Ok, this is it for the moment. Another paper from Karen Eliot’s history class. It has a bibliography AND footnotes–I’m in grad school folks!
(I’d love to hear comments on any of these papers–and feel free to post up fabulous inspiring writings!)
Paul Taylor’s Esplanade: Illuminatory Locomotion[1]
The history of dance during the 20th century in America is a fascinating story of questioning and experimentation. Early in the century, pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham questioned the supposed artificialness of ballet, and experimented with creating new ways of moving, in the process establishing the field of modern dance. As the century progressed, so did this process of questioning and experimentation, within ballet and modern dance both. But while the field’s practitioners might differ from their predecessors in methods, aesthetic values, movement vocabulary, and so on, successive generations of artists did not essentially differ from each other in their base worldview. That dance movement was another sort of movement, elevated beyond the movements of everyday life even if sometimes echoing them, was an unquestioned assumption.
Until the 1960’s. During that decade, artists in all genres were challenging the status quo and their art form’s boundaries, just as the counterculture was challenging the powers-that-be in the civil rights and anti-war protests. In the field of dance, artists started wondering why only certain kinds of movements were sanctioned as acceptable, and others, such as quotidian, pedestrian activities, were written off—after all, if dance’s material was movement, why not make use of all movement? These experimenters changed their question from “What is dance?” to “What isn’t?” (Reynolds 398). The dance that emerged from this new perspective went many different directions, but could still be loosely grouped together, and came to be known under the rubric of “Postmodern Dance.” If it could be characterized in its diversity, it was characterized by its rejection of codified dance technique and the “preening” look of virtuoso dancing, instead embracing the idea that any kind of activity could be dance just by deciding to view it that way (Reynolds 401). Arts audiences usually take time to adjust to and accept new developments, and postmodern dance was no exception. Though the ideas behind postmodern dance were democratizing and inclusive, open to any sort of movement, and open to both trained and untrained bodies as performers, in terms of its audience it tended to be narrower and more ingrown than the “elitist” dance it was challenging. Audiences didn’t immediately gravitate to the idea that they should go to a performance to see things they could see on the street or at home in their everyday lives. Many wanted the virtuoso spectacle of more traditional concert dance, and postmodern dance tended to stay within a small artistic and intellectual circle of people. But even if its audiences weren’t large, postmodern dance’s ideas persisted and percolated widely out into the field.
Paul Taylor’s dance Esplanade was born into this heady fermentation of ideas in 1975. Depending on one’s perspective, the work could be described as a bridge between the old and the new, a mix of the traditional and the postmodern dance worlds, or it could be rejected by each of those worlds as none of the above. Whatever category it belongs to, it is acclaimed as one of the classics of 20th century dance, and continues to be performed and admired today. The most immediately striking aspect of the piece is that it is composed of everyday movements such as walking, running, skipping, falling, and reaching out to another person. But how they are performed! In our everyday movements, we might only wish to be able to walk, run, and skip like this. It is like comparing a pick-up game of touch football to the NFL. The postmoderns introduced everyday movements as a subject of dance in rejection of specialized virtuosic movement, and Esplanade turns that equation on its head by making the everyday into virtuoso movement.
Esplanade is performed to music of Bach: the three movements of his Violin Concerto #2 in E major, followed by the second and third movements of the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor.[2] The music, combined with the presentational aspect of the choreography and the standard proscenium stage setting that it was made for, serve to tie Esplanade to the modern concert dance tradition, and this is part of what makes the pedestrianness of its movement surprising. When it debuted, even noted dance critics didn’t know what to make of it, confounded by the dancers doing such things as even crawling (!) in a situation without the cues of a postmodern performance (Dunning). Anna Kisselgoff, in her New York Times review of the première, said of it: “Esplanade is the kind of dance work – if it is a dance work – that has never been seen before” (Dunning). On the other hand, Arlene Croce wrote in The New Yorker “when I left the Lyceum Theatre…I wasn’t thinking, How beautifully minimal! I was thinking that I’d seen a classic of American dance.” (123-4)
If you have ever started out down the street only to turn back in midstep for some forgotten but crucial item, you have performed the opening choreography. This sort of walking with crisp, surprising changes of direction is how eight dancers begin the piece. Each walks with a sprightly bounce, echoing the bright music, not out of line with how anyone might approach an outing on a refreshing spring day. Their walking paths, however, weave cleanly through each other, making geometrical formations and melting in and out of symmetry. They appear both spontaneous and organized, familiar and distant—no sidewalk has ever looked like this, no matter now cheery the weather. Additionally, the dancers move with a surety, clarity, and freedom that make you think “they aren’t just walking, they’re Walking.”
As the dance progresses, it continues to throw revelatory highlighting on the possible eloquence and expressiveness of movements we might take for granted. In the somber second section, the dancers create images of isolation and sorrow through simple gestures and glances. One part that sticks out in my mind is when two women perform the same steps at the same time, right next to each other, but seemingly without seeing each other. It is as if each woman has a person nearby who understands what she is going through, and could help her through it, but she is so shut off by her experience that she is unable to see beyond it. Their gestures and postures draw you in by their familiarity, while the choreographic use of sustained unison movement—not a familiar occurrence in everyday life—heightens the effect of the women’s gestures beyond the everyday. This image of being shut off from nearby people recurs later in the section. Several women enter in a group, walking simply and pausing individually to crouch down to touch the floor with their hands. Their posture in the crouch suggests vulnerability or bowing under a burden, and their lack of interaction with each other in this moment of need isolates them.
The piece continues to coax the audience along in similar fashion, presenting the ordinary in a decidedly unordinary fashion. It also gradually expands the scope of the ordinary. The walking, running, and gesturing of the first couple sections are fantastically performed, but much of it is still within the scope of what people do daily. By the third section, the dancers are leaning into their circular running paths at angles that would make any reasonable person think twice. In the fourth section, tender duets wherein the woman perches on the man’s thigh, turn into a tender duet wherein the woman walks on top of the man’s prone body. The slow transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary is a set-up for the fireworks of the final section.
Even after repeated viewings, when I know perfectly well what is coming next, the finale still literally takes my breath away. The dancers run and throw themselves to the floor, fly back up off it, and do it all over again. They windmill extravagantly off balance, for the sheer fun of falling down, or even more miraculously, recovering and not falling, with a freedom and abandon that has to be seen to be believed. It’s the sensation of running just for the excitement of going fast, but taken several orders of magnitude beyond what seems even remotely possible. And in my absolutely favorite part, a woman runs, jumps up into a cannonball shape, keeps flying through the air in a cannonball past the point of being able to land (except badly), and is miraculously caught at the last moment by a man, amazingly far away from where she launched herself. Then it happens again, and again, and remains just as thrilling each time. This is astonishing to see live, but in a different way is just as astonishing to see on the 1978 Dance in America video of Esplanade, which is unusual, as video tends to flatten the dynamics of dance. But in this video, the framing is such that in the final section, you can’t always see the catching man until the woman lands in his arms, and it comes off as a brilliant surprise.[3]
One of the trends in recent choreography has been increasing use of wild acrobatics and risk-taking dancing—one might even use the term stunts (except dancers get no stunt doubles!) Yet even today, the last section of Esplanade pulls me in viscerally and stops my breath in a way that newer pieces don’t, even ones that are more athletically risky. I think that much of this has to do with the way Taylor’s well-structured choreography built Esplanade out of movement that the audience can recognize as from their lives, transformed. While I might be astonished by the acrobatics of newer works, they are outside me, “over there,” not made out of material that started off by seducing me into imagining it is something I might do too. Even as the everyday material of Esplanade becomes more and more rarified, the link is still there, so that at the end I feel the swooping excitement in the pit of my stomach as the dancers fly through space. The result is both pedestrian and virtuosic, and neither: it is some beautiful new amalgam of the two seemingly conflicting elements.
Works Cited
Croce, Arlene. Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker. New York: Farrar, 2000.
Dunning, Jennifer. “When Dance Learned to Crawl.” Rev. of Paul Taylor Dance Company, chor. Paul Taylor. City Center. New York Times on the Web. 27 February 2005. 24 February 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com>. Path: Search.
Dance in America: The Paul Taylor Dance Company. Chor. Paul Taylor. 1978. Videocassette. Warnervision, 1999.
Reynolds, Nancy, and Malcolm McCormick. No Fixed Points. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
[1] The title of this paper comes from the opening narration of the 1978 film of Esplanade, written by Paul Taylor: “What makes a dancer out of a pedestrian? Both walk or run, but one is illumination; the other is locomotion.”
[2] Incidentally, the latter concerto was famously used by the ballet choreographer George Balanchine in 1941 for a ballet entitled Concerto Barocco. Both Taylor’s work and Balanchine’s are wonderfully sensitive to the music, but are very different from each other, making a fascinating contrast.
[3] This video can also be recommended for being composed almost entirely of the original 1975 cast.
