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Technique and Autonomy in the Development of Art: A Case Study in Ballet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Sandra N. Hammond  and
Phillip E. Hammond
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Extract

Comparison is the basis of theory. To know a thing is to know what it is not, and to theorize is therefore to compare a thing with many other things, including the thing itself at earlier stages, if the theorizing is about how the thing develops. The more “abstract” the theory, the greater is the range of things that can be compared—the more phenomena, in other words, the theory embraces.

The above paragraph is our way of warning the reader that, while we offer a theoretical perspective on the development of ballet, we spend most of our pages introducing an abstract way of making comparisons–comparisons pertinent not only to the differences between contemporary and earlier ballet but also to the differences between ballet and other artistic endeavors. The publication of this essay in a dance journal is justified by our concluding pages, therefore, but it is our hope that not just dance theorists will profit from (and add to) our analysis, but so also will persons of a theoretical bent interested in any of the arts.

One more word of preliminary explanation. A decade ago we published an essay in the Journal of Social History that offered a radically sociological interpretation of the development of ballet. Our article challenged conventional accounts of ballet history that charted the course of ballet as chiefly a product of its dominant performances and personalities.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Fall 1989 , pp. 15 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1989

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References

NOTES

1. Phillip, E. Hammond and Hammond, Sandra N., “The Internal Logic of Dance: A Weberian Perspective on the History of Ballet,” Journal of Social History 12 (Sept., 1979), pp. 591–608Google Scholar. Some of the final pages of the present essay borrow from this source.

2. Sociology of art, perhaps that discipline's least developed sub-speciality, has had little to say about the paths by which art develops. See, for example, Albrecht, N.C., Barnett, J.H., and Griff, M., eds., The Sociology of Art and Literature (New York: Praeger, 1970)Google Scholar, which devotes only 76 of its 737 pages to matters of art' s development. Munro's, ThomasEvolution in the Arts (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Art Museum, 1963)Google Scholar is such a notable exception to the generalization as to make vivid that generalization.

3. Artz, Frederick, From the Renaissance to Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 114Google Scholar.

4. Cited in Witte, W., “The Sociological Approach to Literature,” Modern Language Review, 36 (Jan., 1941), p. 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Graham, Martha, “A Modern Dancer's Primer for Action,” in Steinberg, Cobbett, ed., The Dance Anthology (New York: New American Library, 1980), p. 47Google Scholar.

6. Artz, pp. 59-60.

7. And yet the language of which cause is more important is hard to discard. The author just cited writes:

An extensive literature has appeared that tried to attribute most changes in style in the arts to political and economic causes…. Without ignoring “climates of opinion,” the fundamental assumption in this book is that changes in style since 1300 are chiefly due to the desire of artists, writers, and musicians to discover and then to explore and exploit new ways of artistic expression—to tap new veins of beauty, (emphasis added)

Ibid, p. 6. Without an agreed-upon metric for measuring effect in comparable units—an unlikely prospect—such discussions appear bootless.

8. Miller, Alec, Tradition in Sculpture (London: Studio Publications, 1949), p. 11Google Scholar.

9. Artz, p. 9.

10. Sachs, Curt, The Commonwealth of Art (New York: W.W. Norton, 1946), p. 335Google Scholar.

11. Kroeber, A.L., ed., Anthropology Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 62Google Scholar.

12. Ibid., p. 299.

13. Artz, p. 7.

14. Kisselgoff, Anna, “There's Nothing ‘National’ About Ballet Styles,” in Copeland, Roger and Cohen, Marshall, eds., What Is Dance? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 362Google Scholar.

15. Artz, p. 9.

16. Mumford, Lewis, Art and Technics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 21Google Scholar.

17. Jowitt, Deborah, Time and the Dancing Image (New York: William Morrow, 1988), p. 226Google Scholar.

18. Sachs, pp. 19, 21.

19. Cohen, Selma Jeanne, Next Week, Swan Lake (Middle-town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), pp. 72–73Google Scholar.

20. Artz, p. 53.

21. Sachs, p. 328.

22. Artz, pp. 27, 62.

23. Ibid.

24. Sachs, p. 332.

25. Legnani's accomplishment of the thirty-two fouettés in the ballet Cinderella, although usually credited as being the first instance of such new virtuosity, probably had already been performed by at least one other Italian ballerina, Maria Giuri, in the ballet Excelsior, in Bologna ten years before. See Guest, Ivor in Strong, Roy, Guest, Ivor, Buckle, Richard, Kay, Barry, and da Costa, Liz, Designing for the Dancer (New York: Universe, 1981), p. 60Google Scholar. Spotting no doubt had long been in use, but dance technique manuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries make no mention of it, even as they emphasize other important aspects of turning—such as balance, form, and preparation. Mathilde Kshessinskaya, the first Russian ballerina to duplicate Legnani's achievement of thirty-two fouettés, recounts in her memoires the secret of her success on stage:

… I told him [the Tsar] that I owed my capacity to perform thirty-two fouettés without flaw to him. … “To dance fouettés in one spot one has to have a clearly visible mark ahead everytime one turns. You always sit in the middle of the front row of the stalls, and when it's dark your decorations glitter in the footlights!”

H.S.H. The Princess Romanovsky-Krassinsky, Dancing in Petersburg. The Memoirs of Kschessinska. Trans, by Haskell, Arnold. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), p. 76Google Scholar.

26. Bensman, Joseph and Lilienfeld, Robert, Craft and Consciousness (New York: John Wiley, 1973), p. 54Google Scholar.

27. Fokine, Michel, “Theory on the Art of Ballet,” in Steinberg, p. 19Google Scholar.

28. Tree, Michael, “Industrial Design,” in Creedy, Jean, ed., The Social Context of Art (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 110Google Scholar.

29. Krog, Steven R., “Is It Art?” Landscape Architecture 71 (May, 1981), p. 373Google Scholar.

30. At a recent exhibition and conference in Berlin on the work of Mary Wigman

… it became clear that debates over whether or not Wigman developed a “technique” derive from differing concepts of “technique.” In the German context “technique” meant a set of principles, derived from Jaques-Dalcroze and Laban, taught through structured improvisation. In this sense Wigman clearly possessed a “technique.” However, in an American con-text “technique” means a codified movement vocabulary, and in this sense Wigman did not possess a ”technique,” though Holm [Wigman's pupil who settled in the United States] evolved her work toward a codified vocabulary.

From a review by McDonald, Amy, “Mary Wigman 1886 To 1973 (Academy of Arts, West Berlin, 24 September-30 October, 1986)” Dance Research Journal, 19/2 (Winter 1987–1988), p. 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Sachs, p. 346.

32. The quotation is from Francis, John, “A Record Hour,” Cyclist (June, 1984), p. 17Google Scholar. The “trick” involved the use of carbon fiber devices to reduce air resistance. We are indebted to Professor Thomas Shrock—political scientist, cyclist, and critic of an earlier draft of this paper—for bringing this analogy to our attention.

33. We leave aside altogether the intriguing question of where technique and style shade into one another. Mayer Schapiro, “Style,” in Kroeber, pp. 287-312, takes up this issue.

34. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), p. 161Google Scholar.

35. Kuhn, Thomas, “Comment,” Comparative Studies in Society and History xi (Oct., 1969), p. 408Google Scholar.

36. Darnton, Nina, “Museums of Modern Garb. Hanging clothes as art,” Newsweek (Feb. 27, 1989), p. 78Google Scholar.

37. Butler, Ruth, Western Sculpture (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975), pp. 16–18Google Scholar.

38. See Miller, 13 ff., for the argument and Cheney, Sheldon, Sculpture of the World (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 7Google Scholar, for an account of Michelangelo's sentiments on the matter.

39. Miller, p. 8.

40. Martin, John, “The Ideal of Ballet Aesthetics,” in Steinberg, p. 302Google Scholar.

41. Sachs, p. 369.

42. Ibid.

43. de Mille, Agnes, The Book of the Dance (New York: Golden Press, 1963), p. 17Google Scholar.

44. An example of an “accidental” impetus of technical expansion in ballet is the following.

Suzanne Farrell thinks that an injury that made it temporarily impossible for her to work on half-toe, although she could manage full pointe, led him [Balanchine] to expand his lexicon of pointework.

Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image, p. 266.

45. For a discussion of the development of pointe work, see Hammond, Sandra N., “Searching for the Sylph: Documentation of Early Developments in Pointe Technique,” Dance Re-search Journal, 19/2 (Winter, 1987–1988), pp. 27–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.