André Levinson on dance

Joan Acocella, Lynn Garafola, edited by, André Levinson on Dance – Writing from Paris in the Twenties, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1991. 

 André Levinson was a Russian emigré who, in 1921, left his country with his wife Lubov and thier daughter Marie. His life as an intellectual of the pre-Revolution era had been destroyed and he was in danger. He was proficient in French and in Paris he bagan working for newspapers such as Comoedia. He wrote about many subjects, but his favourite one was dance. 

He was erudite and had a beautiful writing style. Moreover, he spoke from principle as he was probably the first critic to champion pure versus expressive dance. In other words, he thought dance had value in itself, not just as imitation of other arts. 

This is a thorny question even today as choreographers, critics and scholars are divided between what we may call a formalist and a narrative approach. Does narrative dance imply the imitation of another art, like, say, literature? It is not necessarily so. The frequent creation of dance adaptations of ballets such as Giselle or Swan Lake brings us to think that narrative is a significant part of dance history, not just the imitation of another art. 

Returning to Levinson, he also described dance, thus giving his readers a glimpse of what he had seen. The present book gathers together the essays (all except for two) Levinson wrote for the North American Theatre Arts Monthly and are a very good example of his vision. 

Edited by Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola, these essays cover various types of dance, like ballet, Spanish dance and what was then called Negro jazz dance. In particular, Levinson was devoted to ballet, criticised the Ballets Russes and exalted Maria Taglioni. In “The Spirit of the Classic Dance”, he individuates three main aspects of ballet, like verticality, turnout and elevation, while in “The Spirit of the Spanish Dance” he asserts that it “can best be expressed by a curved line”. 

In “A Crisis in the Ballets Russes”, he points out that “the ballet master, Michel Fokine, sacrificed the forms of abstract movement for expression, pure dance for pantomime”. And in “The Anatomy of a Sylph: Concerning the Beauty of Marie Taglioni”, he analyses Taglioni’s physical characteristics, de facto deifying her, as Marian Smith has highlighted. 

In her essay, “The disappearing danseur”, Smith states that Levinson overlooks the fact that Romantic ballets actually told stories and that La Sylphide was not the only successful ballet of the period. Furthermore, according to her, Levinson was possibly the first to coin the expression ‘ballet blanc’ and contributed to the belief that men were “evicted” from ballet, something she proves to be wrong. 

In André Levinson on Dance, the most racist essay is the one dedicated to black jazz dance: he calls it “primitive dancing”, stating that “the Negro frenzy, although it is completely devoid of any nobility and almost ‘pre-human’, if not actually bestial, can attain to a positive grandeur”. In this sense, this and the other essays have an important historical value and represent a way in which dance was seen in the 1920s. They need to be considered as such, a sign of those times, not absolute truths. 

Levinson also wrote about Alberto Spadolini, as it is reported in Spadolini’s 1946 “Quelques extraits de presse”. He affirms that his postures and gestures “know how to reach an eloquent nobility”. He also highlights “a beautiful touch of acrobatics in his technique” connecting it “to the great Italian ballet masters of the nineteenth century”. So far, I have not been able to place this fragment within Levinson’s work, but it is an interesting point of view on Spadolini. 

Levinson was probably one of the first dance critics in the modern sense of the word. Included in the volume are other essays, like “The Modern Dance in Germany”, “Javanese Dancing: The Spirit and the Form” and the much quoted “The Idea of the Dance: From Aristotle to Mallarmé”. The book is also enriched by a bibliography of Levinson’s writings and by sixteen pages of illustrations. 

 

Further References 

Smith, Marian, “The disappearing danseur”, Cambridge Opera Journal, 19, 1, 2007, pp. 33-57. 

“Spadolini – Quelques extraits de presse”, Paris 1946, Bolero-Spadò Archive.

 

 

Ailey II now streaming (until 2 October 2022)

 

An image from The Hunt as performed by six men.

Two of Ailey II’s performances are now available on the Ailvin Ailey website and YouTube until October 2, see this link. Ailey II, as The New York Times has stated, is the younger version of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is characterised by likewise energy and brilliance. The performances in question are Robert Battle’s The Hunt (2001) and Takademe (1999). Battle is the current artistic director of the Company and, in this case, has devised a refreshing change for both these works: The Hunt was originally danced by men while in this version it is performed by women and Takademe was a solo which is now danced by the whole Company.

The Hunt is an “athletic work for six men” that “reveals the predatory side of human nature and the primitive thrill of the hunt”. In this version danced by four women and restaged by Elisa Clark, the movement quality is different and there is a body fluidity absent in the initial work. The opening image recalls the rarefied atmosphere of an Edward Hopper’s painting thanks to Burke Wilmore’s striking lighting. The high-paced and percussive music by Les Tambours de Bronx immediately starts, creating a stark contrast with the dancers’ initial stillness. Then, as the dance begins, a vigorous pulsating energy emanates from the dancers’ bodies. They move in circles, bend their torso, walk, run and go to the floor mainly in pairs, but also all together. Mia McSwain’s costumes consist of long black skirts with red under layers and red tops. The skirts move along with the dancers’ movements creating a dazzling visual effect.

The title of this piece recalls Tero Saarinen’s Hunt (2002), a solo which represents his version of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, set to Stravinsky’s celebrated music. There, Saarinen plays with a long and wide skirt as well, a sort of white tutu made of panels of fabric where, at one point, images of himself are projected. There is a moonlike and hypnotising atmosphere. Saarinen’s intent was to focus on the giant quantity of information with which we are bombarded every day. In Battle’s The Hunt there is a raw energy and a physicality that bring the dancers to perform a tour de force without rest. We are almost left out of breath at the end of it. That is also why it is so brilliant! 

Takademe “mixes humor and high-flying movement in a savvy deconstruction of Indian Kathak dance rhythms”. Restaged by Kanji Segawa, it presents the whole Company instead of a solo interpreter. This means that the movement of the initial version is amplified and it reverberates through a collective group of dancers. In this case there is a more delicate and precise movement quality with respect to The Hunt. The dancers, for example, cross their arms, perform a small kick and bend in a flowy way. Sheila Chandra’s music contributes to this lighter atmosphere, highlighting each dancer’s move.

This dance reminded me of Martha Graham’s Satyric Festival Song (1932), a playful solo made of irony and wit, where the dancer jumps and walks tossing her hair up and down. Both these works are elegant and refined and humorous. I wonder how Graham’s solo would look like if it were performed by a group as Takademe was. Food for thought, thanks Ailey II!