Natural and artificial in free dance
Материал из HEPTACHOR.
Irina Sirotkina
Dance theory is an area of scholarship that was largely ignored by historians of the human sciences. It is the more surprising given the current interest in the body and its role in the construction of the self. Foucauldian discussions of “practices of the self”, through which “the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion”, concentrated mostly on illness, sex and body discipline. These practices are studied in part by the history of medicine. Though the project of transforming the self was at heart of new forms of dance in early twentieth century, dance and gymnastic have had much less attention from the historians of the human sciences. I suggest two more reasons why modern dance in particular could be of interest for this academic community: first, born at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, dance was permeated by intellectual discussions of its period and it contributed to them. Second, dance studies could be instrumental in dealing with some problems that plague theoretical debates; I take as an example the discussions of the opposition, “natural-artificial”.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), a philosopher beloved of dancers, also held dance in very high regard. There are more than one praise for dance in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891). At one point Zarathustra declared: “I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity - through him all things fall”. At other point he proclaimed: “Only in the dance do I know how to tell the parable of the highest things”. And elsewhere he invited: “Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads!” [Zarathustra, "On Reading and Writing," PN 153; Zarathustra, "The Tomb Song," PN 224.] At her first performance in Zurich in 1916, the great German dancer, Mary Wigman, danced in silence to the “Dance Song”, her favourite chapter from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Isadora Duncan was also an avid reader of Nietzsche.
Intellectual ambitions of some dancers went as far as working towards an academic degree. The pioneer of free dance in Hungary, Valéria Dienes (1879-1978), was a mathematician and Henri Bergson’s student, who received her doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne. Her Russian counterpart, Stefanida Rudneva (1890-1989), had a university degree in ancient history and was a student of Antiquity.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, dance and dance studies underwent a rapid institutionalisation, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. In Berlin there were several dance congresses on the subject of The Art of Movement, which brought together many different approaches to gymnastics and dance. In 1926, a major Congress on Rhythm took place at the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute in Geneva. In the 1920s in Moscow, the state-sponsored Academy of the Art Sciences had a Choreological Laboratory - a large division where dance scholars, ethnographers, and physiologists studied all kinds of movement, from animal to ballet.
Besides institutions, there were a number of debates in which dance practitioners and scholars took an active part. As Dee Reynolds shows in her forthcoming book, Rhythmical Subject, one of the topics of a wider interest was rhythm: the theme brought together life philosophers, movement practitioners and musicians. Another actively debated topic was the relationship between natural and artificial – a theme central for any attempts to understand art and culture in general. The founders of modern dance identified beauty with “nature” rather than with the artifice of classical ballet, which was then in a moribund state and which they strove to reform.
In a striking difference with science and philosophy, where “nature” was till recently an ontological category, in art and dance was no single idea of “nature”. “The natural” was an alternative to various unwanted things: oppression, male domination over women, Taylorism, mechanical civilisation, the artificiality of ballet, Dalcroze eurhythmics etc. In dance and gymnastics there were several conceptions of “the natural movement”, sometimes competing with each other. Each school proposed its own version of what is natural and beautiful: movements of the ancient Greeks epitomised in sculpture and vases (François Delsarte, Genevieve Stebbins, Isadora Duncan); everyday “simple” movements such as walking or running (Duncan, Martha Graham); movements which correspond precisely to the anatomy and physiology of the bodily apparatus (Rudolf Bode’s “expressive gymnastics” and biomechanics); “spontaneous” movements which come from the depths of the unconscious (in psychotherapy called Authentic Movement). I will briefly sketch three of these conceptions.
1) Although Duncan mentioned that the source of free dance is in the movements of “primitive people”, her “nature” was in fact already artistically ennobled, and her “natural body” was really a “civilized body” - of a kind glorified in the Antiquity and depicted by Greek and Roman artist. Sharing her brother Raymond’s enthusiasm for the Greeks, Isadora studied sculpted images and drawing on ancient vases in order to get an idea of a gracious movement. Duncan's reference to ancient Greece as fertile ground for intellectual, artistic and popular expression was not unique for the period.
2) In another conception, the natural movement is a movement constructed accordingly to the laws of bodily mechanic and physiology. A Russian, Ludmila Alekseeva (1890-1964), who started as a Duncan dancer, later created her own “harmonious”, or “artistic gymnastics” – exercises or études to classical music pieces, which she also used in coaching Russian female athletes. She wrote that “the natural form of movement” is achieved when the movements “1) correspond to the body constitution and natural functions of the organs of locomotion; 2) are economical; 3) form units which originate in large muscle groups; 4) flow without interruption”.
3) The third conception of the natural movement originates in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and is mainly used in body and dance-therapy. Here the natural movement is something that comes from within a person undistorted by wrong upbringing, bad habits or social constraints. The conception realises the idea - once popular in the humanist psychology - of authenticity as a source within oneself through which one can fully realise one's potential and discover one's true individuality. The key to achieving this is the person's reunification with his or her own unconscious through listening to the «wisdom of the body». The idea of the wisdom from within is not new to psychotherapy, being already present in the discourse of the founders of modern dance. Duncan told a story how, while trying to create a dance filled with emotions, she spent long days and nights in her studio listening to herself before she found the “true source of movement”; on this “discovery”, she claimed, she “founded her theory and her school”.
All conceptions of the natural in some or other ways has to face a problem well familiar to the readers of Rousseau: having defined the natural in opposition to the social – something that resides in the individual as opposite to society – we come to a vicious circle, for the origins of the individual are social. Dancers claim that their movements are “natural”; yet one has to spend years learning to perform them properly. Duncan and Graham began their lessons by teaching their students to walk and run. These conceptions - if they did not want to be ridiculed (like the idea that the most “natural” is the «primitive dance») - had to be reflective about what exactly they mean by nature and how far their claims of “being natural” extend. The more so because, a couple of decades after free dance had been born born, it had to face its mirror-image: by contrast with the “natural” Duncan dance, a new “mechanical dance” stemmed from the modernist cult of the machine.
A new genre of the dance of machines was represented in Russia by Nikolai Foregger, the founder of a dance theatre, MastFor (short for “Foregger’s Workshop”) very popular in the early Soviet years. He was inspired, in his own words, by “the worker at the machine, a footballer in the match”. Vsevolod Meyerhold introduced the so-called biomechanics in the theatre, and his actors’ movements often imitated operations of the machine. He hoped to get rid of merely decorative purposeless movements; the assumption was that a movement that has a function and a purpose – a “genuine” one - carries much more expression than a movement that seeks to picture or to imitate. Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenshtein scathingly criticised Duncan dance for the lack of structure and discipline and for pretentious mannerism. But neither stage biomechanics nor “the dance of machines” restricted themselves to the rational functional movement; in opposition to what they wanted to avoid, they pictured operations of mechanical tools. As one observer asked: what is the difference between a dancer who imitates the motion of a handsaw or an engine, and a Duncan dancer imitating the motion of a wave?
Nevertheless, the new genre pushed the old one to be reflective and reconsider its categories, beginning with nature. The opposite is also true: free dance and dance therapy, with their stress on “naturalness”, provide important criticism of the most vanguard dance experiments. This juxtaposition continues at present, making dance a very lively area of both practice and theory.
Having rejected the idea of nature, some contemporary choreographers seek to invent movements that cannot be found in humans or to combine movements in unusual sequences. Merce Cunnigham, the dancer active in the last 50 years, is famous for constructing “random” dance movements by throwing dice. These experiments try to counteract the principles of the “natural movement” introduced once upon a time by free dance: instead of creating wholeness, movements are often broken or interrupted. (As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht remarks, by contrast with the Authentic, which takes for granted that Nature is a source of law, order and logic, the Artificial denies any such presuppositions. Each particular system has its own laws and therefore appears random, fragmented and disorderly from the point of view of another system.) Instead of being free-flowing and “organic”, new movements are difficult to perform and require long training; yet at the end dancers are rewarded by what they see as the enlargement of human capacities – in the words of a Cunningham’s dancer, by becoming another, “non-human being”. In addition to experiments with human movements, dancers use computer programmes in choreography or they stage an interactive digital dance or integrate the body with machines: an Australian performance artist Stelarc connected himself to the Internet and moved to the patterns created by a search engine.
Yet, so out of fashion, nature is not easy to bury completely - at least not in dance. Even the most postmodern dancers firmly believe that body is to be trusted more than mind. Cunningham declared that: “I am no more philosophical than my legs, but from them I sense… that the shape the movement takes is beyond the fathoming of my mind’s analysis but clear to my eyes and rich to my imagination. A man is a two-legged creature – more basically and more intimately than he is anything else. And his legs speak more than they ‘know’“. Having been thrown out through the door, the idea of “the wisdom of the body” returns through the window. References to the “natural” movement are especially common in dance training (for instance, teaching professional dancers, who were earlier taught at schools to ignore the body and overcome occasional sufferings, to listen to their bodies and to see it as a creative source of movements). This is the purpose of various somatic techniques, some of them borrowing from yoga, tai-chi and other eastern practices. Even Cunningham’s dancers cannot avoid the reference to the “natural”: while learning a new “artificial” movement, they train it till it becomes “organic”.
As contemporary dance is more about “nature” than it wants to admit, free dance, which claims to be “natural”, is in at least as much about “artifice” than about “nature”. It is an art, and its “naturalness” is a result of a long training and creative efforts on the part of dancers and choreographers. Is “nature” then a redundant notion? My answer is that, although it has lost its literal, ontological character, “nature” has a respectable place in dance discourses: not only in the history of modern dance, but also in current practices of training and choreography. Unlike postmodern theory, dance still has room for “the natural”, if only to balance against “the artificial”. Dance discourses exist in the space between the two (the tension between “the Authentic” and “the Artificial”, according to Gumbrecht, generally creates social order). In the words of an Alekseeva student, free dance “is a philosophy based on each person’s ability to grasp the boundary between the natural and the artificial, which cannot be described otherwise”.
And there is a moral lesson to learn for the cultural theory, which left one part of the opposition natural-artificial out. Postmodernism supposedly discovered that, in the words of a Russian philosopher, there is no natural reality in the sense of an authentic or a model one… People live among signs, images and ‘authentic’ imitations. The author celebratory concludes that “this makes them more artificial, that is, artful creatures”. I think there is nothing here to celebrate. By collapsing the opposition natural-artificial at the expense of “nature”, we loose a useful counterweight to such concepts as “art” or “social construction”. If everything is artificial and constructed, the terms lose meaning and rational. Saying that something is constructed, by the nature of the language, we imply that there should be an alternative - something which is not constructed. What is then the status of this alternative? Is it “nature” or something that people in the past used to call “nature”? These naïve questions sometimes puzzle me in the discussion of social constructivism. In my view, there would be more clarity if we brought back the old-fashioned word, “nature”, and clarified its functions in particular discourses. It seems therefore constructive to look into how dance (and art in general) thrives in the area of high tension between “the natural” and “the artificial”.
