Digging up the past: Some thoughts about preserving or reconstructing dance works, cont.

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4) If a reconstructor wants in some way to change a work so that it speaks to a contemporary audience, can she? To what extent can she push her efforts before the "spirit" of the work is violated, or a different work emerges? To what extent should a dance, like a Shakespeare play, be treated like a text that we can re-outfit to meet our contemporary tastes or desires?

From left to right: dancers Janet Pilla and Jennifer Rose with choreographer Mary Anthony assisted by Donald McKayle (in mirror).

5) We should never pretend that there is not a politics of some sort at work in the processes of preservation or reconstruction, some pressure of an economic, social, political, cultural stripe that influences what works are selected, who controls the process, and who writes or rewrites the history that informs it. This holds true whether we're discussing a single work or, as in some cases, an entire genre of dance.

6) What role does reconstruction play in contributing to our attitude towards and understanding of the ephemeral nature of dance? Ephemerality at different periods in our intellectual and aesthetic histories has been seen as a defining and dynamic factor of dance, a metaphor for life itself. In other periods, however, dance's ephemeral nature was cited as a reason to assign dance a relatively low status as an art form. It was thought that the ability to exactly repeat a dance, as one could "exactly" repeat a musical composition, would go a long way towards establishing its credibility. The first truly complex and comprehensive form of notation in Western dance was developed not only to meet the practical need to preserve or teach the dances of the day but also to give dance more legitimacy as an art form by bringing it closer to a scientific epistemological model that held sway in the eighteenth century.

A more contemporary estrangement from ephemerality as a descriptor of dance was prompted by theories about or attitudes towards—or even the practice of—dance that stripped it, consciously or less so, of its discursive nature as a human semiotic act or as a viable object of discussion. Dance was thought, as Susan Leigh Foster says, to be able to "construct a mood but not deliver a message."[note 6] So reconstruction or restaging, as an attempt to summon dance back from the realm of the ephemeral or the forgotten, reinstates an interesting and possibly productive tension that is still at play today, in the making of performance theory, between a longing for discourse or reiterability and the desire to valorize the dynamic and volatile nature of the ephemeral in dance.