Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism

37. Dancing [with/to/before/on/in/over/after/against/away from/without] the Music: Vicissitudes of Collaboration in American Postmodern Choreography

310 Poslmodern Dance of the eighties- partly because it is descended from developments in the avant-garde dance ofthe sixties and seventies, which defined "postmodern" through practice, and partly because art-cultural discourse has redefined postmodernism - is guided now by the theoretical prescriptions the term has come to imply. 37 Dancing [with/to/before/ on/in/over/after/ against/away from/ without] the Music: Vicissitudes of Collaboration in American Postmodern Choreography Inthinking about collaborations in American postmodern dance and music, several distinctions in the relations between the two arts that have emerged in the broader history of theatrical dance are useful. As well, it is helpful to review briefly the history of postmodern dance in terms of its connections to (and disconnections from) music in general. For it may be that the ways postmodern dance has treated music and the composerchoreographer partnership make collaboration itself a problematic term. How much consultation does it take to make a commission a collaboration, and how much must the separate components fit together in the finished work? Or is a commission itself the minimal act of "laboring together," as the etymology ofthe word collaboration suggests? What happens when the choreographer is the composer, or the dancers the musicians? What if a composer chooses to choreograph? These, indeed, are some ofthe kinds of Choreography and Dance 114 (1992). Dancing [with •.• J the Music questions that have animated the postmodern choreographic inquiry from the start. One distinction in the broader history of theatrical dancing is that between first-rate and second-rate music - the debate, as ballet began to detach itself from opera in the early nineteenth century to become a separate art form, as to whether the music should refrain from calling attention to itself(and away from the dance) by its excellence. The idea was advanced that the music should support the dancing in specific ways: by providing, first of all, a clear rhythmic basis for the dancers' timing, and, second, a "dancerly" (dansante) melody for modulating the flow of energy and expression. Yet these "program-music" aims were not necessarily consistent with the goals ofserious composers - as they had been, for instance, during the baroque era - once dance-music and symphonic music diverged , and once social dance and theater dance were no longer congruent. Serious composers could play around with dancing music and ballet music, but it was not their most serious work; and the composers - mostly hackswho specialized in such music were not expected to aim for excellence in musical composition. It was even reasoned that the music should avoid innovation, for familiar tunes, by context, could augment the mise-enscene with the narrative and emotional development that pure dance could not supply on its own. Closely intertwined with this idea that the music should not upstage the dance - and hence should stay in the hands ofdance-composer specialists without aspirations toward serious music - was the slightly different nineteenth-century notion that, in the collaborative process, the dance came first. That is, the music played second fiddle to the dance, not only in terms ofquality, but also in calling the tune, so to speak. Ballet, it should be remembered, had grown out ofsocial dancing; in that model, ofcourse, the dance form structures the music. But this hierarchy continued to apply even when the dance vocabulary had become more specialized and even when choreographers used first-rate music - not only in the parts of the ballet based on social dances (mazurkas, waltzes, and so on) but also in the more abstract sections of pure classical ballet as well. Thus Tchaikovsky was surprised, in working on the 1877 version of Swan Lake, to see Julius Reisinger reverse the usual work process by choreographing to the music - rather than ordering the music by the measure to fit the dances. Despite Tchaikovsky's growing reputation as a symphonic composer, Marius Petipa did not hesitate to dictate complete requirements for the music for The Sleeping Beauty (1890), and we know that Tchaikovsky was happy to comply. This was the standard method of their collaboration. Nor, as we also know, did Petipa and Lev Ivanov hesitate to rearrange the composer's music for their own 1895 version of Swan Lake.! The working methods may not have changed since the earlier part of 311 312 Poslmodern Dance the century, but the artistic potential released in these late nineteenthcentury ballets - when as a result oftheater reforms I. A...