Roger Copeland
POSTMODERN DANCE AND THE
REPUDIATION OF PRIMITIVISM
In his well-known essay, "Poet and Dancer Before
Diaghilev," Frank Kermode attempts to account for the rhapsodic
enthusiasm with which so many poets and intellectuals greeted the
pioneer modern dancer Loie Fuller, and the first Parisian perfor–
mances of the Ballet Russe. He attributes this love affair to a fascina–
tion with the "primitive" element in both modern dance and the
early work of Diaghilev. Kermode wrote in 1961:
The peculiar prestige of dancing over the past seventy
or eighty years has, I think, much to do with the notion
that it somehow represents art in an undissociated and
un specialized form-a notion made explicit by Yeats and
hinted at by Valery. The notion is essentially primitivist;
it depends upon the assumption that mind and body, form
and matter, image and discourse have undergone a
process of dissociation, which it is the business of art momen–
tarily to mend. Consequently dancing is credited with a sacred
priority over the other arts. . . . There is no fundamental
disagreement that dance is the most primitive, non-discursive
art, offering a pre-scientific image of life, an intuitive truth.
Thus it is the emblem of the Romantic image. Dance
belongs to a period before the self and the world
were divided...
Throughout the twentieth century, this infatuation with
primitivism has resulted in the idealizing and sentimentalizing of rit–
ualistic dances performed by nonliterate cultures.
It
is easy enough
to understand the essentially "therapeutic" appeal of such dancing
for a culture (our own) that has come to lament the neurotic charac–
ter of civilization, the supposed triumph of intellect over feeling, the
"repressive" nature of language, and all the other assorted discon–
tents that urbanization and secularization give rise to.
But it is considerably more difficult to account for the "resid–
ual" primitivism that is so often attributed by dance writers to even
the most secular and fully theatricalized forms of dance. Consider,
