The Rejection of Memory-as-Sole- (Primary)-Authority in Dance
Christian Matjias, Associate Professor of Dance and Music, The University of Michigan, USA
This paper will deal with issues of reconstruction and transmission inherent in the process of staging pre-existing and historic concert dances. Unlike music and theater, where the artwork is preserved in notation or written prose, the field of dance relies primarily upon oral transmission as a means of handing down a work from one generation to the next. There are a number of reasons for the field’s excessive reliance upon oral traditions, but I believe that the primary reason is a near absence of literacy in the notational languages among dance practitioners. Despite this established practice in dance, however, this paper will question the validity of its reliance on memory as the sole (primary) authority, and will suggest that, as in artistic fields that rely upon written records to preserve and transmit their artistic works, dance might reap sizable benefits in the adoption of musical, visual, and notated documents as a means to enhance and support the preservation and performance of these artworks. What I propose here will drastically alter the field and, I believe, will open the field not only to a deeper connection with its past, but will also enable scholars in fields outside of dance to examine the dance artwork. To set the background for my discussion of dance reconstruction, I would like to define a few terms for those who may have little familiarity with the process of staging a dance. In this study, I will use the terms “choreographer,” “ballet master/mistress,” and “repetiteur,” to refer to distinct roles played by those who construct a dance at various points in its history. The choreographer can be understood as the subject who creates the dance; the ballet master/mistress is the subject who is, in some capacity, a member of the dance company on whom the dance is set, and whose job it is to handle daily rehearsals and prepare a work for performance. If the dance returns to the repertory or is staged on a company other than the one that originally performed the dance, it will be set by a repetiteur, who may have been a participant in the first iterations of the dance. The repetiteur is the subject who has been given authority to mount a reconstruction / restaging of an existing dance either by its original choreographer, by a person to whom the dance has been bequeathed, or by a person charged with to approve performance licenses. The repetiteur stands in place of the choreographer as the authority upon whose memories of the work the ballet master/mistress will rely for an “accurate” recreation, or restaging, of that work, and who, once the choreographer has moved past the work, is ultimately responsible to represent and stage the work in the field. The process of dance reconstruction works this way: once a choreographer has completed a dance, staging and rehearsal of the work in its first iteration will be overseen by the choreographer. In subsequent rehearsals of the work, the ballet master/mistress will be responsible to prepare the dance. The role of the ballet master/mistress is to continue rehearsals to follow the work of either the choreographer or repetiteur. It is this link in the creative chain – specifically the reliance upon the memories of the repetiteur and ballet master/mistress in the restaging process – that will be the focus of this paper.
When a repetiteur is faced with a dance work that has already been created, he/she will initiate and direct the process to bring a dance back into the performance setting. The repetiteur’s work can be described as: a reconstruction, a re-staging, a revival, or a re-imagining of the work. The re-staging and revival are the least problematic processes of those listed as in both cases, the dance may have been in the repertory on a semi-regular basis, or has a presence in the repertory of one or more companies. A reconstruction involves the staging of a dance that has long been out of the repertory and may require the input of multiple parties (such as a historian, archivist, or a dancer who performed in an early staging of the piece) who works with the repetiteur to complete work. A re-imagining is the creation of a dance for which there exist no reliable sources from which to stage the choreography. For instance, the dance was likely forgotten and not performed for many years. Photographs, memoirs, and choreographers’ notes may be the only sources from which to work. The musical score may be the same, and there may be an effort to use costumes and staging that would have been used in the original, but ultimately the choreography becomes a work “in the manner of… ” A selection of additional factors that help the repetiteur to decide upon and determine any one of the above may include the age of the dance, whether the dance is to be reconstructed from primary or secondary sources, or whether they were with or without access to dancers originally in the work. The methods used to stage a pre-existing dance are varied in both approach and methodology, but most generally rely upon the memory of the repetiteur as it is informed by earlier performances of the work in which they might have been engaged as a performer, and this I perceive to be one of the shortcomings in dance reconstruction. In dance, the repetiteur’s memories of the work often serve as the primary source for re-staging and re-creation and thereby grant a degree of authority to the repetiteur that arises in part from his or her generational proximity to the work (that is, to its initial creation or to another performer who had a connection to its initial creation). The reliance upon the repetiteur’s memories of the work for its reconstruction, though widely used and accepted in the field of dance, is problematic for a number of reasons I will address. In my discussion of dance reconstruction, I aim to challenge the principle of memory-as-sole (primary)-authority, and will argue in favor of a set of approaches that combine notated, memory-based, visual materials and musical scores as additional sources from which a work can be reconstructed. I will not argue for a fixity of content in the dance object, by which I mean a state in which the repetiteur seeks to replicate (or the audience expects to see) every detail of the original performance of a dance, but will advocate for the adoption of a catalog, or a menu of materials, available to the repetiteur for use in consultation with the institutions and organizations who license dances, in order to support, enhance, and streamline the staging of a work. The catalogue of sources could include a Labanotated score (a system, first published in 1928 and developed by Rudolf Laban to record and analyze human movement) of the dance (should one exist), photographs of earlier performances, choreographer notes, a repetiteur or ballet master / mistress’ notes from an earlier staging(s) of the dance, the musical score (both piano rehearsal scores and performance scores), and video/film sources. Although our reference to such diverse authorities might suggest that I perceive the dance object as a fixed entity that is somehow captured by a notated score, a photograph, or any other of the sources listed above, I believe that the object is nonetheless fluid and open to change over time. The point can be made with a simple parallel drawn to music, where the printed score is never seen as a source of fixity in performance, but instead as a starting point from which a new interpretation (or various different interpretations) of the musical work may arise. So a repetiteur who is armed with a variety of resources can stage a dance with greater authority and precision than one who relies solely upon memory as the source of creative authority. I do not believe that memory supports fluidity or that notation represents fixity, but rather I see this dynamic in opposition. Memory becomes a vision or image we seek to catch and contain, whereas documented and notated sources allow for greater creative freedom in the staging of a dance. To illustrate my point, I will share a portion of the George Balanchine Critical Edition, Vol. 1: Concerto Barocco (edited by Christian Matjias and Tina Curran) at the end of this paper.
The majority of works to which I refer in my discussion of memory-as-sole (primary)-authority, tend to be those that comprise the canon of established 20th-century dance masterpieces in active repertoire, many of which have relied upon the memory of the repetiteur(s) in their reconstruction. While the notion of memory-as-authority might occasionally impinge upon lesser-known works, what distinguishes these works from established dance “masterpieces” is that many lesser-known dances will not be restaged after the death of the choreographer. Should they return to the performance repertory, they will be set either as reconstructions or re-imaginings. Take into account that any dance staged by a repetiteur was likely set from memory, perhaps with assistance from a video or film source, in effect, a dance model of the oral tradition. Clearly the dances are being staged and danced but what is it that we actually see, and how does it compare to the work as envisioned by the choreographer? The fact that we accept the work implies that the methods used to stage the dance are, in fact, effective and successful. So why do I consider methodology based largely on the oral tradition as lacking both in terms of content and authenticity? I do not claim that oral traditions lack integrity or value, but I believe that a complete reliance upon memory will ultimately render the dance as ineffectual. I support retaining oral traditions, but with the support of other resources. It is impossible for all choreographic content in a dance to be relayed intact over the course of generations. Larger choreographic structures will be sustained, but movement and phrasing details will be impossible to preserve generation upon generation. If, as I have already stated, I am not concerned with fixity in a dance, then why should an overbearing reliance upon memory as a primary authority pose any problem.
Choreographic fixity, or the quest to set what is believed to be the original staging of a dance, is an issue we have to consider. Choreographic structures, as the sum total of the various choreographic phrases that constitute a dance work, can exist on macro levels (understood here as the collection of choreographic phrases into the large-scale organizational structure of an individual dance) and micro levels (represented in such moment-to-moment details as individual phrases and points of articulation that constitute the perceptual surface of the dance). In my view, the memory of the large-scale macro-structure of a dance will tend to be fixed, since any change at this level will lead to the creation of an entirely new work (i.e. – Balanchine’s use of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, first as Balustrade (1941) and later as Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972)). To see the extent to which the macro-structure is retained over time, we might examine the history of a given dance, where we might find that although a choreographer may choose to alter any number of surface elements of the dance (various movements, steps, and so forth) in the same ways that a performer may choose to play with the execution of particular sections of a musical work (its tempo, stresses, etc.), the basic structure of the work will be retained. The choreographer and repetiteur may make adjustments to the micro level of the dance, simply though the continued refinement of the choreography. But many more changes to the micro level may originate via ballet master / mistress and dancer whose performance choices / decisions may be added to the dance. Add this to issues of lapses in memory of either the repetiteur or the dancer, and of course, changes in taste and aesthetic preferences about technique and movement vocabulary?
What we find is that movement qualities, methods of execution, and vocabulary are not understood or interpreted with any sense of uniformity by dancers, because each dancer comes from a different pedagogical tradition. Because there exists little uniformity in dance instruction in the United States, one enormous obstacle faced by a dance reconstructor is that every dancer will have a different lens through which to interpret and embody the movement that comprises the dance. The repetiteur cannot assume that her/his cast is armed with all the technical skills required of the choreography, nor can he/she assume the dancers share a common background from which to interpret the movement. Because the use of memory as a tool for dance reconstruction is such a laborious and time-consuming process, much effort is spent on the re-creation of the macro level, with the result that the details that comprise the micro-level will tend to get a more cursory examination. The dancers may be challenged to perform the work in the style and tone expected by the repetiteur, but the dance cannot help but bear the creative imprint of the repetiteur, despite its creation by the choreographer. The fact is that dances that we see performed on stage represent an amalgam of the creative imagination of the choreographer and the kinesthetic memory of the repetiteur. The late Gordon Boelzner, rehearsal and performance pianist, and later musical director for the New York City Ballet from 1959 - 1999 shared with me a valuable philosophy in the process of restaging an existing dance, when he instructed that the repetiteur responsible for staging one of Balanchine’s works is not so much staging Balanchine’s choreography as they are staging their personal memory of Balanchine’s choreography. So you must acknowledge their memory before you can begin to analyze the correctness or authenticity of the choreography. Balanchine not only expected the dances to change over time, but he also understood that each repetiteur and each dancer would bring their own interpretation to the dance. [1]
The oral tradition as experienced in dance, understood as the teaching of choreography through demonstration and kinesthetic memory, can be likened to an orchestra that would perform a classical-era symphony, where each musician has learned their material not from a pre-copied musical score and parts, but rather via the conductor who will sing every musician’s part via solfege. To learn a symphony in such a manner would result in varied and inconsistent representations of the composers’ work. The larger framework would be there, with the correct melodies, harmonies, and rhythms; but details of dynamics and timbre would be near impossible to impart in this manner. Then there also would exist the possibility that phrases or entire sections may be overlooked, or notes omitted simply because a conductor’s memory may have inadvertently forgotten a few notes within the phrase.
An advantage possessed by dance concerns its relationship with music. The dancer who works from memory has musical cues present in the accompanying score, within which movements can be lined up to match the execution of the work, to fit a set number of combinations within so many minutes and seconds. The repetiteur merges kinesthetic and aural memory and allows for a reduction of error as dancers place movement with music. This aside, there remain other factors to compromise the process for dances staged wholly from memory.
In my experiences as a dance musician, as both accompanist and performing musician for dances from choreographers both living and deceased, I have worked with repetiteurs who, if not in the original cast, were among the first generation of dancers to perform the work. I have also worked on pieces where the repetiteur has been several generations removed both from the original dance as well as from the today’s dancers, and in effect bridges the gap between creator and performer. Through these experiences, I have observed certain conventions and beliefs that I find unique to the dance field and I have noticed that repetiteurs face similar challenges in the staging process, that, in my opinion, ultimately waste rehearsal time and that compromise the structural and performative integrity of the dance.
Of the challenges faced in both the preservation and restoration / staging of dances, the field’s resistance to the use of notation or other forms of written documentation to record choreographic direction remains its largest issue. There have been numerous methods of dance notation in use for the past four-hundred years, but none has been adopted at a level equal to adoption of notation in music. A notated system for western music, in existence for a thousand years, has for the past four centuries remained fairly consistent in its use of the staff, clefs, notes, rests, and metric values. As music has evolved, the notation has also evolved, allowing the composer greater control of detail to document and preserve their work. It is expected that any musician who wishes to play this music will be able to read the notation and to execute the music with minimal input from external sources, such as a conductor or director. Ultimately, we must accept that dance is concerned with the issues of fixity on a far greater level than could ever exist in music, and this serves as one of the challenges to enable the acceptance and wide scale adoption of dance notation. For many in the dance field, notation equals fixity, and fixity is seen by some as a concept of one-size-fits-all. This gap is widened when one considers the differences in the acceptance and use of notation in both dance and music. To acknowledge this gulf will allow us to understand the challenges faced by repetiteurs, dancers, and most importantly, dance notators. Only then will we begin to generate new views and practices in the preservation, restoration, and dissemination of dances.
Over the past four hundred years, dance has adopted a variety of symbol-based methods to notate and to preserve choreographic content. The graphic depiction of dance on paper has ranged from stick figures to action strokes of the body on the five line musical staff to more abstract symbol and numerical representations of body and action through time and space. In contrast to the practices of the music conservatory, there has not been a wide scale adoption of notational methods throughout the dance field. Beginning with early seventeenth-century dance treatises, Cesare Negri’s Le Gratie d’Amore, Fabritio Caroso’s Nobilita di dame, Il Ballarino, and Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie, a variety of symbol-based methods have been used to notate dances. Later, other forms of notation came into use in the 19th-20th century, including Stepanov notation (used primarily for late 19th c. Ballets from the Mariinsky Theatre), and Benesh notation. The evolution of dance notation systems have been based largely on dance forms and thus the forms of notation have evolved with the evolution of dance genres and technical styles. It has not been until the 20th century that movement in general, not just dance movements, saw the development of Eskhol-Wachmann and the more widely used Labanotation. This last form has gained significant traction in part due to the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB), founded in 1940, whose tireless efforts have advanced the acceptance of dance notation as a viable medium for archival preservation, education, and research. Where the marketplace has encouraged the publication and sale of musical scores and thereby secured the survival of music notation, there exists no such vehicle for the dissemination of dance notation, so the DNB serves an invaluable role in recording dances, archiving materials, and providing access to these materials. If a repetiteur were to stage a dance from notation, it would be unheard-of for the dancers themselves to read the notated score in order to learn and to analyze the dance. Compare this to the musician who would begin the process of learning a piece from a notated score.
Though I have addressed selected points in order to compare music notation against dance notation, we should acknowledge what is intended by the act of notation for both genres. In music, when one composes and commits ideas to paper, notation is a component and an extension of the compositional process. For dance, where notation often comes after the work has been choreographed and premiered, notation is a process of translation / transcription of an existing visual artifact. This, I believe, is the primary factor that differentiates the intent of notation in both music and dance, and may serve to support the differences in the level of acceptance of the notated document by musicians and dancers. When a musical work is composed, the score is generated almost immediately, typically while the composer is in the process of composing the work, but the composer is never removed from the process of the physical act of notation. In dance, a Labanotated score is created almost exclusively by a third party, and often at some time after the initial creation of the work. One responsibility of the notator is to commit symbols to paper as required by the repetiteur. Should the repetiteur have a lapse of memory, or choose to stage the work in a manner different from other repetiteurs in the field, their demonstration of the movement is what is captured. Few choreographers have the skills to notate their own dances, so the process of notation falls to trained notators and their reliance upon the repetiteurs’ memory to provide a baseline of accuracy and detail places a great deal of responsibility upon both parties.
So why is memory valued so highly as a means to pass on choreographed works? While no widely adopted method of dance notation exists as part of the larger educational experience for dancers, their memory is often considered their most important asset in the preservation of dance.
Though we have the benefit of film and video to record dances, especially over the past three decades, their use raises an entirely new set of issues, most notably those of perspective and space. Except for a brief period from the 1960s-1980s when a number of dances by leading choreographers were documented and recorded in the film/television/video studio, most videos of dance capture a live concert performance. The recorded performance may just as easily come from a ‘good night’ as it may a ‘bad night’. To capture a poor or even mediocre performance would preserve errors and inaccuracies unintended by the choreographer. Without the acknowledgment of mistakes and inconsistencies captured on visual media, these errors can likely enter the performance tradition as readily as those that arise from hazy memories. The issue of perspective is also one that cannot easily be resolved. A single-camera set-up would observe and capture the dance as a single audience member might observe as if seated in a particular location relative to that dance. Depending on one’s visual sight lines and distance from the stage, the precise details of gesture and articulation are difficult, if not impossible to see. A multiple-camera arrangement, that records movement from a variety of perspectives, will be edited in the studio to create yet another perspective on the visual narrative. Despite the shortcomings inherent in these media, repetiteurs often choose to use video or film sources as primary support materials to stage dances. These sources provide a wealth of information, especially as historical artifacts, but ultimately are cumbersome and time-consuming when used as a means to support a re-staging or reconstruction.
In considering the preservation and restoration of dances in recent years, there has been a push to adopt a philosophy and practice often described in the field as a Living Legacy. Representatives of companies with longstanding histories and repertoire in the field have begun to look at both the legacy of a choreographer and of their work as something beyond either history or the performance repertoire. Despite the bias of dance-as-museum-work, among the majority of practitioners, the concept of dance legacy continues to emerge across the field, and I hope will begin to dispense with the misconceptions that notation equals fixity, history implies irrelevance, and that the past does not inform the present.
Though I reject the philosophy of Memory-as-Sole- (Primary)-Authority, I do not discount the value of memory in the reconstruction process; I simply believe it needs to become part of a broader view in dance instead of its current position as the central view.
As mentioned above, the philosophy and practice of Legacy has garnered support within the field. I have seen collected materials used in a dance re-staging that include one or two filmed version of the dance, notes from prior reconstructions, notes taken from oral interviews of dancers in earlier stagings, still photographs, and performance reviews. Each of these archival elements helps to paint a more complete picture of the dance, allowing the repetiteur to include their memory of the dance as part of, and alongside these other supporting documents. In those particular stagings, the process assumes a larger sense of legacy and tradition, and through the combination of all of these elements, the dancers and the repetiteur are more readily able to bring together their shared experience of the dance that results in a richer and more complete performance of the dance.
As one who has built a career as a dance musician, I feel that one component has been left out of the dialogues about notation, preservation, and legacy. Music. Because nearly every Western dance has a corresponding musical score, music should be seen as a crucial component of the whole in the reconstruction process, and it is unfortunately treated as the afterthought to the process. For this paper, it is not my goal to evaluate the impact of pre-recorded media upon dance, but what I see as a problematic influence of recorded music has to do with the its use in the process of staging a dance. If a dance is taught with a live musician in the studio, that musician will play every phrase division of the score multiple times, while the choreographer teaches each movement phrase to the dancer. From the dancers first attempts to embody and engage kinesthetic memory, the order of notes in a musical phrase is a part of their process to capture and shape that kinesthetic information. With the absence of a live musician and the use of a recording, movement phrases will be taught in silence until enough of a phrase can emerge at which point pre-recorded music is introduced into the process. As the dancer has developed their own muscle memory of the dance, they have done so without the music. When music is finally included, it becomes an afterthought and is not embodied into their process. This is a very shortsighted approach that, I believe, ultimately results in a compromised level of embodiment for the dancer and an incomplete understanding of the dance. Due in part to the availability of recorded media, dance has generally moved away from a creative partnership with live music towards an arrangement where pre-recorded music is more readily partnered with dance. The primary motivator behind this is shift is economics, but also issues related to production and efficiency has also contributed to this change.
On the surface, pre-recorded music with dance would seem a natural and safe relationship. The convenience and portability of recordings allows the dancer a greater artistic freedom that would seem to point to a preferred arrangement between music and dance. A critical issue the dance world almost never takes into account with music has to do with performance practice, which is never static, and can affect our tastes as how a particular composition should sound. If we compare recordings of a work performed by the same orchestra, but recorded five decades apart, we would find numerous differences in tempi, timbre, phrasing, articulation, shape, and the ambient, or sonic, qualities of the recording. The piece might not sound appreciably different, but the tempi and tonal colors may be notably different. This is most apparent in recorded music of the baroque and classical era, where the interest in early music performance practice and the use of period instruments have led to the proliferation of different interpretations of the same work. This even holds true with the music of the Romantic and contemporary eras, where current aural experiences will often differ from those experienced in the mid 20th century. The end result is that dancers, with the benefit of pre-recorded music, begin to hear music as sounding a particular way, and as a result, create for themselves a false sense of right, and in turn lose any sense that both music and movement must co-exist as evolving and living practices.
When we exclude music from the dialogue of dance reconstruction and legacy, we overlook a critical piece of the preservation and performance puzzle. I acknowledge that today’s dancers are different from the dancers of five decades ago, with differences possibly as wide as those I have described in performances practices of music from the 1960‘s to the present. This poses a valid counterpoint to my argument, but ultimately, there needs to be some acknowledgment that we’re not simply talking about the music, the right performance, or a preferred tempo, but rather, we should acknowledge the musical aesthetics and performance practices that likely were common at the time the dance was choreographed.
In our edition of Balanchine, Concerto Barocco, Tina Curran and I set out to create a document that would assist repetiteurs, but that would also allow the musician involved in the staging and performance process access to a score that was designed around the choreographic content of the narrative that we provided. Instead of a musician who enters the process with their own prescribed opinions about appropriate tempi, color, and shape, we have provided a new piano rehearsal score that is free of editorial additions that preference contemporary performance practices. Our musical score has no phrase markings, no indications of tempi, and no fingerings, but simply allows the musician to focus on the dance to the same extent that he/she focuses on the music. We also provide a narrative of the Labanotated score, including the spatial floor plans, in addition to a set of essays that address the performance history of the work and that acknowledges recognizable qualities that have emerged in the choreography over the life of the dance. There is also a chapter discussing performance practices of J.S. Bach’s instrumental works and the evolution of performance practice as seen in the seven decades since the premiere of the dance. Our goal was not to create a museum piece from a standpoint of freeze-the-dance-into-a-look-and-sound-of-the-1940s, but rather to inform today’s dancer about the emergence of the work as an iconic choreographic masterpiece. We sought to create a score that would capture Balanchine’s vision, honor the contributions and embodied histories of preceding generations of dancers, but more importantly would allow today’s dancer to discover the qualities that brought the work to the status it now holds in the repertoire and enable them to contribute rather than remove from the performance tradition of that dance. We want to position the dancer and musician to the work in such a way as to place them not at the end of an evolutionary line, but at a point of initial rediscovery.
Notes
References
Caroso, Fabrizio (1581). Il Ballarino. F. Ziletti.
Curran, Tina & Hutchinson Guest, Ann (2008). Your Move. Routledge.
Hutchinson Guest, Ann (1989). Choreo-graphics. A Comparison of Dance Notation Systems From the Fifteenth Century to the Present. Gordon and Breach.
Jordan, Stephanie (2000). Moving Music. Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet. Dance Books Ltd.
Wiley, Roland John, trans. (1978). Two Essays on Stepanov Dance Notation by Alexander Gorsky. CORD, Inc.
Wiley, Roland John (1990). A Century of Russian Ballet, Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1810 - 1910. Clarendon Press.
