Ever since dance was established as a theatrical art form in Western Europe, it has had a constitutive relationship with other dramatic, plastique, and musical arts. In being described as relying on these other art genres, dance works were often regarded as secondary creations. Ballets, for example, were works likened to narrative tableaux that tell stories without words, with music as their indispensable accompaniment, animating the dancing bodies. In the early 20th century, however, the relationship of dance to other art genres was fundamentally shifting. Towards the end of the 19th century, art works were to be envisaged on the basis of a musical model instead of plastique arts hitherto, and dance as an individual art genre was thereby to be redefined, independently of other art genres, as its own medium, its own material for human creative activity. In dance the human body was being recognized as its medium, and the body’s nature, as encompassed in the “plastique,” was to be scrutinized. The usage of the term “plastique” in dance must then have evolved.
Let us consider these examples. In 1899, the American dancer Isadora Duncan arrived in Europe, where she would have a profound impact on audiences. Her natural and free style of dancing came to be called danse plastique. In Russia, Duncan’s dance was enthusiastically received in theatrical circles (Souritz Reference Souritz, Surits, Garafola and Van Norman Baer1999), and she was invited to teach “plastique movement” at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1906 (Suritz Reference Souritz and Surits1996, 144). Meanwhile, the German art historian Albert Dresdner wrote a series of articles in 1903 entitled “La Danse considérée comme art plastique” in La Musique en Suisse, a journal edited by the Swiss musical educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. Jaques-Dalcroze, who (Reference Jaques-Dalcroze1906, ix) himself contrasted musical rhythm with plastique rhythm in his writings, and combined them for the purpose of harmonizing time and space — or the mental and the physical — as part of his educational aims (Seidl Reference Seidl1912, 18); and by 1912, his ideas were to culminate in the concept plastique animée (Jaques-Dalcroze [1912] Reference Jaques-Dalcroze1920, 155-58). Additionally, L’Après-midi d’un Faune, which premiered in Paris in 1912, was described by the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky himself as “an entirely new plastique composition” (Tenroc Reference Tenroc1912), and by his contemporary musicologist Louis Laloy (Reference Laloy1912) as a “poème plastique.”
Did these usages of “plastique” actually have anything in common? And why was this term so often used for dance at that time, and in such different contexts? One explanation could be that many contemporary choreographers visited museums and researched plastique arts, trying to find sources of inspiration.Footnote 1 But this explanation addresses merely a part of the phenomenon of ubiquitous uses of this term at that time.
First, from an art historical perspective, it seems highly unlikely that any art form of this period would have taken the “plastique arts” as its primary model of its artistry. Music was the favored model at the turn of the 20th century. As the English literary critic Walter Pater ([1877] Reference Pater2000, 224, 230) had written in 1877, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” The poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (Reference Apollinaire1912, 2-4), one of the principal reviewers of Cubism in its early stages, captured the new trends in the art of the period in an essay in the first issue of Les Soirées de Paris in February of 1912.Footnote 2 He described Cubism as “an entirely new plastique art,” and characterized it by comparing it to what was musical, that which brings artistic sensation independently of the subjects shown in the picture. This trend reflects the zeitgeist, in which art came to be recognized as a human creation rather than an imitation of nature, which a piece of music exemplifies. Doesn’t the emphasis on “plastique” in dance appear to go against the contemporary trend?
Second, from a dance historical perspective, ballet had always been compared to painting or sculpture, and therefore regarded as a moving plastique art. The 18th-century ballet reformer Jean-Georges Noverre (Reference Noverre1760, 2) wrote “A ballet is a tableau;”Footnote 3 earlier still, the Court Ballet theorist Françoise Ménestrier ([1682] Reference Ménestrier1972, 82) had written “The ballet is a painting;” the 19th-century ballet critic Théophile Gautier (Reference Gautier1864) wrote “Animated plastique – this is the true choreographic element.” Even on the actual stage, plastique art had become a theme in its own right. In Pygmalion (1734), the sculpture of Galatée, carved by Pygmalion, comes to life. In Le Délire d’un Peintre (1843), a dancer in a picture emerges out of the frame. Released from the restraint of static figuration, it begins to dance as if animated. If the plastique arts had always served as models for art dance, why did “plastique” come to be newly emphasized in this period?
Both questions have something to do with the Modernist movement, through which European art dance came to be redefined as an autonomous art form. However, even in this transitional time, artists and audiences still conceptualized dance’s unique nature in reference to vocabulary of other art forms: this term, “plastique,” appears repeatedly in this period in discussions about different kinds of bodily representation, yet it seems to encompass a host of meanings with different nuances. Asking the reasons for the use of the term “plastique,” this article focuses on the common uses of the term in reference to dance works in the early 20th century, and considers its significance both relative to early Modernist dance formations and from a broader historical perspective.
Through this analysis, we will discuss what role the term “plastique” played in the early 20th-century dance in Europe, when new dances were emerging under the influence of the Modernist impulses. During this period, a new type of dancers emerged who criticized ballet and conceived dances based on the concept of “restoring the natural body,’’ even while the Ballets Russes released innovative works. Both groups served as important catalysts for the development of 20th-century dance into a highly creative choreographic art form. Focusing on the fact — whose explanation is, however, not yet revealed — that their dances were described using the term “plastique,” this article will show that, in this transitional time, dance professionals were newly focusing on their dance medium, the human body, and exploring the myriad ways of using it.
In the context of the art world, “plastique” first meant visualized, materialized, and physicalized, and it contrasted with the immateriality of acoustic or spoken art forms. “Plastique” could also be defined as sculptural, in contrast to the picturesque or musical quality of a visual artwork, which was seen as imitative. Furthermore, “plastique” was also used to describe an attribute of the natural world, which was its formative, malleable, or even procreative quality. Considering these uses of the term, we classify definitions of “plastique” into two broad categories: nature plastique and art plastique. The former is the subjective, mysterious plastique power of living nature; the latter, the objective plastique material of literal plastique art. These two are diametrically opposite concepts, but by understanding the wide range of meanings of the term in relation to these opposite concepts, we will explain the widespread use of the term, and, at the same time, shed light on the nature of the body as an art medium.
As we will see, when applied to Modernist dance, the concept “plastique” served significant functions: Firstly, the term identified the unique characteristics of the body as a dance medium, helping dancers recognize them, which encouraged the autonomy of dance art; secondly, the term helped choreographers recognize the concept of spatial visual composition, encouraging them to develop objective methodologies for composing new dances. However, before we delve into the uses of the term “plastique” when applied to dance, we will first locate significant clues to our argument by examining meanings of the term “plastique” in the field of aesthetics and philosophy. We will also examine ways in which pre-modern (which we here use to mean the period before the emergence terms of “modern dance” entered into common usage) dance professionals envisaged dance and dancing body when they too used “plastique” to describe their dances. After all these, we will finally discuss how pioneers of new dances envisaged the body as a dance medium, in envisioning the present and future of contemporary dance, and why they required the term “plastique.”
“Plastique”: How the Meaning has Developed Over Time
Historically, the word “plastique” was used to refer to “that which has the power to form (ce qui a la puissance de former).” In the 1762 and 1798 editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, the article under “Plastique” gives only this meaning, with “the plastique property of animals and plants” as examples. The article explains what is called nature plastique, which was the Dictionnaire’s meaning of the term at that time. In the Encyclopédie (1765), on the other hand, the phrase art plastique is dealt with, along with nature plastique, under the article “Plastique.” In the Encyclopédie, the explanation of nature plastique continues over three pages, while art plastique is given only a few lines, defining it as a part of sculpture. The important point for the purpose of our discussion is, however, that in the Encyclopédie, what is plastique in art is presented alongside what is plastique in nature.
The usage of the phrase nature plastique can be traced back to the 17th century, when anti-Cartesian philosophers such as Ralph Cudworth, Henry More and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were exploring the formative principles of living entities, which they considered to be distinct from those of inorganic physical matter. Though their approaches were different, they all worked on the problem of whether or how they could understand organic life within a mechanistic view of the universe, which was emerging alongside mechanical technology. Nature plastique suggests that there exists an immaterial, generative force in organic systems, implying that organic nature is not controlled mechanically but by different principles than those of machines, which are human inventions. In this context, “plastique” denotes a kind of mystical generative force in organic life.
Art plastique, on the other hand, generally refers to a genre of art: the 19th-century editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française defined Art plastique as “the art of modeling all kinds of figures and ornaments in plaster, clay, stucco, etc.” However, we would like to look at another usage of the term in art. In the above mentioned essay in Les Soirées de Paris in 1912, Apollinaire emphasizes that modern painters, in contrast to the painters before them, do not depict the object as it is actually seen. He calls Cubism “an entirely new plastique art” and refers to music to describe its novelty, pointing to what is musical in painting. While it might sound strange to say that a painting is musical, this assertion can be considered an extension of past aesthetic theories concerning what is plastique and picturesque in art, which had been discussed since the late 18th century. Recalling related aesthetic theories will clarify what musical means in this context.
In the first place, “plastique” and “musical” were used to classify genres of art. When the concept of fine art was becoming established in the latter part of the 18th century, philosophers sought to put the various individual arts into systematic order to aid their understanding of aesthetic theory. In their theories, plastique art usually primarily refers to sculpture, but also to painting, a genre in which the work is represented in substantial materials and appeals to the visual sense as it unfolds in space. It was differentiated from music or poetry, for these acoustic or spoken art forms are immaterial and appeal to the auditory sense, unfolding over time. This classification forms the basis for the definition of the genres of plastique art today.
However, the term “plastique” was also used in another sense: as a way of characterizing artworks irrespective of genre. The German literary historian and writer August Schlegel ([1801-02] Reference Schlegel1884, 156), for example, distinguishes “plastique” and “picturesque,” as denoting two principles by which artwork could be represented: “plastique” is isolating, reducing elements to their essence and excluding material appeal; “picturesque” comprises the whole, representing the entire appearance, and seeks a concomitant physical attraction. He thus understood “plastique” in the sense of what is sculptural, recognizing a different quality from what is picturesque. The same distinctions were made by other German philosophers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder, Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. With the addition of “musical,” these three concepts came to connote different relationships between the medium of art (the imitating) and the depicted object (the imitated) in imitative art.
The 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith (Reference Smith1869, 408) gives an illuminating explanation of these relationships: “In Painting, a plain surface of one kind is made to resemble […] all the three dimensions of a solid substance,” while “in Statuary and Sculpture, a solid substance of one kind, is made to resemble a solid substance of another.” He claims that since the disparity between the imitating (the medium of art) and the imitated (the depicted object) is greater in painting than in sculpture, the pleasure arising from imitation is greater in painting. Smith also says that instrumental music is not essentially imitative: it “presents an object so agreeable, so great, so various, and so interesting, that alone […] it can occupy […] the whole capacity of the mind….” (ibid. 430)
Seen through this lens, “plastique” is closely associated with the idea of imitating an object’s three-dimensional visual reality as it is — that is, what is sculptural. “Picturesque” and “musical,” on the other hand, are associated with less imitative formative principles by which the object imitated follows the form of the relevant medium, resulting in a different outward expression: the focus shifts more to the artist’s inventive contribution and to the use of each medium’s properties. Hegel classifies sculpture as a “classical” art, but painting and music as “romantic,” a classification that is also based on the distance between the imitated and the imitating. The form of the artwork in music is removed from that of the object being depicted, whereas in painting, a three-dimensional object has to be represented in two dimensions. Music abolishes materiality entirely: it is formally composed using a structure of different sounds, its medium, following rules, which the musician engages with subjectively. The musician is no longer restricted by the outer objective content (Hegel [1835-38] Reference Hegel1976, 266; translation by Knox Reference Hegel and Knox1975, 895-96). The work is thus autonomous, a thing in itself, rather than an imitation or representation of something else.
Over the course of European art history, painting changed from being plastique to being picturesque, in Schlegel’s or Hegel’s terms. When Apollinaire compared painting to music, therefore, he suggested that it was becoming still less imitative and required still more inventive contribution from the artist than before. Apollinaire (Reference Apollinaire1913, 34) writes “Cubism differs from the old schools of painting in that it aims, not at an art of imitation, but at an art of conception, which tends to rise to the height of creation (Ce qui différencie le cubisme de l’ancienne peinture, c’est n’est pas un art d’imitation, mais un art de conception qui tend à s’élever jusqu’à la création).”Footnote 4 His understanding of Cubism was thus an achievement of plastique art, which had once been an art imitating nature, God’s creation, but had developed into an art in which human beings themselves created their own objects. When Apollinaire says new plastique art is musical, he means that it is no longer plastique or picturesque in the sense of imitative. We see here that, in aesthetics, “plastique,” “picturesque,” or “musical” connote to what extent a painting is imitative or autonomous.
Dance in the Pre-Modern Era: Its Relationship to Other Arts and to the Body
Towards the end of the 19th century, art dance was to be envisaged on a musical model, shifting from its initial model of plastique art. Likewise, in the field of dance, the distance between the imitated and the imitating was expanding just as it did in other artistic forms. What was the significance of this change regarding how the body was perceived in dance, and what was the impact of this change in perception on dance’s development as an artistic medium?
In the 18th century, ballet makers often compared ballet to poems or paintings — the latter two had already the status of a fine art — so that it might join the ranks of the “fine arts.” Noverre, among others, claims that dance conveys the narratives of dramas or poems without using words, like narrative painting. Adam Smith (Reference Smith1869, 433) even prioritizes dance over painting, saying: “Statuary and History Painting can represent but a single instant of the action which they mean to imitate,” while a pantomime dance “can represent all the events of a long story, and exhibit a long train and succession of connected and interesting situations.” Noverre (Reference Noverre1760, 52) also prioritizes dance, but his reasoning is different from Smith’s: “A beautiful painting is nothing but a copy of nature; a beautiful ballet is nature itself.”
Noverre (ibid. 262) defines dance as “the art of conveying our sentiments and passions to the soul of the audience by the true expression of our movements, our gestures and physiognomy (l’art de faire passer par l’expression vraie de nos mouvements, de nos gestes & de la physionomie, nos sentiments & nos passions dans l’âme des spectateurs),” and writes, “The passions are the springs that make the machine work: whatever movements result, they cannot fail to be true (Les passions sont les ressorts qui font jouer la machine : quels que soient les mouvements qui en résultent, ils ne peuvent manquer d’être vrais)” (ibid. 266). He understands “passion” here as what should be expressed in dance, and simultaneously, as a driving force that holds the key to dance’s creation: a machine-like, formative power in its own right. With this understanding, he argues that dance could achieve a perfect identification between the imitating and the imitated – that is, dance has a more plastique quality than sculpture. Noverre saw a ballet as nature itself, which is tantamount to saying that ballet is not an art. Since he did not separate the imitating and the imitated, he did not define the body as a medium for dance creation.
In the 19th century, Théophile Gautier, a ballet critic and librettist, also described ballet as analogous to a plastique art. In his review of Néméa ou l’Amour Vengé (Reference Gautier1864), he writes: “Anything that cannot be reduced to drawing, ensemble, perspective, is not of the essence. Animated plastique — this is the true choreographic element … (Tout ce qui n’est pas réductible en dessin, en groupe, en perspective, n’est pas de son essence. La plastique animée, voilà le véritable élément chorégraphique …).” Gautier (Reference Gautier1844) gives absolute primacy to the visual element over the discursive, claiming that “A ballet should be a tableau before being a drama.” He criticizes one work for representing “a drama expressed in gestures rather than a series of choreographic poses” (Gautier Reference Gautier1855), and focuses on the outer appearances such as “forms,” “positions” or “lines” rather than the inner expression of “sentiments” or “passions” that Noverre had emphasized. For Gautier, dance was to be made primarily of material elements—media—rather than imitative expression.
We must also note Gautier’s view of ballet scenarios. About the action and characters of a dance work, Gautier (Reference Gautier1837) states that “The more fabulous the action, the more chimeric the characters, the less will be the shock to authenticity; for it is easy enough to believe that a sylphide can express her sorrow in a pirouette and make a declaration of love with a ronde de jambe.” Expressing sorrow or love with a pirouette or a ronde de jambe may create too much distance between the imitating and the imitated for the work to be imitative, but for that very reason, Gautier maintains, ballet should deal with fabulous subject material. Noverre (Reference Noverre1760, 191-92), by contrast, wrote “less of the fairy tales, less of the wonder, more truth, more naturalness, and dance will appear in a much better light.” Noverre’s and Gautier’s viewpoints reveal different conceptions of dance. Noverre regards dance as an imitative art, relying on the proximity between the imitating and the imitated, based on the idea that ballet depicts human beings through human passions. Gautier, by contrast, views it as non-imitative, relying on the distance between the imitating and the imitated, based on the idea that ballet is made of a balletic medium of steps, positions or lines of the body. His view of dance was, in Hegel’s sense, “romantic” rather than “classical.”
Gautier’s (Reference Gautier1837) vision that dance is “the art of displaying elegant and correct forms in various positions favorable to the development of lines (l’art de montrer des formes élégantes et correctes dans diverses positions favorables au développement des lignes)” was a step towards plastique composition based on a musical model. It is worth recalling here that dance has long been understood as analogous to music, and not only to plastique art. The art of balletic dance had established a mechanics of composition comparable to those of music as early as the 17th century; pieces had been written down using dance notation. Noverre (Reference Noverre1807, 135-36) classifies dance into danse mécanique and dance en action: the former being composed of pas without an imitative subject, the latter expressed as the language of passion. He disdained danse mécanique, categorizing it as nothing but a mechanical and systematic series of steps. However, even if ballet reformers in the 18th century loudly proclaimed that dance was an imitative art, dance always took place with dance music, and, its non-imitative forms were widely performed in ballrooms or even onstage. However, when ballet was treated in such a mechanical way, it was to be rejected by the pioneers of new dances in the next century, just as danse mécanique had been in the 18th century. It was Nijinsky who rediscovered the significance of this method under the name of “plastique composition.”
The Genesis of Modernism in Dance and Two Different Views of the Body as a Medium
Dresdner’s 1903 essay “La Danse considérée comme art plastique” was written in light of the new trends in dance and begins by defining dance:
It was in dance that humans first conceived and established their ideal of beauty; dance is a plastique art whose material is the human body, just as color is the material of painting and stone or bronze are the materials of sculpture.
C’est dans la danse, qu’en premier lieu, l’homme a conçu et placé son idéal de beauté ; la danse est un art plastique dont la matière est le corps humain, comme la couleur est la matière de la peinture, comme la pierre ou le bronze les matières de la sculpture. (Dresdner Reference Dresdner1903-1, 219)
Here, Dresdner points to the human body as the medium of dance in the same way that color, stone, or bronze are regarded as the media of plastique art. In terms of the medium, he ranked dance as itself a plastique art. This was different from likening a piece of ballet to a plastique art, as Noverre and Gautier had done.
At this time, individual art genres began to be understood in terms of the characteristics of their media. In 1890, French painter Maurice Denis had written his famous definition of néo-traditionnisme: “It is well to remember that a picture — before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote — is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”Footnote 5 In its own way, dance art became caught up in the artistic trends of the times, so the body came to be explicitly recognized as an art medium. This recognition was truly groundbreaking in terms of the history of Western art dance, since it was only after then that it was possible to ask and consider what kind of medium the body could be. We shall examine how various dance and theater professionals at that time addressed this question. Our interest is in which way the notion of “plastique” served their thinking.
In examining this, we will classify their views of the body into two categories. One, which we liken to nature plastique, is of Francois Delsarte, Albert Dresdner, Isadora Duncan, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, and Alexander Sakharov. The other, which we liken to art plastique, is of Vaslav Nijinsky and Edward Gordon Craig. Though both groups regard the body as a plastique medium, how they treat it is diametrically different: the former tries to bring out its natural, intrinsic potential, the latter tries to create an artificial production from it. In the following, we will examine in detail how each of these groups viewed the body as a dance medium and how the term “plastique” was interpreted in their visions.
(1) Nature Plastique: The Views of Dresdner, Duncan and Delsarte
For Dresdner, “The primordial locus of art” constitutes his predominant vision of the body as an art medium. He elaborates (Reference Dresdner1903-1, 219), “the art of dance fulfilled the role of signaling and forming an emerging new idea of beauty[…]by the rhythmical movement of the human body (l’art de la danse a rempli la tâche d’annoncer et de former le nouvel idéal de beauté […] par le mouvement rythmique du corps humain)” before painters and sculptors fixed them in a durable way.Footnote 6
He further maintains that since dance as a primordial art has declined, new and fertile ideals of beauty cannot appear nowadays in other plastique arts (ibid. 220). In making this argument, he refers to Duncan and looks to her to find a way of breaking through this impasse: whereas “In all these steps and pirouettes, these dislocations and movements there in no sense and nothing plastique (Dans tous ces pas et ces pirouettes, ces dislocations et cet mouvements il n’y a aucun sens et rien de plastique)” in ballet, “Duncan […] never ceases to tend in her movement and gestures towards a plastique expression of feeling (Duncan […] ne cesse jamais de tendre dans ses mouvements et ses gestes à une expression plastique du sentiment).” (Dresdner Reference Dresdner1903-2, 235) When he begins his essay by ranking dance as a plastique art, the term “plastique” appears to mean physicalized or visual because of dance’s medium: the body. But the term takes on a different nuance as his attention turns toward Duncan. He denies that ballet is plastique, but describes Duncan’s dance as plastique, since he observes that it has formative potential that ballet lacks. In this context, “plastique” should not be understood as physicalized or visual, but rather as formative – that is, having the power to form – or fertile or procreative, which is the nature of the living body. And this interpretation is consistent with his understanding of the body as a primordial medium, a locus of “forming or emerging new idea.”
Duncan (Reference Duncan and Cheney1928, 23) herself emphasizes the intimate relationship of dance to sculpture, saying “She [Woman] shall be sculpture not in clay or marble but in her own body, which she shall endeavor to bring to the highest state of plastique beauty” (ibid. 21). She makes her dances using sculpture as a model, such that “plastique” seemingly means “sculptural” for her. But she further says: “She [the dancer] will dance not in the form of nymph, nor fairy, nor coquette, but in the form of woman in her greatest and purest expression.” Concerning the relation between the medium (a woman) and the object depicted (a woman’s beauty), the distance seems to be even closer than in sculpture. However, her dancing tries not to represent or imitate something, but to be Woman herself. Duncan says, “She [Woman] must live this beauty,” and thus her ideal dancer is “a dancer who, after long study, prayer and inspiration, has attained such a degree of understanding that her body is simply the luminous manifestation of her soul” (ibid. 9).Footnote 7
In Duncan’s dance the concept of nature plastique, the power to form in nature, is used to understand the function of the body in shaping form. However, it is not only in the field of dance that the concept of “plastique” has been used to explain the nature or function of artists. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) ([1711] Reference Shaftesbury1964, 136), an English philosopher, says, for example, that a poet is like universal plastique nature; Conti, a painter in Lessing’s drama Emilia Galotti (1772), says, “It is the province of art to paint as plastique nature—if there is such a thing—intended her original design” (Lessing [1772] Reference Lessing and Bell1878).Footnote 8 Here, as in the Encyclopédie, art and nature are treated in parallel via the concept “plastique.” Shaftesbury and Conti attribute the artistic creativity of human beings to nature plastique: just as God created nature, artists rely on the formative powers of nature, which they themselves possess – something mysterious beyond mechanical art and method – to create their works.
Using the term “plastique” to emphasize the natural, formative force with which the human body is intrinsically equipped, Duncan and Dresdner aimed to identify dance as a second nature in the body rather than an artistic work. Dresdner even argued that dance should lead the formation of a new ideal of beauty, as a second nature in society, and he ranked the body as primordial in this kind of formative process. Dance presents the nature of the human body itself: it is autonomous. In this regard, Duncan’s dance is regarded as musical. The body is in fact such a specific art medium that the more one tries to make it into something else, the more it exists as an object in itself — autonomous, like a music piece — rather than an imitation. The more dance is made like a beautiful sculpture (plastique), the more the dancer must become beautiful herself (musical), and this is achieved since the body, as it is, is plastique (in the sense of the formative).
It is understandable why Duncan’s ideas were applied more to physical education than to art. Dance in this era was indeed often considered as a tool for physical education. Focusing on the physical training developed in the early decades of the 1900s, Karen Vedel (Reference Vedel, Carter and Fensham2011, 124), a scholar of dance studies, refers to the Danish definition of the term “plastique” as “the malleable and flexible, a three-dimensional quality, which, like plaster or clay in the hands of a sculptor, may be shaped according to the idealized bodies of Antiquity.” She, too, uses “plastique” in the sense of formativeness, as an attribute of the body, whether the formative process is natural (or mysterious) or artificial (or mechanical).
Before Duncan, singing and drama teacher François Delsarte had identified the “formative” nature of the body as a medium of physical expression as early as the 19th century, which was to have a profound influence on pioneers of new dances in the following century like Duncan and Jaques-Dalcroze, among others (Odom Reference Odom2005, 141-42). According to Genevieve Stebbins (Reference Stebbins1887, 60), who publicized Delsarte’s theories, he had aimed to make the body plastic to express inner emotion, revelatory of the soul, comparing the body to clay as a plastique medium. Concerning the shaping process, she refers to plants, saying that there is spiritual power in gathering dead matter from the earth and the air and shaping it to its chosen form (ibid. 59). Moreover, she adds, the process is not mechanical, but rather mystical (ibid. 64). We see that Delsarte, too, had attributed the shaping process to the power of nature plastique, and used the term “plastique” as the “formative” nature of the body.
Jaques-Dalcroze, who believed that physical exercises were indispensable for musical education, viewed dance as a visual rendering of musical forms. When he spoke of “plastique” rhythm as opposed to “musical,” he expressed his belief that dance renders visible in bodily movement rhythms transposed from music as heard by the ear (Jaques-Dalcroze Reference Jaques-Dalcroze1916, 5). Alexander Sacharoff, a dancer and painter, also states that the body is a medium of dance in quite similar terms to Dresdner.Footnote 9 He was among the most ardent advocates of the idea of “dance as visual music,” saying “we […] do not dance with music or accompanied by music: we dance the music. This means that we realize the music in a visual form” (Sacharoff Reference Sacharoff1943, 13). The more dance becomes visual music, the less it requires acoustic music. Indeed, Sacharoff reports that he himself danced without music (ibid, 36).
According to Jacques-Dalcroz and Sacharoff, the body, a physical entity, has rhythm, a natural mechanism, inherent in it, and as such is able to express what is equivalent in music. Both Jaques-Dalcroze and Sacharoff use the term “plastique” to identify their production as physical music: that is, “plastique,” which here means materialized or visualized. Through an awareness of the musical (what is expressed), they emphasized the plastique as the physical medium of dance. We see here that the more that music is emphasized as a subject of dance, the more plastique dance becomes. We can now understand that the frequent use of the term “plastique” in dance at that time was not in spite of the era’s preference for a musical model, but indeed, because of such an era.
All that the pioneers of new dances discussed above relied on the natural mechanism of the body in the first place, and tried to explore its potential. They all sought what is musical in art by emphasizing what is plastique, and the more dance became musical, the more they required nature plastique of the body. This contrasts against another category of the body, the “artificial” body, which we shall discuss in the following.
(2) Art Plastique: The Views of Nijinsky and Craig
Nijinsky also compared dance with music, but his analogy was completely different from that of Jaques-Dalcroze or Sacharoff. Before the premiere of L’Après-midi d’un Faune, Nijinsky and the impresario Sergey Diaghilev gave an interview in an article headlined “De la peinture à la danse: Nijinski va faire dans ‘l’Après-midi d’un Faune’ des essais de chorégraphie cubiste,” published in the theatrical paper Comœdia on the 18th April 1912. Nijinsky stated:
My work is not actually a ballet; music like this consists of a rhythm, an entirely new plastique composition. Its choreographic form is entirely plastique, being combined very closely with the music.
Mon œuvre n’est point, à vrai dire, un ballet; une telle musique comporte une rythmique, une composition plastique toute nouvelle. La formule chorégraphique en est toute plastique, se combinant très étroitement avec la musique. (Tenroc Reference Tenroc1912, 4)
Nijinsky referred to his piece as “music” as well as “an entirely new plastique composition,” just as Apollinaire, in the same year, described Cubist painting as “an entirely new plastique art,” comparing it to music. Though the label “Cubism,” given by the choreographer himself or perhaps first by Diaghilev, led contemporary critics and later dance researchers to see the work as Cubist choreography,Footnote 10 it would not be reasonable to argue that Cubism, a methodology for two-dimensional composition, was being applied to three-dimensional dance merely by pointing out some similarities in outer appearance. It would also be unlikely that Nijinsky or Diaghilev was versed in Picasso’s and Braque’s methods from a practical perspective at such an early stage of Cubist activity. It is, nevertheless, noteworthy that Nijinsky describes his ballet work in terms so similar to those in which Apollinaire describes Cubist painting, as if he shares something of Apollinaire’s view of contemporary painting in his dance. The following statement by Nijinsky suggests that the ways in which the choreographer manipulated the bodies of dancers includes significant similarities to the ways that Cubists constructed their picture space:Footnote 11
… it has never been realized that the human body in its own right contains a palette of sounds and an orchestra of colors. So, I try to create a “score of movements” in which I arrange my instruments — human bodies […]. My composition is all the more difficult because the human body does not only have four strings, but an infinite multitude of sensitive and expressive elements. When I write this “score of movements” I will not only indicate the pliés, the jumps or the turns, but also each inflection of the head, each curvature of the fingers, in a word all the variations — infinite — of this plastique too often neglected.
… mais jamais on ne s’est avisé que le corps humain recèle à lui seul une palette de sons et un orchestre de couleurs. Je m’efforce donc de créer une « partition de mouvements » où je dispose mes instruments - qui sont les corps humains […]. Ma composition est d’autant moins aisée que le corps humain ne possède pas seulement quatre cordés, mais, une infinie multitude d’éléments sensibles et expressifs. Lorsque j’écrirai cette « partition de mouvements », je n’y indiquerai pas uniquement les plies, les bonds ou les cours, mais aussi chaque inflexion de la tête, chaque courbure des doigts, en un mot toutes les variations — infinies — de cette plastique trop souvent négligée. (Cahuzac Reference Cahuzac1913)
Here we see Nijinsky comparing the body to a musical instrument made up of compositional components such as color in painting or sound in music. Even if he emphasized a method of musical composition using a “score of movements” in his choreography, the dancing in Faune has no rhythmical relationship to Debussy’s music, and is not in fact rhythmical. His choreography was not so much a temporal composition as a spatial, plastique one, whose components were “each inflection of the head, each curvature of the fingers, in a word all the variations—infinite—of this plastique.” He used the term “plastique” in order to emphasize that the medium of his composition is physical (visual) — just as Jaques-Dalcroze and Sacharoff emphasized this.
For Nijinsky, when used for art dance, the body should not be the dancer’s subjective medium as a natural piece of equipment, but an objective instrument to be used in the service of the choreographer’s plastique composition. For him, choreography is not nature plastique but art plastique, objectively designed, in line with 18th-century danse mécanique. Footnote 12 In the Comœdia interview above, Diaghilev denied that Jaques-Dalcroze influenced Faune. He stated, “just as Mr. Fokine was inspired by the art of Isadora Duncan in developing his method of choreography, he (Nijinsky) applied himself to transposing his notation to the theater […]” (Tenroc Reference Tenroc1912). He thus contrasted Nijinsky’s means of choreography to Duncan’s, as if he were contrasting Nijinsky’s art plastique to Duncan’s nature plastique. Nijinsky himself was scathingly critical of Duncan, as is documented by his sister Bronislava Nijinska (Reference Nijinska, Nijinska and Rawlinson1981, 224): “Her barefoot childish hoppings and skippings should not be called an art […] her performance is spontaneous and is not based on any school of dancing and so cannot be taught […] it is not Art.”
Diaghilev’s statement above also shows that Nijinsky was thinking of choreography through the use of notation before the premiere of Faune. And when Diaghilev adds subsequently to this statement, “This is the Cubist theory that Nijinsky wanted to apply to choreography” (ibid. my emphasis), this suggests that Diaghilev saw Cubism as a way of composing an art work like a music piece instead of imitating nature, a plastique composition in space: a view exactly in line with Apollinaire’s theory of Cubism.
According to this perspective, art and nature are diametrically opposite concepts: if dance is an art at all, it should be distinguished from nature. In Duncan’s view of the dance medium, by contrast, the distinction between art and nature is blurred. That its medium is a living thing is surely a unique feature of the art of dance, and it is indeed this very attribute that made Dresdner value it highly as a medium for art. But in emphasizing its naturalness, Dresdner, too, blurs the distinction between art and nature in dance. From his argument we cannot know where and how choreographers should interpose themselves in the process of artistic creation. When Dresdner states “the language of the body, no more than that involving words, cannot be created at will: it emerges, it develops organically (le langage du corps, pas plus que celui des paroles, ne peut être créé à volonté: il se forme, il se développe organiquement)” (Dresdner Reference Dresdner1903-2, 235), he does not recognize dance as something consciously being created.
It was the English theatre director Edward Gordon Craig who identified this very problem of the body as an art medium, as early as 1905. In his Über-Marionette, Craig (Reference Craig1908, 5) states that “the body of man […] is by nature utterly useless as a material for an art” because of the difficulty of controlling it — he greatly appreciated Duncan’s dance, but he never regarded her dance as art (Craig [1952] Reference Craig and Rood1977, 250). For Craig, art requires calculations or design and is never something incidental. He maintains that the artist should rather turn the body into a machine, or into a dead piece of material such as clay (Craig Reference Craig1908, 8). He proposed introducing masks into the theatre in order to turn the body into an art medium.
According to Craig, only through the artificial approach can the body be treated objectively in art dance, externally. This way, the choreographer gains a location and method for interposing himself into the formative process of creation. To enable this objective approach to dance, the first requirement was to make the body an objective medium by controlling its spontaneous nature. This requires artificial treatment so that the dancer does not rely on the natural responses of the body to generate movement. Deformation of the body would be one method of doing this. In composing Faune, Nijinsky deformed the three-dimensional body in accordance with the requirement for a plane-like space in a mechanical way.Footnote 13 He referred to figures on a vase and ventured to represent his dancing figures as two-dimensional, pictorial elements on the stage. The bodies in this piece are thus treated artificially: dancing figures are represented not as Pygmalion-like animated sculptures, but as figures composed by the choreographer. The dancer’s natural passion or spontaneous interpretation was thereby eliminated.Footnote 14
Through deformation, he effectively introduced the artificial body as a new dance medium. Even though ballet had a long tradition of dealing with the body artificially, with Faune, Nijinsky reframed the artificial body. He validated the deformed body as an objective medium of dance composition during the very era in which the natural body in dance, referred to by the term danse plastique, was attracting increasing interest. If Nijinsky modeled Faune on plastique art for this purpose, his use of the term “plastique” in composition may connote not only spatial, physical composition, but also the artificiality of a dead plastique material.Footnote 15
Conclusion
Ever since ballet makers’ urgency for their form to be recognized as an imitative art — so that it could join the rank of the fine arts in the 18th century — art dance, distinguished from genres such as social dance, was often described as analogous to plastique arts. But at the turn of the 20th century, when plastique arts began to pursue what is “musical” rather than “plastique” (in the sense of sculptural) or “picturesque” quality, dance also pursued this trend. Through the recognition of the uniqueness of its own medium, dance became an autonomous art genre that distinguishes itself from other art genres. In this article, with the question of why the term “plastique” was frequently used in dance in the early 20th century, we have clarified how dance professionals envisaged their contemporary dances and their medium, the human body.
Two different views of the body as a dance medium were observed there, both of which described dance as “plastique.” For Duncan and other new dance pioneers, the body was natural and formative, while for Nijinsky and Craig it was used calculatedly for choreographic design. The former brought about a danse plastique in that it relies on the body’s formative potential, nature plastique; the latter, a danse plastique in that it also creates “forms” and uses for these an objective, plastique (materialized, malleable) tool for art plastique. These were contrasting approaches in dance: natural and artificial. Though both shared the same medium — the body — the former relied on its intrinsic force in nature — therefore starting from the rejection of balletic artificiality — while the latter used artificial treatments, with the intention of composing a work by using a partial body as its component. Duncan immersed herself in the former approach, while Nijinsky believed that the subjectivity of the body was nothing but a hindrance to artistic creation and promoted dances that dared to challenge the natural approach.
If we take a broad historical perspective on the way the musical model was disseminated in the field of dance at the beginning of the 20th century, as we have tried to do above with the history of art dance and of plastique arts in general, we can attribute this dissemination to two different things. One was the widespread attempt to develop the formative potential of the body to create an ideal second nature — not only as an art dance medium, but also in physical education — as was the case with Duncan, among others. The second was artists’ pursuit of composition using their own inventiveness, in line with the trend of artistic thought in general, as was the case with Nijinsky. The former provided the impetus for an examination of what the body is and should be as a medium of dance art, while the latter pursuit pointed to the importance of the choreographer’s role in dance creation. In one sense, these two are polar opposites, but nevertheless, they both moved dance in the same direction: towards something that was autonomous and less imitative.
The body’s potential as a plastique medium of dance has since been further scrutinized. This inaugurated an era in 20th-century dance in which dancers’ procreative nature and choreographers’ inventive compositions could both flourish: one on the basis of a subjective, natural body, the other using an objective, artificial body, and both being described using the same term: “plastique.” Nowadays, we are fascinated by the still unexplored potential of the medium, and try to develop its new usage in creating dances.
