Philosophy of the Performing Arts

190 performance as art
Jerrold Levinson’s contention that some of the expressive qualities of musical
works depend upon the kinds of movements required to generate the desig-
nated sequence of sounds on the prescribed instruments. And the notion of
“facture” in the visual arts – visible indications in the artistic vehicle of how
it was produced by the artist – may provide the basis for something similar
in abstract expressionist canvases by painters like Jackson Pollock. In these
cases, however, it might be said that the expressive properties in question
derive from the ways in which the artist uses instruments to manipulate a
vehicular medium distinct from herself.^10 In dance, on the other hand, it
seems that the artist’s own body serves as the vehicular medium through
which the artistic content of her performance is articulated. The musical
analogue of dance is not the playing of instruments by musicians but the
singer’s use of her own voice.
This distinctive role played by the artist’s body means that dance is an
art form naturally fitted for the artistic exploration of issues relating to our
embodied nature. We encountered in Chapter 1 a striking example of this.
In “task dances” like Yvonne Rainer’s Room Service , the dancers exemplify
in their movements the practical intelligence of the body in the pursuit of
everyday goals. Dance has also attracted feminist artists wishing to explore
themes relating to embodiment.^11 However, Graham’s way of characterizing
the distinctive role of the body in dance carries with it certain philosophi-
cal preconceptions that are open to challenge. To suggest, as Graham does,
that the dancer uses her body as an instrument is to subscribe implicitly to
a dualistic conception of the “mindedness” of the human agent. On such a
conception, the agent – in the present case, the dancer – is identified with
the “inner self ” who is distinct from her body but able to act in virtue of
her ability to make demands upon and control it. The dualism here is not
Cartesian – that is, it doesn’t require that the “inner self ” be something non-
physical. It holds just as clearly if we identify the “inner self ” with something
definable in neurological terms. It consists in the idea that the self, however
construed, stands in an instrumentalistic relation to the body. Such a dualism
actually provides us with an easy answer to Yeats’s question. The dancer, we
can say, is the person responsible for those bodily movements that constitute
the dance. And, in another sense of “know,” we can know the dancer from
observing the dance by reading off from the movements of the body the states
of the “inner self ” that are directing those movements.
The instrumentalistic way of putting things seems very natural if, as Graham
is doing, we consider what is involved in dance training and rehearsal. For, as
she points out, dance training aims at providing the dancer with the ability
to use her body in ways that are unavailable to those lacking such training,
and this seems to require an instrumental conception of the relationship
between the dancer and her body. The dance educator Margery J. Turner,