The dark side of the boom

...the - pre-verbal, trans-cultural, and authen- from a tabula rasa, even if that sometimes thought-line of the dance...

...she declared her "rage at the imtune...

...yet it's hard to body...

...mark - is of someone who spends all of view, it doesn't hurt one bit that the Our sprawling national geography beckday perfecting his or her image in a mir- best known names in American dance - ons us to assert our freedom by asserting ror...

...And tion of this exhibitionism...

...The moand continual change...

...When the renowned romantic bal- sential to the medium, resulted in the arena, Americans have always been unlerina, Fanny Elssler, first performed in virtual elimination of the human figure comfortable with genuine eloquence...

...And if without encountering an article titled Baryshnikov set out to demonstrate that (something like) "American Dance male ballet dancers could be aggressively Grows by Leaps and Bounds...

...Is it any wonder ten, comes down to this: man cannot live literacy and verbal skills...

...But in the art of dance - where the gawky, mumble-mouthed Frank Capra is religion...

...It's a among audiences in the other arts wound 1970s as younger Americans increasway of guaranteeing that dance remains ingly redirected their energies and attenas fully as possible in "the present tion away from the public sector and onto tense...

...dance of course, is one of the most prom- Such exhibitionism is, at worst, a inent of those substitute, displaced sites...

...If you look at the history of boom was not confined to Hollywood...

...But it's also - perhaps unwit- themselves...

...Worse yet, nothing so departure, which it is...

...When I travel, as I often do, and soften its grip on the imagination, we Certainly, even at its flashy worst, fall into conversation about Amer- become increasingly receptive to D.H...

...But dance com- fueled primarily by high-octane dancing, primarily not for its dancing, but for that panies have increased from ten to in pricey new perfumes with names like loose-fitting, slung-off-the-shoulderseventy, so it's a seven-fold in- "Pavlova" and "Cabriole," in televi- sweatshirt popularized by Jennifer Beals...

...the sacrifices demanded by what passes Like "no first use," civilian-based de- further effect of subverting the loyalty of for strategy are potentially enormous...

...Of course, from the corpo- upward, then at least horizontal...

...Think of those Ralph Waldo Emerson replied, "No, this ence...

...But there is - just as F IRST, to place this question in the In a culture hungry for vicarious sexual surely - a much darker side to the dance proper context and perspective, it's substitutes, for images of physical ful- boom: specifically, the fact that the rising essential to recognize that the so-called fillment unattainable in the bedroom, the fortunes of American dance are directly, boom of the 1970s did not emerge sud- arts in which the idealized human body is statistically proportional to the declining denly and unexpectedly as if from most prominent - arts like dance and the standards of American literacy...

...Still, there's more planned obsolescence...

...that the deeper link between the dance there's no denying that it appeals to Ultimately, dance thrives in this counboom and the popularity of jogging and people with a strong, solipsistic urge to try because it provides such concrete, but exercise more generally is not their retreat from the outside world...

...narcissisms, and But is it possible that what Sontag calls of dance...

...crease, at a higher rate than any of sion commercials featuring performers But even after we've peeled away the the other performing arts and the purporting to be dancers who peddled layers of hype and separated the choreoeverything from Maxwell House Coffee graphic wheat from the merelyto Stayfree Maxi Pads, and in a flurry of fashionable chaff, there's still no disputROGER COPELAND teaches at Oberlin College and is co-editor of the book What Is hastily concocted dime novels attempt- ing the fact that America has become the Dance...

...now-you-see-it, now-you-don't disap- The very sort of modernist strategies The popularity of jogging and runpearing act that constitutes an essential that caused so much consternation ning, for example, began to soar in the feature of the dance experience...

...Without wideobject of more and more serious atten- Gene Sharp spread public acceptance of their strattion...

...Talleyrand put it no less bluntly launched (Europe), but against the timately by making a conquered country when he said it was possible to do every- source of the attack, the United States or politically indigestible and its people un- thing with the point of a sword except sit its military forces and installations...

...undidactic metaphors for the American mutual physicality, but the relative ease The widespread perception of dance as conception of freedom, a yearning that with which both promote a turning in- an apolitical, narcissistic art form ac- manifests itself primarily in the pursuit of ward, a retreat from the world-at-large...

...But in dance, Dance owes much of its current popular- To be sure, dance is a notoriously dif- the emergence of a formalist, nonity-to the widespread perception that it's ficult art to "notage" accurately on narrative aesthetic resulted in a muchnot only non-verbal, but anti-verbal, that paper...

...But at the disco on a feverish Saturday night...

...It accredited form of macho onethe growth of institutions in the last was visible virtually anywhere one cared upmanship...

...EXAMINING DANCE IN AMERICA The dark side of the boom ROGER COPELAND us postage stamps commemorating variMORE AND MORE often these days, ous varieties of American dance, new' we hear it said that the American hybrid entertainment forms like John dance boom of the 1970s has Curry's "Ice Dancing," and last - as gone bust...

...all devoted to getting and that celebrates the flicker of evanescence the matter is that dance can also be en- keeping the body down-to-size...

...all led inevitably to the same cheery, audience for dance has increased Subsequently, the film Flashdance tried upbeat conclusion: that dance was the by the same kind of ratio...

...Even people not 15 August 1986: 437 readily disposed to displays of patriotism soul is some ethereal essence that yearns, reveal the human figure more fully and tend to concur on this point...

...Is it simnowhere, but was rather the crest of a cinema - are destined to become im- ply coincidental that during the years in wave that had been accumulating mensely popular...

...It can take many based defense taps a crucial insight into those weapons for security...

...Flashdance was a theaters have quadrupled from and Bob Fosse's Dancin' that were case in point: It will be remembered twelve to fifty...

...This is the ques- Barthes once observed, "sex is modern dance was a conscious repudiation that almost never gets asked by everywhere, except in sexuality...

...American choreography is more than a ican arts, as often happens, I gen- Lawrence'e belief that the soul is in the peep show with class...

...When we take a longer view of conspired with the forces of sexual con- babbles on about the primacy of "comthese matters, it becomes evident that the sumerism...

...Nothing so threatens the unity of governments have confined themselves occupation, but also against an internal NATO as its doctrine of first use - that to trying to do just that...

...minor dishonesty...

...Note how prominently conquest of physical space, the nation to say, the dancer's all-consuming daily Baryshnikov was displayed - both as whose manifest destiny extends all the routine is no picnic...

...But at the same time, zen - during Liberty Weekend...

...Dance is the one art where Americans are, and have been for not to the lily-white, sublimated, time...

...In fact, a sizable portion of the well as least - the fervid phenomenon of dance community now waxes nostalgic disco dancing...

...Contemporary tically keyed to the nuances of individual means reinventing the wheel...

...ture bent on repudiating the belief that the story, mime, period costume) work to In both theater and film, our most celCommonweal: 438 ebrated performers are "method" actors music, the novel, and poetry were com- up facilitating rather than challenging for whom bodily tics...

...To which gratiate itself to the mainstream audi- inarticulate "sincerity...

...Dance is undeni- joyed passively, without any exertion of tives for this merger seem obvious ably the most "perishable" of the arts...

...counts in large part for the willingness of (bodily) happiness and in physical mobilThe dancer is in many ways the very Exxon and other major corporations to ity...

...Yet attention has thus far been con- Ballinger, $14.95, 250 pp...

...to be found Dance and Ballet (Putnam, 1978...

...We Boston, Margaret Fuller is said to have - a tendency that did not exactly in- tend to prefer the heartfelt gropings of exclaimed, "This is poetry...

...acquiescence for the success of military undermines public support for NATO as Civilian-based defense is, in a phrase, conquest...

...In America today, we worship disguised sexual exhibitionism of most our good fortune is really the result of our at the shrine of the body...

...And today, is: they present the body in a state of are better than anyone else...

...actually prefer it that way...

...But evidence of the competitive street dancing into a fully cycle...

...In so do- support and military strategy applies as posing an alternative that cannot be dis- ing, it is useful for deterring and defend- much to alliances as it does to individual missed out of hand...

...In the political now...

...Yet it is my Isadora Duncan, the rhapsodic earth form of the contemporary dancer, the mother of American modern dance, ubiquitous Balanchinian practice clothes perverse, rather than patriotic, claimed that in her very own solar plexus of tights and leotards, tantalize in much pleasure to end up pointing out that she had discovered nothing less than the the same way that lingerie ads do - that there is one art at which we really temporal home of the soul...

...Livingston Biddle, the then newly- Point, the popular Hollywood film (Flashdance was also instrumental in appointed head of The National Endow- featuring 'Mikhail Baryshnikov, which helping to popularize break dancing, ment for the Arts, declared proudly that premiered, not coincidentally, just a few which ushered in the final phase in the Dance, more than any other area of months before Livingston Biddle's san- de-sissification of dance - transforming the arts, is in a boom or growth guine proclamation...

...Thus, in the Dance, the art of bodies filling space and than the neighborhood bar...

...and it may be of self-sacrifice...

...is that anti-intellectualism has always entirely by leisure viewing, dance is the been the rule in America, not the exceplive art form that appears to have the most T HIS self-immolating aspect of dance tion...

...and the sad fact of the Utopianism, even re-directed, re-defined matter is that the number of pre-twentieth utopianism, is probably much too genercentury dances still being performed ous a description of this phenomenon...

...Less spec- and prolific choreographers...

...egy, states may well lack the means to fined largely to opponents of current sustain it and the will to carry it out...

...tacularly, the dance boom also brought anywhere in the world...

...As Andre Levin- Dance is a respectable form of antiart form that benefits - not from illiter- son once noted, "She was the product of intellectualism...

...Today in America, the same can be said poverishment of ideas...

...We have the The New York Times, Partisan Review, The glamour and backstage intrigue of big- best and most versatile dancers, the Village Voice, The New Republic, Saturday time ballet (these potboilers, by the way, largest and most enthusiastic audiences, Review, Commonweal, and many dance often came complete with Russian defec- and - above all - the most innovative publications including The Encyclopedia of tors, CIA and KGB agents...

...resident professional Broadway musicals like A Chorus Line ous choreographic art...

...Attacking forms: symbolic protests, civil disobedi- the nature of power: all political power is the Soviet Union itself would pose the ence, social boycotts, strikes and eco- rooted in and continually dependent upon dilemma of extended deterrence in its nomic boycotts, and other, more extreme the cooperation and obedience of the sub- sharpest form for the United States bemethods of noncompliance, defiance, jects and institutions of the society...

...To the extent that seizure of power...

...truthful...

...more palpably than it has ever been retag, for example, recently had occasion As Christianity, with its belief in the vealed before...

...and any art form that glides past the No consideration of the dance boom instinctively prefer the visual to the ver- spectator's eye as swiftly and fleetingly would be complete without at least some bal, will feel right at home with the fast- as dance does requires highly developed mention of the current cult of health and popping, gourmet eye-food served-up by skills of looking...

...Recently, the fitness fad so many contemporary choreographers...

...Such obsessive fascination with these same utopian energies can find fulthe present almost always implies con- fillment when lavished on one's self...

...That NATO strategy, much as the idea of "no Leon V. 8lgal is especially so in the nuclear age when first use" has on this side of the Atlantic...

...to pass itself off as a hybrid of the two, fastest growing and most popular of the The turning point in this saga was suggesting that blue collar balletomania performing arts in America...

...We feel as it turns out, is not all that wide off the rations' not-entirely-disinterested point most free when we're "on the move...

...an unavoidable fact of choreographic the abandoning of traditional narrative (Quintessentially, think of Brando's bus- life, or do dancers and choreographers conventions left many audiences feeling iness with his T-shirt in Streetcar...

...And when it comes to shutting out the household names like Nureyev, our mobility, by indulging our fear of the rest of the world beyond the self, the Makarova, Baryshnikov - invariably stillness and our mania for motion...

...There is one and there is only one and it is when Americans speak of someone or simultaneous dress and undress, both something as having "soul," they refer erotic and coyly decorous at the same dance...

...As a result, enough...

...deny that the basic, stripped-down unierally find that people abroad vastly overestimate us...

...Exercise reeks of hard work, but offers us the aesthetic equivalent of there's probably no other art in which the dance sounds like fun...

...They don't call those costo observe: transcendence of the body, begins to tumes "tights" for nothing...

...by a steady diet of television and who to hit...

...dancing . . . " The starkly antibad habits...

...As if to say: "We were tingly - a way of guaranteeing that the wrong to believe - as we did in the history of dance remains less' tangible sixties - that an organism as complex as and less knowable than that of any other society can be perfected,, but perhaps art form...

...As early as mous, built-in advantage over the other to-riches, SAT scores and standardized 1963, Walter Terry had written in The arts in this regard...

...celebrants of the American dance boom...

...ballet barre is infinitely more successful belong to Russian defectors...

...eleven years, orchestras have dou- to look: In the tremendous success of Obviously...

...today is miniscule...

...Social advancement in America is embodiment of Narcissus...

...similar in Saturday Night Fever - reasThe statistics, rounded up to support suring working-class youth that it was the more hyperbolic claims about Ameri- perfectly, acceptably macho to dress up can dance in the 1970s, varied a bit de- like a peacock while strutting one's stuff pending upon who provided them...

...But it's equally true that many appreciated reprieve from the obligation it constitutes a form of natural language dancers and choreographers like to work to interpret (or even follow...

...tacking Warsaw Pact forces in Eastern Commonweal: 440...

...dance capital of the world...

...gap between the cognoscenti and the dil- than a quest for fitness involved here...

...Americans are particularly fond of this ettantes is so vast...

...a casual' remark that bare-bones essence of the medium is the heroes pitted against the silken smoothies nonetheless demonstrated how easily human body - the elimination of who speak with forked, but velvety dance can stir religious feelings in a cul- "non-essentials" (decor, character, tongues...

...So far, however, ing not only against military invasion and states...

...It is of course essential to acknowlPlatonic soul, but rather to a physically- edge that much of the most ambitious some time, doing the best work in palpable, bodily energy derived from choreography created in America during the world . . . I'm not going to rhythm-and-blues, Gospel music, and the 1960s and 70s was itself a reaction make any Whitmanesque declaraother manifestations of Afro-American against the manifold vulgarities of the tions about why dance should inculture...

...Atgovernable...

...And yet, what we're and Pound if the histories of painting, really talking about is a retreat from the 15 August 1986: 439 body politic into the body...

...Dance has an enor- which American dance went from ragsmomentum for some time...

...It may be that dance is the only recorded or preserved...

...Imagine the effect on Narcissism sounds more like it, but that artists like Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce, also sounds glib...

...Note, too, the peculiar testing in general faltered significantly...

...What the dance world's Dionysian in common with television...

...and behavioral parably impoverished...

...New York Herald Tribune that "Ballet in way in which the mandates of artistic Dance is the ideal mode of expression for America is booming today as never be- modernism in dance have unwittingly a culture (really a counter-culture) that fore...

...Oxford, 1983...

...The paradoxical fact of cise," etc...

...tempt for the past...

...In fact, it's an ordeal dancer and as freshly-minted U.S...

...Yvonne Rainer, for examevitably have found its place here, European by inclination, once com- ple, spoke for a whole generation of in this encyclopedic country...

...Those whose also greatly complicates the act of missionaries don't realize is that they're attention span has been all but destroyed dance-viewing...

...Is there, in other words, a "In the United States," Roland voluptuoiis quality of much early postdark side of the boom...

...in Sharp's words, "Civilian- a strategy that contemplates relying on nonviolent resistance...

...fense provides a critical tool for pointing the attacker's troops and functionaries, The relationship between political up the flaws in current NATO strategy by even inducing them to mutiny...

...NATO is prepared to respond to conventhey have paid any attention at all to the As a critical tool, civilian-based de- tional attack by initiating the use of nuidea, they have denounced it as a radical fense underscores the necessity of public clear weapons...

...In 1978, probably none other than The Turning is not a contradiction in terms...

...factors that make dance so excruciatingly has merged with the dance boom to proMuch like television which promises difficult to see clearly also help make it a duce new hybrid forms of exercise: us the news "live at five," dance is a particularly undemanding art for the per- "Jazzercise," "Dancercise," "Aerobimedium that glorifies the present, one ceptually lazy...

...Eliot, American by birth, dance boom...

...Moving targets are hard preaching to the already-converted...

...I plained that "Our literature is a substitute "post-modern" choreographers when want simply to note our good forfor religion and so is our religion...

...Susan Son- to escape from and transcend the body...

...Loie Fuller, the pioneer Duncan, who sought to create a quintes- that when a dance concert is over they of American modern dance, once de- sentially American form of dance, also don't feel any sort of obligation to say clared that "Motion and not language is steadfastly refused to have her dances anything about it...

...But ironically, the very physical fitness...

...Needless freedom...

...If one drinks public mind at least, American dance be- time, has found its happiest home in the to forget, might one dance to avoid comes associated with the flight toward nation that equates freedom with the "knowing" in the first place...

...Books: OBSTRUCTING AGGRESSION C IVILIAN-BASED deterrence and de- MA11I EUROPE UNCONQUERABLE Civilian-based defense also underfense is an idea whose time has come, THE POTENTIAL OF CIVILIAN-BASED scores the necessity of political support at least in Europe, where it has been the DETERRENCE AND DEFENSE for military strategy...

...Nothing wrong with that And to the generation for whom lei- own past, thrives in America, the country in principle, but the problem, of course, sure reading has been replaced almost that has no past...

...it intellect or sensorium...

...The purpose is to deny cooperation and obedience can be with- against the site from which the attack was any would-be attacker his objectives, ul- drawn...

...This leads to a a growing perceptual laziness among mannerisms are considered more reveal- question: Is this sort of historical amnesia dancegoers...

...Much more...

...That cause it risks Soviet retaliation, not and disruption...

...Our stereotyp- lavish so many of their tax-deductible invariably a matter of "mobility" (if not ical image of the ballet dancer - which, dollars on it...

...The strategy may have the on it...

...citi- way to the moon...

...for that golden age (a mere decade ago) It's worth recalling that Saturday when it was virtually impossible to Night Fever and The Turning Point were browse through a newspaper or magazine released almost simultaneously...

...In the other modernist arts, ing of character than the spoken text...

...Its message, all too ofacy per se - but from the decline of a race that had no past...

...He has written for ing to cash in on the newly discovered...

...In every other art, the spirit of munication" while consistently denigratAmerican fascination with dance has modernist abstraction, coupled with the ing the communicative powers of spoken been an established fact for some time impulse to pare away everything not es- and written language...

...many of these phenomena bled in number, and opera com- Public Television's "Dance in contributed a good deal more to the hispanies have almost doubled in America" series, in long-running tory of fashion than to the history of serinumber...

...as if they'd been cast adrift...

...Isadora dance audiences seem to relish the fact human feeling...

...then that dance, the art that consumes its by head alone...

...But did heterosexual, that real men sometimes American dance really make such a leap wear tights even if they don't eat quiche, forward, and if so, was it really a cause John Travolta accomplished something for celebration...