Philosophy of the Performing Arts

126 performance and the classical paradigm
from the scored work any features of performance that might be scored in
different ways, such as verbally indicated tempo and mood. In the case of
dance, it is obviously a serious obstacle to the application of McFee’s thesis
of notationality to dance if, as we have already noted, there is no consensus as
to how the fluid movements of the dancers are to be notated. For example,
an arm movement can be represented either in terms of the position of the
elbow or in terms of the position of elbow, wrist, and hand. While the nota-
tor, in recording what the dancers are doing, tries to distinguish between the
movements prescribed by the dance and the interpretation of the dance by
the dancer, this is a matter on which accomplished notators may differ. This
supplements Sparshott’s worries voiced earlier.
In fact, for most contemporary dances, we are in an even worse position if
we want to refer a dance performance to the defining conditions of a partic-
ular dance work, perhaps as a precondition for restaging the same work. For
what we usually possess is not a notational prescription for, or description
of, a performance, but a video recording of the performance itself. Whereas
the notator’s decisions as to which features of the dancers’ movements are
constitutive of the dance and which are interpretive can at least be informed
by the choreographer’s instructions to the dancers, no such resources are
available in a film of the finished performance. As Sarah Rubidge notes,
video records, unlike scores and scripts, are over-determined. They inevita-
bly document particular realizations of works by particular performers. They
also record unselectively, and are ever in danger of rendering indeterminate
or contingent features of a performance, such as particular performers’ inter-
pretations of a role, mistakes in execution of the work during the perform-
ance, differences in numbers of dancers as a result of injury, set, costume, and
so on, determinate features of the work. (Rubidge 1996, 223)^16
Since, as we have seen, the distinction between prescription and interpreta-
tion is central to the concept of the performable work, this represents a seri-
ous problem for dance as a performed art if specific choreography is taken to
be constitutive of the dance work. It suggests that, in such cases, it is the par-
ticular performance, or production, supervised by the choreographer that
functions as the work. With a piece like Room Service , for example, it seems
that what groups performances as performances of that work is the presence
of Rainer, as choreographer. Where we lack sufficient notational resources
to identify a piece independently of the choreographer’s presence, Martha
Graham’s remark, of her works, that “when I go, they go”^17 may strike us as
a poignant acknowledgment of the situation.
It might be objected, however,^18 that this is too pessimistic a picture, one
whose pessimism about the idea of dance as a performed art is grounded