Recuperating Loss? Reconstruction, Reenactment, and Work Performance

Chapter 12 explores the extent to which different practices of dance re-doing recuperate lost works, focusing on reconstruction, reworking, and reenactment. It explores what kind of relation obtains between such re-doings and the works they represent. None of these processes seems (simply or straightforwardly) to produce new performances of existing dance works and, in this, they disrupt what David Davies calls the “classical paradigm” of work-performance relations. This paradigm is explicated to highlight its limitations in the dance context. The chapter also explores whether and how reconstructions, reworkings, and reenactments can contribute to knowledge of the choreographic works they remake, and to dance history more generally, given that they are often not motivated by an objective of Werktreue. In this regard, the argument is developed that some reconstructions and reenactments are a species of historical fiction, allowing audiences to entertain while withholding belief about the dance historical representations they offer.

Changing Dance Works

The chapter discusses how variability and change pose particular issues for an ontology of dance works as structures of action-types, which prompts consideration of some alternative positions. The argument (developed by Guy Rohrbaugh) that dance works are historical individuals or continuants is elaborated and critically discussed. The chapter also considers a perdurantist alternative: that dance works are fusions of their performances or temporal parts. Both endurantism and perdurantism struggle to account for the principles of continuity uniting the various embodiments or parts of works, however. The chapter reexamines the idea of persistence in the context of historical dance practice and explores the significance of processes of oral transmission for the continued existence and variability of dance works, focusing on the different levels of intention at which the action constituting a dance might be described. The relative importance of these levels at different historical moments is considered.

Are Dance Works Real?

The chapter considers whether dance works, if they are norm-types, are creatable given that types are conventionally understood to be eternally existing abstracta. It explores whether an account of dance creation as discovery is plausible, critically examining the adaptability to dance of Julian Dodd’s defence of a Platonist ontology of musical works. Problems Dodd raises concerning the putative creatability of indicated types prompts discussion of alternative views, including Amie Thomasson’s arguments that multiple works are abstract artefacts. The chapter critically considers also a simple nominalist view of dance works as sets of performances, and sketches a fictionalist ontology of dance works (following Andrew Kania’s similar discussion of musical works). The fictionalist leanings of some dance discourse critical of the idea of the work is highlighted, and a claim made for the reality of dance works as social objects.

Works, Actions, and Structures

Chapter 5 elaborates the view that dances are indicated structures of action-types, manifest in performance events. The nature of dance action-types and choreographic structuring principles are discussed. The chapter develops the idea that choreographic authorship is a form of artistic indication and explores debates about dancer co-authorship, arguing for the latter under certain conditions. The notion of a norm-type or kind is also considered, alongside the idea that choreography specifies norms for performance. The chapter considers how dance works often depend on underlying consensus about such norms rather than on scores or texts which articulate them explicitly. Contemporary scoring practices are examined in this regard, and it is argued that there is no sharp division between works and structured improvisations. The question of how a norm-type or kind can be manifest is addressed, the chapter arguing that works (qua norm-types or kinds) are only indirectly perceptible.

Dance Identity

Chapter 7 examines dance works’ repeatability, that is, their capacity to appear in/through multiple (and potentially quite diverse) performance events. The philosophical problem of identity is introduced as the challenge of explaining when and why two or more performances are of the same work. The chapter explores situations where repeatability seems compromised because the dancer’s own body or personality is deeply implicated in her dance: distinctions are made between various kinds of cases, and an argument is made for repeatability being circumscribed when a dancer’s identity is built into the action-structure of a work. The chapter examines how far notation and scoring practices enable independent articulation of works, considering how notation and ontological views which centre on it (such as those of Nelson Goodman and Graham McFee) struggle to anchor performance identity. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of choreographic copyright practices and disputes and their relationship to ontological concerns.

Modern(ist) Dances and Modern Work-Concepts

Chapter 3 discusses Western theatre dance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that in this period the dance work-concept acquires a particular “thickness,” clear contours and regulative force in at least some ballet and modern dance practice. Dance comes to be understood as generating authored, repeatable, persistent, and autonomous works that function both as guiding structures for performers and as a focus of appreciation for audiences. Specific developments such as dance “symphonism” and the so-called new ballet are explored, and commonalities in the way the work-concept develops in ballet and modern dance are considered. The chapter also examines one consequence of the work-concept’s consolidation in this period, namely its retrospective application to older ballets and dances by practitioners and historians keen to establish a canon of choreographic achievement.

Early Dances and Ballets

Chapter 1 explores the historical development of dance in Europe, from the Renaissance to the early eighteenth century, focusing particularly on the themes of dance structures, authorship, and autonomy. It considers early modern and secondary sources on social dance, the ballet de cour, and baroque dance, developing the argument that none of these practices produces dance works in the modern sense. Nonetheless, early dance sources to concepts of dance-as-object and dance as “performable” operating well before the idea of a work of dance art develops. This first chapter, then, explores what might be termed the early prehistory of the dance work, through analysis of different ways in which dances are conceived, composed, notated, performed, and linked to developing artistic traditions.

Drowning in Swan Lakes

The chapter continues the discussion of dance identity, examining the problem posed by a specific case, the ballet Swan Lake. This ballet is often invoked in the existing philosophical literature on identity but arguably with insufficient attention paid to its historical genesis and development. The chapter argues that nineteenth-century ballet ‘classics’ are not central or paradigm cases of choreographic works in the modern sense. It also makes the case that the variously authored, individual productions titled Swan Lake are works in their own right rather than tokens of some overarching work-type. If there is an overarching Swan Lake type, then this is a very “thin” entity on which it is problematic to model an account of the identity conditions of later works, since that misrepresents their identity constraints. The discussion illustrates how identity issues—and work ontology more generally—are intertwined with historically contingent conceptualisations and practices.

Conclusion

The Conclusion summarises and qualifies the book’s historical thesis about the late development of the work-concept in Western theatre dance. It draws attention to stronger and weaker conceptualisations of works which have, respectively, narrower and broader historical applications. These are in turn related to the equivocation in ontology of art between two distinct baseline conceptions of works in art forms that produce multiples: work as repeatable structure, and work as the focus of appreciation within the art form in question. These conceptualisations pull apart in dance practices not governed by the classical paradigm. The range of ontological positions considered by the book is also summarised and directions for future research identified. The residual pull of structuralist ontology is acknowledged, given initial convictions about work invisibility and disappearance in dance practice.

The Problem of Lost Works

Chapter 11 considers what it means for a dance work to be lost and under what conditions loss occurs. It argues that (1) lack of performance, (2) lack of documentation, and (3) disintegration of the background practice in whose context the work was initiated all contribute to loss, but that (3) is the most significant. The chapter also examines how dance work loss can and should be understood ontologically, exploring how various ontological positions account for it. The question is addressed of whether, and when, loss implies that a work has ceased to exist or been destroyed. Issues raised in Chapter 6 about the putative eternality of abstracta are taken up again, along with the question of how the norms of action constituting choreographic works are grounded. The discussion is framed by consideration of Katherine Dunham’s (1951) work Southland, discussed at the end of the chapter as vividly illustrating the negative consequences of dance work loss, in contrast to dance discourse that celebrates ephemerality.