Dance Words

Valerie Preston-Dunlop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134361298
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

In her unique collection of the verbal language of dance practitioners and researchers, Valerie Preston-Dunlop presents a comprehensive view of people in dance: what they do, their movement, their sound, and the space in which they work - from the standpoint of the performers, choreographers, audiences, administrators, and teachers. The words and phrases of their technical and vernacular languages, which are used to communicate what is essentially a non-verbal activity, have been collected in rehearsal classes and workshops by interviews, and from published sources. In this first collection of its kind Valerie Preston-Dunlop extends her selection of verbal language to include the various social and theatrical domains of dance.

Part One: The Dance Domain

Chapter 1, THE DANCE DOMAIN, gives examples of what people consider dance to be. It sets out titles, words and phrases for the diverse genres and styles into which dance is divided. The divisions, as the entries show, have boundaries which some dance people largely ignore, creating cross-art forms and cross-genre styles. Other dance people hold to the boundaries with tenacity. At one time in the compilation of this book, entries on the various forms of dance as a theatre art were to be the only entries, social dance being seen as beyond the scope of the present research. However, that rapidly became a foolish limitation, for dance artists made it clear that they make much use of social dance forms in their work. Where one starts and the other finishes is not clear cut.

Education and training, and administration, were not in the first brief either, but the practice and talk of dance artists spills over into these fields, and vice versa. So they are in, but not exhaustively, there being a national flavour to the language of funding and branches of dance training, while a more widely used international language prevails elsewhere.

Titles for DANCE PEOPLE, and their explanations, form Chapter 2. Here the wealth of professions within the dance domain shows itself and the nomenclature within it. What dance artists entitle themselves is indicative of the content of their work, and their attitude to it. for by no means all dance performers call themselves dancers, and dance makers do not all regard themselves as choreographers, but something else. Boundaries are broken here, as in Chapter 1. Who, for instance, is regarded as a dance scholar? Only academics? It would seem not.

Chapter 1 The Dance Domain

1. Dance in General

Dance

"...it is impossible to define..."

Curt Sachs, 1937.

Idiom of dance

"...the idiom of dance is non-verbal and any verbal description of it fails: it is inadequate."

Roderyk Lange, 1980.

Physical creative process

"Dance is a form of art which deals with that which cannot be verbalized ...the physical creative process."

Jerome Robbins in Simone Dupuis, 1987.

Dancing

"...is no more than knowing how to bend and straighten the knees at the proper time."

Pierre Rameau, trans. 1931 (1725).

Dance

"The art of expressing emotion by means of rhythmic bodily movements."

Emile Jaques Dalcroze (1921) in Suzanne Shelton, 1981.

Dance

That which is stimulated by music.

Emile Jaques Dalcroze (1921) in Vera Maletic, 1987.

Dance

"Far from being a futile amusement, far from being a speciality confined to putting on a show now and then for the amusement of the eyes that contemplate it or the bodies that take part in it, it is quite simply a poetry that encompasses the action of living creatures in its entirety."

Paul Valéry, (1936), 1964.

Dance

"The mother of the arts."

Curt Sachs, 1937.

Dance, A

"...it is not a symptom of a dancer's feeling but an expression of its composer's knowledge of many feelings."

Susanne K. Langer, 1957.

Dance, A

"A dance is movements guided by certain principles. It doesn't have to mean anything."

Louis Horst, 1958.

Dancing

"A language whose words are movements of the body."

Peggy van Praagh and Peter Brinson, 1963.

Dance

"A constellation of motor behaviors."

Joann W. Kealiinohomoku, 1965.

Dance

The art of motion where the motion is an end in itself and has no need to justify itself. Time/space/shape interacting in a dynamic relationship.

Alwin Nikolais, 1969.

Dance

"...is everything that a human being is able to do musically, with every part of the body...eyelids and eyeballs (Balinese), little finger (mudras), feet (classical European), animalistic gesticulation of the whole body (modern Western expressionism)."

Karlheinz Stockhausen in Mya Tannenbaum, 1987 (1979-81).

Dance

"Dance might...be defined as any movement designed to be looked at."; said with reference to the Judson Church experiments.

Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 1983.

Dancing

"Dancing, for me, is movement in time and space."

Merce Cunningham in Richard Fraser, 1989.

Dance

"Formalised human behaviour."

Jane Dudley, 1992.

Dance

"...the noble art of Terpsichore...."

Vivi Flindt and Knud Arne J\l=u"\rgensen, 1992.

Dance

Activity which "displays bodies in a condition of special use, bodies that are doing something out of the ordinary" containing "the merging of contradictory extremes of complete control over the body and complete loss of control"; said of the Black Swan and the Mevlevi Dervishes.

Roger Copeland, 1992.

Dance

"Whatever the people say it is; an attempt to avoid a biased definition of what dance might mean to a particular community, an attitude adopted by anthropologists."

Andrée Grau, Interview.

Dance

"A visual art whose raw material is the body."

Judith Mackrell, Interview.

Dance

"A sensorial art, as are all arts."

Doris Rudko, Interview.

Dance

An art form in which the body is both presenting and representing, and in some ways challenging, the culture from which it emerges.

Helen Thomas, Interview.

Dance and theatre

"They have to be magic."

Carla Maxwell, Interview.

Dance as art

Dance which has to be approached, understood, and appre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: The Dance Domain
• Part Two: The Performer
• Part Three: Movement
• Part Four: Choreography
• Part Five: The Dance Sound and the Dance Space
• Part Six: The Dance Event
• Part Seven: Dance Research
• Bibliography
• Oral Contributors
• Permissions
• Index of Terms
• Index of Names