Dancers and photos: they knew how to project magic
Take a look at this photo of dancer Isadora Duncan and see how powerful it is. I challenge you to find anything remotely like it in a contemporary dancer. But then, Duncan was sui generis even in her time, or probably in any time.
Dance is among the most ephemeral of arts, and that was especially true before the advent of the camera. Prior to that, we had verbal descriptions, painting, and lithographs. But those only tell us what the viewer perceived, not the dancer’s corporeal form in space:
The advent of the photo was a great advance, although it still did not involve movement, and movement is the heart of dance. That’s why as a child, although I was fascinated with tales of Isadora Duncan—her pioneering, scandalous, and tragic life, and most of all her revolutionary way of choreographing and dancing that left viewers transfixed and spellbound—she would always remain a mystery, impossible to comprehend and know, because although there are still photos there are virtually no films (except a grainy couple of seconds that are hardly helpful).
The still photos say a surprising amount, though. In all of them, Duncan is timeless and monumental, weighted and yet graceful and reminiscent of classical sculpture, which she used as inspiration. Take a look:
A contemporary of Duncan was another very different dancer of legend, Anna Pavlova. She was before my time, and yet tantalizingly recent enough that my mother when a tiny child had seen her dance, an experience my mother remembered and described to me in glowing terms. With Pavlova we do have a number of short films, but there we encounter the enormous and surprising limitations of dance on film, in which is a three-dimensional art usually suffers greatly from its translation to two dimensions, even now.
With Pavlova there are extra difficulties. The first is the sometimes herky-jerky quality of the old film itself, the second is her terribly old-fashioned choreography and technique, and the third are what Sir Frederick Ashton (in the following clip) describes as Pavlova’s physical limitations, which she managed to transcend. Watch, and listen, and you might see a small glimmer of why she was considered one of the greatest dancers of all time:
When I was growing up and as a young woman, I had the great good fortune to be in or near New York City and able to view many of the greats of the 50s, 60s, and 70s in person. There is nothing like the experience of the living, breathing dancer on a stage. The physical dimensions may number three, but the spiritual and emotional ones can seem almost infinite.
[NOTE: The title of this post comes from a remark by Ashton in the clip.]
see the magic of a family friend i miss DEARLY
more at the link , photo creds on the page…
Photo date: 1938 Irina Baronova / Photo by Maurice Seymour
http://www.hotstepzmagazine.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=108:dance-legendz-iii&catid=37:dance-artist&Itemid=61
I miss maurice and an earlier time..
if only i could go back.. 🙁
i used to play chess with Maurice, he would come to visit my dad, i would go to visit him.. play chess. he would tell me of russia and the soviets… we would sit and like him i ended up taking pics of the famous for a short while, but was never famous, or will be…
he on the other hand was old. he had married a new woman… lost a son who went missing… there used to be a giant bee hive in his back yard light…
my grandfather and him would talk for hours..
Artfldgr: many of my old teachers were from Russia or surrounding countries. Wonderful and colorful characters, all.
Wow, she was a beauty, artfldgr.
One thing about dance, you really can’t affirmative action it. The result is just too obvious to deny. I’ve always believed in making kids try a fine art whether it be dancing, theater, playing an instrument, painting, sculpture . . .
Curtis: If you think she was something, try Tamara Toumanova, one of her fellow “baby ballerinas.”
She couldn’t cook, but she could dance:
The achingly young Gregory Peck was no slouch in the looks department either.
Speaking of Toumanova and dancing (plus fabulous shoes):
Toumanova was Georgian, like Balanchine (he was half-Georgian, actually).
And speaking of Georgians and dance (I could go on and on this way), please please take a look at this video, for which embedding has unfortunately been disabled. The really fun stuff starts at about minute 3:20. Wait for it; you’ll be glad you did!
I’m interested to note that by contemporary standards, Isadora Duncan was kind of beefy! It’s interesting to see how expressive a fleshy woman’s body can be.
here is maurice’s image of Toumanova
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1984665600/nm0869565
http://www.vintageworks.net/sale/detail.php/32/halfprice1/130/3769/1
i like the first one better. 🙂
and yes, they were colorful characters, as he was, and very quirky in ways
i am, as is my family…
no wonder there is no place for me..
here is his shot of ruth page in a mathematical pose
http://www.iphotocentral.com/Photos/VintageWorks_Images/Full/5891RuthPage.jpg
if you search his name, and look at images, you will see his majority work, which is head shots. and this is how i had all these luminaries and others in my life growing up, in that way that you would read of someone who accomplished something and their past was interesting…
actually if one searches my name you could find things. but my celebrity work was more event journalism and fashion. now i am out of that, will i drift back into the arts for a last round before i go? who knows?
others you can find he did were
Melissa Hayden
Alfredo Corvino
Nora Kaye
Raven Wilkinson
graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/05/02/arts/06kour.large2.jpg
I liked Ben Vereen, he was nice to me. Sad how that turned out… Think about the sun pippin!
Guy Lombardo
Bobby May
Valentin Zeglovsky
Eva Malloy
Nora Kovach and Istvan Rabovsky
graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/25/nyregion/25kovach.enlarge.jpg
To be honest, Neo, while I have absolutely no feel for the dance, I really suspect that you would be disappointed in the talents of these people were they ported to modern times.
A large part of this is that they were at the beginning — the progenitors, of course — of modern dance concepts.
Others have taken those ideas and gone vastly farther with them, both from standing on the shoulders of those giants, but also, and very importantly because the athletic capacity of the dancers has increased tremendously since that time.
From pictures of Duncan, she looks kind of pudgy by modern standards. It is exceptionally unlikely that she could even begin to perform the feats of strength and physical precision you see and think of as common in modern dance — not just for the best of the best, but for merely the “pretty damned good”.
The is true throughout sport, and dance is, after all, an art with a foot in both camps.
Go watch a film of 50s or 60s football in action. They positively LUMBER about compared to today’s slashing moves. There’s much more stumbling and far less precision, too.
People often speak of the notion of bringing historical legends of sport — Babe Ruth, or Walter Johnson — into modern times, and seeing how they would do. I think in most cases, as-they-were, they would fare poorly. Given a few years ahead of time exposed to modern diet and training, yeah, their natural talents would make them the equal of anyone of modern times, but right out of the chute?
No. There’s a reason why the so-called “four minute mile” is no longer not only unachievable by modern standards, but is actually the goal of middle distance runners. The actual record, once thought unattainable, has now been bettered by more than 15 seconds… Even a high school runner has managed it.
Modern diet, exercise, and physical training place modern individual feats far beyond that of even 50 years ago, much less 90 or 100. And that includes dance.
Mind you, Duncan might still qualify as a brilliant choreographer (esp. once given time to gain a feel for what modern dancers are actually capable of) but as a dancer itself, she’d be second rate.
IgotBupkis,
actually i think they would translate well to today and they would make a shame of todays performers. i have mentioned before and got flack for it, but if you go back before reproducibility, there were a whole lot more people who were professional, and a whole lot more people who could play. in fact a majority.
so the ability to be considered a top player, or dancer was in fact harder in many ways. the only thing to lower quality was that one was not able to be seen by as many.
this is why as we move forward from that era to today the music is more simple, more primitive, etc… not just because of adorno and his group wishing to make academics take off their clothes and dance in circles with primitive music…
but also because the population was not producing what they consumed.
when everyone cooks, then restaurants have to be really good, or serve only the people who have no one to cook for.
when everyone plays an instrument, then the best have to be much better, as the average person can hear with a players ear.
what you will find different, again in my opinion, is charisma… the people in the past were less impressed by ‘tricks’ which can be mastered with a lot of practice by many, and more impressed with the finer nuance in which you see a tubby person and they move and those movements for some reason sing and cause frisson.
of course today, we like tricks. each song has to have someone scream a horrid note from their throat… to which the Skinnerian diseased Pavlovian crowd (and the man/woman turning the applause tracks),
why is katy perry popular? a quirk in her voice and an absence of morals or boundary, or perspective.
the problem with the creative stuff in the past, which most people dont realize, is that it was often lineage related.
that is, the product of the prior tops became new tops, and often, the new people who became famous in the scenes turned out to have been lovers, or some other deal.
we look at georgia okeefe and we go wow, but if you read her life, and how she got where she was. would she have been looked at at all if it wasnt for her ‘liberated’ (like moses harmons daughter), life in which her being willing in a sea of unwilling helped keep bees interested.
Alfred Stieglitz.. they usually just start the story from his showing her paintings without telling her.. and they tend to ignore the prior history and the key relationships she had.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz
Stieglitz is known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O’Keeffe.
yup, she made it like men do… right? no… but thats why they hide her past.
this is not to say there arent others who elbowed their way in or did work and are celebrated and didnt have such advantage.
but if you read kostabi, he has or had a series devoted to telling you how to become as great as kostabi. it mostly had to do with living your life trying to connect to a small pool of people who will by their knowing each other define what the art world is.
which is kind of why the art world is so sucky.
read about jackson pollack and the cia, and you get why we went so crappy. read about adorno, and others going to hollyweird and either producing with their money, or being in places of choiec and hiring, chose materal and changed the face of everything (ONLY because the public didnt know that what they were watching or experiencing wasnt necessaruly organic or naturally generated as previously… so the theorists are kind of wrong on the blank slate thing, given that it only works if you construct a fake reality. and thats not blank slate thats just corrupting input – GIGO, which is why the product of such games is a crippled person not a person whole and complete with a different subset of selected arbitrary positives)
anyway.
today we favor young, we favor tricks, we favor cargo cult. this is not to say they are not talented, but they are no where in the league of the past.
one look at the nicholas brothers can show that. where is such on todays landscape? the asian dance troupe that looks cool, not because they are highly skilled dancers, but because the young today are so disorganized that a group moving the same way looks cool. (and yet, they do not know busby berkely. i do not know why that is. nor do they know how to talk like this, as to a whole genre of art, as in guys and dolls).
we also now associate theater and art with homosexuality, which again, is because who was being chosen as they were more fun to be with at the parties…
the people that were celebrated as great at the earliest days of RECORDED mediums, not dance, had qualities of dance beyond just physical beauty and tricks. (and others were just great because everyone told everyone they were great. sad).
The still photos of the dancers sort of takes on a new category akin to architecture. You can even notice some of the best poses are accompanied by striking architectural surroundings. Further evidence that architecture is indeed frozen music and we wouldn’t be amiss in saying frozen dance also fits.
As for the comparisons to the modern era, I think there’s a flaw in attempting head to head comparisons of people of different eras. Too many variables get changed so you end up comparing apples and oranges. Would Babe Ruth have been a force in baseball were he exposed to modern diet and exercise techniques? Well there’s no way we can ever know.
What we can be assured of in such misguided comparisons, is our own major shortcomings when we’re judged by the advancements and trendy cultural norms of the future.
Two items:
First, and probably mean-spirited: “flack” is a public relations person, negative connotation. “flak” is a contraction of the German for flugerantikanon or some such. Not as bad as the apostrophe in plurals, but it annoys me before I’ve finished my coffee.
I note, possibly irrelevantly, something in the first picture of Duncan.
Her torso is facing in a particular direction. By some trick of the light, or perhaps her flexibility, she seems to have her neck in two different planes. Then her face looks somewhat to her left, with her eyes looking even further left. If I’m counting correctly, she is, in a sense, pointing in five different directions. Would that be a way of subliminally projecting tension (the physical therapists would probably say so) and drama?
I saw a well-trained singer perform from the front seats once. She had a trick of turning her head one way and her eyes the opposite way, thus seeming to connect with twice as many people as if she’d done the usual.
Lots of stage business.
I was once in a play, more than half a century ago, and find it extremely difficult to enjoy one since. Always looking for the stage business.
Oh, yeah. The hands. Looks as if she’d just lost her grip on the tree branch thirty feet up. Done with calculation.
Question is, did the audience notice it or simply absorb the emotion?
IgotBupkis: I’m with Artfldgr on this one.
I’ve written about the phenomenon before, here and here. Technique only interests me in the service of art, and without art (and the vast majority of the time these days it’s without art) it not only does not interest me at all, it repels me as empty circus tricks. I don’t mind tricks at a real circus or a gymnastics meet, but that’s not what I go to the ballet for, not at all. I’ve been in dance classes in which the dancers are performing marvelous physical feats, and then the teacher (a dancer from the old school) puts them all to shame with a wave of his/her hand and the slightest of physical movements, infused with soul.
By the way, although I’m a baseball fan, the baseball comparison is not apt. Although baseball partakes of grace, grace is not the point; it’s a game of numbers.
As for the issue of Duncan being somewhat heavy: she became heavier as she got older, but was slimmer at the start of her career. However, in her case carrying some extra weight was not a problem at all, because her art had nothing to do with lightness and airiness. Weight, solidity, groundedness, were all elements of what she expressed, which was to be monumental. If you look at Greek statues of women, you will see that many of them had that same solidity. It’s not a modern esthetic, but it’s a valid and wonderful esthetic nonetheless.
Great quote from the Ashton video:
“There was more grace in life… people wanted to please.”
Just now got to take a look at Toumanova: Simply a delight to watch and her voice and demeanor and beauty in the Gregory Peck clip: enchanting.