I'm often asked how dance is preserved, then an hour later finding myself still rattling on about Labanotation. (Think of it, simply, as music notation where bodies become sounds that take up time and space.) Despite the thorough work of this written system - even the basics are meticulous - there is a debate within the dance community as to whether the pen can truly record and convey the dance. This is understandable: live concert dance, as any basic art theorist can shrug and mumble about, is ethereal, ethereal, and ethereal. But the dichotomy between dancers and notators is selfish, and far from self-serving; indeed, it makes for a bleak future at best in written dance preservation.
In Arthur Lubow's "Can Modern Dance Be Preserved?" (New York Times, 5 November 2009) the postmodern dances of the late Merce Cunningham receive especial attention. The old age and ailing health of the renowned choreographer sparked a quick plan to preserve his work - one that seemed counterintuitive at best. Cunningham's famous words suddenly spoke volumes to both the value and the preservational carelessness of his art:
Dance gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.If this is not carelessness, it is at least occupational hazard. As Lubow points out, Cunningham freed dance from dictatorial music, "charged it inventively with the chaotic overflow and technological buzz of contemporary life" (Lubow). These two steps (so to speak) both set his works apart from the dance canon prior and made it nearly impossibly difficult to recreate without the maker at the helm. One could argue that for all the details of a notation score there are infinitely more nuances in Cunningham dances, works that convert pure feeling into pure presentation.
Further problems arise with the infrastructure of most modern dance companies (inseparable choreographer and company), and with the teaching of dance "primarily from one dancer to another, 'body to body'" (Lubow). The alternative method - one taken by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, for instance - is to adopt new works into a repertoire, honoring gestalt over byline. (This of course presents its own problem, perhaps another issue entirely: with one choreographer or ten, artistic attitudes may be as nebulous as trends in the arts or as heavy as Martha Graham's heart. [In the case of Cunningham, chance and indeterminacy put an already abstracted process through a kaleidoscope.]) But in a single choreographer's work, for one company or otherwise, there must be a compromise. I am not convinced that preserving teh dance and honoring the dancemaker are mutually exclusive endeavors.
Lubow refers to the common reliance upon videotaping, the notion that it captures movement and presentation, if incompletely. But performances are not exact, and intentionally or not, Dick Caples (witty and wise Lar Lubovitch Dance Company's executive director) articulates exactly how choreographers hinder their own preservation when they fail to engage notators. "'No choreographer I know can do (Labanotation),'" he says, "'They don't trust giving it over to someone and saying "I can't check on you, but I am going to trust you"'" (Lubow).
A risk is already being taken when a choreographer places movement in the proverbial hands - the literal, risky bodies - of dancers. I accept the artistic distrust of a stranger fitting elaborate thoughts into columns, but there is no rule that this notator be a stranger. What if dancers could preserve their own steps? What if learning to dance and notate were the same as learning to speak and write? Without this dual endeavor, dance culture is making itself one of orators and no written language.
The "dance capsules" in the Cunningham trust are progressive, containing everything from choreographer's notes to pictures of stagecraft to videotapes and dancers' advice (Lubow). Leave it to the theorists to decide whether this threatens the fresh choreographic approaches that made work in the first place - now it's the responsibility of the recreator, a legacy left to the able and willing artists who can reinvent Cunningham indefinitely.
It is painful to consider that a life’s work will disappear, but it is also hard to think that it will be diminished by inexact performances, as fuzzy as fourth-generation photocopies. In establishing the trust and endorsing the extinction of the foundation, Cunningham seemed to be creating a structure as intelligent and farsighted as a Cunningham dance. But as any of his dancers will tell you, his steps are fiendishly difficult to carry out.
