Heritage? … What heritage? - Attitudes - preserving modern dance pieces - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, March, 2002 by Clive Barnes

THERE WERE TWO TRULY IMPORTANT TRENDS IN DANCE DURING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. THE FIRST--THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN DANCE AND ITS GROWTH, AT FIRST IN THE UNITED STATES, THEN LATER WORLDWIDE, as a distinct form of theatrical dance and an alternative to the classic ballet--is self-evident. The second is not so obvious. It is simply the acceptance of choreography as an art form in its own right. It was the difference between talking about Mikhail Fokine's Petrushka rather than Igor Stravinsky's Petrushka. It was the elevation of the choreographer to the position of prime artist in his or her right rather than the earlier concept of the choreographer, or dance arranger, as an interpretative artist, in the manner of the director of a play or opera.

Now no one is going to question the importance of the first of these trends--modern dance, or whatever you want to call it, postmodern, expressionist, contemporary, post-expressionist--but how about the second? Is the choreographer so important? Will his work live; can his work live; should his work live? We occasionally talk about dance's heritage, but what is that heritage? A bunch of ballets or dances or merely a pedagogic, system that maintains, nurtures, propagates, and develops more or less codified styles of dance? Thus we could keep the classic technique without necessarily keeping the actual ballets of, say, Balanchine and Ashton. We needn't fret over lost works by Graham, because the Graham school can still produce Graham dancers.

The choreographer David Lichine used to say, "Choreography is like moisture in the mouth of an orator." Certainly his moisture has dried, although here and there you find a revival of his Graduation Ball. Even Balanchine and Ashton had not any particular interest in the past. Balanchine always wanted to "see something new," and Ashton had no use for "posthumous glory." However, increasingly adept systems of dance notation and also increasingly sophisticated methods of video preservation have made the need to always see something new less pressing, and the possibility of posthumous glory for a choreographer more practicable. We haven't yet got the same perfect methods of preserving choreography that we have for preserving music, but we are moving in the right direction.

So the viability exists of building a heritage repertoire. Take the comparison with the repertoire of any major orchestra. This is usually made up of three parts--each part colored by the traditions of the orchestra, the wishes of its public, and the taste of its music director. The parts are classical music, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, etc.; then modern classics, established twentieth-century composers from Britten to Schoenberg; and finally new and possibly experimental music. And the same factors that colored the choice of this repertoire will also govern the balance between one part and the other.

IN DANCE, WE CANNOT HANDLE OUR heritage so tidily. We do not, for one thing, have the requisite organizations--our dance companies are constructed on totally different lines from our orchestras. And the dangers of losing any dance heritage are infinitely greater than in music. The musical score is sacrosanct. Dance--despite advances in notation and video preservation--is still in large part a tradition handed down body to body. The role of a repetiteur is not tantamount to that of an orchestra conductor. Unlike the conductor, the repetiteur is teaching the choreography as well as interpreting it. This is why if in the twenty-first century we are going to continue to accept the twentieth-century premise of choreography as a major art form--and perhaps we needn't--then the preservation of dance's past onstage takes on a vital importance. We need to hold on to our classics. And the only way we can hold on to them is by keeping as many as possible in performance.

In classic ballet, this should not be so difficult. The organizations involved are larger than those of modern dance, and are accustomed to an eclectic repertoire in which new and old can well exist with one another. The ideal in this respect is New York City Ballet and the way it is preserving, helped by the Balanchine Trust and the Robbins Foundation, the work of its founding choreographers. Other organizations, such as Britain's Royal Ballet or American Ballet Theatre, are not doing so well.

But to my mind the real trouble is going to be with what we might call ancient modern dance. At the end of last year the excellent Limon Dance Company, one of the oldest troupes in the country, had a two-week fifty-fifth anniversary season at New York's Joyce Theater. Now, under Carla Maxwell, the Limon company has been something of a paradigm for the manner in which a major modern dance troupe can survive the death of its founder/choreographer. But I was frankly horrified to note that only two Limon works were presented--and those two the most obvious--and this thin and sour slice of Limon was augmented in the historic way of things by only a couple of dated solos by Eleanor King (hardly a Limon heritage piece) and also a really fresh revival of a little 1949 trio by Doris Humphrey called Invention. This is a plotless and beautifully musical device by the company's original artistic director; revived by Betty Jones, one of the original performers, it reemerged with a songlike grace.