This month, in honour of the upcoming River Dance Festival organized by the Roxey Ballet in which I'm so thrilled to take part, I wanted to constitute my blog in a sort of prelude to a work I'm planning to put together on my favourite subject: choreography. The title of the blog itself is to be the title of the full-length work - until further notice - and thus it gives all of you a taste of what the work itself is to be. But I wanted to introduce it to the world before I venture in even considering beginning the redaction of the extended work; and I thought my monthly blog would be a good way to start.
The art of choreography; what is it? What does one precisely mean when one talks of choreography? Isn't dance a free flowing succession of movements, most of the time improvised? First of all the notion of choreography involves order in a succession of movements - a presentation that will be appealing to the eye, which improvisation can't always be calculated to be. And because of this factor, choreography is primarily linked to the stage.
And now, what is the stage? Following the example of Wagner with his Ring Cycle, I'm starting in this argumentation from the end and following the thread upstream to the source. The stage is a place where movement becomes a communication between people, rather than simply being a means of self-expression. It is a pedestal, whereon the dancer expresses their intention to be seen by other people, the spectators, without being merely dancing for themselves. They want to communicate something to their audience, and in order for this to be possible, they must first gain the interest of their audience. Improvisation is highly personal: the movements executed are those that come spontaneously to the mind of the performer, and don't denote a specific thread of reasoning, of logic, of succession and correspondence. However, in order to interest an audience, a performer must allow that reasoning, that thread, that feeling of harmonious progression & succession to be apparent and shine forth in their work. This is where choreography comes in, as an art and a science and a skill.
Movement is beautiful in & of itself, but organized movement is the art carried to its most powerful level of excellence.
Choreography may be defined as the art to organize movements in intentional succession so as to produce a definite effect on an audience. The nature of that effect can vary greatly depending on the aim of the choreographer, which, in its turn, varies a lot depending on the style of dance. Traditional choreographers tend to have more concrete feelings to express, usually as part of a definite plot which constitute the framework of a ballet. Contemporary choreographers tend to be more abstract in their expressions, often conveying feelings of unexplained joy, fear, anguish, or anger in the succession of movements which they create. But whether the one or the other, choreography is always, because it is the logical thread of the choreographer's thought, and of whatever is expressed by the music, it is always then the means of expression of the choreographer, and what gives meaning to the succession of movements, the plot as it were of the danced sequence. The musician expresses themselves through notes, the orator through words, and the choreographer & dancer through movement, and steps. They each have become proficient in something different, and their proficiency allows them to express exactly what they want to communicate better than words could.
Now I arrive at my second point, and the true aim of the book: choreographing on sung music, as opposed to strictly instrumental music. Words introduce another dimension to music: that of thought. As I stated before, music is primarily emotional in its essence, and as such, primarily conveys emotions. Words are more precise, if perhaps less powerful, and convey thoughts. It necessarily follows that dance choreographed to words is enabled to convey thoughts unlike dance choreographed as most frequently to strictly instrumental music. Richard Wagner's music dramas, because of the structure of their music and their words, are created as a continuous dramatic action rather than just recitatives and arias. The plot is foremost. The unfoldment of the storyline alone is important, and determines the framework and the progression of the music. The same can be done with a dance choreography created on the basis of such a music. This is what it has been my dream to achieve, and which I'm still attempting to do through these short highlights which I'm presenting - and have been for three years now - at the Roxey Ballet River Dance Festival.
Before concluding I merely want to return to that familiar subject - for me - of the main difference of construction which distinguishes Wagner's operas from the more traditional Italian and French ones. First of all, Wagner didn't call his works operas, but dramas. What did he want to convey through that terminology? Well, he wrote dozens of essays on the subject, among which his 1849 The Artwork of the Future is arguably the most famous (and the most readable.) Summed up simply, traditional opera is meant as a musical work with a story part to highlight the dramatic power of the music, and to give context to the various passages that constitute it; but the main focus is the music and the achievements of the singers. For that reason, the passages that make the story advance, are called recitatives, and are nothing more than phrases uttered melodiously, while the purely musical passages which are meant for the audience's enjoyment and the singer's achievement are called arias. During the arias literally nothing happens, and the dramatic action is at a standstill, which is necessary for the music to be enjoyed: while the recitatives, although much more useful to the storyline, are often musically quite arid.
Now how could it be arranged that opera might be transformed into a real means of expression, a storytelling form instead of just a succession of recitatives and arias meant to showcase artists and music? It is to that aim that Wagner entirely changed the way an opera was built. Instead of recitatives and arias, he based the musical progression of his work on the dramatic action alone; to a continuous flow of music he elaborated a thread of dramatic action that wasn't interrupted, but each moment, each passage of music was subordinate to the advancement of the drama and the story, more like a play on music. It's no wonder, indeed, that his first ambition was to become a playwright. The reason however why he chose music is just as meaningful - he wanted to find a more powerful means of expression than just the word. And this is precisely what choreographing to the sung word also delivers: it is a triple means of expression, each of the three being equally powerful, the word, the note, and the step - Speech, Music, and Movement. It is on this concept that I wish to elaborate these ideas of choreographing: instead of merely being pantomime followed by passages of sheer athletic show off, as it must be admitted ballet has mostly always been, it would be a highly expressive and precise style of movement, able to convey thoughts & even words as well as feeling, and to guide the spectator through the narration of a storyline. This is what I've tried to do with this River Dance Festival piece, even though the music to which I choreographed is not sung and involves no words; but it was an attempt in the style of dance that would be most favourable to this sort of choreographic aim, which is neither really classical nor contemporary.
I look forward to this event which will allow audiences to experience the works & styles of various choreographers from across the US. I also look forward to presenting my own piece, in the hope that it will carry through some of these ideas I've evoked here and the role of choreography, music, and words in the elaboration of a performing arts work. I hope to be able to elaborate on these notions in a more complete work on the subject perhaps in a few years.
Previous festivals included the piece Narcissa by Colombian choreographer Giovanni Ravelo: a mysterious piece about love, aging, and death.
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