Leading the Dance

The source: “Dancers as Living Archives” by Martha Ullman West, in ___The Chronicle Review___, April 7, 2006.

In the Khmer Rouge’s decimation of Cambodia’s educated classes in the mid-1970s, 90 percent of classical Cambodian dancers were killed. With each death went a repository of more than 4,500 gestures and positions, the vocabulary of move­ments that comprise classical Cambodian dance, an offshoot of India’s Bharata Natyam. “By killing off the dancers, the Khmer Rouge came within an inch of killing off the dance,” writes Martha Ullman West, a Portland, Oregon, dance writer.

Dances can be preserved through film, video, various notations, the visual arts, and, sometimes, by written accounts. But there is no more satisfactory method of transmitting the intricacies of movement than from dancer to dancer. “Long after they leave the stage, in their minds and muscles they hold the memory of form, rhythm, mood, and intent, constituting an irreplaceable resource for performers, historians, and frequently the choreographers themselves,” writes West. In the case of traditional dances such as Cambodia’s, the only archive may be the dance performers.

Modern dances are also subject to erosion or distortion. Financial and managerial difficulties crippled Martha Graham’s dance company after her death in 1991. Lacking continuity in artistic direction from dancers who personally worked with Graham, the company’s perform­ances faltered, though a recent tour shows evidence that it has righted itself somewhat. “Without Graham’s dancers, works that are as much America’s national treasure as Khmer dances are Cambodia’s were nearly relegated to some wobbly films—and very few of those,” writes West.

Even those dances that are recorded on film may not be adequately preserved. Avant-garde choreographer Yvonne Rainer complained of the camera’s fixed position and its tendency to foreshorten when she assessed a film of her own performance of her piece Trio A. The film “reveals someone who can’t straighten her legs, can’t plié ‘prop­erly’ and can’t achieve the ‘original’ elongation and vigor in her jumps, arabesques . . . and shifts of weight,” she wrote. Rainer’s work has been notated and she has taught it to “authorized transmitters.”

But some dances simply can’t endure unchanged. Many of the nuances of Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine’s signature 1946 ballet The Four Tempera­ments are lost, even in current per­formances by the company he founded, the New York City Ballet. Dance historian Nancy Reynolds has filmed various aging dancers who worked with Balanchine as they coached younger dancers on the finer points of the per­formance. It remains to be seen whether this project can preserve the spirit of the dance.

As for Cambodia’s classical dancers, a few did survive. Many of them went to the United States and Europe, with the memory of the dance embedded in their muscles and their minds. Otherwise it would have been lost, for, as one survivor said, “the dancers were the documents.”