Dance has a long history in France, or at least in Paris, going back to the allegorical court entrainments of the late sixteenth century and the founding in 1661 of the Academie Royale de Danse, the direct ancestor of today's Paris Opera Ballet. But there is nothing in French dance history to explain how the fragile seedling of modern dance, originally imported from the United States, grew and spread like a weed, transforming itself in the process into a hardy, homegrown phenomenon that, in the last five years, has become an export product.
Perhaps it all began with Merce Cunningham. In June 1964, Cunningham and his company began a long overseas tour with a run in a Paris theater, to surprising acclaim from both the public and the critics - and this at a time when Cunningham was still not really a mainstream dance figure in New York. That fall, the Paul Taylor Dance Company appeared in the recently established Paris International Dance Festival, whose audience at the time was oriented primarily toward classical ballet, and met with bewilderment and half-empty houses. The festival persisted, however, largely under the influence of its unofficial adviser on contemporary American dance, Michel Guy (later a French minister of culture), and Cunningham, Taylor, and other American modern dance troupes became regular Paris visitors, either in the festival program or under other auspices. (Indeed, Taylor was playing to full houses in May 1968 when students from the nearby Sorbonne began their famous uprising by occupying the Theatre de l'Odeon.)
Early Dance Wave
During the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Paris audiences made the acquaintance of the dance companies of Alwin Nikolais, Don Redlich, Alvin Ailey, Viola Farber, Twyla Tharp, Sara Rudner, Douglas Dunn, and others, and in what was the ultimate consecration of American modern dance, Merce Cunningham was invited to choreograph a new work in 1973 for the Paris Opera Ballet; titled Un jour ou deux, it had a score by John Cage, with sets and costumes by Jasper Johns. Godfathers to this extraordinary event were Rolf Liebermann, who had just taken over as director of the Paris Opera and was determined to let some fresh air into that tradition-bound house, and Michel Guy, who had just founded the Paris Festival d'Automne, which was, and is, decidedly contemporary in its orientation, in particular toward American imports. More important in its long-range effect was Liebermann's appointment the following year of Carolyn Carlson - a California-born former Nikolais dancer - as choreographer, star dancer, and director of an experimental dance theater group at the Paris Opera, independent of the opera's ballet company. This company within a company was made up mainly of French dancers performing Carlson's works exclusively, while Carlson's tall, slender, and supple body and cool Nordic looks shook up the image of what a dancer was supposed to look like.
All of this records the march to acceptance and popularity in France of American modern dance, which continues unabated. It does not explain how modern dance took out French naturalization papers and took on a different look. Nor is there any more or less continuous modern dance tradition as there is in the United States, from Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn through Martha Graham to the present, or in Germany, from Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss down to today's descendants of German Expressionism, such as Pina Bausch and Suzanne Linke. To find a historical link in France, one has to go back to the nineteenth
...
Read Full Article
|
