Don’t Forget: Seeing Is Believing

Memo to choreographers of the 21st century: Shut up and dance. Don’t try to save the world. Don’t tell us how to live or vote. And, above all, don’t talk us to death. Just explore the profound expressive possibilities of human movement and you’ll help undo one of the most debilitating trends of the last few decades--something well worth leaving behind as we cross the great millennial divide.

Think back a minute to the wrong turn that Euro-American dance theater took as this century began to wind down. Instead of continuing to offer the deeply personal, movement-based perspectives on our society (including its injustices) that have been one of the great glories of the art, societal dance drama became increasingly preachy and text-obsessed--sometimes just a pretext for a message more effectively delivered in the program notes than on the stage.

Indeed, recent dance has often been nearly smothered in words, with audiences arriving early for pre-dance lectures, staying late for post-dance debriefings and enduring all sorts of narrative blather during the performance itself. Yes, critics add their own words to the dance experience--but after audiences have had plenty of time to digest it and form personal interpretations of their own.

Obviously, a body of work that calls itself dance but relies on texts to declare its intentions, that never lets movement dominate verbal expression, has its defenders. It may well be more topical and marketable than intuitive, nonlinear dance, which asks its audience to collaborate in defining its meanings. And it certainly has provided a way for wannabe choreographers to camouflage small talents with big themes. But the question of what is a major or minor work by, say, Martha Graham or Antony Tudor or Twyla Tharp or Mark Morris never turned on their thematic ambitions but rather on issues of movement invention and development--issues that have gone completely out the window in the end-of-century rush to transform dance into a talk show.

More than 50 years ago, the great American dance critic Edwin Denby wrote that “ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening--nobody on the stage at least.” Gone are those days, but not necessarily forever. We can all help break the ruinous cycle of word dependency by concentrating on what a dance does and not what somebody says it means.

Go ahead, try it--just say no to words and, as midnight approaches on Dec. 31, repeat the following mantra very slowly and clearly while throwing any program note longer than three paragraphs into a roaring fire:

Dance is movement art--the meaning is in the motion. It may or may not have something important to say, but it must always have something significant to show.

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What to keep from the 20th century? What’s our greatest gift to the future? A sense of conservation, perhaps--the use of sophisticated new forms of notation and dance-for-camera technologies to preserve masterworks, performances and styles beyond the life span of the generations that created them. Or maybe it’s the recognition of a need for a living repertory of dance classics parallel to those of music and spoken drama. It never existed before in Western culture.

In the past, Western choreography endured only while it was popular with dancers and audiences; once discarded, it was forgotten or, at best, extensively revised and updated. As a result, only one ballet from the 18th century survives in an unbroken line of continuous performance: Vincenzo Galeotti’s parodistic romp “Whims of Cupid and the Ballet Master,” still in the repertory of the Royal Danish Ballet. Moreover, even some of the supposedly ancient Asian dance idioms exist today only in approximations pieced together or synthesized in the first half of this century.

Clearly, our era has made a cottage industry of restoring and reconstructing the choreographic glories of the past: the 19th century Franco-Russian ballets, of course, but also, belatedly, our own century’s milestones and those antiquities requiring the expertise of a new breed of dance archeologist. And happily all this activity has created an unprecedented level of dance literacy among dancers and audiences--at first only in major cultural capitals, but increasingly, through home video, just about everywhere.

In one marathon viewing, we can watch tapes of nearly every major company in the world dancing “Swan Lake,” or every Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie ever made. And with early and late Baryshnikov equally available, equally vivid, we’re no longer locked into our own memories when discussing his career--memories distorted by nostalgia.

Just as a generation of motion picture scholars, critics and directors emerged from behind the Moviola, having studied film masterworks frame by frame, we can expect a daunting, screen-bred generation of dance specialists just around the corner--perhaps when CD-ROMS manage to reproduce human motion convincingly and dance studies become comfortable on the computer.

The danger, of course, is that all this newly conserved input makes everything grist for the media mill, with forms of world dance that anthropologists once traveled years to find trivialized into the excruciating pop exoticism adorning MTV. The hope, however, is that with such an immense dance menu in front of us, all the categories and hierarchies that used to separate people will be blown apart, the value judgments smashed regarding high and low, folk and classical, academic and popular, native and foreign.

Fed by our growing knowledge of widely dispersed but artistically congruent traditions, fusion has already emerged as an exciting form of mediation and, at its most enlightened, contemporary dance reflects a world of choices as well as respect for the integrity of its sources.

That’s not a bad legacy to leave future artists and audiences: our willingness to look at every kind of dance and try to find its value, our appetite for both historical authenticity and maverick experimentation, our sheer bravery as an audience. Respect for diversity may be the ultimate lesson of 20th century culture, and nobody has learned it better than dancers and their public.

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Finally, the list of 20th century dance cliches that should be consigned to history is much too long and depressing to be reprinted here, but surely we should say farewell, once and for all, to such gymnastic perversities as the infamous Crotch Lift (see Yuri Grigorovich’s “Spartacus” for the most stupendously vulgar example).

Let’s also kiss off those rapturous postcoital duets in which the ballerina gets out of bed wearing her toe shoes (see almost every “Romeo and Juliet”), along with the modern- or jazz-dance solos in which a woman endlessly lashes her waist-length hair (does she need a choreographer or a conditioner?). And, please, can’t we scrap the noxious smoke machines choreographers adore that cause audiences to cough and dancers to lose their footing? In dance, as in life, let’s keep the 21st century smoke-free, OK? *