Expert: Jeff - 10/22/2000

Question
Hi, I am a high school senior.  I attend Page High School in Franklin, Tennesee.  In order to graduate, as seniors we must complete a "Senior Project"  I have chosen dance/choreography to be my topic.  Please answer the following questions to the best of your ability.

1. When picking music what should a choreographer go by? the audience they want to appeal to, their likes, or other...

2. Do most choreographers choreograph their dance first then find music to fit it or do they find music and make the steps fit?

3. What is your favorite form of dance, and why?  

Answer
1. When picking music what should a choreographer go by? the audience they
want to appeal to, their likes, or other...

2. Do most choreographers choreograph their dance first then find music to
fit it or do they find music and make the steps fit?

Thank you for letting me off with a “answer to the best of your ability.”  Unlike some of the other “experts” in Allexperts.com, I am not in any way a dance professional, just someone who loves to watch, learn, and think about dance.

Questions #1 and #2 sort of deal with the same thing, which is the process of choreography.  Choreography is as different for choreographers as writing poems for poets and painting pictures for artists and for the same reason—choreography is a creative activity.  Choreography simply put is the creation of dances.   It has both similarity and differences from other performing arts activities.  For example, in the same way as a theatrical director must cast roles for a play, the choreographer must choose his/her dancers for the work.  This is often critical because choreographers may choreograph for a dancer's particular strengths or give them variations to improve their weaknesses.  Dancers will often say that a variation has been choreographed “on” them rather than “for” them.    Many of Balanchine's works are indelibly marked by the artistry and the virtuosity of his various Muses, like Allegra Kent and Suzanne Farrell.  However, dance choreography differs from the other performing arts in that it only exists when performed.  Unlike an opera, which exists in the form of a score, or a play, which can be read from a manuscript, dance only exists in the bodies of dancers as they dance.  This has fundamental implications.  First of all, a dance cannot be choreographed first on paper or in the mind of the artist and then set on dancers (Merce Cunningham is sort of an exception, but more about Merce later).  So, choreography is expensive to produce because it means studio time, a rehearsal pianist or recording tape, and dancers.  Second, it's difficult for choreographers to describe in advance what is the result is going to be before seeing it on the dancers.  At the Pacifica Choreographic Workshop a few years ago, one of the choreographers told about the difficulty he had in getting the composer's permission to use a piece of music for the choreographic project because the composer wanted to know what the piece was about.  The choreographer couldn't tell him because he didn't know himself and wouldn't know until he actually started choreographing.  Moreover, the physicality and artistry of the dancers is so fused with the choreography that it calls into mind Yeats' line, “how can we know the dancer from the dance?”  Finally, dance is passed from dancer to dancer, company to company, generation to generation.  There are such things as dance notation (Benesh and Labnotation, for example), but primarily dances are taught to others by dancers who have memorized all the steps of all the parts.  A dance company will have one or several ballet mistresses/ masters who have the responsibility of (among other things) seeing to it that the dancers know the dances and keep it true to what the choreographer or the artistic director envisioned.  Dances can be taught to new companies by professional dance stagers— I recall seeing Tina Fehlandt of the Mark Morris Dance Group in the lobby at the New York City Center during American Ballet Theater's Fall Season a few years back and I suspect she was there because she had just staged a Mark Morris work on the company.

To get to your specific question about the music:  I suspect that most commissioned works have some sort of stipulation on it.  Works choreographed as a tribute to a composer would be an obvious example.  For example, Balanchine organized a Stravinsky Festival in 1972, which included quite a few works that are in the active repertory of many ballet companies—“Symphony in Three Movements,” “Stravinsky Violin Concerto,” “Divertimento from ‘Le Baiser de la Fee',” “Circus Polka,” etc.  The Joffrey Ballet put together an evening of ballet choreographed to music by Prince (or whatever he calls himself these days).  Though they are a ballet company, they commissioned works by some top post-modern dance choreographers and the results are fantastic.  It is available on video.  Others commissions are more collaborative projects where the composer, the set designer, and the choreographer must all come together.  In the days of the Imperial Russian Ballet, the Court Composers wrote music to the specifications of the choreographer.  Petipa's notes to Tschaikovsky, for example, still exist where Petipa would ask Tschaikovsky for a certain number of bars of a certain style of music.  It is a tribute to Tschaikovsky's artistry that he rose to the challenge and gave us three of ballet's most enduring works that do not sound in the least manufactured (“The Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake,” and “Nutcracker”).  On another example, Peter Martins and jazz great Wynton Marsalis collaborated on a jazz ballet and the process was documented in a film that shows the occasional tensions as well as the triumphs of a collaborative effort.   The video is called, “Accent on the Upbeat.”  The Pacifica Choreographic workshop I mentioned earlier is an annual project by Ballet Pacifica, which is located in Irvine, California.  Every year they invite 4 choreographers to Irvine to work for several weeks with their company dancers.  The company provides the basic materials of dance—studio, dancers, taped music, and a stage to perform at the end.  There is no stipulation except the ever present one of resources (the company only has about 15 dancers so a new “Kingdom of the Shades” is out of the question).  At the end of the four weeks or so the company stages whatever has been done.  I think it's the only such project in the country.

I highly recommend Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets by George Balanchine and Francis Mason.  It is available in most libraries.  It has synopses and comments by the greatest choreographer of the 20th century.  At the end are several, very illuminating essays about various ballet topics.  Let me quote from Balanchine on choreography:

“When I am about to produce a ballet, I begin in one of two ways:  either I begin with the idea and then look for a suitable piece of music, or I hear a certain piece of music which inspires me with an idea.”

“If I begin with an idea, I much prefer to have the music specially written for me and to be in constant contact with the composer while he is writing it.  I try to tell him exactly what I want, and together we conceive the general mood and we time some of the dance sequences.  I have found that most ballet composers like to have a definite timing for a ballet:  they like to know when such and such occurs and how long it will last…. Like novelists they are interested in structure  first….Working on the story ballets Prodigal Son and Orpheus was a collaboration between the composers, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, and myself.”

“If I begin with the music, I familiarize myself with the score thoroughly and try to understand what the composer had in mind musically when writing it.  When he wrote his Concerto in D minor for Two Violins, Bach had no idea  of composing music for a ballet; but in listening to this music, it is possible to conceive of movement that harmonizes with the score.  Actually, it seems to me that the music of Bach and Mozart is always very close to dancing.”

“If the ballet has no story, there is no need to discuss their parts with the dancers in any detail; these parts the dancers work out by themselves, in individual practice.  But in the case of a story ballet, I tell them what characters they are playing and what their relation is to the other characters.”

“Other choreographers, naturally, work differently.  In working on the story ballets, some choreographers spend lots of time talking to the dancers, explaining the story to them;  the time the story took place, the history of that era, and so forth.”

“I have no fixed procedure.  I don't come to rehearsal with any idea so definite and fixed that it can't be changed on the spot.  I never write anything down.  Often I try a step, or a series of movements, on a particular dancer and then I change it to something else…”

“Sometimes I arrange the end of a ballet first; sometimes I commence in the middle.  Rehearsal time is limited, and I can't always indulge in the extravagance of following the order of the music.”  (From the essay, “Notes and Comments on Dancers, Dancing, and Choreography”)

I especially love Balanchine's anecdote on the genesis of “Who Cares.”  I'll quote this, too:  “One day at the piano I played one [Gershwin piece] through and thought to myself, Beautiful, I'll make a pas de deux.  Then I played another, it was just as beautiful and I thought, A variation!  And then another and another and there was no end to how beautiful they were.  And so we had a new ballet.”  I also like Merrill Ahsley's description of Balanchine's facility with choreography.  She said that he would try some steps on a dancer and then look at them.  If he or she forgot some of the steps later, that didn't matter because he would make up something just as good.  She said it was like Balanchine was reaching into his pocket and pulling out diamonds and rubies.

Just by reading about dance (I'll suggest some excellent sources at the end) and listening to the pre-/ post-performance discussions that are associated with some performances (New York City Ballet's “Sightlines” for example), I get the impression that the answer to whether it is the audience, the commissioning organization, the artist's tastes, the dancers' tastes, that goes into the selection of the music is “yes.”  In other words, it is all of those things.  If a choreographer won a commission and then choreographed it to music that everybody really hated, he/she might have trouble making a good impression on the dancers, the artistic director, the Board of Directors, and the audience not to mention the critics.  Performing arts money is blood money, very hard to come by.  Another commission might not be coming anytime soon.  However, sometimes a commission will come when a choreographer is compelled by the momentum of her career or artistic development to choose a particular composer.  Susan Marshall's work, whose name I can't remember, set to Philip Glass' Quartet No. 5 comes to mind.  Or, the choreographer might also be the artistic director of a company and decide that the company needs a cash cow (Pacific Northwest Ballet's production of “Nutcracker” is a particularly astute meeting of artistic and commercial sense, as is Cleveland San Jose Ballet's “Blue Suede Shoes” set to music by Elvis).

Now, about Merce.  Merce Cunningham is a modern/ post-modern dance choreographer whose aesthetic is unlike any others.  His conception is that each of the elements of theatrical dance is important, but that they must be conceived independently of each other.  He choreographs the dance separately from the “music” and the décor.  Merce has been using computer assistance to choreograph, specifically a program called, “Life Forms.”  You can read more about it at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's website.  Once he has the movement down, he teaches it to the dancers.  The steps have nothing to do with the music and in fact many times neither Merce nor th dancers have heard the score until the first performance.  Instead of a rehearsal piano, he uses a stopwatch.  I have been to see company rehearsals at their annual residency at UC Berkeley and it is the most fascinating experience to first see them rehearse by themselves.  They are not dancing in silence because the sound crew and the musicians might be there setting up and testing their equipment but no attempt is made to put the two together as in a full rehearsal by a ballet company.  (What's even better is that you get to see the Company dance without the music, then later in performance with the music, costumes, and lighting.  It is an opportunity to see what effect the other elements have upon the total experience of dance.)  The “music” is oftentimes commissioned by various leading modern composers and the décor and costumes are designed by internationally renown artists.  For example, for Interscape he asked Robert Rauschenberg to design the costumes and the set.  I think the only thing he told Rauschenberg was the number of dancers and the title of the dance.  The music was a piece by John Cage.  Merce doesn't choreograph to music, though he thinks that it is important, because he said that dance should be more than journalism for the music.  This is completely different aesthetic than most dance choreographers, who believe that music is fundamental to dance.  More Balanchine:  “A choreographer can't invent rhythms, he can only reflects them in movement.  The body is his medium, and, unaided the body will improvise for a short breath.  But the organizing of rhythm on a grand scale is a sustained process.  It is a function of a musical mind.”  It's different for Merce.  As his former music director said, “it's not music with dancing, it's music and dancing.”  Unless you've seen the MCDC, it's hard to visualize, but this is some of the most fascinating dance to watch, especially at the Cunningham dancers are practically the most highly trained dancers in the country.

Question #3. What is your favorite form of dance, and why?

In order not to give anybody the wrong idea, I'm going to start by saying that I like all forms of fine arts, performance dance.  There is practically no dance performance that I go to that I don't enjoy or learn something, whether it is a big deal like San Francisco Ballet or a local show, like those “Nutcrackers” put on by small companies every December.  Like the worlds of music and cinema, there is more in dance than anybody could hope to even touch upon, even a dance professional.  For example, there is the dance itself, like ballet, modern, jazz, tap, ballroom, ethnic, etc.  Then there is stagecraft for dance, like décor and costumes, lighting, sound, and music.  There is learning about dance, like history, theory and criticism, journalism, education & teaching.  There are fields related to dance, like notation, kinesiology, various fitness and body therapies, psychological dance therapies.  And, even administrative fields related to dance, like performing arts management, education & outreach, marketing, and fund raising.  And, this is just for western dance forms.  Indian classical dance for example has basically 7 main forms, I think, with a history that goes back centuries before ballet.  Anyway, the point is that I like all dance but because there is only a limited amount of time and energy, stick basically to ballet and modern dance.

Ballet especially is important to me.  I can still recall when the bug bit.  It was June 1996 during American Ballet Theater's run here at the Los Angeles Music Center.  I was very impressed by the pas de deux from “The Leaves Are Fading” (by Antony Tudor) and “Brahms Symphony No. 4” (Twyla Tharp).  It was moving in a way that I had never experienced.  So, I started to read up on dance, especially ballet to try and understand how music and movement could be aesthetically powerful.  What struck me was that though I had listened to classical (and other) music all my life, watching dance was like I had never really heard the music before.  It was also like I had never really seen movement and bodies before.  So, I started to read and learn and most importantly, see dance at every opportunity.

Here is Balanchine's longtime collaborator, Lincoln Kirstein (co-director of their company, New York City Ballet):  

“Ballet's vocabulary, by which strong executants magnetize big audiences, depends on muscular and nervous control deriving from four centuries' research in a logic combining gross anatomy, plane geometry and musical counterpoint.  Its repertory is comparable to opera, symphony, and classical drama….The root of ballet-training in the five academic foot-positions established some three centuries ago is not arbitrary.  These determine the  greatest frontal legibility and launch of the upper body as silhouette framed in a proscenium.  Ballet-repertory was calculated for opera-houses with orchestra-pits, and balconies rendering the stage –floor a virtual backdrop for half the public.  It is not the only form of theatrical dance; it is the most spectacular.  Extreme acrobatism entails hazard which, overcome, sparks the most ardent audience detonation.  Its filigrain of discrete steps; its speed, suavity, and flagrant tenderness; its metrical syncopation and asymmetry make visual superdrama on the broadest spectrum.  (From “Aria of the Aerial”)

Kirstein's essay was a somewhat chauvanistic (he ran New York City Ballet, can you blame him for the tone?)  emphasizing the priority of Big Company Ballet against its modern dance rivals, but he captures something of the apostolic flavor, the canonical status of the Dans d'Ecole, whereby ballet masters of the great companies can be linked by their predecessors practically back to Bourbon France and D'Medici Italy where it all started.  However, there is more to ballet than virtuosity, like 10 turns on a single preparation (Angel Correra in “La Corsaire”) or the Black Swan's 34 fouette's.  Even in small, chamber-music like pieces, ballet's visual “superdrama” works.  Los Angeles Chamber Ballet's “Cocktails with Joey” by Raiford Rogers to various lounge compositions by Joey Altruda and his Mambo Noir Orchestra uses the drama and glamour inherent to many of ballet's basic steps to show off Altruda's ultra-cool music.  It is very effective.  Or, Robert Sund's “Ravelesque” set to Impressionist piano compositions by Ravel.  When the two principal girls turn smoothly on point, it's magic, like finding a glittering diamond in one's pocket.

Ok, I'd better finish now because I've written over 3000 words already.  Remember, I like modern dance, too (for example, the only thing that could make me miss the divine Yuan Yuan Tan dance with San Francisco Ballet  “Giselle” on their 1999 appearance here was the coincidental appearance of Pina Bausch Tanzteater Wuppertal).  But, I'll end with… surprise!  More Balanchine:

“Ballet in many cases can show us how to appreciate music.  The structure of a symphony, how a piece of music is put together, may be something we have no interest in now, but continual attendance at the ballet will cause us to think differently.  Dancing is always pointing to music, showing it, making it visually interesting.”

“They expect ballet to always to be like the theater or literature or the movies, which, quite naturally, it is not.  Ballet is like nothing so much as dancing.  To appreciate it you have to watch it, not think about it.”

I'll have to paraphrase this one because I can't find the exact quote.  “Ballet is significant and it is art.  But, first of all, it is a pleasure.”

Thanks for asking these interesting questions and good luck on your senior paper. JEFF

Suggested references:

Balanchine, George and Francis Mason.  Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets.  Doubleday & Company, 1977.

Cohen, Selma Jeanne, Ed. With new selection by Katy Matheson.  Dance as a Theater Art:  Source Readings in Dance History from 1581 To the Present.  Dance Horizons, 1992.

Copeland, Roger and Marshall Cohen.  What is Dance?  Readings in Theory and Criticism.  Oxford University Press, 1983.

Greskovic, Robert.  Ballet 101:  A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Ballet.  Hyperion, 1998.