Philosophy of the Performing Arts

theater, dance, and literature 125
manifest in dance practice. Philosophers can perhaps do no more, here, than
propose the classical paradigm as a general model and note certain general
constraints on the individuation of works as I have just done. This is perhaps
what we should expect, given the history of dance performance.^14 Dance has
occupied an ambiguous position in the performing arts. On the one hand,
most eighteenth-century thinking took the distinguishing feature of dance as
an art to be its ability to represent actions. So conceived, dance is naturally
allied to theater, and dance works may be thought to be individuated in a
manner analogous to plays, albeit that in the latter case the “actions” are
predominantly linguistic in nature – “speech acts,” as these are often called.
Classical ballets in this tradition seem to owe at least part of their identity
to the narrative thread around which the individual dances are organized.
Such works can therefore admit of alternative choreographies. As a result,
the lack of an agreed notation for capturing finer details of the movements
of dancers will not pose a serious obstacle to the idea of dance performances
as performances of such works.
On the other hand, many modern dance productions eschew the repre-
sentational possibilities of dance, and focus on formal or expressive prop-
erties, thereby allying dance more closely with music. In productions by
choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, for example, the precise move-
ments prescribed for the dancers seem to be crucial to the identity of the
dance work – as crucial as is the precise sequence of prescribed sounds to the
identity of a classical musical work.^15 Here, the lack of agreement on how to
characterize the relevant movements – disagreement both on the notational
system to be used and its adequacy – present more serious problems for the
applicability of the classical paradigm if we accept the thesis of notationality
for such productions.
There are further difficulties if we ascribe to notational representations
of movements the role suggested by McFee. First, as noted earlier, there are
no scores for most dance performances This, as Renee Conroy (2006) has
noted, is partly because of the cost of scoring and the difficulty of getting
competent notators. Furthermore, unlike in the musical case, there is no
general expectation that either dancers or choreographers will be able to
make or read scores for the dance performances in which they are involved.
Second, and relatedly, where we do have notational representations of dance
productions, they are usually made by professional notators who record what
the dancers are doing in rehearsal under the direction of the choreographer.
As we saw in looking at the Goodman argument in Chapter 3, however,
the project of retrieving notational characterizations from performances is
highly problematic, especially if this is to play a central part in the definition
of performable works. It is in attempting to counter these difficulties that
Goodman imposes very strict requirements on musical scores, excluding