Dance As Education
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Dance As Education

Towards A National Dance Culture

Peter Brinson

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eBook - ePub

Dance As Education

Towards A National Dance Culture

Peter Brinson

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About This Book

First published in 1991. In this volume the author examines the place of dance in contemporary Britain. Doing so, he sets out to provide the historical, political and structural elements necessary to achieve a broad understanding of dance in society.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2004
ISBN
9781135387327
Edition
1

Part 1


In the Theatre

Chapter 1
Is There a British Dance Culture



To talk about dance is to talk about you and you and me. Dancing, as I have said often before, is part of the history of human movement, part of the history of human culture and part of the history of human communication. Not for nothing were the English in Tudor times known throughout Europe as the dancing English. English men excelled especially in the leaps and athleticism of the galliard. Today the British are leaders still in dancing. They are the reference point in international ballroom dancing. Scottish dance is vibrant, not only in Scotland, but also in New Zealand, Canada and wherever Scottish people have settled. They dance still the sword dance in north-east England, the clog dance in Lancashire, and the Morris and other traditional dances in the Midlands, the south and in Cornwall. In the culture of our young people dance is linked closely with making and participating in popular music. Our youth dance companies and student companies are welcome visitors in Europe, south-east Asia and the USA. Our disabled and elderly are devising their own choreographic forms. We are embarked on the great adventure of exploring and learning the dance cultures of citizens from Asia and the Caribbean just as we have done over centuries with dance forms from Europe. As many tickets are sold each week for dance halls and discos as are sold for football matches and the cinema.
In dance halls and discos people are their own choreographers, varying rhythms and steps, well-known or new, the way their bodies and tastes dictate. Elsewhere in theatres, schools, private studios and community spaces other dances are choreographed and invented. Choreographers like Kenneth MacMillan, Christopher Bruce, Royston Maldoom, Lloyd Newson and Richard Alston are international figures in their art. Our companies like the Royal Ballet, London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Rambert Dance Company, DV8 and others rank high among the dance companies of the world. Our teachers and teaching methods in classical ballet and modern dance, ballroom and national dance are in demand across the world.
The commercial side of dance often is underrated but is important not only because of its recreational and social value. It extends people’s dance horizons, allows them to dance on their own terms and to exercise personal creativity in incidental dance invention, their own choreography. It is a huge field which I would like to examine further some day alongside our folk dance legacy. It is the bedrock of our dance culture. The other side of our dance culture is what is explored and invented in schools, community situations, private dance studios and on stage. It too is a huge field with urgent problems of financial support, audience support and, above all, public communication. Nevertheless it is the element of our dance culture through which we make sense at many levels, and interpret in dance terms, our complex post-modern world of electronic revolution, global economy and growing global culture. This, therefore, is what I consider here always against the background of popular dance culture and dance interest.


Today’s Theatre Dance

During a week in March 1990 the Royal Ballet was rehearsing in London after two weeks showing La BayadĂšre and MacMillan’s new The Prince of the Pagodas in Birmingham and Manchester. Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet was in Christchurch, New Zealand, showing SwanLake. Rambert Dance Company at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, presented three programmes of post-modern dance which explored new ground and confirmed old prejudices. English National Ballet, seeking a new artistic director after dismissing Peter Schauffus, rehearsed in London while its smaller group, ENB2, took to Scunthorpe Civic Theatre, then Basildon’s Towngate Theatre, a successful mix of works by Paul Taylor, Christopher Bruce, JosĂ© Limon and August Bournonville—two American, one English and one Danish choreographer. At the Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, Hexham, on England’s Roman Wall against the Picts and Scots, London Contemporary Dance Theatre’s programme revealed changing directions under its new American director/choreographer, Dan Wagoner. Like the green shoots of that year’s early spring there were signs of a revival in the company’s creative fortunes. Further north, at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, Scottish Ballet explored American and Soviet styles through a triple bill of Balanchine’s Scotch Symphony and Who Cares?, alongside a Soviet-produced, very classical Paquita. Still in the north, Northern Ballet Theatre finished showing its new Giselle to Sunderland before doing the same the following week in the Welsh capital, Cardiff. London City Ballet, meanwhile, took its new classical La Traviata to the Orchard Theatre, Dartford. Back in London, near Euston Station, the Place Theatre’s annual Spring Loaded season reminded funding bodies that new or newish programmes of post-modern choreography can attract full houses of mostly young people.
In this sort of way London Contemporary Dance Trust at the Place and the Laban Centre with its Bonnie Bird Theatre in south-east London have become flagship organizations for a spreading audience conversion towards modern dance adventure and alternative dance forms from Britain’s multi-racial society. Such developments are modifying not only the legacies of Martha Graham and Rudolf Laban but even classical ballet itself. As if to make the point, the annual Laban Centre Bonnie Bird Awards for new choreography were announced at the beginning of that week at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. In the Centre itself the showcase student company, Transitions, rehearsed its spring tour and London Contemporary Dance School’s 4th Year Performance Group did much the same at the Place. These are part of a missionary movement for postmodern dance spreading across Britain. Pioneers of the movement like the Rosemary Butcher Dance Company appeared the same week at Nottingham University and at art galleries in Lincoln, Sheffield and Liverpool. The Welsh group, Diversions, was seen at the Marina Theatre, Lowestoft, and the black male Phoenix Dance Company appeared at Barnsley Civic Theatre. Shobana Jeyasingh’s Dance Theatre appeared at the Wilde Theatre, Bracknell, in a programme of classical Indian dance styles and the African-inspired company Kokuma appeared at the Blackfriars Arts Centre, Boston—both symbols of dance forms now part of British dance culture and beginning to influence British choreography. Chisenhale Dance Space presented its Spring Collection 2 in London’s East End. The all-women Cholmondeleys danced at the Gardner Centre, Brighton, and the all-male Featherstonehaughs at Warrington, Leigh and Crewe in England’s north-west, both born of the Laban Centre. At the week’s end there happened at the Baylis Theatre in London’s Islington a remarkable range of choreography by a single artist, Royston Maldoom. Called Across the Board because its many dances embraced amateurs and future professionals, young and old, dance styles and themes from many races to many kinds of music, lighting, video, sound and design artists as well as dancers, this day of community dance symbolized a little of the future of Britain’s dance culture.
Much else went on behind and on stage. Festivals like Dance Umbrella planned their seasons for later in the year; private funding bodies like Gulbenkian and Digital continued endless assessments of applications for help; the Arts Council’s dance department pondered different ways to distribute inadequate government support for dance; so did Regional Arts Associations, all in turmoil from threatening plans to reorganize Arts Council procedures and priorities. Groups or choreographers like Second Stride and Siobhan Davies, Adventures in Motion Pictures and DV8, Kokuma and Gregory Nash prepared new programmes. Amici and Common Ground Theatre develbped further the theatrical creativity of disabled people. Musical shows with dance either continued long runs in London, like Cats and The Phantom of theOpera, or toured these shows outside London, like Show Boat to Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre or 42nd Street to Southampton. The critics criticized and professional journals like Dance and Dancers, Dance Theatre Journal and The Dancing Times recorded, commented, advertised.
This was a week in the life of the performance side of British dance culture. It embraced many musicians, theatre technicians, administrators, secretaries, transport staff, writers, advertisers, designers, lighting artists, costume makers, wig makers, shoe makers, dieticians, medical specialists, physiotherapists, businesspeople, film crews, television teams, theatre staffs, travel agents, dance teachers, producers, audiences of many tastes—all relating to the 2,000 or so professional dancers who actually performed. Many thousands of people were involved and many millions of pounds were turned over, not counting the educational dance world, the community dance world, and popular social dancing.


The Modernist Impact

Every industrialized society has a theatrical dance culture of this kind, generated primarily in urban centres. Dance, after all, is a primitive response in each of us to the seen and unseen world in which we live. Our response in rhythmic movement is a fundamental expression of human nature, human emotion, human nurture and human communication, as primary as a primary colour. Therefore dance with music is the oldest of the arts. The questions we should really ask are not whether there is a British dance culture, but whose dance culture? Is it appropriate to the Britain we have today? What animates this culture? Who decides the taste which it displays? Why are the dances it dances like they are?
The days are gone when dance in Britain meant only classical ballet, Mecca dancing, folk dance, tea dances, or the charity balls of polite society. Dance means these things still, but it means also the many forms of contemporary or modern dance taking place in a single week of dance performance. It means community dance in inner cities; youth dance groups across the country; the dance forms of Britain’s many new racial communities; disco dance and other urban folk dance inventions by young people; and the visits of dance companies and styles from abroad. Especially it means dance in education at all levels from primary to higher and further education touching many disciplines like aesthetics, anatomy, anthropology, history, languages, philosophy, psychology, sociology, therapy and, of course, all the arts. At some point, briefly or always, dance touches everyone. The vigorous twentieth-century expansion of dance runs parallel with the expansion of industrial/electronic/nuclear technology, industry and manufacture, international trade, agriculture, transport and the consumer economy within which we live. To its traditional arts the century has added cinema, television and photography. Obviously there is a connection between dance and all these changes. The changes provide not only the social and economic context within which dance takes place today, but also the values which influence the creation of dance. Kenneth MacMillan’s Elite Syncopations for the Royal Ballet and Christopher Bruce’s Ghost Dances for the Rambert Dance Company illustrate this truism, but almost every work of dance art created since 1900 in every industrialized country in some way bears the mark of twentieth century technology. It follows that unless choreographers, teachers, dancers and dance students understand how life around them influences dance and for what they are creating dance, the art of dance will be marginal to urban society, lacking in influence, a minority concern within the rest of British culture.
This does not mean that dancers and dance teachers need at once to become students of politics, economics and international affairs. It does mean they should have acquired some understanding of these influences at school so that they can recognize the social forces in each period whose dances they dance and take account of outside influences in the creation of new work. For example, the dominant influence upon all theatrical dance in advanced industrialized countries this century comes from the modernist and post-modernist movements in art. These movements have shaped the dance we see in our theatres and much of the thinking behind the organization which brings this dance to audiences. Therefore, too, the movements have affected the taste and expectations of audiences partly through education and partly through the creative work of choreographers on stage and in films and television in reaction to the ways of thinking and the arguments which animate these movements. For this reason our first response to questions about dance culture must be to consider the images of dance art which choreographers create. Later we shall examine the interrelation of these images with the educational process and with many other aspects of British life.
Some historical parallels can illuminate the issues of modernism and post-modernism which have shaped the dance art within our dance culture. There are comparisons which can be made between the birth of romantic ballet in the 1830s and the birth of modernism in the arts in the early 1900s just as there are between the decay of romantic ballet at the end of the nineteenth century and post-modern dance in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the USA. The fact that we involve the USA indicates another important parallel, a parallel between the globalization of culture since the second world war—that is, the merchandising of the arts on an international scale like pop music, cinema and fine art auctions through television, sound tapes, discs and other technologies—and the globalization of the economy in the same period. Two sides of the same dollar. The arts, of course, including dance, have been transnational for a very long time. Globalization through technological development is the latest step in an historial process. Because of this we must discuss Britain’s dance culture today always with reference to other countries—the USA and USSR, France and central Europe, even Japan, the West Indies, India, South America and Africa.
There is, therefore, a deep connection between modernism in the arts and modernism in industry, life-style and public values worldwide. Similarly, of course, between post-modernism in the arts and the postmodern world of Vietnam, Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher. There may be now new departures in the arts after the events of 1989 in eastern Europe. For a long time the dance world in the theatre and in education has not paid much attention to the influence of political and economic change upon dance forms and dance content. The influence is acknowledged, of course, when one actually puts the question in a dressing room discussion or over a meal, but usually it is passed over quickly because changes in manufacturing methods, the growth of consumer society and what happens in Parliament seem rather remote, even contrary to ‘art’. The treatment of dance in schools as a physical education subject, rather than an art like drama, reinforces this separation of dance from a common context with other arts. Dance in the curriculum is seen as adding a gloss of ‘expression’ to physical movement. It is useful, perhaps, in gymnastics but otherwise of little value in a games-centred syllabus. No wonder it becomes marginalized, a minority concern throughout the lives of most of those thus ‘educated’.
History shows very clearly the error of this attitude. The romantic movement which gave us La Sylphide (1832), Giselle (1841) and the popular image of classical ballet today was born out of the huge social changes set in motion by the Industrial Revolution, starting in England at the end of the eighteenth century. This changed all the arts and revolutionized theatrical dancing in four important ways. First it altered the status of the art and its creators, confirming a development over the previous half century. Generally speaking, it replaced the patronage of court and nobility—never an ideal way to support the arts anyway—with a commodity status for the arts rather like the emphasis on market forces today. The Paris OpĂ©ra was turned into a private enterprise under Dr VĂ©ron from 1830. His entrepreneurial skills and clever publicity helped to personify romantic ballet in Marie Taglioni’s Sylphide and in Fanny Elssler’s passionate Cachucha. Similarly Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, under Benjamin Lumley brought to England all the great ballerinas of the romantic era. From 1842 to 1848, thanks to the partnership of Lumley with Jules Perrot, romantic ballet’s greatest choreographer, London became the creative centre of romantic ballet in Europe. In many ways, therefore, the introduction of new commercial practices at that time had positive results for the arts. The role and social impact of the arts were enhanced. Their communication reached to a broader public.
What communication? VĂ©ron and Lumley were successful because the ballets they presented caught a public mood in their themes and dance style. In its social appeal Romanticism reacted against the artificiality of themes from antiquity and the idealization of noble patrons in portraits which characterized the eighteenth century. Instead, the romantic endeavour looked to a future of imaginative truth overturning established custom. As Gautier observed at the time, young people wore their hair long and shocked their elders with strange clothes, new habits and different values. The romantic vision stirred artists the way revolutionary visions stirred new styles in 1917, 1968 and 1989. Then and since the artist stepped forward as social critic and rebel. William Blake proclaimed his new Jerusalem; Burns satirized convention and Shelley cocked a snook at establishment morals. For all of them the essential conflict lay between the world as it had become and the vision of a more generous alternative, between squalor and wealth, ugliness and ‘beauty’, reality and dreams of far away peoples in exotic lands, history become romance, a refuge in some supernatural world of unattainable l...

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