Dance and the Individual

Classical and Contemporary Dancing -- Dancing of stylization, dancing of tradition, dancing of innovation, dancing of continuity Chapter 5 of Gerald Jonas's Dancing: The Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement illustrates that classical dance, or traditional forms of 'taught' performed dance have some very similar qualities in very different cultural contexts such as Japan and Europe.

For example, both classical ballet theater and Japanese Kabuki, a traditional Japanese form of dance theater, are heavily stylized works of dance that are taught to dances as part of a coherent dance tradition of specifically trained dance steps and motions. But although both of these dance forms are essentially highly skilled and stylized crafts that take ages to learn, and come very specific cultural traditions, they were, in their origins, extremely popular amongst the common people.

For example, Kabuki, in contrast to the older surviving Japanese art forms such as Noh Theater, was the popular culture of the townspeople and not of the higher social classes. Ballet originated in opera houses that were popular with many different levels of society, and drew their ranks from some of the lower social orders of aristocratic Europe. Thus, both dance forms illustrate that traditional dance can be both formal and popular in history, conceptualization, and in the evolving course of dance traditions.

Both the Kabuki and ballet theater also illustrate the ability of classical dance to tell common cultural stories. Thus, dance is about tradition, but it is also about popular as well as academic and aristocratic traditions, and also about popular stories common to all peoples in the audience. For example, Kabuki plays are about historical events, moral conflicts in love relationships and other themes ordinary individuals can relate to in a very visceral fashion.

The actors in Kabuki theater use an old fashioned language that is difficult to understand even for some Japanese people, as some actors speak in a monotonous voice and are accompanied by traditional Japanese instruments while the dancers dance traditional steps to the music and vocal intonations. Classical Ballet Theater often makes use of stylized gestures and movements to tell tales of love, loss, and romance in ways that are familiar to the audience, such as the myths of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

Likewise, both Kabuki and traditional ballet have certain stock characters or types, such as the main hero or heroine, and many members of the company specialize in such stock types, such as the prince of ballet theater, the older characters danced by members past their prime, or in the case of Kabuki, men who specialize in female roles. Yet, as delineated in Chapter 7 of Jonas, changes in contemporary culture demanded that ballet theater change with the times.

Classical dance gradually shifted from storied productions to less standard tales, from fairy princes and princesses to more symbolic works of fiction and nonfiction. The classical motions to tell the stories thus also, by necessity, became less pantomime-like and more expressive, even while retaining the continuity of the essential art of ballet. Chapter 7 of Jonas on Contemporary Dance tells of how modern dance created a new art form in response to ballet, yet was still contiguous with much of the evolving ballet tradition.

Ballet itself responded to the evolution of modern dance with a freer and more expressive style. Likewise, Kabuki theater was able to remain within the same tradition and retain the tradition's essential forms yet change its significance and modes of expression -- for example, to this day, all female parts are played by male impersonators.