Philosophy of the Performing Arts

122 performance and the classical paradigm
interpretation of a role or dance. In performing a given dance work, the
dancer(s)’s movements follow a recipe for the dance.
McFee proposes that we apply to dance the following (defeasible)
“thesis of notationality” more generally applicable in the performed arts:^11
“Performance A and performance B are performances of the same work of
art ... just in case both satisfy or instantiate some particular ‘text’ in a nota-
tion agreed by the knowledgeable in the art form to be an adequate notation
for that art form” (McFee 2007).^12 According to McFee, our sense of the
identity of a particular dance work, and of what is required for its correct
performance, is tied to the idea of a characterization, in such a notation, of
the sequence of movements to be executed by performers. Such a character-
ization distinguishes, in the actual sequence of movements executed by one
who performs the dance, those features taken to be constitutive of the piece
danced from other features that represent either interpretations or errors
on the part of the performer. It is, then, in terms of the performer’s or
performers’ intention to manifest the features captured in the notation that
we can make sense of the idea that performances are of particular dances.
As a matter of fact, as McFee admits, most contemporary dances are never
notated. But what matters, he claims, is the notatability in principle of a
performance of a dance. For the latter implies at least a tacit understanding
of what is constitutive of the dance performed.
As critics have pointed out,^13 and as McFee (2007) has acknowledged,
the thesis of notationality, whatever its virtues when applied to classical
music, faces some serious problems if applied to dance. First, two notational
systems for representing movement have been used in relation to dance
performance. One of these, Labanotation, is applicable to movement in gen-
eral while the other, Benesh notation, is usually viewed as more suitable
for recording movements in classical ballet. There is not, as in the musical
case, agreement amongst “the knowledgeable” as to whether either system
can capture the relevant features of a given dance performance. This lack
of consensus reflects aspects of the very nature of dance performance. As
Francis Sparshott (2004) has argued, the idea that we can identify a dance
work with a notatable prescription to perform a certain sequence of move-
ments assumes that we have a notation capable of capturing those features
of the movements that are constitutive of the work. The principal medium
of dance, Sparshott maintains, is the unspeaking human body in motion and
at rest. But the latter admits of many different levels of description. We can
describe it in terms of the quasi-mechanical operation of systems of motor
programs, for example, or of such systems as elements in the organic activity
of a living being, or of the execution thereby of meaningful human gestures,
or of these gestures as executed by a gendered human being of a particular
age, or of the meanings of these gestures given the social status or context of