CONSTANTS - WHAT CONSTITUTES A WORK OF ART IN THE DANCE, by Ted Shawn

Ted Shawn, a one-time divinity student from Kansas City Missouri, shared with his wife, Ruth St. Denis, a belief in the validity of dance as a religious expression. Many of the dances he choreographed had a religious or ethnic base, and often the two themes were combined…Ted Shawn was articulate on the dance and published a number of books. The following essay is taken from a collection of lectures that he delivered at George Peabody College [approximately 1925].

Philosophers have tried to tell us that all life is a continuous flux – that nothing is permanent but change. But, somehow the human soul continually reaches out for something permanent, something enduring. We crave solidity and the eternal in the midst of all evidence that everything is elusive and impermanent. Perhaps it is only wishful thinking on my part, but I believe that this eternal desire of the soul is the greatest argument for the value of 'constants' in art. For in art we create our ideal worlds, and in the ideal world of the universal man, there are constant, enduring and never-changing qualities.

In relation to the dance, these constants have two aspects: the physical and the – shall I say? – spiritual (at least spiritual in the sense of art-values).
In the physical realm, the constants are what we, as dancers, must all have and what, critically, we have the right to expect of other dancers. These are bodily skills, mind-body coordinations, disciplines.

No matter what type of dancing is done there are certain things that must be mastered: the dancer must be light, i.e., able to leave the floor by leaping or jumping, and land with elasticity, so as not to jar his body or make a noise. He must have mastered all those fundamental movements patterns which I have elucidated at greater length in my monograph: "The Fundamentals of a Dance Education" - swinging, walking, running, leaping, jumping, falling, torsion, bending, shaking, oppositions, parallelisms, successions, the "alphabet" of those movements out of which dance steps are made; he must be the master of the twin principles of tension and relaxation, and must be able to maintain balance perfectly whether at rest or in motion. He must have his body so trained and so coordinated that the idea, be it kinetic, musical or dramatic, is expressed by his whole body as a unity. He must know thoroughly the patterns of construction of dance in relation to all three dimensions of space, and in relation to that fourth dimension of the dance: time. He must be trained in the relation of the dance to music so that, when dancing to music, his movement and the music seem the twin emanation of one impulse, and he must master the relationship of himself to a group of other dancers in an almost infinite variety of patterns. In addition to this he must apprehend all the different qualities of movement, and be able to produce these qualities as surely as the organist pulls out the stops on his organ. He must acquire a rich vocabulary of movements, so that he can improvise as easily as he indulges in a pleasant and exciting conversation, never stopping to think what word to use, nor how to form his sentence grammatically. And he must have acquired and mastered a technique (many techniques, really) or else build a technique for himself, by doing which he has administered to himself a more severe discipline than if he had been trained in the technique of others.

These, then, are constants – we must deal with all of these if we expect to dance ourselves, and we have a right to expect these in dancers we see, and fairly judge the value and quality of the performance by the degree the dancer shows us how he has absorbed, mastered and practically forgotten these constants.

But beyond these physical constants there are the greater constants. For no matter how cleverly a dancer dances, no matter how disciplined and technically proficient he be-if the dance he performs is inexpertly constructed, and the content worthless or thin, we are disappointed and “let down”.

These greater constants are those which we look for in the dance itself-the dance as a work of art – where we are judging the work of the composer, the author, that is, the choreographer.
In actual physical performance, the dance has many unique problems which are not shared by any other art form, but the standards by which we judge a dance as a work of art (the dance in itself, as distinct from the performance of it) are almost the identical standards by which we judge a work of art in any other medium.

First, there should be complete clarity in the mind of the creator as to what he intends to do (that is, to say, in his own particular medium of the dance). He may wish to create a mood, or he may wish to tell a story, or he may wish only to take a “seed” of basic movement, and let it be organically developed into a final complicated-yet-simple product. Whatever his aim, the choreographer must not be confused as to his intention, his method, his stylization, the special technique used, or the result will by hybrid, confusing, neither one thing nor the other.
Second, there must be unity of style in the composition, one quality of movement must remain throughout. This does not mean that there can be no variety, but that the variety must be within the unity. The work, as a whole must be of one stuff, as an emerald is all emerald – crush it to powder, and each tiny pinch of that powder will still be emerald. A fragment of a Greek vas is instantly recognizable, and each fragment of any dance which is a work of art should be sufficiently stylized to identify the whole from which it was taken. And, within this unity, the work must cohere – it must be solid in its construction, so that there are no joining places left visible in the finished product – but it seems to have been quarried out of one piece.

This means that the dance must have sequence, each movement done must lead inevitably into the next movement, so that one could not imagine any other movement being possible as successor to the movement just done.

And this implies, absolutely, architecture. The whole dance, as a work of art, must be constructed as well and carefully as a beautiful building, which is beautiful not only because of its materials and ornamentation, but also on account of its design, its proportions; because it has a solid foundation, and because its walls are solid and capable of supporting the roof. A dance work of art must have beginning, development and climax – just as a building has foundations, walls and roof.

Since the dance is almost universally accompanied by music, there are certain constants in that relationship, too. The dance must have in it all the qualities that the music has and provide, in replica, all the elements of the music. Of course, the foundation is rhythm – the without-which-nothing – the thing on which all rests. But, as music has harmony so must the movement be harmonious within itself and with the music. Even if one is dancing to the apparent dissonances of modern music, there must be a harmony between the distortion – consciously and intelligently used – of the body and the distortions of tone from the accepted norm. All the values of time, duration, stress, dynamics and form inherent in the music, must be equally inherent in the dance work of art.

Much has been and still is said about kinesthesia, about dance being kinetically created, but this is one only of the legitimate starting points for the creation of a dance, and it never excuses formlessness in the finished product. Many things that are permissible in the studio as training, as experimentation, as discipline are not permissible to offer to an audience as a dance work of art. Many people who are interested in the dance may enjoy visiting a class and watching the training process, but studio exercises should be confined to the studio, and never be brought to an exhibition program of the supposedly finished, product.

We hear the word “stylized” a great deal in regard to the dance. This refers to what I said about unity. A dancer may choose to do a dance in the style of the hieratic wall paintings of ancient Crete, or in the style of a Javanese dance, or a Spanish dance. In this case, this style must predominate, govern and discipline every movement, and even the dance as a whole. The dancer may develop such a strong individual style that his movement may be “stylized” and yet not be classifiable as belonging to any actual style such as those mentioned above; yet within his own style he maintains a unity of quality and is disciplined by his own imposed limitations.

“Distortion” is another word much discussed in the dance today. From a certain angle, all art is distortion, in that it is not a photographic, mechanical reproduction of nature. The artist chooses from out of the vast superfluity of nature that which he wishes to use, shapes that to his own purpose, and so “distorts” it from its original form and shape. But “distortion” is a dangerous word, for many people seem to think that wrenching things blindly into grotesque shapes has value in itself. Those who have revolted unintelligently from the ballet tradition and technique seem to believe that the exact opposite of the rules of the ballet will give some strangely desirable result. This produces movement without real significance – or perhaps it has some significance: that of the naughty child who makes faces to show that it doesn’t like a person.

Do not be afraid that, because you are teachers, and especially teachers in Physical Education, that all this talk about “art” is beside the point. It is very definitely to the point, because the dance is art, or it is nothing. It is not merely a means of exercising, or promoting health, or building a strong symmetrical body. It does all these things, and better than any other means of physical education, but these are all by-products. An art activity is the deepest, richest, most worth-while activity of mankind. It is work and it is play – the most delightful play ever known, and “that work most worthy of man’s perfected powers.” We must be conscious of the dance as art even when we are teaching the simplest beginning fundamentals and try to awaken that attitude towards the dance in all our pupils. The value of the dance, its greatest value, is in the “intangibles.” Success in the dance cannot be measured by a tape, weighed on scales, nor timed with a stop-watch. It demands an awareness and sensitivity in the dancer’s soul and in the soul of the beholder who partakes vicariously, empathetically, in the dance – and it is the development, strengthening and cultivation of this awareness which is the teacher’s most important job.

You must clear your mind of all misconceptions of what art means – get out of your head, if possible and if you have any of that feeling there, that art is something in museums, something remote and precious. Art is experience, vital experience, and nowhere does on e experience the reality of art so greatly as in the dance. Here the constants of beauty, ease, proportion, vitality, technical mastery, of the communication of ecstasy to the beholder, are within one’s body-soul – they are as much you as your blood and your breath. And the greatest constant of all is that here in the dance we experience a rhythmic beauty, the activity of God Himself.