Ballet music and New Dance

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New Dance, for all that it is a new and separate concept, nevertheless is grounded in tradition. We find these roots of a previous art form of dance primarily in old ballet scores. How can we reawaken these old works of music within New Dance, how do we rekindle their spark of life?

In order to answer this question we must also state our position on the relationship between the dance work of art [Tanzkunstwerk] and the musical accompaniment.

At first glance this relationship can strike us as purely external. One could assume that a dance movement sequence, which after all constitutes an independent art form according to today’s perspective, could be performed with or without the accompanying score, to equal effect. Similarly one could make the costume and lighting more or less complex, without adding or taking away significantly from the work of art. However, that is only the case for those dance compositions that were created independently from the accompanying score in the first place.

An instructive example of this kind is Don Juan by the Viennese Dance composer Casparo Angiolini. This dance piece was composed in 1761, and it has had a wide variety of accompanying music over the course of its performance history. One of the accompanying works is the one by Gluck. It is worth noting that the piece had been performed for years without even a mention of the name of the music composer. The textbook described a simple sequence of events. But the dance community at the time was so adept at the receiving and reproducing of these movement sequences that the content of the dance composition remained the same over many performances near and far.

A similar case, in which several version of accompanying music were composed after the ballet is the dance sequence “les petits riens” by Noverre, for which on the occasion of the performance in Vienna a new accompaniment was written by none other than Mozart.

The very detailed textbook about Don Juan could still be dance/mime-performed today. The plot is fundamentally the same as Mozart’s opera of the same name. It should be noted that ballet master Vogt, who staged repeated performances of the piece in Frankfurt and with Johannes Böhm’s stage company, was friends with both Mozart and Mozart’s father. Today we have a peculiar relationship to the piece. We have the scenarium and furthermore the exact rhythmic and musical foundations by Gluck.

However, as one can see from this example, the actual mime performance of the piece is only of limited concern when in fact the main focus is on dances characterised by the spiritual temper of the music, both in group as well as in solo dances. As there is no surviving record of the actual choreography, it is impossible to accurately reconstruct the dances. Therefore, when we hear the wonderful rhythms of Gluck’s work and are urged to reproduce the work, we are obliged to interpret these musical dance structures with a new spirit. The old scenarium may well provide us with clues and suggestions, but for the main part we depend on the interpretation of the music. The question remains if the modern dancer today, who mostly abhors musical interpretations from the outset, can dare to engage in this endeavour in the first place. There are a good number of important points to be made on the subject of dance interpretations of music. First and foremost: evidently there are no artistic reasons against the interpretation of musical works that have been composed as accompaniments to dance, or which originated from a dance form in the first place. However, it is a very different case, when one attempts to dance musical composition which do not gain any additional or meaningful value from the addition of movement. Almost every one of the new musicians has created such compositions of a pure and absolute art of sound, and to attempt to dance these works would offend anyone of artistic sensibilities.

Gluck’s musical compositions are created exclusively for dance, and for us today, [the challenge] is the physical/spatial recreation of these rhythms, some of which are grounded in choreographic tradition, in a way that allows our contemporaries to feel the entirety of this rhythm.

The same can be said for Handel’s Ballet composition Terpsichore. Here the scenario is provided by the recitatives placed in the music by Apollo, [in the role of] the compere. But the individual pieces are well-known dance forms, national and courtly dances of the time, which are danced by the Greek gods.

The task to reanimate these and similar works, to redesign the old dance forms according to our modern body language and to cast them into complete works of art is extremely tempting, an attempt, an opportunity that exists alongside other opportunities for this still young form of dance art.