When dance developed into a form of spectacle, particularly of a secular kind, it was frequently allied to the telling of a story and the depiction of characters. Mimed gesture was often prominent in such dance dramas—for example, in ancient Greece, where the gestures of the chorus illustrated the drama’s major themes. There the mime was often naturalistic: a hand on the head to represent grief or the stretching upward of the arms to express worship. During the later, cosmopolitan period of the Roman Empire, dance and mime were popular entertainment for audiences drawn from a variety of linguistic backgrounds. The highly sophisticated pantomime used by these dancers formed the basis of the improvised mime drama of the 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte and, later, the techniques of 20th-century mime artists such as Marcel Marceau.
Marcel Marceau.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The early European court ballets were also oriented toward dramatic spectacle, though the dance movement itself was not highly expressive and mimed gesture was limited. Other dramatic elements, usually visual effects or speech, communicated the essential points of the story. One of the first choreographers to extend dance movement so that it could be dramatically expressive was the English dancer and ballet master John Weaver, who in his ballet The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717) experimented with giving the characters gestures to express their individual personalities. Later in the 18th century Jean-Georges Noverre reacted against the purely decorative form into which ballet had developed. He believed that mime should be as close to natural gesture as possible and that dance movement should not be meaninglessly decorative but should reflect the ballet’s action.
Noverre’s ideas were partly realized in the Romantic ballet of the early 19th century, which strove to give movement a greater poetic expressiveness. Developments in dance technique, notably that of dancing en pointe (“on one’s toes,” or in toe shoes), gave dancers a wider range of movement to express character and action, although conventional or symbolic mime was also used to tell parts of the story. By the end of the century, however, choreography was once again seldom concerned with plot and character, and long sections of mime (often incomprehensible even to the dancers) were used to tell whatever story there was in the dance. The reforms proposed by Fokine at the beginning of the 20th century, like those of Noverre two centuries before, demanded more naturally expressive mime and dance movement that illuminated theme and character and were an essential component of the dance.
Beriosova, SvetlanaSvetlana Beriosova en pointe in the ballet Don Juan.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Fokine’s own work reflected these ideas faithfully. He experimented with angular movement reminiscent of archaic Greece in Daphnis et Chloé (1912; “Daphnis and Chloé”), developed individual styles for different characters (such as the jerky wooden movements of the puppet Petrushka), and brought mime much closer to natural gesture than the symbolic code previously used. This naturalism still characterizes ballet; the expressive qualities of dance movement and simple, dramatic gestures almost entirely displace conventional mime, and even in revivals of the 19th-century classics, traditional mime is usually kept to a minimum so that audiences have no trouble following it.
The founders of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Doris Humphrey, also reacted against the lack of expression in ballet. Like Fokine, they believed that most ballet dancing was mere decorative acrobatics, but while Fokine was happy to continue using exotic or archaic themes for his new, naturalistic ballets, these later choreographers believed that dance should address subjects of greater relevance and profundity. The kinds of movement with which the modern dance choreographers expressed these themes had little of conventional ballet technique about them. Eschewing mime, particularly that associated with ballet, as well as the traditional ballet vocabulary, they sought to make the whole body dramatically expressive. (See below Theatre dance: Modern dance.)
Doris Humphrey.Culver Pictures
Throughout the 20th century, ballet, like modern dance, moved toward a concern with more serious issues. In works such as Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux lilas (1936; “The Lilac Garden”), Peter Darrell’s Prisoners (1957), Gerald Arpino’s Clowns (1968), and Kenneth MacMillan’s My Brother, My Sisters (1978), choreographers engaged subject matter ranging from emotional and psychological conflict to war and social issues.
Antony Tudor as the Friend in Pillar of Fire, 1943.Fred Fehl
In the avant-garde dance of the 1970s and ’80s, experiments were made in expanding narrative potential by incorporating nondance elements (almost turning full circle back to the early court ballets). At times dance was accompanied by mime, acting, and singing as well as a multitude of visual effects. In some cases choreographers collaborated with artists working in other forms, such as music, drama, and the visual arts, and they thought of dance less as a single discipline than as a broadly based theatre art. Most of these experimental works had some kind of dramatic or conceptual content, although they avoided conventional forms of narration and expression. Events were rarely presented in chronological order, and the distinction between reality, symbolism, and fantasy was often blurred. Types of dance
Ainu people dancing in front of a palace made of snow during the Asahikawa Snow Festival, Asahikawa, Japan.FPG
The division of dance into types can be made on many different grounds. Function (e.g., theatrical, religious, recreational) is an obvious ground, but distinctions can also be made between tribal, ethnic, and folk dance, between amateur and professional, and above all between different genres and styles.
Genre and style are relatively ambiguous terms. They depend on analyses of movement style, structure, and performance context (i.e., where the dance is performed, who is watching, and who is dancing) as well as on a cluster of general cultural attitudes concerning the role and value of dance in society. Genre usually refers to a self-contained formal tradition such as ballet, within which there may be further subgenres, such as classical and modern ballet. (Some critics consider modern dance as an independent genre with a subgenre of postmodern dance, but others subsume both categories under ballet, along with other theatre dance forms such as jazz.) Within subgenres, different styles can be distinguished, such as those of Ashton, MacMillan, and Balanchine in modern ballet and Graham and Cunningham in modern dance. Style as used here embraces many elements, including a preference for certain kinds of movement (fast, slow, simple, or intricate) or for particular kinds of energy and attack (sharp, edgy, and hard, as opposed to soft and fluid). It also embraces different ways of phrasing movement or of arranging dancers into groups, as well as an interest in certain kinds of music or design.