Dressing for the Dance

For decades, the masters of modern dance gradually pared down the traditional elements of the art—, music, even movement itself. They also pared down their audiences. Today, our author writes, dance is fitting itself out in a new set of clothes and hoping to renew itself as a more popular art form.

by Joyce Morgenroth

n the intimate performance spaces of Dance also reflect the chang- New York’s eclectic downtown concert ing role of theatrical dance within society. Idance scene, audiences can expect to Once integral to the functioning of aristo- find politics mixed with their art. In her cratic regimes, dance now often aims to dance, Sarah, choreographer Ann Carlson, subvert the political status quo. Rejecting wearing a strapless and high heels, the aristocratic aesthetic underlying the symbolically upends traditional notions of European dance tradition, American con- femininity by turning herself upside down cert dance since the turn of the century and sticking her ladylike heels up in the air. has broken free from the inherited values Christine Doempke, dancing in combat of decorum, virtuosity, expressivity, and , presents herself as strong and awk- beauty. This impulse unites Isadora ward, casually disregarding the usual expec- Duncan’s sandaled and loosely draped tations of dancerly grace. Mixing wit and reaction against pointe and tutus at social commentary, these dancers commu- the beginning of the century, Martha nicate not only by how they move but by Graham’s angular, percussive denial of what they wear. ballet’s lyricism a few decades later, and The use of costumes as social statements Merce Cunningham’s withdrawal from is probably as old as dance performance narrative and separation of music from itself. In the 17th century, the lace con- dance beginning in the 1950s. It continues spicuously displayed by aristocratic in the Judson Dance Theater’s rejection of dancers in the royal courts of western virtuosity and even basic dance technique Europe reflected their privileged role in during the 1960s, and soon thereafter in society, just as since the 1960s dancers in the minimalists’ ultimate questioning of elastic- pants and T-—or, on the very urge to move. occasion, wearing no clothes at all—have Yet by repudiating elegantly turned-out announced the coming of sexual equality positions, soaring leaps, and multiple and freedom from formal social con- pirouettes, by giving up narrative and straints. doing away with glamorous costuming,

88 WQ Spring 1998 In Sarah, Ann Carlson uses a pair of high heels and black dress to comment on one vision of femininity.

modern dance not only parted ways with among the artistic elite in order to survive. classical ballet but abandoned the qualities Taking to the dance floor in well-worn that for centuries had attracted audiences. , the Soho dancers of the 1960s Trying to escape from aesthetic assump- might not have traveled so far as they prob- tions associated with wealth and inherited ably have believed from their 17th-century privilege, and hoping to forge an aesthetic forebears in fancy heeled pumps. better suited to a democratic and pluralis- tic society, the new American dance allet and modern dance grew out instead ended up producing inaccessible of courtly traditions that germinat- work that excluded the general public. Bed in Renaissance Italy and flow- While the elegantly attired courtiers of ered in the court ballets of King Louis XIV prerevolutionary France had a captive in 17th-century France. Although based audience of court aristocrats, 20th-century on the social dances of the court such as American dancers cultivated an audience the gavotte, the courante, and the gigue,

Dance 89 these choreographed spectacles were ted and a tonnelet, or much more elaborate affairs, flared, short that revealed with spoken verse and music the shape of the legs in their interspersed with balletic entrées ; for the women, dress- performed by professional es of heavy fabric tailored dancers and select nobles. In to the torso with full the final grand ballet, social that entirely con- dance steps were performed cealed legs and feet. By by members of the court, who the symbolic addition of traced detailed, symmetrical a garland and other pas- floor patterns designed to be toral embellishments, a seen by the audience seated in courtier might repre- the court’s raised galleries. sent a shepherd in a The young Louis, himself court ballet. In such renowned for his talent in costumes one dance, came to be was both a known as “the shepherd and Sun King” after a count, he played Apollo playing in the Ballet de la roles in a ballet and in nuit in 1653. the continuing drama of Dancing well was a prerequisite for advance- ment in the elaborate court life Louis created to bind an occasional- King Louis XIV as Apollo in ly restive aristocracy (some of whom had the Ballet de la nuit joined in the Fronde uprisings of 1648–53) more closely to his royal per- son. “A solemn frivolity is one of the sound tools of despotism,” historian court life at the Louvre and, André Maurois dryly observes. Dance, later, Versailles. The costumes with all its costs in both time and also dictated the forms of dance money, was one of many pursuits itself. The style of movement was Louis cultivated to keep France’s restrained by heavy and cumbersome aristocrats preoccupied. “As a mat- clothes that restricted the mobility of limbs ter of policy, Louis forced magnifi- and torso. The shoes, like the normal cence upon all,” Maurois writes. “He of the court, had flexible soles drained everyone by making luxury hon- which allowed for small springing steps, but orable, and thus reduced the courtiers to the raised heels worn by both men and dependence upon his bounty for their women limited the possibility of jumping. existence.” In both form and content, the court ballets served a variety of political hen Louis stopped performing purposes. It was no accident that in the in the 1660s, he raised the pres- Ballet de la nuit, Louis’s sun arrives— Wtige of professional dancers, accompanied by Honor, Grace, Love, once restricted to comic and grotesque Riches, Victory, Fame, and Peace—in parts in court entertainments, by allowing time to drive away thieves looting a burn- them to assume noble roles. He also gave ing house (symbolizing France). It was his approval to several new academies that said to be the king’s favorite role. sped the rise of professional dance, begin- Dancers wore costumes in the style of ning with the short-lived Académie Royale : for the men, a with a fit- de Danse, launched in 1661. It was soon

> Joyce Morgenroth is associate professor of dance at Cornell University and the author of Dance Improvisations (1987). Copyright © 1998 by Joyce Morgenroth.

90 WQ Spring 1998 followed by the Académie Royale de would require nothing short of a real revolu- Musique, which took up residence in the tion before such radical changes in costum- Paris Opéra and became the home of ing could take hold. opera-ballet, in which dance and sung The expressive style found its most elo- drama were mixed. Performances were quent advocate in the dancer and dancing open to the paying public, but aristocrats master Jean-Georges Noverre. Reacting and aristocratic sensibilities still dominat- against sterile movement and declaimed nar- ed. Yet with a new professional class of rative, he argued emphatically in his Lettres dancers performing on public stages, fur- sur la danse et les ballets (1760) for a form of ther divergence of stage dancing and court dance in which the movement itself could social dancing, and of performer and spec- reveal human emotions. To allow for this tator, was inevitable. change, Noverre called for an end to the stiff A formal school for the training of dancers tonnelets and the elimination of masks that opened at the Paris Opéra in 1713. Beyond hid the natural emotions of the face. The the practice rooms, dance was also being particular style of movement he espoused codified in print, notably in Pierre Rameau’s included mimed sequences that we today Dancing Master (1725), which described would find stilted and melodramatic, but and illustrated correct posture, the five Noverre’s broader principles would power- turned-out positions of the feet, and proper fully influence the story ballets of the next execution of dance steps. century. Innovations in dance costume inevitably The great transition in dance began with accompanied these changes, and they were the French Revolution. With the end of the heralded by two rival star ballerinas—the court’s dominance, dance became more two Maries. Marie Camargo, debuting in accessible to the people, its popularity Paris in 1726, quickly won acclaim for her helped in an odd way by the system of cen- apparently effortless and brilliant tech- nique, and especially for her entrechats, jumping steps in which the feet are crossed several times in midair. She was the toast of Paris. To make it easier for her to perform these difficult steps—and for the audience to see and appreciate them—Camargo shortened her skirts a few inches. Widely imitated, the shorter skirt eventually permitted an array of allegro techniques—brilliant jumping steps such as the now-familiar jeté, sauté, and cabriole. It also inaugurated the progressive shortening of the ballerina’s skirt, which led, in the 20th century, to the now-familiar stiff, hip-length . Camargo’s great rival, Marie Sallé, as reserved in her personality as Camargo was effervescent, was known for the dra- matic, expressive quality of her dancing. In 1734, she arranged and performed her own version of Pygmalion in London, giving up the panniered skirt and bodice and the elaborate hairstyles of the period and wearing instead a simple muslin dress over her and , with her hair These choreographic notations by Louis Pécour arranged loosely. Sallé had all of London were published in 1712, at a time when dancing clamoring for tickets to Pygmalion, but it masters were codifying their art.

Dance 91 sorship in revolutionary Paris. The censors most tenuous connection to the ground. allowed ballet more freedom than theater, Over the years, pointe shoes were made considering movement less potentially sub- with increasingly reinforced toes and versive than words. The boulevard theaters shanks, giving greater support to the that had proliferated in Paris didn’t carry the dancer’s foot. The supported pointe prestige of the Opéra, but they charged less also constricted the foot, creating an for admission and attracted a much larger impression of delicacy but giving the foot a audience, featuring revolutionary displays narrower and less flexible base when flat. As and ballets with stories revolving around in the Chinese tradition of foot binding, farmers, merchants, and other ordinary women were meant to appear as depen- members of the bourgeoisie. Costumes dent, aesthetic beings existing for the plea- reflected the rejection of aristocratic stan- sure of men. Despite the fact that women dards. The body was given great freedom in were center stage in ballet, it was men— light, flowing fabrics, and in one for whether they were the male ballet masters, female dancers, even more constraint was librettists, and choreographers who created abandoned with the exposure of a single the ballets, or the influential male patrons breast. The aesthetic of the court was being who admired the physical beauty of the bal- replaced by the aesthetic of the people. lerinas—who determined the aesthetic. Reviews and articles written at the time by he emerging architecture of public prominent writers such as Théophile theaters encouraged new kinds of Gautier focused as much on the physical Tchoreography. While at Versailles charms of the leading dancers as on their and other royal courts the dancers had usu- artistic interpretations, fanning the passions ally been surrounded by an audience on of competing male balletomanes who three or four sides, sometimes seated in argued vehemently for either the ethereal raised galleries, dancers now performed on quality of a Marie Taglioni or the sensuality a raised stage, separated from their audi- of a Fanny Elssler. In the world of 19th-cen- ences and framed by a proscenium arch. tury ballet, influential men were admitted Instead of watching from surrounding backstage to meet the dancers and seek raised galleries, the audience now faced their sexual favors. Starring ballerinas took performers frontally and on roughly the as lovers those with money, good looks, or same plane. This perspective gave jumps, power, and were themselves able to wield turns, and large gestural movements greater power as a result. importance. With the prevailing use of soft, flat-heeled shoes and light fabrics, dancers t is hard for us today to grasp the extent were able to perform brilliant pirouettes of ballet’s popular appeal during its and leaps. IRomantic heyday. Dance critic Jack The new emphasis on vertical posture Anderson tells how Ralph Waldo Emerson and airborne movement provided a fertile blissfully compared his admiration for context for the Romantic aspirations of Elssler to religion; when she performed in early-19th-century artists. In story ballets Washington, D.C., Congress adjourned such as La sylphide (1832), choreographed for a day. by Filippo Taglioni, fairies, sylphs, and But ballet in the second half of the 19th other fantastic creatures tempted humans century suddenly slipped into decline, from their real lives into fantasies of other- especially after the death of major French worldly happiness. Ballerinas captured the choreographer Arthur Saint-Léon and sev- ethereal quality of their characters by danc- eral of Paris’s more promising ballerinas. ing on the tips of their toes and wearing net The best European dancers and ballet and gauze. Period prints of ballet dancers masters gravitated toward Russia, where show an exaggeratedly small and tapering the art had enjoyed strong royal patronage foot. In the pointe shoes that developed dur- since the reign of Catherine the Great a ing this period, the vulgar, useful foot century earlier. A succession of European almost vanished entirely. In its place was choreographers and teachers developed the illusion of an elongated leg and only a what is still known as the Russian style,

92 WQ Spring 1998 which emphasized the grand “pre- sentation.” The greatest of these mas- ters was Marius Petipa, who served the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg for more than 50 years, first as a dancer beginning in 1847 and then as ballet master, creating such classic works as Don Quixote (1869) and The Sleeping Beauty (1890). Given the renewed aristocratic patronage, it is hardly surprising that dance returned to the classical aesthetic. (However, Moscow’s taste in ballet was less aris- tocratic than St. Petersburg’s, a differ- ence reflected even after the Russian Revolution in the styles of the Mos- cow-based Bolshoi Ballet and the more classically oriented Kirov Ballet in Leningrad.) Petipa’s methodically plotted arrangements of the corps de ballet harkened back to the floor pat- terns of the early French court spec- tacles. In his classical ballets such as Swan Lake (1895), ballerinas wore full, multilayered net skirts topped by tight-fitting that more closely resembled the formal court dress of the 17th century than the filmy Grecian styles of the Romantics. This step backward was followed at Isadora Duncan in a 1903 dance pose as Iphi- the turn of the century by a great leap genia, who in Greek legend was sacrificed forward. Isadora Duncan, claiming so that the Greeks could sail on Troy inspiration from the movement of ocean waves off the coast of her native California, envisioned a new dance in ize the mission of woman’s body and the which the woman’s body would be uncor- holiness of all its parts.” She would possess seted and her feet planted firmly on the “the highest intelligence in the freest body.” earth. or bare feet—considered In advocating a personal exploration of scandalous innovations in some circles— movement, Duncan was a crucial forerun- allowed for more natural movement and ner of modern dance. And while she com- permitted Duncan to express a spirituality pletely rejected ballet, with its orchestrated connecting earth and heaven. As she and formalized ensembles, she nevertheless became a celebrated public figure in inspired changes in its form. Her perfor- Europe after appearances in Budapest and mances in St. Petersburg early in the centu- Berlin in 1903 and ’04, she also became a ry left a deep impression. While the spokeswoman for her own version of femi- Imperial Ballet became increasingly fos- nism. She publicly rebelled against mar- silized, a young Russian choreographer for riage and against the aesthetics of ballet, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Mikhail including the constricting and painful Fokine, was encouraged by Duncan’s ideals pointe shoes. The dancer of the future, she to pursue the search for more natural and declared in a famous lecture in 1903, “will expressive movement in ballet. Arriving in dance not in the form of a nymph, nor fairy, Paris in 1909, the Ballets Russes excited all nor coquette but in the form of woman in its of Europe with a performance of Prince Igor greatest and purest expression. She will real- that had the audience storming the stage to

Dance 93 Nijinsky and a frieze of nymphs in a 1912 performance of Afternoon of a Faun embrace the dancers. Fokine was soon suc- neers of the 1930s and ’40s, notably Martha ceeded as company choreographer by Graham and Doris Humphrey, repudiated Vaslav Nijinsky, whose angular and sexually ballet’s aristocratic roots, its notions of fem- suggestive Afternoon of a Faun in 1912 out- ininity, and the emblematic satin raged many dance afficianados and pro- that represented constraint and empha- voked Le Figaro to pronounce it “loath- sized beauty, lightness, and delicacy. They some”—which, of course, only stirred more strove instead to reveal the struggle against public interest. gravity. Graham, for example, built her technique around the principles of “con- he Ballets Russes was very much a traction” and “release,” including move- part of the early-20th-century avant- ments of violent intensity, exuberance, and Tgarde, performing to the music of percussiveness. Often giving up shoes alto- Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, and Claude gether, these innovators choreographed Debussy, and enlisting the likes of Pablo and danced works about woman as pio- Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque neer, as leader, as passionate being—myth- to design sets and costumes. Its innovative ic, heroic, and powerful—and used cos- choreographers introduced new ideas about tumes befitting such characters. Instead of dance that did not depend on the turned-out portraying sylphs, they chose Clytemnestra, legs and pointe shoes that had been indis- Joan of Arc, and the archetypal matriarch pensable to 19th-century ballet. Yet despite as their subjects. They danced barefoot (or the fabulous success of the Ballets Russes, its in the most elemental of ) for con- influence did not survive the brilliant impre- trol, economy, and immediacy, and for lib- sario Diaghilev, who died in 1929. Virtually eration from a physically painful masquer- all of the ballets seen today throughout ade of femininity. Europe and America come from the earlier The next generation carried the revolt Romantic and classical traditions. against tradition even further, inaugurating With the decline of the Ballets Russes, what the dance world now calls postmod- much of the innovative energy in dance ernism. Inspired by the Zen ideas of com- flowed from modern dance, with its em- poser John Cage and choreographer Merce phasis on individual movement and expres- Cunningham in the 1950s, dancers increas- sion—a dance form that took root, not sur- ingly emphasized spareness and an intellec- prisingly, in the United States. It was in tual, almost theoretical approach to move- America, land of automobiles, jazz, and ment. Accordingly, costumes were pared women’s suffrage, that women finally took down—, underwear, skin. Dance on the central role of choreographer and, moved away from music, character, and in doing so, created an entirely new form of story—the very elements that had provided concert dance. The modern dance pio- the foundation for Isadora Duncan and

94 WQ Spring 1998 other modern dance pioneers. In the 1960s, Balanchine, a veteran of the Ballets Russes Yvonne Rainer, one of the Judson Dance who helped found the New York City Ballet Theater’s most influential choreographers, in the 1940s, created a 20th-century heralded a new mood in dance, saying “NO American ballet so well crafted that even to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transfor- skeptical modern dancers took an interest in mations and magic and make-believe no to it. Beginning in the 1970s, modern dance the glamour and transcendency of the star icons such as Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris image.” Dance was not a display of virtuosic choreographed for major ballet companies technique, Rainer and others insisted, it was such as the Joffrey Ballet and the American “movement.” Anyone could do it. In fact, Ballet Theatre. And during the past 20 years, the simplicity of an untrained body was pre- Kirov-trained ballet star Mikhail Barysh- ferred to the affectations of a trained one. nikov, one of the great dancers of the centu- Dancers performed simple tasks: sitting, ry, has crossed over to modern dance. walking, carrying mattresses. The sneaker became the performance shoe of choice he new dance has established no sin- precisely because it was ordinary footwear. gle direction for itself, and too often But the more unpretentious dance Tin contemporary dance (and its aimed to be, the more elitist it became. sometime-sibling, performance art) autobio- Invariably, it alienated traditional audi- graphical or political “authenticity” substi- ences and appealed more to artists and tutes for craft, technique, and inspiration. intellectuals interested in the art’s social But some modern dancers, such as Morris and political content. Had dance come and Trisha Brown, have rediscovered the- full circle? Like the Sun King’s 17th-cen- atricality, musicality, and a rough-and-tum- tury aristocrats, avant-garde dancers in the ble athletic virtuosity. There is also a 1960s donned costumes self-consciously renewed appreciation of costume, a turn drawn from their “real” life; both made marked in Tharp’s Sue’s Leg (1975), in political and artistic statements addressed which the dancers appeared in replicas of to an exclusive audience. Even the perfor- their well-worn rehearsal clothes—but repli- mance spaces of postmodern dance bore a cas wittily created out of elegant satin and resemblance to the early court theaters. materials by designer Santo Loquasto. The Manhattan lofts, galleries, and Very often, today’s dancers wear costumes churches that hosted avant-garde dance ironically, donning prom and thrift companies put performers and audience shop castoffs as a way of putting distance in close proximity, and sometimes even between themselves and what they wear and restored audiences to their former places of commenting on the audience’s expecta- in raised galleries along the sides. tions. Yet they are still wearing costumes, and they are still providing an element of n the past two decades, there has been a theatricality and interest that was until movement away from the austere recently virtually banished from dance. Iprocess of paring down that figured so How far the postmodernist rummaging in prominently in early postmodern dance. the neglected trunks and closets of dance Now the byword is “inclusion.” Embracing heritage will go, and how widespread it will nondance movements, popular dance styles be, remain unclear. But showing once again such as break dancing, as well as rigorous that the old can be made new, the contem- dance technique, contemporary dance has porary pastiche of the traditional and the been willing to encompass even ballet, its avant-garde recently acquired an interesting long-standing archenemy. The old distinc- new source of possibilities and a new tion between ballet and modern dance has emblem: the split-sole sneaker made for been blurred by a series of breakthroughs, pointe work, already being worn by both bal- some of them already decades old. George let and modern dancers.

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