Composing for Dancers

In the introduction to her book of notations or scores for the dance suite, Right-Angled Curves ([Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman1975] Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman2012b)], Eshkol writes about her group of dancers, the Chamber Dance Group (founded in 1954 as The Chamber Dance Quartet): “It is not accidental that the name of the group implies that the work is intended (like the original chamber music) for small audiences and first and foremost for the performers themselves” ([Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman1975] Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman2012b, 138, my italics).

This reference to chamber music and to the idea of a work being intended first and foremost for the performers themselves is to me an intriguing and provocative one. My reflections below are undertaken at a time when in contemporary dance and other arts much value has been placed on “audience participation” and to audience members' experiences as they help to complete the work in some way (an explicit turn to the audience that has at least some of its roots in minimalism in the visual arts).Footnote ⁷ My discussion does not so much turn away from the audience as it values the point of view expressed by Eshkol, according to which, in modern dance, there has been a necessary temporality to the presence and role of the public vis-à-vis dance making. Thus, the performers themselves are participants in precise ways that I would like to try to discuss here and are their own first audience.

It might seem unremarkable that a dance composer could maintain as his or her aim for a dance compositional practice its challenge and pleasure for the dancers, as was the case for composers and musicians in early chamber music as discussed below. It is important to recall, at the outset, however, that modern dance at the turn of the twentieth century was the first appearance of an “individualized” dance in the modernist sense of individual authorship. Dance critic and historian Laurence Louppe (Reference Louppe2010a) points out that prior to the emergence of modern dance, the dancing body had by and large served the institution and enactment of community values and that dance had entailed the socially sanctioned body moving according to particular “traditional” styles (23). Historically, the mainstream of Western dance has been practiced as a “social,” that is participatory, pastime or entertainment: ballet, it will be recalled, has its origins in the social or participatory dancing of the European aristocracy. Modern dance broke with that approach and (drawing on the Dionysian current discussed by Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy [1872]) initiated a modernist, individually authored, art of dance (Louppe Reference Louppe2010a, 26). Louppe notes that modern dance artists tended to be personally rebellious, consistent with their individual explorations of body movement that took them beyond the accepted social norms of (feminine) embodiment (Louppe 2010, 74).Footnote ⁸ These artists, however, also pursued, individually, their “group spirit” as Deborah Jowitt (Reference Jowitt1988) and others have observed. Graham and Humphrey, for example, made dances about communities and explored the role of the leader in relation to the group, not only in their choreographies but in terms of the modes and relations of dance production they developed with their dance groups.Footnote ⁹

The distinction between dancing as a social pastime and modern dance art grounds (contested) ideas of artistic modernism in the West. It is my intention in this essay, by thinking through aspects of Eshkol's practice as a dance artist and drawing on Western musical discourses, to contribute to complicating this opposition. Chamber music (a term indicating a venue, an approach to musical composition, a kind of ensemble, and more) has been one of the most vital spheres in which Western art music has been developed. This has not prevented “one of the most important elements in chamber music (being) the social and musical pleasure for musicians of playing together” (Bashford Reference Bashford2007 ). Of course, modern dance has its own salon tradition and values, and indeed Duncan first performed in the homes of wealthy heiresses.Footnote ¹⁰ The link Eshkol makes with chamber music is perhaps based less in a sympathy with the social class or high art aspirations of early modern dancers than it is associated with her aim to develop a movement-literate audience, of which her dancers would be the first members.

Movement as the Material of Dance

As noted, Eshkol developed a notation system with the collaboration of Avraham Wachman. EWMN is a system for writing movements and relationships between movements according to a spherical “system of reference” (Eshkol and Wachman Reference Eshkol and Wachmann1958,14). The notation describes displacements of “rods” or limbs that are attached to other rods by a joint or joints permitting circular movement (ideally) in all dimensions. The whole body is conceived as the constellation of these independent but interlinked rods/limbs and their countless possible coordinations and synchronizations. Within this system, movement is understood as an ideal or virtual phenomenon in the sense that it is concerned only with visible, quantifiable displacements (of limbs or visible, moveable parts of the organism). Here, the visceral, psychological, internal motivations (“‘attitudes” or “premovement”) are not movement elements, just as the notes of musical notation do not in themselves indicate the texture of a player's body or his or her feelings. Dance, on the other hand, and as Eshkol saw it, uses the material of movement but in each case is dependent on the limits of an actual body, the dance style, or an artist's preferences. The aim of EWMN was to be able “to register the full potential of body movements” (Finkelman Reference Finkelman, Wilson and Zyman2012, 107). During its early development phase, different existing kinds of dance and other movement forms were notated in order to test the developing system against the archive: was EWMN able, for example, to write ballet, or Tai chi, or communicate Feldenkrais exercises? If so, then it would serve as a universal analytic tool that would not “lose its significance in any stylistic frame” (Eshkol and Wachmann Reference Eshkol and Wachmann1958, viii).

According to Eshkol, an art of movement, namely, dance, has to develop the basis for a shared or common literacy or knowledge of its material (movement) in order to ground composition and so that different dance styles and their conventions might not only be elaborated but also be analyzed, compared, and discussed objectively. In relation to the reception of dance, Eshkol felt that without a universal notation for movement, dance criticism and analysis was or could only be opinion or “taste” (Eshkol and Wachman Reference Eshkol and Wachmann1958: viii). The writing of movement in a universal notation could lead to objective analysis, comparison, and development of dance art. This cannot be achieved Eshkol said: “So long as the elements of movement remain un-named and undefined, which is as much as to say unknown … a conceptual tool is necessary so that it is possible to think in the material” ([1975] 2012, 138). In its conception, EWMN is the movement equivalent of Western musical notation. A choreographer or, as Eshkol preferred, a dance composer, using a common notation will compose, to some extent at least, “on paper” and according to the thought made possible by the notation system.

Eshkol had studied briefly with Laban (in Manchester in 1946) and subsequently in London with his pupil, Sigurd Leeder. She was, however, dissatisfied with Laban's notation system on the grounds that:

Eshkol was critical of Laban's notation in terms of it being “literary”; according to her, it employed the words used to describe actions “from life” and hence a “characteristic form of movement” (my italics), not that movement or material from which these actions are created (Amar Reference Amar, Barron and Salvesen2012, 37). EWMN, by contrast, avoids language and consists almost entirely of tables of numbers indicating (quantities of) displacements (planar, conical, or rotational) of limbs around their joints.

As already noted, one of the key aspects of Eshkol's dance is that it emerges from a systematic vision of movement as dance's raw material (“the world of pure movement” [Eshkol and Wachmann Reference Eshkol and Wachmann1958, vii]) and with dance always being “the result of a specific way of treating that material” (vii). Eshkol and Wachmann developed a movement notation system, not a dance notation. Eshkol separated the moment or level of movement composition from that of dance-making, similar to the way that music can be written prior to being played. Similarly, Eshkol was interested in the notation's capacity to imagine or reveal patterns, orchestrations, and other relationships among limbs through space and time. This approach to dance making ensured that the palette of movement possibilities could remain both as wide and as articulate or detailed as possible even if in one lifetime, compositionally, only a start might be made on exploring the infinite possibilities.Footnote ¹¹ As far as the performers are concerned, they tackle the challenge presented to them by the score and become experts in it and what it means physically both in itself and compared to other scores. The dancers cannot necessarily accomplish what the composer has presented to them in terms of the notation because of the difficulties of orchestration of their different limbs or the impossibility of access to a complete spherical range. These obstacles, however, provide opportunities for problem solving, compositional choices, and the development of a “technique” relevant to the score. Furthermore, regarding the intention(s) revealed by and in the score, Eshkol is seen in several video documents held in her archives in Holon insisting on certain ways of doing the movements and on their meanings to her (as dance). It should be understood that working with the notation system as a tool of movement thought both inspires and is a result of wider creative and dancerly intentions.

Chamber Music, Chamber Dance

Modern dance throughout the twentieth century has manifested a complex relationship with music consistent with its aim to establish an independent art of dance. Significant modernist musical figures, such as Louis Horst, John Cage and Robert Ellis Dunn, were seminal in the development of American modern dance. The compositional vision of Noa Eshkol provides us with further perspective on the dance-music relationship, this time in terms of the existence of a composer, her or his compositional score, and performers who come to know the score intimately, that is, both objectively and subjectively.

Chamber music is an elite, abstract, difficult, ensemble form strongly connected historically with the late nineteenth century. What precisely is at stake, then, in Eshkol's reference to it? One of the key sources for discussions of chamber music values is the German philosopher and critical theorist, Theodor Adorno whose Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1988) contains a chapter on the subject. Eshkol may have been familiar with this essay. She had studied music as a child and later taught her method at the renowned Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (founded in 1932). She had numerous composer friends or intimates, including Herbert Brün, a renowned new music figure, whose own work in electronic music composition addressed audiences who could go beyond what he called the ritual of “festive passive attention” (Reference Brün and Chandra2004, 41). Similarly, it has been noted that during Eshkol's lifetime, performances of her work were more like lecture demonstrations or seminars, that is, they had an educative function, as Eshkol was aware that dance or movement literacy could not be assumed in her audience. Indeed, the Eshkol Chamber Dance Group usually performed for (interested) dance and physical education teachers and students and in this can be seen as aiming for the kind of intimate, engaged audience (in part definitional of chamber music, at least in its later nineteenth-century manifestation [see Baron Reference Baron1998, 12]), rather than for a “consumer” public.

Adorno, who also studied music composition under Alban Berg, approaches chamber music as the source or repository of high modernist musical values par excellence. According to him, a composer of chamber music dedicates this music to the players, rather than to an audience, “whom the composer seems at times scarcely to have considered” (Adorno Reference Adorno1988, 85), since chamber music is defined as lying outside the musical market. Chamber music is seen to have originated from groups of friends playing together for their own enjoyment (Sanders Reference Sanders2003, 20). Adorno writes that “no provision (in the chamber) is made for any difference between player and listener” (Reference Adorno1988, 90). He notes that chamber music flourished in a particular historical kind of domestic space or sphere: that is, when the bourgeois home had already become a sphere “parted from the public-professional sphere” but was not yet in dichotomous opposition to it (86). For Adorno there is a utopian aspect to chamber music as for him “it anticipates the state of labor as play” (87).

Musicologically, being generated or having its home in the private sphere—and being supported through private means—chamber music had an (high modernist) “autonomous enfoldment” (Adorno Reference Adorno1988, 90). In Baron's terms, “the music stands on its own, as a musically logical happening, without the need of other considerations to give it its ‘raison d’être’” (Reference Baron1998, 10). Baron writes that “chamber music was the most serious kind of music because it concentrated on music as music” (2). Adorno politicizes the modernism of chamber music: “In the pure pursuit of its own formal law it critically honed itself against the activities of the music market and against the society they complied with” (Reference Adorno1988, 91). Mozart's quartets, he proclaimed, are “paradigmata of true composing, protests against the jumble of commissioned items and the restrictions in technique and imagination which that jumble imposed on a genius” (91). Insofar as it was not in search of or in the service of a public, chamber music in Adorno's view was the crucible of Western musical development (91–92).

Compositionally speaking, chamber music itself is characterized by “developing variation” (quoting Schönberg): it is “a tight and finely woven net of thematic relations” (Adorno Reference Adorno1988, 96). Indeed, Adorno sees chamber music as the forerunner of the new music ushered in by Schönberg: “The consequence of the chamber music principle of totally finishing the structure was to stop paying any attention to the listener's receptivity”(97). In other words, in the spirit of evolution the music went beyond any notion of appealing to an audience's familiarity or acquired taste.Footnote ¹²

The chamber musicians or players are the primary listeners to their music, each player listening to her or his own part and that of the others, with conductorless ensemble playing the highest value. This is different, then, from a structure where soloists play against the background of a group that plays in unison (or, in dance, in a “corps” or even in a modern dance “movement choir”) so that, instead, “each player preserves his or her identity while contributing to the whole” (Baron Reference Baron1998, 8). Indeed, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music describes chamber music as “all the parts being on equal terms” (Scholes Reference Scholes1952, 106). Adorno calls the work of producing this kind of music “discontinuous”: “the tissue of this type of music is constituted by its distribution among several musicians” (Reference Adorno1988, 85)—the fabric of the music is woven from a small number of interdependent threads. A corollary is the expertise of the players and their capacity to play their parts in relation to the whole to which others, playing different parts, are also contributing. Adorno is quite categorical on this point: “Anyone who presents chamber music correctly is reproducing the composition once more, as something that becomes, and simultaneously constitutes its ideal audience, one that shares in its most secret quiver” (Reference Adorno1988, 85). Following Adorno, Sicca (Reference Sicca2000) also notes that the focus for listeners (whether musicians or audience) was to hear musical detail:

In her notation system, Eshkol, too, understood the mover's body as “discontinuous” as each body part or limb (which includes the torso, hands, feet, and head) could be composed independently of the others. Thus, while Eshkol preferred the small number of dancers in her group (usually between two and four) to dance in unison so as to facilitate an apprehension of the composition as quite abstract (i.e., as pursuing formal movement concerns) and not arising from or driven by the inner psychological world of the performer (as is more likely to be assumed when there is only one performer regardless of performance style), she conceived the single body as a kind of ensemble in chamber music terms. This discontinuous conception of a body and its coordination or orchestration requires of a dancer a very high degree of attention to detail in maintaining the simultaneity of the different trajectories of different body parts. At the same time, a dancer may also follow her or his own individual score, one that interweaves in “maze-like” fashion, choreographically, with the others (see below, Paxton Reference Paxton, Wilson and Zyman2012, 7).

Eshkol's vision did not entail that the compositional activity is primarily the production of work(s) for a market or public. It was a process of exploring the potential in movement—made available by the notation—for an art of dance as live performance. Questions of patronage or economics aside, Eshkol's whole approach links the development of an art of dance to the development of movement-literate dancers/performers. The chamber audience, in the sense of a (small) engaged public, furnishes a further knowledgeable judgment and gaze.Footnote ¹³ Eshkol wrote in her preface to Right-Angled Curves that “since 1954 the Chamber Dance Group has performed for audiences interested in the nature of movement” ([Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman1975] Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman2012b, 5). Within the relative intimacy of the “chamber,” audience and performers are involved in an experience of both poetic transformation/de-formation and aesthetic judgment: there is a poetic translation from written score into dance as the dancers work on the material, and a poetic transformation for the audience as they watch with their own bodies. But this poetics is also a function of aesthetic judgment (and vice versa) based on the existence and thus durability of a compositional score. This is particularly so for the dancers because they have studied and “played” the text and the texts of other dances with which the current one can be compared. The effect can be of a performing art practiced at the highest level of detailed or articulate attention and differentiation. This vision is enacted in the ongoing work of the Chamber Dance members at the Eshkol Center and their articulation and development of themselves above all as performers of Eshkol's dances.

Certainly, one of the striking aspects of Eshkol's practice (continued today in her absence) was that it took place in her home understood as a place of thought, with the dancers coming there each day through the week and, in addition to working on dance compositions, contributing to other aspects of maintaining both the house itself and Eshkol's vision more generally (doing archival work, participating in discussions with other visitors, sewing the wall carpets, preparing lunch, etc).Footnote ¹⁴ It has been noted that the house in Holon was a place for conversations on art: this home where Eshkol undertook all her work was a “forum for discourse and exchange” (Kemfert Reference Kemfert2013, 13). As dance critic Wiebke Hüster writes in the catalogue to a 2014 exhibition of Eshkol's wall carpets: “Through Eshkol's dances, bodies do not change dramatically into dancing bodies” (Reference Hüster and Kemfert2013, 36). My reading of this statement in light of the nature of Eshkol's house is that it suggests a level of integration of all the activities, facilitated by the common project of the notation system and the different ways of working on and with it and reflecting on its implications. All of this work continues today. The dancers who come on a daily basis are multidimensional experts, and they form a kind of study group with all of the resonances of amateur enjoyment and professional experience and of working at the highest standard.Footnote ¹⁵

As explained above, despite developing her EWMN notation system in relation to a dance practice with her Chamber Dance Group, Eshkol did not see movement as exclusively human. In fact, it was the distinction between an objective movement (as material) and dance (as social-artistic practices) that was central to her vision. For Eshkol, movement, as noted, was quantitative and visible and not at all psychological. Dance, by definition, engaged the whole person. Eshkol separated composition temporally from dance. Composition of movement took place both away from the dancers and yet also implied them: “Eshkol's universal system of notation was explored, refined, and advanced, above all in rehearsals of Eshkol's own dances” (Kemfert Reference Kemfert2013, 13). Indeed, the daily routine of the Chamber Dance Group, according to Hüster, “consisted of rehearsals in the mornings and study of the Eshkol-Wachmann Movement Notation in the afternoon. They were firmly convinced that anyone who did not master the notation would not be able to perform the dances properly” (Reference Hüster and Kemfert2013, 34). Eshkol saw composition as a practice of research into the possibilities of the material of movement. The moment of dance was then an encounter between dancers, with their bodily thoughts and capacities, and with the material thinking made possible by the notation and represented in the composition. Here, too, if one wanted to speak in such terms, was the moment of “training.”

Eshkol sought a high level of literacy for the performers and the audience, and this would be possible because the dance would be composed using a notation. The score has objectivity, durability, and a common ownership (distributing the compositional authority across space and time as well as securing the author's rights) while providing a standard against which specific interpretations can be more or less salient. The score constitutes a kind of “resistance” akin to the resistance in the field of philosophy that, as Braidotti argues, is provided by a philosophical text: “Difficult texts get illuminated over time, with the build-up of experience and under motivation of endless frustrations”. Such a text, says Braidotti, “is a living tune that goes on resonating” (Reference Braidotti2006, 20).

Art and Participation

Eshkol's comment about her work being intended first and foremost for the dancers of her Chamber Dance Group (cited at the beginning of this discussion) associates her dance with an elite, high-art, modernist musical culture, but one that can also be called participatory in the sense both of its focus on the players/performers and the intimacy and engaged literacy of the listening community. I also note that in this statement Eshkol's reference (to chamber music) is a reference to a European musical tradition and discourse. There is, however, much about her dance poetics and her vision that can suggest a non-Western set of artistic values and, according to dancer Ruti Sela, “she hated the word ‘art’” (Barron and Salvesen Reference Barron, Salvesen, Barron and Salvesen2012, 61). Steve Paxton has given a description that is pertinent here of the impression her work gave him when Eshkol and her group gave performances on American university campuses in 1968–69:Footnote ¹⁶

As noted, Eshkol's aesthetic arising from her use of the notation system conceived each limb or body part independently, and thus it was possible to compose these “kinesthetic mazes” (as Paxton describes them above). Eshkol was born and to a large extent lived in the Middle East, and the link here with what might be called an Islamic aesthetics with its staggering elaborations of geometric and organic forms, especially in its visual culture, is strong. Saoud, for example, notes Islamic preference for abstract, ornamental rather than realist visual design “characterized by the independence and interdependence of its formative elements” (2004). He gives the example of the arabesque pattern that can almost stand as a description of Eshkol's compositions based as they are on composing each limb according to its spherical system of reference. The arabesque “is composed of many units paired and interlaced together, flowing from each other in all directions…. The arabesque design is built up on a system of articulation and orbiculation” (Saoud Reference Saoud2004). Saoud continues, bringing in a musical metaphor: “Each unit, although it is independent and complete and can stand alone, forms part of the whole design, a note in the general rhythm of the pattern” (Saoud Reference Saoud2004, quoting Al-Faruqi 1973).

Clearly for Eshkol, as in the arabesque, “ornamentation” does not refer to decoration. Rather, ornamentation is organized as field of patterns and not in any hierarchical way. Further, according to Hüster, “One reason why the choreographer felt so comfortable with ornamental composition is that it can be arranged without creating symbolic connections” (Reference Hüster and Kemfert2013, 37).

That Eshkol's work might be understood as sharing poetic values with Islamic arts makes sense on numerous levels: she was born in 1924 and spent the earliest years of her life on the Degania Bet kibbutz in Palestine. Although she lived with her mother briefly in New York, they returned to Palestine in 1930. In the 1930s the possibility of a Palestine that would celebrate and combine Jewish, Arab, and other local cultures was alive—if only precariously—and experiments were being made particularly in the field of music. The work of musicologist Robert Lachmann may be important here and, indirectly, a possible influence on Eshkol who moved, as noted, in musical circles. Lachmann, a specialist in Arabic or “Oriental” music worked tirelessly to promote a vision of Jewish music in its Middle Eastern context. He believed his work could “be made to contribute, however modestly, towards … a better understanding between Jews and Arabs” and regarded this as an urgent goal (Davis Reference Davis, Cooper and Dawe2005, 80). Based originally in Germany, Lachmann was invited in 1935 to “found and direct an Archive of Oriental Music” at the newly established Hebrew University of Jerusalem (80). Eshkol may even have known or known of Edith Gerson-Kiwi, a student of Lachmann who, like him, in her work as a musicologist insisted that “Jewish music cannot be studied in isolation of the music of co-territorial non-Jewish communities” (Davis Reference Davis2010, 12).

Eshkol stressed the comparative or choreological possibilities opened up by notation. While Robert Lachmann's archives intended a complete study of the musical modes or melody types of Oriental urban music, during the early 1970s, Eshkol and her dancer-collaborators notated dances of Arab villagers and published the scores in Debka ([Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman1974] Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman2012a). Eshkol's comments echo earlier ones of Lachmann who insisted “on the need for his European listeners to engage with and at least aspire to understand the musical expressions of the Other” (Davis Reference Davis2010,13) and who feared that local Palestinian music would soon be “transformed or altogether destroyed by growing European influences” (quote in Davis Reference Davis2010, 80). For her part, Eshkol wrote in her preface to Debka that: “Our hope is that the present collection will go some way towards preserving a record of the traditional dance style of a culture which is in grave danger of disappearing” ([Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman1974] Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman2012a, 137).

Eshkol went on to comment that Israeli (as opposed to Arab) folk dances were not traditional but the result of self-conscious efforts to weld an integrated Israeli style from local dances and others brought from the Jewish diaspora. Indeed, Eshkol voiced her preference for the Arab dances that to her were “very beautiful and the variations of physically simple elements highly satisfying” ([Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman1974] Reference Eshkol, Wilson and Zyman2012a, 137). Noting that Shmulik Zaidel, who undertook the dabki fieldwork (dabki is the Palestinian name for the dances), was also called up for military service at the time (during the Yom Kippur War), Eshkol concludes her preface by writing:

Eshkol concludes here on a necessarily political and reconciliatory note. From a choreological point of view, she appears inspired by the so-called traditional or participatory folk dances of her region as they evidence a long process of poetic refinement.