Agon has often been cited as a key composer/choreographer collaboration, and its choreographer, George Balanchine, himself considered it “the most perfect work” to come out of his creative relationship with composer Igor Stravinsky (I). It is surprising, therefore, that so little has been written regarding the details of the interaction of music and dance. Most writers have concentrated on the dance or on the musical aspects of Agon, or have made only broad generalizations about its musical/choreographic structure.

In this article, I begin the analysis of structural relationships between music and dance with the main focus on rhythm. This is perhaps an obvious starting point for analysis, but it seems an especially important one, given the rhythmic complexity of the musical score and Balanchine's acknowledgement of the rhythmic lead that music provided forhim (2). It was Stravinsky's rhythmic style that Balanchine so often referred to when admiring the composer's work (3). In Agon, Balanchine seems to have been far less concerned with responding to pitch structure than to the rhythmic content of the music.

In the twentieth century, dance performances in the Republic of Korea have undergone a number of changes in terms of settings, audiences, and performers. Since the 1970s dance activity has blossomed under the auspices of university dance and physical education departments; there has been a steady increase in the number of professors of dance and also in the number of students majoring in dance. With the regular academic calendar, a concert season has developed and professor-choreographers have been pushed to provide new dance pieces for these concerts. Many of the new works freely blend vocabulary from various styles of Korean dance, such as court, professional female entertainer (kisaeng) (I), mask, and farmers' dances, with spatial arrangements suited for a proscenium stage.

While this creative activity is indicative of the growth taking place in all areas of Korean society, older specialists in Korean culture and arts have noted that recent efforts involve changes in the movement qualities and moods created by dancers. As these specialists watch younger dancers perform the traditional dances they often lament that “something” is being lost (Lee, Du-hyon 1984).

The study of dance, let alone “dance anthropology,” is still barely accepted by academia in the schools and universities of the United Kingdom. On the whole, Farnell's 1981 discussion of dance and dance education in England is still relevant. There is, however, a growing awareness among British anthropologists of the critical relevance of dance within the field of anthropology and among dance scholars of the relevance of anthropology to dance studies.

In the last decade or so a number of studies that look at the state of the art within the field of “dance” anthropology have been published in the United States and in Europe (see, for example, Giurschescu and Torp [1991], Kaeppler [1991], Lange [1980], Sklar [1991], and Williams [1986]). It would be more accurate to talk about the anthropology of human movement, as do a number of the writers mentioned above, since the concept “dance,” as known in English and other cognate languages, may not be appropriate cross culturally. I find the term “anthropology of human movement,” however, rather cumbersome, and since it is “dance”—rather than martial arts or signing systems, for instance—that is usually looked at by the authors I will be referring to later, I consider the use of the term “dance anthropology” justifiable.