Terpsichore and the architects: 'I have a deep sense of my body's architecture … the skeleton', said choreographer Trisha Brown in her prelude to the Royal Academy Forum which brought the worlds of dance and architecture together. In these pages Jeremy Melvin summarizes contributions, from a classicist, two architects, three choreographers and artist David Ward

Architectural Review, The, August, 2004 by Simon Goldhill

CHRISTIANS DON'T DANCE

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Simon Goldhill

Dance had a particular significance in Ancient Greece. Its subsequent history in Western culture is grounded in the Christian response to the Greek world, from the early dismissal of bodily pleasure to the discovery that Greece could be an antidote to Christian bodily attitudes in the late nineteenth and early twenticth centuries. Nothing shows the changing significance of dance better than the terrible problem contemporary theatre has with the chorus when staging Greck drama.

A story reveals much about how dance was viewed in Ancient Greece. Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon in the 5th century BC was a distinguished, wealthy and powerful man with a daughter to marry off. At the Olympic Games he announced a competition for the best and brightest of the Greeks to gather at Sicyon within 60 days. He would recompense each defeated suitor with one talent of silver, and the winner would be known throughout Greece as the best man of his age. The day of judgment arrived. One hundred oxen were slaughtered and as the feast progressed, the favoured suitor, Hippocleides, who had had one too many glasses of wine, called for a table to show off his excellence in dancing. At first he danced a solid, Spartan dance, then a rather more fey Athenian dance. Finally he stood on his head and kicked his legs lasciviously in the air. The prospective father-in-law became increasingly outraged and eventually could not bear it any longer. 'You have danced away your wedding!' He exclaimed, to which Hippocleides cheerfully replied, 'Hippocleides couldn't care less!' which became a proverb.

For the Greeks, what you did with your body showed what sort of a man you were. Given the Greek obsession with training the body, perfecting its symmetrical balance through exercise became a moral and social vocation. Dancing became a charged moment when the body could be seen in its perfected form, poetry in motion. Kicking your legs in the air was not just a social gaffe, but condemned the perpetrator to eternal recognition as the man who couldn't care less.

Plato captured the Greek attitude to dance, in loose translation, 'If you do not participate in the singing and dancing of the chorus you cannot consider yourself educated and cultured', or more simply, 'no chorus, no culture'. The chorus had immense importance in the social fabric of Ancient Greece. It was here that the educative force of dance was felt, as they were performing the stories behind Greek culture; learning and singing the songs was a form of acculturation, institutionalized by training. That is why so many choral performances did consist of young men and women as they were being trained into adulthood and why, too, so many performances were at crises of transition like marriages or funerals. Choruses were above all important when the city put itself on display. Dance was the embodiment of cultural tradition, and whenever the boundaries of culture needed to be reinforced, the chorus was there to dance.

In Greek theatre the chorus always marched onto stage in a square, but danced in circular mode. The dance consisted of three sections: strophe, antistrophe and epode. The strophe consisted of a turn, the antistrophe a counterturn, with matching rhythms and metres. The epode was a fixed position. So the circular theatrical space came into existence. Just as a religious procession marked out the space of religion, the chorus danced the architecture of the theatrical space into being. In a classical city, dance connected war and culture and articulated the spaces for public ritual.

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There were other sorts of dance in the classical world, but they were suspect. Xenophon's Symposium told of a Sicilian dancing master who staged a dance of a slave boy and a girl in the story of Dionysus and Ariadne. It was so seductive, said Xenophon, that everyone leapt up to go home and have sex with their wives--except Socrates. The link between sex and dancing continues through the ancient world and culminated in the Pantomime, which literally means 'a man who imitates everything'. With its emphasis on the solo dancer, it marks a shift in the culture of dance. The dancer was a storyteller whose body told a story, like a sculpture coming alive or a mobile embodiment of tradition.

It could even replace diplomatic missions, as a Black Sea king suggested to the Emperor Nero that a dancer might be able to interpret for his barbarian neighbours. But the heady pleasures of dance also made Romans very nervous. Cicero never danced and there is no record of any proper Roman man dancing. Upright Roman military men could not deal with the flexibility of a dancer's body. Worrying about their emotional response separated dance from the citizen's body. Dance's space no longer followed the Greek pattern: it could be an instrument for diplomacy or sexual pleasure, but it took place out there and ceased to be a mode of acculturation.

Early Christians developed their moral fervour against this backdrop. They had no truck with bodily pleasure and easily dismissed dance. Dance was banned, and for centuries Christians didn't dance ... It was only the rediscovery of Greek culture in the Renaissance that changed the Christian distrust of dance. The second century BC Greek writer Lucian, who thought dance good because it could tell stories, was rediscovered and became the source for numerous dancing master manuals. Greek tragedy helped to shape opera. But our nervousness over how to treat the body and its rhythmic movement in space has remained, and we are still trying to resolve the tension between the perfect body and the disastrous body, and what the social impact of dance is.