Maggie Kast on Contemporary Choreography: Reclaiming the Sacred

Maggie Kast

BEFORE dance was ballet or modern, tap or jazz, waltz or disco, folk or square, it was religious ritual. Across the globe, people have danced to commemorate the dead, to give thanks for a victory, to pray for the crops to grow or for rain to come. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, David danced before the ark of God (2 Samuel 6), and in Psalm 150 we are instructed to “praise God with drums and dancing.” Liturgical dance continues this tradition in modern worship settings.

Contemporary choreography draws on many roots and materials, including social and popular dance (hip-hop and break-dancing, for instance), as well as ballet, modern and tap techniques. Often it uses all of these materials in an effort to ritualize performance, to return to the sacred, to reclaim for dance the deep meanings and connections it once expressed.

Religious traditions themselves, however, have denied dance almost as many times and places as they have embraced it, most notably in the Christian West, where a body-soul dualism became deeply embedded. “Where there is dancing, there is the devil,” said John Chrysostom, describing dancers as “people frisking like camels and mules.” This view is as much a part of our heritage as our ritual roots.

Where does contemporary choreography stand in relationship to these roots? I propose to trace the history of contemporary Western concert choreography from the first modern dancers through the post-modern period to the present, with a view to understanding the role of religious concerns and sacred meaning in this work. Religion may appear as theme, as in the ethnography of Ruth St. Denis, who traveled across the world and brought back sacred dances from many traditions. Sacred meaning may be explicitly rejected, along with personal, emotional and narrative meanings. The sacred may appear as an attitude toward dance, a sense of ascetic dedication toward the discipline or reverence for the sacred studio space. Finally, the sacred may appear as an effort to overcome the ritual/performance distinction by including the audience as members of a celebrating community essential to the event, rather than as mere spectators.

The modern dance movement began as a revolt against the codified gestural vocabulary of ballet, defined originally in the court of the French King Louis XVI. This elite and precious tradition was challenged at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where the “butterfly” dances of Loie Fuller created a sensation. Using theatrical light and great swags of white fabric, she amazed audiences on the midway not so much with her body as with the illusions of clouds and flight. In 1900, Isadora Duncan took off her corsets and shoes and performed a free and improvisational kind of dance in the salons of Paris. She based her movement on the forms of classical antiquity, inspired by her study of Greek sculpture and vases. More prophet than priest, she did not codify or record her work. Some scholars and performers have attempted to recreate her pieces, but much guesswork is involved. Ruth St. Denis, on the other hand, was both priest and ethnographer of dance. She traveled widely and recreated the dances she discovered. She selected exotic elements from her material and rearranged them to serve as entertainment, but she maintained a focus on the sacred in various cultures. This focus is reflected in the “Credo” of Ted Shawn, with whom she worked in partnership for many years as “Denishawn.” He wrote, “I believe that dance is the most perfect symbol of the activity of God and His angels.”

Martha Graham (who danced with the Denishawn company), Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman in the United States, and Mary Wigman in Germany were the next-generation pioneers of what came to be called modern dance. Despite differences in technique and emphasis, all of their work attempted to connect dance more deeply with meaning, understood as expression. Whether the dances dealt with religious material, family life, or history, the dances were intended to make statements about the human condition. In some cases, they attempted to effect social change.

Awareness of gravity and friendship with the floor were central to early modern dance, which deliberately abandoned the search for lightness and the illusion of flight. Early Graham technique was angular, passionate and earthy. Movement originated with the pelvis and its contraction, and dances dealt with serious dramatic, religious, psychological or historical material. Humphrey’s technique was based on fall and recovery—a response to gravity—and the rhythm of the breath. Freed from the superficialities of light entertainment, dance became a serious vocation. Dancers made great sacrifices in terms of family and finances, and treated their art like an all-consuming religion. The studio space became the temple and filling it with motion the ritual act, its sequence as carefully prescribed as any ordo. A class in Graham technique began with bounces and stretches and spirals from a seated fourth position, looking like a swastika on the floor. Then came pleadings in deep contraction, arms raised from the floor and hands folded into little triangular houses. Next came pliés, beats and brushes, and finally falls, performed only to the left, the dark or sinister side of the body, the side which succumbs. Graham always saw the body as miraculous and mysterious. She says in her autobiography, Blood Memory, “In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small, beautiful bones and their delicate strength.” She explained the necessity of falling to the left from the weight of the heart being on the left side, as well as from the Latin root of the word “sinister.” She once slapped my right cheek smartly to initiate the fall and bring the lesson home. For Graham, the body resonated with myth, but at the same time demanded utter realism. She said, “Either the foot is pointed, or it is flexed.” Her students knew, though perhaps they could not have said it, that they were aligning their bodies and spirits with deep structures of the universe as they pointed, flexed, and fell.

Modern dancers also studied choreography. Louis Horst, the musician who wrote for, mentored, and accompanied Graham for much of her life, developed a method of teaching this, as did Humphrey. These training programs reflected the individualism and psychological aesthetic of the time. Most modern dancers hoped to be choreographers, and wanted to achieve pioneer status through personal expression. Dancing spoke through emotional movement and through everyday gestures abstracted, enlarged, and varied, but literal meanings were forbidden. Words were sometimes used, but one-to-one correspondences between words and gestures were strictly avoided. Humor was downplayed (though not unknown) and inner struggle was a favorite theme for dances. Pantomime was strictly forbidden, relegated to classical ballet. Movement could express, but only abstractly. Students of choreography dreaded to hear the disparaging critique: "That’s pantomime.” Some of the most enduring or well-known dances of this period dealt with religious themes: Humphrey’s Shakers, for instance, based on the American Shaker tradition; José Limon’s There is a Time, based on Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; Graham’s El Penitente and Primitive Mysteries, based on penitential sects of the American Southwest. In those days, ballet and modern dance were as firmly polarized as Catholics and Protestants after the Reformation. The modern dancers were those who had protested, and the protest left them zealous and a little somber. As the Reformers had dispensed with elaborate ritual and sale of indulgences, so the modern dancers had dispensed with much frivolity: the heritage of court dance, the sense of class exclusivity, the reputation for triviality and provision of light entertainment for aristocrats, the elaborate codification of steps, the pre-occupation with fairy tales told in ballet. The ballet dancers were those who maintained the tradition. Secure in their system, which promised them lightness and beauty after the grueling rigors of technique, they could afford to be more light-hearted. “Balletic” was another bad word among modern dancers at that time.

Modern dancers did not realize until the ‘60s that subjectivity and abstraction could be as stultifying as any other code. Eventually modern techniques became vocabularies of movement almost as limiting as the codified steps of ballet. The emphasis on individual expression, abstraction, and control by the choreographer seemed not a means to freedom but a source of limitation. With the cultural upheaval of the ‘60s came questioning. Was the self and its expression really the most important thing? What about the world outside the self? What aspects of movement and performance had been taken for granted?

Merce Cunningham, collaborating with the composer John Cage, liberated dance from music, allowing both to take place simultaneously, but independent of each other. No longer would dancing “to the music” be a probable choice. Cunningham and Cage began exploring chance as a structural principle, thus removing the choreographer and his/her personality from a central position. The spiritual implications of this choice are often ignored. A dance made by chance cannot have a religious theme, but it can leave space beyond the choreographer’s control through which the sacred can enter. As photographer James Klosty observed, “Cunningham uses chance much as he might use a magnet, to draw possibilities to him from beyond his reach.” Cage wanted to disarm the power of individual will, expressing a deep respect for the natural world, for the way things are. Cunningham writes on his web site of his realization that any part of the stage could be a center. “There aren’t any fixed points,” he writes. “Well that’s a Buddhist thought, of course. Wherever you are is the center, as well as where everybody else is.” Yvonne Rainer, considered by many to be an exemplar of post-modern choreography, viewed movement as an object to be examined. Dance scholar Sally Banes writes in Terpsichore in Sneakers, “Descriptive activity, rather than an attempt to probe beneath surfaces for mysterious, ‘deeper’ meaning, was...the antidote Rainer recommended for modern dance.” In 1965, Rainer formulated this strategy for demystifying dance and making it objective:

No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformation and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.

Like the Via Negativa of Dionysius the Areopagite, such a strategy of denial permitted a purification of dance. Dionysius proposed that we search for the unknowable God by saying what God is not. Rainer stripped dance of spectacle, virtuosity and emotion, and was able to explore what movement can be in itself. Like many who performed at Judson Dance Theatre in New York in the ‘60s, she made use of the movement of everyday life, task-oriented movement, movement as uninflected as her prose. Investigations of new territories ignited one other like explosions lighting fuses in a chain reaction. The elitism which affected modern dance, as well as ballet, was challenged by extending performance opportunities to the untrained. Ms. Rainer taught her seminal Trio A “to anyone who wanted to learn it—skilled, unskilled, professional, fat, old, sick, amateur—and gave tacit permission to anyone who wanted to teach it...I envisioned myself as a post-modern dance evangelist bringing movement to the masses.”

The domination of the choreographer and the hierarchical structure of dance companies were challenged by Steve Paxton and his development of Contact Improvisation, in which improvisation became not just a means to choreography but the performance itself. Contact Improvisation has increased widely in popularity since that time and has become an athletic social dance form. In this form, two people improvise together while maintaining some form of physical contact. In his essay, “Contact Improvisation,” Paxton says, “Each party of the duet freely improvises with an aim to working along the easiest pathways available to their mutually moving masses.” People performing Contact learn to trust each other and overcome the fear of falling, gaining new understanding of balance and the place of the body in the world. Paxton further describes Contact as a social system, and says the dancers must “hold to the ideal of active, reflexive, harmonic, spontaneous, mutual forms.” Thus, Contact explores cooperation and mutuality from the ground up and from the body outwards, giving it much in common with some martial arts and many spiritual-physical practices. Like worship and other participatory forms, it requires no audience. It embodies religion not as theme or idea, but as practice or way of life.

The exploration of movement apart from any set vocabulary or style forced much closer attention to gesture and its perception. An audience which had previously been carried along passively by the flow of music or story was now forced to notice in detail what the bodies were actually doing. Everyday gesture was objectivized by being performed, and the performance was often a description or catalogue of the gestures themselves. Both illusion and underlying meaning were rejected.

Some critics of the period have deplored the turn away from meaning, seeing a loss of referents for symbols, a loss of vocation and willingness to sacrifice, and a loss of connection to the community. They have blamed the flight from content on the cold war, anti-communism, and McCarthyism. These social forces created fear of reprisal and leached political content from the arts, forcing them into abstraction.

It is true that post-modern choreography had no interest in religious themes or themes of any kind, and specifically turned against meaning, whether sacred, political, or personal. Nonetheless, modern dance was crying out for a change in the late ’50s. Circles of reference had become closed and meanings taken for granted in expressive dance forms. The thigh-drumming or floor-pounding movements of modern dance reflected an angst as predictable as mimetic gesture. Thus a “dance about dancing” could interrupt the circle and allow new kinds of meanings to break through. Such an examination of the medium made it possible to question the audience-performer relationship or the use of performance in itself, revealing new connections and new openings to the sacred.

Among several different kinds of choreographers working today, there exist various trends: an emphasis on content, a return to narrative, a collapse of the distinction between popular and high culture, the incorporation of virtuosic dancing in the same pieces which use untrained or non-traditional dancers, and continued efforts to ritualize performance. Each of these trends relates to the sacred in different ways. The emphasis on content opens choreography to religious themes. The return to story-telling can put choreography in touch with the foundational stories of the biblical tradition. The use of untrained or non-traditional dancers makes choreography more inclusive, more capable of enacting the hopes and fears of a people. Thus, dance performance can move closer to ritual and effect transformation of its audience.

Over the last thirty years, both modern and ballet worlds have come to learn and borrow from each other’s strengths. Now that the distinctions between modern and ballet vocabularies have faded, choreographers feel freer to combine eclectically the best of technical movement, structural patterns, verbal narration, and mime. Sally Banes has observed a shift in the use of the term “post-modern dance,” since the ‘70s. Dance so labeled has become “less formalist, more concerned with content—in particular, the politics of identity, and, demographically speaking, its practitioners have become more multi-cultural.” Examples of these trends can be found in the works of Anjelin Preljocaj, Muntu Dance Theatre, Bill T. Jones, Mark Morris, David Rousséve and many others.

The Annunciation, by Preljocaj, was premiered by his company in the spring of l997. Based on the New Testament story, the piece was performed by classically trained dancers with superb technique, using movement in which ballet and modern sources were inseparable. The form was “pure” dance: no singing, no narration, no audience participation. When the curtain rises, we see a young woman in a simple white tunic sitting on a bench, lit by a single diagonal beam coming from high up on stage left. Her hands make small, self-conscious movements around the back of her head. Strains of Vivaldi’s Magnificat can be heard, layered with sounds of children playing in a schoolyard. This is Mary, the virgin who is still really only a child, unique and vulnerable.

The angel enters with the crashing discordant sounds of Stéphane Roy’s Crystal Music. Bright white light illuminates his face and body, and we see Mary’s vision: a tall, dark-haired figure in a dark green tunic faces her in a deep lunge, one hand raised with a finger extended. We can almost hear him speak, as his movement pushes her back without touching her, electrifies her, exhausts her, and leaves her curled on the floor. His message and energy are too much for her. She cannot accept him, cannot dance with him. Her refusal is expressed in limpness, passivity.

Only a later look at the program lets us know that the angel dancer is a woman. Tall, thin, and short-haired, she seems perfectly androgynous, a different order of being from Mary the schoolgirl. The angel comforts Mary, supporting her in low, hanging lifts, challenges her passivity, and finally teaches her a jumping, leaping, ecstatic angel dance, punctuated by a fluttering arm movement which solidifies into a curve, defining a wing. Now she is energized by the angel, and can join the dance. The angel and Mary dance in perfect unison, entirely at one. They retire to the bench where they sit side by side, and each takes a turn leaning her head on the other’s shoulder, dropping it to her lap and rotating to sit on the other side. It is a gentle scene of mutual comfort. Finally, the angel leaves in a second flash of light and crash of sound. Mary returns to her bench and the sounds of Vivaldi. She touches her head again, pondering all that has happened.

The choreographer suggests in his notes to the piece the tension between submission and revolt implied by many paintings of the Annunciation. This choreographed version of the story expresses fully in movement the fear and amazement of a very young woman confronted by such a message, the pure and fiery but compassionate divinity of an angel with a frightening, inspiring message, and Mary’s assimilation of the message, which is at the same time a physical event. Suddenly it seems that dance is the most appropriate medium for this most physical of stories. Preljocaj further draws a parallel between the creation of new life in the Annunciation and in the artistic process. Speaking of his use of narrative in an interview with the New York Times, he says: “The story has to translate into choreographic equivalents, and the dancers must, in that sense, be the instruments of that bodily narrative.”

This piece succeeds in illuminating and commenting on a story from the Christian tradition without sentimentality or surface piety. It does not shrink from exploring the humanity of one of its characters or the divinity of the other, and alludes gently and subtly to the sexuality of their encounter. Thus, it represents a high point in fusing religion and dance. Rather than pointing to a story we could just as well have read, the dance breaks open the narrative, and the sacredness of the story suffuses each gesture.

Rites and Rituals, by Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago, also premiered in the spring of 1997 and was explicitly offered as ritual. Presented in a formal theatre, it nonetheless aimed beyond performance to the encouragement, inspiration, and transformation of a people.

The rising curtain reveals thirty singer-dancers in bright, flowing choir robes milling and dancing excitedly, then arranging themselves into a formal church-like choir to sing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” This music segues seamlessly into African drumming, and a white-clad priest-figure advances, with authoritative, weighted steps, down center to pour a libation to the ancestors, explaining his actions in English and performing the ritual in Yoruba, the language of Nigeria. An ancient-looking woman with a cane moves to center stage and begins reciting Langston Hughes’ poem, “The Negro Mother.” Frail at the beginning, she gains strength and force as she speaks Hughes’ powerful words about dark origins in slavery, suffering and faith. Hope for the future of her children shines through her as she sings a solo verse of “Nobody Knows.”

The singer-dancers re-enter in long dresses for the women and white suits for the men, now members of an old-time church congregation with their preacher. The singing and clapping are infectious and the preaching is compelling. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” the preacher says, “and that light is faith.” Is this a worship service, or is it a recreation of one in the style of music theatre? The intention of the company is clearly transformational. In the words of the program notes, it is dedicated to “all those who have come before us who have paved the way and opened the roads to our future.” The notes speak of prayer as “strengthening the links between God and people and among people, creating harmony in the world.” The performance seeks to retrieve roots, transitions, and rituals of the past in order to strengthen a people and empower them to move into a better future. The ritual/performance which results is both syncretic and prophetic. As seamlessly as hymn-singing becomes African drumming, the preaching of Isaiah, prophet of justice, gives way to the danced cult of the Orishas. These priests and priestesses of the Yoruba people of Nigeria take turns performing solo: Elegba in red cloth mask carries a knife and raises his legs in karate-like kicks; Yemaya wears a flowing silk robe which undulates like water. Each in turn dances a solo and then blesses a member of the group.

The movement throughout is of highest energy, pounding the floor or jumping off it, hips and shoulders moving independently and creating waves of motion from torso out to fingertips and back. In a men’s circumcision dance, the legs move so fast, crossing and uncrossing like scissors, that they appear to be sliding on ice. The pace and rhythm of the accompanying drums builds and builds. The performers sing or speak or move as the occasion demands.

“Dance and music are an integrated force linked with religion in the worship of deities, divination rituals and the ancestors,” says a program note, thus summarizing the evening’s synthesis of African roots with Christianity.

The last curtain call is over, and the drums and colors of the performance are replaced by the flashing lights and cool night air of the city as we leave the theatre. We are not sure if we have seen a performance or participated in a ritual, but the world looks like a more hopeful place.

Tomorrow night’s dance concert may be any or many of these: abstract, balletic, athletic, religious, musical, theatrical, ritual, virtuosic, political, mimetic, popular. The era of rigid demarcation is over. Movement at its best still functions to break through language, to express what words cannot, and thus is specially suited to access the sacred.

Choreographers are no longer those who set steps, but auteurs of performance works who use a variety of methods and materials to achieve their varied ends. More and more often, these ends are religious by virtue of theme and/or transformational intent. Religion and dance can be seen occasionally moving towards their original unity. The inclusion of song and narration along with movement from many sources is generating a multi-disciplinary kind of performance work which can speak the hopes and fears of a people to its God, as well as open both audience and performers to a fresh awareness of the sacred in their lives.

Visit Maggie Kast as Image Artist of the Month for March '98

Issue #19 • Spring 1998