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What Dance Has to Say About Beauty
Reprinted with permission from the The New York Times, Sunday, July 23, 2000.

Except for one-time personal use, no part of any New York Times material may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, electronic process, or in the form of phonographic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise copied for public or private use without written permission from The New York Times Permissions Department.

It’s probably not surprising that, at the start of a new millennium, artists are reviving old issues with new points of view. Since the advent of modernism, beauty had been questioned as a sufficient, or even necessary, requirement for art. Most recently, it had been dismissed as irrelevant to the avant-garde’s concerns with identity and culture.

But the Hirshhorn Museum’s exhibition ‘‘Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late 20th Century,’’ which ran in Washington last winter, demonstrated that beauty is still a force to be reckoned with. For a decade, visual artists, like the 36 represented in the show, have been grappling with the concept and tradition of formal harmony, the sublime and visual pleasure. Who defines the body beautiful, and how has this definition been affected by feminism, multiculturalism, mass media and new technologies? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what kinds of images still have the power to produce such sensory experience?

What are the implications of these questions for dance, which by and large rejected the burden of beautiful bodies and pleasing stage pictures in the 1960’s? Bill Bissell, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Dance Advance grant program in Philadelphia, organized a trip for this year’s grantees to view the Hirshhorn exhibit in mid-January. Afterward, the 14 attending choreographers, artistic directors and presenters gathered to discuss their responses.

Ann Daly, who teaches performance studies at the University of Texas, moderated the conversation, which for an hour and a half ranged from issues of craftsmanship to audience to education. The discussion, like the exhibition, raised more compelling questions than it could answer.

ANN DALY. Do you believe in beauty?

MANFRED FISCHBECK (artistic director, Group Motion Company). For me there’s no question about beauty in life, beauty in art, beauty as existence. When I experience something that is fully what it is — when it doesn’t present itself as being something but just is — then I feel I’m witnessing beauty. Galloping horses are beautiful, but the horses are not galloping and thinking, “Oh, we are so graceful.” If they were thinking this, then they might not be beautiful.

MICHAEL A. CARSON (choreographer). I come to dance from a nontraditional background. I had Mary Wigman-based training. I’d always been taught that traditional beauty was something that you didn’t really strive for. The first piece in the Hirshhorn show, which is a deconstruction of a statue, is the thing you went for immediately. Somehow this graceful line, if it was distorted, was much more interesting, much more artistic and much more important. If it was just a little bit too beautiful, it was somehow frivolous. For it to truly be postmodern dance, it had to be atonal — pulled and pushed around a bit.