Philosophy of the Performing Arts

theater, dance, and literature 123
the agent. Of course, we might say the same thing about any medium used
in the arts. In painting, for example, as we saw in Chapter 1, it is standard to
draw a distinction between the physical medium of pigment distributed on
canvas and the artistic medium of brushstrokes, impasto, and composition
(see D. Davies 2003). But the problem for dance, Sparshott suggests, is that
the available notational systems represent movement and rest of the human
body at a more basic level of description than seems appropriate if we are
concerned with these as elements in an artistic medium. These notational
systems break movements down into teachable steps, whereas the identity
of the dance seems to require a more abstract level of description in terms
of meaningful gestures.
Even if these difficulties can be overcome, there is a more fundamen-
tal problem. McFee assumes that what is constitutive of a dance work is
a particular sequence of movements – the sequence that the notation is
supposed to capture. But, if we look at how we characterize performances
in dance practice, we find a much more complex phenomenon. Take as a
simple example The Nutcracker. This work was commissioned as a ballet,
with music and associated narrative by Tchaikovsky and choreography by
either Marius Petipa or Lev Ivanov, and the first performance took place
in St. Petersburg in December 1892. McFee’s “notatability” conception of
what the dance work prescribes for its performances would suggest that
the constitutive features of the work are the movements specified in the
choreography, presumably taken in concert with a score for the music that
the movements are designed to accompany. However, this doesn’t seem
to fit the subsequent history of the work. While productions labeled as
being of The Nutcracker over the first 30 or so years generally aimed to
follow the original choreography, subsequent productions so labeled have
freely departed from it. Indeed, this applies to some of the most famous
productions generally taken to be of this work, such as Balanchine’s 1954
production mentioned earlier and Baryshnikov’s 1976 production. Both of
these involved for the most part completely original choreography. If we
ask what is common to all of the productions generally accepted as being of
The Nutcracker , the least plausible answer is their choreography. But equally
implausible, if we are not to radically overrule the classifications made in
our practice, is the suggestion that they share a plot or a set of charac-
ters with the original production. Some accepted productions completely
revise both plot and characters, and there is wide variation in apparently
essential features of the narrative, such as the ending, the presence of a
central romantic theme, and the status of much of what transpires as real-
ity or fantasy. What is relatively constant is the use of Tchaikovsky’s score,
although even here there are variations in the ordering of the constituent
pieces and sometimes supplementation with other material.