Predictability and Inevitability in Dance-Music Relationships in Mark Morris's Falling Down Stairs
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01472520802118418
ISSN1532-4257
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes ∗ Paul Crowther writes of a reconciliation of the rational and the sensuous aspects of human experience in our engagement with art in the sense that we are invited both to perceive the sensuous surfaces of the artifact (he is writing specifically about visual art) and engage with the implied semantic content, or layers of potential meaning. It is an inviting notion to see dance and music as sometimes reflecting this reconciliation through drawing attention mutually to one another in first one aspect, then another (Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993], pp. 54–56). See also Rachel Duerden, "Dancing in the Imagined Space of Music," Dance Research, vol. 25, no. 1 (Summer 2007): 73–83. ∗ Choreographer Jonathan Burrows has drawn a parallel with homeopathy in this respect, likening the abstraction of gestural movement from "real life" to the supposed increase in potency of a solution diluted to such an extent that the original added substance is no longer perceptible (quoted in Chris De Marigny, "Burrows: Our Thoughts," Dance Theatre Journal, vol. 11, no. 2 [1994], p. 9). ∗ However, determining the potential subtleties of a distinction between motif and gesture is beyond the scope of the present study, so I shall stay with the notion of gesture as "energetic shaping through time," or as an event in dance or music that carries significance in its ability to open up interpretive possibilities. ∗ "Affect" is a term frequently used in relation to music of this period and earlier to refer to an often difficult-to-define but nonetheless discernible and usually also constant character, mood or feeling attributed to the music. ∗ Wilfrid Mellors refers to the Prélude as a "loosening up exercise" (Bach and the Dance of God [London: Faber and Faber, 1980], p. 18). ∗ Inge Damsholt notes that the term has been used to describe "simple-minded and banal" music vizualisation ("Mark Morris, Mickey Mouse, and Choreomusical Polemic," The Opera Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 1 [2006]:6), and Arlene Zallman warns choreography students that when "the visual representation of a musical gesture" is allowed to "degenerate to the level of mimicry," this is described as "mickey-mousing" ("Music and Dance," in New Dance: Approaches to Non-Literal Choreography, by Margery J. Turner [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971], p.75). Joan Acocella quotes critic Clive Barnes on Morris's choreography demonstrating "a literalness that some apparently find musical but I find Disneyesque" (Mark Morris [New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1993], p. 176). ∗ For example, according to Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, in order to create an element of surprise, the intention would be to set up a rhythm that "feels right" for the action, and then to introduce an unexpected accent to upset this sense of the predictable (The Illusion of Life: Disney Animations [New York: Disney Editions, 1981], p. 294). To make this work with existing music demanded stringent control of the animation and economy of means. ∗ Crowther (Art and Embodiment, p. 145) also refers to the importance of being free to respond to elements in an artwork that reflect, bring to mind, or give physical embodiment to ideas about things that we may find reflected in our own lives or wish to find in our own lives—a balance between adventure and stability, for example. ∗ The choreography was reworked for stage performance in 1997. Nicholas Cook and Nicola Dibben refer to the "public" dimension of "affect" in eighteenth-century music, the sense that the mood or feeling characterizing music would be recognized and shared among participants and listeners as the overall emotional coloration sustained throughout a given piece, dance or movement ("Musicological Approaches to Emotion," in Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], pp. 45–70). ∗ Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne use the terms "arsis" and "thesis" to illustrate the difference between passages of activity and repose in eighteenth-century dances. In the bourrée it was a characteristic feature to have three measures of active movement followed by one of repose in a four-measure phrase. An intermediate moment of repose could occur at the end of a two-measure figure, representing the secondary thesis of the phrase as a whole (Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001], pp. 24, 37, 41). ∗ Inge Damsholt, writing about Morris's Gloria, refers to moments in the choreography when a "simultaneous exaggeration of both vizualisation and opposition betrays our expectations, inviting the spectator to deconstruct the nature of mickey-mousing and to question the simplicity of 'translating the score into dance"' ("Mark Morris, Mickey-Mouse, and Choreomusical Polemic," p. 8). Musicians, too, move their bodies to make the music "move" fast, but in much more restricted spaces and typically without the shifting of whole-body weight. One broad bow stroke of the cellist's right arm can encompass a scale articulated by the fingers of the left hand. 1. Inspired by Bach, directed by Barbara Willis Sweete, original creative concept by Yo Yo Ma, choreography by Mark Morris (Toronto, Ontario: Rhombus Media, 1997; BBC broadcast, February 14, 1998), DVD. 2. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 357. 3. Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 1. 4. See Rachel Duerden, "Dancing in the Imagined Space of Music," Dance Research, vol. 25, no. 1 (Summer 2007): 75. 5. See, for example, description of the gesture in the Song 4 solo, in Rachel Chamberlain Duerden, The Choreography of Antony Tudor: Focus on Four Ballets (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), p. 125. 6. Wilfrid Mellors, Bach and the Dance of God (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 18. 7. Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne, Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 25. 8. Little and Jenne, Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach, p. 25. 9. Meredith Ellis Little, "Bourrée," in International Encyclopedia of Dance, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 516–17. 10. Johann Mattheson (1739), quoted in Little and Jenne, Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach, p. 35. 11. Mellors, Bach and the Dance of God, p. 35. 12. Leonard Meyer, "Music and Emotion: Distinctions and Uncertainties," in Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 358–59. 13. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animations (New York: Disney Editions, 1981), p. 295. 14. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, p. 427. 15. Paul Crowther, Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 59. 16. Meyer, "Music and Emotion," pp. 351–55. 17. Yo Yo Ma, sleeve notes, The Cello Suites: Inspired by Bach (1997), Sony S2K 63203. 18. See Crowther, Art and Embodiment, p. 59. 19. Barbara Willis Sweete, sleeve notes, The Cello Suites: Inspired by Bach (1997), Sony S2K 63203.
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