Dressing for the Dance

In the intimate performance spaces of New York’s eclectic downtown concert dance scene, audiences can expect to find politics mixed with their art. In her dance, Sarah, choreographer Ann Carlson, wearing a strapless dress and high heels, symbolically upends traditional notions of femininity by turning herself upside down and sticking her ladylike heels up in the air. Christine Doempke, dancing in combat boots, presents herself as strong and awkward, casually disregarding the usual expectations of dancerly grace. Mixing wit and social commentary, these dancers communicate not only by how they move but by what they wear.

The use of costumes as social statements is probably as old as dance performance itself. In the 17th century, the lace conspicuously displayed by aristocratic dancers in the royal courts of western Europe reflected their privileged role in society, just as since the 1960s dancers in elastic-waist pants and T-shirts—or, on occasion, wearing no clothes at all—have announced the coming of sexual equality and freedom from formal social constraints.

Dance costumes also reflect the changing role of theatrical dance within society. Once integral to the functioning of aristocratic regimes, dance now often aims to subvert the political status quo. Rejecting the aristocratic aesthetic underlying the European dance tradition, American concert dance since the turn of the century has broken free from the inherited values of decorum, virtuosity, expressivity, and beauty. This impulse unites Isadora Duncan’s sandaled and loosely draped reaction against pointe shoes and tutus at the beginning of the century, Martha Graham’s angular, percussive denial of ballet’s lyricism a few decades later, and Merce Cunningham’s withdrawal from narrative and separation of music from dance beginning in the 1950s. It continues in the Judson Dance Theater’s rejection of virtuosity and even basic dance technique during the 1960s, and soon thereafter in the minimalists’ ultimate questioning of the very urge to move.

Yet by repudiating elegantly turned-out positions, soaring leaps, and multiple pirouettes, by giving up narrative and doing away with glamorous costuming, modern dance not only parted ways with classical ballet but abandoned the qualities that for centuries had attracted audiences. Trying to escape from aesthetic assumptions associated with wealth and inherited privilege, and hoping to forge an aesthetic better suited to a democratic and pluralistic society, the new American dance instead ended up producing inaccessible work that excluded the general public. While the elegantly attired courtiers of prerevolutionary France had a captive audience of court aristocrats, 20th-century American dancers cultivated an audience among the artistic elite in order to survive. Taking to the dance floor in well-worn sneakers, the Soho dancers of the 1960s might not have traveled so far as they probably have believed from their 17th-century forebears in fancy heeled pumps.

Ballet and modern dance grew out of courtly traditions that germinated in Renaissance Italy and flowered in the court ballets of King Louis XIV in 17th-century France. Although based on the social dances of the court such as the gavotte, the courante, and the gigue, these choreographed spectacles were much more elaborate affairs, with spoken verse interspersed with balletic entrées performed by dancers and select nobles. In the final grand ballet, social dance steps were performed by members of the court, who traced detailed, symmetrical floor patterns designed to be seen by the audience seated in the court’s raised galleries. The young Louis, himself renowned for his talent in dance, came to be known as "the Sun King" after he played Apollo in the Ballet de la nuit in 1653.

Dancing well was a prerequisite for advancement in the elaborate court life Louis created to bind an occasionally restive aristocracy (some of whom had joined in the Fronde uprisings of 1648–53) more closely to his royal person. "A solemn frivolity is one of the despotism," historian André Maurois dryly observes. Dance, with all its costs in both time and money, was one Louis cultivated aristocrats preoccupied. "As a matter of policy, Louis forced magnificence upon all," Maurois writes. "He drained everyone by making luxury honorable, and thus reduced the courtiers to dependence upon his bounty for their existence." In both form and content, the court ballets served a variety of political purposes. It was no accident that in the Ballet de la nuit, Louis’s sun arrives— accompanied by Honor, Grace, Love, Riches, Victory, Fame, and Peace—in time to drive away thieves looting a burning house (symbolizing France). It was said to be the king’s favorite role.

Dancers wore costumes in the style of court dress: for the men, a coat with a fitted bodice and a tonnelet, or flared, short skirt that revealed the shape of the legs in their hose; for the women, dresses of heavy fabric tailored to the torso with full skirts that entirely concealed legs and feet.

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