How can movement be preserved in
immobile form? This contradiction in terms has preoccupied artists for
millenniums. (It obsesses
choreographers and dancers too.
“Motion in stillness, stillness in
motion” has been a motto for dance
forms as diverse as the ancient
traditions of Southeast Asia and the
avant-garde choreography of Merce
Cunningham.)
Three New York exhibitions catch a
dancegoer’s eye for what they tell us of dancers and dance itself. In the
Metropolitan Museum’s “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World” — though it features a remarkable variety of dancers —
movement is most hauntingly
addressed in a small statue of a man identified as Alexander the Great. He’s not dancing; he’s hunting. But energy, line and expression — prime
dancerly virtues — all pour forth from him. In the past, he was identified as Meleager or Actaeon, mythological huntsmen. Recently, his facial features, downturned and not easy to discern, have led scholars to decide he’s
Alexander. (The sculpture’s date,
probably between 250 and 100 B.C., is post-Alexander anyway.) Whoever he is, he’s compelling. He’s caught in mid-action; you can feel what he was doing a moment ago and what will happen next.
And he exemplifies something that
preoccupies artists who depict dance:He’s different from every angle. Dance exists in three spatial dimensions (as well as the fourth dimension of time). When dancers move, they change before our eyes; when they’re captured in a single image, the artist’s eye often becomes drawn to multiplicity and complexity.
Looking at this Alexander from his left, you notice how his left arm, descending from shoulder level, is braced. From neck to hand, the tension is marvelous.
From this angle, you’re also struck by his cloak, wrapped around his
shoulders and left arm. Its final few
inches are flying backward. Yet from
his right side, that cloak is nearly
invisible — he’s otherwise nude — and now what dominates is his raised right arm.
See him from the front, and it becomes plain how both his arms are involved in the same action, as if driving a spear. Now you observe, even if you can’t see his face, how his head is determinedly focused on an unseen lower object. The angles of both elbows answer each other; the arms and shoulder describe a descending zigzag.
From every angle you notice his stance, with the weight all on the right leg. One diagonal line ascends from his stretched left leg, through the spine to the neck; and, at a tangent, the right arm continues its upward slope. Every line here is purposeful. There’s none of
the repose that characterizes the Greek ideal. This hunter is perfect, and perfectly caught, but his perfection is subordinated to action and intention.
Many regular visitors to the
Metropolitan’s permanent collection of ancient art will already know the
“Baker dancer” (so called because it
was donated by Walter C. Baker), said to come from Alexandria, Egypt. This exhibition, however, allows us the chance to walk around her. Like other dancers of her era (third or second century B.C.), she’s veiled from head to toe, and masked. The sculpture is a masterpiece in its depiction of complex
movement through fabric.
Few depictions of dance have ever
been so multidimensional, or so
interestingly ambiguous about the
nature of the dance involved. The
tilting angle of the torso, the line of the advancing leg (its foot is just off the floor), the crook of one elbow, all add up variously as you circumnavigate her. From one angle she seems to be screening her averted face from view;
from another angle she seems to
protect her torso with that elbow,
crooked like a prow. She has both
repose and action, grace and mystery; what she shows and what she hides are equal parts of her beauty.
How much variety the Hellenistic world contained! From early in the first century B.C. (lent from present-day Tunisia) comes a bronze statuette of a dancing dwarf. Like some other dancers in this exhibition, his weight is
all on the right foot, and he creates a
through-the-body line; but that line —sly, impish — is traced, not stretched. What’s striking are the heavy contours of his hips and thighs and the witty malice of his face: His eyes seems to gleam through the metal. The first picture you see on enteringthe Museum of Modern Art’s “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty” exhibition is a monotype of a ballerina on point beside an instructor: It’s called
“Le Maître de Ballet” (around 1876).
Although the caption does not identify him, many viewers of Degas’s work will know the teacher as Jules Perrot —Europe’s greatest male dancer in the 1830s, its dominant choreographer in the 1840s and 1850s and an important
ballet teacher in the 1870s.
Degas seems to have been obsessed with Perrot for a while. This ballet master, gripping his tall stick even when sitting down, embodies both authority and inability: The young woman can do what he cannot, but he
knows how she should do it.
Although Degas is often, and rightly,
considered an evocative realist, some of his ballet art has a touch of
caricature. A naughty example here —Degas’s only depiction of a ballet jumpthat I know — is “Pas Battu” (around 1879), which has a touch of deliberate absurdity. The dancer’s shoulders seemhunched as she jumps; the angle of her
legs in midair (parted, one bent) looks daft; the effortful grace of her arms (“en couronne”) seems comic. Degas is wickedly precise; you feel he’s satirizing a leap that really did happen.
Degas’s subjects are often labor, stress and exhaustion. Around this exhibition, his dancers, so often resting or preparing, take their place amid the many other working women he depicted — singers, laundresses, prostitutes. His tone seems to vary: It can be compassionate, dispassionate,
tender, merciless.One of the most wonderful pictures, lent by the Cleveland Museum, is the
“Frieze of Dancers” (an odd translation of the French “Danseuses Attachant Leurs Sandales”), an oil painting from around 1895. Four seated dancers are each tying the ribbons of their right point shoe (“sandale”); they are probably the same dancer from four different angles. The parted legs, bent
knees, leaning torso, hidden face all
ought to add up to an image of travail, yet the color and spirit turn this into an image of grace, beauty and charm.
Amid the folk art collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman at the New-York Historical Society are Elie Nadelman’s own sculptures of dancers and circus performers. Here are the painted, glazed, ceramic miniature originals of the two colossal statues that dominate
the great upstairs foyer of the David H. Koch Theater.
More fascinating, to a dancegoer, are
the two high-kicking “Dancer” women he depicted in wood in 1920-24. Here modernity and primitivism meet, with a touch of humor. The crescent lines
with which their lowered arms answer their upthrust legs are terrific, like the long, slanting curve of the two legs.
What makes me smile is the way these women turn their head to look over their shoulders, away from the energy of those legs. Though these statues are small, they imply vastness. If the Koch contained these two danseuses instead
of those seated pairs of women, you
feel their energy would raise the roof.
By Alistair Macaulay
Source: THE NEW YORK TIMES
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