require words, just music and the dancing body. Dance can use
words, but it does not have to.^9
The opening of West Side Storyis a true example of the inte-
grated musical. The plot gains narrative impetus in the num-
ber itself. Yet something else is going on. The theatrical excite-
ment of dance in West Side Storylies beyond the integration of
the elements. It lies in the immediate connection between the
orchestra and the dancers’ bodies, in the land where words are
not necessary. The bodies of the dancers become immediately
musical, as though they were the orchestra. Orchestraoriginally
meant “the place for dancing” in the Greek theatre, and that
radical combination of ideas has never ceased to matter. The
place for dancing is now called the stage, but dancing material-
izes the orchestra, gives it body and motion in what I will call
the space of vulnerability. The omniscient accompaniment to
the musical is being translated into visible bodies without hav-
ing to pass through words or through the strophic structures of
song. Words and strophic song can be called upon, but they
are not necessary—dance needs no explanations.
This has always been true of dance, but West Side Story
makes it known and unforgettable: dance is orchestrain the full
meaning, with dancers’ bodies realized in the music—or is it
the other way around? Dancers and poets have talked about
this before. Donna McKechnie, who originated the role of
Cassie in A Chorus Line, said, “you can reach a level in dance
beyond words, beyond music.”^10 I do not think it is beyond mu-
sic so much as in music, but Donna McKechnie is the dancer,
and she should know. The poet is Yeats, in the famous couplet
at the conclusion of “Among School Children”:
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?The meaning of dance is the dancer engaged in dance. The
dancing body seems inseparable from its own aesthetic form.
THE ORCHESTRA 141
(^9) For fuller commentary from Balanchine and Robbins, see Cohen, ed.,
Dance as a Theatre Art, pp. 187–92.
(^10) Quoted in Steyn, Broadway Babies, Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now,
p. 183.