Dance as High Art, Dance as Broad Art

Dance, one of the most ancient arts, began as a communal, participatory endeavor through which people interacted with a spirit world that possessed real power over their lives. Dances invoked the gods with appeals to bring rain, heal the sick, and guard the dead. But during the Renaissance and Baroque periods in Europe, dance metamorphosed into an aristocratic art for which participation required training, and ultimately it evolved into a highly specialized entertainment in which intensively schooled performers present their skill for the benefit of a wallflower audience. In the process, the imaginative absorption into the symbolic realm that dance creates has shifted away from the ecstasy induced by the physical intensity of dancing and towards the passive—but no less imaginative—intellectual and emotional transportation created by the expressive power of the dance under view. In other words, with the important exception of social dancing, the past four centuries have transformed dance from a broad art into a high art.

Two absorbing new books detail these different functions of dance in our times. Choreographer and dancer Liz Lerman founded the Dance Exchange in 1976 as a means of putting on dances she wanted to see, with people in them she wanted to watch dancing. She has worked tirelessly to return dance to the public and, by integrating nonprofessionals into the Exchange, return the public to dancing. As implied by her title, Hiking the Horizontal, she has dedicated herself to dance as a broad, democratically based art. On the high-art side, it would be difficult to think of a composer more magisterial than Igor Stravinsky. Charles M. Joseph, a leading scholar of Stravinsky's music, has followed his excellent books Stravinsky Inside Out (2001) and Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention (2002) with Stravinsky's Ballets, a new study that distills material from both the earlier books and makes a convincing case for the composer's dance music as the pinnacle of his achievement.

Perhaps because of her Jewish upbringing—through the 1990s, for example, she experimented with the role of dance in Jewish worship at Temple Micah in Washington, D. C—Liz Lerman formulated her Dance Exchange's essential mission in four questions, Passover Seder-style: "Who gets to dance? What is the dance about? Where is it happening? Why does it matter?" Because Lerman's book collects fifty pieces she has written over many years, adding a useful prologue and epilogue, these questions recur and recycle, always with new and surprising answers. They add up implicitly to the most revealing analytical Big Question about any dance—Why is this dance different from all other dances?—but in a way that asks choreographers and dancers to define exactly what they think they are doing, while also challenging the polar orthodoxies of classical ballet and avant-garde modern dance.

Lerman's idea that the ordinary people usually relegated to observer status should "get to dance"—the elderly in nursing homes, children in hospitals, students in schoolyards, workers at shipyards—defies the high-art idea that dancers require years of rigorous academic training. It also defies avant-garde choreographers who insist dances should consist of everyday gestures, since their performances still distinguish between dancers and the audience. Similarly, insisting that a dance be "about" something counters the often misguided high modernist practice of intending choreography to convey no meaning beyond its physical gestures. Lerman is right that any dance worth watching is "about" something beyond itself, and choreographers who believe strictly in presenting steps or interpreting music can lose sight of the fact that a space populated by dancers becomes transformed into a symbolic realm of complex action. But she has gone beyond such abstractions to make dances about real social, political, and personal problems: aging, faith, pollution, bioethics. She has even tackled issues as specific as the historical and economic significance of the shipyard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire (The Music...