The study of dancers' relationships with their noncharacter solo roles in leotard ballets by George Balanchine and William Forsythe reveals a dynamic cluster of flexible and multifaceted conceptualisations. Performers' process includes a range of abstract images, nonfictional and docufictional ideas, metaphoric allusions and storyboarding constructions. Drawing upon Michael Kirby's concept of non-matrixed performing (1987), as well as on ideas from dance aesthetics, narratology, theatre and film theories, noncharacter roles are understood as partly flexible, diverse performing frameworks that contain ambiguity but do not promote characterisation. The findings suggest that the dissolution of character traits in plotless choreography often serves as a catalyst for the performers' polyvalent expressions of their artistic identities, value systems and agency. Observation of performances, in conjunction with direct interviews with expert dancers from several international ballet companies, brings to light the links between the performer's ideas and the effects observable in the dance. Attention to the performers' approaches and aspects of the work which they wish to emphasise reveals less observed aspects of dance texts and illuminates the nature of the ballet dancer's qualitative contribution in non-narrative choreography.
This article focuses on the aesthetic implications innate to the introduction of tight-fitting rehearsal-style costume, a leotard, to the dance studio and stage. In ballet, the pared-down and subtle design of such costumes is found in many dance works from the twentieth century until
today, including the ‘black and white ballets’ by George Balanchine, or ‘ballet-ballets’ by William Forsythe. These works are also considered plotless and seem to deter the viewer from the theatrical conventions of plot lines, characters and narratives. This article
is concerned with that which is highlighted in such works: the dancer’s moving body and the leotard as a costume that particularly refers to the performer at work and in own cultural setting. The look into the relationship between the dancers and leotard as a costume type communicates
important information about the performer’s work and their development of roles in such repertoire. The closer consideration of this relationship in reference to the aesthetic of practice-clothes ballet also discloses plenty about the artistic potentials in such choreography and performance,
revealing how the use of leotard as a stage costume has both furthered and challenged some of ballet’s traditions and cultural conventions.
The collaboration between William Forsythe and Issey Miyake in Ballett Frankfurt’s The Loss of Small Detail (1991) includes the Colombe dress, used in the finale of the first act, “the second detail.” If seen as a parallel choreographic object in Forsythe’s work, Miyake’s Colombe as “one piece of cloth” concept suggests the fold (Deleuze, 1993) as a potent epistemological principle that unites various versions of the work. Used in the solo dance that bridges two acts, the Colombe dress via the figure of fold visually hints at Forsythe’s choreographic gestures that open out balletic épaulement through “disfocus.” When Miyake’s and Forsythe’s topological gestures are juxtaposed, their discrete works reveal analogous shapeshifting that promotes multidirectional links between ballet and fashion as artistic forms that use historical and cultural frictions to fold into contemporaneity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.