The
documentation of dance regularly asserts a false concept. This is that dances can be fixed, like a text,
script, a painting or even a musical score.
Dance academics and organisations like ballet companies and the trusts
that claim to protect and preserve the heritage of specific choreographers,
struggle with this idea. Focussed far
more on outputs than production, they decontextualize dance by ignoring its
context: the working process. Notwithstanding the problematics of this
assumption about the archival form of such material, that the tokens of the
types that Wollheim (1968) posits as necessary are simply too flexible to be
captured as definitive, this in itself presents a creative opportunity. This paper posits this working process as
played out in performance as well as the confines of rehearsal, and gives as a practical
example the performance of a work by the same dancers across a thirty year time
frame, presented in sync with original video material.*
For dancers
and choreographers there is a more subtle process of evolution that occurs with
the regular performing of a dance: the dance changes itself to suit its
purposes, and this often renders the meaningfulness of documentation an
academic (or more lately legal) exercise.
Evidence for this can be found not only in the experience of dancers,
but in the actions of choreographers dealing with their own works, even when
they are considered classics. The
limitations of this approach have been known from early times,
from Arbeau (1588) who tells young Capriol that the dances of thirty years before would bore him. Classics as canonical as Swan Lake or Giselle are subject to countless revisions, Cunningham observed the differences that emerge when dancers other than from his own company or from a different generation performed his work, Balanchine making major revisions to works now considered cast in stone before even broaching those dances that are intentionally different every time. Dances, it seems, simply wear out unless they are subject to regular revision and a definitive version cannot be said to exist. This is not to say an account of a dance is impossible, but to suggest there are conditional features that need taking account of, and to question the artistic validity of ossified reproduction.
from Arbeau (1588) who tells young Capriol that the dances of thirty years before would bore him. Classics as canonical as Swan Lake or Giselle are subject to countless revisions, Cunningham observed the differences that emerge when dancers other than from his own company or from a different generation performed his work, Balanchine making major revisions to works now considered cast in stone before even broaching those dances that are intentionally different every time. Dances, it seems, simply wear out unless they are subject to regular revision and a definitive version cannot be said to exist. This is not to say an account of a dance is impossible, but to suggest there are conditional features that need taking account of, and to question the artistic validity of ossified reproduction.
