Drama

Cultural distinction between dramatic and formal dance

Musicologist Curt Sachs argued that the division between dramatic and formal dance in tribal cultures followed the division between hunting and planter cultures. While the accuracy of his claim may be hard to establish, it can help to illuminate the different types and function of dance that lie at the root of such a division. In hunting dances (and war dances as well) the dancers’ movements are dramatically charged, expressing a state of excitement or aggression and frequently imitating the movements of animals or fighting men, even to the point of manipulating weapons. Imitative sounds increase the power of the illusion, as does the wearing of masks, makeup, or animal skins. The effect on both dancer and spectator is to be drawn into a fictional world, in which the dancers become the people or animals that they represent and the story or situation enacted by the dance takes on an immediate reality. Any successful dramatic dance should, in fact, produce this effect, even if the dancers do not actually feel the emotions they are representing or the spectators respond as if the imitation were real.

In the dances of planter cultures, Sachs argued, the movements tend to be smaller and not directly imitative. The groupings of the dancers and the floor patterns traced by their steps, on the other hand, tend to be much more complex and ordered. In addition, the sequence of movements tends to be more repetitive and the dancers’ movements are more uniform. Such formal dances are often performed as part of a ritual propitiation of the gods in order to assure good weather and successful harvests. Although their movements may not be imitative, the repetitive patterns often represent such natural occurrences as the cycle of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the Moon, and the growing of vegetation, and they even evoke more abstract entities such as space and time. The effect may thus be one of fusing the dancers and spectators with some aspect of the natural world. At the same time the dance may produce an effect similar to the repetitive chanting of prayer or meditation, emptying the mind of its usual preoccupations and focusing it on the object of worship. In fact, the power of dance in achieving this type of spiritual discipline is peculiarly strong, since the repetitive movements work kinesthetically as well as aurally and visually. As a consequence, mind and body are equally absorbed into the ritual.

Even where formal dances are not part of a ritual (as in modern plotless dance works), the movement of the dancers may produce an effect not dissimilar to that described above. Space, time, and the force of gravity may be made apparent to the spectator through the trajectories that the dancers make in space, through the configurations that they form on the dance floor, through the duration of the dance phrases, and through the alternating sensations of weight and weightlessness created by falls and jumps. In a similar way, too, the audience may experience a special focusing of attention, a draining of the usual habits of perception through the kinesthetic, visual, and aural power of the movement and music.

Many extant tribal dances can be categorized as either imitative or formal, as can the European folk dances that developed out of earlier tribal dance forms. Courtship dances, the descendants of ancient courtship and fertility dances, still retain overt imitations of flirtatiousness. Other dances have similarly retained their early formal character, even, in some cases, retaining the symbolic significance of their patterns. In Ukrainian dances descended from pagan Moon-worshiping ritual, the circling of the dancers represents the way the Moon influences the work in the fields, and the final pivot represents the flourishing of the corn. In Armenian carpet-weaving dances, the complex floor patterns mimic the action of the work process.

Drama in Western theatre dance

When dance developed into a form of spectacle, particularly of a secular kind, it was frequently allied to the telling of a story and the depiction of characters. Mimed gesture was often prominent in such dance dramas—for example, in ancient Greece, where the gestures of the chorus illustrated the drama’s major themes. There the mime was often naturalistic: a hand on the head to represent grief or the stretching upward of the arms to express worship. During the later, cosmopolitan period of the Roman Empire, dance and mime were popular entertainment for audiences drawn from a variety of linguistic backgrounds. The highly sophisticated pantomime used by these dancers formed the basis of the improvised mime drama of the 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte and, later, the techniques of 20th-century mime artists such as Marcel Marceau.

The early European court ballets were also oriented toward dramatic spectacle, though the dance movement itself was not highly expressive and mimed gesture was limited. Other dramatic elements, usually visual effects or speech, communicated the essential points of the story. One of the first choreographers to extend dance movement so that it could be dramatically expressive was the English dancer and ballet master John Weaver, who in his ballet The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717) experimented with giving the characters gestures to express their individual personalities. Later in the 18th century Jean-Georges Noverre reacted against the purely decorative form into which ballet had developed. He believed that mime should be as close to natural gesture as possible and that dance movement should not be meaninglessly decorative but should reflect the ballet’s action.

Noverre’s ideas were partly realized in the Romantic ballet of the early 19th century, which strove to give movement a greater poetic expressiveness. Developments in dance technique, notably that of dancing en pointe (“on one’s toes,” or in toe shoes), gave dancers a wider range of movement to express character and action, although conventional or symbolic mime was also used to tell parts of the story. By the end of the century, however, choreography was once again seldom concerned with plot and character, and long sections of mime (often incomprehensible even to the dancers) were used to tell whatever story there was in the dance. The reforms proposed by Fokine at the beginning of the 20th century, like those of Noverre two centuries before, demanded more naturally expressive mime and dance movement that illuminated theme and character and were an essential component of the dance.

Fokine’s own work reflected these ideas faithfully. He experimented with angular movement reminiscent of archaic Greece in Daphnis et Chloé (1912; “Daphnis and Chloé”), developed individual styles for different characters (such as the jerky wooden movements of the puppet Petrushka), and brought mime much closer to natural gesture than the symbolic code previously used. This naturalism still characterizes ballet; the expressive qualities of dance movement and simple, dramatic gestures almost entirely displace conventional mime, and even in revivals of the 19th-century classics, traditional mime is usually kept to a minimum so that audiences have no trouble following it.

The founders of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Doris Humphrey, also reacted against the lack of expression in ballet. Like Fokine, they believed that most ballet dancing was mere decorative acrobatics, but while Fokine was happy to continue using exotic or archaic themes for his new, naturalistic ballets, these later choreographers believed that dance should address subjects of greater relevance and profundity. The kinds of movement with which the modern dance choreographers expressed these themes had little of conventional ballet technique about them. Eschewing mime, particularly that associated with ballet, as well as the traditional ballet vocabulary, they sought to make the whole body dramatically expressive. (See below Theatre dance: Modern dance.)

Throughout the 20th century, ballet, like modern dance, moved toward a concern with more serious issues. In works such as Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux lilas (1936; “The Lilac Garden”), Peter Darrell’s Prisoners (1957), Gerald Arpino’s Clowns (1968), and Kenneth MacMillan’s My Brother, My Sisters (1978), choreographers engaged subject matter ranging from emotional and psychological conflict to war and social issues.

In the avant-garde dance of the 1970s and ’80s, experiments were made in expanding narrative potential by incorporating nondance elements (almost turning full circle back to the early court ballets). At times dance was accompanied by mime, acting, and singing as well as a multitude of visual effects. In some cases choreographers collaborated with artists working in other forms, such as music, drama, and the visual arts, and they thought of dance less as a single discipline than as a broadly based theatre art. Most of these experimental works had some kind of dramatic or conceptual content, although they avoided conventional forms of narration and expression. Events were rarely presented in chronological order, and the distinction between reality, symbolism, and fantasy was often blurred.