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2. Actions and Passions, Airs and Graces
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2. Actions and Passions, Airs and Graces Auguste Vestris, seen in an English caricature of 1781, was known for his technical prowess. However, someone is said to have remarked of his feats: "Any goose can do as much." What is dance? Is it difficult movement or beautiful movement? Or something elseagain? 2O [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:47 GMT) NTHROPOLOGIST Adricnne Kaeppler has defined dance as "a cultural form that results from creative processes which manipulate human bodies in time and space." She continues with a warning: "Every society has its own way of thinking about its cultural forms and what is aesthetically relevant for one society will not necessarily be aesthetically relevant for another." To illustrate she cites three cultural forms ofjapan: mikagura, performed in Shinto shrines, buyo, performed in Kabuki drama, and ban, performed to honor the dead. Westerners would consider these three kinds of dance, but to the Japanese they are simply the movement dimension of three entirely different activities that function in three entirely distinct ways within the society to which they belong. Even within the western tradition dance serves a number of distinct functions: to confuse the values of ritual dance with those of recreational dance or of theatrical dance results only in distortion . Though aesthetic values may be found in all of them, these values are essential only to the last, and their absence from religious or social dancing in no way lowers the capacity of those forms to function in manners perfectly appropriate to the ends they are intended to serve. The western world has, on occasion, deemed dance a "sublime activity—a kind of kinetic analogy for the divine order." On other occasions, however, this same segment of the globe has chosen to consider dance "a grotesque spectacle," fit only for contempt and ridicule. Havelock Ellis called it "the loftiest, the most moving , the most beautiful of the arts." But Sir Joshua Reynolds likened dancing masters to hairdressers and tailors, claiming that all three distort and disfigure the human form. Over the years dance has been blamed for corrupting the morals of youth and for the disintegration of kingdoms. Yet it has been praised for its values in the areas of health, recreation, courtship, and entertainment. 21 A 22 / Next Week, Swan Lake The status of dance within a culture has often been influenced by the position accorded it in relation to the other arts. Paul Oskar Kristeller noted that the ancients generally linked dance and music as elements of poetry; this balance was altered by the Pythagorean discovery of the numerical proportions underlying musical intervals , after which music was likened to mathematics and opposed to poetry and dance. The Middle Ages made a point of separating the liberal from the mechanical arts (the latter including agriculture , medicine, and theatre), but by the seventeenth century the division most often referred to was that between the arts and the sciences, with music sometimes in one camp, sometimes in the other, and dance rather lost between the two. In 1710 Abbe Massieu defined three categories of arts: those that polish the spirit (eloquence, poetry, history, and grammar), those that aim for diversion and honest pleasure (painting, sculpture, music, and dance), and those that serve the necessities of life (agriculture, navigation, and architecture). In 1746 the influentialAbbe Batteux separated the mechanical arts from the fine arts, the latter having pleasure as their end and including music, poetry, painting, sculpture , and dance. Regrettably for us, however, dance did not maintain its eighteenth-century status, for Kristeller, writing in 1952, summarized the current attitude, which defined five "major" arts as fundamental to the modern system; on these five, he asserted, "all writers and thinkers seem to agree." They were painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry. Some other arts, Kristeller admitted, were occasionally added, depending on "the different views and interests of the authors." He listed these as follows : "gardening, engraving and the decorative arts, the dance and the theatre, sometimes the opera, and finally eloquence and prose literature." The place of dance in these hierarchies naturally reflects the prevailing value system of the society, but with a peculiar qualification . Western civilization has long been characterized by a compulsion to exalt the spirit over the flesh, the mind over the Actions and Passions I 23 body. Though Americans tend to blame our Puritan forebears for this situation, the attitude may be found throughout the JudeoChristian tradition. Because of its physicality, dance was often...