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Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions, and examining the work of other critics. She traces the development of contemporary dance from the early work of such influential figures as Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine to such contemporary choreographers as Molissa Fenley, Karole Armitage, and Michael Clark. She analyzes the contributions of the Judson Dance Theatre and the Workers’ Dance League, the emergence of Latin postmodern dance in New York, and the impact of black jazz in Russia. In addition, Banes explores such untraditional performance modes as breakdancing and the “drunk dancing” of Fred Astaire.
Ebook Edition Note: Ebook edition note: All images have been redacted.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819571816 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 428 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Jill Johnston: Signaling Through the Flames
Jill Johnston is important to modern dance history not only because her writings afford us a vivid glimpse of avant-garde New York dance in the 1960s (much of which disappeared with little documentation elsewhere), but also because of the kind of writer she was. A champion of the avant-garde — not only in dance but in all the arts — from her first essay published in Dance Observer in 1955, Johnston chose subject matter, language, and structure that have profoundly influenced a subsequent generation of critics and choreographers who have learned much about dance through her writings.
Johnston's passions as an art critic (she worked for Art News as a reviewer from 1960–66) and dance critic often led her to see parallels between fine art and dance, or to use metaphors from the visual arts to describe choreography. She also wrote at a time when boundaries between various art forms were beginning to blur; and it seems only logical that her two volatile interests should have combined explosively to produce a cultural "cryptic." Writing about theater, dance, music, happenings, environments, and art panels in the pages of the Village Voice, she both noted the intermedia connections (the sculptor Robert Morris's dances; the writings and influence of composer John Cage, Merce Cunningham's music director; Yoko Ono's performances; Fluxus and poetry performances, et al.), and made her own. In her critical writing she began, in the midsixties, to use forms and strategies analogous to those she wrote about: the found phrase paralleled the found objects of pop art and neodada, or the found movements of postmodern dance; stream-of-consciousness correlated to assemblage and improvisatory dance composition.
Johnston is often remembered as the dance critic who created a precedent for personalized, descriptive criticism. That aspect of her writing, as I have suggested, suited the temper of her times. Yet I think a careful reading of Johnston's early reviews and essays (1957–65 — after the 1955 essay she did not write regularly on dance until 1957) show another valuable contribution: a rigorous, analytical, yet generous approach to the avant-garde that still found room to acknowledge the contributions of the old guard.
Johnston's first dance essay, "Thoughts on the Present and Future Directions of Modern Dance" (1955), sets forth themes that will recur throughout her career as a dance critic. While vague (it mentions no names), often pedantic, and embracing an oceanic, organic-idealist notion of art — proposing that art has life cycles, like living creatures, and that those cycles are an evolving progression — the essay hints that a "rebel group" will revitalize choreography, and calls for a constructive criticism to meet the challenge recent dance experiments have raised. "Here and there in this boiling pot of arm waving, choreography by chance, egos in vacuums, and styles of all descriptions may be detected snatches of original inspiration, and an occasional work of breadth," it notes optimistically.
Two years later, in "The Modern Dance — Directions and Criticism," Johnston's language has relaxed and her thesis is more specific. She names José Limón and Merce Cunningham as the leading exponents of two opposing tendencies in modern dance. In Limón's camp she puts Anna Sokolow, Pearl Lang, Ruth Currier, Sophie Maslow, and Natanya Neuman. These are the choreographers who will consolidate and extend the traditions of the modern dance pioneers of the 1930s. The other group consists of rebels — besides Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, Sybil Shearer, and Katherine Litz. Though Johnston generalizes that this group is engaged in depersonalizing movement, excluding emotional subject matter, and breaking with the past, she finds that they have little in common apart from their strong individualism, and concludes by calling again for a new criticism, an objective criticism that will no longer judge artists by predetermined standards, but rather will "[penetrate] the style, method and content of its subject, in the interests of the public it serves" (italics Johnston's).
It was the rebel choreographers, including also James Waring, Paul Taylor, Merle Marsicano, Aileen Passloff, and after 1962 Yvonne Rainer and other members of the Judson Dance Theater, to whom Johnston chiefly directed her own attention and criticism, both at Dance Observer and the Village Voice. However, until around 1963, even while delivering polemics against the old modern dance, she continued, in print, to appreciate the accomplishments of a Limón or a Sokolow in extending an honorable tradition.
A third essay, "Abstraction in Dance," written in 1957, further clarifies Johnston's sympathies by invoking abstract expressionism in painting and arguing that any discussion of the abstraction process in dance must account for the fact that it is not movement that is abstracted — "Movement is what it is" — but choreography. Through the organization of movement, the gestures become divorced from dramatic content. This notion of abstraction has historical precedents, from Petipa's ballet divertissements to Limón's "stylized decoration." Johnston hopes that her essay has made the term less mysterious and threatening.
Besides these three essays, Johnston wrote seven reviews for Dance Observer between March 1957 and October 1959. Her first review for the Village Voice, published February 3, 1960, was of Alwin Nikolais's Totem. Her tone is still somewhat pompous. But here she has the space for discursive argument, rather than a paragraph or so for each dance, as she had at Dance Observer. The leisurely, logical, and analytical style she would use for the next five years is already evident in the Totem review. It opens with a paragraph setting forth its premise that Nikolais creates a science fiction of the dance. It then talks about the choreographer's style in general, giving only short descriptions to support a point in its argument. These descriptions summarize the action, rather than dissect the movements in detail; for example, "In Reliquary Murray Louis looks like a harlequin-skeleton-monkey in the role of a relic. He cavorts amiably on a bar (which must be his reliquary) supported by two impassive bearers." The last third of the review analyzes the impact of the dance; in this case, Johnston concludes that Nikolais sacrifices choreography for special effects. In this, her first review of Nikolais, Johnston is forebearing. Yet her patience with his work soon runs short. The following year she complains about his "shenanigans" and the "indignity suffered by the dancer in the role of prop for the props," the deadening effect of his predictably symmetrical shapes. By 1964, she has dismissed Nikolais's work summarily, conceding, however, the talent of some of his dancers. "Sanctum is a bombastic bag of noise and color. ... The manipulation of props and costumes is as predictably naive as ever."
After an initial enthusiasm for Paul Taylor, especially for his use of stillness, Johnston soon finds his style gimmicky and habit-bound. By the end of 1962, she pronounces the passing of Taylor's experimentalism, judging his distinctive style a trap. "Now it seems proper to stop thinking about Taylor as the man with the golden heel. He did what he did; ... he continues to be an interesting dancer with interesting ideas; there is no longer a need to anticipate what is not a probability," i.e., that Taylor's future works will be as astonishing or important as, for example, his Epic (1957) or Three Epitaphs (1960). Johnston does not write about Taylor again until 1967, in a review that declares, "Paul Taylor is like one of those great-looking animals with a low I.Q. ... Since [1958] it's been all downhill for Taylor. ... [He] remains a terrific dancer ... but he needs a choreographer." Johnston's passion for Merce Cunningham's works never flags, from her first review, of the premieres of Rune, Summerspace, and Antic Meet (1960), to her comments on the first performance of Winterbranch (1964). (That advocacy continues in her writings, of course, beyond 1965.) Her commitment to Cunningham stems in part from his commitment to pure dancing, a step both revolutionary and radical, in the literal sense. "He has brought us back to the reality that dancing concerns dancing" (italics mine). Yet she does not deny that his movements are expressive; rather, she celebrates the expressive intensity of abstraction, which "implies much more than a simple defined emotion. Which, in the end, is more powerful, more human and exacting, than the sledgehammer technique of a doubled-over grief or a chest-expanded joy."
Because of the nature of Cunningham's choreography, in which the structures seem to disappear to set forth the dancing, Johnston is content to describe the works, rather than to analyze their workings, although generally she introduces the reviews with ruminations on how to look at the dances. At first she has difficulty evoking the movements; discussing Rune (1959) and Summerspace (1958) she can only analogize them to paintings seen as one passes through a room, to which one would like to return for a closer look: "Rune ... contains some typically swift and dazzling passages, but the dominant tone is a rich, slow brown. By contrast, Summerspace is light and resilient ... it has the quality of the speckled backdrop and costumes — something like the dappled play of light and shadow caused by the sun when it glints through leaves." (Johnston's later renderings of the qualities of Cunningham's movement are among her finest, most concise images: "I have a vivid recollection of an 'incident' originating as a vibration in [his] thighs, transferred to the stomach, travelling upward to the arms and shoulders and exploding like a geyser at the top," she would say of Cunningham's dancing in Aeon. And of Winterbranch she would write, "The dancers move through the sound like hunters going calmly about their business in the animal kingdom of a jungle night. The sound is wild. The action is spare and remote. It takes a long time for a dancer to push himself the length of the stage on his back, the beam of a flashlight raking from under his shirt. Mostly I recall a beautiful tumble as they all clasp arms and make a slow, massive rise and fall of liquid branches following after a long stretch of flotsam burlap drifting across the bleak stage.")
By 1962 Johnston's writing style is informal, personal, still authoritative but in an appealing, if brash manner. With a review of works by Fred Herko and Yvonne Rainer in March of that year, Johnston prophetically announces that "fresh winds" are blowing from the direction of Robert Dunn's composition course, taught from 1960 to 1962 at Merce Cunningham's studio. (Herko and Rainer, along with Ruth Emerson and Trisha Brown, whom Johnston here singles out as interesting dancers in the concert, had been among the active members of the Judson Dance Theater from its beginnings in July 1962.) She identifies Herko's Edge, a piece for dancers and actors, as a "combine-dance," correlating his style to Robert Rauschenberg's in painting, and writes, "The movement of the dancers was large, lyric, unassumingly original. The actors thrashed, snarled, wrestled, and in general made themselves bigger than life in a barroom brawl. When the dancers and actors were on together, the tension ... made a charming uproar. ... Mr. Herko kept switching tactics and if you think about it, which I am doing, it really was a mismash of styles, events, media, and it all made excellent sense." Rainer's static method of repeating movement fragments without climax or development — in The Bells (1961), Satie for Two (1962), and Three Seascapes (1962) — moves Johnston to quote Gertrude Stein on repetition: "From this time on familiarity began and I like familiarity. It does not in me breed contempt it just breeds familiarity. And the more familiar a thing is the more there is to be familiar with. And so my familiarity began and kept on being." This comparison was quite a compliment to Rainer, in view of the fact that Johnston herself was emulating Stein's writing style with increasing frequency around this time.
With her review of the first Concert of Dance (1962) given by Judson Dance Theater, which presented works by fourteen choreographers in one evening, Johnston announces the arrival on the scene of a group of choreographers "who could make the present of modern dance more exciting than it's been for twenty years." It is this group, including Rainer, Herko, Emerson, Brown, David Gordon, Judith Dunn, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, Elaine Summers, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Morris, Deborah Hay, and Alex Hay, as well as the older choreographers showing work at the Judson (Waring, Litz, Marsicano, Passloff), to whom Johnston is to devote the majority of her writing for the next several years.
Johnston's stylistic innovations are present in embryonic form almost from her first articles for the Voice. There is a casualness and abruptness in her diction that easily segues into the later experiments with cliché, sentence fragments, and fractured paragraphs. She introduces the pronoun "I" into the first Voice review, and within a few months would be using it often, in a direct and conversational tone. By June 1960, she has already introduced a review with a long anecdote about her dealings with press agents — a reworking of Kafka — that prefigures the picaresque columns of the later sixties, in which her adventures before, after, and in between dance concerts are as important as the dancing itself. "Fluxus Fuxus," her inspired treatise on events by the neo-dadaist music group Fluxus, published July 2, 1964, is an early and nearly complete model of Johnston's later modus operandi. A single paragraph nearly a thousand words long, it begins:
Fluxus flapdoodle. Fluxus concert, 1964. Donald Duck meets the Flying Tigers. Why should anyone notice the shape of a watch at the moment of looking at the time? Should we formulate the law of the fall of a body toward a center, or the law of the ascension of a vacuum towards a periphery? The exposition became a double bloody mary. Some Fluxus experts went to the Carnegie Tavern also. Fluxus moved into the street and onto my typewriter. Polyethylene and people everywhere and some of them have all these voices. Soren Agonoux said (that). The voice of being kind to your fine feathered friends. Put your favorite sounds in a tube and see how they come out at the other end. Be kind to Your Fine Feathered Friends was never so palatable. Take a loaf of tip top bread and try constructing a staircase. What did George Macunias mean by saying that "all other pieces have been performed whether you notice them or not?"
Johnston's participation in the aesthetic revolution of the sixties was so direct that her style and method of writing changed drastically; she passed from writing about events passively observed to writing about her own activities at dance concerts as well as on art panels, in lecture events, at artworld parties, and on her journeys to and from these incidents. Ironically, her attempts to be true to the material she wrote about led her directly back to her self. A fragmented, visionary, yet matter-of-fact style, studded with clichés and puns, became Johnston's hallmark after 1965. It was that year, after her first breakdown, that she decided "[to explain] myself to the universe ... [to] exonerate and redeem myself and hopefully plead the case for a visionary life ... to shatter and reorganize the language for myself." For this enormous goal, the field of dance alone was clearly too narrow; for someone whose writings about dance had helped to widen dance to include more of life, the only territory left was all of life. Her structures became fluid, open-ended, dense, full of compound words, montage sentences without paragraph breaks, and autobiographical revelations. Dance was sometimes still the content, but usually only secondarily so. Through 1968, "Dance Journal," as Johnston's column in the Voice was titled after mid-1965, was primarily about the daily adventures and mental processes of the critic-as-artist. "The artists were never pleased that I began to find their lives more interesting than their work," she wrote later.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism"
by .
Copyright © 1994 Sally Banes.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
WRITING CRITICISM/ HISTORYJill Johnston: Signaling Through the Flames
Working and Dancing: A Response to Monroe Beardsley’s “What is Going on in a Dance?” with Noël Carroll
Criticism as Ethnography
On Your Fingertips: Writing Dance Criticism
Power and the Dancing Body
THE EURO-AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE
Balanchine and Black Dance
An Introduction to the Ballet Suedois
Soiree de Paris
Kasyan Goleizovsky’s Ballet Manifests
Merce Cunnighams Story
Cunnigham and Duchamp with Noël Carroll
THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN CONNECTION
To the Beat, Y’all: Breaking is Hard to do
Breakdancing: A Reporter’s Story
Lock Steady
Critic’s Choice: Breakdancing
Breaking
A House is Not a Home
Breaking Changing
The Pleasin’ in Teasin’
The Moscow Charleston: Black Jazz Dancers in the Soviet Union
OTHER SUBCERSIONS: POLITICS AND POPULAR DANCE
Stepping High: Fred Astaire’s Drunk Dances
The Men at John Allen’s Dance House
Red Shoes: The Workers’ Dance League of the 1930’s
POSTMODERN DANCE: FROM THE SIXTIES TO THE NINETIES
Judson Rides Again!
Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater
Vital Signs: Steve Paxton’s Flat in Perspective
Meredith Monk and the Making of Chacon: Notes from a Journal
Dancing from a Journal
Dancing on the Edge
“Drive,” She Said: The dance of Molissa Fenely
Self-Rising Choreography
Transparent Living
No More Ordinary Bodies
Happily Ever After? The Postmodern Fairytale and the New Dance
Pointe of Departure
Classical Brinksmanship: Karole Armitage and Michael Clark
Terpsichore in Sneakers, High heels, Jazz Shoes, and On Pointe: Postmodern Dance Revisited
Dancing {with/to/before/on/in/over/after/against/away from/without} the Music: Vicissitudes of Collaboration in American Postmodern Choreography
La Onda Próxima: Nueva Latina Dance
Dance and Spectacle in the United States in the Eighties and Nineties
Dancing in Leaner Times
Going Solo
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Impressively rich and varied . . . A very important addition to the literature of the field for graduate students in dance history, performance art history, post-modern culture and for interested undergraduates doing research in these areas."—Janice Ross, Stanford University
"Impressively rich and varied . . . A very important addition to the literature of the field for graduate students in dance history, performance art history, post-modern culture and for interested undergraduates doing research in these areas."—Janice Ross, Stanford University
"Sally Banes has followed the development of postmodern dance more thoroughly than anyone. She is the person to analyze the nature and significance of this important movement"—Selma Jeanne Cohen
"Impressively rich and varied . . . A very important addition to the literature of the field for graduate students in dance history, performance art history, post-modern culture and for interested undergraduates doing research in these areas."
— Janice Ross, Stanford University
“Sally Banes has followed the development of postmodern dance more thoroughly than anyone. She is the person to analyze the nature and significance of this important movement”