sarma

Once everyone - artists and audiences both - understood clearly the functions of narrative in ballet. Narrative was those little bits that glued the dancing together and sometimes even influenced it. The hero would perhaps perform some hapless and charming dumb show for the heroine; she would then rise up onto her pointes and tear off a solo that would be a kind of emotional gloss on the resultant changes in her situation-or plight, as it was more likely to be. The format is similar to that of opera with its alternation of recitative and aria. Whatever the story of the ballet might be, it had to offer good opportunities for dancing, and, come to think of it, this may be one of the reasons why so many of the early ballet libretti involved royalty: they could always give a ball.

The 20th-century ballet choreographers and pioneer modern dancers began to have different ideas about narrative or "content". Some worked from a basis of human gestures and actions - amplifying them and stretching them into dance until whatever story there was could be carried along by appropriately expressive movement, instead of by pantomime or acting. Antony Tudor's Romeo and Juliet, recently revived by American Ballet Theatre is a brilliant example of this kind of drama in ballet.

Others, starting with modern dancers Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman, saw the symbolic or metaphoric possibilities inherent in the gestural approach to dance. They and their followers experimented with dance forms that involved a mood, an ambience, a role, or perhaps one simple dance task-a slave breaking his bonds and standing erect, sea waves rolling up to the shore, a primitive race growing into knowledge. During the Freud-conscious fifties, the spectacle of a solo dancer tying himself into improbable knots was certain to suggest an inner bout with his psyche.

Martha Graham made some drastic innovations in dramatic dance. Influenced possibly by film techniques, by Oriental theater, by Jung, by Einstein, and goaded by her own genius, she fractured the orderly progress of time perceived as a series of causally related events. Her dances, the Greek myth ones in particular, show a linear logic within small sections, but she has rearranged the order of these sections or stacked them up on stage so that they coexist in space while occupying different corridors of time. Her flashbacks permit you to see the past in the midst of the present.

Until quite recently, whatever the narrative or dramatic content of a dance, audiences understood most of what was going on. Since ambiguity wasn't considered interesting, copious program notes often let them in on the choreographer's intentions. It was usually pretty clear, too, when a dance was simply "about" dancing. The choreographers arranged their dancers in formal patterns and bounced them in and out of phase with the music, and the dancers smiled happily over the edge of the stage-proud to be showing off the splendid bodies that their hours of work and gallons of sweat had produced.

But there was something interesting and dangerous lurking all along under these tidy distinctions between dramatic and nondramatic dance. Some people were clever enough to see it; others became aware of it only when it was forced on them, and then they were puzzled and annoyed. In the middle of a nondramatic dance of the sixties, or even earlier, spectators might suddenly have found themselves looking at the dancers and wondering, "Who are these people, and what are they up to?"

Not surprising. After all, one of the essential ingredients of dance is dancers, and dancers look and act like people - improbable ones at times but still people. Their bodies are not impersonal elements like musical notes; they never completely disappear into the fabric of a dance. One can make polyphonic structures with them, but seldom homophonic ones. When singers hold a unison note, you hear a blend; when dancers strike a unison pose, you see the pose multiplied by the number of dancers. Each component is still isolable. It is the human quality of those bodies that makes dance what it is, and even when a dance appears to be only about speed, impetus, shapes in space and time, even then the human gestures and implicit human relationships surface with or without the choreographer's consent.

This hidden drama in dance has become more evident during the past 15 years or so because dance forms have become more irregular, more lifelike, even random. The neat patterns, steady predictable rhythms, unison virtuosity of traditional dance tend to militate against this kind of vision. Except from children. I remember once watching a flashy classical pas de trois, and the applause woke a little girl dozing on my lap, who explained that she had fallen asleep when "that lady started taking so long to make up her mind which of those two men she liked best."

Some choreographers have made deliberate use of this sort of drama. They employ collisions of bodies, eruptions into recognizable human gesture like words that never add up to a sentence, sentences that don't quite make a paragraph. An extremely obvious example occurs in Balanchine's Scotch Symphony when, out of a snatch of clever dancing, a group suddenly poses. A girl is surrounded by men who fence her in with their arms while staring threateningly toward another group of men. "Don't touch our sister," says one rival clan to the other. It's a charming joke, later repeated but never pursued.

Today's avant-garde choreographers assert their right to incorporate anything they wish into their dances - speech, song, gesture, you name it - and they are aware of the connotations and relish them. Suddenly in a dance, someone barks out a very good and serious dog imitation. (Yvonne Rainer did this once.) It's like gluing a piece of newspaper onto a collage. The resultant picture isn't "about" newspapers any more than the dance is "about" dogs. In a solo once, Judith Dunn did a slow turn, paused in plié, and raised a pointed index finger. By using such a natural gesture surrounded by more impersonal dance movement, she seemed in one sense to be insisting on its right to exist as pure movement, yet in another sense she momentarily urged us to be on guard - perhaps against her. The more outrageous a choreographer, the easier it is for audiences to accept these slices of life, even if they don't like the work. When Meredith Monk in her lawn dance Needlebrain Lloyd and the Systems Kid, had a group of people tear through on horseback, no one asked what it meant, but marveled at the speed, beauty, unexpectedness of the act. Although some did ask whether it was dance. When Robert Wilson in his Deafman Glance asked some men to construct a wooden bin on stage and billed them as "Bin-Builders," no one thought to ask what the bin was to be used for.

It seems to be the flash of characteristic human behavior-or what, because of the way the dancer accentuates it, looks like human behavior -in contemporary ballet or in plotless works of choreographers like Merce Cunningham that confuses some people. Here is a prominent drama critic's view of Cunningham ' 's Rainforest: "The story seems to be about one man seducing another's girl then another man stealing the man and so on for a while, There is little structure or build to it and it concluded in the middle of nowhere."

The critic in question is not simply insensitive or ill-educated. Merce Cunningham in making a work may think only of movement; however, sound, costumes, lights - added later - inflict an atmosphere. Also his rhythms are irregular, his groupings unusual, and something about the relaxed way his dancers perform, coupled with the strangeness of what they are doing, often reminds us of something we know, something we have perhaps seen on the street.

When two men stand and look down at a girl lying at their feet, there is a fugitive human drama to the moment. But it is fatal to begin wondering actively whether she has been hit by a car or whether the two men are planning to leave her and go off together. If the spectator seizes on this event too tightly, he is bound to be disappointed; it won't be developed, but will sink back down into the current of the dance. It's like a chance form - a spot of mold on a wall that looks, from a certain angle, like a dog. A nice thought to play with, but one to be held lightly, so that it can give a richness of texture, but no irrevocable associations that would inhibit all other possibilities.

It may be pointless to speculate on what audiences will or won't accept with case and pleasure, because one is so often proven wrong. The mysterious sense of community that the dancers show in Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering seems to have caused nothing but delight. The dancers are private with each other, specific with the space. They appear to be assuming and discarding a variety of roles. In Robbins's new The Goldberg Variations, there is less of this behavior. The large, hierarchically arranged groups are dancing very beautifully for you, the audience. They begin simply, become more daring and elaborate. They look pleased and concentrated, as if the Bach music were a dolphin they were riding. I find both dances wonderful in their separate ways; many prefer Dances at a Gathering, and I think it is the subliminal meanings that move them.

This is an astonishingly rich period in American dance. All forms and styles from the past coexist with the newest experiments. And our own ways of seeing are changing and widening. I find it endlessly fascinating to be able to watch a dance, wondering fleetingly, "Who are these people and what are they doing?" and to expect or need no answers.

I think I was wrong about The Goldberg Variations. After seeing it again, I noticed quite a few ambiguously dramatic events within it. I now think that the reason Dances at a Gathering suggests a community while The Goldberg Variations does not is that there are fewer dancers in the former. Since we get more opportunity to watch them dancing with different partners in different ways, we may feel we know them better than we do the many dancers who appear - and disappear in The Goldberg Variations.