Modern Meanings

WE MUST BEGIN with a definition. We're focusing on modern dance in this issue and we might reasonably ask the question: What is it? That was certainly an easier question to answer thirty years ago than it is today, because there seems to have been a surge of change in dance since then, and there are many questions being asked about the direction in which dance has been heading. Sister Wendy Beckett, the Carmelite nun with a passionately pro-art presence on TV and in numerous books, says that wherever you find art, you are dealing with humans. Art changes, and it may change beyond recognition. But just because art changes doesn't mean that it has gotten better, or, as we like to say, that it has somehow evolved. It just is, there before us.

Here's a story that illustrates a decisive moment in the evolution of dance.

We all called her Martha, plain Martha, even those of us who quaked and stepped backwards in her presence, convinced as we were that we might get burn blisters or worse if we allowed ourselves to be drawn too close. This particular gathering in the early 1970s was, I think, the first that Martha Graham attended following a long illness from which she had not been expected to recover. In characteristically dulcet, reasoned tones she announced that the so-called "war" between modern dance and ballet was over! She told us that her modern dance works--among the epic masterpieces of the twentieth century--should now be called ballets, a term previously reserved for the classic form of theater dance that had its origins in the Renaissance courts of Europe. Modern dance, too, had European origins, if you went back to Delsarte at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and understood that the modernism was a revolt against Victorian culture.

But it was American modern dance, with its emphasis on weight and gravity and the earth, that would bear the message back to the rest of the world In the first half of the twentieth century. And as with many suppressed minorities, the modern dancers fought long and hard to define and defend themselves. They needed a clearly identifiable enemy, and ballet was it. Thus, the war, which drew passionate and opinionated disciples.

Perhaps Graham had already made this pronouncement somewhere else, and perhaps many times before, and perhaps others had said it as well. But her intuitive sense of theater and her ability to grab hold of the moment made her declaration stick like glue. Only a few among us dared to question this pivotal goddess of modern dance with any real persistence. Anna Kisselgoff was the most courageous, I thought at the time: What, exactly, do you mean? she asked.

Nobody knew for sure. The dance war stories were legendary, like famous battles of the American Revolution. Graham, in fact, had played her own role in making herself one of the frontline fire-throwing renegades. But what worded people thirty years ago was the question: Did Graham's new declaration mean that modern dance would overrun the unsteady stages of theatrical dance, that ballet would recede, despised and discredited, into the dust of dance history? Was Graham, we speculated, perhaps announcing her own demise, the end of her technique and the disappearance of her extraordinary repertory?

Looking back, I'm not at all sure that she knew, either. There was quite a bit of the old blarney left in this extremely complicated New Englandy-Irish lady yet, and she was struggling to redefine her life, as well as her art. Ballet was now an acceptable addition to modern dance training. It would take a generation of dancers to prove her assertion.

WHAT DOES THE term modern mean today? Contemporary dancers and choreographers seemed the perfect group to turn to for definitions. Some declined outright to comment at all, or claimed that they simply hadn't thought about it very much. After considering the question for about six seconds, Twyla Tharp said it was a hard question but she thought that what we call modern dance must refer to certain dance forms and techniques prior to the 1950s. This is, I believe, the period we now call historical modern dance. Other follow-up forms are usually defined by their decades and the reigning aesthetic philosophies of the moment.

I asked Paul Taylor, the greatest living choreographer today. He said with sly avoidance that he had no idea what modern dance was any longer. He just makes dances, some good ones, some bad ones, and it's damn difficult work, low-paying, unappreciated, never-ending. He doesn't call his dances anything in particular--oh, they could be called modern, yes, because of his debt to Martha, among others, for those early years. But that was then and this is now and he didn't know any longer. Nope.

And so I turned elsewhere.

I asked two of the most talented and widely recognized fast-rising young choreographers of their generation, Stanton Welch and Christopher Wheeldon. Both are extremely articulate, both speak with knowledge and wisdom, which is also evident in their ballets, which are now being seen around the world. Chris said that many young talents today are afraid to use ballet vocabulary; nobody dares use pure ballet to create new works; and that the work of most so-called contemporary choreographers today is based on ballet technique with some modern dance influences to varying degrees. This results in a form he called generic. Generic dances use the eclectic training and possibilities of range embodied in today's professional dancers, who are better trained than those of any previous generation.