Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

“A New Kind of Beauty”

The Ideal of Beauty in Ballet Following Kant, the Russian-French ballet critic André Levinson states in his 1922 essay “Some Commonplaces on the Dance” that “it [is] difficult to define beauty.”1 A few years later, in his seminal 1925 essay “The Spirit of the Classic Dance,” Levinson remarks that “the dancer is a machine . . . for manufacturing beauty,” suggesting that it is in the dancer’s body, rather than the choreographer’s composition, that the beauty of ballet may be found.2 Although Levinson refers to ballet’s “logic” of “creating beauty by organized dynamism” and its “spirit of order and discipline,” implying that both the dance composition and the dancer’s technical prowess might provide grounds for discovering beauty, in neither essay does he establish specific criteria for defining or gauging beauty in ballet—in performance or composition.3 He seems, like Kant, to think of beauty as subject to no prescriptive formula but 303 k “A New Kind of Beauty” From Classicism to Karole Armitage’s Early Ballets : In Peg Zeglin Brand, ed., Beauty Matters (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) rather as particular to each object. One can recognize free beauty when one sees it, but one can’t conceptualize it. And yet, in his attempt for the first time “to formulate specifically the laws of this art on its own ground, . . . to portray the intrinsic beauty of a dance step, its innate quality, its esthetic reason for being,” Levinson does lay down the basic principles of ballet, or classic dancing, that many historians, theorists, and critics since his time have used repeatedly as a framework for discussing how ballet as an art form generates its own kinds of beauty in specific works.4 According to Levinson, the three basic principles governing ballet are verticality, the five positions of the feet, and the turnout of the body (especially the legs). These are the constraints that define and limit classic dancing. By verticality, Levinson means not only the upright carriage of the individual ballet dancer, but also the very “configuration of motion in space” oriented along the vertical frontal plane of the proscenium arch.5 Turnout, or the rotation of the legs outward from the hips, was also a result of the move to the picture-frame proscenium stage. Dance historian and theorist Lincoln Kirstein calls turnout “the bedrock of ballet style and practice,” and he explains that it is the means through which the human body achieves theatrical legibility—it allows “the frontal plane of the dancer’s body [to face] his audience in its maximum silhouette .”6 Turnout also permits the dancer total freedom of lateral, forward , backward, and diagonal movement while still facing front; Levinson observes that “instead of being restricted to a simple backward and forward motion . . . many motions otherwise impossible are thereby facilitated .”7 And turnout creates a perspectival, rather than foreshortened , view of the dancer’s body within the proscenium picture frame.8 This constraint, Levinson argues, proves to be the exact opposite of a restriction, for it leads to a state in which “the dancer is freed from the usual limitations upon human motion.”9 The five positions of the feet are, in a sense, a logical extension of turnout, since they constitute the various relationships between the legs as, rotated, they line up (first position), cross (fifth and third positions), or separate (second and fourth positions). The five positions allow the feet to navigate without collision, arranging themselves parallel to one another as the legs move in a variety of directions.10 Added to these three principles or constraints are the generative possibilities facilitated by elevation (including aerial work like jumps and leaps) and pointe work, or dancing on the tips of the toes (for women).11 And resulting from these restrictions and possibilities are the qualities of 304    equilibrium, symmetry, harmony, and unity of line, made all the more arresting because of their contingency—because in ballet, unlike in static art forms such as sculpture and architecture, they are achieved, disturbed, and found again in the flow of motion. The presence of the three principles adumbrated by Levinson does not, in itself, constitute beauty; most experts would agree with Levinson that all ballet dancing, beautiful or not, is grounded at least in these principles. But it is widely believed among dance critics that the perfect achievement of these principles of the dancer’s technique typically contributes to the beauty of the work. Levinson states that the difference between the...