Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Snip, Snip: Dance, Too, Needs Editing

| 205 Snip, Snip: Dance, Too, Needs Editing New York Times, June 30, 2002 After years of anxiety when starting to choreograph, I learned to just doodle or noodle to get any kind of movement going, and then I’d have something to play around with and reshape. It’s in the editing stage when the piece tells me where it wants to go. From the other side, as an audience member, it’s sometimes frustrating to see where or how a piece could have been edited to save itself. Choreographers neglect editing at their peril. “All dances are too long,” Doris Humphrey wrote forty-some years ago. Her pronouncement was surely exaggerated, but her admonition is as apt today as it was then. Novelists submit to editors, and directors and playwrights have dramaturges to help them maximize theatrical impact. Filmmakers trust editors to make the final cut of movies. But choreographers get no such formal assistance while making work. Often it is not until a piece is performed for an audience that its flaws are revealed. When dances feel too long to audiences, it has little to do with how long they actually run. Rather, they tend to suffer from too much repetition or too little structure. Trisha Brown tells a story about the time she was working on Set and Reset in 1983 with the artist Robert Rauschenberg, who designed the set and costumes. During a rehearsal, Brown showed Rauschenberg a section of the piece in which she suddenly dived into the arms of another dancer, seemingly catching him by surprise. This daredevil maneuver originally appeared three times. Rauschenberg told Brown, “You’re only allowed to do that once.” She took his advice. As a result of this kind of restraint, Set and Reset possesses an exciting momentum that makes you want to see the dance again and again. Rauschenberg was acting as a colleague rather than as an editor. But such informal feedback isn’t heeded often enough. Choreographers must have tunnel vision to a certain extent, but it’s easy for them to become too stubborn about their own ideas. Dancemakers who repeat indiscriminately may be overly attached to favorite motifs or may be looking for a way to achieve cohesiveness. But when the choreography doesn’t progress beyond its opening themes, it gets bogged down. Repetition lends dance resonance, but only if each time the gesture or phrase is repeated it is given a new context by the surrounding movements or a change in scene. If not, a seasoned dancegoer may ask: 206 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer “For whom is this movement or sequence being repeated? Where are the surprises?” The problem of nonessential repetition crops up across the board: choreographers creating lavish ballet productions sometimes struggle to fill out the music, modern dance choreographers may feel obliged to fulfill a theme-and-variations format, and experimental dance makers may wade through a period of aimlessness on the way to clarity or spontaneity. (An extraordinary performer, of course, can often overcome the shortcomings of a piece of choreography.) Whether or not a dance has a narrative element, the order in which the sections are presented is crucial. Audiences want to feel that some form of logic—even if it’s dream logic—is operating. And we want to feel that each section, no matter how ample or lean, is essential to the expressive thrust of the work. Sections that do not shed light on the whole should be tossed, even if the dancers have worked long hours on them. Have our shorter attention spans made us less tolerant of longer works? Is this an American phenomenon, or are there cultural biases involved? Makhar Vaziev, the director of the Kirov (Mariinsky) Ballet in St. Petersburg , Russia, acknowledged in a radio interview a few years ago that the company shortened its full-length ballets for American audiences. “In Russia ,” he said, “our public is ready to watch ballet for four, five, six hours.” Are Russians more patient than Americans? Perhaps they don’t have to worry about paying babysitters or catching up on their e-mail. In the seventies, we seemed to possess endless stores of patience. Sitting through Robert Wilson’s five-hour performance piece Einstein on the Beach was no strain at all. Even today some artists make compelling work that operates outside a conventional theatrical time frame. Merce Cunningham ’s “events,” as he calls his choreographic collages, unfurl with no overarching theme but...