The Dance History Gallery
curated by Alkis Raftis
1.
Guidelines 1.1.
Try different spellings 1.2.
Type only one word in a field 2.
The
fields ARTIST:
Name
of artist. Given name, then family name (country of birth, year of birth - year
of death). TITLE
OF WORK: Title of work in English
(title in the language of origin). TYPE
OF WORK: Type of work: painting,
drawing, sculpture, print etc. Material: canvas, marble,
ceramic etc. Technique. DATE:
Year
work was made or presented. For B.C. dates with negative prefix. DIMENSIONS:
Dimensions
of original work in cm. Height x width x length COMMENTS:
Other
data on the work, remarks by the compiler. LOCALITY
OF REFERENCE: Country, place or culture
related to the subject of the work. DANCE
FORM: Type of dance depicted or
presumed. KEYWORDS:
Words
on the subject not contained in the Title, to help in retrieval. 3.
Introduction Less
than a third of the works in this gallery, mostly prints, belong to me. The
rest has been scanned from books, postcards, auction catalogues, museum albums
and other publications. Owners of original works who wish them to be removed
from this website can simply ask me to do so. I
have tried to provide a useful tool for dance researchers and others interested
in the History of Dance. Thirty years ago, when I started, I realized that
historians having preceded me relied mainly on written sources, while there was
so much to learn from works of art. At that time books on the general history
of dance dealt mostly with ballet and stage dance in Europe. The most notable
exception, World History of the Dance by Curt Sachs, though treating various
forms of dance in many countries, was entirely based on texts. Since
then I have divided equally my time between reading, field observation of the
present, and studying visual material from the past. Painters and sculptors
have always been thrilled by dancers, mostly professional ones, and have left a
wealth of works depicting them. The first difficulty is finding a sufficient
number of works or art from the same place and the same period so as to obtain
a reliable picture. With a small number there is a risk of generalizing in the
wrong direction. The second difficulty lays in interpreting them. Every form of
art uses conventions, different ones at each period. One needs to decipher the
conventions of the painter as well as the ones of the dancer, to 'read’ the
work in sight. I
am convinced that the evolution of dance in each country runs in two parallel
streams, amateur and professional, each stream influencing the other but always
maintaining its autonomy. Authors of Dance History books seem to take a
different view - they consider amateur dance as a primitive form from which
professional form has evolved. To
clarify the terms I use, amateur dance includes traditional dance (passed from
one generation to another in villages), folk dance (traditional forms
transported in cities for recreation and performance by youth ensembles) and
popular dance (particular to city people). Professional dance, on the other
hand, is practiced by artists who have taken a longer time to learn it since it
is much more elaborate and meant for stage performances only. The crucial
feature of distinction is whether a dance form requires considerable
instruction under a specialized teacher, or can be simply passed from one
amateur to another. Stage
(or theatrical) dance forms dominate the attention of authors, researchers and
historians, while amateur forms are treated as simplistic, thus inferior. All
forms convey beauty of movement but the beauty of amateur dance is more subtle
and elusive. It is influenced by the personal relationships between dancers and
conveys social norms and values, thus it is imperceptible to an external
observer who is not thoroughly familiar with the particular social group. When
viewing a work of art depicting dancers we can usually tell whether they are
stage dancers and adapt our criteria accordingly. The painter, engraver or
sculptor is severely limited, being obliged to portray only a snapshot out of
an elaborate trajectory. We cannot see the sequence of movements, we do not
hear the music, we do not grasp the interactions between dancers, do not follow
their evolution in space. Only great art and our imagination can picture the
full scene out of one frozen instant. This is why we need many images to feed
our imagination. The
purpose of this collection is to provide food for the imagination in
approaching dance in the past centuries. For a better understanding one has to
read not only dance history books but descriptions of scenes found abundant in
literature: novels, accounts by travelers, newspaper articles, studies by
anthropologists. As
practitioners we all are dedicated to one form of dance, our knowledge of other
forms is very limited. It couldn't be otherwise, there is barely enough time to
learn one form well enough. Not knowing other forms from the inside keeps us
from appreciating their inherent beauty, we see only their external beauty. In
a similar way, works of art on dance thrill us visually and invite us to
imagine the exquisite enjoyment experienced by the dancer. My
wish is that the Gallery broadens the dancers' perspective, enriches their
experience by presenting the immense breadth their art has taken through the
centuries it has been practiced by mankind. Alkis
Raftis
ENTER