Sensing the Dancer's
Impulse
Ernestine Stodelle
Art
Times, November 1983. Used with
permission.
During the first third of our century, a new
kind of composer came into being at the request
of a new species of dancer. In a dramatic
reversal of roles, the dance as an American art
form considered itself the
“handmaiden” of music, seeking
rhythmic identity with a musician’s
personal choice of timing or with melodies of an
emotionally inspiring nature. In contrast,
musical accompaniment would have to relate to the
dynamic thrust of the choreographer’s
ideas…ideas that renounced the popular
concept of dance as superficial entertainment and
sought instead to create a movement vocabulary
out of the rougher, more angular textures of
modern life.
It was a period of aesthetic ferment
throughout the arts. Musicians, too, were seeking
new ways of reflecting the times: to introduce
dissonance and unpredictable changes of pace and
rhythm more in keeping with the jagged tempo of
the day; and to investigate sound itself as a
separate entity from the classical musical
scale.
It was also a period of economic shock. The
depression was of earthquake size, especially in
the large cities where dancers and musicians
found survival to be a precarious thing. Grants
were non-existent. The new pioneers in modern
dance—Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey,
Charles Weidman, and later, the Wigman-trained
Hanya Holm—had to subsidize their own
concerts. Even paying $1 to $1.50 an hour for an
accompanist was a burden; but the radical new
ideas demanded radical approaches in playing for
classes…in short, musicians with a gift for
improvising fresh themes and fresh rhythms.
Martha Graham and Louis Horst, her musical
director and mentor for the first twenty-two
years of her independent career; Doris Humphrey
and Charles Weidman had Pauline Lawrence, their
manager and costume designer whose musicianship
was likewise of concert stature. Soon, however,
appeared a young musician-composer who would
first accompany the Humprey-Weidman concerts, and
then create musical scores for all the
aforementioned pioneers. Her name was Vivan Fine.
She is now known throughout the country as one of
America’s outstanding women composers, the
creator of chamber, orchestral and operatic
works.
In Fine’s own words, “Music and
dance are two languages with a common source.
They come out of the same stuff…as
Shakespeare wrote, ‘dreams are made
on’…In writing for the dance, the
musical ideas are stimulated by ideas the dancer
has conceived.”
The success of the early collaboration
therefore depended on the validity of the
choreographic idea, first, as a dramatic,
lyrical, or abstract statement, and then as a
dance movement capable of evoking sonic imagery
of exciting texture in the mind of the composer.
The fact that the dance was created first and the
musician had to compose according to
pre-established counts might have seemed a
thankless musical task. But to Vivian Fine,
working with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman
was overwhelmingly gratifying: “I realize
now how rich their dances were. They had a
remarkable sense of line. They moved so
beautifully…with effortless nuance.
Everything was infused with a sense of what
movement could be…”
Fine was impressed with Doris Humphrey’s
lyricism and musicality; with Weidman’s
“fantastic” sense of timing, and with
their protégé, Jose Limón (for
whom she later wrote a score): “He had the
nobility of a Spanish courtier—the grace
and dignity—and he was very musical. He had
obviously studied the piano seriously. I remember
him playing the first few bars of Bach’s
Italian Concerto.”
The climax of Fine’s long association
with the Humphrey-Weidman Dance Company came in
1938 when she was commissioned to write a score
for Doris’s Thurber-inspired, “The
Race of Life” and for Charles’s
commedia dell-arte-styled “Opus 51,”
the latter to be premiered at Bennington College
Summer School, where Fine was also in
residence.
Working on “Opus 51” with the
Chaplinesque Weidman (Charles’s comic gifts
were frequently compared to those of the immortal
tramp) ignited Fine’s own playful
instincts. The choreographic canvas, as conceived
by Weidman, was a three-part suite. Between the
formal, but warmly gracious opening dance (still
performed by the Deborah Carr Theatre Dance
Ensemble) and the closing “swift-moving,
technically difficult” finale, a middle
section emerged, overshadowing all by the sheer
vitality of its irrepressible comedy. According
to Fine, “No attempt was made to create
situations leading to a comic
‘point.’ Instead, we were shown
unrelated actions strung together, the ultimate
expression of the absurd.”
Weidman’s brand of comedy was inimitably
his. Using recognizably descriptive gestures in
illogical sequences, he created a unique collage,
which he called Kinetic Pantomime. For example,
at one moment, the dancer would be squatting in
the presumable act of milking a cow, and then
suddenly strike the pompous stance of a country
preacher. “Anything went,” wrote the
Christian Science Monitor dance critic, Margaret
Lloyd. “There was hoeing and weeding at the
farm, sewing costumes, stumbling over an obstacle
that wasn’t there, sweeping a floor, and a
bit of hair-pulling that could have been
anybody’s quarrel, but
wasn’t.”
Vivian Fine’s music caught the full
flavor of Weidman’s humorous jabs at chores
and human behavior with no let-up of energy.
“I was able to do this by not composing for
individual movement or patterns, but by sensing
the impulse that moved the dancer.”
By 1960, when Martha Graham invited Fine to
compose a score for her “Alcestis,”
the dancer-choreographer had settled into the
habit of first commissioning music for a new work
and then composing her dance afterwards…a
long cry from the use of counts as the main
instructive to the composer.
As presented to Fine, Graham’s original
choreographic idea was strangely unresolved. She
had in mind, not Euripides’ classic drama
but a short modern play entitled “The Dream
of Alcestis,” which she described to the
composer as a projection of a woman in a crisis
of emotional cross-purposes.
To Fine’s surprise, no such portrait
emerged. But the score served nevertheless the
dramatic purposes of the choreographer. A
splendid spectacle, with its sculptured
décor by Noguchi and Fine’s vibrant
score, “Alcestis” was considered by
New York Times critic John Martin to be one of
Graham’s “most ravishing
creations.”
By this time in her career, Vivian Fine had
practically withdrawn from her role as creative
collaborator of dance works. It was becoming
increasingly clear to her that her own creative
drive should be in the direction of chamber and
orchestral music. She regretted the shift,
especially in Graham, from starkly expressive
movement themes to straight drama and the
elaborate theatricalization of her ideas.
Fine’s own inspiration in composing for the
dance had always come from the exciting
originality of a dancer’s inventiveness.
“It was the movement itself that was
marvelous…not the situation.”
A choreographer who stands out today in
Fine’s mind as a seeker not only of fresh
ideas but of freshly conceived movement is Paul
Taylor. Perhaps, Taylor will lead the way to new
heights of creative collaboration…