ABSTRACT
In her ground-breaking 2000 monograph on interrelations between dance and music, entitled Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in the Twentieth-Century Ballet, dance historian Stephanie Jordan works to show that, in dance theater, music functions with dance as “interactive, interdependent components or voices, each working upon the other, so that the whole experience becomes more than the sum of its parts.”2 She opens this important project that reinscribes music as integral to the experience of dance with the comment by Alexandre Benois, Serge de Diaghilev’s collaborator and designer, that “For us it was the music which provided ballet with its centre of gravity.” Through this choice of citation as the very opening of her work, Jordan implicitly aligns much of twentieth-century dance in the West with the music-centered creative aesthetic of the Ballets Russes, pointing to the specific historical importance of Diaghilev’s troupe in exploiting music’s own resonances in the theatrical experience. A musician himself, Diaghilev commissioned scores from composers who would work knowing that, for him, “music was the basis of the ballet. ”3 Eliciting contributions from such artists as Igor Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc, and Darius Milhaud, who have shaped much of the twentieth century’s musical and artistic development in the West, Diaghilev established a model actively emulated by other impresarios, choreographers, and musicians: as Jordan intimates, and as we have seen in the example of Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien, this model of collaboration, in which the musical work informs the meaning and reception of the dance, spawned significant, meaning-filled creative expression.
