PrintI’ve now seen Christopher Wheeldon’s pas de deux from “After the Rain” three times. It is a quiet piece, all pale leotards and glowing late-afternoon light; the dancers’ steps are small and sometimes tentative, sometimes languorous, yet the entire work brims with the power of sweet sadness, or perhaps sad sweetness—some fleeting emotion distilled to the precise tension in the dancers’ bodies, the peculiar movements of their heads and arms and feet.
Dance is an ephemeral art form. It’s not like a poem, with words that you can return to again and again, ink that will stay bound to a page. Nor is it like a painting at the Met, its frame affixed to the wall for years. To me, this is part of what makes dance beautiful: the certainty that I will never see “After the Rain” or “Swan Lake” performed in exactly the same way again. Recordings may allow a few performances to exist past their normal lifetimes, but what video could capture the smallness of Juliet as she gathers her strength in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the panoramic vastness of the beginning of Balanchine’s “Serenade,” the frenzied jubilation at the end of Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations”? As dancer, choreographer, and Barnard junior Amanda Kostreva muses, dance “creates a moment that the audience and dancers share together,” and this unique energy is lost when translated to film.
Still, trying to record the experience and spirit of a performance and attempting to record the choreography itself are two very different things. Dance truly lives only in performance, and so having the ability to restage a work has become a great concern in the dance world. “Unless tackled and performed,” says Patricia Kent, a former dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, “[a dance] simply disappears.” With the recent deaths of choreographers like Cunningham and Pina Bausch, the preservation of choreography seems more essential than ever. Kent and others have begun to develop “Dance Capsules,” permanent records of about 50 of Cunningham’s most important works. She and her colleagues have put together as much information on these pieces as possible, from Cunningham’s own notes to video of rehearsal and performance to details on music and costumes and lighting.
There are three ways in which dance has traditionally been preserved for future generations: coaching, video, and dance notation—written records of choreography that specify certain movements. While most choreographers and dance experts feel that all three are necessary, many consider coaching the most important: Ellen Sorrin, director of the George Balanchine Trust, says that while coaches who restage Balanchine’s choreography may use video, their expertise in Balanchine’s style and knowledge of his intent are most crucial in passing down his works. Though Mary Cochran, head of Barnard’s dance department and former dancer with Paul Taylor, consults written notations occasionally, she also emphasizes the importance of oral tradition.
According to Barnard dance professor Lynn Garafola, notation is often the most accurate of the three methods, and when combined with coaching it can be very successful. At the Royal Ballet, experts in dance notation routinely record choreography made for the company, allowing revivals of the work to occur decades later. Yet many U.S. companies do not have the resources for notation, and written notation is not a language in which most dancers and choreographers are fluent.
Video, which flattens space and can hide the technical aspects of many steps—the way in which much tricky partnering is achieved, for example—is also often the less expensive way to record choreography. Two young choreographers, Emery LeCrone and GS senior Lydia Walker, have both used video to keep records of their choreography. Walker, founder and former artistic director of the Columbia Ballet Collaborative, says that CBC has videotaped all of its performances and that this has proved helpful in restaging the pieces. When she and fellow dancer Philip Askew restaged a piece of their choreography for an Ivies at Cunningham performance, having the visual record of the original performance was useful even if it was, as she puts it, “already frozen in the past.”
Emery LeCrone, a professional choreographer who has set pieces on CBC, adds that it is essential to know the work that has come before her. Video has allowed her to study the works of Balanchine, Forsythe, and other choreographers, as well as given her insight into what makes their choreography so effective. Moreover, she says, video allows young artists to see their work critically and revise it.
Choreographers, then, must choose how to preserve their work based on their resources and on their comfort with the various forms, while remaining mindful of the fact that works recorded by more than one method are more likely to survive. When debating how best to preserve choreography, it is important to remember that the final goal is to make sure that these dances continue to be performed.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to a “disappearing” art show called “A Book About Death.” Approximately 500 artists had each sent in 500 copies of a postcard about death, and those attending the show were meant to take postcards with them when they left, gradually depleting the supply. In practice, however, the show demonstrated an unwillingness to let anything disappear without some record of it: People roamed around snapping photos and taking videos, while others scrambled to gather entire collections of their own. In preserving choreography, the aim should not be to acquire boxes of videos and files filled with notes that simply suffocate on shelves, like the postcards surely stuffed in drawers and forgotten. Instead, these memories should be used to allow forgotten dances to breathe again.