Arts & Sciences

Louis XIV was renowned for his ability to dance in a period when court dancing was performed primarily by the nobility for the nobility and when professional dancing masters were integral to the life of the court. Trained in correct deportment and dancing from an early age, noble men and women raised their own status by being able to dance well, especially since dance was used to political effect: establishing the dominance of the French court, celebrating the joining of two royal families, or paying metaphorical homage to visiting dignitaries. Wearing pastoral embellishments, courtiers might represent shepherds and shepherdesses in a ballet de cour. One could be both shepherd and count; play a role in a ballet and in a real-life drama of political strategies.

Dances were complex, with elaborate floor patterns and step sequences. Although the technique required excellent balance and control, dress limited the possibilities of the movement. Both men and women performers wore shoes resembling the normal footwear of the court. Flexible soles allowed for small springing steps, but the raised heels restricted the possibility of jumping.

By the end of the 1660s, Louis XIV had made his last stage appearance, after which he allowed noble roles to he assumed by professional dancers who had previously appeared only in comic or grotesque roles. As professionals danced alongside the nobility they gradually led dance technique towards greater virtuosity. Professionals influenced not only the technique, however; they also moved dance towards a more expressive style that was accessible to a broad audience. Meanwhile, the development of the mercantile class meant that a public existed with capital to be spent on such pastimes as attending theatres.

While professional dancers were evolving movement techniques appro- priate to new audiences, choreographers were adapting their work to new spaces. In the Paris Opera and the many new theatres that proliferated at the end of the eighteenth century, the perspective of the audience was radically changed. Instead of performing in a space surrounded by an audience on three sides, sometimes seated in raised galleries, dancers now were separated from their audiences and framed by a proscenium arch and viewed frontally Movement in the frontal plane replaced floor pattern as the most visible spatial effect. Technically, the use of soft, flat shoes by professional dancers allowed them to explore a range of movement different from that used in court dances. Jumps replaced the small springing steps. Elevation became more and more important.

This emphasis on vertical posture and airborne movement was the perfect context for Romantic aspirations of the nineteenth century. In story ballets, fairies, sylphs, and other unreal creatures tempted humans from their real lives into fantasies of other-worldly happiness. Ballerinas expressed their ethereal characters by dancing on the tips of their toes and wearing net and gauze. In pointe shoes the vulgar, useful foot is gone. In its place is the illusion of an elongated leg and only a most tenuous connection to the ground.

The nineteenth-century ballerina was the object of public adulation, but the aesthetic was determined by the male ballet masters, librettists, choreographers, and patrons. At the beginning of the twentieth century however, Isadora Duncan envisioned a new dance, in which the woman's body would not be corsetted and in which her feet would be planted firmly on the earth. Sandals or bare feet allowed for more natural movement and permitted Isadora to express a spirituality that was based on a connection between earth and heaven, As she became a celebrated public figure, she also became a spokeswoman for her own version of feminism: rebellion against many of the strictures experienced by women, including marriage and the aesthetics of ballet, in particular the constricting and painful pointe shoes.

The modern dance pioneers of the 1930s and 1940s were even more earthbound; they wanted to reveal the struggle against gravity. Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey repudiated ballet, its elitism, its femininity, and the emblematic satin slipper which represented constraint and an emphasis on beauty and delicacy. Instead, they danced about woman as a pioneer, a leader, a passionate being, mythic, heroic, powerful: Clytemnestra, Joan of Arc, the archetypal matriarch. They danced barefoot for control, economy, immediacy

With the Judson Dance Theatre in the 1960s there erupted a further revolt against much that had been tradition in Western dance performance. As articulated in Yvonne Rainer's infamous "No" manifesto, the new work of the period deglamorized the body and rebelled against theatrical traditions of magic, make-believe, illusion, the star system, and emotional manipulations. Instead of a display of virtuosic technique, dance was "movement." Anyone could do it; in fact, the simplicity of an untrained body was preferred to the affectations of a trained body The performance shoes of choice were sneakers, the everyday shoes of the informal life of the artists. Eventually work boots, harder to dance in, but able to make a more emphatic political statement, also made appearances. Performances were held in lofts, galleries, and churches-spaces curiously similar in layout to those used in the seventeenth century and placing the performers and audience in close proximity. Ironically the more unpretentious the dance aimed to be, the more elitist it was in effect, alienating the traditional audience that expected to see "real" dancing in a dance concert, appealing more to an intellectual group for whom the artistic/sociopolitical message was at least as compelling as the medium of dance.

Have we come full circle? If the aristocrats performed in their court shoes, the shoes in which they presented themselves in their very formal daily life, so did the avant garde artists of the sixties and seventies perform in their everyday shoes. Parallel to the selfconscious presentation by the nobility in their court life is the inverse selfconscious value of the artist as everyman. Like the courtiers of Louis XIV the early post-modernists made a political as well as artistic statement- although perhaps, despite themselves, not untainted by elitism.

Joyce Morgenroth '66, associate professor of dance and Dance Program coordinator, came back to Cornell in 1977 to teach modern dance technique and composition, but has also taught human anatomy twentieth-century dance history improvisa-tion, and writing about dance. She began her dance training at the School of American Ballet before majoring in theoretical mathematics at Cornell University and getting an MA. in French literature at Johns Hopkins University Her book Dance Improvisations, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, is in its second printing She has choreographed and taught since 1969 and has offered improvisation workshops in the United States, Canada, and Europe.