In Dance, Preserving a Precarious Legacy Begins Onstage
ONCE the arcane domain of historians and librarians, preservation has become a veritable rallying cry throughout the dance world. Maybe it's a sign of the flagging energy of contemporary dance, or a case of millennial self-consciousness about the past and future, or the result of conservative funding priorities, but preservation now occupies a top spot on the field's agenda. Organizations like the Dance Heritage Coalition, the National Initiative to Preserve America's Dance and the George Balanchine Foundation have succeeded in raising consciousness about the critical and immediate need to safeguard the notoriously precarious legacy of American dance.
The call for preservation raises a fundamental question: what is lost to us if a dance tradition dies? It's a question to be considered not just by the preservation movement but by everyone interested in cultural policy.
Take the case of Martha Graham. After suspending operations nearly nine months ago, the Martha Graham School reopened on Jan. 16.
The company remains in limbo, however, and its modern-dance repertory, one of the great documents of 20th-century America, is at risk of perishing. Paradoxically, Graham, who died in 1991 at the age of 96, was named by the Dance Heritage Coalition as one of "America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures" a few months after the board of her nearly bankrupt dance center announced the shutdown last May.
A dance treasure, however, is not a sunken chest of gold doubloons. Once buried, it can never truly be retrieved. In order to maintain the integrity of a classical repertory, a dancer must be in constant training for a specific technique and style. Videotape and notation notwithstanding, dance is an oral tradition, whose fullness of history, meaning and conditions of creation are passed along from generation to generation. It is not a treasure that can be framed, stored or polished. Dance is a practice, not an object.
This is not to say that dance should not be documented. It should be documented, preserved and made accessible. The Library of Congress, which acquired the Martha Graham Archives in 1998, has planned to create a "living history" on video, produce multimedia reference works and sponsor live performances.
But preservation does not substitute for actual performance, in which individuals gather in a public arena for a shared experience and, potentially, a shared conversation.
At a conference on cultural policy last October in Washington (sponsored by Americans for the Arts and the Center for Arts and Culture), Julia Foulkes, a dance historian and professor at the New School University, called the fate of Graham's company "a dramatic exposé of the fragile existence of modern dance."
Ms. Foulkes traced the difficulties of modern dance in American culture: "Its relatively short history, the high labor costs involved in a performing art, the lack of permanence of the artworks, compounded by the difficulty in recording and preserving dance or reproducing it in any commodified form." And she concluded with an impassioned plea: "If Graham's company and school do not survive, I hope we can at least carry forth this insight into formulating cultural policy for the 21st century."
The federal government officially maintains a "no policy" cultural policy — despite its myriad tax codes, military bands, arts agencies, fellowship and exchange programs, educational standards, archives and museums, monuments, national parks, cultural attaches, broadcast regulations and copyright laws, and the First Amendment.
In the last two decades, however, a cultural policy network has developed among researchers, administrators and policy makers. Literature has been published, university programs established and annual conferences organized. By last August, when the Pew Charitable Trusts announced an initiative to "usher in a new era of cultural policy development," the idea had gained critical mass. Beginning in March, the Center for Arts and Culture, an independent research organization, will release a series of recommendations and issue briefs on "Art, Culture and the National Agenda."
During the debates over money for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the scarcity of reliable research on the arts hampered the cultural sector in making a compelling case for them. As a result, a flurry of dollars has been directed toward data collection, much of it economic. Many a researcher is now gathering numbers to prove that the arts produce a measurable, significant and meritorious impact on the economy.
The problem with this approach is its implication that the arts are justifiable only through their market value. If Graham's company generated less local restaurant and parking revenue one year than the year before, would it then be that much less valuable to us? The case to be made for Graham — or any other artist — is as a public good, not as an economic good.
When the arts endowment was founded in the 1960's, art — defined specifically as high art — was seen as needing protection against the pernicious incursion of popular culture (not to mention communist culture). As such, support for artists served as an antidote to an increasingly commercialized society. By the 1980's, the social role of the artist had shifted, for two reasons. First, popular culture was no longer the enemy. Second, what qualified as art was no longer restricted to high art.
Mary Schmidt Campbell, a former Cultural Affairs Commissioner of New York City and now dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, interprets the past decade's "culture wars" — intense public debates over the nature, purpose and financial support of art— as a backlash against this thriving cultural pluralism. "Diversity was the mandate of the Endowments," she wrote in a 1998 essay. "Having achieved this diversity, however, the Endowments are now witnessing a public deeply uncomfortable with its ramifications."
If diversity was a mandate, it turned out not to be an end in itself. As the variety of artistic practices in America proliferates, their vital, if underrecognized, role in the democratic process becomes more pronounced.
The arts are a public forum where we tell one another — in symbolic language — who we are, who we've been and who we'd like to become. Every artwork is, as Graham titled one of her dances, an "American Document" that can incite and engage the imagination of its audience. The arts frame an opportunity for civic dialogue, when commonalities as well as differences can be debated and elaborated.
That was the message in Pittsburgh last November, when leading business and foundation executives signed the Pittsburgh Arts Accords, affirming private sector support of the arts. The arts "empower people to participate effectively in a democratic society," the accords said, "by developing skills of perception, reflection, interpretation and communication, which promote understanding of diverse and cross-cultural values."
Graham tackled some of the most fundamental, enduring and contested issues of American identity: the tension between individual and community, the mastery of space, the dilemma of womanhood and the social role of ritual and religion. For a younger generation just discovering the Graham company last season, and eager for more, her languishing repertory is a lost opportunity to participate in the continuing creation of our national life.