Denise Levertov once commented that dance is inherently inferior to the other arts. Referring, especially, to ballet, she noted its dependence on narrative, as in the popular ethereal plots from the Romantic era. Sickly peasant maidens who, crossed in love, die and turn into Willis do not have much connection with the complex reality of experience, obviously. But there seems to be something more to her statement. Today ballet, and dance in general, still may rely on narrative, but many works are based in the formally abstract. Levertov was speaking of the limitedness of dancehow its specialized movement is removed from the movement of real life, how it must always reference back to a human narrative because its medium is the human body.
The body, however, has it own language (hence body language) and, as such, is capable of building its own vocabulary. We often praise actors with this abilityTom Hanks in Cast Away when hes stranded on the island with Wilson or Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind with his idiosyncratic twitches and nose-rubbings. We dont often realize, however, that method acting has its basis in mime, which developed hand-in-hand with ballet in 15th century France.
Pilobolus is one of those that has ventured to develop a distinct dialect within their art form. Named after a heliocentric fungus that throws its spores long distances, this touring dance company from Connecticut boasts four artistic directors, all with backgrounds varying between Landscape Design, Intellectual History, Philosophy, and Biophysics. Its dancers serve also as choreographersa rarity in that most modern companies form around a specific choreographers vision (i.e. Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor). Employing a form of weight-bearing improvisation, their acrobatic quality recalls the contortionists of the Ed Sullivan era; the dancers might be comfortable balancing tea sets on their metatarsals while bent over backwards on their hands. The scope of movement, however, is capable of embracing both humor and gravity, human nature and biology, and movement and concept.
Sometimes this occurs within the same piece, although not always successfully. The Brass Ring, the opening piece, used an overlaying circus theme to metamorphose from amoeba-like shapes, to gambling individuals, to nebulous cosmic entities. Familiar music lent a farcical quality to their gymnastic feats, but the changes in tone seemed too abrupt and too dissimilar for the audience to be able to leap from guffaw to poignancy. The sudden appearance of stars on the backdrop at the end were gimmicky, at best. Walklyndon was a more skittery, nonsensical comedy piece reminiscent of the Judson Church movement. Without music implemented, individuals hurriedly and repeatedly cut across the stage. When their paths crossed, they kicked, slapped, and laughed at each other, although no one seemed damaged by the cruelty they experienced.
The clear masterwork of the evening came in the form of Symbiosis, in which two organisms slithered and leaned on each other then appeared to evolve into crawling insectoid forms. Almost always in constant contact with one another, their homogenous forms became more diverse as the male dancer took on tree-like characteristics that provided a climbing apparatus for the female and a protective, supportive structure for her activities. The scientific allusions of biology and physics were ever-present, but more obvious in the last piece, Sweet Purgatory. More abstracted and instinctually ordered, I was continuously reminded of cell behavior observed through a microscopic field. The dancers weaved among each other, created canons of movement, and suspended each other in unshaped lifts.
In contrast to The Doug Varone Dance Company, which is centered on human relationships, or even Cunninghams abstract formations of improvisation and movement, Pilobolus is using human relationships and abstract formations together to try to talk about the way our world is organized and layered. This is what I think good poetry does and probably what Denise Levertov attempted with her own writing. But dance, unlike gallery-oriented art and serious creative writing, has difficulty escaping the girdle of entertainment. Twyla Tharp may have tried occasionally venerating her choreography by taking it into Central Park in the 60s, but the stage is still the conventional way to present dance forms. Its link to theater is intrinsic and hard to escape, demonstrable in the fact that The Kansas City Ballet is performing Giselle this season, as many ballet companies frequently do, because it is a classic and an audience-pleaser. The Houston Ballet has even attempted to revive the story ballet in the last decade through vehicles like The Snow Maiden and Cleopatra.
Dance, reasonably, struggles more than the visual arts, writing, and music to validate itself. It has a harder time considering itself intellectually. The potential, though, of dance to express complex things comes through our immediate empathy for the human body and the human situationthe very same perceived limitedness of its medium.
While your comments are, as always, well thought out and perceptive, I must comment on what you have to say about narrative and “serious” writing.
Narrative experimentalists have been trying to do away with narrative for at least a generation, and, as the more-or-less failed experiments abstract art in the twentieth century have shown us, getting rid of the most basic formal elements of your medium are doomed to failure.
Dance may be somewhat of an exception; certainly not all writing requires narrative (you’re right to mention poetry, though it, too, has occasion to use it). Narrative, though, is both fundamental and universal human expression. Though other cultures may have different patterns of character and behaviour within their stories, they all tell stories. It may be caused by something as simple as the fact that language, in its spoken roots, is somewhat of a performance art: if you’re going to tell the others around the campfire what happened out on the hunt that day, you need to package it neatly. Narrative allows one to do that, so it is a seemingly natural way to express one’s activities, thoughts, feelings, ideas.
As far as “serious” writing suffering from the need to entertain, read Joyce! or worse yet, Pound.