What Dance Has to Say about Beauty
IT’S probably not surprising that, at the start of a new millennium, artists are reviving old issues with new points of view. Since the advent of modernism, beauty had been questioned as a sufficient, or even necessary, requirement for art. Most recently, it had been dismissed as irrelevant to the avant-garde's concerns with identity and culture.
But the Hirshhorn Museum's exhibition "Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late 20th Century," which ran in Washington last winter, demonstrated that beauty is still a force to be reckoned with. For a decade, visual artists, like the 36 represented in the show, have been grappling with the concept and tradition of formal harmony, the sublime and visual pleasure. Who defines the body beautiful, and how has this definition been affected by feminism, multiculturalism, mass media and new technologies? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what kinds of images still have the power to produce such sensory experience? What are the implications of these questions for dance, which by and large rejected the burden of beautiful bodies and pleasing stage pictures in the 1960's? Bill Bissell, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts' Dance Advance grant program in Philadelphia, organized a trip for this year's grantees to view the Hirshhorn exhibit in mid-January. Afterward, the 14 attending choreographers, artistic directors and presenters gathered to discuss their responses.
Ann Daly, who teaches performance studies at the University of Texas, moderated the conversation, which for an hour and a half ranged from issues of craftsmanship to audience to education. The discussion, like the exhibition, raised more compelling questions than it could answer.
ANN DALY. Do you believe in beauty?
MANFRED FISCHBECK (artistic director, Group Motion Company). For me there's no question about beauty in life, beauty in art, beauty as existence. When I experience something that is fully what it is — when it doesn't present itself as being something but just is — then I feel I'm witnessing beauty. Galloping horses are beautiful, but the horses are not galloping and thinking, "Oh, we are so graceful." If they were thinking this, then they might not be beautiful.
MICHAEL A. CARSON (choreographer). I come to dance from a nontraditional background. I had Mary Wigman-based training. I'd always been taught that traditional beauty was something that you didn't really strive for. The first piece in the Hirshhorn show, which is a deconstruction of a statue, is the thing you went for immediately. Somehow this graceful line, if it was distorted, was much more interesting, much more artistic and much more important. If it was just a little bit too beautiful, it was somehow frivolous. For it to truly be postmodern dance, it had to be atonal — pulled and pushed around a bit.
MICHAEL ROSE (managing director, Annenberg Center/University of Pennsylvania Presents). I think you may also want to ask the converse — what is not beauty? Within the context of dance, is it something that is imperfectly put together, or something that doesn't have structure, or that is crassly commercial? I think you have to address this question to understand the aesthetics of dance.
MYRA BAZELL (choreographer). I don't think "beauty" is the right word for this whole thing, because the word "beau" or "beauty" for me means "not ugly." It's not the right word because what we're striving for is to accept what's honest, what's nature, what's sometimes organic to an extreme, or sometimes inorganic to such an extreme that it moves us. But what I find beautiful are things that are ugly as well as beautiful. We have to invent a new word. Maybe "creamy," as in cream of the crop.
EVA GHOLSON (choreographer). Instead of being so preoccupied with what's beautiful or what's not beautiful, I'd like to talk about what is good art and what is craftsmanship. Unlike Michael, I was trained (by Bessie Schoenberg) to create well-developed compositions. I think that good art is autobiographical. This is about perception. It's personal. There is a way that both the ugly and the beautiful can coexist. But the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth — you've got to look like this, now you've got to look like that. Well, let's talk about what is good art, how do you make good art, and what is integrity in craftsmanship.
TERRY FOX (dance curator, the Painted Bride Art Center). I think that the dance field is actually much wider open than the art field. You can still have a ballet, and a ballet can also be modern.
JOAN MYERS BROWN (executive/artistic director, Philadanco). There is so much more that dance can bring that is beautiful. I can go to a ballet and hate it, but I can still see beauty in it. Then I can go to a modern dance concert and see great beauty in what other people don't think is beautiful.
ERIC SCHOEFER (choreographer). I am drawn to the concept of beauty as an experience — beatific, to beam, to emanate — versus the concept of beauty as an object — form, space and time. The strongest flash of beauty for me recently in experiencing dance was working with a party of hip-hop kids in North Philly in a warehouse space with a lot of graffiti. These boys were dynamos. It will never be caught again. It was an embodiment of energy and motion.
BAZELL. What does the audience want, and what are we creating? We lose the audience when things slow down and become a little more like nature. This is connected to the state of the world now, and the destruction of nature. It's impatience with things that take time. I feel subjected a little bit, as an artist, to the pressure of what viewers feel is beautiful or what they need from beauty. There's a void socially and politically at so many levels now that can't be filled, and I see it manifested in the art and the commentary in the art. What you're getting from the art is not the breath inside the experience but the constant commenting of the artists on art. This is a sign of the times. There is something missing about what is natural and what is beautiful.
FISCHBECK. It's not that audiences have no more channels or no more ability to perceive and experience beauty. They are ready, in the same way that we are, to experience what is real, or what is captivating, or what is engaging. When my company on occasion went out on the street to dance, people would gather and watch. Most of them had no idea what they were watching. We were not trying to do something to them; we were just there. Opening up the organic and expressive side of a particular dance to the audience is what I'm concerned with. People actually can experience the beauty, the realness, the truth of the nature of movement in whatever form it comes.
BAZELL. Is beauty our responsibility? That's a big question for me.
DALY. How do you deal with the audience expectations that you know or imagine are there?
FISCHBECK. Well, we need to go on and do what we're doing. But there is another side to our work. People grow up with music, they grow up with art, they grow up with literature. They do not grow up with dance, for the most part. The dance experience has to be made available on a much larger scale. Dancers, choreographers or teachers, all of us, need to keep that in mind. The teaching of dance, bringing that into the school or into the everyday experiences of people in whatever way you can think of, should be part of our concern.
CARSON. I'm working in a humorous vein, and I find that I can say almost anything as long as I make people laugh. Making them laugh gives me license to talk about something that's very uncomfortable. In terms of beauty, you've got to give a little beauty if you want to give a little ugly and keep people in their seats.
DALY. What does dance know about beauty that visual art hasn't grasped?
ANN VACHON (choreographer). When Manfred was talking before, I kept getting an image of his daughter. I had the experience of watching her in a performance in which she was so incredibly focused on what she was doing that I almost was worried that she had lost touch with herself. That kind of total focus of the performer in the moment is beautiful.
SCHOEFER. The concept of beauty in dance has something to do with presence. It's just a moment, really. Not only, in a traditional sense, is it this human form making this ideal form right now. It is also right now that this human being is alive and breathing and making an action.
FISCHBECK. When you look at somebody dancing, you see who that person is. You can talk to them for three hours. You can know all of their stuff, but when they start dancing, you see them. It's only in dance where you can have that.