Art And Engagement

7. Dance as Performance [Includes Image Plates]

CHAPTER SEVEN Dance as performance IT IS COMMONPLACE IN AESTHETICS TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN those arts that center on a stable, relatively permanent object, such as a painting, a sculpture, or a building, and those that appear in the ephemeral form of a transient activity, such as music, theater and, most especially, dance. This division of the realm into performing and nonperforming arts has a certain common-sense plausibility that pleases our desire for order. Divide and organize has been the theme of Western intellectual life since classical times, reaching its zenith in the modem age of scientific analysis and technological mastery. Are there any alternatives to this powerful intellectual process? Need one seek any other mode of understanding? As with many distinctions, that between the performing and nonperforrning arts is suggestive more for what it does not explain than for what it does. How, for example, do we account for poetry, originating in song, as Valery once noted, and still bound to the oral tradition of sound more than sight, even though our access is most often through the eye than the ear? Indeed, literature in general inheres in no physical form, the printed page being but an unintelligible series of hieroglyphs to those who have not learned its tongue, and the book an occasion for reading and not an artistic embodiment . Theater, moreover, is filled with scripts that read better than Copyrighted Material 151 they play, like Byron's Manfred, Shelley's Cenci, and the dramas of Christopher Fry; or that play better than they read, such as Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class and most farces; or that rely heavily on special production techniques of set, or lighting, or on nudity, such as Oh, Calcutta!; or that, like the commedia dell'arte, are improvisational theater in which there is no script at all. Less common is it for the same piece to work well both in and out of performance , as most of Shakespeare does or as sometimes happens when a fine novel is made into an equally good film, for the literary and theatrical arts are significantly different. In this last instance we have actually two different arts, of course, not just performing and nonperforming modes of the same work. Film is a curious case. Some, like Rudolf Arnheim, argue that it is primarily a visual art, while others, in the manner ofEric Rohmer, stress the dramatic portrayal of dialogue. In either case, film needs to be "performed" by being projected onto a screen for its traits to appear. Further, in nearly every case, film begins as the visual record of actual performances without which it could never exist. But film is an art as complex as it is provocative, and it deserves its own discussion. I There is, then, this unsettled middle ground of arts that do not fit comfortably into either the performing or nonperforming camps. But other, more serious difficulties lie ahead. Ifwe look closely at arts like painting and sculpture, we find, setting aside custom and tradition in aesthetics, that they actually function in appreciative practice more like performing arts than not. Whatever else performance requires, it is necessary for a person, alone or in company with others, to animate the art object, realizing the canvas, the script, the instructions of the creative artist in an active embodiment. Other common accompaniments of performance, such as a separate audience or a set, are not essential. One can perform a musical composition with no one else present, as is commonly done in a recording studio, or present a play without the usual embellishments of costume and set, as may occur in a minimalist production in street dress. In fact, one can even rehearse a performance, as in a dress rehearsal, allowing the work to proceed without interruption under its own momentum and with its own life. Although there is more to the subject than can be developed here, it is enough to recognize that performance is an integral, dynamic occasion that requires the contribution of what one can call the "activator" of the work. 152 Engagement in the Arts Copyrighted Material Now such an activating agent is as essential in literature and the visual arts as in music, theater, and dance. Creative actualization carries the aesthetic event to realization in painting, sculpture, and literature as much as it does in any other art. The appreciation of painting requires a provoking eye...