Poised in Performance: the Visual Culture of Dance through Time and its connection with Early Dance Practice
Dance is a significant form of cultural expression in all human societies using movement as a nonverbal communication tool to convey emotions and tell stories. Just as in contemporary dance, ancient dance forms were products of unique social and cultural contexts, while their intangible character made dance practices challenging to preserve or archive. Many of those practices disappeared or changed with time, leaving no trace apart from the depiction in visual arts where performers were poised in time. Visual references are among the earliest evidence of ancient dance practices, including Palaeolithic rock art paintings in Madhya Pradesh, dancing scenes on reliefs and frescoes of ancient Egypt, sculptures and paintings from Ancient Greece and Roman Empire, celebratory scenes from Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Even ballet, which emerged relatively recently, has more visual references than verbal descriptions. In this interdisciplinary session, curated by the Early Dance Circle, celebrating its 40th anniversary of researching and promoting European historical dance practice and performance, we would like to explore how visual depictions of dance from different periods can inform the research and recreation of early dance practices, what these visual references may tell about the body politics of the societies and what were the roles of visual art depicting dance in different cultures. We would also like to discuss the approaches of using dance research based on written sources in interpreting objects of art and in art analysis.
Session Convenors:
Alena Shmakova, University of Highlands and Islands, UK
Bill Tuck, Early Dance Circle
Sharon Butler, Early Dance Circle
Speakers:
Alena Shmakova, University of Highlands and Islands, UK
The Image of Dance in the Works by Scottish Artists between the 1780s and 1830s
The development of genre art among Scottish artists at the end of the 18th century, led by David Allan, resulted in several paintings depicting dancing scenes in idealised natural landscapes and built environments. Notable examples include Scottish-themed rustic scenes such as ‘Highland Dance’ (c.1780) and ‘Highland Wedding at Blair Atholl’ (1780) by Allan, as well as several illustrations of penny weddings by David Allan (1795), David Wilkie (1818) and Alexander Carse (1819). Such scenes could be attributed to the reaction to the rapidly changing Scottish society and lifestyle, thus presenting an ‘Arcadian peasant dance’ scenes. However, this paper will explore the depicted scenes, focusing on their dance history merit, comparing the visual description of the dancers with the available verbal accounts, and analysing the similarities between the painters’ approaches.
Compared to peasant dances, ‘fashionable’ or elite dancing scenes were rarely depicted by Scottish artists in the late 18th and beginning of the 19th century. An interesting example is David Allan’s conversation painting of ‘Sir John Halkett of Pitfirrane, 4th Bart (1720 – 1793), Mary Hamilton, Lady Halkett and their Family’ (1781), illustrating children dancing a ‘cotillon’. This paper will also look at the painter’s attitude and realisation of differences in the character of the dance.
Wenyu Dong, University of Manchester
Lost in Translation: Transmedia Depictions and the Disappearance of Dance in the Medieval Danse Macabre
After more than a century of its presence in literature, Danse Macabre entered visual material as a representational subject. In 1424 – 1425, the dance of death, performed hand in hand, was shown on the walls of cloisters in the cemetery of Les Saints Innocents in Paris. The motif of the dance became well known through the influence of the cemetery and spread further with the publication of engravings by Guy Marchant in 1485 and 1486. The famous illustration of ‘Imago mortis’ in Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 is an indication of the popularity of the motif at the time, as well as the possibilities for the subject to assimilate multiple meanings and pictorial traditions.
Of particular interest at the level of visual depiction is the fact that the transformation from mural to print becomes the beginning of a radical shift in the form of dance, and even its complete disappearance. The representation of the dance on the folio page created difficulties in depicting a circular (or linear) formation of dance. Also, it underlined a dyadic arrangement of images and a logic of narrative. Soon after, in the visual representation, Danse Macabre was removed from its original architectural setting and dismantled into a two-by-two dyadic (or even single) interaction of figures. At the same time, more textual and pictorial traditions began to be absorbed into this motif. Through an art-historical approach, this paper provides a case study of how early dance in visual culture struggled to be represented in shifting mediums, being continually changed, and even reshaped in meanings.
Keith Cavers, independent scholar, UK
Ballet Icons – Portraits versus Caricatures
As a Dance Historian as well as an Art Historian I have often had to examine the images that have been left to us from these two differing perspectives – and, working backwards from the written sources of particular performances, to attempt some sort of analysis of the seemingly conflicting merits of both the portrait and the caricature in representing a truthful record of either performance or performer. Of course, some portraits have an element of caricature, and all caricatures contain a large helping of portraiture (without which the satire would be pointless). In this paper, I examine a range of visual material in an attempt to pin down some of those characteristics which help us in our exploration of the history of the dance.
Swati Mondal Adhikari, Savitri Girls’ College, Kolkat India
From Celestial to Terrestrial: representation of apsarā in Bengal sculpture
The focus of the paper is to search the continuity and shift of the ‘female dancing figure sculptures’ deciphered in Bengal temples to realise the situation of art of dance in Bengal colonial period.
The temples of ancient India are abundantly studded with figure sculptures, and a prominent part of these creations is the representation of apsarā, or the celestial dancer. In the imagination of ancient Indian society, the apsarā is auspicious and dances for the gods in heaven. They represent the desire.
As a divine representative of living dancer, she is poised with specific mudrās, i.e., hand gestures and bhāva, i.e., expressions. The sculptures of apsarās, embedded in the temple walls and pillars, are personified śṛṇgāra, which is the fervor of love and the erotic in a narrow sense, while in a broader sense itis the aesthetics of beauty and truth.
Examples mentioned above were a common legacy for all Indian scenarios including Bengal. In the late medieval period, the tradition began to degenerate. Society has changed due to political upheaval and complex phases of conflict between and conglomeration of different cultures. Bengal society became a seeker of peace in the serene and sedentary wave of spirituality inspired by the Gauḍiya Vaiṣṇava sect. In late medieval period the society turned into a hub of bhakti or devotional submission to a personal God. It was reflected in the art of terracotta panels of in Bengal temples. The focus of śṛṇgāra was shifted to pure bhakti, or śṛṇgāra bhakti.
In colonial period bhakti and śṛṇgāra in its broader sense was replaced by śṛṇgāra in its narrow sense of eroticism. The new colonisation gave birth to a ‘bābu culture’- a conglomeration of culture of the educated urban middle class and the traditional reminiscent of landed aristrocrats. The focus of dance and music panels changed. The celestial turned to almost terrestrial.