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At the Vanishing Point: Images
of Dance in Archives and on Stage
Erik Näslund
(Stockholm)
Documentation et Art de
l'Acteur
Records and Images of the Art of the Performer
18ème Congrès
International, Stockholm 3-7 septembre1990 / 18th
International Congress, Stockholm 3-7 September 1990
Editor: Barbro Stribolt (Drottningholms Teatermuseum).
Stockholm: 1992, p. 28-32
Is dance the most
neglected of all the arts? I am very tempted to answer
"yes" on this question. Dancers are still, very
often looked upon as belonging to a less decent
profession, meaning dance is viewed as frivolous art. The
other arts have their own academies: here in Sweden,
there is the Swedish Academy for literature, the Music
Academy for the music and the Academy of Art for painting
and sculpture. But it is very characteristic that there
is no Academy for the art of movement. We take for
granted that every symphony orchestra in this country
should have its own home, its own concert hall. But the
world famous Cullberg Ballet had to wait twenty-three
years before it now finally, in Spring 1991, can perform
not on its very own stage, but at least on a stage that
is being dedicated to the dance.
The House of Dance here in Stockholm will be opened in
January 1991, joining a theatre for dance with the Dance
Museum. The opening will be an historical event in the
history of dance in Sweden. Finally it seems as if dance
is being taken seriously.
There is of course a reason - or probably several reasons
- why dance has been and still is not taken as seriously
as its sister arts and why it suffers from a big handicap
in comparison with literature, art or music. Dance has
been discounted from serious cultural contention because
it has been so hard to know exactly how it looked like.
It has not been possible to document dance in the way
literature, music and art has survived to our time.
You can read Shakespeare's plays, Mozart's scores or
touch upon the sculptures of Rodin, but you can't see how
the very first Swan Lake looked like. Dance is the
most volatile of the arts. Dance exists at a perpetual
vanishing point. At the moment of creation it is gone. It
disappears in the very act of materializing. No other art
is so hard to catch, so impossible to hold. When Virginia
Woolf, the reknown British novelist, heard Richard
Wagner's operas at Bayreuth in 1909 she felt that there
were immense problems in dealing with this new sound and
that these problems aroused directly from the fact that
the music was heard only once. Today's listeners have an
abundance of recordings to listen to and it is without
any doubt a fact that this availability has been of great
importance for the development of analytical and
scholarly studies in music.
The situation is even better for the literary interested
who can compare almost every literary form with some
earlier form and can measure the achievement by some
familiar standard.
But he who wants to go back to that evening in Moscow in
March 1877 when Swan Lake was seen for the very
first time, he is left in despair. The situation is
somewhat, I say somewhat, better with the second version
of the same ballet presented by Petipa and Ivanov in St
Petersburg in 1895. This edition has at least survived in
parts, according to what is called tradition. But what
about Minotauros by the reknown Swedish
choreographer Birgit Åkesson, how did it look like when
it was premiered at the Stockholm Opera in 1958. It is
impossible to control. Dance is indeed hard to catch.
This quick disappearance has also posed problems
concerning the copyright of the choreographer.What is
written down is always protected and thus also the music
and the libretto of a ballet, but the problem is what
makes dance become dance, the movement itself. Today the
situation is like this: the choreography is protected if
it exists in writing, in some countries also if it is
"visible" on film or video.
In the U.S., for instance, the artist's copyright is
valuable if the choreographer sends a copy on video or
film of his composition to the Library of Congress in
Washington, exactly the same procedure as with literary
works.
During centuries there have been several attempts to find
a system to fixate the movement of dance in writing, but
it is not until our time that two systems have been
developed which have turned out to be useful in practice:
Rudolf von Laban developed his system in the twenties and
Joan and Rudolf Benesh theirs in the fifties.
Today many companies have employed their choreologists or
notators who write down the repertory - most of these
choreologists are educated in the Benesh system. With
these "scores" the choreographic composition
can be both proved - touched upon - and preserved.
But does that mean that the ballet itself has been
preserved? Do you get a skeleton or a body of flesh and
blood?
Two recent productions of Bronislava Nijinska's Les
Noces - originally produced in 1923 for Diaghilew's
Ballets Russes - put the question under a flashing light.
One production was done by a choreologist following a
Benesh-notated score. The other one was staged by
Nijinska's daughter Irina.
The one produced after the notated score was accurate
down to every little movement, but lacked the spirit. The
one staged by the daughter might not have been absolutely
accurate in every little detail, but captured the flesh
and the blood. With more and more ballets being notated,
the staging of them will also become more and more a
matter of interpretation, as is the situation in the
opera field. He who wants can sit down with the score in
his lap and listen to, for instance, Richard Strauss' Der
Rosenkavalier on record or on stage. Every little
note by Strauss is there in the score - but then it is a
matter of interpretation for the conductor to decide what
exactly Strauss means with his notation "ziemlich
lebhaftes Walzertempo" (moderately lively waltz
tempo) in the great waltz scene of Baron Ochs in the
second act - how much "moderately" did Strauss
mean is the question.
The matter of interpretation becomes even more evident in
the light of the development in dance during the past
decade: reviving old ballets has almost become an
industry. In Europe and in the States "lost"
ballets are reappearing: Vaslav Nijinsky's Le sacre du
Printemps, Bronislava Nijinska's Le train bleu
and Rondo capriccioso, Michel Fokine's Paganini,
George Balanchine's Cotillon - the list goes on
and on.
Clearly, this is a trend of today, although one should be
aware of the fact that already Marius Petipa and Serge
Diaghilew, for instance, were into resurrecting the past.
But what is new today is the idea to create a replica of
the original, even when this means stripping away details
that accrued during its performance life.
As an attitude toward the past, such historicism is new.
New is also the interest in works belonging to the
twentieth-century repertory. As the twentieth century
wanes, and one after another of its choreographic great
works begin to collect dust, a run has started on
especially the works of Diaghilew's Ballets Russes and
its successors. The trend is, of course, welcome, since
it adds to our knowledge of the past. But it is also very
problematic, because it rests on assumptions whose
application to dance is difficult. One is the existence
of a fixed original; a second that this can be
duplicated; a third, that accuracy alone is a guarantee
of historical truth. Two contrasting definitions of
authenticity seem to exist - one concerns the possibility
to recreate the choreography, the other about its spirit.
The question is this: what is most important, to capture
every little movement or being true to the spirit of the
choreographer and his work.
To provide help in this trend of recreating the past, the
dance archives, libraries and museums can be of great
importance. The Royal Danish Ballet presented last spring
an interesting recreation of a "lost" ballet by
August Bournonville, Thrymskviden, last seen in
Copenhagen in 1905. The recreation was staged by Elsa
Marianne von Rosen and Allan Fidericia and they based
their production not only on the resources available in
different archives and libraries in Copenhagen but also
on a wealth of material found here in Stockholm, notably
a rehearsal score with copious notes from the stage
manager on the original production and detailed
descriptions of the costumes.
The producers had made every effort to get back to
Bournonville's original intentions, but also made it
clear that cuts had to be made in order to present the
work for an audience of today. Thus the producers did not
want to use the word recreation for their work but called
it instead "choreographic retelling". It was
made clear that what the audience now saw was not a
ballet identical to the one audiences saw in Copenhagen
in 1868.
Bournonville himself never had any illusions about his
ballets surviving very long in the repertory of the Royal
Danish Ballet after his death. Perhaps, he says in the
last part of his memoirs, that a couple of the best
ballets will be preserved for posterity as "national
property". It turned out to go even better than
Bournonville ever dreamed of. Today nine ballets can be
performed in productions coming - in certain cases -
fairly close to original versions - thanks to a body
tradition handed down from one dancer to another, from
one ballet master to another.
But during more than a century Bournonville has been
polished and shaped by performance after performance and
the Bournonville ballets we see today certainly do not
look like they did hundred or even fifty years ago. So
trying to bring old ballets back to life immediately
brings to question: true to whom and to what? True to the
performance style hundred years ago or true to the spirit
of the choreographer? And who could ever talk about an
authentic Bournonville?
What living images of the history of dance have been
preserved to our days? Before coming here today I tried
to go through what we can find in our living library of
dance. It is disappointingly little. Most of the moving
images have vanished, whereas the most trivial little
poem by any poet has survived because it has been
preserved in print or writing. There is a great interest
today in the earlier forms of social dancing and here it
is possible to reconstruct what has otherwise vanished
thanks to the many dancing books once published by
various dance masters. These books offer a rich material
of images for the one who can decode them.
Mary Skeaping, the British dance historian and ballet
Mistress, certainly could ,and during her régime as
director of the Royal Swedish Ballet 1953-62 she
introduced a suite of historical ballets at the
Drottningholm Court Theatre. But nevertheless, these
ballets by Skeaping can't be placed under the
classification of reconstruction but under the one of
pastiche, as a suggestion of how theatrical dance may
have looked like during the 18th century.
Skeaping's great achievement to try to imagine the image
of the dancers 200 years ago, has been continued here in
Sweden by Regina Beck-Friis and Ivo Cramér; and
Skeaping's and Cramér's productions have even found
their way to France where they have been performed with
great success by the Paris Opera Ballet.
Last year Mr. Cramér recreated La Fille mal gardée
for the Ballet de Nantes - with the original music from
1789, found by Cramér, after many years of research and
hunting, in the library of the Music Academy here in
Stockholm. The very steps which the first choreographer
Mr. Jean Auberval created in 1789 have of course
vanished,and Mr. Cramér thus had to create a pastiche of
the style of the 18th century. There exists only one
ballet which has survived from this period in a fairly
authentic version, The Whims of Cupid and the Ballet
Master, staged by Vicenzo Galeotti for the Royal
Theatre in Copenhagen three years before La Fille mal
gardée, in 1786.
This charming piece has survived into our time thanks to
the tradition of being handed down from dancer to dancer,
from ballet master to ballet master. From the romantic
period very little has been preserved.
Giselle from 1841, considered as one of the
highlights of the era, can we watch today thanks to a
Russian tradition. The original disappeared from the
Paris Opera repertory in 1868 but was later revived by
Marius Petipa for the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg.
It was this Russian reconstruction that Serge Diaghilew's
Ballets Russes presented in Paris 1910 - without very
much of success - and it was the same version that found
its way back to the Paris Opera in 1924 and to London in
1934. And today Giselle is one of the cornerstones
in the repertory of all classical ballet companies,
thanks to the fact that the ballet survived in Russia but
not in France.
Many changes have of course been made during all these
years of performances, with a lot of conscious or
unconscious editing that repertory life inevitably
brings. The situation is similar with the heritage that
The Royal Danish Ballet possesses and of which I have
already talked and which heritage actually is our best
source to the romantic ballet. Even if what we can see
today in Copenhagen is not exactly Bournonville's own
compositions. The authenticity is more questionable than
the facade wants to permit.
The situation is even worse with the great classics which
today form the repertory foundation of every ballet
company. But the performing of the ballet classics is a
very young tradition, it has only existed some decades
and the existence of the ballet classics is dependent on
one man only: Nicholas Sergeyev, the Russian ballet
master who occupied the role of régisseur at the
Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg at the turn of this
century.
He notated - with help of a system developed by Vladimir
Stepanov - the repertory of the company, Giselle, The
Sleeping Beauty, Swanlake, The Nutcracker, Coppélia,
and when he left Russia in 1918, he took his notations
with him in his luggage. He was to become the rescuer of
the Russian classical ballet. He staged these mentioned
ballets particularly in London in the thirties and from
there his notated records of the great Russian era took
off on an odyssey around the world - and a repertory of
classics was created. Thanks to Sergeyev the original
versions of these ballets have survived in a fairly
accurate condition, but we also know that Sergeyev made
many changes in them, why the authenticity can be
questioned on many points.
We have already seen what great interest there is today
in reviving the ballets from the Diaghilew/Ballets Russes
era.
Many of the most famous works, Petrouchka,
Scheherazade, Spectre de la rose, have survived in a
bodily tradition, often through the dancers, more or less
talented, who danced in the companies formed after
Diaghilew's death in 1929 under names like Ballets Russes
de Monte-Carlo, Original Ballet Russe and so on. This is
why the authenticity of all these versions staged
"after" Fokine and "after" Nijinsky
are so questionable. How much is left of what Fokine
actually choreographed and staged and how much has been
added by dancers and ballet masters in the performance
tradition? It seems as an almost impossible task today to
try to produce Fokine's Petrouchka, it demands
both a great knowledge of Fokine's choreography and his
style, but it also demands a great portion of love to
make it come alive.
And from the repertory of Diaghilew's rival in Paris
between 1920 and 1925, Rolf de Maré's Ballets Suédois
exists practically nothing, even if the Dance Museum here
in Stockholm from de Maré inherited all the sketches,
all the scores, all the photographic images of the
company. After de Maré closed down his company, he
stayed on in Paris and founded Les Archives
Internationales de la Danse in 1931. It was an historical
event, since this was the very first time that dance,
this the most ephemeral of all the arts, received its own
research institute and a museum totally consecrated to
itself. You can even say, perhaps, that this was also the
first time that dance was taken seriously, that dance
existed without help from the other arts, existed
independently. After the second world war de Maré
dissolved his Archives and one part went to Stockholm to
serve as the foundation for the Dance Museum, established
in 1950 and opened in 1953.
There exist several ways for a museum or an archive to
register the images and memories of dance. One is of
course to use the means of video and film to memorize
what is happening today and under the patronage of UNESCO
there exists today at the Dance Museum in Stockholm an
international videotheque. In a hundred years, hopefully,
it will be possible to watch the great performers and the
great works of dance of today. It's a revolution for the
dance!
I believe that a museum can take part in the dance life
in two ways. Firstly, to try to help people to understand
what dance, in its broadest sense, is and can be.
Secondly by being a sort of depository for the artists
and dance companies and give them a sense of
consciousness of the history of the dance - and perhaps
in this way also make the companies and the theatres more
positive to their own history and their own archives.
Denis Diderot one day said that a "dance is a
poem". No one contradicts him. But it is necessary
to document these "poems" in order to make
dance one day an independent art.
18th Congress
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