Last night we went to a performance by Ballet BC. Ballet BC, is arguably, the best performing arts group in Vancouver. Under the astute leadership of Emily Molnar, they have a stellar record of commissioning new work from choreographers from all over the world, and a corps of young and very talented dancers. They seem to be on a sustainable path after a brush with bankruptcy, and have the young and excited audiences that other organizations dream of.
The recent show, though, got me thinking about dance and music. As a composer who has worked with many dance companies over the years (including Ballet BC), I have a very biased way of experiencing dance. I see it through the music, and the most significant thing for me is the relationship between the music and the dance. In that way, I am quasi autistic; where others see a dance being about human emotions, I hear/see rhythms, patterns, lines, colors, and structure. (Which is not to say that I am not moved by dance.) My two favorite choreographer/composer collaborations are Balanchine/Stravinsky and Cunningham/Cage; the two are certainly polar opposites in their approach to the connection between music and dance. With Balanchine/Stravinsky, the music and the choreography are mutually intertwined; with Cunningham/Cage the two are completely independent. (Often the Cunningham dancers would not hear the music until the first performance of the piece.) This may seem paradoxical, but the complete independence of the music and dance in this case allows each to exist in a kind of clarity which is exciting.
When composers first began to synchronize music to film dramas in the early days of sound film, the paradigm was established by the composer Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone With the Wind, etc.) Steiner said that the audience should be able to close their eyes, and by listening to the music, understand everything that was happening on the unseen screen. In other words, the music should tell the same story as the visuals, and this became the standard Hollywood practice. As the art of film music developed, some filmmakers and composers realized the aesthetic fallacy of this practice. Hans Eisler wrote a long screed against the practice, and Jean Cocteau famously took the score he had commissioned for a film, and put the parts of the music in scenes different than that which they had been written. Godard notoriously chopped up music into small fragments and scattered them around his films, and Alain Resnais often referred to music as a plastic element in his film compositions. It was not there to illustrate anything.
What does this have to do with dance? What I would suggest is that many choreographers today have very little sophistication about the aesthetics of music and dance. While the connections between music and film and music and dance are certainly not functioning in exactly the same way, there is a similarity. Nowadays music seems to be chosen because it inspires the choreographer, or projects the emotion that they are trying to convey in the dance. And the same goes for Hollywood. Or the music is chosen because it is popular, or, in Hollywood's case, the marketing department thinks it will help sell the film (and its soundtrack). It used to be Philip Glass and Aarvo Part all the time for choreographers. It seems very few choreographers these days are following Merce Cunningham's innovations.
The paradigm for many dance pieces I have heard lately is to take a piece with a very energetic and repetitive rhythmic pulse, and create movement with a very energetic and rhythmic pulse. (You could close your eyes and know what's going on on stage.) (This is often "dance music", in the popular genre sense) For me, it feels like I am watching a workout class. The virtuosity of the dancers is appealing, but the thing quickly loses its appeal after a certain amount of relentless thumping. The audience, of course, loves it.
The other issue I have is with the use of recorded music. It is hard to quantify, but somehow the relationship with the music and dance enters a different realm when the sound emanates from loudspeakers. Unfortunately, for a majority of dance companies, like Ballet BC, live music is simply not an affordable option.
On the Ballet BC program, the first piece, a premiere by Cayetano Soto, began superbly with interesting movement counterpointing nicely with music from David Lang's "little match girl passion". The beautiful austerity of Lang's music worked extremely well against the more vigorous patterns of Soto's choreography. Things went downhill from there, though. I also liked the beginning of Gustavo Sansano's work, with the andante from Bach's "Italian Concerto" contrasting with a beautifully idiosyncratic movement by a solo dancer. But the piece as a whole lost me, owing in part to its being set to mishmash of mediocre recordings of bits from different Bach keyboard works, defying all musical logic. Here is an instance where a choreographer could have set the piece to a single keyboard work, and even allowed for the use of a live performer.
The last piece on the program thumped me into a state of extreme fatigue.
Marx once said, to a man who had five children, "I like my cigar, too, but I take it out once in a while." Groucho Marx, that is.
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