{"id":4174,"date":"2003-04-07T12:10:00","date_gmt":"2003-04-07T12:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4174"},"modified":"2003-04-07T12:10:00","modified_gmt":"2003-04-07T12:10:00","slug":"modernism-in-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4174","title":{"rendered":"modernism in dance"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know less about ballet than about any other art form, which<\/p>\n

is to say, nothing. Thus I was fascinated to read Jennifer Homans’ article<\/p>\n

"Geniuses Together<\/a>,"<\/p>\n

in the New York Review of Books<\/i> some time ago. I have long believed<\/p>\n

that "modernism<\/b>" means a recognition that all the past<\/p>\n

ways of representing the world have been arbitrary and culturally relative<\/p>\n

styles<\/i>. Once modernism arrives, we have three main choices: (1)<\/p>\n

historicism<\/i>, the effort to reproduce past styles accurately and<\/p>\n

comprehensively; (2) abstraction<\/i>, the effort to move beyond style<\/p>\n

and representation altogether by taking inspiration from something universal,<\/p>\n

such as mathematics or the unconscious; or (3) irony<\/i>, the joking<\/p>\n

recognition that there is no way out of style. I’ve argued that these<\/p>\n

are the choices faced by the visual arts and also by philosophy. My friend<\/p>\n

David Luban argues<\/p>\n

that even law faces this dilemma<\/a>. From Homans’ article, it appears<\/p>\n

that the ballets of Stravinsky perfectly illustrate the same situation.<\/p>\n

First came a historicist phase, around 1909, when Michel Fokine was Stravinsky’s<\/p>\n

choreographer:<\/p>\n

\n

Ballet, [Fokine] said, was hopelessly "confused." It was<\/p>\n

historically nonsensical for pink-tutued ballerinas to run around with<\/p>\n

Egyptian-clad peasants and Russian top-booted dancers; ballet dancers<\/p>\n

were ridiculously "straight-backed." … Ballet, Fokine insisted,<\/p>\n

must be reformed, and it was here that his ideas dovetailed with Diaghilev’s:<\/p>\n

a ballet, he said, must "have complete unity of expression."<\/p>\n

It must be historically consistent and stylistically accurate. Petipa’s<\/p>\n

French classical vocabulary was appropriate only for French classical<\/p>\n

or romantic subjects. If a ballet was about ancient Greece, then the<\/p>\n

choreographer must invent movement based on the art and sculptures of<\/p>\n

that place and time. …. In Fokine and Diaghilev’s historicist aesthetic,<\/p>\n

classical ballet was not a universal form, but a particular style. ….<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And then came abstraction, with Balanchine:<\/p>\n

\n

Choreographically, Apollon Musagète<\/i> created a stylistically<\/p>\n

unified, Fokinesque "whole" world. But Balanchine broke with<\/p>\n

Fokine in one crucial respect. …. For Balanchine, what mattered was<\/p>\n

that the external shape, color, and tone of the movement capture an<\/p>\n

important idea. He was not interested in historical accuracy or what<\/p>\n

he called "petty, everyday" emotions: he was trying to show<\/p>\n

something more elevated: "supplication."[7] <\/p>\n

In 1957, Balanchine further simplified Apollo<\/i> (as it was then<\/p>\n

renamed) by dispensing with the ballet’s seventeenth-century sets and<\/p>\n

costumes in favor of simple black-and-white practice cloths against<\/p>\n

a plain backdrop. As such, he brought Apollo<\/i> into aesthetic orbit<\/p>\n

with his most recent Stravinsky collaboration: Agon<\/i>. …. Agon<\/i><\/p>\n

was the culmination of an aesthetic Balanchine first introduced in 1946<\/p>\n

with The Four Temperaments<\/i>, and it changed everything we know<\/p>\n

about how to watch a dance. Agon<\/i> has no clear narrative, no melodic<\/p>\n

or lyrical line: rather, it piles blocks of movement and music one on<\/p>\n

top of another. ….<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, dancing in plain lyotards in front of plain drapes is also<\/p>\n

a style. In the other arts, sooner or later, minimalism and abstraction<\/p>\n

are seen as arbitrary styles, at which point irony becomes the only option.<\/p>\n

I wonder whether this has happened in dance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know less about ballet than about any other art form, which is to say, nothing. Thus I was fascinated to read Jennifer Homans’ article "Geniuses Together," in the New York Review of Books some time ago. I have long believed that "modernism" means a recognition that all the past ways of representing the world […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fine-arts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}