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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819570932 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/21/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
José Limón
AN AMERICAN ACCENT
I
THE ballet as an art is an old and established tradition, not the least of the many splendors of European civilization. One cannot fully savor the essence of European culture without recognizing the importance of the ballet, for nations make themselves known through their dances. We gain a more profound insight into the soul of Spain, of India, of Cambodia, Bali, China, Korea, and Japan from their dances than from any of their other arts.
Italy, the mother of the ballet; France, its nursemaid; and Imperial Russia, which saw it to its glittering maturity, reveal themselves to the world in every movement, gesture, and configuration of their prodigious creature. The great Medici were not only statesmen, rulers, and patrons of the arts; they were connoisseurs and lovers of the ballo. One of their daughters, the illustrious Catherine, transplanted it to the court of France, where — amidst the turmoil of a savage century — it grew and flourished, elegant and serene. Subsequently the Roi Soleil gave it the prestige of his august participation. The Italian immigrant was now as royal as the dynasty of the House of Bourbon, as French as Versailles, and henceforth its code of movement, its vocabulary, was to be expressed in the French tongue.
The Imperial Romanovs, in transforming Russia from an Asiatic despotism into a state with the outward trappings of a Western nation, took care that the ballet, that most Western of the arts, should certify and confirm the new status. So superbly did the ballet flourish in the climate of the Muscovite empire — favored by Imperial patronage and the astonishing aptitude of the Russian temperament and physique — that before long it surpassed the product of the regions of its origins. The formidable Imperial Russian Ballet came to be to the nation what armies, scientific achievements, and ancient ruins were to other nations. The Russian Ballet became the envy and wonder of the Western world. It became not only an art but a lingua franca of urbanity and civilization.
Yet it is a curious property of human accomplishment that — when seemingly at its zenith — it contains the seeds of the dissolution that could destroy it. It was at this high noon of the popularity of the ballet that an American girl rose in the cultural firmament and incredibly seemed to eclipse its radiance. Isadora Duncan, a rebel, an iconoclast was — like all revolutionaries — bold and uncompromising in her attack. She declared that the ballet was decadent, effete, ugly, artificial; that its training and technique, its turned-out positions, its rigidities, its obsessive use of the pointes, were odious, distorted, and against all nature. It made the human entity into a mechanical puppet, moving jerkily from one affected pose to another to the accompaniment of execrable music. With peerless audacity, she flung out her accusations and defiance, not only in the capitals of the West but in that holy of holies of the ballet itself — St. Petersburg.
It is dangerous for an art, however "classical," to become so rigid, so fossilized, as to lose the freshness, resiliency, and vigor of its original impulse. The art of the ballet during this era, in Western Europe and especially in Russia, seems to have fallen into such a state as to justify the ardent accusations of Isadora Duncan. Where the Parisians, with their cynical predilection for joie de vivre, made of their ballet a toy — a petit rien, a bagatelle — the Russians, with a heavy, despotic hand, transformed it into an instrument of the Imperial order — as were the church, the apparatus of government, and the armed forces. And they made it, like these, impervious to new ideas and to change.
Duncan — a scandal, a danger, and a delight — split the artistic world in half. There were those who saw her as a crude amateur, a shameless exhibitionist with no technique; there were those who sensed in her a challenge, a revelation, and a portent for the future of the dance. It was fortunate for this future that artists of the caliber of Michel Fokine accepted the disturbing challenge to stagnation. So came into being, away from Czarist authority, in the freer ambient of the West, the glories of the Ballets Russes.
It has been said that the modern dance is a temporary phase — that it has not sent down roots like the ballet and cannot, like it, endure. Yet the modern dance began with Duncan shortly after 1900. Now, in 1966, one would have to be myopic not to see that it is far from finished. An art that has produced such figures as Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Helen Tamiris, Hanya Holm, Pauline Koner, Anna Sokolow, Alwin Nikolais, Sophie Maslow, Pearl Lang, and Merce Cunningham, and can look to the vigor of a new generation, has a more than fair prospect of enduring. Especially when its principles exist and flourish, not only in its own milieu but in the works of the leading ballet companies. Let us make no mistake about it: if by "modern dance" one means a state of mind, a cognizance of the necessity of the art of the dance to come to terms with our time, then that art cannot be relegated to the position of a merely transitory influence. The modern dance is here to stay, whether it is performed barefoot or sur les pointes.
Modern dance is not a "popular art." It is not suitable, as is the traditional ballet, to advertise automobiles, vacuum cleaners, rugs, or hair dyes in newspapers or magazines or on television. A pretty ballerina in a pert tutu and pink toe shoes is a much more fetching sales pitch than a vision of a barefoot dancer in a species of ecstasy or suffering. On the other hand, talented — or sometimes merely clever — choreographers have taken the modern dance and adapted it to serve very successfully in musical shows, television, and films, in much the same manner that adaptations of Debussy, Bartók, and Schönberg have found their way into popular songs and the sound tracks of films from Hollywood. The use of serious art in any of its forms for less than its exalted purpose may be open to question. The fact remains that the multitudes who flock to musicals and movies would have had no contact with the contemporary arts (however diluted their presentation in commercial form) if they had not encountered them in this way.
I discovered, however, early in my career, after I had appeared in Broadway shows as both a dancer and a choreographer, that the commercial form and the serious form of the modern dance were incompatible. One had to devote one's self exclusively to one or the other. They could not mix. The serious dance demands an incorruptibility that makes no concessions to so-called popular taste. This has resulted in a dance that not only is not popular, it is not fashionable — it is not chic.
Yet it is a reality and a necessity of our time. Not every artist is disposed toward the Academy, great as it is in tradition and accomplishment. An American idiom is needed to say what cannot be said within the vocabulary of the European dance. This idiom, created by generations of American artists, is in essence non-academic; in principle, experimental; in practice, eclectic and inclusive.
Doris Humphrey declared that, as a young dancer, she was trained to perform — besides the traditional ballet — Spanish, Hindu, Siamese, Balinese, Japanese, Chinese, and other exotic dances. The time came, however, when she became aware that she had no identity as an American, and that all her dancing was — in effect — an impersonation, a masquerade. It was always something borrowed from Europe or the Orient. She could very well have accepted this, as so many young artists did and still do. But she suffered a deep discontent, knowing that for her this was not the way. What to do? What was there to look to as an American dance? Square dances? The American Indian? Negro jazz? Tap dancing? None of these offered a solution. Even the great Duncan, in rejecting the ballet, had reverted to the Hellenistic era. Doris Humphrey saw that the dance idiom she sought would have to be invented. Its creation would be a hard and long voyage of discovery into the inner self; its origins, its awareness and experience and capacity as an American self living in the twentieth century. This dance would spring from the temper of her time.
I was fortunate in coming as a novice to her studio at the precise moment when, in company with Charles Weidman, she had embarked on this voyage of discovery. My experience with the dance had been, in a sense, similar to hers, though — by comparison — miniscule. As a child in Mexico, I had been fascinated — as any child would be — by Spanish jotas, Mexican jarabes, and Indian bailes. Later, across the border, I had seen tap dancers and ballet dancers. All this seemed interesting enough to watch, but to me it was something for girls to do. It never occurred to me as something a man would be caught dead doing. Then pure accident brought me to a performance by Harald Kreutzberg. What I saw simply and irrevocably changed my life. I saw the dance as a vision of ineffable power. A man could, with dignity and a towering majesty, dance. Not mince, prance, cavort, do "fancy dancing" or "show-off" steps. No: dance as Michelangelo's visions dance and as the music of Bach dances.
Kreutzberg had given me the illumination to see the road. But he was a German; his visions were Gothic. They became him; but I was by origin a Mexican, reared in the United States. I must find the dance to say what I had to say about what I was. In Doris Humphrey I found a master who knew that every dancer, being an individual, was an instrument unique and distinct from any other, and that in consequence this dancer must ultimately find his own dance, as she had found hers. I was instructed, stimulated, trained, criticized, encouraged to look for and find my own dance. I was not to ape my teachers. Early, I was encouraged to compose dances. I was admonished: "You will compose one hundred bad dances before you compose one good one."
I view myself as a disciple and follower of Isadora Duncan and of the American impetus as exemplified by Doris Humphrey and Martha Graham, and by their vision of the dance as an art capable of the sublimity of tragedy and the Dionysian ecstasies. I try to compose works that are involved with man's basic tragedy and the grandeur of his spirit. I want to dig beneath empty formalisms, displays of technical virtuosity, and the slick surface; to probe the human entity for the powerful, often crude beauty of the gesture that speaks of man's humanity. I reach for demons, saints, martyrs, apostates, fools, and other impassioned visions. I go for inspiration and instruction to the artists who reveal the passion of man to me, who exemplify supreme artistic discipline and impeccable form: to Bach, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goya, Schönberg, Picasso, Orozco.
With the years, I have become blind to the blandishments and seductions of the romantics. I am impatient with the sounds of the Schumanns, the Mendelssohns, the Gounods, and the Massenets. The literature of the romantics, their architecture, and their fashions arouse in me a feeling of aversion. The undisciplined and sometimes fatuous exhibition of the romantic soul in exquisite torment — whether in music, painting, or dance — leaves me cold. This saccharine and maudlin view of the human condition is to me specious and decayed. I am happy that the Cézannes, the Debussys, the Duncans, the Ibsens, the Dreisers, and the O'Neills have given us back a more adult view of our humanity.
I deplore the artist who makes of his art a withdrawal from the travail of his time; who sterilizes and dehumanizes it into empty formalism; who renounces the vision of man as perfectable, a "golden impossibility," and makes him into the shabby scarecrow of the beatniks; who forgets that the artist's function is perpetually to be the voice and conscience of his time. It was Doris Humphrey who first taught me that man is the fittest subject for choreography. And Martha Graham continues triumphantly to prove that his passions, grandeurs, and vices are the ingredients of great dance, great theatre, and great art.
It is important to preserve the traditional. It is part of our heritage, and as such it is to be cherished. But the modern idioms should be left to the individual to be kept resilient, venturesome, experimental, unhampered. The individual contribution is what gave us cultural maturity and independence from Europe in all our arts. Were it not for this, dancers in America would have remained docile provincials, creating nothing original. By learning to speak in an American idiom, they have enriched the world.
II
The tie between father and son is one of the most baffling of human relationships. Every man looks for his son, hoping through him to achieve his immortality. Every son rejects the father, and every father suffers for this, yet remains ultimately loving and compassionate. The wound that the son inflicts comes as a kind of blessing, a benediction. I feel poignantly the wisdom and beauty of this parable.
In composing dances, I tend to turn to my own experience. Therefore, as I did in The Traitor, I would set this version of the Prodigal Son in the present time. I would try to find in it something cogent and pertinent to our time. The Traitor was the result of my horror at the execution of two Americans, husband and wife, in peacetime, for treason and espionage against their country; and the spectacle of Russians who, in turn, abandoned their country and defected to the West.
I have been a son, and I have known the adolescent's antagonism toward his father, that instinctive hostility and resentment of his authority. I rebelled, resolving to be the exact opposite of my father. Years later — too late — I realized that I had been wrong and had misjudged him completely. Then I discovered that he had always understood and had been forgiving.
My dance, therefore, would have only two characters, a protagonist and an antagonist, eternally opposed and irreconcilable. They would represent the conflict between authority and the rebel, orthodoxy and the heretic, order and chaos. The dancers would perform on an austere, bare stage, hung with black velour, superbly lit throughout the action. There would be, for the son, no adventures, festivities, or orgies during his flight from his father's house. In this case, such scenes would be obvious and superfluous. I would show the son's defection from the virtues of his father's love as a subjective analysis of my own rebellious excesses, typical of all youth, and I would show them in an evocative solo of some substance. I would then examine the father's reaction in a dance symbolic of the desolation of those rejected and abandoned. Compassion is a bitter thing, for it leaves the compassionate without the solace that hatred and contempt bring. They must endure with their understanding and their pity.
I would not show the return of the chastened Prodigal in a sentimental dénouement with a fatted calf. There would be no touching filial repentance, no tender paternal acceptance. For the son can never return to the paternal bosom; he can only come back and continue to face the adversary anew. So I would have only a confrontation with new eyes and a new awareness. It would be austerely restrained and unemotional. Ultimate repentance and ultimate forgiveness are serene beyond sentiment. They are resolved in utter and private loneliness, for each man — forgiving father and errant son — must fail to reach or know the other. Each can regard the other only across a dark gulf, a chasm. In this scene, the abyss would deepen and intensify as the two dancers, remote as two planets, would circle — ostensibly for an eternity — each in his own lonely orbit. This I have found is my experience, and this is how I would — and probably will — compose a dance on the theme of the Prodigal Son.
I would persist in my emulation of the artists whom I revere. I would work to the limit of my capacity to utilize the elements of this theme with the utmost passion, with complete formality, with all simplicity.
CHAPTER 2Anna Sokolow
THE REBEL AND THE BOURGEOIS
I
I hate academies. I hate fixed ideas of what a thing should be, of how it should be done. I don't like imposing rules, because the person, the artist, must do what he feels is right, what he — as an individual — feels he must do. If we establish an academy, there can be no future for the modern dance. An art should be constantly changing; it cannot have fixed rules.
The trouble with the modern dance now is that it is trying to be respectable. The founders of the modern dance were rebels; their followers are bourgeois. The younger generation is too anxious to please, too eager to be accepted. For art, this is death. To young dancers, I want to say: "Do what you feel you are, not what you think you ought to be. Go ahead and be a bastard. Then you can be an artist."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Modern Dance"
by .
Copyright © 1966 Wesleyan University.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University.
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Table of Contents
<P>Introduction: The Caterpillar's Question<BR>José Limón: An American Accent<BR>Anna Sokolow: The Rebel and the Bourgeois<BR>Erick Hawkins: Pure Poetry<BR>Donald McKayle: The Act of Theatre<BR>Alwin Nikolais: No Man From Mars<BR>Pauline Koner: Intrinsic Dance<BR>Paul Taylor: Down With Choreography<BR>Contributors</P>What People are Saying About This
"I am always amazed at how well the modern dancers are able to express themselves in words, and the seven chosen for this book are no exception. These are artists with a strong point of view, and what they have to say is worth reading. [This] will appeal to professionals and laymen alike."
“The essays actually amount to a documentary on the modern dance at mid-century as seen by its practitioners.”
"I am always amazed at how well the modern dancers are able to express themselves in words, and the seven chosen for this book are no exception. These are artists with a strong point of view, and what they have to say is worth reading. [This] will appeal to professionals and laymen alike."—Ruth Page
"The essays actually amount to a documentary on the modern dance at mid-century as seen by its practitioners."—Herta Pauly, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.