Bronislava Nijinska arrived in Warsaw during June of 1937 to accept the post of ballet mistress and choreographer for the Polish Ballet. She created a company, premiered five choreographies, and within four months brought the Polish Ballet to acclaim by capturing the Grande Prix award at the 1937 Paris International Exposition of Art and Technology Applied to Modern Life. Although her work for the Polish Ballet was prolific and significant, it had an early and unanticipated finale; Nijinska's three-year contract was prematurely terminated by the company's administration following her first year as artistic director. Little evidence remains to document this year of intense creativity and commitment. Unaware that she would not return to Poland after her first year, she left many of her personal records in Warsaw during the summer of 1938. The 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany resulted in the subsequent destruction of numerous precious source materials, including the choreographic notes, musical scores, and costumes of Nijinska's ballets.

These papers were originally given as a panel entitled What Constitutes a Dance at the 1989 Congress on Research in Dance Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia. Panelists selected Antony Tudor's 1937 Dark Elegies as a case study and basis for examining general questions regarding elements to be considered in identifying a dance work. Several issues and occurrences inspired panel members, such as recent interest in revivals of dance works from the beginning of this century and scholarly debate about issues related to directing dance from Labanotation scores. While Nelson Goodman's 1968 book Languages of Art served as a theoretical springboard for discussion, Judy Van Zile's 1985–86 article “What is the Dance? Implications for Dance Notation” proved a thought-provoking precedent for this investigation.

The question of what constitutes the essential elements of a choreographer's work is an important one for the dance director. This study concentrates on identifying some of the constitutive properties of Antony Tudor's 1937 masterpiece Dark Elegies. I will present some aspects of the work's compositional form and some details of its movement vocabulary. I will also compare these with traditional classical ballet usages of these elements.

The Labanotation score of Dark Elegies was written by Airi Hynninen in 1980 during a revival of the ballet under Tudor's personal supervision. I believe it provides a complete and detailed record of the work's essential structural and stylistic properties. This score is the primary source for my choreographic investigation.

This discussion focuses on the extent to which the essential components of a choreographic work are transmitted in different renderings of it. Tudor's Dark Elegies is observed in performances by two different companies as mediated by film and television. The 1976 American Ballet Theatre (ABT) production of the work is documented in a black and white archival film of a stage rehearsal in which dancers perform in tights and leotards and are accompanied by a piano rendering of the score. The 1974 videotape produced by Swedish television and performed by members of the Royal Swedish Ballet translates Tudor's proscenium work into a television event. The comparative analysis of these two productions addresses (a) variants in the performance of choreographic motifs that were made by Tudor for the two companies, and (b) the perceptual differences arising from the nature of the film record versus the television adaptation. The discussion of film and television interventions in rendering a work conceived for the proscenium stage is of particular relevance at a time when much of western theatrical dance research relies on resources in which the material is transmitted by these media.

One of Antony Tudor's choreographic concerns is the emotional life and societal role of women. His best known early works, Lilac Garden (1936), Dark Elegies (1937), and Pillar of Fire (1942) explore the feminine realm and the differences in power between men and women that relegate women to their particular place in society. In both Lilac Garden and Pillar of Fire the central issue is the difficulty women face in finding romantic love in polite society. In both pieces women face uncertainty and confusion until the right man steps in to fulfill their destiny. In Dark Elegies, gender is not the central issue, but the scenario is the same: underneath the explorations of personal and communal grief, the struggle to cope with the loss of young children, is a clear and critical thread of gender differentiation.

Tudor connects gender with the ways people handle grief—women get lost in grief, men cope with it—and with the leadership roles in the Dark Elegies community. Men are the driving forces in the community. They are the comforters and have the capacity to lead the group through the stages of the grieving process into resignation. Women are the passive members of the community. They can neither help themselves nor each other, but must depend on their men for solace and salvation.

The discussion that followed the original presentation of these papers at the 1989 conference speculated on the possibilities of radically reconstructing Tudor's work, somehow re-arranging the gender roles he assigns in order to comment on his covert construction of gender. Reactions varied: some conference participants asserted it was an interesting idea, but felt they wouldn't want to violate Tudor's intentions; others thought this was perfectly acceptable, that the definition of the work needed to be open-ended and include many possibilities. One audience member felt our panel might be considered an instance of the work, especially because Giffin and Maletic performed motifs from the dance.

These diverse opinions reflect alternate understandings of what our panel accomplished. On the one hand, our search for constitutive properties is a way of documenting and preserving Dark Elegies. The search for constitutive properties details what has happened in various performances and the content of the score, and also tries to recapture Tudor's thinking. Through his analysis of the score, Giffin discusses Tudor's choreographic constructions and distinctive ways of using the body.

Choreography classes are structured in a way that places intrinsic value on peer criticism, or the evaluation by students of the works their colleagues present in class. For this reason, a choreography course may be conceived of (as writing courses often are) as a “revisions process” course. But while choreography teachers already devote class time to soliciting students' critical evaluation of each other's dances, approaches to training students in this activity, as documented in the literature on the teaching and learning of choreography, are neither consistent nor intellectually rigorous. The literature concerns itself primarily with the practice of producing dance studies: exploring and making creative choices about movement and structure in the dance.

A number of writers do acknowledge and articulate the importance of teaching students to develop a sharp critical eye.