Dance and American Art: A Long Embrace

Conclusion

265 Conclusion I f there is anything that is made clear by looking at a broad picture of the relationship between American art and dance, it is this: that dance has drawn on the nation’s deepest resources of historical awareness and imaginative reflection . At important moments, it has embodied our culture’s prevailing cultural assumptions or myths, while sometimes filtering them through the distorting lens of ideology. However manipulated, it is clear that dance and its visual art representations have each helped to define the character of the other. They are, in one fundamental sense, two different approaches to the problem of self-realization. There was a belief, widespread in the early twentieth century, that the foundation of any nation’s dance lies within the character of its people. In the United States, as we have seen, dance culture has been tied closely to its various regions, a notion that instantly recalls Alexis de Tocqueville’s attempts to describe the character of American places. From his vantage point in the 1830s, the French visitor looked ahead to see America’s solitudes disappearing. “One sees them,” he wrote, “with a sort of melancholy pleasure; one is in some sort of a hurry to admire them.”1 What Tocqueville predicted about landscape has applied equally to American culture: it changes so rapidly that one must see it in a hurry. And dance, like the pulse of change itself, takes on heightened importance as a component of America’s rushing cultural journey. Especially in the modern era, dance, with its inherent and unceasing references to motion, autonomy, and change, seems to confirm something of the essentially rootless or nomadic character of American life. Still, velocity and change need not obscure America’s search to define itself culturally. Links between national character (however quaint or murky the term) and cultural traditions can be studied if we slow down long enough to do so. Dance anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku argues that all forms of dance reflect their obvious origins in cultural traditions within which they developed.2 This is as true for the United States (with its multiple cultural identities) as for a less mongrel people. As we have already seen, the varieties of American identity are reflected in many ways, not least in its diverse dance expressions. As a subject for visual artists, dance has given new meaning to America’s perennial myths, cherished identities, and most powerful dreams. Like every other nation, the United States has defined itself in part by its leisure pursuits. And social dance, in its endless variations, has been an important expression of 266 conclusIon Americans at play. But alongside its potential for enjoyment, dance, like visual art, testifies to the abiding importance of spatial organization, physical pattern, and rhythmical motion in realizing aesthetic form. Dance’s habitual patterns of movement acquire associated emotions that reflect culturally specific ideas about order and meaning.3 Not infrequently, visual artists have been among the first to understand and record those ideas. As American dance has come to reflect an increasingly complex set of attitudes toward the moving body, visual artists have pressed dance into every part of their own realm, and drawn it out again with protean inventiveness. Everywhere, dance has helped to define the visual character of the modern world and to illuminate humanity’s own complex interaction with that world. Even now, as globalization is eroding national styles (in dance as in all arts), American dance continually reinvents itself, while carrying fresh expressions around the world. Empathy and distance are two sides of the same aesthetic coin. Often the aesthetic experience, in modern Western terms, has been characterized as a moment of “liminality,” when individuals can step back—in a museum, for example— from everyday concerns and relations to look at their world with different thoughts and feelings. As the Swedish writer Goran Schildt has written, museums are settings in which we seek a state of “detached, timeless and exalted” contemplation that “grants us a kind of release from life’s struggle and . . . [from] captivity in our own ego.”4 Observing ritual or dance can produce the same kind of liminal effect, enabling viewers to enter a quasi-ceremonial site where time and space differ from what lies outside. In this study, I have argued that—besides their other obvious affinities—dance and art participate symbiotically in generating that kind of experience. Whether transfixed by a painting or caught up in a dance performance, viewers themselves enact liberating aesthetic...