musicality
I’m home for thanksgiving and relaxing, but wanted to put in this paragraph from an article in the Oct. 23 New Yorker, by Joan Acocella. She’s talking about musicality in modern dance, and how it’s been lost–and yet is still yearned for by audiences. In this case she’s referring to a British choreographer who was trained as an Indian classical dancer and brings that sense of rhythm and music into his modern dance.
“Modern dance arose partly in opposition to ballet, and one of the fripperies of ballet that some early modern dancers were determined to throw off was subservience to music. We tend to locate modern dance’s split with music in the nineteen-sixties, with Judson Dance Theatre, but it began early in the century, and it hasn’t gone away. In every downtown dance venue, on every Saturday night, you can see performers doing just about anything except moving to a beat. But audiences are hungry for musical dancing, and they have found it, usually in other kinds of dance—in ballet, for example. Utterly empty ballets will often be frenetically applauded if they are performed to a rousing beat. A better example is “ethnic” dance. Why is the cheesy Riverdance such a hit? Why does the New York Flamenco Festival sell out? Because their shows are exciting musically. To come back to modern dance, what makes Mark Morris so popular? Why are the works of Ronald K. Brown the main draw of the Alvin Ailey company’s recent repertory? Partly because both men have taken their inspiration from music-bound ethnic forms—African dance in Brown’s case, Balkan dance and flamenco in Morris’s. As populations go on moving from Asia and Africa to Europe and America, this revival of musicality in modern dance will continue.”