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.

Water Study, choreographed by Doris Humphrey in 1928, is described by dance writer Marcia B. Siegel as “still one of the most extraordinary works in American dance.” One of Humphrey's earliest works, it was created during the period in which American modern dancers Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Martha Graham broke away from the ersatz ethnicity of Denishawn to begin choreographing their own works. “As small and strange as it is,” Siegel continues, “Water Study is a masterpiece of the choreographic art”.

The piece begins with ten to twelve dancers crouched low on the floor, scattered throughout the stage area, and all facing stage right. They slowly rise and sink in canon, as though a wave passed over them and back again. The movement grows until it brings them onto their feet: they separate and rush toward one another, leaping and falling like waves splashing together and subsiding. Then, grouped together, they surge back and forth from one side of the stage to the other like shifting tides. One cluster of dancers breaks away while another leaps, turns, and falls, forming a progressive, whirl-pool-like spiral to the floor. A side-to-side rocking motion gradually brings the dancers into unison as they spread throughout the stage area again. They return to the crouching position and ripple upward again in one last splash before finishing with a slow crawling action that leaves them prone like the last remnant of a wave creeping up the shore.

Water Study focuses attention on movement by minimizing other theatrical elements. The dance does not tell a story; it is performed in silence with no scenery; lighting changes are minimal; and dancers are costumed in plain, flesh-colored leotards. Although these kinds of choices tell their own story, as will be examined later, they serve to “turn the volume up” on the movement “channel” of communication.

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.

José Limón's The Moor's Pavane, subtitled “Variations on the theme of Othello,” premiered on August 17, 1949, at the American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut. The original cast consisted of José Limón as The Moor, Lucas Hoving as His Friend, Pauline Koner as His Friend's Wife, and Betty Jones as The Moor's Wife. With costumes by Pauline Lawrence and music arranged by Simon Sadoff (conductor and pianist for the José Limón Dance Company) from Henry Purcell's Abdelazar, The Gordian Knot Untied, and The Pavanne and Chaconne for Strings, the work was quickly recognized as a major modern dance classic. Now more than forty years old, The Moor's Pavane continues in the repertory of the Limón Dance Company, as well as in that of many ballet companies throughout the world.

John Martin, reviewing the premiere in The New York Times, declared that Limón had “definitely made a place for himself among the best of them” with his latest work. And Louis Horst wrote in The New London, Conn., Evening Day, “With a quartet of dancers… José Limón has, within the strict limitations he has set himself, produced a gripping and absorbing composition.” Horst also praised the dancers, noting that ”[t]he performance by the quartet was on a very high level, especially the stunning portrayal of the Iago role by Lucas Hoving, which was one of unforgettable malevolent intensity”.

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.

Since its publication in 1923 Havelock Ellis's essay, “The Art of Dancing,” found in his book The Dance of Life (pp. 34-63), has had a special place in the hearts of dance lovers from all walks of dance life. In the past several years Ellis's essay has been reprinted in three anthologies: Dance, in the quarterly periodical Salmagundi (1976:5-22), edited by Martin Leonard Pops; The Dance Anthology (1980:238-254), edited by Cobbett Steinberg; and What Is Dance? (1983:478-496), edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen. Their collections, claim the anthologists, contain the best available writing on dance; thus, they include Ellis's essay. In their introductory remarks Steinberg as well as Copeland and Cohen emphasize Ellis's comprehensive view of dance. Both their books contain a section entitled “Dance and Society” where Ellis's essay is presented. Only Pops accurately identifies Ellis, along with most of the other authors in his collection, as an enthusiastic amateur.

Since its publication, ideas from Ellis's essay have been quoted by many writers on dance: critics Walter Terry in The Dance in America (1971), Walter Sorell in Dance Through the Ages (1967), John Martin in America Dancing (1936), and Carl Van Vechten in his essays “The Land of Joy” and “Spain and Music” (1974:135-167); educators Margaret H'Doubler in Dance: A Creative Art Experience (1940), Elizabeth Selden in A Dancer's Quest (1935), Roderyk Lange in The Nature of Dance: An Anthropological Perspective (1975), Frederick Rand Rogers in Dance: A Basic Educational Technique (1941), Richard Kraus in History of Dance in Art and Education (1969), and Sondra Fraleigh in Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetic (1987); historian Selma Jeanne Cohen in Next Week Swan Lake (1982); and philosophers Theodore M. Greene in The Arts and Art Criticism (1940) and Francis Sparshott in Off the Ground: First Steps in a Philosophical Consideration of Dance (1988). Early modern dance pioneers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn imply in their writings that, because Ellis once again identified dance as an art, his status and erudition validated their own ideas about the value of dance (Terry 1976:43). These artists and authors regard Ellis as an authority. To introduce this reconsideration of Ellis's ideas about dance, the ideas these authors select to quote or cite from Ellis's essay will be examined.

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.