PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF DANCE CRITICISM

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY AND DANCE CRITICISM

by Julie Charlotte Van Camp

Copyright Julie Charlotte Van Camp 1981

All Rights Reserved

NOTE: This dissertation may be downloaded, saved, printed, and reproduced for personal, educational, and scholarly uses, but only if this complete permissions notice and the full copyright notice are included with any such uses. This dissertation may not be sold or otherwise used for commercial purposes. For commercial use, please contact the author.

The page numbers from the original dissertation are included in the text here as follows: /p. x.

Endnotes from the original dissertation are included in the text here as follows: (x)

Aestheticians have typically ignored the problems of dance criticism, or given them only the most cursory treatment, which is understandable, given the complexity of dance. (1) A performing art, it involves not only human movement, but also music, scenery, lighting, costumes, acting, plots, and even, in some experimental works, poetry-reading and videotapes. Only recently have any philosophers attempted full-length analytical works of dance, although some have claimed that certain comprehensive aesthetic theories also apply to dance and others have commented briefly on dance in discussions of other artforms.

As the philosophy of dance criticism is largely undeveloped, it would be premature to attempt a comprehensive theory here. Nor is this intended as a survey of dance, the history of dance, or dance criticism. These areas provide a wealth of important examples for the issues to be discussed, but they do not constitute, in themselves, philosophical discourse or analysis.

Among the many unexamined philosophical issues in dance, some of the most difficult and important involve evaluation. What is the meaning of "good" as used to evaluate dance? Are

there objective, ultimate principles justifying judgments of aesthetic value? What are those principles, and how are they justified? How are specific critical reasons related to and supported by these ultimate principles and by a work of art itself? Before these questions can be properly explored, however, more preliminary issues must be addressed concerning the object of criticism.

This dissertation identifies several of these philosophical problems concerning the object of criticism in dance, many suggested or implied, although not always systematically examined, by aestheticians, historians, theoreticians, and critics of dance. They are important problems, in part because they involve special characteristics of dance not shared by such major artforms as painting, music, and theater, and thus are less likely to have been addressed adequately by aesthetic (2) theories explaining other artforms. The problems here should also provide additional perspective and challenges to the development of a better understanding of the arts generally.

A. Philosophical Work on Dance: Why So Little Has Been Done

The existence of a dearth of philosophical work on dance is beyond dispute, but there is disagreement over the explanation for the shortage, and even its undesireability, with the blame spread generously among philosophers and dance-world alike.

Since philosophy involves analysis of other things, one

simple explanation is the near-absence of a subject. Despite the long history of dance in religious and social rituals, its emergence as an artform is fairly recent, and its acceptance as anything other than an esoteric obsession of a small cult occurred only within recent decades. (3)

Even after emerging as an artform, dance has changed so continuously and rapidly that the very identification of the object of study remains difficult. (4) Dance is also unusually complex, compared with the simpler, "purer" artforms of painting and music. Dance is an "impure" mixture of unequal parts, of unclear relative importance, of human movement, music, theater, acting, mime, and the visual dimensions provided by scenery and costuming. (5)

The non-verbal nature of dance also contributes to the difficulty of articulating even its elementary characteristics, (6) as does its ephemeral existence for only brief periods of time, (7) usually unrecorded for further study.

Other artforms, most notably music, are also non-verbal and ephemeral. Theoretical writing on dance, however, has also suffered from a fundamental anti-intellectualism that has infected many artists and writers in dance. Philosopher Curtis Carter blames those ". . . dancers, writers, and educators who separate sensibility from intelligence, . . ." and misleadingly characterize dance as an art of sensibility along. (8) Carter suggests that the ". . . principal source of confusion in the understanding of dance" is "the mistaken assumption that abstractions do not apply to dance." (9) Selma

Jeanne Cohen, a dance historian and theoretician, also criticizes dance practitioners for their skepticism of scholarship. (10)

This anti-intellectualism can be explained, in part, by the dance-world's defensiveness against Puritanical attitudes prevalent in Western culture. As suggested by critic Marcia B. Siegel: ". . . dancers suffer a heritage of conflict, between the primal, total expressiveness of which their art is capable and the puritanical attitudes that society has clamped on it for hundreds of years." (11) Philosophers in particular have been charged by their colleague, David Michael Levin, with misunderstanding the human body and denying "the reality of the body's sensuous presence," which, in turn, explains their lack of interest in dance: "If philosophers cannot even develop an adequate account of the human body, how can they be expected to say anything true and interesting about dance?" (12) The human body is involved either as an instrument or an object of representation in such artforms as opera, theater, sculpture, and painting, which have received more attention from philosophers. Dance alone, however, uses the living, moving body in performance as the primary instrument of the artform, giving plausibility to the charge of philosophical Puritanism. But it is clearly unfair to blame only philosophers for the underdevelopment of dance philosophy, in view of the obstacles amply provided by the dance community and the nature of the artform itself.

For the few writers and scholars defying these discouragements, limited research materials and methodologies present practical obstacles. Until recently, with the growth of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, source material was very scarce and inaccessible. (13) Even now, the valuable resource of film and videotapes of actual performances are often non-existent or unavailable to the scholar because of viewing restrictions imposed by choreographers. (14) Dance works of previous centuries are even more inaccessible because they were preserved, if at all, in crude notational systems, written notes, and sketches, (15) and the memories of dancers. Limited opportunities for advanced study of the theoretical aspects of dance have also contributed to the dearth of scholarship. (16)

These problems have hindered dance scholars of all kinds, the historian and theoretician, along with the philosopher. But the philosopher has had an additional hurdle, the late development in philosophy of aesthetics as an analytic discipline. Until recently, aesthetics was usually pursued, if at all, as a minor divertissement from the serious business of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. (17) Although dance historians described and analyzed movement, they too failed to systematically address the philosophical questions of the nature of "beauty" in dance, what dance is, and how critical judgments are justified. (18)

Only in the last few decades have aestheticians made a systematic effort to apply the analytical tools of twentieth-

century philosophy to the problems of art and art criticism. (19) Even though philosophers as early as Plato and Aristotle mused briefly on beauty and the arts, contemporary philosophy is still identifying basic questions and formulating basic principles of aesthetics. Specific analyses of individual artforms have, quite properly, lagged behind the more rudimentary development of the field. While a discipline is still trying to master the intellectual equivalent of a demi-plié, it is not expected to attempt double assemblé turns.

Especially for those aestheticians who consider the proper domain of aesthetics to be the analysis of art criticism, philosophical work on dance has also been hampered by a dearth of dance criticism. (20) Traditionally, choreographic art has not been widely recognized as an important subject of criticism. (21) Only recently has there been a significant number of major dance critics. (22)

The dearth of philosophical work on dance thus results from many factors, including the recent development of the artform and criticism of the artform; the complexities of dance, especially its non-verbal, ephemeral, and mixed nature; the anti-intellectualism of practitioners and the puritanism of intellectuals; and the late development of philosophical aesthetics.

B. Philosophical Problems of Dance Criticism

Most writing on dance has not been philosophical: the history of dance, the biographies of dancers, evaluation and

description of dancers' performances and choreographers' creations, technical discussions of dance technique and the mechanics of production, and the sociological and ethnological context of dance. These theoretical areas might, of course, be the subject matter - the raw data - of philosophical inquiry.

This is not to say that academic philosophers have exclusive jurisdiction over philosophical thought. Glimmers of philosophical insight can be culled from the writings of choreographers, dancers, critics, and devotees, in their much broader articulation and conceptualization of dance. Professional philosophers are more likely to produce comprehensive, systematic examinations of philosophical issues, and to identify and analyze philosophical insights in the writings of others, (23) but who is or is not a "professional philosopher" is a different question from what makes an issue philosophical.

Philosophical issues of dance initially can be identified and categorized according to traditional subject areas of philosopher. Metaphysical issues include the ontological status of dance. Is a dance solely the physical bodies of the dancers, moving in time and space, at a particular performance? Is a dance the total of all bodies that have ever performed the dance? the choreographer's mental concept of the choreographic design? the written notation for the choreography? the perceptions and thoughts of the audience? the collection of all perceptions of all audiences who have ever

seen a performance of the work?

Another metaphysical issue is the identity of a dance. How is a performance identified as Giselle, and not Swan Lake? What are the criteria by which such an identification is made? Is it the familiar music? If the original score has been re-arranged, with new sections added at a later time, is the ballet still Giselle? What if a familiar production of Giselle were altered solely by substituting the score for Swan Lake in place of Adams' traditional music? Would this still be a performance of Giselle? Would it be Swan Lake? Is identity determined by the well-known plot and characters? If the ending of the Swan Lake plot were changed, would that performance still be Swan Lake? What aspects of a ballet simply cannot be changed without changing its identity as Ballet X?

Epistemological issues include whether audiences learn anything from watching dance. Do they acquire knowledge in some verbal or non-verbal sense? Does dance have meaning? What are "knowledge" and "meaning" in the context of dance? Are dance movements symbolic? Do they represent things? Do dancers express things? What do spectators perceive when they watch dance, merely bodies in motion, or movement somehow invested with additional meaning?

A very different approach to philosophy that has had some appeal to writers on dance is a phenomenological approach of describing the "perceptually visible," the "surface" phenomenon, both that of the experience of dancing and

of the visual perception of dance. (24) Seymour Kleinman characterizes phenomenology as

. . . a descriptive approach to experience which attempts to capture the meaning and significance of an act, a behavior, an art object, or in fact anything or anybody encountered in the "life-world." The major tenet is "return to the things themselves." Go directly to the experience and take it for what it is. (25)

Although this approach has enjoyed a certain popularity and is a useful reminder of the importance of perceptual qualities, it rejects the additional insights possible from theoretical, analytic work on other cognitive and evaluative dimensions of dance and will not be considered in detail in the following chapters.

More philosophically-inclined dance theorists, critics, and historians have been especially preoccupied with phenomenology and the work of Susanne K. Langer, while philosophers have tended to simply include dance as an afterthought in more comprehensive theories. Nor has anyone attempted to systematically identify and study certain foundations of philosophical analysis of dance. Gertrude Lippincott's 1949 sketch of aesthetic areas needing study is limited to: (1) the underlying principles of modern, "expressional" dance, (2) the relationship of dance to the broader context of politics, morals, and religion, (3) "the problem of literal representation or imitation and the relation of art to nature," and (4) "'the problem of making a match between an emotional experience and a form that has been conceived but not created,'" that is, analysis of "the creative impulse

and process." (26) Only the third area is of obvious and important interest to analytic philosophy. The first is an issue of dance theory, but not clearly philosophy. The second concerns the sociology of dance, and the fourth, the psychology of dance.

Other literature discussed here has addressed a miscellany of topics which do not coalesce into any foundation for an eventual comprehensive theory. For example, Wilfred A. Hofmann, noting the "relative immaturity of dance aesthetics," focused in 1973 on evaluative issues: "Are there objectively beautiful movements? which movements are considered beautiful? Why?" (27) But after briefly surveying historical uses of the concept of beauty, he turns to "the inductive, empirical method" to identify "which movement phenomena call up that pleasure which characterizes aesthetic enjoyment," (28) concluding "that beautiful movement is organically compatible, functional, clear, well-proportioned, and dynamic." (29) His analysis is ultimately less philosophical than personal and descriptive.

The philosophical issues of dance addressed in this dissertation concern the object of criticism and are basic to further philosophical analysis, especially because they involve unusual features of dance which might render philosophical work regarding other artforms suspect or less than obviously valid when applied to dance. The problems are as follows:

What is dance? (Ch. II). - Attempts to define dance

stake out a domain of human enterprise within which the critic works, along with psychologists, historians, philosophers, and other theorists of dance. Once this domain is identified, further analyses can proceed to identify more specific types and methodologies of discourse. A prerequisite to philosophical analysis of dance is an understanding of the artform itself, developed in part by examining possible definitions of "dance" for adequacy. Does dance possess distinctive features which set it apart from other artforms and other human activities? What theories and assumptions about normative, metaphysical, and epistemological issues are stated or implied in definitions proposed by various writers? What characteristics of dance are of special significance to other philosophical issues? The development of definitions has also been an important part of the reasoning in dance criticism. They are offered not merely as descriptions of what dance is, but of what dance and dance performances ought to be. Even if definition is ultimately not possible, the attempt provides important understanding of the concept examined.

What is the philosophical significance of the multiple media of dance? (Ch. III). - An unusual and important characteristic of dance, its use of several different artistic media, has special significance for the ontological status and the evaluation of dance performances. What is the nature of the existence of the thing being evaluated? What is the relative importance of each medium in the overall assessment

of the dance performance? Should critics evaluate the music, scenery, and costumes which are often part of a dance program? What is the significance of whether dance is an autonomous art or only an impure mixture of other pure artforms?

How is the identity of a work of art in dance established? (Ch. IV). - what is the work that is the object of criticism? How do critics evaluate what is shown in a dance program with regard to the work claimed to be shown? Identity theories relying exclusively on notational systems fail to explain identity in dance, consistently with actual practices, in part because of the liberal tolerance for variation in dance, the multiple media of the artform, and the use as the dance instrument of unique human bodies.

What is the proper object of criticism in dance, especially given the important role of production factors not perceivable in dance performances? (Ch. V). - The use for evaluation of information external to perceivable performances, especially information about creative processes and production factors, is common in actual practice by dance critics, but problematic for an anti-geneticist theory of aesthetic value restricting the proper aesthetic object to perceivable aspects of a performance.

In addressing these questions, philosophical analysis must explain the artform as it is actually practiced, appreciated, and evaluated. Consistency with philosophical theories regarding other artforms is important, but less so than explanatory adequacy. One reason why philosophical comment

on dance has sometimes been inadequate may be a reversal of these priorities. It is possible and to be hoped that much that philosophers have said about other artforms applies to dance, but this should be shown, not presumed. The unusual characteristics of dance, especially its multiple media and its use of the unique human body as instrument, may necessitate rejection of some philosophical theories attractive in explaining other artforms and new analysis in view of the characteristics of the artform of dance.

NOTES

(1) Unless otherwise stated, the use of the term "dance" will refer to the artform of dance, as opposed to recreational, ritualistic, or social dancing. Further, although some writers use the term 'ballet" to include all genres of the artform of dance, I will not follow that practice because of the narrower connotation of "ballet" as "classical dance" often understood today. Return to text

(2) "Aesthetics" is used here in the broad sense described by John Hospers as ". . . the branch of philosophy that is concerned with the analysis of concepts and the solution of problems that arise when one contemplates aesthetic objects;" in contrast, "philosophy of art covers a somewhat narrower area . . . , since it is concerned only with the concepts and problems that arise in connections with works of art and excludes, for example, that aesthetic experience of nature." "Problems of Aesthetics," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, I, 35-6.

The Oxford English Dictionary (1971) traces the history of the word from its use in Germany in the eighteenth century by Baumgarten as "'criticism of taste' considered as a science or philosophy," a use criticized by Kant, who preferred the more ancient sense of aesthetics as "'the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception.'" "Aesthetic," Vol. I, 147.

"Aesthetics" is sometimes used in dance writings to refer to any theoretical writing about art, or, sometimes, the collection of all theories about what art is and ought to be, but these uses seem unduly broad. On the other hand, the narrower sense of "aesthetics" as the philosophy of metacriticism does not yet enjoy universal acceptance. Return to text

(3) Critic Marcia Siegel points out the very short history of classical ballet: "The ballet repertory as handed down in the accepted oral-visual tradition dates back only La Fille Mal Gardee (1789), . . . it would be as if our music had started with Beethoven." "Waiting for the Past to Begin," in Growth of Dance in America, ed. By Edward Kamarck (Madison, Wisconsin: Arts in Society, 1973), p. 233.

Gertrude Lippincott cites, as one reason for the lack of interest by philosophers, the fact that dance ". . . has been considered a serious form of art for a relatively short period of time." "A Dancer's Note to Aestheticians," JAAC, VIII (1949), 98. Lippincott also details the interest in this country in the artform for the last several centuries. Return to text

(4) ". . . of all the arts dance has most successfully evaded extended scholarly and philosophical scrutiny by its unwillingness to stand still long enough to be examined."

Selma Jeanne Cohen, "Review: Dance Index," JAAC, XXX (Summer, 1972), 555. Return to text

(5) Louis Arnaud Reid characterizes "musical dancing" as one of the most "impure," "very mixed" arts, in that it appeals to more than one of the senses. Only "song and Opera" are more complex, to the point of being "compound," according to Reid's analysis. "A Criticism of Art as Form," in Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, ed. By John Hospers (New York: The Free Press, 1969), pp. 115-16.

Similarly, Virgil C. Aldrich has said: "Dancing is usually done to music, and is then an impure art, a mixture of two arts. Perhaps dancing is a minor art, as a hybrid between sculpture and music." Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), p. 66.

This complexity has resulted in an absence of "an independent identity" for dance, which has contributed to the lack of interest in theoretical writing: ". . . it has been considered an adjunct of other arts like music and drama, or as a part of physical education, rather than as an entity in its own right." Curtis L. Carter, "Intelligence and Sensibility in the Dance," in Growth of Dance in America, p. 213. Return to text

(6) Andre Levinson observes: "Nothing is more difficult than to reduce the essential esthetic realities of the dance to verbal formulas. Our ordinary methods of analysis are of very little use in dealing with this art, which is primarily a discipline of movement. . . . We are exceedingly ill equipped for the study of things in flux - even for considering motion itself as such." "The Spirit of the Classical Dance," Theatre Arts Monthly, IX (March, 1925), 176-7.

Anna Kisselgoff provides an especially candid admission of the difficulty verbalizing about dance: "Personally, this writer has never felt a dancer exert such compelling power over a viewer. If it is easier to describe the audience reaction than the actual dimension of Miss Alonso's performance, this is because the essence of that performance had some kind of ineffable magnetism. . . . It was a performance that defies analysis, and that's why it was so great." "Dance: Alicia Alonso In 'Spartacus' Excerpt," New York Times, July 23, 1979. Return to text

(7) "All dance exists in the moment. As with other art forms which exist in time, dance appears and then is gone." Joanne Friesen, "Perceiving Dance," Journal of Aesthetic Education, IX (October, 1975), 106. Return to text

(8) "Intelligence and Sensibility in the Dance," p. 210. Return to text

(9) Ibid., p. 213. Return to text

(10) "The State of Sylphs in Academe: Dance Scholarship in America," in Growth of Dance in America, p. 222. (Hereinafter referred to as "State of Sylphs.") Return to text

(11) "Waiting for the Past to Begin," p. 228. Other writers have similarly noted this puritanical disdain of dance. Ellen W. Jacobs, in explaining the recent surge in interest in dance, says that in the last decade, ". . . America finally began to loosen her chastity belt. . . . America was shedding the skins of her puritanical past, a past that had religiously taught its children to divide themselves into three parts: mind, body, and spirit. . . . A concern with and display of the body had traditionally met with severe criticism or, at best, with nervous snickers." "Why Everybody Suddenly Loves Dance," in Growth of Dance in America, p. 267. See also, Lippincott, "A Dancer's Note to Aestheticians," 100-1. Return to text

(12) "Philosophers and the Dance," Ballet Review, VI, No. 2 (1977), 74.

John Martin, long-time dance critic for the New York Times, charges that philosophers have "deliberately snubbed" dance, but he himself speaks of the enterprise of philosophy in petty, disparaging terms; e.g., "There is no intention here of expounding an aesthetic philosophy, and the right is reserved to repudiate any or all of the grandiose definitions [of art] about to be given the day after tomorrow." The Modern Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, Inc., 1933), pp. 34-5. Return to text

(13) See Cohen, "State of Sylphs," p. 224; Cohen, "Review: Dance Index," 555; Lippincott, "A Dancer's Note to Aestheticians," 101. Return to text

(14) Siegel, "Waiting for the Past to Begin," p. 231. Return to text

(15) See, e.g., Cohen, "State of Sylphs," p. 225. Return to text

(16) Ibid., pp. 223, 226. Return to text

(17) Joseph Margolis has said, for example, "It is, I think, . . . a professional cliché (and a true one) that, until relatively recent years (with important exceptions), treatises in aesthetics 'rounded out' philosophical systems, and professional discussions were led by people not especially well-informed about the arts. Also, it is nothing more than honest reporting to say that professional philosophy has, in the past, been rather suspicious of the credentials of specialists in aesthetics." Philosophy Looks at the Arts

(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962), p. 6

John Fisher said recently, "A couple of generations ago work in aesthetics in America was being done by professionals, but hardly professional aestheticians, for there was no profession. The pioneers were men like Dewey, Prall, Boas, Pepper, Munro. They were lucid, but the subject itself was unclear." "Editorial," JAAC, XXXVII (Fall, 1978), 1. Return to text

(18) "No one has ever tried to portray the intrinsic beauty of a dance step, its innate quality, its esthetic reason for being. This beauty is referred to the smile of the dancer, to the picturesque quality of his costumes, to the general atmosphere surrounding him, to the synchronizing of his bodily rhythm with the beat of the music or again to the emotional appeal of the dramatic libretto of the ballet: but never is it shown to lie in the contours of the movement itself, in the constructive values of an attitude or in the thrilling dynamics of a leap in the air." Levinson, "The Spirit of the Classic Dance," 166-67. See also, Lippincott's brief survey of more theoretically-inclined dance critics, "A Dancer's Note to Aestheticians," 97. Return to text

(19) According to Margolis, "Possibly the single most important factor was the founding of the American Society for Aesthetics and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1942). What the Journal and the Society made possible was a sense of a repertory of fairly precisely formulated questions of an analytic sort and a sense of a continuing responsible exchange on those questions." Philosophy Looks at the Arts, p. 6. Return to text

(20) Monroe C. Beardsley is the foremost proponent of the view that aesthetics is ". . . the philosophy of criticism, or metacriticism." Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1958), p. 4. (Hereinafter referred to as "Aesthetics.") ". . . neither aesthetics nor criticism can be carried on independently of the other . . . We can't do aesthetics until we have some critical statements to work on." Ibid. Return to text

(21) Stephen Coburn Pepper, "The Aesthetic Work of Art," in Art and Philosophy, ed. By W. E. Kennick (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964), p. 122). Return to text

(22) Deborah Jowitt, "A Private View of Criticism," in Growth of Dance in America, p. 207.

Previously, dance criticism was written, if at all, by music critics. See, e.g., Martin, The Modern Dance, pp. 1-2. Return to text

(23) "Aesthetics, possibly more than any other branch of philosophy . . . , gathers its contributions from a great many amateurs of philosophy. And this is worth our notice, because it suggests how quite spontaneous these philosophical questions are . . . but there are obvious dangers in these amateur contributions . . . . Philosophers are performing a service, then, seeking to sort out, in accord with the prevailing professional standards, the answers to essentially philosophical questions posed by art itself." Margolis, Philosophy Looks at the Arts, pp. 8-9. Return to text

(24) See, e.g., Levin, "Philosophers and the Dance," 76-7. Return to text

(25) "Essay Review: Phenomenology and the Dance," Journal of Aesthetic Education, II, 125 (October 1968). Return to text

(26) Lippincott, "A Dancer's Note to Aestheticians," 104. Return to text

(27) "Of Beauty and the Dance: towards an Aesthetics of Ballet," in Three Essays in Dance Aesthetics (New York: Dance Perspectives 55, 1973), p. 16. Return to text

(28) Ibid., p. 19. Return to text

(29) Ibid., p. 22. Return to text

Return to the beginning of the dissertation

Comments and questions are welcome: jvancamp@csulb.edu

Last updated: August 3, 1997