Collection Box for the Back of My Mind
In this Sunday’s NYT Magazine, Arthur Lubow wonders if modern dance can be preserved, working through Merce Cunningham’s last days:
While in one sense he was averting his eyes from his mortality, Cunningham was also facing up to the fact that dance is the most fragile of the arts. Happening in the moment, it evaporates after every rendering. Unlike drama and music, which also unfold in time, dance is not dictated by a written script or score. Although choreographers may sketch out a work for themselves with notes, dance is still taught primarily by one dancer to another, “body to body,” as the saying goes, the way the arts were transmitted in ancient cultures. A sculptor’s blocks of stone or a painter’s pigments are paragons of stability compared to the human clay that the choreographer molds.
It’s an interesting read, but it focuses so intently on the problem of preservation that it ends up ignoring the related question: should modern dance be preserved?
I’m of the mind that part of the beauty and value of live theater, music and dance is that it is acknowledged as fleeting. In this digital age, where the value of recorded works has been obliterated by the lossless transfer abilities of bits, I’m all the more appreciative of performance. And all the more averse to any attempt to distill it into a recorded form.
