Dance’s True Partner: Music

In an intimate performance space at the Skirball Cultural Center, American cellist Walter Haman is playing a complex, turbulent passage from Allan Hovhaness’ solo suite “Yakamochi” while Venezuelan modern dancer Jose Navas stands behind him. Suddenly, Navas gently touches Haman’s chest with one hand and covers the musician’s eyes with the other, closing his own eyes as the music goes on.

A dancer who stops dancing in order to channel music through touch isn’t exactly the norm in the dance world, nor is a musician who assumes the active role in a meditative pas de deux. But the daring Haman/Navas Project in February was just one recent example of choreographers and musicians testing new collaborative relationships through increasingly radical experiments.

Loretta Livingston’s improvisational “Dances for White Rooms” at the Luckman Theatre last May also involved physical interplay between dancers and musicians, while Bill T. Jones’ “WorldWithout/In” at UCLA last month put instrumentalists from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on stage as performers and witnesses to a masked neo-Expressionist ritual of death and rebirth.

Obviously tap-dancing and many other rhythm-based dance forms around the world have always cultivated the interaction of dancers and musicians. But Euro-American concert dance has traditionally followed a different set of rules.

Up through the 19th century, classical music composed for the concert hall remained off limits to ballet; instead, house composers supplied accompaniments to order. Some of them were masters in their own right, but their music often served the dance so slavishly that any ballet scores with independent interest (Tchaikovsky’s, for example) were initially judged to be too symphonic or heavy--a.k.a. undanceable.

Enter Isadora Duncan and other innovators at the turn of the century who were determined to dance to the great concert-hall classics. Their achievements proved revolutionary but ended by replacing one form of servitude with another: Experiments in music visualization and the symphonic ballet led to an assumption that dance must serve music.

Moreover, the achievements and influence of such neoclassic masters as George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton seemed to close the debate once and for all: Abstract, non-narrative choreography that revealed the beauties of the greatest music in Western culture became the Holy Grail of dance art.

Even Merce Cunningham and his postmodern separate-but-equal stance--with music and choreography created without reference to one another and only juxtaposed in performance--made no real dent in the belief of artists, critics and audiences that dance’s job involves interpreting the sounds coming from the orchestra pit or tape machine.

Those choreographers who rebelled against this status quo tended to use music as sonic filler or mock the very idea of dancing to it--German iconoclast Pina Bausch, for instance--and their work inspired the critical label dance-theater to separate them from the music-dominated dance world. The governing principle in that world at the turn of our century remained the Balanchine ideal of seeing the music.

Since Balanchine’s death in 1983, no one has been more dedicated to enforcing musical primacy than Mark Morris, a choreographer disarmingly contemporary in his inclusion of all sorts of bodies and all sorts of movement in his work but increasingly conservative in musicality.

As Morris’ methods have hardened into formulas, he has become an index to the growing emptiness and predictability of post-Balanchine music visualization. In vocal scores, for example, you can expect Morris to pull gestural images from the lyrics: imaginary sipping during the song “A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You” from his 1998 “Dancing Honeymoon” suite or wing-fluttering during “Two Little Bluebirds” from the same work.

The effect can be playful and childlike the first two or three times. But it soon proves merely an automatic response, especially when the lack of any deep engagement with the music extends to serious scores. “Sang-Froid,” from 2000, for instance, trivializes Chopin, the inspiration for a whole pantheon of 20th century dance masters from Mikhail Fokine to Jerome Robbins. As usual, Morris uses dance motifs to structurally diagram the music, but for all their expertise, his dancers look cued into action, moving to Chopin-counts like puppets.

Happily, interpretive musicality survives with greater freshness in the work of a few up-and-coming choreographers such as Sean Curran. At the Alex Theatre in October, Curran’s plotless “Symbolic Logic” showpiece reflected the style of recordings by Indiapop singer Sheila Chandra through walks, stances and hand-poses suggesting Indian classical dance--an idiom familiar to Morris. But Curran’s inspired spatial invention--his wheel formations and multiple layers of dancers moving with astonishing torque and precision to chanted rhythm-syllables--made dance a full partner of the music and then some.

Even so, the process of putting on a CD and creating a dance equivalent isn’t taken for granted anymore.

Paul Taylor’s recent “Black Tuesday” for American Ballet Theatre used songs of the Great Depression to satirize relentlessly upbeat popular entertainment. In other words, it made dancing refute its music, insisting, despite the accompaniment, that there was never anything remotely cheery or colorful about poverty in the 1930s.

When postmodern pioneer Trisha Brown brought her company to UCLA in February to perform “El Trilogy,” her first choreography to jazz, she didn’t impose a preset interpretive method on the music, a la Morris, but rather let it take her in new creative directions.

Hearing random noises and musicians’ coughs in the taped accompaniment, for example, she sought a kind of documentary movement that would form a contrast with the company’s formal dancing. Her solution: sudden heavy falls to the floor by one dancer after another, falls that seemed accidental at first, like the coughs, but soon developed into unexpected texture and punctuation in the piece.

Finally, there’s a generation of choreographers who insist on the right to hear familiar music in a new way--their way. They include artists such as Matthew Bourne, who heard feral violence in Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” and echoes of World War II in Prokofiev’s “Cinderella.” Their work has not only helped reinvigorate musicality but also the whole narrative tradition in dance.

Make no mistake: George Balanchine’s see-the-music ballets may well constitute the greatest dance repertory we will ever encounter. But we don’t expect new composers to pursue Mozart’s priorities simply because he was great, and a succession of mediocre Balanchine imitators has definitively proved that his genius isn’t transferable through emulation.

Like the cycles of male and female dominance of the dance repertory, the chicken-and-the-egg question of music and dance will be redefined in every epoch. The current trend toward making the two arts a love match has already brought us exciting adventures in collaboration and, by breaking down traditional roles and assumptions, promises to renew the oldest relationship in live performance.

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Lewis Segal is The Times’ dance critic.