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What Is Going On in a Dance?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Monroe C. Beardsley
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I begin these rather tentative and exploratory reflections by calling upon some provocative remarks by George Beiswanger, from an essay written some years ago and later reprinted:

Muscular capacity is the physical means by which dances are made. But the means becomes available to the choreographic imagination only through the operation of a metaphor, a metaphor by which a moving in the muscular sense takes on the character of a doing or goings-on. … Strictly speaking, then, dances are not made out of but upon movement, movement being the poetic bearer, the persistent metaphor, by which muscular material is made available for the enhanced, meaningful, and designed goings-on that are dance.

Though this passage summarizes a view that I shall try to defend and articulate, the attempt to apply the concept of metaphor troubles me: it seems a strained extension of an otherwise reasonably clear and useful term. So instead of Beiswanger's rather mysterious “operation of a metaphor” I shall suggest we employ some concepts and principles borrowed from the philosophical theory of action. But I still like his favored expression for what we are all trying to understand better—those special “goings-on” that constitute dance.

Type
Articles on Philosophy and Dance
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Fall 1982 , pp. 31 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1982

References

NOTES

This paper was presented at “Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Inquiry and Aesthetic Criticism,” co-sponsored by CORD and Temple University, May 5, 1979.

1. “Chance and Design in Choreography,” reprinted from the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 21 (Fall 1962): 14–17Google Scholar, in Nadel, Myron Howard and Miller, Constance Nadel, eds., The Dance Experience: Readings in Dance Appreciation, rev. ed. (N.Y.: Universe Books, 1978), p. 88Google Scholar.

2. “Movement and Action in the Performing Arts,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 37 (Fall 1978): 25–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. See “Haig Khatchadourian's ‘Movement and Action in the Performing Arts,’” forthcoming. I must add that in writing this essay I have benefited much from study of Julie Van Camp's dissertation, Philosophical Problems of Dance Criticism, and also from her helpful comments on an earlier draft.

4. Khatchadourian, p. 25.

5. Siegel, Marcia B., The Shapes of Change: Images of Modern Dance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 280Google Scholar.

6. “A Prolegomenon to an Aesthetics of Dance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 21 (Fall 1962): 19–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in several places, including Nadel and Miller, op. cit., and Beardsley, M.C. and Schueller, H.M., eds., Aesthetic Inquiry: Essays on Art Criticism and the Philosophy of Art (Belmont, CA: Dickenson, 1967)Google Scholar.

7. See his footnote 13, p. 36.

8. “An Appetite for Motion,” reprinted from The New Yorker (1968) in Nadel, and Miller, , p. 273Google Scholar.

9. De Libero Arbitrio, II, xvi, 42Google Scholar; trans. Burleigh, H.S., in The Library of Christian Classics, Vol. VI (Philadelphia, 1955)Google Scholar.

10. Where playacting or miming is prominent, we are tempted to say what Anna Kisselgoff wrote of a Jerome Robbins work: “The line between dance and nondance has been obliterated in ‘Watermill’” (The New York Times, May 27, 1979)Google ScholarPubMed.

11. Quoted by Abeel, Erica in “The New New Dance,” reprinted from Dance Scope (1965) in Nadel, and Miller, , op. cit., p. 117Google Scholar.