorium at the Opera;
besides, the shabbiness of the scenery, completely faded and torn
 THEOPHILE GAUTIER 435

in every fold, forbade the exhumation of these mummies of bal¬

lets which, twenty years ago, perhaps, had fresh and youthful
bodies and charming features with happy smiles, but which will
always seem to us somewhat ridiculous, out-of-date, and old-
fashioned.
For some time past there has been talk of Mile. Fanny Elssler's
reviving Mile. Taglioni's parts in La Sylphide and La Fille du Dan¬
ube; the Taglionists gave vent to cries of sacrilege and the abom¬
ination of desolation—one would have thought that it was a
question of laying hands on the Ark of the Covenant. Mile. Elss-
ler herself, with that modesty which so well becomes her talent,
shrank from encroaching on parts in which her illustrious rival
had shown herself to be perfect, but it was not right that so
charming a ballet as La Sylphide should be struck out of the rep¬
ertory because of exaggerated scruples; there are a thousand
ways of playing, and, above all, of dancing the same character,
and the pre-eminence of Mile. Taglioni in comparison with Mile.
Elssler is a matter than can quite well be contested.
Mile. Taglioni, tired out from her interminable travels, is no
longer what she was; she has lost much of her lightness and her
elevation. When she appears on the stage, you always see the
white mist bathed in transparent muslin, the ethereal and chaste
vision, the divine delight which we know so well; but, after
some bars, signs of fatigue appear, she becomes short of breath,
perspiration bedews her brow, her muscles seem to be under a
strain, her arms and chest redden; formerly, she was a real syl¬
phide, but now she is merely a dancer, the first dancer in the
world, if you will, but nothing more. The princes and kings of
the North have so applauded her, so wearied her with compli¬
ments, they have caused so many showers of flowers and dia¬
monds to fall upon her, that they have weighed down her tire¬
less feet, which, like those of the amazon Camilla, could run over
blades of grass without bending them; they have loaded her with
so much gold and so many precious stones that Marie full of
grace has not been able to take to flight again, and only timidly
skims the ground like a bird with wet wings.
Mile. Fanny Elssler to-day is in the full flower of her talent,
she can only vary her perfection and not transcend it, because
above very good is too good, which is nearer to bad than may be
thought; she is the dancer for men, as Mile. Taglioni was the
dancer for women; she has elegance, beauty, a bold and petulant
vigour, a sparkling smile, an air of Spanish vivacity tempered by
her German artlessness, which makes her a very charming and
436 DANCE CRITICISM

very adorable creature. When Fanny dances, one thinks of a

thousand pleasant things, in imagination one wanders into mar¬
ble palaces flooded with sunlight and silhouetted against a deep-
blue sky, like the friezes of the Parthenon; you feel yourself lean¬
ing on your elbow on the balustrade of a terrace, with roses
round your head, a cup full of Syracusan wine in your hand, a
white greyhound at your feet, and beside you a beautiful woman
with a plumed head-dress and robe of crimson velvet; you hear
the thrum of tambourines and the silvery tinkle of small bells.
Mile. Taglioni reminded you of cool and shaded valleys,
where a white vision suddenly emerges from the bark of an oak
to greet the eyes of a young, surprised, and blushing shepherd;
she resembled unmistakably those fairies of Scotland of whom
Walter Scott speaks, who roam in the moonlight near the mys¬
terious fountain, with a necklace of dewdrops and a golden
thread for girdle.
If one may make use of the expression. Mile. Taglioni is a
Christian dancer. Mile. Fanny Elssler is a pagan dancer—the
daughters of Miletus, beautiful Ionians, so celebrated in antiq¬
uity, must have danced in the same manner.
Hence Mile. Elssler, although not fitted by temperament for
Mile. Taglioni's parts, can replace her in every way without any
risk or danger; because she has sufficient versatility and skill to
adapt herself to suit the particular style of the part.
The theme of La Sylphide is one of the most delightful themes
for a ballet that could possibly be encountered; it includes an
idea at once moving and poetic, a rare thing in a ballet, and we
are delighted that it is to be staged again; the action is self-
explanatory and can be understood without any difficulty, and
lends itself to the most graceful pictures—in addition, there are
hardly any dances for men, which is a great comfort.
Mile. Elssler's costume was of a delicious freshness; her dress
might have been fashioned of dragon-flies' wings and her feet
shod with satin made from lilies. A garland of convolvulus of an
ideal shade of pink encircled her beautiful brown hair, and
behind her white shoulders quivered and trembled two little
wings made of peacocks' feathers, superfluous with such feet!
The new Sylphide was frantically applauded; she invested the
role with an infinity of delicacy, grace, and lightness—she
appeared and vanished like an intangible vision; when you
believed her to be in one place she was in another. She surpassed
herself in the pas with her sister; it is impossible to see anything
more perfect or more graceful; her miming, when she is caught
 THEOPHILE GAUTIER 437

by her lover in the folds of the enchanted scarf, expresses with

a very poetic regret and pardon the feeling of disaster and of
error beyond repair, while her last long look at her wings which
have fallen to the ground is full of a great tragic beauty.
At the beginning of the ballet, there took place a little accident
which, fortunately, had no serious consequences, but which at
first alarmed us: at the moment when the Sylphide disappears
through the fireplace (a strange exit for a sylphide) Mile. Fanny
Elssler, being carried too quickly by the counter-weight, knocked
her foot violently against the frame of the chimney-piece.
Fortunately, she did not hurt herself; but we take this oppor¬
tunity of inveighing against these “flyings" which are a tradition
of old opera. We see nothing graceful in the spectacle of five or
six unfortunate girls almost dying of fright from being sus¬
pended in mid-air by iron wire which may quite well give way;
these poor wretches who distractedly move their arms and legs
like toads out of their element involuntarily remind one of
stuffed crocodiles hung from a ceiling. At the performance given
for Mile. Taglioni's benefit, two sylphides remained suspended
in mid-air, it was impossible to pull them up or lower them
down; people in the audience cried out in terror; at last a machin¬
ist risked his life and descended from the roof at the end of a
rope to set them free. Some minutes later. Mile. Taglioni, who
only spoke this once in all her life (at the theatre, of course),
went towards the footlights and said: "Gentlemen, no one has
been hurt." The following day two sylphides of the second class
received a present from the real Sylphide. It is not unlikely that
another difficulty of this sort will soon recur.
(1838)
 i
DANCE CRITICISM

ANDRE LEVINSON
THE ART AND MEANING
OF ISADORA DUNCAN

Thanks to the fact that, up to recent times, ballet has been the
exclusive domain of a closed circle, it was isolated from the gen¬
eral public by prejudices which have not yet been overcome. The
individual form in which the art of dance first reached us, excit¬
ing and troubling us, was the dance of Isadora Duncan. This
powerful artist did not immediately arouse our sympathy; her
widespread recognition came later, coinciding with a decline in
her style. Consequently, evaluations of her dancing have been as
enthusiastic as they have been superficial.
Instinctively reacting to the new beauty Miss Duncan reveals,
friends of her art in the public and in the press created a com¬
pletely false and unsuitable criterion for evaluating her talent:
they compared her dancing to ancient dance.
Little is known about ancient dance; its living tradition is irre¬
trievably lost. We do know of its deep ties to forms of cult wor¬
ship. In acknowledging the absence of a religious basis in her
explorations of dance. Miss Duncan herself denies that her art is
a direct organic perpetuation of antiquity; her dance, she
asserted in a public lecture, is not a dance of the past but a dance
of the future. But if there is not a genuine link to the little-
known essence of ancient dance in her art, then its ideological, I
would say even moral, base coincides in part with the themes of
the somewhat simplified and vulgarized Hellenism of our day.
Its slogans are: freedom of the body, the cult of plastique, palp¬
able beauty—a cult nourished by the beautiful relics of
museums. But it seems to us that there is no need to mix our
current Hellenism with the already difficult-to-comprehend
character of ancient culture.
Fans of Duncan's art, hoping to find a measure of support for
their arguments and to justify their enthusiasm before the judg¬
ment of skeptics, greatly overestimate the significance of such
museum pieces. There is no question that one must credit Miss
Duncan with a serious study of the monuments of ancient art—
of reliefs, and especially of vase painting, all of which develop
 ANDRE LEVINSON 439

and enrich her dance. But it would be quite erroneous to per¬

ceive this as her innovation or as the "focal point" of her art. The
fact is that by reconstructing antiquity through documents
which have been preserved, it is possible to recreate the tradition
not only in choreography but on the contemporary stage as well.
Perhaps many have not been able to discern, through the veil of
her creative individuality, the unprecedented evocation of antiq¬
uity which is one of the main attractions of Sarah Bernhardt's
interpretation of Racine's Phedre. The creation of this image is
preceded by an extensive study of museum treasures right up to
the Attic treasures in our own Hermitage. The basic inability of
plastic arts, sculpture, and painting to give movement to each
instant has been fatal in attempts to restore ancient forms of
dance. These art forms can only fix one instant of movement,
chiefly its beginning or end. Plastic art is especially static, as it is
tied to rules of equilibrium. Therefore, ancient art can give us
only a whole series of poses and positions. It is not within its
powers to give us an entire presentation of the dynamics of
dance or movement itself. Even the most consistent and
resourceful attempts to recreate ancient dance are inevitably
characterized by inadequacy and arbitrariness.
But Duncan's art is not tied genetically to antiquity. It is sup¬
ported (to a greater degree) by the contemporary Hellenic slogan
of the body's freedom from clothing and the cult of the body
reborn. The contemporary ideal of nudity, which only censor¬
ship prevented Duncan from achieving, does not at all agree
with ancient aesthetics, which valued the choreographic mean¬
ing of clothing and draperies. Consequently, one generally can¬
not relate the slogans supporting nudity purely to aesthetics. But
the overemphasis on slogans is in protest against false shame,
against the hermetically sealed philistinism of Duncan's moral¬
izing critics. In a word, the slogan offers a conventional lie as
opposed to the attacks of the naive.
A socially significant issue raised by Duncan is our deep con¬
cern for the physical development of the younger generation,
and our own struggle against approaching degeneration. Dun¬
can's innovation in the area of dance naturally added to the blos¬
soming of various types of sports. This was seen in the devel¬
opment of every imaginable kind of gymnastic group during the
past decade. Duncan's dancing appeared to affect choreography
in the same way that the sudden appearance of the natural corset
affected dress reform in the world of fashion. It is completely
natural that Isadora Duncan sought not so much to create a new
440 DANCE CRITICISM

phalanx of refined artists as to make her pedagogical goal the

general dissemination of her message to the masses. It is not
without reason that A. G. Kornfeld noted, in his "small eulogy"
to the artist, the significance of her art as "the possibility for all
of us to be beautiful."
The cult of athleticism, of the strong, lithe, healthy body, gave
rise to talk not only of the influence of contemporary society on
her dancing, but of the "racial" quality evidenced in Duncan's
art. The aesthetic character of her dance carries this typically
anglo-saxon impression. This characteristic is best described by a
term already in use for another aspect of English artistic cul¬
ture—"Pre-Raphaelitism."
Pre-Raphaelitism is a reactionary movement which brings
overrefined classical and post-classical forms back to the level of
primitive artistic concepts. It is a compromise movement—one
not quite strong enough. Although it finally breaks with the aca¬
demic tradition, it does not then return to the initial stages of
development of the art but timidly stops short. English Pre-
Raphaelite artists broke from the powerful maturity of the cin-
quecento thanks to Botticelli and Verrocchio; none of them
approached Giotto.
Duncan has that vividness of form, that absence of chiaro¬
scuro, that concreteness of art which characterized the quattro¬
cento. In her Ange avec violon, in her poetic Primavera, there is all
the healthy strength of the good Lorenzo di Credi, softened by
the fragile intellectualism of Botticelli. Duncan has that romantic
yet not overly profound nostalgic du passe which developed in the
treatment of antiquity during the quattrocento, that idyllic note,
that inability to capture the monumental such as one sees in the
work of Pietro di Cosimo, whose Venus sits among the little
multicolored flowers in a melancholy field while a fleeting but¬
terfly alights on her bared knee.
In essence Duncan's dance is mimetic—figurative. She draws
her forms from imitations of natural, common poses and move¬
ments, and with her spontaneous mimicry she conveys emo¬
tional experiences. It is true that there is not an exact duplication,
but there is a deep analogical resemblance to antiquity. In the
Ange avec violon she imitates, with the movement of her arms, the
motions of playing a real violin; in Primavera, choreographed
according to Botticelli's painting, she drops countless flowers; in
the Lullaby of Gretchaninoff, she bends just so over the infant's
cradle, and when her Narcissus bends his beautiful knee over the
imaginary stream into which he gazes, the audience can feel the
 ANDRE LEVINSON 441

moisture and transparency of the current, the trembling and the

sudden coldness going through his body. As, in Goethe's ballad,
water drawn from the palm of the hand by Brahmane's wife
turns into a crystal ball, so Duncan's imitative gesture scoops
imaginary objects from the surrounding atmosphere revitalizing
them with actual palpable life. That is why her use of various
props—palm branches, golden leaves in Tchaikovsky's
Romance—seems to be an unnecessary infringement on her orig¬
inal purity.
In her dancing she extracts mimetic, even dramatic content
from the music's impressions. This has elicited many opinions as
to whether she dances Chopin, Grieg, Beethoven authentically,
but even a whole crusade of musicians could not arrive at the
truth. Since this or that image or mood are created by irrational
forces within our minds, they cannot be identical for everyone,
and therefore cannot be considered universal.
I am convinced of music's power to inspire moods and move¬
ments by the extraordinary example of the somnolent Made¬
line—who dances under hypnosis. Her will is paralyzed, and the
only source of her movement is the musical rhythm, that insur¬
mountable imperative, spontaneously acting upon her imagina¬
tion and surrogate will. From it comes the diversities of her
dance and the sometimes frenzied rise of dramatic experience.
In depicting her spiritual moods, Duncan does not go beyond
the boundaries of realistic movement. Her dance—free from the
constraints of clothing, is a free, broad run; leaps are not char¬
acteristic of her (although they are a primary element of classical
ballet), nor is dancing on point, which is practiced by all baller¬
inas whose heads and arms, in addition, are guided by specific
rules of equilibrium. Duncan's head is freely thrust back or is
bent forward; her hands, independent of the movement of her
arms, live as a free expression of life. In this there is yet another
analogy to ancient dance. Lulled by the rhythm, passive and
indecisive, her head, arms and torso sway right and left at the
beginning of a Strauss waltz. Her impatient leg simply beats
time.
Impressions of Duncan's latest performance take shape in a
more definite and concrete form, which I venture to describe
here. Here she performed plastic and dramatic creations like
Gluck's Orpheus and the songs of Richard Wagner.
After the orchestra's overture, a mournful Orpheus appears
from a dark corner of the stage, flooded with crimson light. The
head is tilted back, the hands are at his sides. In this long funeral
442 DANCE CRITICISM

moment, his mood is revealed only by the agonizingly slow

movement of his footsteps. His costume, which is too long, falls
in straight, rigid pleats, as if a body were dragging behind him,
hindering his movement. This material constraint expresses
Duncan's impotent despair until she extends an invoking arm
upward, with fingers outstretched. Then, as a violin intones
Orpheus' repeated cry, "Eurydice! Eurydice!" she bends over an
imaginary grave and with gestures of tenderness breaks the sol¬
emn, stern ritual of funereal rites. This action, executed by Dun¬
can with the absolute minimum of figurative means, lacks the
distinctive mark of ancient funereal mimicry. The ancient mour¬
ner invariably feigns the gesture of pulling out his hair by plac¬
ing his crooked arm over his head. Duncan's portrayal is not
based on archaeology but on spontaneous experience. True, this
experience is not sufficiently deep, because the sublime concep¬
tion is not within the dancer's means. The second scene—a cho¬
rus, and the dances of the Furies spellbound at the end of
Orpheus' lyre—is less attractively conceived. It is true that Dun¬
can skillfully manages to evoke the impression of a moving cho¬
rus with many people represented. She is able to communicate
the orchestra's anxious dissonances by sudden breaks in her plas¬
tic line; but the dance itself fails because of the lack of technical
means. This "flat-footed" or, as the Romans called it, "planipes"
dance did not use leaps or movements on point, but allowed for
great variety of certain kinds of runs and steps. Her knee thrusts
forward, billowing the light cloth of her tunic, or she throws her
legs back, breaking the pleats in her garments, pleats which con¬
sistently fall back into place. Often during her dance Duncan
throws back her head and thrusts forth her arms with extended,
pointing fingers; the typical gesture of an ancient "dactylology."
In general, the artist only uses material from ancient dances in
measure with her amateur technical capabilities.
On the stage of the Elysees Theatre, Duncan relates to the
image of Orpheus' drivers a blissful shadow, a nuance of the
fragile grace of the eighteenth century. In the final glorification
of the gods, her extended hands, trembling with joy, bring the
Olympians generous and beautiful gifts of thanks. The figurative
strength of her gesture is such that the audience can see the sac¬
rificial flowers and vessels in her hands.
Of course, Duncan's mimetic paraphrase in no way exhausts
the contents of Orpheus. The artist herself knows that gesture is
conditioned by and dependent on meaning. As the sweet voice
of the real Orpheus, accompanied by a solo violin, sings in self-
 ANDRE LEVINSON 443

forgetfulness, a mute dancer moves across the stage. But even

with her naive and limited concept of Orpheus, Duncan's per¬
formance was distinguished by nobility and deep tenderness.
The Brahms waltz suite, which formed the second half of the
program, answers to a great degree to Duncan's talent. At the
base of her art lies an unconscious sense of formal creation and
a particular musical sensitivity. Her dance is impressionistic and
calls forth a feeling of involuntariness, of sudden improvisation.
The Brahms waltzes are an example of this. In the first measure,
the dancer seems to be already rocking and even resisting the
inspiration of the music until her movement begins to become
more defined and full and the whirlwind of the dance totally
carries her away. More than anything else, Duncan's art is repro¬
ductive: it is a sound turned into movement. Often her gestures
remind one of the instinctive dancing movement of a conductor
at his music stand.
The Brahms was followed by a Schubert encore. Somewhat
naive, but noble and penetrating, the fully realized artistry of
these dances had a lyric charm which dispersed the uncertain
and sometimes painful impressions of Orpheus.
On the second evening, in Wagner's Four Poems, from the
epoch of Tristan's creation, the psychological passivity of Dun¬
can's art was once again revealed. In L’Ange her arms cross in
supplication and her lips shine with gratitude; she coils her arms
and bends her torso in exhaustion beneath the sweet charms of
the music. She intertwines her arms in a gesture of torment and
self-defense—Suffering. In Dreams, the dancer, lying on the
ground, actually seems to be a sleeping person—symbolism is
always important in her dance and, raising herself on her elbow,
she joyfully gazes at images of a magic dream.
These Poems serve as Duncan's prelude to Isolde's Death. Here
again, her strength is focused on the mimicry of the face and
hands: her legs are motionless: only occasionally does a swift
gust carry her ahead a few paces. Again, as in Orpheus, the artist
in a white chlamys with wide sleeves, and with gestures of
lamenting tenderness, bends beneath the body of her beloved
until the storm of ecstasy straightens her bent back and turns her
clouded gaze upward.
With each crescendo of the orchestra, she shakes her uplifted
arms and finally throws them vigorously to and fro. Her least
effort is accompanied by smooth and sinewy movements of her
horizontally extended arms, exactly like an unseeing soul. It goes
without saying that this was not a tragic and majestic ascension
444 DANCE CRITICISM

of Isolde: the dancer's movements are the echo of her imagina¬

tion—her voice.
In the Bacchanale from Tannhciuser, the dance in Venus' grotto,
the dancer does not succeed at all. She is not capable of com¬
municating a multifaceted musical image in which melodic fig¬
ures at first stand out distinctly and then slip back into the sea
of orchestral polyphony: the representation of bacchanalia can¬
not be realized without the counterpoint opposition of separate
groups within a mass of dancers. This is why the artist, who is
usually so mindful of the rhythm, here sometimes reinterprets
it. Her whole appearance, uniting full-grown maidenliness with
young masculinity, is alien to the music's spontaneous charms.
The violet stage lighting and the blood-red tunic are powerless.
The Three Graces (this was the preparatory study for Botticelli's
Primavera performed by Duncan on a previous occasion) is the
height of her art. The dancing nymph reaches out her hand to
an unseen friend, and then she herself is suddenly the friend, a
new dancer joining in to the music; after this a third one springs
up. Here, elements of banal transformation (a quick change of
clothing) are side by side with sudden and full metamorphosis.
This brings us to the very essence of the artist's creative ability.
The psychological elements are joyfulness, light intoxication
with the spring sun, free strides, a gentle breeze, and the playful
pleats of her tunic. There is something bucolic about her. There
is no tragedy. No eroticism. There is no real femininity in her
essence. In her there is a simple grace, strength, the joy of youth.
And this is why this artist-androgyne can be at once Orpheus
and Eurydice, Narcissus and Daphne, Tan and Echo, and L'Ange
avec Violon. These two evenings defined for us Duncan's signif¬
icance. Undoubtedly, her art form has become familiar, and its
emotion will only sometimes reflect our experiences; her excita¬
tion will often be fruitless. Because we see in it the appearance
of an unusual personality, all her art is valuable, but its content
exhausts itself. A phenomenon like Duncan is a frequent occur¬
rence, appealing but not remarkable. Placing her within the gen¬
eral evolution of theatrical dance is a precarious business... .

(1917)
 CARL VAN VECHTEN 445

CARL VAN VECHTEN

ANNA PAVLOWA, 1920

It may seem a little unprecise to describe a personality so vivid

as that of Anna Pavlowa as old-fashioned. Yet she is old-fash¬
ioned, in the delightful sense of that epithet; not old-fashioned
like things of the day before yesterday, the slang of 1910, the
bicycle, or "ballroom dancing," but like the lambrequins, wax-
flowers, shell-baskets, glazed chintzes, and mezzotints of our
grandmothers, which the Baron de Meyer has so pleasantly
revived.
She is the last of the great school of classic dancers, a fragrant
reminiscence of the early nineteenth century, born of the same
tradition as Taglioni and Fanny Elssler and Carlotta Grisi, and as
great as these, perhaps greater than these. With the modern
movement in dancing, with which she mistakenly allied herself
at one time in her career, she has nothing whatever to do. Save
in such a divertissement as Les Sylphides, she was entirely out of
place in the Russian Ballet, into which the more nearly contem¬
porary art of Karsavina fitted so neatly. Even less appropriately
can Pavlowa be identified with Isadora Duncan and the so-called
revival of the dances of the Greeks. The Russian has, to be sure,
assumed character roles, but she is only supreme as the exponent
of the classic ballet in works like Coppelia, in the true Italian tra¬
dition, or Adolphe Adam's Giselle. In Glazunow's Bacchanale,
which she and Mordkin performed with so much abandon, she
may have appeared to commit herself to the new freedom, but it
was to be observed that even in this number she preserved the
conventions of the classic school by wearing tights and ballet-
slippers.
Her only rival in coeval choreographic history, Adeline
Genee, a far inferior performer, was practically vanquished from
the day that Pavlowa first set foot on the London stage, Genee,
who had enjoyed her hour, was roguish, witty, twinkling, and
saucy. (Saucy is a word that has almost fallen into disuse because
no new girls are born to fit it. Perhaps Marie Tempest was the
last. She was saucy. Another epithet, piquant, frequently applied
to sauces for steaks, might with equal justice be applied to her.)
But the Scandinavian not only lacked the finished technique of
446 DANCE CRITICISM

the Russian, she also wanted her tragic grace. For the mask of
Pavlowa is truly tragic, a face of haunting intensity and hurt
loveliness. It may be that with her passing the school of toe¬
dancing will also pass, but it may also be remarked that nothing
dies so long as any one is great enough to keep it alive.
(1920)

EDWIN DENBY
THREE SIDES OF AGON

ONE
Agon, a ballet composed by Igor Stravinsky in his personal
twelve-tone style, choreographed by George Balanchine, and
danced by the New York City Ballet, was given an enormous
ovation last winter by the opening night audience. The balcony
stood up shouting and whistling when the choreographer took
his bow. Downstairs, people came out into the lobby, their eyes
bright as if the piece had been champagne. Marcel Duchamp, the
painter, said he felt the way he had after the opening of Le Sacre.
At later performances. Agon continued to be vehemently
applauded. Some people found the ballet set their teeth on edge.
The dancers show nothing but coolness and brilliantly high
spirits.
Agon is a suite of dances. The score lasts twenty minutes, and
never becomes louder than chamber music. On stage the dancers
are twelve at most, generally fewer. The ballet has the form of a
small entertainment, and its subject—first, an assembling of con¬
testants, then the contest itself, then a dispersal—corresponds to
the three parts into which the score is divided.
The subject is shown in terms of a series of dances, not in terms
of a mimed drama. It is shown by an amusing identity in the
action, which is classic dancing shifted into a ''character" style
by a shift of accentuation. The shift appears, for example, in the
timing of transitions between steps or within steps, the sweep of
arm position, in the walk, in the funniness of feats of prowess.
 EDWIN DENBY 447

The general effect is an amusing deformation of classic shapes

due to an unclassic drive or attack; and the drive itself looks like
a basic way of moving one recognizes. The "basic gesture" of
Agon has a frank, fast thrust like the action of Olympic athletes,
and it also has a loose-fingered goofy reach like the grace of our
local teenagers.
The first part of the ballet shows the young champions warm¬
ing up. The long middle part—a series of virtuoso numbers—
shows them rivalizing in feats of wit and courage. There is noth¬
ing about winning or losing. The little athletic meet is festive—
you watch young people competing for fun at the brief height
of their power and form. And the flavor of time and place is ten¬
derly here and now.

TWO
Agon shows that. Nobody notices because it shows so much
else. While the ballet happens, the continuity one is delighted
by is the free-association kind. The audience sees the sequence
of action as screwball or abstract, and so do I.
The curtain rises on a stage bare and silent. Upstage four boys
are seen with their backs to the public and motionless. They
wear the company's dance uniform. Lightly they stand in an
intent stillness. They whirl, four at once, to face you. The sound¬
less whirl is a downbeat that starts the action.
On the upbeat, a fanfare begins, like cars honking a block
away; the sound drops lower, changed into a pulse. Against it,
and against a squiggle like a bit of wallpaper, you hear—as if by
free association—a snatch of Chinatown, my Chinatown misre-
membered on an electric mandolin. The music sounds confident.
Meanwhile the boys' steps have been exploding like pistol shots.
The steps seem to come in tough, brief bursts. Dancing in canon,
in unison, in and out of symmetry, the boys might be trying out
their speed of waist, their strength of ankle; no lack of aggres¬
siveness. But already two—no, eight—girls have replaced them.
Rapidly they test toe-power, stops on oblique lines, jetlike exten¬
sions. They hang in the air like a swarm of girl-size bees, while
the music darts and eddies beneath them. It has become complex
and abstract. But already the boys have re-entered, and the first
crowding thrust of marching boys and leaping girls has a secret
of scale that is frightening. The energy of it is like that of fifty
dancers.
448 DANCE CRITICISM

By now you have caught the pressure of the action. The

phrases are compact and contrasted; they are lucid and short.
Each phrase, as if with a burst, finds its new shape in a few steps,
stops, and at once a different phrase explodes unexpectedly at a
tangent. They fit like the stones of a mosaic, the many-colored
stones of a mosaic seen close-by. Each is distinct, you see the cut
between; and you see that the cut between them does not inter¬
rupt the dance impetus. The novel shapes before you change as
buoyantly as the images of a dream. They tease. But like that of
a brilliant dream, the power of scale is in earnest. No appeal from
it.
While you have been dreaming, the same dance of the twelve
dancers has been going on and on, very fast and very boring, like
travel in outer space. Suddenly the music makes a two-beat
cadence and stops. The dispersed dancers have unexpectedly
turned toward you, stopped as in a posed photograph of athletes;
they face you in silence, vanish, and instantly three of them
stand in position to start a "number" like dancers in a ballet
divertissement.
The music starts with a small circusy fanfare, as if it were toss¬
ing them a purple and red bouquet. They present themselves to
the public as a dance-team (Barbara Milberg, Barbara Walczak,
Todd Bolender). Then the boy, left alone, begins to walk a "Sar-
abande," elaborately coiled and circumspect. It recalls court
dance as much as a cubist still life recalls a pipe or guitar. The
boy's timing looks like that of a New York Latin in a leather
jacket. And the cool lift of his wrong-way-round steps and
rhythms gives the nonsense so apt a turn people begin to giggle.
A moment later one is watching a girls' duet in the air, like flying
twins (haute danse). A trio begins. In triple canon the dancers do
idiotic slenderizing exercises, theoretically derived from court
gesture, while the music foghorns in the fashion of musique con¬
crete. Zanily pedantic, the dance has the bounce and exuberant
solemnity of a clown act. The audience laughs, applauds, and a
different threesome appears (Melissa Hayden, Roy Tobias, Jona¬
than Watts).
For the new team the orchestra begins as it did for the pre¬
vious one—first, the pushy, go-ahead fanfare, then the other
phrase of harmonies that keep sliding without advancing, like
seaweed underwater. (The two motifs keep returning in the
score.)
The new team begins a little differently arid develops an
obvious difference. The boys present the girl in feats of balance.
 EDWIN DENBY 449

on the ground and in the air, dangerous feats of lucid nonsense.

Their courage is perfect. Miss Hayden's dead-pan humor and her
distinctness are perfect too. At one point a quite unexpected
flounce of little-girl primness as in silence she walks away from
the boys endears her to the house. But her solo is a marvel of
dancing at its most transparent. She seems merely to walk for¬
ward, to step back and skip, with now and then one arm held
high, Spanish style, a gesture that draws attention to the sound
of a castanet in the score. As she dances, she keeps calmly “on
top of" two conflicting rhythms (or beats) that coincide once or
twice and join on the last note. She stops and the house breaks
into a roar of applause. In her calm, the audience has caught the
acute edge of risk, the graceful freshness, the brilliance of
buoyancy.
The New York audience may have been prepared for Agon's
special brilliance of rhythm by that of Opus 34 and Ivesiana, two
ballets never shown on tour. All three have shown an acuteness
of rhythmic risk never seen and never imagined outside the city
limits. The dangerousness of Agon is as tense as the danger of a
tightrope act on the high-wire. That is why the dancers look as
possessed as acrobats. Not a split-second leeway. The thrill is,
they move with an innocent dignity.
At this point of Agon about thirteen minutes of dancing have
passed. A third specialty team is standing on stage ready to begin
(Diana Adams, Arthur Mitchell). The orchestra begins a third
time with the two phrases one recognizes, and once again the
dancers find in the same music a quite different rhythm and
expression. As the introduction ends, the girl drops her head
with an irrational gesture more caressing than anything one has
seen so far.
They begin an acrobatic adagio. The sweetness is athletic. The
absurdity of what they do startles by a grandeur of scale and of
sensuousness. Turning pas de deux conventions upside down,
the boy with a bold grace supports the girl and pivots her on
point, lying on his back on the floor. At one moment classic
movements turned inside out become intimate gestures. At
another a pose forced way beyond its classic ending reveals a
novel harmony. At still another, the mutual first tremor of an
uncertain supported balance is so isolated musically it becomes
a dance movement. So does the dangerous scoop out of balance
and back into balance of the girl supported on point. The dance
flows through stops, through scooping changes of pace, through
differences of pace between the partners while they hold each
 © Martha Swope

Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell in Balanchine's "Agon" (1957). " . ..

a pose forced way beyond its classic ending reveals a novel harmony."
(Denby)

450
 EDWIN DENBY 451

other by the hand. They dance magnificently. From the start,

both have shown a crescendo and decrescendo within the thrust
of a move, an illusion of "breath"—though at the scary speed
they move such a lovely modulation is inconceivable. The fact
that Miss Adams is white and Mr. Mitchell Negro is neither
stressed nor hidden; it adds to the interest.
The music for the pas de deux is in an expressive Viennese
twelve-tone manner, much of it for strings. Earlier in the ballet,
the sparse orchestration has made one aware of a faint echo, as
if silence were pressing in at the edge of music and dancing.
Now the silence interpenetrates the sound itself, as in a Bee¬
thoven quartet. During the climactic pas de deux of other ballets,
you have watched the dancer stop still in the air, while the music
surges ahead underneath; now, the other way around, you hear
the music gasp and fail, while the two dancers move ahead con¬
fidently across the open void. After so many complex images,
when the boy makes a simple joke, the effect is happy. Delighted
by the dancers, the audience realizes it "understands" every¬
thing, and it is more and more eager to give them an ovation.
There isn't time. The two dancers have become one of four
couples who make fast, close variations on a figure from the pas
de deux. The action has reverted to the anonymous energy you
saw in the first part. Now all twelve dancers are on stage and
everything is very condensed and goes very fast. Now only the
four boys are left, you begin to recognize a return to the start of
the ballet, you begin to be anxious, and on the same wrestler's
gesture of "on guard" that closed their initial dance—a gesture
now differently directed—the music stops, the boys freeze, and
the silence of the beginning returns. Nothing moves.
During the stillness, the accumulated momentum of the piece
leaps forward in one's imagination, suddenly enormous. The
drive of it now seems not to have let up for a moment since the
curtain rose. To the realization of its power, as the curtain drops,
people respond with vehement applause in a large emotion that
includes the brilliant dancers and the goofiness of the fun.
The dancers have been "cool" in the jazz sense—no buildup,
inventions that did not try to get anywhere, right after a climax
an inconsequence like the archness of high comedy. But the dra¬
matic power has not been that of jokes; it has been that of unfore¬
seeable momentum. The action has had no end in view—it did
not look for security, nor did it make any pitiful appeal for that.
At the end, the imaginary contestants froze, toughly confident.
The company seems to have figured jointly as the off-beat hero.
452 DANCE CRITICISM

and the risk as the menacing antagonist. The subject of Agon, as

the poet Frank O'Hara said, is pride. The graceful image it offers
is a buoyance that mystifies and attracts.

THREE
A program note says that "the only subject" of the ballet is an
interpretation of some French seventeenth-century society
dances. The note tells you to disregard the classic Greek title
(Agon) in favor of the French subtitles. It is a pity to. The title
and the subtitles are words that refer to civilized rituals, the for¬
mer to athletics, the latter to dancing. Athletic dancing is what
Agon does. On the other hand, you won't catch anyone on stage
looking either French or Greek. Or hear musically any reason
they should. French Baroque manners and sentiments are not
being interpreted; elements or energies of forms are.
The sleight-of-hand kind of wit in the dancing is a part of that
"interpretation." You see a dancer rushing at top speed, stop
sharp in a pose. The pose continues the sense of her rush. But
the equilibrium of it is a trap, a dead end. To move ahead, she
will have to retract and scrounge out. She doesn't, she holds the
pose. And out of it, effortlessly, with a grace like Houdini's, she
darts away. The trap has opened in an unforeseen direction, as
music might by a surprising modulation. At times in Agon you
see the dancer buoyantly spring such traps at almost every step.
Or take the canonic imitations. At times a dancer begins a com¬
plex phrase bristling with accents aqd a second dancer leaping
up and twisting back an eighth note later repeats it, then sud¬
denly passes a quarter note ahead. The dissonance between them
doesn't blur; if you follow it, you feel the contradictory lift of the
double image put in doubt where the floor is. Or else you see a
phrase of dance rhythm include a brief representational gesture,
and the gesture's alien impetus and weight—the "false note" of
it—make the momentum of the rhythm more vividly exact.
These classic dissonances (and others you see) Agon fantastically
extends. The wit isn't the device, it is the surprise of the quick
lift you feel at that point. It relates to the atonal harmonies of the
score—atonal harmonies that make the rhythmic momentum of
the music more vividly exact.
At times you catch a kind of dissonant harmony in the image
of a step. The explosive thrust of a big classic step has been deep¬
ened, speeded up, forced out farther, but the mollifying motions
of the same step have been pared down. In a big step in which
 EDWIN DENBY 453

the aggressive leg action is normally cushioned by mildly

rounded elbows the cushioning has been pared down to mildly
rounded palms. The conciliatory transitions have been dropped.
So have the transitional small steps. Small steps do not lead up
to and down from big ones. They act in opposition to big ones,
and often stress their opposition by a contrariness.
The patterns appear and vanish with an unpredictable sud¬
denness. Like the steps, their forms would be traditional except
for the odd shift of stress and compactness of energy. The steps
and the patterns recall those of Baroque dancing much as the
music recalls its Baroque antecedents—that is, as absurdly as a
current Harvard student recalls a Baroque one. Of course, one
recognizes the relation.
Agon shifts traditional actions to an off-balance balance on
which they swiftly veer. But each move, large or small, is
extended at top pitch. Nothing is retracted. The ardent exposure
is that of a grace way out on a limb.
The first move the dancers make is a counteraccent to the
score. Phrase by phrase, the dancers make a counterrhythm to
the rhythm of the music. Each rhythm is equally decisive and
surprising, equally spontaneous. The unusualness of their
resources is sumptuous, like a magnificent imaginative weight.
One follows the sweep of both by a fantastic lift one feels. The
Balanchinian buoyancy of impetus keeps one open to the vividly
changeable Stravinskian pressure of pulse and to its momentum.
The emotion is that of scale. Against an enormous background
one sees detached for an instant, the hidden grace of the dancer's
individual move, a chance event that passes with a small smile
and a musical sound forever into nowhere.
(1957)
454 DANCE CRITICISM

EDWIN DENBY
A BALANCHINE
MASTERPIECE
(CONCERTO BAROCCO)

Concerto Barocco, the Balanchine novelty of the current Monte

Carlo season at the Center, is an unpretentious and good-tem¬
pered little ballet and it is also the masterpiece of a master cho¬
reographer. It has only eleven dancers; it is merely straight danc¬
ing to music—no sex story, no period angle, no violence. It does
not seem to be trying to win your interest, but before you know
it it has absorbed your attention and doesn't let it go. It has
power of rhythm and flow; in a wealth of figuration it is every¬
where transparent, fresh, graceful and noble; and its adagio sec¬
tion is peculiarly beautiful.
Concerto Barocco was recognized as a masterpiece at once when
it was shown here in dress rehearsal four years ago by Lincoln
Kirstein's American Ballet. It had just been created then for the
Rockefeller-sponsored South American tour of that company.
And though this ballet tour has recently been spoken of as one
of Mr. Rockefeller's inter-American mistakes, as a ballet critic I
can say that in showing Concerto Barocco, he was showing our
neighbors choreography of the best quality in the world—show¬
ing a United States product that no country of western Europe
could have equaled. A mistake such as that does anyone honor.
It is a pleasure to report that the Monte Carlo production of
Barocco is excellent both in the dancing on stage and in the play¬
ing in the orchestra pit. Unfortunately though, the piece has in
the present production been given a backdrop of meager, dirty
blue and a set of harsh black bathing suits for the charming girls.
Meagerness and harshness are not in its spirit; some of the won¬
derful clarity in its spacing is dimmed; and in so poverty-struck
a frame, the rich title of the ballet strikes one as absurd.
But Concerto Barocco comes by its fancy title quite honestly. The
name might lead you to expect an evocation of Baroque dancing
or Baroque mannerisms; still what the title actually promises is a
Baroque concerto, and this is just what you get. Balanchine has
set his ballet so happily to Bach's Concerto for Two Violins that the
 EDWIN DENBY 455

score may be called his subject matter. The style of the dance is
pure classic ballet of today, and the steps themselves follow the
notes now strictly, now freely. But in its vigorous dance rhythm,
its long-linked phrases, its consistent drive and sovereign artic¬
ulation, Concerto Barocco corresponds brilliantly to this master¬
piece of Baroque music.
The correspondence of eye and ear is at its most surprising in
the poignant adagio movement. At the climax, for instance,
against a background of chorus that suggests the look of trees in
the wind before a storm breaks, the ballerina, with limbs pow¬
erfully outspread, is lifted by her male partner, lifted repeatedly
in narrowing arcs higher and higher. Then at the culminating
phrase, from her greatest height he very slowly lowers her. You
watch her body slowly descend, her foot and leg pointing stiffly
downward, till her toe reaches the floor and she rests her full
weight at last on this single sharp point and pauses. It has the
effect at that moment of a deliberate and powerful plunge into a
wound, and the emotion of it answers strangely to the musical
stress. And (as another example) the final adagio figure before
the coda, the ballerina being slid upstage in two or three swoops
that dip down and rise a moment into an extension in second—
like a receding cry—creates another image that corresponds viv¬
idly to the weight of the musical passage. But these "emotional"
figures are strictly formal as dance inventions. They require no
miming in execution to make them expressive, just as the violin
parts call for no special schmalz. And this modesty of stage pres¬
ence combined with effects so strong and assured gives one a
sense of lyric grandeur.
The adagio section is the only movement with a lyric expres¬
sion. The introductory vivace is rather like a dance of triumph,
strong, quick and square; while the concluding allegro is livelier
and friendlier, with touches of syncopated fun and sportive jig¬
ging. Both these sections have sharply cut rhythms, a powerful
onward drive and a diamond-like sparkle in their evolutions.
There are, for instance, many lightning shifts in the arm posi¬
tions and yet the pulse of the dance is so sure its complexity
never looks elaborate. The ten girls who execute the little chorus
and the two girl soloists are precise and quick and their grace is
wonderfully natural. They are all so earnestly busy dancing, they
seem more than ever charmingly young, and their youth gives
an innocent animal sweetness to their handsome deportment.

(1945)
456 DANCE CRITICISM

DEBORAH JOWITT
MONUMENTAL MARTHA

As a choreographer, Martha Graham is also a brilliant arche¬

ologist. Or is it psychologist? At any rate, during her long career,
she has been adept at exposing famous old scars of the Western
world and making them bleed significantly.
Paradoxically, although we consider her one of the creators of
"American Modern Dance," she has made comparatively few
dances with specifically American subject matter or themes: and
her extraordinary movement vocabulary developed, it seems to
me, not only from her own motor impulses, but from shrewd
borrowings from the dance styles of other, more ancient cul¬
tures. Her work provides an object lesson in the uses of the past,
for her style has never looked eclectic, has never looked any¬
thing but authentic and wildly original.
This isn't the serious article that ought to be written on the
evolution of Graham's style. I think I'm in the business of throw¬
ing out teasers. Martha Graham began to work with Ruth St.
Denis and Ted Shawn in 1916 and stayed with the Denishawn
Company until 1923. (In 1919 she got her first big part—as the
fierce heroine of Shawn's Aztec ballet, "Xochitl.") Seven years of
Denishawn. The influence had to be profound; Graham utilized
it profoundly.
St. Denis and Shawn were interested in exotic genre pieces—
evocations of various oriental, archaic and primitive styles, or
what they imagined these styles to be. (In spite of their earnest
research, I suspect that they viewed even the American Indian
exotically or, at any rate, romantically.) Many of Graham's own
early dances—which she has since denounced in print—seem to
have been little antique studies. But as early as the late twenties,
she began her important process of exploration, assimilation and
transformation.
For one series of works, among which is the 1931 masterpiece,
"Primitive Mysteries," she created a "primitive" style based in
part on the straight, narrow look of American Indian dancing.
This early Graham style had the purity of an earth-sky rite, with
its rooted look, pounding feet, stiffly vertical posture, arms that
branched occasionally into angular gestures. Austere, hopeful.
 DEBORAH JOWITT 457

unambiguous dancing that reflected her ruthless asceticism and

her desire to purge dance of all trivialities of movement. Graham
has returned occasionally to elements of this style—especially
for male figures like the Christ in "El Penitente," the Creature of
Fear in "Errand into the Maze," the Revivalist in "Appalachian
Spring." Among other things, it conveniently turns men into liv¬
ing phallic pillars.
Graham also utilized—beginning I'm not sure when—features
of the so-called "archaic" style derived from Egyptian friezes.
Perhaps she liked this style originally for the simple strength of
its designs. But, as performed by a living human body, the arti¬
ficial stance—feet walking in one direction while the upper
body twists open against that base—can easily become, and
eventually did for Graham, a metaphor for a kind of ardent
ambivalence. She kept the twist, increased it, bent the body in
several places, tipped it slightly off center, until in her famous
fall sequences, she arrived at a position in which the arms
opened in one direction, while the knees remained pressed
together, hips averted from the focus of the reaching arms. An
agonized and somehow reticent posture and one ideally suited
for the dire predicaments of those Greek heroines she dealt with
from the late forties on, when she began to become the unhappy
high priestess of our collective unconscious.
Elements of various Far Eastern styles have also enriched Gra¬
ham's vocabulary, but these, too, she restructured. Frantic, beat¬
ing arm gestures or a bowed head made decorative Cambodian
knee-walks look anything but decorative. She added a twist to a
flex-footed attitude (also Cambodian or Siamese), so that her
head could look backward—away from where her feet were
going. A position reminiscent of Lord Shiva drawing his bow
(Indian Bharata Natyam) looks entirely different when the dan¬
cer's spine pulls away from the direction of the gesture. Tiny,
smooth Japanese steps; arm gestures like oppositely curving half
moons; hands bent stiffly at the knuckle: Graham pressed all
these oriental movements and poses into violence and ended up
with something startlingly expressive of all of our illustrious
Western dilemmas, like the polarity of spirit and flesh.
Just as some Eastern styles do, Graham made us aware of the
shape of the dancing body in still positions, but she linked those
poses together not with flowing transitional steps, but with tense
little runs, or by a process which involved unmaking the pose
for a second and then abruptly reforming it one step further on
in space. Although the long, breathing stillnesses that punctuate
458 DANCE CRITICISM

Graham dancing are very Eastern, little else about the dynamics
of her style relates to the controlled fluidity of much oriental
dancing. Graham, until very recently anyhow, wanted her move¬
ment performed with tremendous tension. One set of muscles
inhibited or restricted another. In many of her important works
of the forties and fifties, you felt the dancing shuddering along
in huge jerks, propelled by the violently contracting and expand¬
ing bodies. When I first saw Graham in 1955, 1 was stunned by
the whiplash of her spine; by the way, as Medea in “Cave of the
Heart/' she writhed sideways on her knees—simultaneously
devouring and vomiting a length of red yarn; by the elegantly
neurotic quivers that went through her Emily Bronte in “Deaths
and Entrances." What she did wasn't like any dancing that I
knew; it was more like a body language consisting solely of
epithets.
Conventions of Eastern theater have merged with gleanings
from Jung, Einstein and cinema in Graham's art. In the course of
one dance sequence, characters can jump back and forth in
time—acting, meditating on the results of that action, expressing
their feelings in relation to it. They can be both narrators and
protagonists. Two people can portray one or one portray two.
Everyone can be her own grandma. In “Seraphic Dialogue,"
three aspects of Joan of Arc wait, immobile as decor, for an ago¬
nized fourth Joan-who-remembers to call them to life. Symbolic
props not only create devastating images—think of the vast red
cloak in “Clytemnestra" which spreads like blood over every¬
thing—but also free Graham from the anathema (to her) of
impressionism. In “Dark Meadow," for example, a little branch
pops out from a pillar, and we know it's spring and don't need
anyone being a flower, or even smelling the air. The dancers can
get on with the business of peopling that spring.
Recent Graham works have often approached a kind of exoti¬
cism, almost as if the style were reflecting a morbid nostalgia for
Graham's own lost-dance-power, or else as if the physical weak¬
ness that comes with age had imparted a flabbiness to her dances
that she was too overwrought to notice. I don't know how else
to explain the voluptuous profusion of movement, the beautiful,
limber, half-naked dancers sinking into the movement phrases
as into a warm bath, the absence of the old percussive force.
Sometimes things looked pretty, dreamlike, absentminded;
sometimes wilfully decadent. And she herself remained on stage
at the heart of many of her compositions, portraying any number
of unhappy ladies remembering their flaming pasts. The works
 ARLENE CROCE 459

had to be shaped around this almost immobile central figure,

whose brave attitudes had no muscle power behind them, who
seemed driven by a blaze of nerves.
Now in her 70's, Martha Graham has finally retired as a dan¬
cer. But other dancers have taken her roles successfully before
and will again. (Mary Hinkson and Pearl Lang will alternate in
the title role in the revival of “Clytemnestra.") Let's hope, self¬
ishly, that she reconstructs some of her great works for us. Per¬
haps too, through the act of retiring as a dancer, of reaffirming
herself as a choreographer, she can again make works for the
company that will have the vitality of “Diversion of Angels" or
“Canticle for Innocent Comedians."
I hope she outlasts her imitators.
Goodbye Martha. And welcome back.

(1973)

ARLENE CROCE
MOMENTOUS
(THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS)

A masterpiece by definition transcends its time, but even mas¬

terpieces are created in response to some need of the moment.
Perhaps it would be more true to say that a masterpiece doesn't
so much transcend its time as perpetuate it; it keeps its moment
alive. In The Four Temperaments, revived at the New York City
Ballet after some years out of repertory, the moment is lumi¬
nously there. In Danses Concertantes, the moment eludes me.
Although Eugene Berman's frontcloth says 1944, the program
says “New choreography by George Balanchine," and what Bal¬
anchine in part created and in part reconstructed for his revival
in 1972 doesn't add up to a major work either of the forties or of
the seventies. To read about the original Danses Concertantes,
which starred Alexandra Danilova and Frederic Franklin with
the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, is to anticipate a joyous tease of
a ballet—modest, light, and playful. The new Danses Concertantes
460 DANCE CRITICISM

is clearly modest, but it's also remote and sourish, and the Ber¬
man decor, much praised in its day, is something of a shock. (At
the last performance of the ballet's run this season, the unac¬
countably gloomy backdrop had been removed.) Of the pas de
deux for the two stars, I can only assume that it has been entirely
rechoreographed, and indifferent casting from 1972 onward
hasn't helped me see what Edwin Denby in 1944 described as a
"happy flirtation." The much improved Robert Weiss and the
highly promising Daniel Duell both danced the man's role this
season, but neither as yet has the impact of a star or the quality
that Denby said Franklin projected in the part—"the fatuousness
of a happy male." Even if they'd had those things, that's still only
one half of a flirtation.
Yet if there is a time capsule embedded in this remade Danses
Concertantes, I would guess it to be the third pas de trois (which
Berman dressed in lavender). With one man supporting two
storklegged women in double arabesques penchees, it has the
robust chic and the rippling erotic tension we associate with
high-style Balanchine, and it has also a kind of systematic visual
punning, an intertwining of echoes and cross-references, that
distinguishes his greatest work of the forties. What a monumen¬
tal decade it was! Balanchine by then was established in America,
but not solidly established; from Concerto Barocco and Ballet Impe¬
rial on through The Four Temperaments to Theme and Variations and
Symphony in C he is on the attack. His objective: to make plain to
American audiences the dynamics of classical style. In each of
these ballets, the dancing grows from simple to complex struc¬
tures, and every stage of growth is consequentially related to
every other. It is partly because of their structural logic that his
ballets make such great sense—or such vivid nonsense—to us
years after they were completed, but it's also because such logic
isn't the featured attraction; it's only the means by which a par¬
ticular kind of entertainment is elucidated. What is featured is
human variety.
This is true even of The Four Temperaments, one of the earliest
works in which the elements of logic are arrayed in a form so
brilliantly consequential that they nearly become the whole
show. The relation between the continuity of the piece and its
subject, which is the four varieties of human temperament
(melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric), is truly a magical
one, consisting of a dance logic Balanchine has made look
uniquely ritualistic. It isn't ritualistic in an exotic sense, it is rit¬
ual achieved by the most radical exposure of classical style Bal-
 ARLENE CROCE 461

anchine has provided to date. The Four Temperaments, created in

1946, marks one of Balanchine's several "beginnings," and, like
Apollo, his first collaboration with Stravinsky, and Serenade, his
first ballet for American dancers, it is a messianic work, which
conveys to this day the sense of a brilliant and bold new under¬
standing. Hindemith's score, subtitled "Theme with Four Varia¬
tions (According to the Four Temperaments) for String Orchestra
and Piano," was written to Balanchine's commission in 1940, but
it was not until the formation of Ballet Society, following the
Second World War, that Balanchine composed his choreography.
After years of working on Broadway, in Hollywood, and for bal¬
let organizations not his own, he was again in charge of a com¬
pany, and in his first ballet for Ballet Society (the direct prede¬
cessor of the New York City Ballet) he made a fresh start,
reestablishing the bases and the directions of American dance.
Nowadays, The Four Temperaments (carelessly billed without the
The, as if there could be more than four) doesn't appear novel in
the way it did to observers of that time; its "distortions" and
"angularities" have been absorbed into one important stream of
Balanchine ballet and have been imitated the world over. But its
style, in both root and blossom, is so consistent and so consis¬
tently keen to the eye, and the scale on which it flowers is so
active in its leaps from tiny to enormous and back again, that one
follows the progress of the ballet in wonder; it never fails to sur¬
prise and to refresh, and so it is new every time.
Going back to basics in 1946, Balanchine concentrated his
attention equally on the smallest details and the largest resources
of classical dance and on making transitions from one to the
other clearer, perhaps, than they'd ever been before. When, in
the opening statement of the ballet—the first part of the
Theme—we see a girl, supported on her points, turning from
side to side and transferring her weight from one foot to the
other as she turns, we see her do it with a finicky grace: she lifts
and lowers the free foot, curls it around the standing leg, and
carefully flexes it before arching to full point. We see, in short, a
foot becoming a point—nature being touched to artificial life.
The detail looms for an instant, then quickly takes its place in
the grand scheme of the ballet. The Theme is full of elementary
particles, jostling, caroming, crisscrossing space in strokes that
define the boundaries of the territory Balanchine will invade. In
the Theme's second statement (there are three such statements,
each a pas de deux), the side-to-side turns have become full rev¬
olutions, rapid finger-turns marked off by the girl's point as it
462 DANCE CRITICISM

taps the floor. In the third statement, the finger-turns are taken
in deep plie with one foot held off the ground in passe position.
The weight on that one supporting point looks crushing, but, as
we have seen, there is something about a woman's point that
makes it not a foot—that makes it a sign. The image created by
the third girl as she is spun is blithe, even comical; could Bal¬
anchine have been thinking of the bass fiddle the forties jazz
player spins after a chorus of hot licks?
The developing sense of the passages I've cited is analogous to
the process that takes place in the molding of a classical dancer's
body. The "story" of The Four Temperaments is precisely that
story—the subjection of persons to a process and their re-emer¬
gence as human archetypes—but these citations may make it
seem as if that process happened all in closeup, and if that were
true we would be in a crazy man's world. The world of The Four
Temperaments is wide and swarming with possibilities, yet if we
could pass the choreography through a computer to see how
many core gestures there actually are, there would probably not
be more than six—maybe eight. Balanchine has built a large and
dense composition on a handful of cellular motifs, and it's this
economy that allows us to perceive the ballet and survive it, too.
There are gestures that seem to cluster in family relationships
and that recur subtly transformed. How many elaborations are
there on grand battement en balancoire? How many derivations
from, adaptations of, combinations with? Some of these we see
clearly, others hang just at the edge of vision. There are gestures
that do not change at all—they're like stabilizing props that keep
back the tide. One of these is the "Egyptian profile" with squared
elbows; another is the women's splits across the men's thighs
(but this, too, is an evolution—from the first pas de deux: the girl
dropped in a split to the floor and slid into the wings). Balan¬
chine's control of the action's subliminal force allows us the most
marvellous play in our minds; we're torn in an agony of delight
between what we see and what we think we see. Metaphoric
implications flash by, achieve their bright dazzle of suggestion,
and subside into simple bodily acts. The way the women stab the
floor with their points or hook their legs around men's waists or
grip their partners' wrists in lifts—images of insatiable hunger,
or functional necessities? Balanchine gives us a sharp pair of
spectacles to see with, but he occasionally fogs one of the lenses.
If he didn't we'd perish from the glare.
And that lens we see with—isn't it a moving lens, a camera
eye? Darting in for details, withdrawing to lofty heights, it views
 ARLENE CROCE 463

the dance from as many perspectives as the body can indicate in

its manifold placements within space. Space itself is liquefied,
and planes on which we observe the dance rise, tilt, descend.
Sometimes we are launched and roving in this liquid space;
sometimes we are pressed, riveted, to the floor. Out of these vol¬
atile perspectives drama is made. In the first variation (Melan¬
cholic), we have an expansive field of vision, but the solo dancer
does not seem to know how much room he has. His space is pen¬
etrated by menacing diagonals for the entries of the corps. The
corps is a few small girls, a small menace. But they are enough
to block and frustrate his every attempt to leap free. He leaps and
crumples to earth. We recognize this man: his personal weather
is always ceiling zero. (It's a nineteenth- rather than a seven¬
teenth-century conception of melancholy—Young Werther
rather than Robert Burton.) In the Sanguinic variation, for a vir¬
tuoso ballerina and her partner, the vista is wide, the ozone pure
and stinging. The ballerina is an allegro technician; she is also a
character. She enters and pauses. Her partner is expectant. But
she pauses and turns her gaze back toward the wings. For a
moment she seems to wear a demure black velvet neck ribbon,
and then she is bounding like a hare in the chase, an extrovert
after all. The Sanguinic variation takes us to the top of the world,
and twice we ride around its crest, its polar summit (a circuit of
lifts at half-height). In these two thrilling flights, the camera eye
pivots on the pinpoint of a spiral, once to end the trajectory, once
to start it. We see, as in some optical effect of old cinema, a scene
spread from the center of its compass, then respread in reverse.
The topography of the ballet shrinks in the Phlegmatic varia¬
tion to the smallest it has been since the Theme. Phlegmatic is
indolent, tropical, given to detached contemplation, to preten¬
tious vices. The male soloist languishes, and loves it. Slowly he
picks up invisible burdens, lifts them, and clothes himself in
their splendor. Slowly, self-crowned, he picks up his right foot
and studies it. His little dance with the corps includes cabalistic
gestures toward “his" floor, and he hovers close to the ground,
repeating his mumbo-jumbo (a syncopated time step) as if he
expected the ground to answer him. The confined, floor-con¬
scious world of Phlegmatic and Melancholic returns redeemed
in the next section, when Choleric, that angry goddess, executes
her climactic ronds de jambe par terre. Here we have the tradi¬
tional denouement of an eighteenth-century ballet (or such a
nineteenth-century one as Sylvia), in which Mount Olympus
hands down a judgment on the mess mortals have made. Choi-
464 DANCE CRITICISM

eric enters in a burst of fanfares and flourishes, kicking the air.

Her fury must be appeased, assimilated by the ballet's blood¬
stream. The entire cast collaborates in the process. Key motifs are
recapitulated in tempi that charge them with new vitality. We
are racing toward the finality of a decision, and then it comes.
Those ronds de jambe are a space- and air-clearing gesture. Three
circles traced on the ground: it is the most wonderful of the bal¬
let's magic signs; the vastness of it incorporates all bodies into
one body, all worlds into one planet. After a silence in which
nobody moves, the great fugue of the finale begins its inexorable
massed attack. All the parts the ballet is made of are now seen at
once in a spectacle of grand-scale assimilation. Apotheosis. We
see a succession of sky-sweeping lifts; we see a runway lined by
a chorus of grands battements turned to the four points of the
compass. The lifts travel down the runway and out as the curtain
falls.
As a conception for a ballet, the four temperaments, or humors
of the blood, have been realized with a profundity that doesn't
depend on the intellectual powers of either the audience or the
dancers. Balanchine has interpreted the subject in the form of a
dance fantasy, but never so literally or so schematically that we
need fear, if we miss one element, having missed all. We can
trust the ballet in performance because it is built of the things
that dancers as a race know about. No small part of its moral
beauty comes directly from the dancers, from their fastidious
concentration, their ghetto pride. Yet in The Four Temperaments,
as in every ballet, casting does make a difference. This season,
the perfect cast was Bart Cook in Melancholic, Merrill Ashley in
Sanguinic, Jean-Pierre Bonnefous in Phlegmatic, and Colleen
Neary in Choleric—all of them new to their roles, and all hitting
new highs in their careers. For dancers and audience alike, the
ballet represents the cleansing and healing that Robert Frost
speaks of in "Directive" when he says, "Here are your waters and
your watering place./Drink and be whole again beyond
confusion."

(1975)
 ARLENE CROCE 465

ARLENE CROCE
JOFFREY JAZZ
(DEUCE COUPE)

As its name indicates. Deuce Coupe is a vehicle for two compa¬

nies, and as a joint presentation of Twyla Tharp's company and
the City Center Joffrey Ballet it was the hit of the entire spring
season. Now it's back, in repertory, with much the same cast as
before (a very smiley Nancy Ichino has gone in for Starr Danias,
and there are one or two other minor replacements) and in even
better performance condition. The audience loves it; I love it. But
Deuce Coupe is more than a big hit, more than the best thing the
Joffrey Ballet has ever done—it's the outstanding accomplish¬
ment to date of the ballet year.
For excitement and originality, none of the new works by
major choreographers compare with it—not even Merce Cun¬
ningham's Changing Steps, which was included in a series of
Events given last March at the Brooklyn Academy. I say "not
even Cunningham" because there may well be a genealogical
link between him and Twyla Tharp. I won't attempt to trace
Twyla Tharp's line of descent—she seems to have absorbed
something from nearly everybody who moves well—but, like
Cunningham, she is routinely classified as an "avant-garde" cho¬
reographer, and only a few years ago she was one of those cho¬
reographers who were working without music and in nonthe¬
atrical and open spaces—either out-of-doors or in museums and
gyms. The only element that she did not eliminate was dancing
itself, and in this she was unique—defying the exponents of
nondance and antidance. The way she danced was unique, too.
The open-space movement in choreography goes on, and Twyla
Tharp now has her imitators, but at that time nothing like her
had ever been seen before. The finest of the post-Cunningham
generation of choreographers, up until Deuce Coupe, she was
thought to be also the most forbiddingly idiosyncratic. Even
when, with her own small company, she started choreographing
in more conventional surroundings to eighteenth-century music
and to jazz, the burn of her intensely personal style didn't wear
off, and her dancers seemed to be moved by a form of private
466 DANCE CRITICISM

communication which made them unlike any other dancers that

one could see. I believe that the dances she has done for them—
especially the great jazz ballets Eight Jelly Rolls and The Bix Pieces
and The Raggedy Dances—are her best work. But Deuce Coupe is a
good work, too. It isn't a great ballet, but it fills to abundance
every need it was meant to fill, and, as far as ballet audiences are
concerned, nothing like it has ever been seen before, either.
Deuce Coupe is a pop ballet and a great gift to the Joffrey com¬
pany. Since 1968, when Robert Joffrey put his company on the
cover of Time with a mixed-media/rock ballet called Astarte, it
has been polishing its reputation as America's great swinging
company. This is one half of the Joffrey company's Janus profile;
the other is the image of custodian of modern-day classics from
the international repertory. But the Joffrey's dual policy
stretched the capacities of its dancers too far and broke them.
Dancers live and progress on roles that are created for them. All
those slick, empty, and violent ballets by Gerald Arpino that
slammed the audience with the Dionysian ecstasy of dance or
appealed to the audience's political convictions and hunger for
"relevance" certainly did contribute to the shaping of a style, but
it was a style that rendered Joffrey dancers unfit for anything
better. As classical dancers, the Joffreys have no touch; they look
squat, badly placed, hectic, and unmusical. When Joffrey, who
has excellent taste in non-Joffrey ballets, imports a classic Danish
ballet like Konservatoriet, his dancers can hardly get through it.
At the moment, they are having serious problems with a pro¬
duction of Frederick Ashton's The Djeam. (What dream is this?
Their tendency to broaden and coarsen is like a bad dream of
American ballet.) After seven years in residence at the City Cen¬
ter, the company had grown so unattractive that serious dance
lovers stopped attending everything but the classic revivals—the
choices were always interesting, even if the actual performances
were not. What this withdrawal of attention meant was that the
structure by which the company made its dancers grow was
dead. Generally speaking, you can't feed dancers on imports and
revivals. Imports and revivals please audiences; they seldom
help the dancer, who can't be at his best in somebody else's old
part.
It would be too much to claim that Deuce Coupe has saved the
Joffrey, but it does give the dancers something genuine to
respond to—something that's exactly suited to their talents—
and it tidies up the company's self-image. It's just as if Twyla
Tharp had said, "So you want pop? I'll give you pop," but what
 ARLENE CROCE 467

she has given the Joffrey is so close to the real thing that part of
the audience—the part that has decided what contemporary,
orgiastic, youth-spirited, with-it ballet looks like—is taken by
surprise. Deuce Coupe astounds by the utter unfamiliarity of
familiar things. Its music is a tape collage of fourteen Beach Boys
hits, starting with "Little Deuce Coupe" and ending with "Cud¬
dle Up"—probably the last jukebox pop that was pop, and not
Pop Art. Its decor is spray-can graffiti applied to a rolling back¬
cloth while the ballet is in progress. And its dancing—that
which gives it life and joy—is a peculiar Tharpian combination
of classical ballet and the juvenile social dancing of the past
decade. The ballet steps are like a primitive's-eye view of classi¬
cal style, fascinating in their plainness and angularity, and the
social dances are rich with crazy, campily corny suggestion. Nei¬
ther type of dancing is what it would be in the hands of any
other choreographer, and yet neither is what it ordinarily
appears to be in its raw state—in the classroom, or in school
gyms, ballrooms, and discotheques. Whatever the Tharp eye
sees, it changes. (Even the graffiti, with their characteristic stilted
lines, curly serifs, and locked edges, look as it they were
intended for Deuce Coupe. And, oh. New York! Isn't it nice to see
the stuff in a place where it belongs?) As a result, the whole bal¬
let has this low-contrast choreographic weave that knits its sep¬
arate scenes together, but there's so much action going on, and
the action is so complicated and delicately timed, that the effect
is never one of monotony. (There is one moment when the ballet
seems to slump. At the end of "Don't Go Near the Water," we
get one more roiling group instead of something we haven't
seen before.) This complexity and delicacy can be undervalued.
Most of the time in Deuce Coupe, the dancers appear to be behav¬
ing with such realism that we could believe they were making it
up as they went along. People who don't often go to the ballet
might recognize the validity of these dances at once and wonder
why such a fuss was being made over them. People who go more
regularly fall into the trap of their expectations, and Deuce Coupe
looks formless to them—just taken off the street and thrown onto
the stage. Actually, no one has put contemporary American pop¬
ular dancing of quite this intensity and freedom on the stage
before, and I am sure no one but Twyla Tharp would have
known how to make these dances legible in the theatre. A
hundred kids going berserk at a school prom is a powerful but
not necessarily a theatrical spectacle. To be realized on the stage,
such potency has to be objectified; the material has to be changed
468 DANCE CRITICISM

and heightened. In the process, it becomes beautiful, but

"beauty" isn't the choreographer's object—clarity is. And Twyla
Tharp does something that people dancing for recreation don't
do: she makes a theatrical translation of the music. In "How She
Boogalooed It," she doesn't give us the Boogaloo—she gives us
something that looks more like snake dancing at top speed.
"Alley Oop," "Take a Load Off Your Feet," "Long Tall Texan,"
and "Catch a Wave" are based as much on the lyrics as on the
music, and include several obvious, Broadway-style jokes. In
"Papa Ooh Mau Mau," the dancers mime smoking pot and freak¬
ing out. When the music isn't interesting enough, it's speeded
up or two tracks are run side by side. We do get a long way from
the school prom. The spontaneity and naturalness of the dances
are a marvelous illusion, a secret of professional style. Everyone
has had the experience in the theatre of the happy occurrence—
some fantastically accurate inflection or bit of punctuation, so
like a moment in life we think it couldn't happen again. Twyla
Tharp's choreography is full of such moments that do happen
again. In Deuce Coupe, I think of Nina Wiener's freak-out or
Glenn White landing in fifth position right on the poiv! of the
downbeat in "Wouldn't It Be Nice." (The surprise is partly that
you hadn't seen him jump.)
Deuce Coupe makes rather a special point of ballet versus pop
dancing. In this, it's an extension of The Bix Pieces, which was
composed two years ago for the Tharp company's formal Paris
debut. (Its most recent performances took place this past summer
at Jacob's Pillow and a few weeks ago on the CBS Sunday-morn¬
ing program Camera Three.) The Bix Pieces, named for Bix Beider¬
becke, is based on jazz-band dance music of the 1920's. The danc¬
ing is a moody synthesis of the tap-toe-baton-acrobatic routines
that millions of American children have been heirs to, and in the
course of the work a narrator informs us, "The fundamental con¬
cepts can produce infinite combinations and appearances. For
example, 'slap, ball, change' is 'chasse' in ballet, or 'slap'
('tendu'), 'ball' ('pique'), 'change' ('plie')." This is demonstrated,
and the narrator goes on to say, "So, you see, all things can be
profoundly and invisibly related, exactly and not at all the
same." Deuce Coupe deals in a similar technical paradox—some¬
times at too great a length. For example, it has a ballerina (Erika
Goodman) performing a classical solo virtually all through the
piece. Sometimes she's alone onstage and sometimes she's the
eye of the hurricane, but she never stops dancing, and since
there are other ballet dancers on the stage, I have sometimes
 ARLENE CROCE 469

wondered why she's there. She is eternal, the others are tem¬
poral? But I have never wished Miss Goodman off the stage
while watching her on it. I like what she does, and she's doing
it this season with unusual beauty. Erika Goodman is chubby and
neckless, with big legs that wave in disproportionately high
extensions. With her large-scale gesture and demonstrative
warmth, she's becoming a baby Struchkova. But, like most of the
Joffrey girls, she lacks something as a classical stylist, and her
role—a taxing one, which consists of the ballet vocabulary per¬
formed alphabetically—is so Tharpian in conception that it
really doesn't resemble classical ballet enchainements at all.
What we see in her random provocative movements is a parallel
to the dislocated, familiar-unfamiliar movements that dominate
the main action of the ballet. The two dance forms—ballet and
popular—remain technically distinguishable but become stylist¬
ically fused. It's a Tharpian fusion, and the didactic point of The
Bix Pieces disappears. All things are no longer so invisibly
related.
There's a sense in which Deuce Coupe would be better if the
Joffrey members of the cast were better classical dancers. Twyla
Tharp has asked a lyricism of them, and a precision of epaule-
ment, that they can't consistently supply. Yet in "Wouldn't It Be
Nice," the most exhilarating of the Beach Boys songs, the steps
are entirely classical, and this is the number I love best. From the
opening port de bras to the quietly held preparations in fifth—
held so long that when the jetes into attitude-front start popping
like molecules around the stage the pressure appears to blow
them into the air—there is a tender mystery to the dancing
which seems equal to the best of The Bix Pieces and to the best
classical ballet I know. Deuce Coupe makes the Joffrey dancers
look human (at the first performance I had trouble recognizing
most of them); it rescues them from the curse of pseudo ballet
and gives them back their natural grace of movement. They look
very much as they might have looked as children which is
right for the preteen, presexual world that the ballet invokes—
and they are magically divested of their customary hard-sell per¬
forming style. Besides Miss Goodman and Mr. White, the Joffrey
dancers who shine most vividly in this new light are (in order
of their appearance): Rebecca Wright, William Whitener, Beatriz
Rodriguez, Larry Grenier, Gary Chryst, Donna Co wen, and
Eileen Brady.
As for the Tharp dancers, they always do what comes natu¬
rally. Their stage personalities are so alive that we can follow
470 DANCE CRITICISM

them from ballet to ballet like characters in the Sunday comics.

Twyla Tharp herself, with her sorrowful-baleful semihallucin-
ated stare, is the Krazy Kat of the bunch. Sara Rudner is the Mys¬
terious Lady (her Deuce Coupe solo "Got to Know the Woman" is
ironically seductive, like an adolescent's vision of sexuality), and
Rose Marie Wright, the "Long Tall Texan," has an instantaneous
impact on the audience—it applauds her on sight. Kenneth
Rinker, the lone male, is a brotherly, somewhat taciturn cordu-
roy-cap type, and the two other girls, Isabel Garcia-Lorca and
Nina Wiener, have a fashion-model elegance. The group dancing
of the Tharp company suggests a federation of individuals, and
you can see the same kind of freedom in the group dancing of
Deuce Coupe. But the restlessness and pain of American children
are in it, too. The end of the ballet—the long, slow crescendo of
tossing arms, lunges in pile, and backward bourrees on point,
with here and there a fall to the floor—is half truth, half myth.
It sums up a kind of schmaltzy romanticism that young people
love to wrap themselves in, and it is absolutely true to our expe¬
rience of their world. The crescendo is ingeniously stage-man¬
aged, gaining might not by mass but by intensity, like a hum that
gets louder, and it ends in a masterstroke—a freeze-pose black¬
out into silhouette. The cliche is the only possible schmaltz-cli¬
max. Then, gradually, it loosens. Miss Goodman takes a few hops
forward, and Deuce Coupe continues somewhere in space as the
curtain falls.
Deuce Coupe is fresh and exciting because it is closer to its
source in popular culture than most pop or "jazz" ballets ever
care to be. The music is the kind of music for which a dance
idiom already exists. The choreography is in part a parody of that
idiom, but it is authentic. In two other ballets in the Joffrey rep¬
ertory, Eliot Feld's Jive and Arpino's Trinity, the music is concert-
hall jazz and evangelical rock, respectively: two forms for which
the dancing has to be invented, and in both ballets the chore¬
ography is more synthetic than the music. Jive is set to Morton
Gould's "Derivations for Clarinet and Jazz Band"—the same
score that Balanchine used for a piece called Clarinade, which is
remembered solely because it was the first ballet he created at
Lincoln Center. The music doesn't work any better for Feld, who
transforms it into a tight, cheerless, and ambivalent pastiche of
the fifties, the period of Jerome Robbins wearing sneakers. It
ends with the dancers lurching at the audience and crying
"Jive!" Jive (a forties title) represents a good choreographer
working below his form. Trinity represents a bad choreographer
 ARLENE CROCE 471

working at the very top of his. The work is all big jumps and
running lifts, and it is consumed with the fake piety of the
beads-and-amulets era. At the end, the dancers place peace can¬
dles all over the stage. In the context of these two ballets, and of
the Joffrey repertory generally. Deuce Coupe is a masterpiece. Not
only is it musically sound and poetically convincing—its emo¬
tions are the kind that make civilized contact in the theatre pos¬
sible. It doesn't bludgeon us for a response; when it throws out
a manipulative net, it does so with a grin. It doesn't pretend that
we share the life it depicts, or make us feel that we should. It is
completely objective, but, beyond that (Jive is objective, too, and
dead), it respects its material. Deuce Coupe is an adult ballet about
kids.
(1973)
 VII
Dance and Society

Paul Valery's definition of dance—useful though it may be in

helping us to distinguish dance from similar-looking activities
in nature—is nonetheless limiting in at least one respect: it
excludes all non-theatrical dances, those ritualistic and social
dances which have historically performed a variety of practical
functions. These non-theatrical dances are often the creation of
many individuals, whose contributions are made anonymously
over long periods of time. Unlike contemporary works which
may reflect nothing more than the individual attitudes of their
choreographers, these non-theatrical dances are often viewed by
anthropologists and sociologists as sensitive cultural barometers
of the societies that produce them.
In the view of Havelock Ellis, famous as a sexologist and social
theorist, dance functions in all the major manifestations of
human life: religion, love, art, work, morals. For the primitive to
dance is to worship and pray, and to take part in controlling the
world, including the social world. Among primitive people
dancing is a way of courting and constitutes "a novitiate for
love." Since it encourages sexual selection it may also be viewed
as a kind of unconscious eugenics that aids the highest devel¬
opment of the race. In the modern world dancing is known
mainly as a profession, an amusement, and an art. But at all times
dancing has been customary and has decisively influenced the

473
474 DANCE AND SOCIETY

socializing and moralizing of the species. Ellis thinks that savage

dancers stirred by a single influence exhibit a wonderful unison
as they fuse into a characteristic style. He is one of those cele¬
brants of primitive wholeness to whom we alluded in the Intro¬
duction to Section II. It is precisely this feeling of unity that
advocates of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk were attempting to
re-capture. Indeed, apart from war, dancing is the chief factor
making for social solidarity in primitive life. The value of dance
as a method of individual and national education was recognized
as civilization became increasingly self-conscious. In the Laws
Plato remarked that a good education includes knowing how to
dance and sing well. Ellis felt that this function of the dance was
no longer generally appreciated and that dance ought to figure
more prominently in a modern education.
For Ellis the ultimate significance of dancing lies in the fact
that it manifests a general rhythm which marks not only life, but
the entire universe as well. A notable manifestation of this view
was current among the Elizabethans who, according to the Shake¬
spearean scholar E. M. W. Tillyard, often pictured universal
order as a dance. The angels or saints dance to the music of
heaven as the planets and stars dance to the music of the spheres.
Social dances, in their original manifestations, often imitated
these heavenly movements, as did the court ballets of the six¬
teenth and seventeenth centuries, which adapted their intricate
floor patterns from the social dances of the period. Today, many
of these dances might strike us as purely formal, geometrical
configurations—no more "representational" than an elaborate
football halftime show. But in fact, they often enacted a version
of the cosmic drama that Tillyard describes. Earthly things dupli¬
cate these planetary dances and the dance is, in fact, the very
foundation of human civilization and of political and moral
order. Davies's long poem. Orchestra, which Tillyard discusses at
length, gives expression to this view and in it Queen Elizabeth
is seen as the central point in the dance pattern exhibited by her
court. As such she is the symbol and guarantor of order and nat¬
ural unity in a perilously poised social world.
Ellis noted the gradual transition from dancing as a sacred
function to dancing as an art or profession. The English scholar
of ancient Greek religion and art, Jane Harrison suggests, more
specifically, that in Athens it is the decay of religion, the loss of
faith in the magical efficacy of the Spring Rite, that provides the
impulse to art. So long as people believe that by excited dancing
they can induce the coming of spring and achieve the practical
 DANCE AND SOCIETY 475

end of guaranteeing their food supply and securing their lives,

ritual survives. But when this faith weakens, they drift away and
become mere spectators of a rite established by custom. The rite
dies, but its mould persists and, in the case of the dromenon of
Dionysus, it blossomed into drama. Art succeeds religion and
contemplation replaces action. This change is reflected in the
development of the Greek theatre. The orchestra with its chorus
of dancing worshippers yields in importance to the seats for
spectators which finally give their name “theatre" to the entire
structure. Our word "theatre," Harrison reminds us, is derived
from the Greek word theatron which means, literally, "seeing
place" (a place set aside for spectators). Ritual, by contrast, is a
more purely participatory activity. This linguistic connection
between our word "theatre" and the act of watching helps
explain why writers such as Stokes, Heppenstall, and Kirstein
refer to classical ballet as the quintessentially "theatrical" variety
of dance, the one most committed to complete "legibility."
Ross Wetzsteon, the Village Voice critic and editor, examines
ritual dancing and aesthetic contemplation from a contemporary
point of view. Reflecting on a performance of the Whirling Der¬
vishes in Austin, Texas, he wonders how the Dervishes can go
on performing their rituals for an eclectic and largely secular
audience. Will the spirit be ready at curtain time? Will they
achieve ecstasy at every performance? He also wonders what
access non-believers can have to an unfamiliar religious ritual
they witness for their ecumenical and aesthetic purposes. Can
one review the Pope performing the Mass? Is it relevant that
some New York dancers can whirl better than the Dervishes?
Wetzsteon reports that the Dervishes think that non-believers, as
well as believing non-participants, can share the ecstatic experi¬
ence: this dancing is not purely aesthetic in its effects.
The political functions and implications of the striptease are
examined by Roland Barthes, the late French critic who wrote
extensively about popular culture as well as about literary works.
He argues paradoxically that the dance which accompanies the
striptease is in no way erotic. Rather, it constitutes the last and
most efficient barrier to nudity, which in fact it hides. The social
role of the striptease is to inoculate the public with a touch of
Evil, the better to plunge it afterwards into a permanently
immune Moral Good.
Roger Copeland calls attention to the fact that the modern arts
have pursued the goal of minimalist self-purification. But he
argues that the arts cannot pursue what Ortega y Gasset called
476 DANCE AND SOCIETY

"dehumanization" or what Clement Greenberg called "self-crit¬

icism" forever. He thinks that at some point it becomes a purely
practical, if not an ideological or spiritual necessity, for art to
reestablish relations with the world and to reclaim human expe¬
rience. If art is to perform its traditional function it must rees¬
tablish its connection with the human body and with what John
Crowe Ransom called "the world's body." This is in fact what
dance and photography did in the 60's and 70's and it accounts
in large part for the immense popularity and prestige of these
arts in that period. Unlike those minimalist arts that progres¬
sively eliminated the human form, choreography like that of Bal¬
anchine's modernist ballets progressively reveals the human
form even as it pursues its minimalist goals.
In the essays we have discussed so far, the emphasis has been
on the social role and functions of dance, although Roland
Barthes also hints at the way in which French striptease reflects
French, and specifically French bourgeois, culture. In the
remaining essays the emphasis shifts decisively to the way dance
reflects the society in which it is created. As Ruth Katz, the Israeli
musicologist, suggests, the dance of the day is a good reflection
of the values of a given time and she writes of the moment after
the French Revolution, when "everyone" danced the waltz. In
her view the triumph of the waltz reflects the values of liberty
and equality that were celebrated by the Revolution as well as
the uncertainties that attended the new social dispensation. In
contrast to the social and geometrical formalities of its predeces¬
sor, the minuet, the waltz permitted individual variations and
interpretations. (For a fuller discussion of the social context of
the minuet, see Shirley Wynne's article "Complaisance, an Eigh¬
teenth-Century Cool," listed in the Bibliography.) The waltz
allowed different kinds of individuals and members of different
social classes to come together on an equalitarian basis. Katz
observes, however, that despite the new equalitarianism the
individual lost his sense of having a proper place in a predictable
society after the Revolution, and she finds this social factor
reflected in the new individualism and sense of self that char¬
acterized the post-revolutionary period. For Katz this aspect of
social experience finds expression in the "letting go" character¬
istic of the waltz, in the experience it gives of an "escape" from
reality through the thrilling dizziness of whirling one's way into
a world of sensuality.
It is generally conceded that dances like the minuet and the
waltz reflect the culture and sensibility of a particular time and
 DANCE AND SOCIETY 477

place. But writers on classical ballet have generally viewed it as

an international form of universal aesthetic validity. Joann Keal-
iinohomoku, an anthropologist of dance, rejects this claim and
the ethnocentricity that lies behind it. For her, ballet is simply
another form of ethnic dance. She also points out that many
apologists for ballet, and for Western dance more generally, have
a wholly inadequate conception of what they alternately
describe as folk dance, ethnic dance, or primitive dance. For
these are often not the manifestations of collective impulse or
inspiration, or the expression of unhistorical tribal unities that
writers like Ellis suppose. Certainly, there is no specific form or
quality that characterizes the primitive in dance. Kealiinoho-
moku subscribes to the cultural relativism that inspires most cul¬
tural anthropology, and calls for a more enlightened investiga¬
tion of non-Western dances and of the way they reflect the
cultural traditions of the societies in which they develop.
Elizabeth Kendall, the American social historian and dance
critic, shows how the birth of the Modern American Woman
gave rise to the first generation of American solo dancers, who,
in fact, became prime symbols of the new phenomenon. Kendall
notes that the New Woman appeared as America emerged in
world politics (and typically, the dancers' merits were first appre¬
ciated in Europe). Social reformers and feminists had been
attempting for decades to free women's bodies and minds
through spiritual and physical panaceas: dress reform, open air,
aesthetic exercise, artistic pursuits. Physical culture and art came
into vogue at the same time in the 1890's, and occupied women
in a country where women had more time, more money, and
more space to be individuals than in any other country at any
other time in history. In fact, "the physical" and "the artistic"
were the two realms in which the American woman's supposed
new capacities for self-expression were exercized. Dancing was
the synthesis of these two realms.
478 DANCE AND SOCIETY

HAVELOCK ELLIS
From THE DANCE OF LIFE

THE ART OF DANCING

ONE
Dancing and building are the two primary and essential arts.
The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express
themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or
architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the
person; and in the end they unite. Music, acting, poetry proceed
in the one mighty stream; sculpture, painting, all the arts of
design, in the other. There is no primary art outside these two
arts, for their origin is far earlier than man himself; and dancing
came first.1 *
That is one reason why dancing, however it may at times be
scorned by passing fashions, has a profound and eternal attrac¬
tion even for those one might suppose farthest from its influ¬
ence. The joyous beat of the feet of children, the cosmic play of
philosophers' thoughts rise and fall according to the same laws
of rhythm. If we are indifferent to the art of dancing, we have
failed to understand, not merely the supreme manifestation of
physical life, but also the supreme symbol of spiritual life.
The significance of dancing, in the wide sense, thus lies in the
fact that it is simply an intimate concrete appeal of a general
rhythm, that general rhythm which marks, not life only, but the
universe, if one may still be allowed so to name the sum of the
cosmic influences that reach us. We need not, indeed, go so far
as the planets or the stars and outline their ethereal dances. We
have but to stand on the seashore and watch the waves that beat
at our feet, to observe that at nearly regular intervals this seem¬
ingly monotonous rhythm is accentuated for several beats, so
that the waves are really dancing the measure of a tune. It need
surprise us not at all that rhythm, ever tending to be moulded
into a tune, should mark all the physical and spiritual manifes¬
tations of life. Dancing is the primitive expression alike of reli¬
gion and of love—of religion from the earliest human times we
know of and of love from a period long anterior to the coming
of man. The art of dancing, moreover, is intimately entwined
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 479

with all human tradition of war, of labour, of pleasure, of edu¬

cation, while some of the wisest philosophers and the most
ancient civilisations have regarded the dance as the pattern in
accordance with which the moral life of men must be woven. To
realise, therefore, what dancing means for mankind—the poig¬
nancy and the many-sidedness of its appeal—we must survey
the whole sweep of human life, both at its highest and at its
deepest moments.

TWO
"What do you dance?" When a man belonging to one branch
of the great Bantu division of mankind met a member of another,
said Livingstone, that was the question he asked. What a man
danced, that was his tribe, his social customs, his religion; for, as
an anthropologist has put it, "a savage does not preach his reli¬
gion, he dances it."
There are peoples in the world who have no secular dances,
only religious dances; and some investigators believe with Ger-
land that every dance was of religious origin. That view may
seem too extreme, even if we admit that some even of our mod¬
ern dances, like the waltz, may have been originally religious.
Even still (as Skene has shown among the Arabs and Swahili of
Africa) so various are dances and their functions among some
peoples that they cover the larger part of life. Yet we have to
remember that for primitive man there is no such thing as reli¬
gion apart from life, for religion covers everything. Dancing is a
magical operation for the attainment of real and important ends
of every kind. It was clearly of immense benefit to the individual
and to society, by imparting strength and adding organised har¬
mony. It seemed reasonable to suppose that it attained other ben¬
eficial ends, that were incalculable, for calling down blessings or
warding off misfortunes. We may conclude, with Wundt, that the
dance was, in the beginning, the expression of the whole man,
for the whole man was religious.2
Thus, among primitive peoples, religion being so large a part
of life, the dance inevitably becomes of supreme religious impor¬
tance. To dance was at once both to worship and to pray. Just as
we still find in our Prayer Books that there are divine services
for all the great fundamental acts of life,—for birth, for marriage,
for death,—as well as for the cosmic procession of the world as
marked by ecclesiastical festivals, and for the great catastrophes
of nature, such as droughts, so also it has ever been among prim-
480 DANCE AND SOCIETY

itive peoples. For all the solemn occasions of life, for bridals and
for funerals, for seed-time and for harvest, for war and for peace,
for all these things there were fitting dances. To-day we find reli¬
gious people who in church pray for rain or for the restoration
of their friends to health. Their forefathers also desired these
things, but, instead of praying for them, they danced for them
the fitting dance which tradition had handed down, and which
the chief or the medicine-man solemnly conducted. The gods
themselves danced, as the stars dance in the sky—so at least the
Mexicans, and we may be sure many other peoples, have held;
and to dance is therefore to imitate the gods, to work with them,
perhaps to persuade them to work in the direction of our own
desires. "Work for us!" is the song-refrain, expressed or implied,
of every religious dance. In the worship of solar deities in var¬
ious countries, it was customary to dance round the altar, as the
stars dance round the sun. Even in Europe the popular belief that
the sun dances on Easter Sunday has perhaps scarcely yet died
out. To dance is to take part in the cosmic control of the world.
Every sacred dionysian dance is an imitation of, the divine dance.
All religions, and not merely those of primitive character,
have been at the outset, and sometimes throughout, in some
measure saltatory. That was recognised even in the ancient
world by acute observers, like Lucian, who remarks in his essay
on dancing that "you cannot find a single ancient mystery in
which there is no dancing; in fact most people say of the devo¬
tees of the Mysteries that 'they dance them out/" This is so all
over the world. It is not more pronounced in early Christianity,
and among the ancient Hebrews who danced before the ark,
than among the Australian aborigines whose great corroborees
are religious dances conducted by the medicine-men with their
sacred staves in their hands. Every American Indian tribe seems
to have had its own religious dances, varied and elaborate, often
with a richness of meaning which the patient study of modern
investigators has but slowly revealed. The Shamans in the
remote steppes of Northern Siberia have their ecstatic religious
dances, and in modern Europe the Turkish dervishes—perhaps
of related stock—still dance in their cloisters similar ecstatic
dances, combined with song and prayer, as a regular part of
devotional service.
These religious dances, it may be observed, are sometimes
ecstatic, sometimes pantomimic. It is natural that this should be
so. By each road it is possible to penetrate towards the divine
mystery of the world. The auto-intoxication of rapturous move-
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 481

ment brings the devotees, for a while at least, into that self-for¬
getful union with the not-self which the mystic ever seeks. The
ecstatic Hindu dance in honour of the pre-Aryan hill god, after¬
wards Siva, became in time a great symbol, "the clearest image
of the activity of God," it has been called, "which any art or reli¬
gion can boast of."3 Pantomimic dances, on the other hand, with
their effort to heighten natural expression and to imitate natural
process, bring the dancers into the divine sphere of creation and
enable them to assist vicariously in the energy of the gods. The
dance thus becomes the presentation of a divine drama, the vital
reenactment of a sacred history, in which the worshipper is
enabled to play a real part.4 In this way ritual arises.
It is in this sphere—highly primitive as it is—of pantomimic
dancing crystallised in ritual, rather than in the sphere of ecstatic
dancing, that we may to-day in civilisation witness the survivals
of the dance in religion. The divine services of the American
Indian, said Lewis Morgan, took the form of "set dances, each
with its own name, songs, steps, and costume." At this point the
early Christian, worshipping the Divine Body, was able to join
in spiritual communion with the ancient Egyptian or the later
Japanese5 or the modern American Indian. They are all alike
privileged to enter, each in his own way, a sacred mystery, and
to participate in the sacrifice of a heavenly Mass.
What by some is considered to be the earliest known Christian
ritual—the "Hymn of Jesus" assigned to the second century—is
nothing but a sacred dance. Eusebius in the third century stated
that Philo's description of the worship of the Therapeuts agreed
at all points with Christian custom, and that meant the promi¬
nence of dancing, to which indeed Eusebius often refers in con¬
nection with Christian worship. It has been supposed by some
that the Christian Church was originally a theatre, the choir
being the raised stage, even the word "choir," it is argued, mean¬
ing an enclosed space for dancing. It is certain that at the Eucha¬
rist the faithful gesticulated with their hands, danced with their
feet, flung their bodies about. Chrysostom, who referred to this
behavior round the Holy Table at Antioch, only objected to
drunken excesses in connection with it; the custom itself he evi¬
dently regarded as traditional and right.
While the central function of Christian worship is a sacred
drama, a divine pantomime, the associations of Christianity and
dancing are by no means confined to the ritual of the Mass and
its later more attenuated transformations. The very idea of danc¬
ing had a sacred and mystic meaning to the early Christians, who
482 DANCE AND SOCIETY

had meditated profoundly on the text, "We have piped unto you
and ye have not danced." Origen prayed that above all things
there may be made operative in us the mystery "of the stars
dancing in Heaven for the salvation of the Universe." So that the
monks of the Cistercian Order, who in a later age worked for the
world more especially by praying for it ("orare est laborare"),
were engaged in the same task on earth as the stars in Heaven;
dancing and praying are the same thing. St. Basil, who was so
enamoured of natural things, described the angels dancing in
Heaven, and later the author of the "Dieta Salutis" (said to have
been St. Bonaventura), which is supposed to have influenced
Dante in assigning so large a place to dancing in the "Paradiso,"
described dancing as the occupation of the inmates of Heaven,
and Christ as the leader of the dance. Even in more modern times
an ancient Cornish carol sang of the life of Jesus as a dance, and
represented him as declaring that he died in order that man
"may come unto the general dance."6
This attitude could not fail to be reflected in practice. Genuine
dancing, not merely formalised and unrecognisable dancing,
such as the traditionalised Mass, must have been frequently
introduced in Christian worship in early times. Until a few cen¬
turies ago it remained not uncommon, and it even still persists
in remote corners of the Christian world. In English cathedrals
dancing went on until the fourteenth century. At Paris, Limoges,
and elsewhere in France, the priests danced in the choir at Easter
up to the seventeenth century, in Roussillon up to the eigh¬
teenth century. Roussillon is a Catalan province with Spanish
traditions, and it is in Spain, where dancing is a deeper and more
passionate impulse than elsewhere in Europe, that religious
dancing took firmest root and flourished longest. In the cathe¬
drals of Seville, Toledo, Valencia, and Jeres there was formerly
dancing, though it now only survives at a few special festivals in
the first.7 At Alaro in Mallorca, also at the present day, a dancing
company called Els Cosiers, on the festival of St. Roch, the patron
saint of the place, dance in the church in fanciful costumes with
tambourines, up to the steps of the high altar, immediately after
Mass, and then dance out of the church. In another part of the
Christian world, in the Abyssinian Church—an offshoot of the
Eastern Church—dancing is also said still to form part of the
worship.
Dancing, we may see throughout the world, has been so essen¬
tial, so fundamental, a part of all vital and undegenerate religion,
that, whenever a new religion appears, a religion of the spirit
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 483

and not merely an anaemic religion of the intellect, we should

still have to ask of it the question of the Bantu: "What do you
dance?"

THREE
Dancing is not only intimately associated with religion, it has
an equally intimate association with love. Here, indeed, the rela¬
tionship is even more primitive, for it is far older than man.
Dancing, said Lucian, is as old as love. Among insects and among
birds it may be said that dancing is often an essential part of love.
In courtship the male dances, sometimes in rivalry with other
males, in order to charm the female; then, after a short or long
interval, the female is aroused to share his ardour and join in the
dance; the final climax of the dance is the union of the lovers.
Among the mammals most nearly related to man, indeed, danc¬
ing is but little developed: their energies are more variously dif¬
fused, though a close observer of the apes. Dr. Louis Robinson,
has pointed out that the "spasmodic jerking of the chimpanzee's
feeble legs," pounding the partition of his cage, is the crude
motion out of which "the heavenly alchemy of evolution has
created the divine movements of Pavlova"; but it must be
remembered that the anthropoid apes are offshoots only from
the stock that produced Man, his cousins and not his ancestors.
It is the more primitive love-dance of insects and birds that
seems to reappear among human savages in various parts of the
world, notably in Africa, and in a conventionalised and symbol¬
ised form it is still danced in civilisation to-day. Indeed, it is in
this aspect that dancing has so often aroused reprobation, from
the days of early Christianity until the present, among those for
whom the dance has merely been, in the words of a seventeenth-
century writer, a series of "immodest and dissolute movements
by which the cupidity of the flesh is aroused."
But in nature and among primitive peoples it has its value pre¬
cisely on this account. It is a process of courtship and, even more
than that, it is a novitiate for love, and a novitiate which was
found to be an admirable training for love. Among some peo¬
ples, indeed, as the Omahas, the same word meant both to dance
and to love. By his beauty, his energy, his skill, the male must
win the female, so impressing the image of himself on her imag¬
ination that finally her desire is aroused to overcome her reti¬
cence. That is the task of the male throughout nature, and in
innumerable species besides Man it has been found that the
484 DANCE AND SOCIETY

school in which the task may best be learnt is the dancing-

school. Those who have not the skill and the strength to learn
are left behind, and, as they are probably the least capable mem¬
bers of the race, it may be in this way that a kind of sexual selec¬
tion has been embodied in unconscious eugenics, and aided the
higher development of the race. The moths and the butterflies,
the African ostrich and the Sumatran argus pheasant, with their
fellows innumerable, have been the precursors of man in the
strenuous school of erotic dancing, fitting themselves for selec¬
tion by the females of their choice as the most splendid progen¬
itors of the future race.8
From this point of view, it is clear, the dance performed a dou¬
ble function. On the one hand, the tendency to dance, arising
under the obscure stress of this impulse, brought out the best
possibilities the individual held the promise of; on the other
hand, at the moment of courtship, the display of the activities
thus acquired developed on the sensory side all the latent pos¬
sibilities of beauty which at last became conscious in man. That
this came about we cannot easily escape concluding. How it
came about, how it happens that some of the least intelligent of
creatures thus developed a beauty and a grace that are enchant¬
ing even to our human eyes, is a miracle, even if not affected by
the mystery of sex, which we cannot yet comprehend.
When we survey the human world, the erotic dance of the ani¬
mal world is seen not to have lost, but rather to have gained,
influence. It is no longer the males alone who are thus compet¬
ing for the love of the females. It comes about by a modification
in the earlier method of selection that often not only the men
dance for the women, but the women for the men, each striving
in a storm of rivalry to arouse and attract the desire of the other.
In innumerable parts of the world the season of love is a time
which the nubile of each sex devote to dancing in each other's
presence, sometimes one sex, sometimes the other, sometimes
both, in the frantic effort to display all the force and energy, the
skill and endurance, the beauty and grace, which at this moment
are yearning within them to be poured into the stream of the
race's life.
From this point of view we may better understand the
immense ardour with which every part of the wonderful human
body has been brought into the play of the dance. The men and
women of races spread all over the world have shown a marvel¬
lous skill and patience in imparting rhythm and measure to the
most unlikely, the most rebellious regions of the body, all
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 485

wrought by desire into potent and dazzling images. To the vig¬

orous races of Northern Europe in their cold damp climate, danc¬
ing comes naturally to be dancing of the legs, so naturally that
the English poet, as a matter of course, assumes that the dance of
Salome was a “twinkling of the feet/'9 But on the opposite side
of the world, in Japan and notably in Java and Madagascar, danc¬
ing may be exclusively dancing of the arms and hands, in some
of the South Sea Islands of the hands and fingers alone. Dancing
may even be carried on in the seated posture, as occurs at Fiji in
a dance connected with the preparation of the sacred drink, ava.
In some districts of Southern Tunisia dancing, again, is dancing
of the hair, and all night long, till they perhaps fall exhausted,
the marriageable girls will move their heads to the rhythm of a
song, maintaining their hair, in perpetual balance and sway.
Elsewhere, notably in Africa, but also sometimes in Polynesia, as
well as in the dances that had established themselves in ancient
Rome, dancing is dancing of the body, with vibratory or rotatory
movements of breast or flanks. The complete dance along these
lines is, however, that in which the play of all the chief muscle-
groups of the body is harmoniously interwoven. When both
sexes take part in such an exercise, developed into an idealised
yet passionate pantomime of love, we have the complete erotic
dance. In the beautiful ancient civilisation of the Pacific, it is
probable that this ideal was sometimes reached, and at Tahiti, in
1772, an old voyager crudely and summarily described the native
dance as “an endless variety of posturings and wagglings of the
body, hands, feet, eyes, lips, and tongue, in which they keep
splendid time to the measure." In Spain the dance of this kind
has sometimes attained its noblest and most harmoniously beau¬
tiful expression. From the narratives of travellers, it would
appear that it was especially in the eighteenth century that
among all classes in Spain dancing of this kind was popular. The
Church tacitly encouraged it, an Aragonese Canon told Baretti in
1770, in spite of its occasional indecorum, as a useful safety-valve
for the emotions. It was not less seductive to the foreign specta¬
tor than to the people themselves. The grave traveller Peyron,
towards the end of the century, growing eloquent over the lan¬
guorous and flexible movements of the dance, the bewitching
attitude, the voluptuous curves of the arms, declares that, when
one sees a beautiful Spanish woman dance, one is inclined to
fling all philosophy to the winds. And even that highly respect¬
able Anglican clergyman, the Reverend Joseph Townsend, was
constrained to state that he could “almost persuade myself" that
486 DANCE AND SOCIETY

if the fandango were suddenly played in church the gravest wor¬

shippers would start up to join in that "lascivious pantomine."
There we have the rock against which the primitive dance of sex¬
ual selection suffers shipwreck as civilisation advances. And that
prejudice of civilisation becomes so ingrained that it is brought
to bear even on the primitive dance. The pygmies of Africa are
described by Sir H. H. Johnston as a very decorous and highly
moral people, but their dances, he adds, are not so. Yet these
dances, though to the eyes of Johnston, blinded by European civ¬
ilisation, "grossly indecent," he honestly, and inconsistently,
adds, are "danced reverently."

FOUR
From the vital function of dancing in love, and its sacred func¬
tion in religion, to dancing as an art, a profession, an amusement,
may seem, at the first glance, a sudden leap. In reality the tran¬
sition is gradual, and it began to be made at a very early period
in diverse parts of the globe. All the matters that enter into court¬
ship tend to fall under the sway of art; their aesthetic pleasure is
a secondary reflection of their primary vital joy. Dancing could
not fail to be first in manifesting this tendency. But even reli¬
gious dancing swiftly exhibited the same transformation; danc¬
ing, like priesthood, became a profession, and dancers, like
priests, formed a caste. This, for instance, took place in old
Hawaii. The hula dance was a religious dance; it required a spe¬
cial education and an arduous training; moreover, it involved the
observance of important taboos and the exercise of sacred rites;
by the very fact of its high specialisation it came to be carried out
by paid performers, a professional caste. In India, again, the
Devadasis, or sacred dancing girls, are at once both religious and
professional dancers. They are married to gods, they are taught
dancing by the Brahmins, they figure in religious ceremonies,
and their dances represent the life of the god they are married
to as well as the emotions of love they experience for him. Yet,
at the same time, they also give professional performances in the
houses of rich private persons who pay for them. It thus comes
about that to the foreigner the Devadasis scarcely seem very
unlike the Ramedjenis, the dancers of the street, who are of very
different origin, and mimic in their performances the play of
merely human passions. The Portuguese conquerors of India
called both kinds of dancers indiscriminately Balheideras (or
dancers) which we have corrupted in Bayaderes.10
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 487

In our modern world professional dancing as an art has

become altogether divorced from religion, and even, in any bio¬
logical sense, from love; it is scarcely even possible, so far as
Western civilisation is concerned, to trace back the tradition to
either source. If we survey the development of dancing as an art
in Europe, it seems to me that we have to recognise two streams
of tradition which have sometimes merged, but yet remain in
their ideals and their tendencies essentially distinct. I would call
these traditions the Classical, which is much the more ancient
and fundamental, and may be said to be of Egyptian origin, and
the Romantic, which is of Italian origin, chiefly known to us as
the ballet. The first is, in its pure form, solo dancing—though it
may be danced in couples and many together—and is based on
the rhythmic beauty and expressiveness of the simple human
personality when its energy is concentrated in measured yet pas¬
sionate movement. The second is concerted dancing, mimetic
and picturesque, wherein the individual is subordinated to the
wider and variegated rhythm of the group. It may be easy to
devise another classification, but this is simple and instructive
enough for our purpose.
There can scarcely be a doubt that Egypt has been for many
thousands of years, as indeed it still remains, a great dancing
centre, the most influential dancing-school the world has ever
seen, radiating its influence to south and east and north. We may
perhaps even agree with the historian of the dance who terms it
'The mother-country of all civilised dancing." We are not
entirely dependent on the ancient wall-pictures of Egypt for our
knowledge of Egyptian skill in the art. Sacred mysteries, it is
known, were danced in the temples, and queens and princesses
took part in the orchestras that accompanied them. It is signifi¬
cant that the musical instruments still peculiarly associated with
the dance were originated or developed in Egypt; the guitar is
an Egyptian instrument and its name was a hieroglyph already
used when the Pyramids were being built; the cymbal, the tam¬
bourine, triangles, castanets, in one form or another, were all
familiar to the ancient Egyptians, and with the Egyptian art of
dancing they must have spread all round the shores of the Med¬
iterranean, the great focus of our civilisation, at a very early
date.11 Even beyond the Mediterranean, at Cadiz, dancing that
was essentially Egyptian in character was established, and Cadiz
became the dancing-school of Spain. The Nile and Cadiz were
thus the two great centres of ancient dancing, and Martial men¬
tions them both together, for each supplied its dancers to Rome.
488 DANCE AND SOCIETY

This dancing, alike whether Egyptian or Gaditanian, was the

expression of the individual dancer's body and art; the garments
played but a small part in it, they were frequently transparent,
and sometimes discarded altogether. It was, and it remains, sim¬
ple, personal, passionate dancing, classic, therefore, in the same
sense as, on the side of literature, the poetry of Catullus is
classic.12
Ancient Greek dancing was essentially classic dancing, as here
understood. On the Greek vases, as reproduced in Emmanuel's
attractive book on Greek dancing and elsewhere, we find the
same play of the arms, the same sideward turn, the same extreme
backward extension of the body, which had long before been
represented in Egyptian monuments. Many supposedly modern
movements in dancing were certainly already common both to
Egyptian and Greek dancing, as well as the clapping of hands to
keep time which is still an accompaniment of Spanish dancing.
It seems clear, however, that, on this general classic and Medi¬
terranean basis, Greek dancing had a development so refined
and so special—though in technical elaboration of steps, it seems
likely, inferior to modern dancing—that it exercised no influ¬
ence outside Greece. Dancing became, indeed, the most charac¬
teristic and the most generally cultivated of Greek arts. Pindar,
in a splendid Oxyrhynchine fragment, described Hellas, in what
seemed to him supreme praise, as "the land of lovely dancing,"
and Athenaeus pointed out that he calls Apollo the Dancer. It
may well be that the Greek drama arose out of dance and song,
and that the dance throughout was an essential and plastic ele¬
ment in it. Even if we reject the statement of Aristotle that trag¬
edy arose out of the Dionysian dithyramb, the alternative sup¬
positions (such as Ridgeway's theory of dancing round the tombs
of the dead) equally involve the same elements. It has often been
pointed out that poetry in Greece demanded a practical knowl¬
edge of all that could be included under "dancing." Aeschylus is
said to have developed the technique of dancing and Sophocles
danced in his own dramas. In these developments, no doubt,
Greek dancing tended to overpass the fundamental limits of clas¬
sic dancing and foreshadowed the ballet.13
The real germ of the ballet, however, is to be found in Rome,
where the pantomime with its concerted and picturesque
method of expressive action was developed, and Italy is the
home of Romantic dancing. The same impulse which produced
the pantomime produced, more than a thousand years later in
the same Italian region, the modern ballet. In both cases, one is
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 489

inclined to think, we may trace the influence of the same Etrus¬

can and Tuscan race which so long has had its seat there, a race
with a genius for expressive, dramatic, picturesque art. We see it
on the walls of Etruscan tombs and again in pictures of Botticelli
and his fellow Tuscans. The modern ballet, it is generally
believed, had its origin in the spectacular pageants at the mar¬
riage of Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, in 1489. The fashion
for such performances spread to the other Italian courts, includ¬
ing Florence, and Catherine de' Medici, when she became Queen
of France, brought the Italian ballet to Paris. Here it speedily
became fashionable. Kings and queens were its admirers and
even took part in it; great statesmen were its patrons. Before
long, and especially in the great age of Louis XIV, it became an
established institution, still an adjunct of opera but with a vital
life and growth of its own, maintained by distinguished musi¬
cians, artists, and dancers. Romantic dancing, to a much greater
extent than what I have called Classic dancing, which depends
so largely on simple personal qualities, tends to be vitalised by
transplantation and the absorption of new influences, provided
that the essential basis of technique and tradition is preserved in
the new development. Lulli in the seventeenth century brought
women into the ballet; Camargo discarded the complicated cos¬
tumes and shortened the skirt, so rendering possible not only
her own lively and vigorous method, but all the freedom and
airy grace of later dancing. It was Noverre who by his ideas
worked out at Stuttgart, and soon brought to Paris by Gaetan
Vestris, made the ballet a new and complete art form; this Swiss-
French genius not only elaborated plot revealed by gesture and
dance alone, but, just as another and greater Swiss-French genius
about the same time brought sentiment and emotion into the
novel, he brought it into the ballet. In the French ballet of the
eighteenth century a very high degree of perfection seems thus
to have been reached, while in Italy, where the ballet had orig¬
inated, it decayed, and Milan, which had been its source, became
the nursery of a tradition of devitalised technique carried to the
finest point of delicate perfection. The influence of the French
school was maintained as a living force into the nineteenth cen¬
tury,—when it was renovated afresh by the new spirit of the age
and Taglioni became the most ethereal embodiment of the spirit
of the Romantic movement in a form that was genuinely clas¬
sic,—overspreading the world by the genius of a few individual
dancers. When they had gone, the ballet slowly and steadily
declined. As it declined as an art, so also it declined in credit and
490 DANCE AND SOCIETY

in popularity; it became scarcely respectable even to admire

dancing. Thirty or forty years ago, those of us who still appreci¬
ated dancing as an art—and how few they were!—had to seek
for it painfully and sometimes in strange surroundings. A recent
historian of dancing, in a book published so lately as 1906,
declared that "the ballet is now a thing of the past, and, with the
modern change of ideas, a thing that is never likely to be resus¬
citated." That historian never mentioned Russian ballet, yet his
book was scarcely published before the Russian ballet arrived to
scatter ridicule over his rash prophecy by raising the ballet to a
pitch of perfection it can rarely have surpassed, as an expressive,
emotional, even passionate form of living art.
The Russian ballet was an offshoot from the French ballet and
illustrates once more the vivifying effect of transplantation on
the art of Romantic dancing. The Empress Anna introduced it in
1735 and appointed a French ballet-master and a Neapolitan
composer to carry it on; it reached a high degree of technical
perfection during the following hundred years, on the tradi¬
tional lines, and the principal dancers were 'all imported from
Italy. It was not until recent years that this firm discipline and
these ancient traditions were vitalised into an art form of exqui¬
site and vivid beauty by the influence of the soil in which they
had slowly taken root. This contact, when at last it was effected,
mainly by the genius of Fokine and the enterprise of Diaghilev,
involved a kind of revolution, for its outcome, while genuine
ballet, has yet all the effect of delicious novelty. The tradition by
itself was in Russia an exotic without real life, and had nothing
to give to the world; on the other hand, a Russian ballet apart
from that tradition, if we can conceive such a thing, would have
been formless, extravagant, bizarre, not subdued to any fine aes¬
thetic ends. What we see here, in the Russian ballet as we know
it to-day, is a splendid and arduous technical tradition, brought
at last—by the combined skill of designers, composers, and danc¬
ers—into real fusion with an environment from which during
more than a century it had been held apart; Russian genius for
music, Russian feeling for rhythm, Russian skill in the use of
bright colour, and, not least, the Russian orgiastic temperament,
the Russian spirit of tender poetic melancholy, and the general
Slav passion for folk-dancing, shown in other branches of the
race also, Polish, Bohemian, Bulgarian, and Servian. At almost
the same time what I have termed Classic dancing was indepen¬
dently revived in America by Isadora Duncan, bringing back
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 491

what seemed to be the free naturalism of the Greek dance, and

Ruth St. Denis, seeking to discover and revitalise the secrets of
the old Indian and Egyptian traditions. Whenever now we find
any restored art of theatrical dancing, as in the Swedish ballet, it
has been inspired more or less, by an eclectic blending of these
two revived forms, the Romantic from Russia, the Classic from
America. The result has been that our age sees one of the most
splendid movements in the whole history of the ballet.

FIVE
Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will
always be undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as
a social custom, it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of
the people. Less than a century ago the polka thus arose, extem¬
porised by the Bohemian servant girl Anna Slezakova out of her
own head for the joy of her own heart, and only rendered a per¬
manent form, apt for world-wide popularity, by the accident that
it was observed and noted down by an artist. Dancing has for
ever been in existence as a spontaneous custom, a social disci¬
pline. Thus it is, finally, that dancing meets us, not only as love,
as religion, as art, but also as morals.
All human work, under natural conditions, is a kind of dance.
In a large and learned book, supported by an immense amount
of evidence, Karl Bucher has argued that work differs from the
dance, not in kind, but only in degree, since they are both essen¬
tially rhythmic. There is a good reason why work should be
rhythmic, for all great combined efforts, the efforts by which
alone great constructions such as those of megalithic days could
be carried out, must be harmonised. It has even been argued that
this necessity is the source of human speech, and we have the
so-called Yo-heave-ho theory of languages. In the memory of
those who have ever lived on a sailing ship—that loveliest of
human creations now disappearing from the world—there will
always linger the echo of the chanties which sailors sang as they
hoisted the topsail yard or wound the capstan or worked the
pumps. That is the type of primitive combined work, and it is
indeed difficult to see how such work can be effectively accom¬
plished without such a device for regulating the rhythmic
energy of the muscles. The dance rhythm of work has thus acted
socialisingly in a parallel line with the dance rhythms of the arts,
and indeed in part as their inspirer. The Greeks, it has been too
492 DANCE AND SOCIETY

fancifully suggested, by insight or by intuition understood this

when they fabled that Orpheus, whom they regarded as the ear¬
liest poet, was specially concerned with moving stones and trees.
Bucher has pointed out that even poetic metre may be conceived
as arising out of work; metre is the rhythmic stamping of feet, as
in the technique of verse it is still metaphorically called; iambics
and trochees, spondees and anapaests and dactyls, may still be
heard among blacksmiths smiting the anvil or navvies wielding
their hammers in the streets. In so far as they arose out of work,
music and singing and dancing are naturally a single art. A poet
must always write to a tune, said Swinburne. Herein the ancient
ballad of Europe is a significant type. It is, as the name indicates,
a dance as much as a song, performed by a singer who sang the
story and a chorus who danced and shouted the apparently
meaningless refrain; it is absolutely the chanty of the sailors and
is equally apt for the purposes of concerted work.14 Yet our most
complicated musical forms are evolved from similar dances. The
symphony is but a development of a dance suite, in the first place
folk-dances, such as Bach and Handel composed. Indeed a dance
still lingers always at the heart of music and even the heart of
the composer. Mozart, who was himself an accomplished dancer,
used often to say, so his wife stated, that it was dancing, not
music, that he really cared for. Wagner believed that Beethoven's
Seventh Symphony—to some of us the most fascinating of them
and the most purely musical—was an apotheosis of the dance,
and, even if that belief throws no light on the intention of Bee¬
thoven, it is at least a revelation of Wagner's own feeling for the
dance.
It is, however, the dance itself, apart from the work and apart
from the other arts, which, in the opinion of many to-day, has
had a decisive influence in socialising, that is to say in moralis¬
ing, the human species. Work showed the necessity of harmo¬
nious rhythmic cooperation, but the dance developed that
rhythmic cooperation and imparted a beneficent impetus to all
human activities. It was Grosse, in his "Beginnings of Art," who
first clearly set forth the high social significance of the dance in
the creation of human civilisation. The participants in a dance,
as all observers of savages have noted, exhibit a wonderful uni¬
son; they are, as it were, fused into a single being stirred by a
single impulse. Social unification is thus accomplished. Apart
from war, this is the chief factor making for social solidarity in
primitive life; it was indeed the best training for war. It has been
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 493

a twofold influence; on the one hand, it aided unity of action and

method in evolution: on the other, it had the invaluable func¬
tion—for man is naturally a timid animal—of imparting cour¬
age; the universal drum, as Louis Robinson remarks, has been an
immense influence in human affairs. Even among the Romans,
with their highly developed military system, dancing and war
were definitely allied; the Salii constituted a college of sacred
military dancers; the dancing season was March, the war-god's
month and the beginning of the war season, and all through that
month there were dances in triple measure before the temples
and round the altars, with songs so ancient that not even the
priests could understand them. We may trace a similar influence
of dancing in all the cooperative arts of life. All our most
advanced civilisation, Grosse insisted, is based on dancing. It is
the dance that socialised man.
Thus, in the large sense, dancing has possessed peculiar value
as a method of national education. As civilisation grew self-con¬
scious, this was realised. "One may judge of a king," according
to ancient Chinese maxim, "by the state of dancing during his
reign." So also among the Greeks; it has been said that dancing
and music lay at the foundation of the whole political and mili¬
tary as well as religious organisation of the Dorian states.
In the narrow sense, in individual education, the great impor¬
tance of dancing came to be realised, even at an early stage of
human development, and still more in the ancient civilisations.
"A good education," Plato declared in the "Laws," the final work
of his old age, "consists in knowing how to sing and dance well."
And in our own day one of the keenest and most enlightened of
educationists has lamented the decay of dancing; the revival of
dancing, Stanley Hall declares, is imperatively needed to give
poise to the nerves, schooling to the emotions, strength to the
will, and to harmonise the feelings and the intellect with the
body which supports them.
It can scarcely be said that these functions of dancing are yet
generally realised and embodied afresh in education. For, if it is
true that dancing engendered morality, it is also true that in the
end, by the irony of fate, morality, grown insolent, sought to
crush its own parent, and for a time succeeded only too well.
Four centuries ago dancing was attacked by that spirit, in
England called Puritanism, which was then spread over the
greater part of Europe, just as active in Bohemia as in England,
and which has, indeed, been described as a general onset of
494 DANCE AND SOCIETY

developing Urbanism against the old Ruralism. It made no dis¬

tinction between good and bad, nor paused to consider what
would come when dancing went. So it was that, as Remy de
Gourmont remarks, the drinking-shop conquered the dance, and
alcohol replaced the violin.
But when we look at the function of dancing in life from a
higher and wider standpoint, this episode in its history ceases to
occupy so large a place. The conquest over dancing has never
proved in the end a matter for rejoicing, even to morality, while
an art which has been so intimately mixed with all the finest and
deepest springs of life has always asserted itself afresh. For danc¬
ing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts,
because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life
itself. It is the only art, as Rahel Varnhagen said, of which we
ourselves are the stuff. Even if we are not ourselves dancers, but
merely the spectators of the dance, we are still—according to
that Lippsian doctrine of Einfuhlung or “empathy" by Groos
termed "the play of inner imitation"—which here, at all events,
we may accept as true—feeling ourselves in the dancer who is
manifesting and expressing the latent impulses of our own
being.
It thus comes about that, beyond its manifold practical signif¬
icance, dancing has always been felt to possess also a symbolic
significance. Marcus Aurelius was accustomed to regard the art
of life as like the dancer's art, though that Imperial Stoic could
not resist adding that in some respects it was more like the wres¬
tler's art. "I doubt not yet to make a figure in the great Dance of
Life that shall amuse the spectators in the sky," said, long after,
Blake, in the same strenuous spirit. In our own time, Nietzsche,
from first to last, showed himself possessed by the conception of
the art of life as a dance, in which the dancer achieves the
rhythmic freedom and harmony of his soul beneath the shadow
of a hundred Damoclean swords. He said the same thing of his
style, for to him the style and the man were one: "My style," he
wrote to his intimate friend Rohde, "is a dance." "Every day I
count wasted," he said again, "in which there has been no danc¬
ing." The dance lies at the beginning of art, and we find it also
at the end. The first creators of civilisation were making the
dance, and the philosopher of a later age, hovering over the dark
abyss of insanity, with bleeding feet and muscles strained to the
breaking point, still seems to himself to be weaving the maze of
the dance.
(1923)
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 495

Notes

‘It is even possible that, in earlier than human times, dancing and
architecture may have been the result of the same impulse. The nest of
birds is the chief early form of building, and Edmund Selous has sug¬
gested (Zoologist, December, 1901) that the nest may first have arisen as
an accidental result of the ecstatic sexual dance of birds.
2//Not the epic song, but the dance," Wundt says (Volkerpsychologie, 3d
ed. 1911, Bd. I, Teil I, p. 277), "accompanied by a monotonous and often
meaningless song, constitutes everywhere the most primitive, and, in
spite of that primitiveness, the most highly developed art. Whether as a
ritual dance, or as a pure emotional expression of the joy in rhythmic
bodily movement, it rules the life of primitive men to such a degree that
all other forms of art are subordinate to it."
3See an interesting essay in The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays, by
Ananda Coomaraswamy. New York, 1918.
4This view was clearly put forward, long ago, by W. W. Newell at the
International Congress of Anthropology at Chicago in 1893. It has
become almost a commonplace since.
^ee a charming paper by Marcella Azra Hincks, "The Art of Dancing
in Japan," Fortnightly Review, July, 1906. Pantomimic dancing, which has
played a highly important part in Japan, was introduced into religion
from China, it is said, in the earliest time, and was not adapted to secular
purposes until the sixteenth century.
6I owe some of these facts to an interesting article by G. R. Mead, "The
Sacred Dance of Jesus," The Quest, October, 1910.
7The dance of the Seises in Seville Cathedral is evidently of great
antiquity, though it was so much a matter of course that we do not hear
of it until 1690, when the Archbishop of the day, in opposition to the
Chapter, wished to suppress it. A decree of the King was finally obtained
permitting it, provided it was performed only by men, so that evidently,
before that date, girls as well as boys took part in it. Rev. John Morris,
"Dancing in Churches," The Month, December, 1892; also a valuable arti¬
cle on the Seises by J. B. Trend, in Music and Letters, January, 1921.
8See, for references, Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol.
Ill; Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, pp. 29, etc.; and Westermarck, History of
Human Marriage, vol. I, chap. XIII, p. 470.
9At an earlier period, however, the dance of Salome was understood
much more freely and often more accurately. As Enlart has pointed out,
on a capital in the twelfth-century cloister of Moissac, Salome holds a
kind of castanets in her raised hands as she dances; on one of the west¬
ern portals of Rouen Cathedral, at the beginning of the sixteenth cen¬
tury, she is dancing on her hands; while at Hemelverdeghem she is
really executing the morisco, the "danse du ventre.”
10For an excellent account of dancing in India, now being degraded
by modern civilisation, see Otto Rothfeld, Women of India, chap. VII,
"The Dancing Girl," 1922.
496 DANCE AND SOCIETY

UI may hazard the suggestion that the gypsies may possibly have
acquired their rather unaccountable name of Egyptians, not so much
because they had passed through Egypt, the reason which is generally
suggested,—for they must have passed through many countries,—but
because of their proficiency in dances of the recognised Egyptian type.
12It is interesting to observe that Egypt still retains, almost unchanged
through fifty centuries, its traditions, technique, and skill in dancing,
while, as in ancient Egyptian dancing, the garment forms an almost or
quite negligible element in the art. Loret remarks that a charming Egyp¬
tian dancer of the Eighteenth Dynasty, whose picture in her transparent
gauze he reproduces, is an exact portrait of a charming Almeh of to-day
whom he has seen dancing in Thebes with the same figure, the same
dressing of the hair, the same jewels. I hear from a physician, a gynae¬
cologist now practising in Egypt, that a dancing-girl can lie on her back,
and with a full glass of water standing on one side of her abdomen and
an empty glass on the other, can by the contraction of the muscles on
the side supporting the full glass, project the water from it, so as to fill
the empty glass. This, of course, is not strictly dancing, but it is part of
the technique which underlies classic dancing and it witnesses to the
thoroughness with which the technical side of Egyptian dancing is still
cultivated.
13"We must learn to regard the form of the Greek drama as a dance
form," says G. Warre Cornish in an interesting article on "Greek Drama
and the Dance" (Fortnightly Review, February, 1913), "a musical sym¬
phonic dance-vision, through which the history of Greece and the soul
of man are portrayed."
14It should perhaps be remarked that in recent times it has been
denied that the old ballads were built up on dance songs. Miss Pound,
for instance, in a book on the subject, argues that they were of aristo¬
cratic and not communal origin, which may well be, though the absence
of the dance element does not seem to follow.
 E. M. W. TILLYARD 497

E. M. W. TILLYARD
From THE ELIZABETHAN
WORLD PICTURE

THE COSMIC DANCE

Ever since the early Greek philosophers creation had been fig¬
ured as an act of music; and the notion appealed powerfully to
the poetically or the mystically minded. As late as 1687 Dry den
gave it its best known rendering in English poetry, keeping
strictly to the old tradition.
From harmony, from heavenly harmony.
This universal frame began:
When nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay
And could not heave her head.
The tuneful voice was heard from high:
Arise, ye more than dead.
Then cold and hot and moist and dry
In order to their stations leap
And music's power obey.
From harmony, from heavenly harmony.
This universal frame began;
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran.
The diapason closing full in man.
But there was the further notion that the created universe was
itself in a state of music, that it was one perpetual dance. It was
a commonplace in the Middle Ages and occurs in the works of
Isidore of Seville, most popular of all medieval encyclopedists.
He wrote
Nothing exists without music; for the universe itself is said to have
been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven itself
revolves under the tones of that harmony.

The idea of creation as a dance implies "degree," but degree

in motion. The static battalions of the earthly, celestial, and
divine hierarchies are sped on a varied but controlled peregri-
498 DANCE AND SOCIETY

nation to the accompaniment of music. The path of each is dif¬

ferent, yet all the paths together make up a perfect whole.
Shakespeare's
Take but degree away, untune that string.
And hark, what discord follows,
together with Lorenzo's speech on music shows his knowledge
of the general doctrine. Elyot shows the same when he says that
the governor's tutor
shall commend the perfect understanding of music, declaring how
necessary it is for the better attaining the knowledge of a public
weal: which is made of an order of estates and degrees, and, by
reason thereof, containeth in it a perfect harmony: which the gov¬
ernor shall afterward more perfectly understand when he shall
happen to read the books of Plato and Aristotle of public weals,
wherein be written divers examples of music and geometry.

Like the static notion of degree, the dance to music is repeated

on the different levels of existence. The angels or saints in their
bands dance to the music of heaven. Milton has his own beau¬
tiful version of this dance in Reason of Church Government:
The angels themselves, in whom no disorder is feared, as the apos¬
tle that saw them in his rapture describes, are distinguished and
quaternioned into their celestial princedoms and satrapies, accord¬
ing as God himself has writ his imperial decrees through the great
provinces of heaven. Yet it is not to be conceived that these eternal
effluences of sanctity and love in the glorified saints should by this
means be confined and cloyed with repetition of that which is pre¬
scribed, but that our happiness may orb itself into a thousand
vagancies of glory and delight, and with a kind of eccentrical equa¬
tion be, as it were, an invariable planet of joy and felicity.

Milton speaks poetically not explicitly, but he certainly means

that the blessed in heaven resemble the planetary spheres in the
variety of their motions and in the music to which those motions
are set. Nor is the comparison derogatory to the angels, for of all
the dances that of the planets and stars to the music of the
spheres in which they were fixed was the most famous.
On the earth natural things, although they shared in the
effects of the Fall, are pictured as duplicating the planetary
dance. Milton in Comus, which as a masque would turn its
author's thoughts to dancing, not only expresses his sense of the
world's fullness, of the vastness of the chain of being, but passes
from immobility to motion. He pictures all the seas dancing in
 E. M. W. TILL YARD 499

obedience to the moon and allows Comus himself to make the

impudent claim that he and his crew are duplicating the dance
of the planets:
We that are of purer fire
Imitate the Starry Quire
Who in their nightly watchfull Sphears,
Lead in swift round the Months and Years.
The Sounds, and Seas with all their finny drove
Now to the Moon in wavering Morrice move.
The notion of the seas dancing is not Milton's but is an inherited
commonplace. Here is Sir John Davies's* version in Orchestra:
And lo the sea, that fleets about the land
And like a girdle clips her solid waist.
Music and measure both doth understand;
For his great chrystal eye is always cast
Up to the moon and on her fixed fast.
And as she danceth in her pallid sphere
So danceth he about his centre here.
Further than Orchestra I need not go, for this poem is the perfect
epitome of the universe seen as a dance. Davies published
Orchestra in 1596 when he was a student as the Inns of Court
aged 27. Popularly reputed to be a work of pure extravagance, it
is poetically one of the airiest and nimblest of Elizabethan
poems, hovering with accomplished skill between the fantastic
and the sublime. It is not for nothing that it is contemporary
with A Midsummer Night's Dream. In subject matter it combines
invention with a mass of cosmic commonplaces. The poet
recounts how one night when Penelope at Ithaca appeared
among her suitors Athena inspired her with special beauty.
Antinous, most courtly of the suitors, begs her to dance or in his
own words to
Imitate heaven, whose beauties excellent
Are in continual motion day and night.
Penelope refuses to join in something that is mere disorder or
misrule, and there follows a debat between the two on the subject

*Not to be confused with John Davies of Hereford, poet and writing-master.

Sir John Davies was poet, lawyer, Attorney-General for Ireland, and author of
a prose work on the Irish question.
500 DANCE AND SOCIETY

of dancing, Antinous maintaining that as the universe itself is

one great dance comprising many lesser dances we should our¬
selves join the cosmic harmony. It was creative love that first per¬
suaded the warring atoms to move in order. Time and all its divi¬
sions are a dance. The stars have their own dance, the greatest
being that of the Great Year, which lasts six thousand years of
the sun. The sun courts the earth in a dance. The different ele¬
ments have their different measures. The various happenings on
the earth itself
Forward and backward rapt and whirled are
According to the music of the spheres.
The very plants and stones are in some sort included.
See how those flowers that have sweet beauty too
(The only jewels that the earth doth wear.
When the young sun in bravery her doth woo).
As oft as they the whistling wind do hear.
Do wave their tender bodies here and there;
And though their dance no perfect measure is.
Yet oftentimes their music makes them kiss.
What makes the vine about the elm to dance
With turnings windings and embracements round?
What makes the loadstone to the north advance
His subtile point, as if from thence he found
His chief attractive virtue to redound?
Kind nature first doth cause all things to love;
Love makes them dance and ih just order move.
In human existence dancing is the very foundation of civilisa¬
tion. Penelope herself is full of the dance without knowing it:
Love in the twinkling of your eyelids danceth.
Love danceth in your pulses and your veins.
Love, when you sew, your needle's point advanceth
And makes it dance a thousand curious strains
Of winding rounds, whereof the form remains.
To show that your fair hands can dance the hey.
Which your fine feet would learn as well as they.

Then, prompted by the God of Love, Antinous in final persua¬

sion gives Penelope a magic glass to look in, where she sees first
the moon with a thousand stars moving round her and then the
mortal moon, Elizabeth, surrounded by her Court.
 E. M. W. TILLYARD 501

Her brighter dazzling beams of majesty

Were laid aside, for she vouchsaf'd awhile
With gracious cheerful and familiar eye
Upon the revels of her court to smile;
For so time's journeys she doth oft beguile.
Like sight no mortal eye might elsewhere see.
So full of state art and variety.
For of her barons brave and ladies fair.
Who, had they been elsewhere, most fair had been.
Many an incomparable lovely pair
With hand in hand were interlinked seen.
Making fair honour to their sovereign queen.
Forward they pac'd and did their pace apply
To a most sweet and solemn melody.
Davies never finished his poem, but presumably the sight of
Queen Elizabeth as the central point of the court's dance-pattern
"in this our Golden Age" would have persuaded Penelope to lay
aside her prejudice.
The introduction of Queen Elizabeth and her court is not mere
flattery; it shows the cosmic dance reproduced in the body poli¬
tic, thus completing the series of dances in macrocosm body pol¬
itic and microcosm. But it stands too for something central to
Elizabethan ways of thinking: the agile transition from abstract
to concrete, from ideal to real, from sacred to profane. And the
reason is the one given before for similar catholicity: the Eliza¬
bethans were conscious simultaneously and to an uncommon
degree of "the erected wit and the infected will of man." It was
thus possible for Davies to pass from the mystical notion of the
spherical music to the concrete picture of Elizabeth's courtiers
dancing, without incongruity.
Orchestra is a fine poem. It serves as pure didacticism, as perfect
illustration of a general doctrine. Yet it draws poetic inspiration
from the doctrine it propounds. And it has no qualms or doubts
about the order it describes. It testifies to the preponderating
faith the Elizabethans somehow maintained in their perilously
poised world. Not that Davies does not know the things that
imperil it:
Only the earth doth stand for ever still.
Her rocks remove not nor her mountains meet;
(Although some wits enricht with learning's skill
Say heav'n stands firm and that the earth doth fleet
502 DANCE AND SOCIETY

And swiftly turneth underneath their feet):

Yet, though the earth is ever stedfast seen.
On her broad breast hath dancing ever been.
If Davies knew (as here he shows he does) the Copernican
astronomy, he must have known that this science had by then
broken the fiction of the eternal and immutable heavens. But he
trusts in his age and in the beliefs he has inherited, and like most
of his contemporaries refuses to allow a mere inconsistency to
interfere with the things he really has at heart.

(1943)

JANE HARRISON
From ANCIENT ART
AND RITUAL

FROM RITUAL TO ART

The distinction between art and ritual, which has so long
haunted and puzzled us, now comes out quite clearly, and also
in part the relation of each to actual life. Ritual, we saw, was a
re-presentation or a pre-presentation, a re-doing or pre-doing, a
copy or imitation of life, but—and this is the important point—
always with a practical end. Art is also a representation of life
and the emotions of life, but cut loose from immediate action.
Action may be and often is represented, but it is not that it may
lead on to a practical further end. The end of art is in itself. Its
value is not mediate but immediate. Thus ritual makes, as it were,
a bridge between real life and art, a bridge over which in primitive
times it would seem man must pass. In his actual life he hunts
and fishes and ploughs and sows, being utterly intent on the
practical end of gaining his food; in the dromenon of the Spring
Festival, though his acts are unpractical, being mere singing and
dancing and mimicry, his intent is practical, to induce the return
of his food-supply. In the drama the representation may remain
for a time the same, but the intent is altered: man has come out
 JANE HARRISON 503

from action, he is separate from the dancers, and has become a

spectator. The drama is an end in itself.
We know from tradition that in Athens ritual became art, a
dromenon became the drama, and we have seen that the shift is
symbolized and expressed by the addition of the theatre, or spec¬
tator-place, to the orchestra, or dancing-place. We have also tried
to analyse the meaning of the shift. It remains to ask what was
its cause. Ritual does not always develop into art, though in all
probability dramatic art has always to go through the stage of
ritual. The leap from real life to the emotional contemplation of
life cut loose from action would otherwise be too wide. Nature
abhors a leap, she prefers to crawl over the ritual bridge. There
seem at Athens to have been two main causes why the dromenon
passed swiftly, inevitably, into the drama. They are, first, the
decay of religious faith; second, the influx from abroad of a new
culture and new dramatic material.
It may seem surprising to some that the decay of religious faith
should be an impulse to the birth of art. We are accustomed to
talk rather vaguely of art "as the handmaid of religion"; we
think of art as "inspired by" religion. But the decay of religious
faith of which we now speak is not the decay of faith in a god,
or even the decay of some high spiritual emotion; it is the decay
of a belief in the efficacy of certain magical rites, and especially
of the Spring Rite. So long as people believed that by excited
dancing, by bringing in an image or leading in a bull you could
induce the coming of Spring, so long would the dromena of the
dithyramb be enacted with intense enthusiasm, and with this
enthusiasm would come an actual accession and invigoration of
vital force. But, once the faintest doubt crept in, once men began
to be guided by experience rather than custom, the enthusiasm
would die down, and the collective invigoration no longer be
felt. Then some day there will be a bad summer, things will go
all wrong, and the chorus will sadly ask: "Why should I dance
my dance?" They will drift away or become mere spectators of a
rite established by custom. The rite itself will die down, or it will
live on only as the May Day rites of today, a children's play, or
at best a thing done vaguely "for luck."
The spirit of the rite, the belief in its efficacy, dies, but the rite
itself, the actual mould, persists, and it is this ancient ritual
mould, foreign to our own usage, that strikes us today, when a
Greek play is revived, as odd and perhaps chill. A chorus, a band
of dancers there must be, because the drama arose out of a ritual
dance. An agon, or contest, or wrangling, there will probably be.
504 DANCE AND SOCIETY

because Summer contends with Winter, Life with Death, the

New Year with the Old. A tragedy must be tragic, must have its
pathos, because the Winter, the Old Year, must die. There must
needs be a swift transition, a clash and change from sorrow to
joy, what the Greeks called a peripeteia, a quick-turn-around,
because, though you carry out Winter, you bring in Summer. At
the end we shall have an Appearance, an Epiphany of a god,
because the whole gist of the ancient ritual was to summon the
spirit of life. All these ritual forms haunt and shadow the play,
whatever its plot, like ancient traditional ghosts; they underlie
and sway the movement and the speeches like some compelling
rhythm.
Now this ritual mould, this underlying rhythm, is a fine thing
in itself; and, moreover, it was once shaped and cast by a living
spirit: the intense immediate desire for food and life, and for the
return of the seasons which bring that food and life. But we have
seen that, once the faith in man's power magically to bring back
these seasons waned, once he began to doubt whether he could
really carry out Winter and bring in Summer, his emotion
towards these rites would cool. Further, we have seen that these
rites repeated year by year ended, among an imaginative people,
in the mental creation of some sort of daemon or god. This dae¬
mon, or god, was more and more held responsible on his own
account for the food-supply and the order of the Horae, or Sea¬
sons; so we get the notion that this daemon or god himself led
in the Seasons; Hermes dances at the head of the Charites, or an
Eiresione is carried to Helios and the Horae. The thought then
arises that this man-like daemon who rose from a real King of
the May, must himself be approached and dealt with as a man,
bargained with, sacrificed to. In a word, in place of dromena,
things done, we get gods worshipped; in place of sacraments,
holy bulls killed and eaten in common, we get sacrifices in the
modern sense, holy bulls offered to yet holier gods. The relation
of these figures of gods to art we shall consider when we come
to sculpture.
So the dromenon, the thing done, wanes, the prayer, the praise,
the sacrifice waxes. Religion moves away from drama towards
theology, but the ritual mould of the dromenon is left ready for a
new content.
Again, there is another point. The magical dromenon, the Car¬
rying out of Winter, the Bringing in of Spring, is doomed to an
inherent and deadly monotony. It is only when its magical effi¬
cacy is intensely believed that it can go on. The life-history of a
 JANE HARRISON 505

holy bull is always the same; its magical essence is that it should
be the same. Even when the life-daemon is human his career is
unchequered. He is born, initiated, or born again; he is married,
grows old, dies, is buried; and the old, old story is told again next
year. There are no fresh personal incidents, peculiar to one par¬
ticular daemon. If the drama rose from the Spring Song only,
beautiful it might be, but with a beauty that was monotonous, a
beauty doomed to sterility.
We seem to have come to a sort of impasse, the spirit of the
dromenon is dead or dying, the spectators will not stay long to
watch a doing doomed to monotony. The ancient moulds are
there, the old bottles, but where is the new wine? The pool is
stagnant; what angel will step down to trouble the waters?
Fortunately we are not left to conjecture what might have hap¬
pened. In the case of Greece we know, though not as clearly as
we wish, what did happen. We can see in part why, though the
dromena of Adonis and Osiris, emotional as they were and
intensely picturesque, remained mere ritual; the dromenon of
Dionysos, his dithyramb, blossomed into drama.
Let us look at the facts, and first at some structural facts in the
building of the theatre.
We have seen that the orchestra, with its dancing chorus,
stands for ritual, for the stage in which all were worshippers, all
joined in a rite of practical intent. We further saw that the theatre,
the place for the spectators, stood for art. In the orchestra all is
life and dancing; the marble seats are the very symbol of rest,
aloofness from action, contemplation. The seats for the spectators
grow and grow in importance till at last they absorb, as it were,
the whole spirit, and give their name theatre to the whole struc¬
ture; action is swallowed up in contemplation. But contempla¬
tion of what? At first, of course, of the ritual dance, but not for
long. That, we have seen, was doomed to a deadly monotony. In
a Greek theatre there was not only orchestra and a spectator-
place, there was also a scene or stage.
The Greek word for stage is, as we said, skene, our scene. The
scene was not a stage in our sense, i.e., a platform raised so that
the players might be better viewed. It was simply a tent, or rude
hut, in which the players, or rather dancers, could put on their
ritual dresses. The fact that the Greek theatre had, to begin with
no permanent stage in our sense, shows very clearly how little
it was regarded as a spectacle. The ritual dance was a dromenon,
a thing to be done, not a thing to be looked at. The history of the
Greek stage is one long story of the encroachment of the stage
506 DANCE AND SOCIETY

on the orchestra. At first a rude platform or table is set up, then

scenery is added; the movable tent is translated into a stone
house or a temple front. This stands at first outside the orchestra;
then bit by bit the scene encroaches till the sacred circle of the
dancing-place is cut clean across. As the drama and the stage
wax, the dromenon and the orchestra wane....
Greek tragedy arose, Aristotle has told us, from the leaders of
the dithyramb, the leaders of the Spring Dance. The Spring
Dance, the mime of Summer and Winter, had, as we have seen,
only one actor, one actor with two parts—Death and Life. With
only one play to be played, and that a one-actor play, there was
not much need for a stage. A scene, that is a tent, was needed, as
we saw, because all the dancers had to put on their ritual gear,
but scarcely a stage. From a rude platform the prologue might be
spoken, and on that platform the Epiphany or Appearance of the
New Year might take place; but the play played, the life-history
of the life-spirit, was all too familiar; there was no need to look,
the thing was to dance. You need a stage—not necessarily a
raised stage, but a place apart from the dancers—when you have
new material for your players, something you need to look at, to
attend to. In the sixth century b.c., at Athens, came the great
innovation. Instead of the old plot, the life-history of the life-
spirit, with its deadly monotony, new plots were introduced, not
of life-spirits but of human individual heroes. In a word, Homer
came to Athens, and out of Homeric stories playwrights began
to make their plots. This innovation was the death of ritual
monotony and the dromenon. It is not so much the old that dies
as the new that kills.

(1913)
 ROSS WETZSTEON 507

ROSS WETZSTEON
THE WHIRLING DERVISHES:
AN EMPTINESS FILLED
WITH EVERYTHING

Circles ... white circles ... circles of light... I'm trying to find
the right words .. . but cliches are never more common than
when we're confronted by transcendence ... I'm trying to find
something better than T-shirt Sufisms to describe the feelings
aroused by the swirling undulations of the Whirling Dervishes'
skirts . .. don't say "hypnotic” ... don't say "parables of ecstasy"
... something about the relationship between movement and
meditation . .. the transfixing serenity of ceaseless motion ... the
revolutions revealing, like the circles they describe, that the cen¬
ter is synonymous with the whole ... that timelessness has its
own rhythms ... I start to take notes on the pad in my lap,
watching the Whirling Dervishes last week in Austin, Texas, but
I immediately sense the shock of the elderly lady on my right,
my hostess and guide, a devotee of the Mevlevi Sufi order of
Islam, and smile as I realize I agree with her—how detached!
taking notes on ecstatic trances—then smile at the smile, as I also
realize that whatever she's feeling. I've fallen into the rational¬
ist's prejudice against reason, our materialistic preference for
emotional participation over intellectual detachment, our naive
assumption, in fact, that immanence and abstraction are contra¬
dictory. Eastern thought has entered our consciousness without
having passed through our intelligence—even more western
than disengagement is our will and will-lessness, our self-loath¬
ing decision to float with the self.
So I continue to take notes, mildly self-contemptuous, when I
suddenly realize I've already mentally accused the dervishes
themselves of the same kind of spurious duality—a kind of self-
observing, self-transcendence. On the plane from New York to
Texas, I'd decided that to mention that the Whirling Dervishes
had a press agent for their American tour would be to exploit a
glib paradox—the intelligentsia's easy scorn for America's tacky
eclecticism, the taco-burgers of cultural journalism—but still.
508 DANCE AND SOCIETY

several troubling questions remained. Facetiously, if the Pope

were to travel to Tokyo, expenses paid by Sushi University, to
perform a high mass in a prosceniumed temple for the entertain¬
ment of 2000 Buddists at 50 yen a head, would the wine and
wafer transubstantiate? More seriously, if one begins by won¬
dering what access non-believers can have to an unfamiliar reli¬
gious ritual they merely witness for their ecumenical edification,
a kind of spiritual window shopping, one has to go on to spec¬
ulate how the believers themselves can survive such circum¬
stances. Would the spirit be ready at curtain time? Would not
some violation of the soul be involved? Religious ritual, of
course, is not performed for its own sake—which is the only way
a non-believer can experience it (e.g., the mass as spectacle, or,
in this case, the Whirling Dervishes as dance)—but as a means
of reaching another level of being, as a way of releasing spiritual
meaning. What you see, in short, is not what you get. A sacra¬
ment is merely the outwards of an inner grace, so, just as wine
is fermented grape juice to a Turk, would not whirling be show
biz to an American? And worse, from the point of view of the
believers themselves, might the spectators, who can't follow,
actually hold the participants back? To perform a religious ritual
at the behest not of the soul, not of the communicants, but of an
audience—wouldn't the altered purpose of the ritual debase the
ritual itself?—vinegar instead of blood? vertigo instead of
levitation?
But then—halfway across the circle I also remembered what
had seemed at the time merely an amusing confusion with my
hostess and guide an hour before the performance. Trying to
communicate between English and Turkish in insecure French,
I asked, thinking of avant-garde dance, of Robert Wilson and
Andy de Groat in particular, how the Whirling Dervishes felt
about the appropriation of spinning for non-religious purposes.
Madame Atashi responded as she frequently did, with a smiling
Sufi parable, which I ineptly translated as follows: "Man want to
say prayer for he who died. Other man ask, who died? First man
answer, he who put on the hat only for play." When I discerned
that "the hat" referred to the sacred hat used by the Whirling
Dervishes in their religious ceremonies, the meaning of the par¬
able became clear—to adopt the surface appurtenances of the rit¬
ual (and, in answer to my question, for American dancers to
spin) is to die. But as Madame Atashi went on to talk about the
masters' love and tolerance for non-believers, I became increas¬
ingly unsure of my self-satisfied interpretation—until suddenly
 ROSS WETZSTEON 509

it dawned on me that to her the parable meant just the opposite,

that one must pray for everyone, even for those “who put on the
hat only for play." Relax, Bob and Andy.
Sufi parables, of course, are intended to yield multiple mean¬
ings, and even though the meaning I had found in this particular
case was clearly false, its very falseness made me aware of
another meaning—that one mustn't be too sure. If I had arrived
at a different but equally valid interpretation from Madame
Atashi, in short, I would have discerned one level of Sufi truth,
the multiplicity of meanings. But having utterly missed the
point, I was reminded of a deeper level of truth—the insecurity
of even the multiplicity of meanings—the truth that you can
learn from being wrong.
But what did any of this have to do with the spinning taking
place on stage? Simply that this particular circle was now com¬
plete-something about the relationship between movement
and mediation—but not so much a circle as a spiral, returning to
the same point but on a different level. And now the issues of
whether or not to take notes, of the Pope in Tokyo, of prayers
and parables, of sacraments and Sufisms, didn't seem answered
so much as irrelevant. Back to the stage, to the swirling skirts,
now neither a detached witness, nor a Sufi convert, but at least
willing to be unsure, and perhaps even—for all they ask is our
openness—ready to levitate.
Arms crossed over their chests, each hand grasping the oppo¬
site shoulder—after the 10-minute opening chant by the Hafiz,
the 10-minute prelude by the reed flute, after walking solemnly
in a circle and kissing the Sheik's hand—each of the seven der¬
vishes begins to turn slowly counter-clockwise. Two, three, four,
five times—and at the first fluttering moment of spiritual quick¬
ening, each dervish feeling his own intimation of ascension,
their hands slowly leave their shoulders and their arms slowly
extend and rise, both meanings of grace, an inaudible hymn, the
first bird unfolding its wings. Pivoting on their left feet and
wheeling their right legs around “the pillar," their right palms
up, their left palms down, as if in acceptance and dispensation,
they continue to revolve slowly counter-clockwise around the
pivots, which themselves rotate counter-clockwise around the
stage, seven circles within a larger circle. Despite the common
image, the last thing one feels in the presence of the dervishes
is any sense of frenzy—their spinning evokes, rather, an effort¬
less, tranquil, almost stately ecstasy. Four times they spin,
approximately 10 minutes each time, followed by a brief recita-
 510 DANCE AND SOCIETY

The Whirling Dervishes. "Despite the common image, the last thing one
feels in the presence of the dervishes is any sense of frenzy—their spin¬
ning evokes, rather, an effortless, tranquil, almost stately ecstasy."
(Wetzsteon)

tion from the Koran and the contluding sound "Hu," all the
names of God in one.
What's a theater critic to say? Some of the spinners are clearly
more "talented" than others, and if the truth were known, many
New York dancers I've seen are "better" spinners than most of
the dervishes (though Dogan Ergin is surely one of the finest
flute players in the world). But talent is beside the point—was
Raphael closer to God than the daubers in his classes? The der¬
vishes are less artists than priests, and the priest fulfills his func¬
tion less through his talent than through our participation, less
through private inspiration than through communal designa¬
tion, as assent of which he is more servant than beneficiary. So
''evaluation" is also clearly beside the point—one might
"review" Raphael, but not the mass—an incompetent dervish
might embrace his God more ecstatically than a master. But let's
put on the hat for a moment, if only for play.
 ROSS WETZSTEON 511

Madame Atashi, when I asked her to try to put into words the
nature of the “experience" she kept talking about, said simply,
“to feel it is better than to describe it." Well, yes, this is what
critics always hear, and it always seems both self-evident and
evasive. It's a little too convenient to believe in “mute Miltons"
if your poetry is lousy. But then, one of the dervishes asked me
after the performance for my reaction, and I found myself agree¬
ing—to say anything at all is difficult, for to undertake the act of
detachment necessary to describe is precisely to deny the feeling
of the experience.
But having suffered the sloppy solipsism of non-verbalists
none too gladly myself, I hastened to add, in embarrassment,
that there are some questions I can now answer: The dervishes
feel that non-believers, as well as believing non-participants, can
share the ecstatic experience (if they are disposes, in Madame
Atashi's word); they themselves don't invariably enter such a
state at every performance (individuel aussi); the circle, unlike the
cross, is tolerant, the only form in which every part is equal; and
spinning, like a circle, is an emptiness filled with everything.
On a Sunday afternoon, in the summer of 1961, on the island
Paros, in the middle of the Cyclades in the middle of the Aegean,
I sat on the shore and watched the waves. After about an hour, I
gradually realized I was coming out of something. The only
words I could find to describe the experience were hopelessly
banal—the feeling of being outside of one's body, the oneness
of the universe, etc., etc. But the banality of the words was utterly
irrelevant—and since that day. I've never felt a moment's fear of
death. Now like you, and you, I wince when people start to tell
me about their extraordinary “mystical experiences." But the odd
thing is, that hour on the beach didn't feel extraordinary at all—
the only extraordinary thing about it was how matter-of-fact it
felt—if I felt it was extraordinary. I'd lose it.
(1978)
512 DANCE AND SOCIETY

ROLAND BARTHES
STRIPTEASE

Striptease—at least Parisian striptease—is based on a contra¬

diction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is
stripped naked. We may therefore say that we are dealing in a
sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of
fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious
terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at
once the idea of sex and its conjuration.
It is only the time taken in shedding clothes which makes voy¬
eurs of the public; but here, as in any mystifying spectacle, the
decor, the props and the stereotypes intervene to contradict the
initially provocative intention and eventually bury it in insig¬
nificance: evil is advertised the better to impede and exorcize it.
French striptease seems to stem from what I have earlier called
"Operation Margarine," a mystifying device which consists in
inoculating the public with a touch of evil, the better to plunge
it afterwards into a permanently immune Moral Good: a few par¬
ticles of eroticism, highlighted by the very situation on which
the show is based, are in fact absorbed in a reassuring ritual
which negates the flesh as surely as the vaccine or the taboo cir¬
cumscribes and controls the illness or the crime.
There will therefore be in striptease a whole series of cover¬
ings placed upon the body of the woman in proportion as she
pretends to strip it bare. Exoticism is the first of these barriers,
for it is always of a petrified kind which transports the body into
the world of legend or romance: a Chinese woman equipped
with an opium pipe (the indispensable symbol of "Sininess"), an
undulating vamp with a gigantic cigarette-holder, a Venetian
decor complete with gondola, a dress with panniers and a singer
of serenades: all aim at establishing the woman right from the start
as an object in disguise. The end of the striptease is then no
longer to drag into the light a hidden depth, but to signify,
through the shedding of an incongruous and artificial clothing,
nakedness as a natural vesture of woman, which amounts in the
end to regaining a perfectly chaste state of the flesh.
The classic props of the music-hall, which are invariably
rounded up here, constantly make the unveiled body more
 ROLAND BARTHES 513

remote, and force it back into the all-pervading ease of a well-

known rite: the furs, the fans, the gloves, the feathers, the fish¬
net stockings, in short the whole spectrum of adornment, con¬
stantly makes the living body return to the category of luxurious
objects which surround man with a magical decor. Covered with
feathers or gloved, the woman identifies herself here as a stereo¬
typed element of music-hall, and to shed objects as ritualistic as
these is no longer a part of a further, genuine undressing. Feath¬
ers, furs and gloves go on pervading the woman with their mag¬
ical virtue even once removed, and give her something like the
enveloping memory of a luxurious shell, for it is a self-evident
law that the whole of striptease is given in the very nature of the
initial garment: if the latter is improbable, as in the case of the
Chinese woman or the woman in furs, the nakedness which fol¬
lows remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful
slippery object, withdrawn by its very extravagance from human
use: this is the underlying significance of the G-String covered
with diamonds or sequins which is the very end of striptease.
This ultimate triangle, by its pure and geometrical shape, by its
hard and shiny material, bars the way to the sexual parts like a
sword of purity, and definitively drives the woman back into a
mineral world, the (precious) stone being here the irrefutable
symbol of the absolute object, that which serves no purpose.
Contrary to the common prejudice, the dance which accom¬
panies the striptease from beginning to end is in no way an
erotic element. It is probably quite the reverse: the faintly rhyth¬
mical undulation in this case exorcizes the fear of immobility.
Not only does it give to the show the alibi of Art (the dances in
strip-shows are always “artistic"), but above all it constitutes the
last barrier, and the most efficient of all: the dance, consisting of
ritual gestures which have been seen a thousand times, acts on
movements as a cosmetic, it hides nudity, and smothers the spec¬
tacle under a glaze of superfluous yet essential gestures, for the
act of becoming bare is here relegated to the rank of parasitical
operations carried out in an improbable background. Thus we
see the professionals of striptease wrap themselves in the mirac¬
ulous ease which constantly clothes them, makes them remote,
gives them the icy indifference of skillful practitioners, haugh¬
tily taking refuge in the sureness of their technique: their science
clothes them like a garment.
All this, this meticulous exorcism of sex, can be verified a con-
trario in the "popular contests" (sic) of amateur striptease:
there/'beginners" undress in front of a few hundred spectators
514 DANCE AND SOCIETY

without resorting or resorting very clumsily to magic, which

unquestionably restores to the spectacle its erotic power. Here
we find at the beginning far fewer Chinese or Spanish women,
no feathers or furs (sensible suits, ordinary coats), few disguises
as a starting point—gauche steps, unsatisfactory dancing, girls
constantly threatened by immobility, and above all by a "tech¬
nical" awkwardness (the resistance of briefs, dress or bra) which
gives to the gestures of unveiling an unexpected importance,
denying the woman the alibi of art and the refuge of being an
object, imprisoning her in a condition of weakness and
timorousness.
And yet, at the Moulin Rouge, we see hints of another kind of
exorcism, probably typically French, and one which in actual fact
tends less to nullify eroticism than to tame it: the compere tries
to give striptease a reassuring petit-bourgeois status. To start
with, striptease is a sport: there is a Striptease Club, which organ¬
izes healthy contests whose winners come out crowned and
rewarded with edifying prizes (a subscription to physical train¬
ing lessons), a novel (which can only be Robbe-Grillet's Voyeur),
or useful prizes (a pair of nylons, five thousand francs). Then,
striptease is identified with a career (beginners, semi-profession¬
als, professionals), that is, to the honourable practice of a spe¬
cialization (strippers are skilled workers). One can even give
them the magical alibi of work: vocation; one girl is, say, "doing
well” or "well on the way to fulfilling her promise,” or on the contrary
"taking her first steps” on the arduous path of striptease. Finally
and above all, the competitors are socially situated; one is a sales¬
girl, another a secretary (there are many secretaries in the Strip¬
tease Club). Striptease here is made to rejoin the world of the
public, is made familiar and bourgeois, as if the French, unlike
the American public (at least according to what one hears), fol¬
lowing an irresistible tendency of their social status, could not
conceive eroticism except as a household property, sanctioned by
the alibi of weekly sport much more than by that of a magical
spectacle: and this is how, in France, striptease is nationalized.
(1957)
 ROGER COPELAND 515

ROGER COPELAND
DANCE, PHOTOGRAPHY,
AND THE WORLD’S BODY

In her influential book On Photography, Susan Sontag offers a

rather uncharitable explanation for the current level of interest
in the photographic arts:
The seemingly insatiable appetite for photography in the 1970's
expresses more than the pleasure of discovering and exploring a
relatively neglected art form.... Paying more and more attention
to photographs is a great relief to sensibilities tired of or eager to
avoid the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical
modernist painting presupposes highly developed skills of look¬
ing, and a familiarity with other art and with certain notions about
the history of art. Photography, like pop art, reassures viewers that
art isn't hard; it seems to be more about subjects than about art.

But I'd like to suggest that the current enthusiasm for photog¬
raphy is evidence of something other than a growing perceptual
and intellectual laziness, something much more positive (and
necessary). Granted, we are at this moment experiencing a “back¬
lash" against modernism (or more specifically, against two
closely related manifestations of the “modern": formalism and
minimalism). And yes, photography has benefited substantially
from this shift in sensibility. But it's essential to recognize that
this widespread dissatisfaction with two of the avant-garde's
most celebrated projects was initiated in most instances by the
artists themselves and not in response to a restless, fickle, and
inattentive public.1
The fact of the matter is that the arts simply cannot pursue the
goal of “self-purification" indefinitely. By “self-purification" I
mean the two different varieties of radical surgery that the arts
have performed on themselves during the last 100 years. First
came the process that Ortega y Gasset called “dehumanization"
in which the arts purged themselves of their “human content"
or “lived reality." This resulted in a variety of "formalism." Art
stopped serving as a "criticism of life" (Matthew Arnold s con¬
ception of art's function). Art turned its back on the world and
refused to “hold the mirror up to nature."
516 DANCE AND SOCIETY

Subsequently, the separate arts underwent an even more

impoverishing variety of “purification'' that Clement Greenberg
calls ''self-criticism":

What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was
unique and irreducible not only in art in general but also in each
particular art. . . The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from
the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably
be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each
art would be rendered ''pure/' (''Modernist Painting")

Less, in other words, is more. But surely, at some point in time,

it becomes a purely practical, if not an ideological or spiritual
necessity, for art to re-establish relations with "the world" and
to reclaim for itself those aspects of human experience once rig¬
orously excised in the name of modernist purity.
Some of the various activities loosely referred to as "concep¬
tual art" provide a case (perhaps the case) in point. Here, the
quest for self-purification led art to divest itself of its very object-
hood.2 And significantly (at least for my purposes here), the only
factor lending many such experiences a semblance of "material¬
ity" was photographic documentation. Oftentimes, the photo¬
graph not only lent a touch of "permanence" to an otherwise
ephemeral event, it also served to "situate" the event in the
larger context of "the world" (the same world that the event
itself—in its defiantly self-referential way—often refused to
acknowledge). The world, as it turns out, does not cease to exist
simply because we refuse to acknowledge it.
And at approximately the same time (late '60's early '70's), pho¬
tography began to achieve widespread acceptance as an art in its
own right. I don't think it's coincidental that dance is the only
other art to have flourished so visibly in the '70's. Both photog¬
raphy and dance help restore to us what John Crowe Ransom
called "the world's body." Ransom complained that science had
robbed the world of its body by concerning itself only with the
abstract principles which underlie experience, rather than with
the concrete immediacy of experience itself ("as science more
and more completely reduces the world to its types and forms,
art, replying, must invest it again with a body" wrote Ransom).
Siegfried Kracauer has written at great length about the extent
to which the modernist arts unwittingly sustain this curse of sci¬
entific abstractness:3 "Abstract painting," he argues, "is not so
much an anti-realistic movement as a realistic revelation of the
prevailing abstractness." Photography and the cinema, on the
 ROGER COPELAND 517

other hand, can help bring about what he calls "a redemption of
physical reality" by "clinging to the surface of things" (rather
than extracting their skeletal substructure or interior meaning).4
Clearly, for Kracauer, abstraction equals subtraction, and art is
left impoverished rather than purified.
But even the most abstract photograph is "connected" to the
world beyond it in a way that a painting by, say. Ad Reinhardt
or Frank Stella is not. Sontag makes this point deftly (even if she
doesn't acknowledge its healthier implications):
, .. the identification of the subject of a photograph always domi¬
nates our perception of it—as it does not necessarily, in a painting.
The subject of Weston's "Cabbage Leaf," taken in 1931, looks like a
fall of gathered cloth; a title is needed to identify it. Thus, the image
makes its point in two ways. The form is pleasing, and it is (sur¬
prise!) the form of a cabbage leaf. If it were gathered cloth, it
wouldn't be so beautiful. We already know that beauty, from the
fine arts. Hence ... what a photograph is of is always of primary
importance. The assumption underlying all uses of photography,
that each photograph is a piece of the world means that we don't
know how to react to a photograph . .. until we know what piece
of the world it is. What looks like a bare coronet—the famous pho¬
tograph taken by Harold Edgerton in 1936—becomes far more
interesting when we find out it is a splash of milk.

Kracauer makes the closely related argument that photography

(and the cinema) are the only arts which continually re-direct the
viewers' attention back to the pre-existing world.5 The other
arts—especially in their abstract, modernist phases—consume
and transcend their raw materials.
What Kracauer says of photography is perhaps even truer of
much contemporary dance. For example, George Balanchine is
often accused of "dehumanizing" his ballerinas; and there are in
fact a great many parallels to be drawn between his choreog¬
raphy and the proposals Ortega makes in his famous essay. Bal¬
anchine, at least in his formalist works, eliminates the narrative
structure and the theatrical accessories (period costume and sce¬
nery) we associate with 19th Century classical ballet. But in con¬
trast with those minimalists in the other arts who progressively
eliminated the human form, the end result of Balanchine's par¬
ing-down process is to reveal the palpable physicality of the dan¬
cer's body more fully than it has ever been revealed before. Thus,
perhaps ironically, the more "abstract" and the more "minimal¬
ist" the Balanchine ballet, the more it exhibits what Ransom
called "the bodiness of the world."
518 DANCE AND SOCIETY

We might go further and say that contemporary dance in the

popular, stripped-down, Balanchinian mold has brought about
the “de-sublimation" of the dancer's body. Even though we rou¬
tinely define dance as the art of the human body in motion, it's
only in our own time that choreographers have chosen to reveal
rather than conceal the actual human form. As long as dance, like
the other arts, was envisioned as a mode of sublimation (that is,
the conversion of bodily energy into something more spiritual,
something worthy of the soul), the dancer's body invariably
served a “higher" end beyond itself. In the earliest court ballets
for example, the body was allegorized; its significance lay in the
allegorical meaning of the group pattern that enveloped it. In
the romantic ballet, the body was etherealized; “spirituality"
could only be achieved by transcending its materiality.
But in our own de-sublimating century, we have come more
and more to believe (as D. H. Lawrence argued) that the soul is
in the body. (Consider the way Afro-American street jargon has
re-defined the word “soul.") Thus, choreographers such as Bal¬
anchine, Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, and Lucinda Childs have
created dances that are, in their own way, profoundly responsive
to our new “spiritual" (as well as aesthetic) needs.
Ultimately, dance and photography offer at least a provisional
solution to the problem Ortega y Gasset refers to as “the pro¬
gressive dis-realization of the world":

“The progressive dis-realization of the world" which began in the

philosophy of the Renaissance reaches its extreme consequences in
the radical sensationalism of Avenarius and Mach. How can this
continue? ... A return to primitive realism is unthinkable: four
centuries of criticism, of doubt, of suspicion have made this attitude
forever untenable. To remain in our subjectivism is equally impos¬
sible. Where shall we find the material to reconstruct the world?
(“On Point of View in the Arts")

Dance, as we've seen, can never completely lose touch with the
human form (as John Martin once wrote, “no movement can be
made by the human body which is wholly non-representa-
tional"); and likewise, photography invariably reveals some
aspect of the material world. But at the same time, neither dance
nor photography is in any danger of lapsing into a naive, regres¬
sive realism. Dance is inherently “unrealistic" to the extent that
the human figure is estranged from the world of speech. Anal¬
ogously, photographic art (unlike cinematic art) remains for the
most part uninterested in the “realism" of color. Despite the
 ROGER COPELAND 519

attention recently lavished on serious photographers who work

in color (William Eggleston, for example), most photographic
artists remain committed to the more "abstract" beauty of black
and white (which is not to say that all color photography is nec¬
essarily "realistic").
Ortega thought that a formal appreciation of art was incom¬
patible with a more directly empathic involvement in "lived
reality":
Perception of lived reality and the perception of artistic form . ..
are essentially incompatible because they call for a different adjust¬
ment of our perceptive apparatus.

Commenting on Titian's portrait of Charles the Fifth on horse¬

back, Ortega argues that in order to appreciate the painting
properly
... we must forget that this is Charles the Fifth in person and see
instead a portrait—that is, an image, a fiction. The portrayed person
and his portrait are two entirely different things: we are interested
in either one or the other. In the first case, we "live" with Charles
the Fifth, in the second, we look at an object of art. ("The Dehu¬
manization of Art")

But this is precisely the sort of either/or dichotomy that pho¬

tography transcends. When we look at Andre Kertesz's "Railroad
Station" (1937), we see both an arrangement of forms and lines
reminiscent of Cubist painting and a "human reality" we readily
recognize from our own mundane experience.
To Ortega, the mutual exclusivity of "formalism" and "real¬
ism" mirrored the unbridgeable nature of the gap between the
avant-garde artist and "the masses." But today, the desire to "epa-
ter le bourgeois" appears to be on the wane; and what Lionel
Trilling once called "the adversary relationship" between the
avant-garde artist and middle-class society has transformed into
something more closely resembling peaceful co-existence. This
is the cultural ambience in which photography and dance now
thrive.
(1977, 1981)

Notes

‘This desire to escape the minimalist cul-de-sac is evident in almost

all of the arts, not just painting. In the mid-sixties, Twyla Tharp, for
example, was creating minimalist dances for performers who were
520 DANCE AND SOCIETY

rarely called upon to move, let alone "dance" in a virtuosic manner. Yet
today, she choreographs for Baryshnikov. Composers like Steve Reich
and Philip Glass have progressively "thickened" the textures of their
once minimal music. And in the world of architecture, Robert Venturi
has led the revolt against minimal "purity" by declaring "Less is a bore."
2Of course, the conceptualists were motivated by other concerns as
well, chief among them being the desire to create "non-buyable" art¬
works. Thus, photography, while re-locating the conceptual event in the
world, also re-implicated it in the dynamics of the marketplace (because
photographic documentation is collectable).
3Ironically, Kracauer would dismiss as "abstract" the very sort of
poetry that Ransom championed in his book The World's Body. Ransom
felt that the poetic image (or "iconic sign") was more concrete than the
abstract, scientific "concept" which gives us not the world's body, but
the world's skeleton.
“The word "redemption" betrays the essentially "spiritual" nature of
Kracauer's argument. Like Bazin (whom he resembles in so many ways)
Kracauer saw modernism as the creation of an alternative world which
further estranges an already alienated species from its natural habitat.
So perhaps I should make clear the extent to which I'm appropriating
the work of Kracauer and Bazin for my own (purely secular) purposes.
Both of them are just as opposed to formalist abstraction in the photo¬
graphic arts as they are in the other arts (in fact, even more so). But my
point is that even the most "abstract" photograph still demonstrates
their essential ideas about the special relation between the photograph
and its subject (even if that subject is "pre-stylized").
furthermore, in Theory of Film, Kracauer insists that, unlike painting,
the frame of the, photograph "is only a provisional limit, its content
refers to other contents outside the frame." Stanley Cavell expands on
this idea nicely in his book. The World Viewed: "You can always ask,
pointing to an object in a photograph—a building, say—what lies
behind it, totally obscured by it. This only accidentally makes sense
when asked of an object in a painting. You can always ask, of an area
photographed, what lies adjacent to that area, beyond the frame. This
generally makes no sense asked of a painting. You can ask these ques¬
tions of objects in photographs because they have answers in reality. The
world of a painting is not continuous with the world of its frame; at its
frame, a world finds its limits. We might say: A painting is a world: a
photograph is of the world."
 RUTH KATZ 521

_RUTH KATZ_
THE EGALITARIAN WALTZ

One need not be an anthropologist or a cultural historian to

remark that social dancing these days seems to isolate the indi¬
vidual in a trance-like self-absorption which virtually discon¬
nects him from the world and even from his partner. Indeed, the
dance of the day—like other art forms—is often a good reflection
of the values of a given time and place. Today's developments,
both in the dance and in society, provide more than the usual
scholarly justification for looking back to one of the earliest man¬
ifestations of individualism and escape in the dance and its asso¬
ciation with the values of liberty, equality and uncertainty which
followed upon the French Revolution. The dance was the waltz;
the dancers, at first, were the middle classes, soon to be joined by
both upper and lower classes; the time and place are Central
Europe, and soon the whole Western world, at the beginning of
the nineteenth century.
The history of the dance makes plain that the upper classes of
Western society borrowed many of their dance forms from “the
people," although the dances underwent various transforma¬
tions in the course of their adaptation. Two forms of the same
dance frequently existed side by side, the upper classes prefer¬
ring the restrained and calmer version, while the country folk
preferred the freer and wilder form.1 Despite the apparent dif¬
ferences between court and folk dance, and the variations in the
extent of similarity from dance to dance, and from time to place,
the kinship is almost always discernible. Historically, the tie
between the two forms was particularly close until the fifteenth
century. From that time forward, there is an increasing gap.
We are told that dances tended to be quite simple until the
fifteenth century, and their unwritten rules could be learned
through observation and participation. The emphasis on both
court and folk dance was primarily on their larger basic features,
where the relatively few individual components of each dance
were fused into an artistic whole. Beginning in the fifteenth cen¬
tury, however, this emphasis on simplicity and on the whole
begins to be replaced by a liking for multiple elements, com¬
plexity and attention to small details.2 Without entering into an
522 DANCE AND SOCIETY

explanation of the underlying reasons for this new aesthetic out¬

look—a problem which is not really relevant to the present
paper—it will be recalled that this new “realism of particulars"
also found expression in other arts of the period such as the illu¬
mination of books, for example, or the importance attached to
detail in the weaving of tapestries, etc.
In the dance, the attention to detail gave rise to an elaborate
vocabulary of steps. For the first time, intricate features had to be
learned with exactitude and memorized carefully. This new
development led, eventually, to the establishment of a new
profession, the dance teacher, and to the crystallization of a the¬
ory" of the dance to which the proliferation of dance manuals
attests. As a result, courtly dance and folk dance spread further
apart. They continued to influence each other, one may say, but
their aims and styles were different.3
The purpose of this paper, however, is not to analyze why the
cultural gap between the social classes widened, but rather to
point out a moment in history when they converged once again,
when "everybody" danced the waltz. This vantage point, per¬
haps, may also contribute to the clarification of why and when
high culture and popular culture diverge and converge.

THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE WALTZ

Popular imagery today has it that in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, kings and commoners, nobles and bourgeoi¬
sie whiled away their nights waltzing. Hollywood has contrib¬
uted substantially to this image4 and perhaps that alone is
enough to make it suspect, particularly when one recalls, from
cultural history in general, and from the history of the dance
alluded to above, that the homogeneity of cultural expression
had declined, as the class structure became more heterogeneous.
Yet, for all this, a close investigation substantiates the popular
image. Indeed, everybody seems to have been dancing the waltz.
No less interesting than the success of the waltz as a dance
form is its success from a purely musical point of view. Concert
performances of the waltz attracted audiences as significant as
those whose legs it propelled. The standing of Johann Strauss Sr.
among composers and among concertgoers was very high, and
in an era when Beethoven had just died (1827), the waltz was
admitted not only to the ballroom and to "pop" concerts, but to
the very halls in which Beethoven had resounded the night
before. We know that not only kings and queens lent their ears.
 RUTH KATZ 523

but that composers like Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Ros¬

sini, Meyerbeer, Bellini, Auber, Berlioz, Brahms, and even Cher¬
ubini, who had lived through the entire high classical era, were
among those who praised and applauded Strauss.5 Farga, with all
his exaggerated enthusiasm, seems right when he says, "Nie vor-
her und nie nachher erreicht die Unterhaltungsmusik ein der-
artiges Niveau vie zur Zeit Strauss und Lanners."6
If one holds to the theory that every artistic creation is an
expression of the world in which it was created, two questions
immediately arise: 1. What social conditions account for this rad¬
ical change? In particular, what changes had taken place in the
relationship among the social classes that could be made mani¬
fest in this way? 2. Apart from the social basis which may explain
the convergence of cultural behavior, one must inquire into the
cultural expression itself: What is it about the waltz that made it
suitable for this unique role? In what sense does the nature of
the dance itself reflect the society which created it? Both of these
sets of questions will occupy us in what follows.

THE MINUET AND THE WALTZ

To make the argument of this paper more tangible, it is inter¬
esting to compare the character of the waltz and its social setting
with that of the minuet and its social setting. The major dance
which immediately preceded the waltz, the minuet, is a courtly
dance whose folk origins had been transferred from their initial
unrestrained expressiveness into the classical ideas of clarity, bal¬
ance and regularity. While outwardly simple, the minuet had to
be "studied,” a fact to which a great number of dance manuals
devoted to its rules and regulations attest. Goethe's oft-cited
observations, made at one of the carnivals he attended in Rome,
substantiates this point even further. He remarks, "Nobody ven¬
tures unconcernedly to dance unless he has been taught the art;
the minuet in particular, is regarded as a work of art and is per¬
formed, indeed, only by a few couples. The couples are sur¬
rounded by the rest of the company, admired and applauded at
the end."7 Thus, we also learn from Goethe something which is
fully corroborated in the dance manuals: the minuet involves not
only dancers but onlookers as well, and these latter are an impor¬
tant part of the spectacle.
The delicately planned geometry of the dance steps were the
quintessence of dignity and formality. There was no room for
individual variation, embellishment or creativity. All is as care-
524 DANCE AND SOCIETY

fully planned and executed as the architecture of a Le Notre gar¬

den. The dancers' dress was costly but moderate, emphasizing an
appreciation for the beauty of simplicity. Subdued half-tone
colors predominated. The hoop skirt symbolized additional
restraint and "distance."
But for all the simplicity and uniformity, social status consid¬
erations played an important part in the dance. Perhaps it was
the presence of an audience which made it so tempting to incor¬
porate into the dance symbols of the status of the dancers in the
social structure; perhaps it was something else. But what we do
know is that it took a great deal of research to determine who
would open the ball, and in what succession each guest should
enter the dance.8 The minuet, it may be said, reflected and incor¬
porated the wordly ranks which its participants brought with
them when they entered the ballroom. Paradoxically, this was
made possible by the very uniformity of the minuet.
Not so the waltz. The waltz emphasized not uniformity, but
individual expression; there are no rules to be studied, save for
a few basic steps; the individual is encouraged to introduce his
own variations and interpretations. Here, the dancers surrender
their worldly identities upon entering the "society of the dance"
where individuals take on new roles and where recognition is
accorded not by virtue of one's status in the larger society, but
by virtue of one's performance in the dance. Often, in dances
like the waltz where individual expression is encouraged, the
best dancers are permitted to bring the dance to a close while the
others encircle them to watch and applaud. Except in this latter
sense, there are no onlookers or audience in the waltz. The
emphasis is on the participation of all, and on the equality of all,
while rewarding achievement within the dance itself rather than
status one brings to the dance from "the world outside."

THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE WALTZ

If the minuet represented the separateness of the classes and
retained social distinctions even within the dance, the waltz rep¬
resents the breaking down of these distinctions. In trying to
explain how this happened, the first thing to note is that the
waltz, or something very much like it, had been rejected by the
middle and upper classes not very long before.
About the middle of the eighteenth century the word "wal-
zen" was introduced as the name of a whirling or revolving
dance movement. Ultimately, the word is thought to derive from
 RUTH KATZ 525

the Latin "volvere" (to turn around). From both verbal and pic¬
torial documents dating as early as the sixteenth century, it can
be deduced that the waltz as a dance movement is of much older
date than that in which it received a definite name. The Weller,
the Spinner, and the Volte—noted by sixteenth-century writers
such as the Meistersinger, Kunz Has,9 and Thoinot Arbeau in his
Orchesographie10—show great resemblance to the later waltz in
that the dancing couple whirl in close embrace, often revolving
about the room, rather than dancing separately side by side in
the form that predominated until after the minuet.
These precursors of the waltz were severely criticized by mor¬
alists and others. Thoinot Arbeau was concerned with the diz¬
ziness caused by the Volte,11 while a variety of clergymen
remarked on the young women who allowed themselves to be
grasped anywhere by their partners and lusted to be thrown into
the air and twirled about.12 One such warning is sounded by
Cyriacus Spangenberg in his publication of 1578 warning all
pious young men against those "Jungfrauen die da Lust zu den
Abendtanzen haben und sich da gerne umbedrehen, unziichtig
kiissen und begreifen lassen."13
The upper classes, at least, heeded the warnings, although per¬
haps for other reasons. Under the influence of the ballet and the
increasing distance between folk-dance and court-dance, during
the seventeenth and greater part of the eighteenth century,
courtly dance found little room for the sensual. The minuet, the
most dignified representative of those dances the movements of
which were conventionalized, was a conscious work of art, lack¬
ing that element of spontaneity which characterized the dances
it replaced. While some of the whirling dances were "salonfa-
hig" for a time, the dancing masters easily succeeded in substi¬
tuting artistic skill and discipline for spontaneity and
expressiveness.
The return to naturalness in the dance began in the eighteenth
century, together with the renewed interest in folk song, and
was part of a movement to recapture the vitality of the folk for
the new nationalistic needs of society. Thus, the centuries-old
German Dreher was rediscovered, and in a short time became a
world-conquering dance which not only dominated dancing
itself but succeeded in penetrating into compositions which had
little to do with dancing.14
Of the many whirling dances, it is particularly the Landler
from which the waltz derived. The couples in close embrace
made a turn to each two measures while at the same time follow-
526 DANCE AND SOCIETY

ing a circular course. The three-four rhythm with the strongly

accentuated first beat characteristic of most Landlers was adopted
by the waltz.
The waltz attained its true character, however, by being
danced like a Schleifer, having given up the skips and the turn¬
ing under the arm of the Landler in favor of dragging the feet
along the floor.15 The skips unquestioningly represented a cer¬
tain freedom of expression, but it is these smooth revolutions,
the ecstatic gliding motion, which first made it possible to really
"let go." Of course, this very "letting go" was the basis on which
the ancestors of the waltz had been resisted.

THE WALTZ IN IDEOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL

PERSPECTIVE
It is well known that the development of courtly art since the
close of the Renaissance came to a standstill toward the middle
of the eighteenth century and was superseded by middle-class
subjectivism and romanticism. Arnold Hauser, discussing this
development, distinguishes, however, between pre-revolution¬
ary romanticism and that of the post-revolutionary period.
The French Revolution, argues Hauser, although it conceived
of art as harnessed to the needs of the emerging "new" society,
created an idea of artistic freedom which had no precedent. The
revolution itself limited the freedom of the individual artist by
focusing on art and not the artist. It declared that art must not be
the privilege of the rich and the leisured, or an idle pastime, but
that it must "teach and improve and contribute to the happiness
of the general public and be the possession of every man." By
creating a correspondence between the idea of artistic truth and
that of social justice, the revolution challenged the dictatorship
of the academies and the monopolization of the art market by
the court and aristocracy.
The consequent romanticism denied that there existed objec¬
tive rules of any kind to govern the production or consumption
of art. It enshrined the concept of the uniqueness of individual
expression and the struggle against the very principle of tradi¬
tion, authority and rule. Whereas the pre-revolutionary middle
class saw art as one means of expressing identification with the
aristocracy and aloofness from the lower classes, in the post-rev¬
olutionary period it began to think of art as individualistic and
idiosyncratic, a "matter of taste" which might vary among dif¬
ferent people, different times and different places.16 Thus, art
 RUTH KATZ 527

which had previously been looked upon as possessing universal

validity, in this over-all rebellion against authority of any kind,
could no longer be judged by absolute standards. The continuous
striving toward the goal of perfection, so characteristic of the
eighteenth century, gave way to a kind of relativism in which it
became possible to "like" both a Beethoven and a Strauss, not
because they stand comparison, but because they need not be
compared.
As the individual was "freed" from conventional standards
and tastes, and the artist was "freed" from his royal patrons and
a market developed in which the artist had to satisfy "public
opinion" and its new leaders, the critics, the demand increased
for lighter and less "complicated" music which led, ultimately,
to a division into "serious" and "light" music which had not
existed previously. The concert societies and later the large con¬
cert halls replaced performances at court and drawing rooms,
and induced greater concentration on expressiveness and on
individual style. "Individual style" in fact, now characterized the
music of the nineteenth century. Emotionalism and sentimental¬
ism now served the middle class as a means of expressing its
intellectual independence of the aristocracy, but ultimately led
to a cult of sensibility in which the aristocracy itself could join.
Along with nationalism, then, the newly-awakened concern
with sensibility, the throwing off of traditional standards and the
rise of relativism all cut across barriers to create an ideology of
romanticism. This ideology began in the middle classes, but, in
time, spread both upwards to the waning aristocracy and down¬
wards to the industrial lower classes. These cohesive forces com¬
bined with the economic and political interaction which reduced
the barriers between classes.
Yet, for all the equality which the newly-freed individual
might experience with those about him, psychologically speak¬
ing, there is a loss involved: the sense of having some fixed and
proper place in a stable and predictable society. The individual
stood alone. This, of course, is the most famous dilemma of mod¬
ern man, the roots of which are to be found in the post-revolu¬
tionary period.17

THE APPROPRIATENESS OF THE WALTZ

The attributes of the waltz are compatible with this social and
ideological setting. This was a period of unity, as we tried to
point out, in which nationalism, relativism and the over-all ide-
528 DANCE AND SOCIETY

ology of romanticism brought very different kinds of people into

contact and sympathy with each other. The universality of the
waltz gave expression to this unity and mutual accessibility. Fur¬
thermore, the period was one of individual assertiveness and
achievement, and the waltz allowed for freedom of expression
and provided an opportunity for proving oneself. The beautiful
commoner, if she waltzed very well, would be invited to dance
with the prince.
But with all of this the times were troubled too. Austria, for
example, was at war no less than five times between 1792 and
1814, yet she was the leader in the crusade for Gemiitlichkeit.
The individual who had lost his sense of belonging since the
revolution, who no longer had an idea of a proper place in a
predictable society, became an object of importance and interest
to himself at the expense of his commitment to other social roles.
"Gemiitlichkeit" is only one of the symptoms of this new state
of being. Self-experiences now replaced the experiences of the
world outside and were treated as though they were constantly
slipping away and being lost forever. Losing oneself in the waltz
is indeed one of the most symbolic cultural expressions of this
new frame of mind, and the waltz craze of the first decades of
the nineteenth century expresses so well this attitude to experi¬
ences and their temporality. It is interesting and amusing to
mention in connection with this that the Apollo Palace in
Vienna, where the waltz was danced with passion and verve by
up to 6,000 persons in five large and thirty-one smaller dancing
rooms, is supposed to have contained a hall for pregnant women
who were eager not to lose even a moment of the dance, even
though they preferred not to mingle with the general crowd.18
The waltz not only made it possible for different kinds of indi¬
viduals to come together on an egalitarian basis, it also made pos¬
sible a kind of "escape" from reality through the thrilling diz¬
ziness of whirling one's way in a private world of sensuality. The
"letting go" function of the waltz seems relevant to a world
without clear standards, in which the individual stood alone
having to find his own way. Werther, Goethe's romantic hero,
confesses to Wilhelm that while waltzing with Lotte, everything
around him seemed to disappear. "Ich war kein Mensch mehr,"
he relates, "das liebenswiirdigste Geschopf in den Armen zu
haben und mit ihr herumsufligen wie Wetter, dass alles ring-
sumher verging."19
Although the waltz seemed like a centrifugal force generated
by rotation and threatening to hurl the dancers into space, the
 RUTH KATZ 529

support given by each partner to the other was so strong that

there was no "danger" in their abandonment. In other words,
the waltz permitted additional "freedom," the kind of sexual
contact which had heretofore been unthinkable in public. The
greater physical contact between the sexes made possible by the
waltz is cleverly illustrated in the following sarcastic verses writ¬
ten by Lord Byron on this subject:

Round all the confines of the yielded waist

The strongest hand may wander undisplaced:
The lady's in return may grasp as much
As princely paunches offer to her touch.
Pleased round the chalky floor how well they trip;
One hand reposing on the royal hip.
The other to the shoulder no less royal
Ascending with affection truly loyal!
Thus all and each in movement swift or slow.
The genial contact gently undergo;
Till some might marvel with the modest Turk
If "nothing follows all this palming work"?
Something does follow at a fitter time;
The breast thus publicly resign'd to man
In private may resist him—if it can.

The waltz, it seems, not only made it possible to lose con¬

sciousness of time and space, but by introducing sensual thrills
and encouraging free erotic expressions it also succeeded in pro¬
viding the "desert island" to which one might escape. In this
sense the waltz may have represented a world in which only the
senses were operative, a world which was void of responsibility,
an experience of self and self-involvement, an escape from real¬
ity and a surrender to the moment which can best be understood
when contrasted with the element of objectivity and detachment
so essential in the execution of the minuet.20

CONCLUSION
Everybody danced the waltz. The waltz, the dance of the mid¬
dle class, was as expressive for the upper classes who now shared
the world view of the middle classes as it was for the lower
classes in urban centers who also shared the same world view,
not yet having developed one of their own. As was pointed out,
the different social strata could share the same cultural expres-
530 DANCE AND SOCIETY

sions because of the greater cultural mobility which resulted

from the over-all endorsement of romanticism and its manifold
aspects, which directly or indirectly encouraged such a devel¬
opment. The acceptance of some of the basic ideas of the early
nineteenth-century philosophy of nationalism directly facili¬
tated cultural mobility.
Louis Philippe with his bourgeois manners and clothes best
portrays the changed world view of the upper class. He loved
the waltz and paid tribute to one of his major composers. He
invited Johan Strauss, Sr., and his orchestra to play some of the
waltzes with which he was already familiar at his court.21
Louis Philippe is not the only one in whose court the waltz
resounded. In 1834 Strauss played for King Friedrich Wilhelm
III and the Prussian court. And Czar Nicholas and the Czarina of
Russia, upon hearing Strauss in Vienna invited him to introduce
his waltzes at St. Petersburg.22
The Vienna Congress, held in the years 1814-15, is not only
important in modern European history, but also represents an
important moment in the history of the waltz. The diplomats and
delegates who attended the Congress represented their countries
but not a particular social class. The Congress was composed of
mixed groups. It consisted of aristocrats of the old regime who
applied eighteenth-century diplomatic principles, as well as rep¬
resentatives of other classes who were imbued with post-revo¬
lutionary political ideas. The well-known saying "le Congres ne
marche pas, il danse" is certainly significant of the rage for danc¬
ing, but it is doubly significant for us that it was the waltz which
propelled the legs of the delegates of all classes.
While the different social classes could share the same cultural
expressions, the expressions themselves could now vary, since
the new society was no longer guided by absolute values. This
was a society for whom art became a matter of changing taste; a
society for whom it was "natural" for varied artistic expressions
to co-exist. Moreover, any individual of that society could
respond favorably to a diversity of artistic expressions, no longer
experiencing the need to rank them in a single continuum of
merit.
This is what permitted Berlioz to take Johann Strauss as the
starting point and climax of one of his essays for the Journal des
Debats, to which he was a monthly contributor. With Strauss as
his example, Berlioz demonstrated to the Parisians the suprem¬
acy of German music and set him on a plane with Gluck, Bee¬
thoven and Weber.23
 RUTH KATZ 531

Musically speaking, Berlioz is not the only well-known com¬

poser of that period to have accepted the waltz and to have
praised one of its greatest composers. However, the main sup¬
porters of the waltz were the members of the audience who
required lighter music and wanted to be entertained. This audi¬
ence, which was continuously increasing, was catered to because
music became a commodity on the free market and made adjust¬
ments to the new situation. The idea of making music accessible
to the masses can be traced directly to the revolution which made
art the possession of every man, and which in the process of
democratizing art, lowered its standards. As will be recalled, the
social reformers saw a correspondence between the idea of artis¬
tic truth and that of social justice. Indeed, the waltz, to this soci¬
ety, represented some kind of artistic truth because it was so
socially just. The Congress of 1815, which in a way, tried to elim¬
inate from history both Napoleon and the French Revolution,
took over the new dance of the bourgeoisie as its own form of
social expression, gazing once more at "Liberte, egalite, frater-
nite," with affection and approval, knowing that the dance, and
more specifically the waltz, may have proven to be one of the
very few areas where those great ideas could actually be mani¬
fested, an area where freedom did not impair equality and vice
versa. What a wonderful world in which to get lost!
(1973)

Notes

‘Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance (New York, 1937), p. 282.
Hbid., p. 298.
3Ibid., pp. 299-302.
4One will recall Warner Brothers' “The Great Waltz" in this connec¬
tion, as well as more recent offerings, such as a Walt Disney cartoon
about Johann Strauss in which both cats and mice join together in the
waltz.
5H. E. Jacob, Johann Strauss, Father and Son (Richmond, Va„ 1939), pp.
79-108.
6Franz Farga, Fanner und Strauss (Vienna, 1948), p. 42.
7J. W. von Goethe, Italien, Zweiter Aufenthalt in Rom, 1788. Sachs uses
this quotation in a somewhat different connection, primarily to empha¬
size the aesthetic values of the minuet, op. cit., p. 399.
"The audience served as an integral part of the dance, the spectators,
not only the audience, were saluted with ceremonial bows which pre¬
ceded the actual dance. Ciambattista Dufort finds it necessary to devote
two whole chapters of his manual Trattato del ballo nobile (Naples, 1728)
532 DANCE AND SOCIETY

to this subject, Gottfried Taubert devotes sixty pages of his Rechtschaffe-

ner Tanzmeister (Leipzig, 1717) to the same, and J. M. de Chavanne
devotes almost his entire book Principes du Minuet (Luxembourg, 1767)
to that crucial opening which so well expresses the atmosphere of the
whole dance.
9See Edward Reeser, The History of the Waltz (Stockholm, n.d.), p. 1.
I0Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesography, translated by Mary Stewart Evans
(New York, 1967), pp. 119-23.
nIbid., p. 121.
12See Paul Nettl, "Tanz und Tanzmuzik," in Adler's Handbuch der Musik-
geschichte (Berlin 1930), Vol. II, pp. 979-80.
“Cited in Reeser, op. cit.r p. 9.
14See Paul Nettl, The Story of Dance Music (New York, 1947), pp. 252-
86.
15See Sachs, op. cit., p. 433.
16For a suggestive discussion of the above see Arnold Hauser, The
Social History of Art (London, 1951), Vol. II, pp. 622-710.
17For a relevant sociological study of the European drama see Leo
Lowenthal, Literature and the Image of Man (Boston, 1957), pp. 136-220.
18Jacob, op. cit., p. 24.
19J. W. Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther in Goethes Sdmtliche Werke
(Miinchen, 1910), Vol. II, p. 265.
20Callois includes waltzing in the type of game to which he assigns
the term ilinx—the Greek term for whirlpool—to cover "the many vari¬
eties of such transport ... which consist of an attempt to momentarily
destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic
upon an otherwise lucid mind." See Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games
(New York, 1961), pp. 23-26.
21Jacob, op. cit., p. 91.
“Jacob, ibid., pp. 80-81.
“See Hector Berlioz, Memoirs (New York, 1966), pp. 375-77. Also see
Jacques Barzun. Berlioz and the Romantic Century (Boston, 1950), Vol. I, pp.
473-74.
 JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU 533

JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU
AN ANTHROPOLOGIST
LOOKS AT BALLET AS A
FORM OF ETHNIC DANCE

It is good anthropology to think of ballet as a form of ethnic

dance. Currently, that idea is unacceptable to most Western
dance scholars. This lack of agreement shows clearly that some¬
thing is amiss in the communication of ideas between the schol¬
ars of dance and those of anthropology, and this paper is an
attempt to bridge that communication gap.
The faults and errors of anthropologists in their approach to
dance are many, but they are largely due to their hesitation to
deal with something which seems esoteric and out of their field
of competence. However, a handful of dance anthropologists are
trying to rectify this by publishing in the social science journals
and by participating in formal and informal meetings with other
anthropologists.
By ethnic dance, anthropologists mean to convey the idea that
all forms of dance reflect the cultural traditions within which
they developed. Dancers and dance scholars, as this paper will
show, use this term, and the related terms ethnologic, primitive and
folkdance, differently and, in fact, in a way which reveals their
limited knowledge of non-Western dance forms.
In preparing to formulate this paper, I reread in an intense
period pertinent writings by DeMille, Haskell, Holt, the Kin¬
neys, Kirstein, La Meri, Martin, Sachs, Sorell and Terry. In addi¬
tion I carefully reread the definitions pertaining to dance in Web¬
ster's New International Dictionary, the 2nd edition definitions
which were written by Humphrey, and the 3rd edition defini¬
tions which were written by Kurath. Although these and other
sources are listed in the bibliography at the end of this paper, I
name these scholars here to focus my frame of reference.
The experience of this intense rereading as an anthropologist
rather than as a dancer, was both instructive and disturbing. The
readings are rife with unsubstantiated deductive reasoning,
poorly documented "proofs/' a plethora of half-truths, many
534 DANCE AND SOCIETY

out-and-out errors, and a pervasive ethnocentric bias. Where the

writers championed non-Western dance they were either apol¬
ogists or patronistic. Most discouraging of all, these authors saw
fit to change only the pictures and not the text when they reis¬
sued their books after as many as seventeen years later; they only
updated the Euro-American dance scene.
This survey of the literature reveals an amazing divergence of
opinions. We are able to read that the origin of dance was in play
and that it was not in play, that it was for magical and religious
purposes, and that it was not for those things; that it was for
courtship and that it was not for courtship; that it was the first
form of communication and that communication did not enter
into dance until it became an "art." In addition we can read that
it was serious and purposeful and that at the same time it was an
outgrowth of exuberance, was totally spontaneous, and origi¬
nated in the spirit of fun. Moreover, we can read that it was only
a group activity for tribal solidarity and that it was strictly for
the pleasure and self-expression of the one dancing. We can
learn also, that animals danced before man did, and yet that
dance is a human activity!
It has been a long time since anthropologists concerned them¬
selves with unknowable origins, and I will not add another ori¬
gin theory for dance, because I don't know anyone who was
there. Our dance writers, however, suggest evidence for origins
from archeological finds, and from models exemplified by con¬
temporary primitive groups. For the first, one must remember
that man had been on this earth for a long time before he made
cave paintings and statuary, so that archeological finds can
hardly tell us about the beginnings of dance. For the second set
of evidence, that of using models from contemporary primitives,
one must not confuse the word "primitive" with "primeval,"
even though one author actually does equate these two terms
(Sorell 1967:14). About the dance of primeval man we really
know nothing. About primitive dance, on the other hand, we
know a great deal. The first thing that we know is that there is
no such thing as a primitive dance. There are dances performed
by primitives, and they are too varied to fit any stereotype.
It is a gross error to think of groups of peoples or their dances
as being monolithic wholes. "The African dance" never existed;
there are, however, Dahomean dances, Hausa dances, Masai
dances, and so forth. "The American Indian" is a fiction and so
is a prototype of "Indian dance." There are, however, Iroquois,
Kwakiutl, and Hopis, to name a few, and they have dances.
 JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU 535

Despite all anthropological evidence to the contrary, however.

Western dance scholars set themselves up as authorities on the
characteristics of primitive dance. Sorell combines most of these
so-called characteristics of the primitive stereotype. He tells us
that primitive dancers have no technique, and no artistry, but
that they are "unfailing masters of their bodies"! He states that
their dances are disorganized and frenzied, but that they are able
to translate all their feelings and emotions into movement! He
claims the dances are spontaneous but also purposeful! Primitive
dances, he tells us, are serious but social! He claims that they
have "complete freedom" but that men and women can't dance
together. He qualifies that last statement by saying that men and
women dance together after the dance degenerates into an orgy!
Sorell also asserts that primitives cannot distinguish between the
concrete and the symbolic, that they dance for every occasion,
and that they stamp around a lot! Further, Sorell asserts that
dance in primitive societies is a special prerogative of males,
especially chieftains, shamans and witch doctors (Sorell 1967:10-
11). Kirstein also characterizes the dances of "natural, unfettered
societies" (whatever that means). Although the whole body par¬
ticipates according to Kirstein, he claims that the emphasis of
movement is with the lower half of the torso. He concludes that
primitive dance is repetitious, limited, unconscious and with
"retardative and closed expression"! Still, though it may be
unconscious, Kirstein tells his readers that dance is useful to the
tribe and that it is based on the seasons. Primitive dance, or as
he phrases it, "earlier manifestations of human activity," is
everywhere found to be "almost identically formulated." He
never really tells us what these formulations are except that they
have little to offer in methodology or structure, and that they are
examples of "instinctive exuberance" (Kirstein 1942:3-5).
Terry describes the functions of primitive dance, and he uses
American Indians as his model. In his book The Dance in America
he writes sympathetically towards American Indians and his
primitive brothers." However, his paternalistic feelings on the
one hand, and his sense of ethnocentricity on the other, prompt
him to set aside any thought that people with whom he identi¬
fies could share contemporarily those same dance characteristics,
because he states "the white man s dance heritage, except for the
most ancient of days, was wholly different (1956:3-4, 195-198,
3).
With the rejection of the so-called primitive characteristics for
the white man, it is common to ascribe these characteristics to
536 DANCE AND SOCIETY

groups existing among African tribes, Indians of North and

South America, and Pacific peoples. These are the same peoples
who are labeled by these authors as "ethnic." No wonder that
balletomanes reject the idea that ballet is a form of ethnic dance!
But Africans, North and South Amerindians and Pacific peoples
would be just as horrified to be called ethnic under the terms of
the stereotype. Those so-called characteristics-as-a-group do not
prevail anywhere!
Another significant obstacle to the identification of Western
dancers with non-Western dance forms, be they primitive or
"ethnologic" in the sense that Sorell uses the latter term as "the
art expression of a race" which is "executed for the enjoyment
and edification of the audience" (1967:76), is the double myth
that the dance grew out of some spontaneous mob action and
that once formed, became frozen. American anthropologists and
many folklorists have been most distressed about the popularity
of these widespread misconceptions. Apparently it satisfies our
own ethnocentric needs to believe in the uniqueness of our
dance forms, and it is much more convenient to believe that
primitive dances, like Topsy, just "growed," and that "ethnol¬
ogical" dances are part of an unchanging tradition. Even books
and articles which purport to be about the dances of the world
devote three quarters of the text and photos to Western dance.
We explicate our historic eras, our royal patrons, dancing mas¬
ters, choreographers, and performers. The rest of the world is
condensed diachronically and synchronically to the remaining
quarter of the book. This smaller portion, which must cover all
the rest of the world, is usually divided up so that the portions
at the beginning imply that the ethnic forms fit on some kind of
an evolutionary continuum, and the remaining portions at the
end of the book for, say, American Negro dance, give the appear¬
ance of a post-script, as if they too "also ran." In short we treat
Western dance, ballet particularly, as if it was the one great
divinely ordained apogee of the performing arts. This notion is
exemplified, and reinforced, by the way dance photos are pub¬
lished. Unless the non-Western performer has made a "hit" on
our stages, we seldom bother to give him a name in the captions,
even though he might be considered a fine artist among his
peers (Martin is the exception). For example, see Claire Holt's
article "Two Dance Worlds" (1969). The captions under the pho¬
tos of Javanese dancers list no names, but you may be sure that
we are always told when Martha Graham appears in a photo. A
scholar friend of mine was looking over the books by our dance
 JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU 537

historians, and he observed that they were not interested in the

whole world of dance; they were really only interested in their
world of dance. Can anyone deny this allegation?
Let it be noted, once and for all, that within the various "eth¬
nologic" dance worlds there are also patrons, dancing masters,
choreographers, and performers with names woven into a very
real historical fabric. The bias which those dancers have toward
their own dance and artists is just as strong as ours. The differ¬
ence is that they usually don't pretend to be scholars of other
dance forms, nor even very much interested in them. It is
instructive, however, to remind ourselves that all dances are sub¬
ject to change and development no matter how convenient we
may find it to dismiss some form as practically unchanged for
2,000 years (see DeMille 1963:48). It is convenient to us, of
course, because once having said that, we feel that our job is
finished.
As for the presumed lack of creators of dance among primitive
and folk groups, let us reconsider that assumption after reading
Martin's statement:
In simpler cultures than ours we find a mass of art actually created
and practiced by the people as a whole. (Martin 1939:15)

The first question which such a statement raises is what is a

"mass of art"? Martin never really defines art, but if he means
art as a refined aesthetic expression, then it can be asked how
such could ever be a collective product. Does he mean that it
appeared spontaneously? Does he really think there can be art
without artists? And if he believes that there must be artists, does
he mean to imply that a "people as a whole" are artists? If so,
what a wonderful group of people they must be. Let us learn
from them!
Doubtless, Martin probably will say that I have taken his state¬
ment to an absurd extension of his meaning, but I believe that
such thoughtless statements deserve to be pushed to their
extreme.
It is true that some cultures do not place the same value on
preserving the names of their innovators as we do. That is a mat¬
ter of tradition also. But we must not be deceived into believing
that a few hundred people all got together and with one unani¬
mous surge created a dance tradition which, having once been
created, never changed from that day forward.
Among the Hopi Indians of Northern Arizona, for example,
there is no tradition of naming a choreographer. Nevertheless
538 DANCE AND SOCIETY

they definitely know who, within a Kiva group or a society,

made certain innovations and why. A dramatic example of the
variety permitted in what is otherwise considered to be a static
dance tradition is to see, as I have, the "same" dance ceremonies
performed in several different villages at several different times.
To illustrate, I observed the important Hopi "bean dances"
which are held every February, in five different villages during
the winters of 1965 and 1968. There were the distinguishing dif¬
ferences between villages which are predictable differences,
once one becomes familiar with a village "style." But, in addi¬
tion, there were creative and not necessarily predictable differ¬
ences which occurred from one time to the next. The Hopis
know clearly what the predictable differences are, and they also
know who and what circumstances led to the timely innova¬
tions. Not only do they know these things, but they are quite
free in their evaluation of the merits and demerits of those dif¬
ferences, with their "own" usually (but not always) coming out
as being aesthetically more satisfying.
In Martin's Introduction to the Dance (1939') the first plate con¬
tains two reproductions of drawings of Hopi kachinas. Judging
from its position among the plates, this must be Martin's single
example of dances from a primitive group. DeMille also shows
Hopis as examples of primitive dancers (1963:33,35. The latter is
a "posed" photo). Let us see how well the Hopis compare to the
generalities attributed to primitive dancers.

PARADIGM
Hopi dances are immaculately organized, are never frenzied
(not even, in fact especially, in their famous snake dance), nor is
there a desire to translate feelings and emotions into movement.
The dances are indeed serious, if this is synonymous with pur¬
poseful, but many dances are not serious if that word negates the
fact that many dances are humorous, use clowns as personnel,
and contain both derision and satire. Hopi dance is also social if
one is speaking as a sociologist, but they have only one pre¬
scribed genre of dance which the Hopis themselves consider
"social" in the sense that they can be performed by uninitiated
members of the society. Hopis would find the idea of "complete
freedom" in their dance to be an alien idea, because much of the
form and behavior is rigidly prescribed. Certainly they would
never lapse into an orgy! Nor do they "hurl themselves on the
ground and roll in the mud" after the rains begin (DeMille
1963:35).
 JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU 539

Hopis would be offended if you told them that they could not
distinguish between the concrete and the symbolic. They are not
children, after all. They certainly understand natural causes. But
does it make them primitive, by definition, if they ask their gods
to help their crops grow by bringing rain? Don't farmers within
the mainstream of America and Europe frequently pray to a
Judeo-Christian God for the same thing? Are the Hopis more
illogical than we are when they dance their prayers instead of
attending religious services with responsive readings, and a vari¬
ety of motor activities such as rising, sitting, folding hands and
the like?
Once again assessing the Hopis in the light of the character¬
istics presumably found for primitive dancers, we find that
Hopis don't dance for the three specific life events which sup¬
posedly are "always" recognized in dance. That is, Hopis don't
dance at births, marriages, or deaths.
Obviously, it cannot be said that they dance on "every" occa¬
sion. Furthermore, the Hopi stamping would surely be a disap¬
pointment to Sorell if he expected the Hopis to make the earth
tremble under his feet" (1967:15). DeMille might also be sur¬
prised that there is no "state of exaltation or ecstasy in Hopi
dance (cf. DeMille 1963:34,67).
It is true that more Hopi dances are performed by males than
by females, but females also dance under certain circumstances
and for certain rituals which are the sole prerogative of females.
What is more important is that women participate a great deal if
one thinks of them as non-dancer participants, and one must,
because it is the entire dance event which is important to the
Hopis rather than just the actual rhythmic movement.
For the Hopis, it is meaningless to say that the primary dancers
are the chieftains, witch doctors and shamans. Traditionally they
have no real "government" as such, and every clan has its own
rituals and societies which are further divided according to the
village in which they live. Thus everyone will participate to
some degree or another in a variety of roles. There is no shaman
as such, so of course there cannot be shamanistic dances. As for
witch doctors, they do not dance in that role although they dance
to fulfill some of their other roles in their clan and residence
groups. „
I do not know what is meant by a "natural, unfettered society,
but whatever it is I am sure that description does not fit the
Hopis. In their dance movements the whole body does not par¬
ticipate, and there is no pelvic movement as such. The dances are
indeed repetitious, but that does not interfere in the least with
540 DANCE AND SOCIETY

the real dramatic impact of the performance. Within the "limi¬

tations" of the dance culture, Hopi dance still has an enormous
range of variations, and this is especially true because the dance
"event" is so richly orchestrated.
Far from being an "unconscious" dance form, Hopi dancing is
a very conscious activity. And I cannot believe that it is any more
"retardative" or closed within its own framework than any other
dance form, bar none. Finally, I find nothing in Hopi dance that
can be called "instinctively exuberant," but perhaps that is
because I don't know what "instinctive exuberance" is. If it is
what I think it is, such a description is inappropriate for Hopi
dances.
Lest someone say that perhaps the Hopis are the exception to
prove the rule, or, perhaps, that they are not really "primitive,"
let me make two points. First, if they are not "primitive" they do
not fit into any other category offered by the dance scholars dis¬
cussed in this article. Their dances are not "folk dance" as
described, nor do they have "ethnologic dances," nor "art
dances" nor "theatre dance" as these terms are used in the writ¬
ings under consideration. Clearly, in the light of these writers'
descriptions, they are a "primitive," "ethnic" group with dances
in kind. Secondly, I know of no group anywhere which fits the
descriptions for primitive dance such as given by DeMille,
Sorell, Terry and Martin. Certainly I know of no justification for
Haskell's statement that "many dances of primitive tribes still
living are said to be identical with those of birds and apes"
(1960:9). Unfortunately, Haskell does not document any of his
statements and we cannot trace th£ source of such a blatant piece
of misinformation.
It is necessary to hammer home the idea that there is no such
thing as a "primitive dance" form. Those who teach courses
called "primitive dance" are perpetuating a dangerous myth. As
a corollary to this let it be noted that no living primitive group
will reveal to us the way our European ancestors behaved. Every
group has had its own unique history and has been subject to
both internal and external modifications. Contemporary primi¬
tives are not children in fact, nor can they be pigeonholed into
some convenient slot on an evolutionary scale.
I suggest that one cause for so much inaccurate and shocking
misunderstanding on the subject of primitive groups is due to an
overdependence on the words of Sir James Frazer and Curt Sachs
whose works have been outdated as source material for better
than three decades. In their stead I would suggest that they read
 JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU 541

some of the works of Gertrude P. Kurath, whose bibliography

appeared in the January, 1970 issue of Ethnomusicology. This and
other suggested readings are given at the end of this article.

DEFINITIONS
It is disconcerting to discover that writers tend to use key
words without attempting real definitions which are neither too
exclusive nor too inclusive. Even the word dance, itself, is never
adequately defined to apply cross-culturally through time and
space. Instead of definitions we are given descriptions, which are
a different matter altogether. I have been closely questioned as
to the need for definitions "as long as we all mean the same
thing anyway," and I have even been asked what difference it
makes what we call something as long as we all understand how
some term is being used. The answers are twofold: without the
discipline of attempting to define specific terms we are not sure
we do all mean the same thing or that we understand how a term
is being used. On the other hand, the tacit agreement about
frames of reference can distort the focus of emphasis rather than
giving the broadly based objectivity which comes from using a
term denotatively.
For seven years I pondered over a definition of dance, and in
1965 I tentatively set out the following definition which has
since undergone some slight modifications. In its current form it
reads:
Dance is a transient mode of expression, performed in a given form
and style by the human body moving in space. Dance occurs
through purposefully selected and controlled rhythmic move¬
ments; the resulting phenomenon is recognized as dance both by
the performer and the observing members of a given group.
(1965:6, rev. 1970)

The two crucial points which distinguish this definition from

others are the limiting of dance to that of human behavior since
there is no reason to believe that birds or apes perform with the
intent to dance. Intent to dance and acknowledgment of the activ¬
ity as dance by a given group is the second distinguishing fea¬
ture of my definition. This is the crucial point for applying the
definition cross-culturally as well as setting dance apart from
other activities which might appear to be dance to the outsider
but which are considered, say, sports or ritual to the participants.
Webster's International Dictionary shows much contrast in the def-
542 DANCE AND SOCIETY

initions of dance between the 2nd and 3rd editions. The reason
for the contrasts is clear when it is understood that a performer-
choreographer of Western dance wrote the dance entries for the
2nd edition (Doris Humphrey), while an ethnochoreologist (Ger¬
trude P. Kurath) wrote the entries for the 3rd edition.
We cannot accept Kirstein's contention that "it is apparent...
that the idea of tension, from the very beginning, has been fore¬
most in people's minds when they have thought about dancing
seriously enough to invent or adapt word-sounds for it" (1935:1).
Alber (Charles J. Alber 1970: personal communication) assures
me that both Japanese and Mandarin Chinese have time-hon¬
ored words for dance and related activities and that the idea of
tension does not occur at all in these words. Clearly Kirstein's
statement indicates that he has not looked beyond the models set
out in Indo-European languages. Can we really believe that only
white Europeans are "advanced" enough to speak about dance?
The notion of tension through the etymology of European
words for dance does reveal something about the Western aes¬
thetic of dance which is apparent from the Western dance ideals
of pull-up, body lift and bodily extensions. Elsewhere these
things are not highly valued. Indeed my "good" Western trained
body alignment and resultant tension is a handicap in perform¬
ing dances from other cultures. Martin seems to have the greatest
insight in the relativity of dance aesthetics when he describes
dance as a universal urge but without a universal form (1946:12).
Further he states:

It is impossible to say that any of these approaches is exclusively

right or wrong, better or worse than any other. ... They are all
absolutely right, therefore, for the specific circumstances under
which they have been created (1946:17).

Indeed Martin comes the closest to the kind of relativity which

most American anthropologists feel is necessary for observing
and analyzing any aspect of culture and human behavior (see
Martin 1939:92-93, 108). It is true that Sorell and others speak of
differences caused by environment and other pertinent circum¬
stances, but Sorell also ascribes much of the difference to "race,"
to "racial memory," and to "innate" differences which are "in
the blood" (1967:75-76, 275, 282, 283). These ideas are so out¬
dated in current anthropology, that I might believe his book was
written at the end of the 19th century rather than in 1967.
It is true that many cross-cultural differences in dance style
and dance aesthetics are due to both genetically determined
 JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU 543

physical differences and learned cultural patterns. In some cases

the differences are clear. For example, a heavy Mohave Indian
woman could not, and would not perform the jumps of the Masai
people of East Africa. Other differences are not clear because
they are part of a chicken/egg argument until further research is
done and until more of the right questions are asked. We do not
know, for example, whether people who squat easily with both
feet flat on the ground do so because their leg tendons are genet¬
ically different from non-squatters, or if anyone could have the
same tendon configuration if they habitually assumed such pos¬
tures (see discussion in Martin 1939:97). As for “innate" qualities,
we have almost no real evidence. There is nothing to support
claims such as "barefoot savages have an ear for rhythms most
Europeans lack" (DeMille 1963:48). There is much we do not
know about bodies and genetics and cultural dynamics, and in
addition, we are especially ignorant about systems of aesthetics.
It would be wiser for Western dance scholars to leave qualifying
remarks and openendedness in their discussions of these things,
or else these scholars may have a lot of recanting to do.
Two terms which now require discussion are "primitive
dance" and "folk dance." These comments are to be understood
against the framework of my definition of dance which I have
already given.
British, and especially American, folklorists are concerned
with defining the "folk" in order to know what "folk dances"
are. Our dance scholars, on the other hand, usually use "folk
dance" as a kind of catch-all term. For example, DeMille lists
Azuma Kabuki under her chapter on folk dance companies
(1963:74). To call this highly refined theatrical form "folk dance"
doesn't agree with Sorell's argument that folk dance is dance that
has not gone "through a process of refinement"; that has not
been "tamed" (1967:73). Perhaps such discrepancies help to show
why definitions are so important and what a state of confusion
can exist when we presume we all "mean the same thing."
Rather than following Sachs' contention that the "folk" or the
"peasant" is an evolutionary stage between primitive and civi¬
lized man (1937:216), I shall follow the more anthropologically
sophisticated distinctions which are discussed by the anthropol¬
ogist Redfield in his book Peasant Society and Culture (1969: see
especially pp. 23, 40-41). In brief, a primitive society is an auton¬
omous and self-contained system with its own set of customs and
institutions. It may be isolated or it may have more or less contact
with other systems. It is usually economically independent and
544 DANCE AND SOCIETY

the people are often, if not always, nonliterate. (Notice that the
term nonliterate refers to a group which has never had a written
language of their own devising. This is quite different from the
term illiterate which means that there is a written language, but
an illiterate is not sufficiently educated to know the written
form. Thus DeMille's statement that the primitives are illiterate
is a contradiction of terms [DeMille 1963:23].) In contrast, peas¬
ant or folk societies are not autonomous. Economically and cul¬
turally such a community is in a symbiotic relationship with a
larger society with which it constantly interacts. It is the "little
tradition of the largely unreflective many" which is incomplete
without the "great tradition of the reflective few." Often the peo¬
ple in peasant societies are more or less illiterate. If one adds the
word dance to the above descriptions of primitive and folk (or
peasant) there might be a more objective agreement on what is
meant by "primitive dance" and by "folk dance."
Another troublesome term is that of "ethnic dance," as I have
already indicated. In the generally accepted anthropological
view, ethnic means a group which holds in common genetic, lin¬
guistic and cultural ties, with special emphasis on cultural tra¬
dition. By definition, therefore, every dance form must be an eth¬
nic form. Although claims have been made for universal dance
forms (such as Wisnoe Wardhana has been attempting to develop
in Java: personal communication 1960), or international forms
(such has been claimed for ballet: see Terry 1956:187), in actuality
neither a universal form nor a truly international form of dance
is in existence and it is doubtful whether any such dance form
can ever exist except in theory. DeMille says this, in effect, when
she writes that "theatre always reflects the culture that produces
it" (1963:74). However others insist on some special properties
for ballet. La Meri insists that "the ballet is not an ethnic dance
because it is the product of the social customs and artistic reflec¬
tions of several widely-differing national cultures" (1967:339).
Nevertheless, ballet is a product of the Western world, and it is
a dance form developed by Caucasians who speak Indo-Euro¬
pean languages and who share a common European tradition.
Granted that ballet is international in that it "belongs" to Euro¬
pean countries plus groups of European descendants in the
Americas. But, when ballet appears in such countries as Japan or
Korea it becomes a borrowed and alien form. Granted also that
ballet has had a complex history of influences, this does not
undermine its effectiveness as an ethnic form. Martin tells us
this, although he probably could not guess that his statement
would be used for such a proof:
 JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU 545

The great spectacular dance form of the Western world is, of course,
the ballet. ... Properly, the term ballet refers to a particular form
of theater dance, which came into being in the Renaissance and
which has a tradition, technic and an aesthetic basis all its own
(1939:173).
Further quotations could be made to show the ethnicity of ballet,
such as Kirstein's opening remarks in his 1935 book (vii).

ETHNICITY OF BALLET
I have made listings of the themes and other characteristics of
ballet and ballet performances, and these lists show over and
over again just how "ethnic" ballet is. Consider for example, how
Western is the tradition of the proscenium stage, the usual three
part performance which lasts for about two hours, our star sys¬
tem, our use of curtain calls and applause, and our usage of
French terminology. Think how culturally revealing it is to see
the stylized Western customs enacted on the stage, such as the
mannerisms from the age of chivalry, courting, weddings. Chris¬
tenings, burial and mourning customs. Think how our world
view is revealed in the oft recurring themes of unrequited love,
sorcery, self-sacrifice through long-suffering, mistaken identity,
and misunderstandings which have tragic consequences. Think
how our religious heritage is revealed through pre-Christian
customs such as Walpurgisnacht, through the use of Biblical
themes, Christian holidays such as Christmas, and the beliefs in
life after death. Our cultural heritage is revealed also in the roles
which appear repeatedly in our ballets such as humans trans¬
formed into animals, fairies, witches, gnomes, performers of evil
magic, villains and seductresses in black, evil step-parents, roy¬
alty and peasants, and especially, beautiful pure young women
and their consorts.
Our aesthetic values are shown in the long line of lifted,
extended bodies, in the total revealing of legs, of small heads and
tiny feet for women, in slender bodies for both sexes, and in the
coveted airy quality which is best shown in the lifts and carry¬
ings of the female. To us this is tremendously pleasing aestheti¬
cally, but there are societies whose members would be shocked
at the public display of the male touching the female's thighs! So
distinctive is the "look" of ballet, that it is probably safe to say
that ballet dances graphically rendered by silhouettes would
never be mistaken for anything else. An interesting proof of this
is the ballet Koshare which was based on a Hopi Indian story. In
546 DANCE AND SOCIETY

silhouettes of even still photos, the dance looked like ballet and
not like a Hopi dance.
The ethnicity of ballet is revealed also in the kinds of flora and
fauna which appear regularly. Horses and swans are esteemed
fauna. In contrast we have no tradition of esteeming for theat¬
rical purposes pigs, sharks, eagles, buffalo or crocodiles even
though these are indeed highly esteemed animals used in dance
themes elsewhere in the world. In ballet, grains, roses and lilies
are suitable flora, but we would not likely find much call for taro,
yams, coconuts, acorns or squash blossoms. Many economic pur¬
suits are reflected in the roles played in ballet such as spinners,
foresters, soldiers, even factory workers, sailors, and filling sta¬
tion attendants. However, we would not expect to find pottery
makers, canoe builders, grain pounders, llama herders, giraffe
stalkers, or slash and burn agriculturists!
The question is not whether ballet reflects it own heritage. The
question is why we seem to need to believe that ballet has some¬
how become acultural. Why are we afraid to call it an ethnic
form?
The answer, I believe, is that Western dance scholars have not
used the word ethnic in its objective sense; they have used it as a
euphemism for such old fashioned terms as "heathen," "pagan,"
"savage," or the more recent term "exotic." When the term eth¬
nic began to be used widely in the '30's, there apparently arose
a problem in trying to refer to dance forms which came from
"high" cultures such as India and Japan, and the term "ethno¬
logic" gained its current meaning for dance scholars such as
Sorell (1967:72), Terry (1956:187, 196), and La Meri (1949:177-
178). (An interesting article by Bunzell on the "Sociology of
Dance" in the 1949 edition of Dance Encyclopedia rejects the use
of the word "art" for these dance forms, however. In the context
of his criticism, his point is well taken [1949:437].) I do not know
why La Meri chose to discard this usage and substituted the
word "ethnic" for "ethnologic" in her 1967 version of the Dance
Encyclopedia article. She did not otherwise change her article, and
since it was originally written with the above mentioned dichot¬
omy implicit in her discussion, her 1967 version becomes illogi¬
cal. (For a critical review of the Dance Encyclopedia and especially
of La Meri's entries see Renouf, Ethnomusicology May, 1969:383-
384.)
It is not clear to me who first created the dichotomy between
"ethnic clance" and "ethnologic dance." Certainly this dichot¬
omy is meaningless to anthropologists. As a matter of fact, Euro¬
pean cultural anthropologists often prefer to call themselves eth-
 JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU 547

nologists, and for them the term "ethnologic" refers to the

objects of their study (see Haselberger's discussion 1961:341). The
term "ethnological" does not have much currency among Amer¬
ican cultural anthropologists although they understand the term
to mean "of or relating to ethnology," and "ethnology" deals
with the comparative and analytical study of cultures (see entries
in Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd edition). Because
"culture," in a simplified anthropological sense, includes all of
the learned behavior and customs of any given group of people,
there is no such thing as a cultureless people. Therefore, "eth¬
nologic dances" should refer to a variety of dance cultures sub¬
ject to comparison and analysis. Ethnic dance should mean a
dance form of a given group of people who share common
genetic, linguistic and cultural ties, as mentioned before. In the
most precise usage it is a redundancy to speak of "an ethnic
dance," since any dance could fit that description. The term is
most valid when used in a collective and contrastive way.*
Apparently one pan-human trait is to divide the world into
"we" and "they." The Greeks did this when "they" were called
barbarians. Similarly, the Romans called the "they" pagans,
Hawaiians call "they" kanaka'e, and Hopis call the "they" bahana.
All of these terms imply not only foreign, but creatures who are
uncouth, unnatural, ignorant and, in short, less than human. The
yardstick for measuring humanity, of course, is the "we." "We"
are always good, civilized, superior; in short, "we" are the only
creatures worthy of being considered fully human. This phe¬
nomenon reveals the world view of the speakers in every lan¬
guage, so far as I know. Often the phenomenon is very dramatic.
According to a scholar of Mandarin and Japanese languages, in
Mandarin the "they" are truly "foreign devils," and in Japanese
the "they" are "outsiders" (Charles Alber, personal communica¬
tion: 1970).
I suggest that, due to the social climate which rejects the con¬
notations with which our former words for "they" were
invested, and because of a certain sophistication assumed by the

•Harper distinguishes between ethnic and theatrical dance on the basis of

"integral function of a society" versus dance which is "deliberately organized"
to be performed for a general, impersonal audience (1967:10). This dichotomy,
which is based on genre rather than the society, provides a good working clas¬
sification. However, the distinction fails when the terms are tested. Thus one
can have ethnic dances of an ethnic society, but not theatrical dances of a the¬
atrical society. It seems clear that "ethnic" is a more embracive category under
which "traditional" and "theatrical" might be convenient sub-divisions. In any
case. Harper's discussion is thought-provoking.
i

548 DANCE AND SOCIETY

apologists for the "they," English-speaking scholars were hard-

pressed to find designators for the kinds of non-Western dance
which they wished to discuss. Hence the euphemistic terms eth¬
nic and ethnologic seemed to serve that purpose.
It is perfectly legitimate to use "ethnic" and "ethnologic" as
long as we don't let those terms become connotative of the very
things which caused us to abandon the other terms. We should
indeed speak of ethnic dance forms, and we should not believe
that this term is derisive when it includes ballet since ballet
reflects the cultural traditions from which it developed.
I must make it clear that I am critical of our foremost Western
dance scholars only where they have stepped outside their fields
of authority. Within their fields they command my great respect,
and I would not want to argue their relative merits. Scholars that
they are, they will agree with me, I feel confident, that whatever
are the rewards of scholarship, comfortable complacency cannot
be one of them.
(1970)

Sources Cited
Bunzel, Joseph H., "Sociology of the Dance," The Dance Encyclopedia,
Anatole Chujoy, comp, and ed. New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1949,
pp. 435-440.
DeMille, Agnes, The Book of the Dance. New York: Golden Press, 1963.
Frazer, Sir James G., The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan Co., 1947.
Harper, Peggy, "Dance in a Changing Society." African Arts/ Arts d'Af-
rique 1:1, Autumn, 1967, pp. 10-13, 76-77, 78-80.
Haselberger, Herta, "Method of Studying Ethnological Art." Current
Anthropology 2:4, October, 1961, pp. 341-384.
Haskell, Arnold, The Wonderful World of Dance. New York: Garden City
Books, 1960.
Holt, Claire, "Two Dance Worlds." Anthology of Impulse, Marian Van
Tuyl, ed. New York: Dance Horizons, Inc., 1969, pp. 116-131.
Humphrey, Doris, "Dance" and related entries, Webster's New Interna¬
tional Dictionary, 2nd edition, unabridged. Springfield, Massachusetts:
G. and C. Merriam Co., Publishers, 1950.
Kealiinohomoku, Joann Wheeler, A Comparative Study of Dance as a Con¬
stellation of Motor Behaviors Among African and United States Negroes,
unpublished M.A. thesis. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Univer¬
sity, 1965.
Kinney, Troy and Margaret West Kinney, The Dance. New York: Fred¬
erick A. Stokes Co., 1924.
Kirstein, Lincoln, Dance. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935.
 JOANN KEALIINOHOMOKU 549

-, The Book of the Dance. Garden City, New York: Garden City Pub¬
lishing Co., 1942.
Kurath, Gertrude Prokosch, "Dance" and related entries, Webster’s New
International Dictionary, 3rd edition, unabridged. Springfield, Massa¬
chusetts: G. and C. Merriam Co., Publishers, 1966.
La Meri, "Ethnic Dance," The Dance Encyclopedia, Anatole Chujoy and P.
W. Manchester, comps, and eds. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967,
pp.338-339.
-, "Ethnologic Dance," The Dance Encyclopedia, Anatole Chujoy,
comp, and ed. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1949, pp. 177-178.
Martin, John, Introduction to the Dance. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.,
Inc., 1939.
-, The Dance. New York Tudor Publishing Co., 1946.
-, (John Martin's Book of) The Dance. New York: Tudor Publishing
Co., 1963.
Redfield, Robert, The Little Community and Peasant Society and Culture.
Chicago and London: Phoenix Books, The University of Chicago
Press, 1969. (First published separately, 1956.)
Renouf, Renee, Book Review of The Dance Encyclopedia, Anatole Chujoy
and P. W. Manchester, comps, and eds., Ethnomusicology 13:2, May,
1969, pp. 383-384.
Sachs, Curt, World History of the Dance, Bessie Schonberg, trans. New
York: Bonanza Books, 1937.
Sorell, Walter, The Dance Through the Ages. New York: Grosset and Dun¬
lap, 1967.
Terry, Walter, "Dance, History of," The Dance Encyclopedia, Anatole Chu¬
joy and P. W. Manchester, comps, and eds. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1967, pp. 255-259.
-, "History of Dance," The Dance Encyclopedia, Anatole Chujoy,
comp, and ed. New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1949, pp. 238-243.
-, The Dance in America. New York: Harper and Brothers Publish¬
ers, 1956.

Recommended Reading

Adriann G. H. Claerhout, "The Concept of Primitive Applied to Art."

Current Anthropology 6:4, Oct. 1965; Peggy Harper, op. cit.; Herta Hasel-
berger, op. cit.; Adrienne L. Kaeppler, "Folklore as Expressed in the
Dance in Tonga," Journal of American Folklore 80:316, April-June 1967;
Adrienne L. Kaeppler, The Struture of Tongan Dance, unpubl. doctoral
diss., Honolulu, University of Hawaii, 1967 (University Microfilms, Ann
Arbor); Joann W. Kealiinohomoku and Frank J. Gillis, "Special Bibliog¬
raphy: Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, "Ethnomusicology 14:1, Jan. 1970; Ger¬
trude Prokosch Kurath, "Panorama of Dance Ethnology," Current
Anthropology 1:3, May 1960; Renee Renouf, op. cit.; Armistead P. Rood ,
"Bete Masked Dance: A View from Within," African Arts/Arts d'Afnque
2:3, Spring 1969.
i

550 DANCE AND SOCIETY

ELIZABETH KENDALL
From WHERE SHE DANCED

“A POSSIBLE GRACE”
One hundred years ago a kind of entertainment called spec¬
tacle-extravaganza flourished, and it was there that theatrical
dancing as an art survived, no matter how tenuously, in this
country. The dancing was called ballet, although it was a very
different ballet from today's. Popular dancing of that time-
square dancing, jigs, reels, vaudeville soft shoe—was not consid¬
ered art, not until it began to borrow some of the fancy ballet
look of the spectacle extravanganzas that were not plays or
operas or musicals or ballets but blends of all these forms inside
a loose fantastical pantomime plot geared to the display of the¬
atrical marvels.
Every country in the Western world produced spectacle-extra¬
vaganzas, with variations according to nationality. Some of the
classics of the genre have survived in the repertories of modern
ballet companies because of their splendid music scores—
Delibes' Coppelia (France, 1870), Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty
and The Nutcracker (Russia, 1890 and 1892). No American spec¬
tacle is extant, because this counfry's productions tended to be
even more loosely structured and, in modern terms, far-fetched,
than Europe's. They were vast tableaux with processions, dis¬
plays of empires or of fairy kingdoms, featuring the latest theater
technology—but they did not really represent a theatrical form
with its roots in American culture the way the same spectacles
in Europe recalled the old court masques and the pomp and hier¬
archical display of monarchies.
American spectacles with dancing are thought to date from the
first production of The Black Crook (1866), a lavish show whose
dance emphasis came about by chance. When the manager of a
popular New York theater, Niblo's Garden, inserted into his
theater's current melodrama a whole foreign corps de ballet he
had just bought, the resulting hybrid was a monumental hit. The
"crook" in the title was a learned hunchback, Herzog, who made
a pact with the devil about the fate of three other characters,
Aminta (whom he loved), Rudolfo (whom she loved), and Count
 ELIZABETH KENDALL 551

Wolfenstein. It was a familiar Faustian tale, with plenty of occa¬

sion for theatrical wonders to appear and disappear; flying sce¬
nery, clouds of golden mist, magic glades, gilded chariots, and
the like—and, thanks to the manager, a stunning array of dimin¬
utive foreign ballerinas in gauze costumes and satin toeshoes.
America was dimly familiar with the look of ballet dancing
from the tours of Europe's solo Romantic ballerinas of the
1840s—the most memorable of whom was Fanny Elssler with
her famous Cracovienne and her La Tarentule. When Elssler and
her counterparts came from Europe in the forties, their highly
articulate art was almost nowhere taught in America, and Mile.
Elssler's ballet master, James Sylvain, had a desperate time trying
to find girls just to fill the stage and stand correctly for her corps
de ballet. This remained the general condition until twenty years
later, when The Black Crook encouraged some teaching of ballet
decorum: the original production and its many revivals required
a corps of 150 girls along with demi-soloists and soloists (soloists
in the first production, Marie Bonfanti and Rita Sangalli, were
artists and set high standards from the beginning). No one in the
American audiences, though, quite realized there was a system
involved in this kind of dancing, and a highly exacting mode of
study; that the ballerinas advertised from La Scala or from San
Carlo had emerged from academies far stricter and more disci¬
plined that any convent school for girls. Instead, for a good many
years, they were seen as wildly exotic curiosities. During this
time, scores and scores of new soloists and corps de ballet girls
populated the countless Black Crook revivals and imitations.
Indeed, the reason The Black Crook seems to have fascinated the
public for so long was not merely the display of legs but the un-
Americanness of the whole thing. Watching The Black Crook was
to most people a form of ogling foreigners in their most exotic
plumage. The importance of ballet and also its peculiarly non¬
sensical aura in America can be recognized in advertisements for
subsequent spectacles, like this one for Enchantment (1879):
An Entirely New Grand Spectacle of 4 Acts and 20 Tableaux
First appearance in America of the renowned Terpsichorean artists:
Miles Casati, Conalba and E. Capelini (Europe's greatest premier
danseuses assolutas from The Theater La Scala, Milan, and San
Carlo, Naples, and the Grand Opera House, Paris)
Also appearances of Miles Sallio, Camis, Ortoli (Theater National
Bucharest), Miles R. Carpelini, Pasta and Ciappa, together with
extensive Corps of Coryphees
552 DANCE AND SOCIETY

Miss Rose Lee (from the Covent Garden Theater, London)

Miss Jessie Greville (of the Alhambra, London)
Miss Eugenie Nicholson (from the Crystal Palace, Southampton)
Mr. C. T. Campbell (of the Opera Comique, London)
Les Vantoches Vallotte, Human Automatons
Molva, most graceful of all gymnasts
La Troupe Rajade, Comic Eccentrics
& Occarinistes, who play upon an entirely new instrument

The featured ballet dancers—Italian, French, English (the Rus¬

sians hadn't come out of their dark continent yet)—might as well
have been creatures from the moon for all the public knew or
cared—they seemed more like contortionists than actresses (and
actresses were foreign enough). At any rate, if they were viewed
as people, as women at all, they were condemned as absolutely
outside the pale of normal American social intercourse. It is fas¬
cinating to think how many of them must have been crisscross¬
ing America in the 1880s and 90s in spectacle after touring spec¬
tacle—La Surprise (after Lucia di Lammermoor), La Nymphe de Diane
(after Sylvia), Ali Baba, Aladdin's Lamp, The Black Venus, Excelsior,
Columbus and the Discovery of America, Railroads on Parade, Turco the
Terrible—to name only a few.
While the soloists toured, the corps de ballet never travelled
from city to city; instead it was assembled in each new territory
by an advance ballet master. He drew on collections of American
girls of the humblest social order, country girls just come to the
city, factory girls, runaway girls who read in a newspaper that a
corps of 150 was needed. They called at the stage door and were
fitted into tutus and drilled in lines to stand obediently, or walk
or turn as coryphees, without having the least idea of what ballet
dancing was about. This race of girls did not give ballet a very
high standing—and in fact ballet was considered synonymous
with the leg shows that also featured ranks of girls in tights. One
was a San Francisco production of the late 1860s called The
Female Forty Thieves, or, The Golden Legion of the Fairy Region. The
San Francisco Bulletin's comment about it could have served for
many leg shows and the spectacle-extravaganzas:

The bountiful display of Amazonian limbs, and the number of

revolving tableaux introduced without any particular reason,
pleased the spectators.

The American “pick-up" ballet girls, even the high-class ones

with some training, were if anything more suspect than the
incomprehensible foreigners—they couldn't dance as well and
 ELIZABETH KENDALL 553

they had presumably chosen to throw away all respectability and

a normal life. Whether or not it was true, all were assumed to be
at the disposal of gentlemen who hired them for club celebra¬
tions and bachelor dinners. A former ballet girl could not enter
domestic service or work in a shop once she had been in that sort
of theater work. The only way for her to advance in her profes¬
sion was laterally, over to a vaudeville solo spot or from show to
show. Many girls did go to vaudeville, starting in the 1890s as
solo acts came to prominence, and a whole new genre—skirt
dancing, a cross between jigs and clogs and the formal pseudo¬
ballet steps of spectacles—arose for girl solo dancers. Those who
were chorines, ballet girls, and skirt dancers of the late-nine-
teenth century are mostly invisible to us now: they rarely wrote
their memoirs. But by searching old magazines and programs it
is possible to follow a few of them from show to show and to
learn what training they had, if any.
In New York at least, some training was available. All along,
certain of the foreign ballerinas in those American spectacles
married in this country or simply retired, and taught privately
in their homes—usually girls already in the theater. Gradually
by the 1890s a relaxation of moral standards for women meant
that these Mesdames attracted more pupils, amateur and profes¬
sional, and could afford studios—especially when some of the
smart ones added dance fads such as physical culture exercises,
aesthetic posing, or risque serpentine motions to the classical
techniques they had been taught and were still trying to propa¬
gate. The Metropolitan Opera didn't open a ballet school until
1909, but earlier, Marie Bonfanti, original star of The Black Crook,
maintained a studio near Union Square and then one next to the
Palace Theater on Broadway. Leon Espinosa and members of his
family taught dancing at Madison Square Garden after he was
appointed ballet master there in 1890. Mme. Elizabetta Menzeli,
former Berlin colleague of Marie Taglioni, also trained in Paris,
St. Petersburg, and Vienna, had a professional school on East
16th Street in the 1880s and 90s, the Conservatoire de Chore-
graph Classique. There she taught a few girls with serious dance
ambitions and coached many amateur ladies for "all kinds of
acts, plays, sketches, etc."
The existence of these schools was one reason for the rise in
the late 1890s of the first generation of American solo dancers
whose names are remembered today—Loie Fuller, La Belle
Dazie, Gertrude Hoffman, Bessie Clayton, Isadora Duncan, Ruth
St. Denis. All of them began as ballet girls, but they are remem-
554 DANCE AND SOCIETY

bered now because they came out of the corps de ballet to

become soloists, on vaudeville stages or musical comedy stages
or on various art stages of their own devising. All of them were
strong-minded, original young women who were not happy in
a corps de ballet of a spectacle, nor were they willing to accept
the age-old taint of the American ballet girl, which had nothing
to do with their dreams and ambitions. They were of their time,
a time that saw the birth of a new social being, the Modern
American Woman. They, the dancers, would become one of her
prime symbols. The New Woman emerged as America emerged
into world politics. She happened after decades of reformers' and
feminists' trying to free women's bodies and minds through spir¬
itual and physical panaceas: dress reform, open air, aesthetic
exercise, artistic pursuits. Physical culture and art came into
vogue at the same time, in the 1890s and occupied women in a
country where women had more time, more money, more space
to be individuals than in any other country at any other time. In
fact, "the physical" and "the artistic" were the two realms where
American women's new capacities for self-expression were exer¬
cised. Dancing was the synthesis of those two realms.
If there was a new American woman, it was not exactly clear
what was correct for her to do. Henry James, that constant
observer of women, said the American woman was the one in
the world who was the least afraid, "the most confidently grown,
the most freely encouraged plant in our democratic garden." Yet
he thought this kind of encouragement interfered with women's
learning true femininity in the age-old sense of that term. James
lived in Europe. By 1907, when he wrote two articles for Harper's
Bazaar on the speech and manners of American women follow¬
ing a long return visit to America, he saw that women here were
ignoring, had always ignored, the feminine qualitites that he
most admired in European women, which consisted of "definite
conceptions of duty, activity, influence; of a possible grace, of a
possible sweetness, a possible power to soothe, to please and
above all to exemplify."
In Europe a woman was trained to be a private being within a
complex social fabric. A European woman could shun wifehood
and motherhood and choose the life of nun, courtesan, artist, bal¬
lerina, joining a parochial feminine hierarchy whose values were
understood and needed by the whole society. An American
woman was trained for a cruder and more public purpose. Very
little true artistic discipline was offered her in the nineteenth
century. Girls were taught to sew and read and play the piano.
 ELIZABETH KENDALL 555

even to perform quadrilles and other social dances, insofar as

these things helped them to be valuable members of families,
wives and mothers and citizens of the Democracy. Even such
staunch feminists as Catharine Esther Beecher, eldest daughter
of the famous Calvinist Lyman Beecher and sister of Harriet
Beecher Stowe, did not believe a woman should cultivate her
personality for her own sake but for a larger, more selfless pur¬
pose. She described this in an 1871 address to the Christian
Women of America.

Women's great mission is to train immature, weak and ignorant

creatures, to obey the laws of God; the physical, the intellectual, the
social and the moral—first in the family, then in the school, then
in the neighbourhood, then in the nation, then in the world—the
great family of God whom the Master came to teach and to save.

There were a few examples in nineteenth-century America of

unconventional educations producing women with bold minds
of their own. Margaret Fuller, the sole female among the cabal
of Transcendentalist writers in Concord and Boston, was one of
these. She was specially tutored by her father in the “masculine"
disciplines of logic, Latin, law, and oratory—but she did not
learn the arts. She did not, for instance, study ballet, which was
a discipline as articulate and civilized as logic or law, only in
another realm, an artistic and wordless one that was not available
to upstanding American women. To have seriously taught Mar¬
garet Fuller theatrical dancing or any art would have been more
subversive than to discipline her mind—for it would have per¬
mitted her a private cultivation of her spirit, an artist's intense
dialogue with self which in fact Margaret Fuller sought painfully
all her life. An artist, a woman alone with a vigorous, disciplined
imagination that she listened to over and above her husband,
children, or neighbors, was not part of the American design. A
woman like Margaret Fuller, over-trained in a consciousness of
public morality, was.
Contemporary with Margaret Fuller lived several non-intel¬
lectual, seemingly immoral, Bohemian heroines who put them¬
selves outside of the American design—they were supposed to be
the artists. Lola Montez, the Irish dancer-courtesan who almost
became a Californian, was a woman like this, or Adah Isaacs
Menken, the Jewess from New Orleans, proclaimer of free verse
and frequent star of the old pantomime Mazeppa (in which she
always made her entrance costumed as a prince, “en travestie,"
in tights, strapped to the back of a white stallion who galloped
556 DANCE AND SOCIETY

down several runways to deposit his rider in the center of the

drama). These women, unlike the fine and strictly professional
actresses of nineteenth-century America, used the theater to
advertise their personalities. They were in fact "artistes/'poseurs
instead of real artists, for they suffered from the opposite malady
from Margaret Fuller's—they had no discipline instead of too
much; wild ideas, without any experience of artistic skill or
structure. Adah Menken never could learn her dramatic lines,
nor did she see the reason to—for her instincts in gesture and
costume (a "one-piece yellow silk garment" sometimes replaced
the tights) kept her audience captive. Although Adah Menken
may be considered the first American spectacle-extravaganza
star, she had no effect on the genre itself. She was an isolated
legend. Her only real skill was equestrian. (She herself rode the
horse onstage in Mazeppa, instead of the cardboard dummy that
was standard for this galloping entrance.)
Extravagant and uncultivated "artistic" impulses troubled
Henry James in his countrywomen fifty years after Adah Men¬
ken's career had peaked. And now these impulses were in style;
they cropped up in numbers of high spirited modern girls who
came of age in the 1880s and 90s. There was money to indulge
an artistic bent, yet no one knew quite how to do this in a society
where wives and mothers were still the only feminine models of
good behavior. Only by going abroad could an American girl
encounter the artistic discipline to guide her new-found
instincts. Back home, professional training only occurred in
exceptional cases in the theater ^nd music or literature (a fine
writer like Kate Chopin—The Awakening, 1899—was allowed to
imitate modern French literature in her Catholic and cosmopol¬
itan education in St. Louis). But dancing, the art that was scorned
and misunderstood, the art that wasn't even an art, provided
discipline.
American artistic dance was born of some American dancers'
extravagant desires for self-expression, guided, no matter how
unconsciously, by disciplines they had absorbed from the thea¬
ter. An old fashioned corps de ballet, casual though that insti¬
tution was in America, provided the only secular example of a
disciplined feminine hierarchy based on Henry James's "concep¬
tions of duty" and "a possible grace." These new dancers had
been physically trained in these conceptions of duty; their bodies
had learned to move to the rhythm, and to be still. Their minds
raged against the confinement of a corps de ballet, yet their bod¬
ies had been taught harmony. They were ballet girls possessed
 ELIZABETH KENDALL 557

of those "unballetic" qualities of the new American woman—

her “great fund of life," her self-absorption, her fearlessness, her
unbounded imagination, and her often monstrous daring. It was
the combination of the ballet girl's body with the American
untamed spirit that produced our first solo dancers and our first
native art form.
The unskilled American ballet chorine did not disappear with
the advent of a new dance; she was more than ever present in
the expanded theater activity at the turn of the century. She was
needed in large numbers for the choruses of the musical come¬
dies that were replacing the old spectacles as the most popular
theatrical genre. Her story has been told in uncanny detail in
Theodore Dreiser's great novel of 1900, Sister Carrie. But it is not
Dreiser's silent, helpless, and strangely elegant Carrie who con¬
cerns us in the story of American art-dance, nor is it Henry
James's high-strung but undisciplined heroines of the leisure
class who never thought of the theater as an arena for them-
selves_but a rarer kind of girl somewhere between those two.
A sort of pattern emerges, even from the strongly individual
stories of these first dancers. They were usually of genteel back¬
ground but poor; they turned to the theater first for money and
then for adventure. Gertrude Hoffman, for instance, the first
"art" dancer in American vaudeville, received a strict convent
education in San Francisco; it included some social dancing, per¬
haps too much, for she ran away at fifteen to perform in the oper¬
etta chorus of the Castle Square Theater, became a rehearsal
director, then moved up the theatrical ladder through sheer
dogged intelligence. Ethel Gilmore, one of the few trained bal¬
lerinas of her time, was the daughter of a widowed Irish Cana¬
dian ladies' tailor, Rachel Janet Gilmore, whose love of color had
brought her to theatrical costuming and to New York. She put
her three daughters into Elizabetta Menzeli's school—and all
three of them made their debuts in the ballet chorus of a Florenz
Ziegfeld show. Miss Innocence (1906). Ethel, the middle one, was
picked in 1908 to replace the great Danish-English ballerina Ade¬
line Genee in Ziegfeld's The Soul Kiss, and Ray, the youngest,
became the top "picture girl" model in New York.
It was usually the mothers of these dancers who formed them,
who stood as bulwarks guarding the light-heartedness, the free¬
dom needed for young dancers, yet who taught them the disci¬
plines of poverty. They held on to certain defiant beliefs about
women's inner independence so they could teach their daugh¬
ters things that weren't part of the American mission to save
i
558 DANCE AND SOCIETY

“immature, weak and ignorant creatures." Through personal

catastrophe—their husband's death or desertion—these mothers
had been left outside the pale already, on the fringe of the big
cheerful family of the democracy.
Mary Dora Duncan, mother of Isadora and of three older chil¬
dren, was a fascinating and brave woman who taught her chil¬
dren as much of the civilized arts as she knew how to—music,
dance, and aesthetic exercise, poetry and ideas borrowed from
more sensual civilizations—arts of no use in an orderly Ameri¬
can existence. It was almost a European education she gave her
youngest daughter, almost a courtesan's training, but with an
American crusading edge. The Duncan clan was aggressive; their
heroes and heroines were past and present California Bohemians
(such as Adah Menken), and they wanted to be a guerrilla band
of serious artists inside what they saw as a misguided and thor¬
oughly inartistic America. The story of Isadora's art consists of
her discovering the seriousness of it after she had declared it
loudly to be there. And she had the physical and theatrical skills
to find this. Skills and training explain hoyv Isadora grew up to
become not only a desperate, chaotic, bold, and grandly tragic
personality (as in a Henry James novel about a too proud Amer¬
ican girl), but an artist who fashioned a new form of dancing.
In terms of pure dance invention, Isadora was the most signif¬
icant figure in her generation. Her bold self-questioning was
connected at the root to her physical training—that is, her mind
and her body were inseparable, which is probably true of all
great dance innovators. However, Isadora, while remaining an
American "character," became a world artist who influenced the
art-dance of Russia and Germany and England as much as or
more than she did American dance.

It is not Isadora Duncan but another self-created dancer, Ruth St.

Denis, who began the lineage of modern dance in America.
Because Ruth St. Denis was a more specialized artist than Isadora,
because she could have emerged only in America and she
appealed mostly to American audiences, her story is to a great
extent the story of this book. For a few years at the start of the
century, Americans who saw her found in her dancing some¬
thing that satisfied them deeply: a pantomimic shorthand of
spectacle-extravanganza with religious overtones. The child
Ruth Dennis was unlike those other early American dancers in
several ways. She was a Protestant, whereas most of them were
 ELIZABETH KENDALL 559

Catholics. Although her mother taught her some of the same aes¬
thetic exercises Isadora's mother taught her, the intent behind
Ruth's education was hygienic and spiritual not artistic. It was
more in the American idiom. Ruth Emma Dennis was a highly
religious and moral woman; her daughter's heroines were not
the artistic ballerinas and actresses of Isadora's childhood but
women reformers, aesthetics lecturers, Delsarte priestesses, and
the pioneer women doctors of the nineteenth century, all of
whom exhorted women to examine the conditions of their bod¬
ies as a manifestation of the conditions of their spirits. And
besides her background of health reform, Ruth knew more than
the other solo dancers about the popular theater and less about
dance training, so that a significant part of her dance inventions
derived from theater and the techniques of tragic actresses of her
day.
Ironically, Ruth St. Denis became the mother of American art-
dance because she never belonged completely to art, but
believed equally in religion, hygiene, and the popular theater.
She was a high-toned entertainer more than she was a schooled
artist—and yet her imagination contained the freshness of an
artist as well as the single mindedness of a crusader. Ruth St.
Denis' art was half-conscious. It came from the natural perform¬
er's unerring instincts for putting herself and her audience into
another time and place—Egypt, the Orient—simply by acting
out that time and place with costumes and movements. Lacking
a dance education, she invented one, a kind of dance pre-history
culled from her visions of antique and sensual civilizations and
some scraps of information from public libraries. But she
believed it. She never doubted she was giving her audience an
ideology as well as a performance.
It is striking that Ruth St. Denis and the other American danc¬
ers, who all found dance metaphors in other civilizations,
appeared just as the Russian Ballet made its blinding entry into
Western culture and began the twentieth-century revival of bal¬
let as an art form. The Russians, led by choreographer Michel
Fokine, had also rediscovered ancient pagan civilizations. They
introduced a pagan abandon into the traditional language of
classic ballet and thus made new dance forms based on the old.
The Americans had little experience with living theater-dance
forms that made sense to them, yet blindly, almost coinciden¬
tally, they found the right ones for their culture. It seems almost
a sociological accident that the imaginations of some American
women, on the periphery of American life, were so untamed and
560 DANCE AND SOCIETY

so fresh that they could divine something of what the Russians

reached after decades of consummate tradition and education. It
still appears sometimes as if American Modern Dance exists by
accident. Ruth St. Denis, its accidental founder, set the tone of it
by drawing ultimately on the stuff of her personality rather than
on a system of theater discipline. How that personality emerged
out of her unconventional early education, her entry into vaude¬
ville, her years in the theater, her debut as a cultural priestess, is
an epic of her time. It is known today because her husband, Ted
Shawn, built a learning institution, Denishawn, around her, and
taught the students in it to re-enact—intently, systematically, at
times grimly—the process by which the original Priestess had
discovered her dance.

(1979)
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Expression as an Aspect of Style." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
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Best, David N. Expression in Movement and the Arts. London: Harry Kamp-
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Cohen, Selma Jeanne. "A Prolegomenon to an Aesthetics of Dance."
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Hanna, Judith Lynne. To Dance Is Human. Austin: University of Texas
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561
562 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Straus, Erwin W. "The Forms of Spatiality," in Phenomenological Studies.

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Valery, Paul. "Dance and the Soul," in Dialogues. Trans, by William
McCausland Stewart. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956, pp. 25-62.

II. The Dance Medium

Arnheim, Rudolf. "Concerning the Dance," in Toward a Psychology of Art.
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Bateson, Gregory. "Why a Swan?" in Anthology of Impulse. Edited by Mar¬
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Feibleman, James K. Aesthetics. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949,
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Greenberg, Clement. "Modernist Painting," in The New Art. Edited by
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Lessing, Gotthold. Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.
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Valery, Paul. "Some Simple Reflections on the Body," in Aesthetics.
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 BIBLIOGRAPHY 563

Kim, Myung Whan, “Dance and Rhythm: Their Meaning in Yeats and
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IV. Genre and Style

Ballet
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Dance Horizons, 1969.
-. Movement and Metaphor. New York: Praeger, 1970.
-. Nijinsky Dancing. New York: Knopf, 1975.
_. Three Pamphlets Collected. New York: Dance Horizons, 1967.
564 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Levinson, Andre. "The Spirit of the Classic Dance." Theatre Arts Monthly,
March 1925.
Noverre, Jean-Georges. Letters on Dancing and Ballets. Trans, by Cyril
Beaumont. New York: Dance Horizons, 1966.
Poirier, Richard, "The American Genius of George Balanchine." The New
Republic, 183, no. 15, October 11, 1980, pp. 21-31.
Stokes, Adrian. Tonight the Ballet. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1935.
Story, Alan. Arabesques. London: Newman, Wolsey, Ltd., 1948.

Modern Dance
Cohen, Selma Jeanne, ed. "Essays, Stories, and Remarks about Merce
Cunningham." Dance Perspectives 34, Summer 1968.
-, ed. The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief. Middletown,
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1966.
Coton, A. V. The New Ballet. London: Dobson, 1946.
Cunningham, Merce. Changes: Notes on Choreography. Edited by Frances
Starr. New York: Something Else Press, 1968.
Duncan, Isadora. The Art of the Dance. Edited, with an introduction by
Sheldon Cheney. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1969.
Graham, Martha. The Notebooks of Martha Graham. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovitch, 1973.
Horst, Louis. Pre-Classic Dance Forms. New York: Dance Horizons, 1968.
Humphrey, Doris. The Art of Making Dances. Edited by Barbara Pollack.
New York: Grove Press, 1959.
Kirstein, Lincoln. "Martha Graham," in Martha Graham. Edited by Merle
Armitage. Los Angeles: Lynton Kistler, 1937, pp. 23-33.
Klosty, James, ed. Merce Cunningham. New York: Saturday Review Press,
1975.
Martin, John. The Modern Dance. New York: Dance Horizons, 1972.
Mazo, Joseph. Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America. New
York: Morrow, 1977.
McDonagh, Don. The Complete Guide to Modern Dance. Garden City, New
York: Doubleday and Company, 1976.
Shawn, Ted. Every Little Movement: A Book about Frangois Delsarte. New
York: Dance Horizons, 1974.
Wigman, Mary. The Language of Dance. Trans, by Walter Sorell. Middle-
town, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1966.

Post-Modern Dance
Anderson, Jack. "Yvonne Rainer: The Puritan as Hedonist." Ballet Review
2, no. 5, 1969, pp. 31-37.
Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Boston: Hough¬
ton Mifflin, 1980.
Carroll, Noel. "Post-Modern Dance and Expression," in Philosophical
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 565

Essays on Dance. Edited by Gordon Fancher and Gerald Myers. New

York: Dance Horizons, 1981, pp. 95-104.
Copeland, Roger. "The Neo-Classical Task." New Performance 2, no. 3,
1981, pp. 50-59.
-. "Post-Modern Dance and the Repudiation of Primitivism." Par¬
tisan Review 50, no.. Winter 1983.
Forti, Simone. Handbook in Motion. Halifax: Press of Nova Scotia College
of Art and Design, 1974.
Johnston, Jill. "The New American Modern Dance," in The New Ameri¬
can Arts. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Collier Books,
1967, pp. 162-93.
Kirby, Michael. "Objective Dance," in The Art of Time. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1969, pp. 103-13.
Kostelanetz, Richard. "Metamorphosis in Modern Dance." Dance Scope
5, no. 1, Fall 1970, pp. 6-21.
Livet, Anne, ed. Contemporary Dance. New York: Abbeville Press, 1978.
McDonagh, Don. The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance. New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1970.
Michelson, Annette. "Yvonne Rainer, Part One: The Dancer and the
Dance." Artforum. January, 1974, pp. 57-63.
-. "Yvonne Rainer, Part Two: 'Lives of Performers.'" Artforum.
February, 1974, pp. 30-35.
Morris, Robert. "Notes on Dance." Tulane Drama Review no. 10, Winter
1965, pp. 179-86.
Pops, Martin L. "Some Remarks on Modern and Post-Modern Dance,"
Salmagundi, Fall 1980/Winter 1981, pp. 242-49.
Rainer, Yvonne. Work 1961-73. New York: New York University Press,
1974.

V. Language, Notation, and Identity

Armelagos, Adina, and Mary Sirridge. "The Identity Crisis in Dance."

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 37, no. 2, Winter 1978, pp. 129-
39.
Benesh, Rudolph and Joan Benesh. An Introduction to Benesh Dance Nota¬
tion. London: Black, 1956.
Eshkol, Noa, and Abraham Wachsman. Movement Notation. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1958.
Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1968.
Hall, Fernau. "Benesh Notation and Choreology." Dance Scope 3, no. 1,
Fall 1966, pp. 30-37.
Hanna, Judith Lynne. "Toward Semantic Analysis of Movement Behav¬
ior: Concepts and Problems." Semiotica, no. 25%, 1979, pp. 77-110.
Hutchinson, Ann. Labanotation. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1977.
566 BIBLIOGRAPHY

-. “Perspective on the Dance Notation Situation." Dance Scope 5,

no. 1, Fall 1970, pp. 39-46.
Kleinman, Seymour. "Movement Notation Systems: An Introduction."
Quest, no. 33, January, 1975, pp. 33-56.
Laban, Rudolph von. Principles of Dance and Movement Notation. London:
MacDonald and Evans, Ltd., 1956.
Margolis, Joseph. "The Autographic Nature of the Dance." Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 29, no. 4, Summer 1981, pp. 419-27.
Stone, Roslyn E. "Human Movement Forms as Meaning-Structures: A
Prolegomenon." Quest, no. 23, pp. 10-17.
Turnbaugh, Douglas Blair. "Dance Notation: Potential and Problems."
Dance Scope 4, no. 2, Spring 1970, pp. 34-47.
Ziff, Paul. "About the Appreciation of Dance," in Philosophical Essays on
Dance. Edited by Gordon Fancher and Gerald Myers. New York:
Dance Horizons, 1981, pp. 69-83.

VI. Dance Criticism

Aloff, Mindy, ed. "On Dance Criticism." New Performance 2, no. 1.
Brown, Carolyn, Arlene Croce, Nancy Goldner, Dale Harris, and David
Vaughan. "Symposium: Writing about the Dance." Ballet Review 7, no.
4, 1978-79, pp. 108-24.
Cocteau, Jean. "Diaghilev and Nijinsky," in Cocteau's World. Trans, and
edited by Margaret Crosland. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company,
1972, pp. 257-60.
Croce, Arlene. Afterimages. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Denby, Edwin. Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets. New York:
Horizon, 1965.
-. Looking at the Dance. New Yo^k: Horizon, 1968.
Gautier, Theophile. The Romantic Ballet. Trans, by C. W. Beaumont. New
York: Dance Horizons, 1972.
Haggin, B. H. Ballet Chronicle. New York: Horizon Press, 1971.
Johnston, Jill. Marmelade Me. New York: Dutton, 1971.
Jowitt, Deborah. "A Private View of Criticism." Arts in Society, Pall 1976
pp. 204-9.
-. Dance Beat: Selected Views and Reviews, 1967-76. New York: Mar¬
cel Dekker, 1978.
Siegel, Marcia B. At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance. New York:
Saturday Review Press, 1972.
-. The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance. Boston: Hough¬
ton Mifflin, 1979.
-.Watching the Dance Go By. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Sontag, Susan. On Dance and Dance Writing." New Performance 2, no
3, pp. 72-81.
Van Vechten, Carl. The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten. Edited by Paul
Padgette. New York: Dance Horizons, 1974.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 567

VII. Dance and Society

Artaud, Antonin. ''On the Balinese Theatre," in The Theatre and Its Dou¬
ble. Trans, by M. C. Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958, pp. 53-67.
Boas, Franziska, ed. The Function of Dance in Human Society. New York:
Dance Horizons, 1972.
Bourguignon, Erika. "Trance Dance." Dance Perspectives 35, Autumn
1968, pp. 8-19.
Copeland, Roger. "Towards a Sexual Politics of Contemporary Dance."
Contact Quarterly, 7, no. 3/4, Spring/Summer 1982, pp. 45-50.
De Mille, Agnes. "Ballet and Sex," in Dance to the Piper. Boston: Little,
Brown, and Co., 1952, pp. 54-60.
Harrison, Jane. Ancient Art and Ritual. London: Williams and Norgate,
1918.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955, pp. 164-65.
Kendall, Elizabeth. Where She Danced. New York: Knopf, 1979.
Koegler, Horst. "In the Shadow of the Swastika: Dance in Germany
1927-1936." Dance Perspectives 57, Spring 1974, pp. 3-48.
Lawrence, D. H. "The Hopi Snake Dance," in Mornings in Mexico. New
York: Knopf, 1927, pp. 141-79.
Leeuw, Gerardus van der. Sacred and Profane Beauty. Trans, by David E.
Green. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.
Rust, Frances. Dance in Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
Rahner, Hugo. "The Heavenly Dance," in Man at Play. New York: Her¬
der and Herder, 1976, pp. 65-90.
Slonimsky, Yuri. The Bolshoi Ballet. Moscow: Foreign Language Publish¬
ing House, 1960.
Wolcott, James. "Dance Captures that Old Rock Magic." The Village Voice
December 29, 1975, p. 66.
Wynne, Shirley. "Complaisance: An Eighteenth-Century Cool." Dance
Scope 5, no. 1, Fall 1970, pp. 22-35.
 X <

'

.
Permission to reprint the following material is gratefully acknowledged:

Jack Anderson. “Idealists, Materialists, and the Thirty-Two Fouettes" from Ballet
Review 6:4 (1975-76). Reprinted by permission of Ballet Review, published quarterly
by The Dance Research Foundation, New York, N.Y. 10014.
Roland Barthes. "Striptease" from Mythologies by Roland Barthes, selected and trans¬
lated from the French by Annette Lavers. Mythologies was first published in French
by Editions du Seuil (Paris), 1957. Translation copyright © 1972 by Jonathan Cape
Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Roland Barthes, Jonathan Cape Ltd.,
and Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Eric Bentley. Excerpt from "The Purism of Etienne Decroux" and from "Martha Gra¬
ham's Journey" in In Search of Theatre. Copyright 1953 by Eric Bentley; copyright
renewed. Reprinted with the permission of Atheneum Publishers.
R. P. Blackmur. Excerpt from "The Swan in Zurich" from A Primer of Ignorance by R.
P. Blackmur. © 1958 by the Estate of R. P. Blackmur. Reprinted by permission of
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Marshall Cohen. "Primitivism, Modernism, and Dance Theory" from Philosophical
Essays on Dance, edited by Gerald Myers and Gordon Fancher. Originally published
1981 by Dance Horizons. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Selma Jeanne Cohen. "Dance as an Art of Imitation" reprinted from The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 12:2 (December 1953), pp. 232-36. Copyright 1953 by The
American Society for Aesthetics. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Selma Jeanne Cohen. "Problems of Definition," edited from Chapter 6 of Next Week,
Swan Lake. Copyright © 1982 by Selma Jeanne Cohen. Reprinted by permission of
Wesleyan University Press.
R. G. Collingwood. Excerpt from The Principles of Art, by R. G. Collingwood (1938).
Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Roger Copeland. "Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception" from The New
Republic, November 17, 1979. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Roger Copeland. "Photography and the World's Body" from The Massachusetts Review
14:4, Winter 1978. © 1978 by The Massachusetts Review, Inc. Reprinted by permis¬
sion of the publisher. Adapted for this anthology and given a new title.
Arlene Croce. "Momentous," copyright © 1975 by Arlene Croce. Reprinted from
Afterimages, by Arlene Croce, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and A. & C.
Black (Publishers) Limited. Originally appeared in The New Yorker. "Joffrey Jazz,"
copyright © 1973 by Arlene Croce. Reprinted from Afterimages, by Arlene Croce, by
permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and A. & C. Black (Publishers) Limited. Origi¬
nally appeared in The New Yorker.
Edwin Denby. "A Balanchine Masterpiece" ("Concerto Barocco") from Looking at the
Dance (New York: Horizon Press 1968). Copyright © 1947 by Edwin Denby.
Reprinted by permission of the author's agent.
Edwin Denby. "Three Sides of 'Agon'" from Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets
(New York: Horizon Press 1965). Copyright © 1965 by Edwin Denby. Reprinted by
permission of the author's agent.
Isadora Duncan. Excerpt from "The Dance of the Future," from "I See America Danc¬
ing " and from "Richard Wagner" from The Art of the Dance. Copyright 1928 by Helen
Hacked, Inc. Copyright renewed 1956. Copyright © 1969 by Theatre Arts Books.
Used by permission of the publisher. Theatre Arts Books, 153 Waverly Place, New
York, N.Y. 10014.
Havelock Ellis. "The Art of Dancing" from The Dance of Life. Reprinted by permission
of Professor F. Lafitte, Trustee of the Havelock Ellis estate.
 Michel Fokine. Letter to The Times (London), July 6, 1914, reprinted in Michel Tokine
and His Ballets, by Cyril W. Beaumont. Reprinted by permission of the Imperial Soci¬
ety of Teachers of Dancing.

Theophile Gautier. "Fanny Elssler in 'La Tempete'" and "Revival of 'La Sylphide'"
from The Romantic Ballet as Seen by Theophile Gautier, translated by Cyril W. Beaumont.
Reprinted by permission of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing.

Katharine Everett Gilbert. Excerpt from "Mind and Medium in the Modern Dance"
reprinted from The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, no. 1, Spring 1941, pp. 106-
29. Copyright 1941 by The American Society for Aesthetics. Reprinted by permission
of the publisher.

Nelson Goodman. Excerpts from Languages of Art, 2nd ed., 1976. Reprinted by per¬
mission of Nelson Goodman and Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana.

Fernau Hall. "Dance Notation and Choreology" from British Journal of Aesthetics 4:1
(January 1964). © 1964, 1983 by Fernau Flail and British Journal of Aesthetics.
Reprinted by permission of the author's agent.

Rayner Heppenstall. Excerpt from "The Sexual Idiom" from Apology for Dancing.
Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Quotations within the article from
The Art of the Dance, by Isadora Duncan, are reprinted with the permission of the
publisher. Theatre Arts Books; quotations from My Life, by Isadora Duncan, are
reprinted with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright 1927
by Horace Liveright, Inc. Copyright renewed 1955 by Liveright Publishing
Corporation.

Tom Johnson. "Running Out of Breath" from Dance Scope 11:2, Spring/Summer 1977.
Copyright © 1977 by the American Dance Guild, Inc. Reprinted from Dance Scope by
permission of the American Dance Guild, Inc.

Deborah Jowitt. "Monumental Martha" from Dance Beat: Selected Views and Reviews,
1967-76 (Marcel Dekker: New York, 1978). Reprinted by permission of Marcel Dek-
ker, Inc.

Ruth Katz. "The Egalitarian Waltz" from Comparative Studies in Society and History 15:3,
June 1973. Copyright © 1973 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permis¬
sion of Cambridge University Press.

Joann Kealiinohomoku. "An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic

Dance" from Impulse, 1969-70. Reprinted by permission of Impulse Publications Inc.
and the author.

Elizabeth Kendall. The "Prologue" from Where She Danced. Copyright © 1979 by Eliz¬
abeth Kendall. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Frank Kermode. Excerpt from "Poet and the Dancer before Diaghilev" from Puzzles
and Epiphanies. Copyright © 1962 by Frank Kermode. Reprinted by permission of
Literistic, Ltd.

Lincoln Kirstein. "Classic Ballet: Aria of the Aerial" from Playbill, May 1976
Reprinted by permission of American Theatre Press, Inc.

Lincoln Kirstein. "Classic and Romantic Ballet" from Ballet Alphabet in Three Pam¬
phlets Collected (1967). Reprinted by permission of the author.

Anna Kisselgoff. "There Is Nothing 'National' about Ballet Styles" from The New York
Times, September 12, 1976. © 1976 by The New York Times Company Reprinted bv
permission. r y

Heinrich von Kleist. "Puppet Theatre," from Beryl de Zoete's The Thunder and the
Freshness. © 1963 by Arthur Waley. Used by permission of Neville Spearman, Ltd.
and the publisher. Theatre Arts Books, 153 Waverly Place, New York, N.Y. 10014

Susanne K. Langer. Excerpts from Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from
Philosophy in a New Key. Copyright 1953 by Charles Scribner's Sons; copyright
renewed 1981 by Susanne K. Langer (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953).
Reprinted with the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons and Routledge & Kegan
Paul Ltd.
David Michael Levin. "Balanchine's Formalism" from Dance Perspectives 55, Autumn
1973. Reprinted by permission of Dance Perspectives Foundation.

David Michael Levin. "Philosophers and the Dance" from Ballet Review 6:2 (1977-
78). Reprinted by permission of Ballet Review, published quarterly by The Dance
Research Foundation, New York, N.Y. 10014.

Andre Levinson. Excerpt from "The Art and Meaning of Isadora Duncan," translated
from the Russian by Susan Cook Summer and Debra Goldman, from Ballet Review 6:4
(1977-78). Reprinted by permission of Ballet Review, published quarterly by The
Dance Research Foundation, New York, N.Y. 10014.
Andre Levinson. "The Idea of the Dance: From Aristotle to Mallarme" originally
appeared in Theatre Arts Monthly, August 1927, and is used by permission of Theatre
Arts Books, 153 Waverly Place, New York, N.Y. 10014.

Stephane Mallarme. "Ballets" from Mallarme: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters,
translated by Bradford Cook. Copyright © 1956 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Joseph Margolis. Excerpt from "Art as Language" from The Monist 58:2, and subse¬
quently revised by the author. Copyright © 1974 by The Monist, La Salle, Illinois.
Reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.
John Martin. "Dance as a Means of Communication," an excerpt from The Dance
(1946); and "Metakinesis," "Extension of Range," and "Form and Metakinesis,"
excerpts from The Modern Dance (1972), are reprinted by permission of the author.

Jean-Georges Noverre. Letter 1 from Letters on Dancing and Ballets, translated by Cyril
W. Beaumont. Reprinted by permission of the Imperial Society of Teachers of
Dancing.
Yvonne Rainer. "A Quasi Survey of Some Minimalist Tendencies . . from Minimal
Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock. Copyright © 1968 by Yvonne
Rainer. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Theodore Reff. Excerpt from "Edgar Degas and the Dance" reprinted from Arts Mag¬
azine 53:3, November 1978, by permission of the publisher.
Steve Reich. "Notes on Music and Dance" from Ballet Review 4:5, (1973). Reprinted
by permission of Ballet Review, published quarterly by The Dance Research Founda¬
tion, New York, N.Y. 10014.
Jacques Riviere. Excerpt from "Le Sacre du Printemps," translated by Miriam Lass-
man, from Nijinsky Dancing, by Lincoln Kirstein. Reprinted by permission of Lincoln
Kirstein.
Bernard Shaw. Excerpt from "8 February 1893" from Music in London 1890-94, vol. 2.
Reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw
Estate.
Francis Sparshott. "Why Philosophy Neglects the Dance." Copyright © 1983 by
Francis Sparshott. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Adrian Stokes. Excerpt from "The Classical Ballet" from Tonight the Ballet. Copyright
(C) 1934 by Adrian Stokes; renewed 1963. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of
Adrian Stokes and Da Capo Press, who have reprinted Tonight the Ballet and Russian
Ballets together in one volume.
E. M. W. Tillyard. Excerpt from The Elizabethan World Picture. Copyright 1944 by Mac¬
millan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1972 by Stephen Tillyard, Mrs. V. Sankaran,
and Mrs. A. Ahlers. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.,
Chatto and Windus Ltd., and the author's literary estate.
Paul Valery. "Philosophy of the Dance" from The Collected Works in English, Bollingen
Series 45, vol. 13, Aesthetics, translated by Ralph Manheim. Copyright © 1964 by
Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press
and Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

Carl Van Vechten. "Anna Pavlowa" from The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten,
edited by Paul Padgette. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Carl Van Vechten.

A. K. Volinsky. Excerpt from "The Vertical: The Fundamental Principle of Classic

Dance" from The Book of Exultation translated by Seymour Barofsky. Copyright ©
1971 by the American Dance Guild, Inc. Reprinted from Dance Scope (Spring 1971)
by permission of the American Dance Guild, Inc.

Ross Wetzsteon. "The Whirling Dervishes: An Emptiness Filled with Everything"

from The Village Voice, October 30, 1978. Copyright © The Village Voice, Inc., 1978.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Mary Wigman. Excerpt from "My Teacher Laban" from The Mary Wigman Book: Her
Writings, edited and translated by Walter Sorell (Wesleyan University Press, 1975),
reprinted by permission of the author's literary executor, Walter Sorell. Excerpt from
"The Philosophy of Modern Dance," first published in Europa (Vol. 1, No. 1, May-
July 1933), reprinted by permission of the author's literary executor, Walter Sorell.
 INDEX

Numbers in italics indicate material written by named author.

Adams, Diana, 143n, 357, 360, 449, Artaud, Antonin, 320

451 Ashley, Merrill, 342, 464
Aesthetic attitude, 4-6, 43, 166, Ashton, Frederick, 390, 412, 414,
299. See also Psychical distance 416, 466; and counterpoint, 209;
American Ballet (Lincoln and Cunningham, 352; and
Kirstein's), 454 style, 362-63; and tempo, 144n
American Ballet Theater, 370 Astaire, Fred, 170, 242, 322
Anderson, Jack, 370, 371, 410-419 Avril, Jane, 150, 151, 158, 223
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 164
Architecture, 104, 248, 520; and Bach, J. S., 300, 346, 356, 418, 454,
dance as primary arts, 478 492
Argentina, Mme, 55, 65, 287 Bakst, Leon, 203, 248, 281
Aristotle: and government, 498; Balakirev, M. A., 203, 204
and Greek tragic drama, 185-86, Balanchine, George, 3, 198, 209,
506; and imitation, 2, 9, 15-16, 243, 249, 317, 343, 370, 470; and
21, 48, 50; and music, 298-301; American style, 236, 355-63; and
and rhythm, 147; and theoria, the body, 105, 517-18; and
298-99 clarity, 344; A. Croce on, 430,
Aristotelian, 3, 49, 51, 298 459-64 (The Four Temperaments);
Armelagos, Adina, 370, 389n and Cunningham, 317; and
Armitage, Merle, 30, 31, 300 formalism, 5, 94, 106, 190, 226;
Arnheim, Rudolph, 19 and modernism, 108-9, 123-25;
Arnold, Matthew, 423, 515 162, 170-77, 241; and narration,
Arpino, Gerald, 470 174, 188; and revision, 412-13

573
574 INDEX

Ballet, 40-41, 111-15; character¬ Blackmur, R. P., 236, 354-61

istics of (S. J. Cohen), 340-46; Blasis, Carlo, 17, 18, 52
classical, 124, 170-71, 227-29, Body: and Balanchine, 105, 517-18
236, 238-43, 244-55, 346, 445; and Christianity, 87-88, 431,
Duncan's criticisms of, 263, 281- 436; and Cunningham, 96, 518;
82; as "ethnic" dance, 477, 533, and Fuller, 104, 106. See also
544-48; modern, 115-23, 123-45, Medium
241-43, 248-50, 254, 257-61 Bonnefous, Jean-Pierre, 464
(Fokine), 349, 354-61, 446, 453, Bortoluzzi, Paolo, 347
454-55, 459-64, 465-71; morality Bournonville, August, 363, 391,
of, 255-57; romantic, 101-2, 168- 411, 416, 417; and clarity, 343;
70, 220, 237, 251, 365-66, 431-34, and classical style, 345-46; and
434-37, 489, 519; and verticality, gravity, 169, 175
255-57. See also Ballet blanc; Brahms, Johannes, 443
Ballet d'action; Turn-out Brecht, Bertolt, 312-15, 320, 322n
Ballet blanc, 251, 253-54 Brechtian, 231
Ballet d'action, 10, 15, 17, 97-101 Britten, Benjamin, 357
passim, 289-90 Brook, Peter, 322
Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Brown, Earle, 320
459 Brown, Trisha, 234, 323n, 348
Ballets Russes, 26, 319, 363; and Bruhn, Erik, 347
the Wagnerian ideal, 96, 108, Buckle, Richard, 92
145, 163, 185-86, 229, 319. See Bullough, Edward, 299
also Diaghilev Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 529
Ballets Trockadero de Monte
Carlo, 418 Cage, John, 96, 97
Banes, Sally, 349 Callois, Roger, 532n
Barnes, Clive, 351 Camargo, Marie-Anne de Cupis
Barthes, Roland, 321, 323n, 324n, de, 17, 251, 254-55, 417, 489
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 529 Caro, Anthony, 125
Batteux, Charles, 147 Cassirer, Ernst, 35, 37, 291
Baudelaire, Charles, 147 Cavell, Stanley, 520n
Beauchamps, Pierre, 16, 21, 49, 252 Gecchetti, Enrico, 250
Beaumont, Cyril W„ 45n, 49, 251 Chance, 232, 310, 317
Beck, Hans, 416 Chaplin, Charles, 202
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 441, 492, Character dance, 253
522, 527 Childs, Lucinda, 323n, 518
Bejart, Maurice, 167 Chomsky, Noam, 93
Bell, Clive, 141 Chopin, Frederic, 225n, 268, 441
Benesh,Joan, 369, 395-98 Christianity: and the body, 87-88,
Benesh, Rudolph, 369, 395-97, 431, 436; its effect on dance,
409n 481-83
Bennington College, 239 Cinema, 516-17, 520
Benois, Alexander, 281 Cocteau, Jean, 164, 186
Bentley, Eric, 163, 186-90, 197-202, Cohen, Marshall, 4, 109, 161-78
210-15 Cohen, Selma Jeanne, 2-3, 5, 15-
Bergson, Henri, 34, 158 22, 106, 235, 339-54
Berlioz, Hector, 531 Collective unconscious, 311
Berman, Eugene, 459, 460 Collingwood, R. G., 3, 186, 367-68,
Bharata Natya, 342, 344, 457 371-76, 381, 386
Black Crook, The, 550, 551, 553 Conceptual art, 516, 520
 INDEX 575

Contraction and release, 202, 231, Degas, Edgar, 103, 217-23

239, 348; and Cunningham's de Groat, Andy, 508
isolation, 319 Dehumanization (Ortega y Gasset),
Cook, Bart, 464 159, 344, 515, 517; in
Copeland, Roger, 162, 175, 232-33, Balanchine's choreography, 354-
307-24, 475, 515-20 61 passim
Coppelia, 244, 249, 391, 413, 445 de Kooning, Willem, 319
Coralli, Jean, 365, 411 Deleuze, Gilles, 321
Cosmic dance: Ellis on, 478; Delibes, Leo, 550
Tillyard on, 497-502 Delsarte, Francois, 147, 559
Costume, 251, 254-55n, 489 de Mille, Agnes, 106-7, 533, 537-
Craig, Gordon, 145, 163, 187, 198, 40, 543-44
214, 271 Denby, Edwin, 341, 425; on Agon
Cranko, John, 416 (Balanchine), 446-53; on Concerto
Criticism: contrasted with Barocco (Balanchine), 454-55;
reviewing, 423; contrasted with critical method of, 92, 428-30;
theory and history, 421-22; and on Cunningham, 318; on
A. Croce, 429-30, 459-71; and Graham, 198; on time, 135-36,
Denby, 428-29; differences 144n
between dance and other forms Denishawn, 241, 349, 456,
of, 424-25; and Gautier, 426-27, 560
438-44; intrinsic vs. extrinsic, Derrida, Jacques, 321, 323n
422; and Jowitt, 429, 456-59; in Descartes, Rene, 89
the nineteenth century, 425; and Deuce Coupe (Tharp), 465-71
Van Vechten, 445-46. See also Dewey, John, 296, 297
Deconstructive criticism Diaghilev, Sergei, 5, 146, 207, 241,
Croce, Arlene, 425, 429-30; on 363, 393, 411; and classical
Cunningham, 314-15, 322, 352; ballet, 248-50; and
on Deuce Coupe (Tharp), 465-71; Cunningham, 319-20; and
on The Four Temperaments Duncan, 157, 281; innovations
(Balanchine), 174-75, 459-64 of, 25-26, 427, 490; and Wagner,
Croce, Benedetto, 3, 34, 226 108, 109, 145, 162-64, 166, 210,
Cunningham, Merce, 109, 225, 326, 232. See also Ballets Russes
339, 352, 465; and the body, 96, Didelot, Charles, 390
518; Copeland on, 307-24; Diderot, Denis, 17, 50, 98
relation to emotion and Doubrovska, Felia, 250
expression, 3, 129, 167; and Draper, Paul, 356
Judson group, 336; and modern Dress reform, 439, 477, 544. See also
dance, 346-47, 349; and music, Feminism
109, 188, 232-33; and Wagner, 162 Dryden, John, 497
Duchamp, Marcel, 315, 316, 446
Dalcroze, Jacques, 73, 110, 188 Duell, Daniel, 460
D'Alembert, Jean, 98, 99 Duncan, Isadora, 5, 146, 262-66;
Danilova, Alexandra, 459 296, 311, 365, 553, 558; and
Darwin, Charles, 262 ballet, 40, 147, 158, 169, 229, 230,
Dauberval, Jean, 390, 412 317; emotion and expression in,
Davies, Sir John, 474, 499-502 23, 26, 230; Fokine on, 257-59,
Dean, Laura, 235, 336, 347, 349 261; and Fuller, 151; and
Deconstructive criticism, 323-24 gesture, 28, 168; and the Greeks,
Decroux, Etienne, 188-91, 197, 202, 26n, 48, 250, 326, 445, 490;
210-15 Heppenstall on, 267-88;
576 INDEX

Duncan, Isadora (Continued) Falla, Manuel de, 208

Levinson on, 426-27, 438-44; Farrell, Suzanne, 363
and modern dance, 231, 349; and Feld, Eliot, 470
music, 97, 316; and soul, 290-92; Feminism, 86-87, 95, 201; and
and Whitman, 96, 241 ballet, 263-64; and Duncan, 275,
Duncan, Kathy, 234, 333 281-82; and early modern dance,
Duncan, Mary Dora, 558 477, 554-60
Duncan, Raymond, 268 Fenley, Molissa, 351
Dunn, Douglas, 351 Fokine, Michel, 5,. 190, 257-61, 285,
Dunning, Jennifer, 350 362-63, 427; and authenticity,
Duse, Eleanora, 145, 150, 292 392, 411, 414; and Balanchine,
Dying Swan, The, 31 125, 130; and expression, 19, 228,
248; and music, 203-5, 208; and
Eilber, Janet, 370 Nijinsky, 117-20; and technique,
Eliot, T. S., 147, 149, 159, 165, 369, 18, 21
423 Folk dance: distinguished from
Elizabeth I (Queen of England), primitive dance, 543-44. See also
474, 501 "Ethnic" dance; National
Ellis, Havelock, 104, 149, 197, 478- dances; Minuet; Waltz
96; and dance renaissance, 145- Fonteyn, Margot, 354, 362
46; and primitivism, 186; and Formalism, 1-2, 5-6, 108, 124, 126,
society, 473-74 129, 190, 201, 351, 515,517,519;
Elssler, Fanny, 252, 365, 433; Levinson on, 47-55. See also
Gautier on 431-37; and Taglioni, Balanchine; Heppenstall; Levin;
52, 426, 431, 435-37 Petipa; Stokes; and Russian
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 241 formalism
Emotion. See Expression Forti, Simone, 319
Epstein, Alvin, 212 "Found" movement, 328
Eshkol, Noa, 370, 409n Franklin, Frederic, 459, 460
Essenin, Sergei, 271, 280 Frazer, Sir James, 147, 541
"Ethnic" dance, 238, 477, 533-49. Freud, Sigmund, 273
See also Social dance; National Fried, Michael, 127, 129, 139, 172
dances Fry, Roger, 377
Exemplification: as defined by Frye, Northrop, 227, 423
Goodman, 6-7, 72-78, 81-82, Fuller, Loie, 149, 151-58, 230, 321;
380-81 and ballet, 147; and the body,
Existentialism, 309 104, 116; and Mallarme, 104; and
Expression, 1-4, 6-7, 19-20, 30-36, unity of the arts, 108, 146, 163,186
119-21, 124, 126-27, 129-31, 134, Fuller, Margaret, 555
141n-43n,147, 167-68, 228-29,
231, 248, 380-81; Collingwood Galeotti, Vincenzo, 390
on, 344; Duncan on, 272, 290; Gautier, Theophile, 47, 52, 425,
and Fokine's "Five Principles," 426,431-37
260; Goodman on, 70-72, 74-78, Genee, Adeline, 445, 557
81-82; for Laban, 296; Langer Genre theory, 225-35, 339-40
on, 30-36; Margolis's critique of Gerdt, Pavel, 418
Goodman on, 385-86; Martin on, Gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner's total
22-28; and modern dance, 239, work of art), 96, 108-9, 161, 163-
243, 346; in revivals of early 65, 185-87, 191-96, 212, 474; and
modern dance, 351-52. See also Brecht, 312, 320; Cunningham's
Cunningham; Duncan; Fokine; rejection of, 312, 320; and
Graham; Sachs; Wigman modern dance, 266
 INDEX 577

Gesture, 5, 28-29, 33, 50, 114, 119— Grieg, Edvard, 441

20, 167-68, 189-90; Laban's Grisi, Carlotta, 252, 391, 445
conception of, 292-96; in Gsovsky, Victor, 412
modern ballet, 260; as original Guilbert, Yvette, 149, 150
language, 295. See also Duncan;
Language; Levinson; Noverre Haeckel, Ernst, 262
Gilbert, Katharine Everett, 231, Hall, Fernau, 368, 369, 390-99
289-302 Harris, Dale, 125, 129, 144n
Giselle, 52, 244, 425; authenticity of, Harrison, Jane, 147, 198, 474-75,
391, 411, 413, 417; and Duncan, 502-6
40; and Grisi, 252; and Pavlova, Haskell, Arnold, 533, 540
445; and Romantic movement, Hauser, Arnold, 526
170,237, 365 Hayden, Melissa, 448, 449
Glass, Philip, 520 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
Glazounov, Alexander, 445 9, 94, 100, 102
Gluck, Christobald W., 441 Hegelian, 8, 139
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Heidegger, Martin, 90, 92, 127
523, 529 Hellenism: and classical ballet,
Goh, Cho San, 350, 351 250; and Duncan, 438-39
Gombrich, Ernst, 68, 70, 377, 378 Helpmann, Robert, 362
Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, Heppenstall, Rayner, 125, 232,
64, 149, 152, 154, 217, 218 267-88; and classical ballet, 350-
Goodman, Erika, 468, 469 51, 475; and formalism, 141n;
Goodman, Nelson, 66-85, 399-410; and impersonality, 230
discussed by Margolis, 377, 383- Hindemith, Paul, 461
86; on imitation, 68-70; and Hinkson, Mary, 459
notation, 368-69, 399-410; and Hockey Seen, 80-82
style, 340; and symbolization, 6- Hoffman, Gertrude, 533, 557
7,66-85 Humphrey, Doris, 231, 326, 346,
Gorsky, Alexander, 308, 309, 391, 533, 542; and gravity, 169; and
413 modern dance, 232, 302, 347;
Grace, 110, 122-24, 130-35, 140, and music, 165, 300
142n,173,178-84
Graham, Martha, 107, 163, 199, Illusion, 166-70, 175-76, 233-34,
300, 332n, 370, 536; and abstract 323, 427; Langer on, 4, 29-47; in
expressionism, 309; and ballet, post-modern dance, 327, 329-30
129, 238; Bentley on, 197-202; Imitation. See Aristotle; Goodman;
and the body, 104; and Laban; Noverre; and
Cunningham, 310, 317, 320; and Representation
dramatic representation, 164, Impersonality, 104, 154, 156, 158-
301; and floor work, 169, 318; 60, 230, 234, 344; in classical
and Fokine, 19; Jowitt on, 456- ballet, 274; in post-modern
59; and magical theater, 187; and dance, 328, 373-78
modern dance, 231-32, 311, 327, Inanimate motion, 1, 131, 172-73
346-49, 352; and primitivism, Intentionality (of human
186 movement), 110, 131, 168, 172-
Gravity, 4-5, 39-40, 43, 110, 168- 73
69,173-76,179-81, 214, 238-43, Ivanov, Lev, 252, 411, 412, 419
263,307
Greenberg, Clement, 107-9, 126- James, Henry, 554, 556, 558
28,170-75, 476 James, William, 290
Gretchaninov, Alexander, 440 James-Lange theory, 70
578 INDEX

Jazz, 240-41, 265 dance, 231, 290, 299, 394; and

Joffrey, Robert, 466 personal types, 24; Wigman on,
Joffrey Ballet, 129, 235, 362, 465-71 302-5
Johns, Jasper, 233, 311, 315, 316, Lacan, Jacques, 48, 324n, 480
319 La Cornalba, 104, 111
Johnson, Tom, 234, 332-35 Lacotte, Pierre, 412
Johnston, Jill, 428 Lambert, Constant, 187-88, 203-
Jooss, Kurt, 168, 241, 286, 302 10
Jowitt, Deborah, 340, 429-30, 456- La Meri, 533, 544, 546, 547
59 Lancaster, Mark, 321
Judson Dance Theater, 233, 323n, Lander, Harald, 416, 417
328, 336, 337, 339, 347, 349 Lang, Pearl, 459
Jung, Carl, 458 Langer, Susanne, 3, 28-47, 98, 159,
Jungian, 86, 309 429; M. Cohen's critique of, 4-7,
167-70; and modern dance, 158;
Kant, Immanuel, 133, 139, 166, 203, and primitivism, 146-47; and
256 physical movement, 104, 223;
Kantian, 69, 127, 139 and symbolism, 377
Karsavina, Tamara, 363, 445 Language, 121, 163, 187, 366-69;
Katz, Ruth, 476, 521-32 377-89; dance as the mother of,
Kchessinska, Mathilde, 40, 41, 280 375; dance is not a, 376-89
Kealiinohomoku, Joann, 477, 533- passim; and gesture, 295, 371-
49 76
Kendall, Elizabeth, 477, 550-60 Lawrence, D. H., 276-79, 320, 518
Kermode, Frank, 108, 145-60, 162, Legat, Nicholas, 267
165, 186, 230 Leland, Sara, 131, 135
Kierkegaard, Soren, 92 Le Notre, Andre, 524
King, David, 149 Lessing, Gotthold E„ 106, 107, 161,
King, Kenneth, 349 190, 231
Kirstein, Lincoln, 238-43, 345, 364- Levin, David Michael, 85-94; 123-
66; and ballet history, 92; and 45, 165, 226, 234; M. Cohen on,
dehumanization, 356, 360; and 170-77; on female principle, 8;
ethnicity of ballet, 533, 535, 542, . on formalism, 108-9, 165, 351
545; and modern dance, 230, Levinson, Andre, 47-55, 110, 144n,
347; and nature of ballet, 227, 250, 438-44; and the ballet
229, 232, 234, 341, 475; and dancer, 159-60, 344, 364; and
space, 139, 142n characteristics of ballet, 228, 245,
Kisselgoff, Anna, 236, 347, 361-63 343; on Duncan, 426-27, 438-44;
Kleist, Heinrich von, 110, 111, and formalism, 5, 6, 141n, 190;
178-84 on Fuller, 154, 158; and gesture,
Kline, Franz, 308 167
Koner, Pauline, 411 Lifar, Serge, 249-50, 299
Kracauer, Siegfried, 516, 517, 520n Limon, Jose, 107, 347, 348, 411;
Kreutzberg, Harald, 241 company, 235
Kurath, Gertrude P., 533, 541, 542 Lincoln, Abraham, 277
Literature, 203-4. See also Poetry
Laban, Rudolph von, 28, 30, 292- Litz, Katherine, 326
96; and gesture, 31, 46n; and Lloyd, Marie, 149, 150
imitation, 19-21; and Louis XIV, 15n, 49, 97, 220, 252
Labanotation, 405-9; Langer's Louis Philippe, 530
critique of, 35; and modern Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 49, 99, 489
 INDEX 579

Mallarme, Stephane, 103, 145, 111- 258; forerunners of, 262-66,

15, 146, 186; and Fuller, 153-59, 267-88, 438-44; medium in 296-
230; and pantomime, 189; and 97; non-Western influences on,
symbolism, 104, 108, 164 240, 457-58; Wagner and, 266;
Margolis, Joseph, 368, 376-89 Wigman on, 304-7
Markova, Alicia, 362 Modernism (in the arts), 124-26,
Marsicano, Merle, 326 128-29, 161-62, 170-77, 515, 517.
Martin, John, 3, 22-28, 110, 427- See also Balanchine
28; on ballet, 229, 341, 344; on Monk, Meredith, 349
empathy, 323n; and ethnic Montez, Lola, 555
dance, 536, 537, 538, 540, 542; on Moore, Henry, 125
experience, 296; and modern Mordkin, Mikhail, 445
dance, 232, 346 Morris, Margaret, 286
Maryinsky (theater), 363 Morris, Robert, 125, 128, 320
Massine, Leonide, 109, 147, 249, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 30,
287; and music, 204, 209; and 205-7,216, 492
Parade, 109, 164 Murray, Gilbert, 24
Matisse, Henri, 241 Music; and Balanchine and Bach,
Mauclair, Camille, 145, 146, 154, 454-55 passim; and Balanchine
320 and Stravinsky, 446-53 passim;
Medici, Catherine de', 489 choreographing to popular, 465-
Medium, 103-11, 161, 164, 171; 71 passim; and Cunningham,
defined as dancer's body, 103-4, 310, 312, 313, 316; relationship
110-11 of dance and, 156, 187-88, 203-
Menestrier, Pere Claude, 16, 17, 49 10, 249, 252, 255n, 260; in
Menken, Ada Isaacs, 555 relation to post-modern dance,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 90 336-38. See also Music of the
Metakinesis; defined by Martin, 3, spheres; Music visualization
23-25 Music of the spheres, 474
Mime, 5, 10-11, 27, 73, 197, 208; Music visualization, 188
and ballet, 114, 135-36, 188-90, Muybridge, Eadweard, 191, 221
248, 251, 429; and Decroux, 210-
15; and modern dance, 301 National dances, 287, 361-63, 365.
Mimesis. See Aristotle; Goodman; See also "Ethnic" dance
Laban; Noverre; and Neary, Colleen, 361, 464
Representation Nerval, Gerard de, 320
Minimalism, 105, 172-73, 233, 235, Neumeier, John, 413, 414
475-76, 515, 517; and post¬ New York City Ballet, 236, 355,
modern dance, 326 356, 359, 361, 370
Minuet, 246; contrasted with Nietzsche, Friedrich, 94, 198, 241,
waltz, 476, 523-24 272, 320
Mitchell, Arthur, 449, 450, 451 Nijinska, Bronislava, 45n, 209, 241,
Modern dance, 19-21, 33-34, 40, 363, 412
44, 73, 147, 167, 169, 186-87, 190, Nijinsky, Vaslav, 172, 242, 308,
197-202, 229-33, 456-59; as an 393; and classical ballet, 229,
American form, 265, 277, 285; 241; Riviere on, 105, 110-23
contrasted with ballet, 25-26, Nikolais, Alwin, 104, 323n, 340
238, 243, 266-68; Cunningham Notation, 368-71; as aid to
and, 311, 316, 317, 319, 321; choreographers, 397-99; as aid
distinguishing characteristics of in reconstruction, 410-19 passim;
(S. J. Cohen), 346-52; Fokine on. consequences of ballet's failure
580 INDEX

Notation (Continued) Picasso, Pablo, 109, 126, 164, 190,

to develop an adequate, 390-97; 219, 241
and Goodman's distinction Plato, 23, 48, 291, 474, 493, 498
between allographs and Platonic, 99
autographic arts, 369, 384-85, Poetry, 106, 145-60
399-404; Goodman on the Pollock, Jackson, 308, 309, 311, 318
possibility of a, 404-8; Margolis Post-modern dance, 105, 189, 320,
on Goodman's view of, 384-85; 323, 325-38, 430; and illusion,
relative value of steps vs. 327, 329, 330; and impersonality,
choreographic concept in 328, 337-38; and minimal
systems of, 410-19. See also sculpture, 326. See also "Tasks"
Benesh; Eshkol; Laban; Post-modernism (in architecture
Wachsman and the other arts), 320
Noverre, Jean-Georges, 10-25, 190, Pound, Ezra, 157, 159
368, 391, 489; and gesture, 28; Primitive dance: utilitarian
and imitation, 2, 3, 9, 17, 19, 25, functions of, 473-74, 479-89,
48, 50-51, 97, 100; and modern 492-94; Western scholars'
dance, 290; and nature, 229; and ignorance of, 477, 533-44. See
notation, 394 also Primitivism
Nureyev, Rudolph, 345 Primitivism, 4-6, 22, 38-45, 108,
Nutcracker, The, 189, 238 146-47, 160, 161-70, 186, 197-
202, 308-9, 321; and Graham,
Opera, 185-86, 195-96 456. See also Primitive dance
Oriental vs. Occidental dance, 240, Prokofiev, Sergei, 241
244-47 Psychical distance (Bullough's
Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 147, 159, 475, phrase), 299-301. See also
515,517-19 Aesthetic attitude
Puppets, 122, 150, 178-84
Painting, 106-7, 109, 233; and Purity (of medium), 106-9, 188,
Cunningham, 307-16; images of 203-15, 515-16
dance in,190-91, 217-23
Pascal, Blaise, 57 Racine, Jean Baptiste, 214
Pavlova, Anna, 54, 102, 363, 413; Rainer, Yvonne, 105, 129, 167, 325-
and classical ballet, 248-49; and 32, 518; and anti-illusionism, 5,
Duncan, 40, 41; and The Dying 233-34; and minimalism, 233,
Swan, 31, 241; Van Vechten on, 235; and post-modernism, 323n,
427, 445-46 349
Pavlova, Nadezhda, 361 Rambert, Marie, 243; Ballet
Paxton, Steve, 323, 326, 336 Rambert, 393
Pecourt, Louis, 16, 49 Ransom, John Crowe, 476, 516,
Perrot, Jules, 41 517,520n
Petipa, Marius, 53, 174, 252, 287, Rauschenberg, Robert, 233, 307,
391; and abstraction, 162; 309-11, 313, 315-16, 319
authenticity of Swan Lake, 411 — Realism, 198-201, 213
12; and classical style, 236; and Reff, Theodore, 190-91, 217-23
formalism, 21, 49 Reich, Steve, 235, 336-38
Phenomenology, 8, 90-94, 126, Repetition; in Laura Dean's
127, 132-33 choreography, 336; in post¬
Philosophy; in relation to dance, modern dance, 330-32
55-65 passim; why dance has Representation, 1-3, 6-7, 9, 98-99,
been neglected by, 85-94, 94-102 124, 126-27, 131, 173-74, 380-81;
Photography, 476, 515-20 S. J. Cohen on, 15-22; Duncan
 INDEX 581

on, 440-42; Goodman on, 67-70, Shklovsky, Victor, 314-15

81-82; Martin on, 25; Noverre Siegel, Marcia, 314
on, 10-15; G. B. Shaw on, 215-17 Sirridge, Mary, 370, 389n
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai Sleeping Beauty, The, 253, 391, 411 —
Andreevich, 203, 204 14,550
Ritual, 316, 473; its evolution into Smith, David, 127, 128, 136, 176
art, 474-75, 486-88, 502-6; as Smith, Tony, 318
perceived by a secular Social dance, 474; and the
sensibility, 507-11 Elizabethan world picture, 498-
Riviere, Jacques, 105, 115-23 500; and the origins of court
Robbins, Jerome, 165, 167, 343, ballet, 248, 252. See also "Ethnic"
347, 470; and anxiety, 187, 202; dance; Folk dance; Minuet;
and narration, 188 National dances; Waltz
Rogers, Ginger, 242 Solar plexus, 229, 276
Romanticism, 147, 168-69, 236-37, Sontag, Susan, 307, 515, 517
526-27. See also Ballet: classical Sorrell, Walter, 533-46 passim
and romantic; Elssler; Gautier; Soul: as Duncan's spring of
Giselle; Taglioni motion, 229, 290-91
Rothko, Mark, 309 Sparshott, Francis, 8, 9, 94-102
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 49 Spectre de la Rose, Le, 105, 118, 122
Roval Ballet (of Great Britain), 361, Speech acts, 381-82
362, 363, 390, 393, 416 St. Augustine, 59, 63
Royal Danish Ballet, 362 St. Denis, Ruth, 21, 238, 456, 491,
Ruskin, John, 430 533, 558-60
Russian formalism, 314 Stein, Gertrude, 362
Steinberg, Leo, 323n
Sachs, Curt, 42, 46n, 143n, 533, Stella, Frank, 313
543; and art, 47n; and Stepanov, Vladimir, 394, 395
expression, 30, 32; and origins of Stokes, Adrian, 244-55; and
dance, 38, 39, 541 classical ballet, 227-30, 232, 234,
Sacre du Printemps, Le, 105, 115-23, 341, 475; on Diaghilev, 163
249 Strauss, Richard, 441, 522, 523, 527,
Sadler's Wells Ballet, 354, 355, 357 530
Salle, Marie, 368, 391 Stravinsky, Igor, 241, 343, 413; and
Sappho, 271 Balanchine, 143n, 144n, 363, 446,
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 90, 133 453; and ballet music, 188, 206-
Satie, Erik, 109, 164 8, 249; and Nijinsky, 119, 123
Schiller, Friedrich, 4 Style, 235-37, 340; American, 354-
Schlemmer, Oscar, 110 61; in ballet, 274; concept of
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 4, 166, 316 national, 361-63. See also
Schubert, Franz, 268, 443 Ashton; Balanchine;
Scriabin, Alexander, 273 Bournonville
Sculpture, 222, 247 Sublimation, 87, 273-74, 518
Semiology, 311, 321; and popular Swan Lake, 244, 252, 253, 411, 412
culture, 512-14 Sylphide, La, 251, 365, 434-37
Sergeyev, Nicholas, 394 Symbol systems. See Goodman;
Shakespeare, William, 214 Language; Notation; Semiology
Shaw, George Bernard, 189, 190, Symbolism (as a movement in
215-17 literature and painting), 154,
Shawn, Ted, 238, 285-86, 456, 560 156-57, 163
Shearer, Sybil, 326 Symons, Arthur, 148, 149, 150,
Sheets, Maxine, 8 157
582 INDEX

Taglioni, Filippo, 53, 252, 365, 390, Visconti, Galeozzo (Duke of

413 Milan), 489
Taglioni, Marie, 102, 251, 445, 553; Volinsky, A.K., 228, 255-57, 342,
Gautier on, 426, 431-32, 434-37; 344, 350
and romanticism, 51, 365, 489 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet),
"Tasks": and post-modern dance, 50
162, 234, 328, 336 von Frisch, Karl, 1
Taylor, Paul, 104, 349
Terry, Walter, 533, 535, 540, 546 Wachsman, Abraham, 370, 409n
Tetley, Glen, 350, 351 Wagner, Richard, 156, 191-96, 198,
Tharp, Twyla, 225, 340; and 273; and Diaghilev, 163-64; and
abstraction, 129; and classical Duncan, 266, 441, 443; and
ballet, 226, 235; A. Croce on, Mallarme, 52, 145. See also
430, 465-71; and minimalism, Gesamtkunstwerk
519; and weight, 349 Wagnerian, 96, 109, 210, 474
Theater: in relation to dance, 187, Waltz: contrasted with minuet,
190, 197-202 476; as democratic form, 521-31.
Thomson, Virgil, 362 See also National dances
Tillyard, E. M. W„ 474, 497-502 Warhol, Andy, 318, 319
Tschaikovsky, Peter I., 252-54, 417, Warren, Austin, 422
441, 550; Lambert on, 188, 204, Weaver, John, 16
206-8 Weiss, Robert, 460
Tudor, Antony, 129, 143, 168, 362, Wellek, Rene, 422
412; and dance notation, 392-93 Wetzsteon, Ross, 475, 507-11
Tudor, David, 321 Whirling dervishes, 507-11
Turn-out (as foundation of Whitman, Walt, 241, 265, 277
classical ballet), 244-47, 341-42, Wigman, Mary, 26, 31, 233, 241,
345 302-7, 326; and Dalcroze, 110;
and experience, 44-45, 296; and
Vaganova, Agrippina, 362 expression, 26; and Laban, 231,
Valery, Paul, 54, 55-65, 159, 221, 296, 302-5; and modern dance,
343-44, 473; and aesthetics of 231, 289, 299, 301, 346; and
dance, 5-6; and Fuller, 157; and , music, 109, 246; and weight, 5,
Mallarme, 156; and primitivism, 169
146, 163 Wilson, Robert, 508
Valois, Ninette de, 362 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 376
Van Vechten, Carl, 427, 428, 445- Wolff, Christian, 320
46 Wynne, Shirley, 477
Vaudeville, 550-52; interaction
with ballet, 552-54 Yeats, W. B„ 147, 148, 149, 157; and
Vaughan, David, 352 Fuller, 152, 154, 321; and
Venturi, Robert, 320, 520n Graham, 187, 198; and
Vestris, Auguste, 180, 489 primitivism, 146, 163
Vigano, Salvatore, 101, 368, 391 Young, La Monte, 320
•*

.
4

v
N
 833781 793.3
W55
What is dance?

DATE DUE

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES LIBRARY

PHILLIPS ACADEMY
ANDOVER, MASS.
DANCE/ARTS

Here is the most comprehensive and best-organized anthology of dance

writings ever assembled.
The sixty essays here have been selected not only because they represent
the work of the finest dance writers in America and Europe but also for
the particular questions they pose about the definition of dance, the ways
in which dance conveys meaning, the relationship of dance to the other
arts, and much more.
The book contains contributions by popular critics such as Arlene
Croce and Edwin Denby, choreographers such as Noverre, Isadora
Duncan, Mary Wigman, and Yvonne Rainer, historians such as Lincoln
Kirstein and Selma Jeanne Cohen, and theoreticians such as Mallarme,
Susanne Langer, and Paul Valery. Also included are writers not generally
associated with dance, among them Roland Barthes (on the semiotics of
the striptease), Frank Kermode (on poetry and dance), R.P. Blackmur (on
Balanchine), Eric Bentley (on Martha Graham), and George Bernard
Shaw (on nineteenth-century ballet in London).
The editors have written over sixty pages of introductory essays, which
make an invaluable contribution to the serious study of dance. In addi¬
tion, the introductions continually emphasize the many ways in which a
familiarity with theory can benefit the critic, historian, teacher, and
student of dance, and even the casual dance goer.

Roger Copeland has written for The New York Times, The New
Republic, Partisan Review, Saturday Review, and many dance publica¬
tions, including The Encyclopedia of Dance and Ballet. He is Assistant
Professor of Theater and Dance at Oberlin College.

Marshall Cohen is Professor of Philosophy at The College of Staten

Island and Executive Officer of the Program in Philosophy at the Grad¬
uate Center of the City University of New York. He is co-editor of the
anthology Film Theory and Criticism (with Gerald Mast).

Cover design by Marsha Cohen

Cover illustration: lb Andersen in the New York City Ballet’s production of George
Balanchine's "Apollo." Photo by John R. Johnsen.

A Galaxy Book • Oxford University Press • New York

GB 720/ $ 12.95 ISBN 0-19-503197-0