Is there a place for acrobatic content in dance? Nina Levy offers her thoughts.
BACK in the February/March ’16 edition of Dance Australia, we ran a story entitled “The acro invasion” by editor Karen van Ulzen, raising concerns about the rise of acrobatic and contortionist content in amateur dance competitions. The argument against this trend, says van Ulzen, is two-fold. She points to a reported rise in injuries normally associated with tumbling or overstretching as one concern. The other issue, she says, is that teachers are replacing choreography with acrobatic stunts. She argues that while dance is an art form, gymnastics and acrobatics are “displays of physical strength and flexibility”.
The article, which was also published online in May, drew a lot of feedback from readers. While some wrote that they agreed wholeheartedly with the concern that dance competitions are becoming a display of acrobatic ability, a number of circus artists, aerialists and teachers of acrobatics expressed their dismay at the assertion that dance and acrobatics are separate entities, occupying opposite ends of a spectrum that has “art” at one end and “sport” at another.
So what is the relationship between dance and acrobatics? Stepping outside the context of the original article - the world of amateur competitive dance - we see that, historically, crossover between dance and acrobatics has taken place in popular dance. By comparsion, at a glance it appears that ballet and acrobatics have little to do with each other. After all, classical ballet is manifestly “upright”. The closest a ballerina gets to being upside down is a penché and at no point do the hands touch the floor, much less take weight. Perhaps the closest classical ballet gets to anything approaching the world of acrobatics is when ballerinas are “flown” in on wires.
If we dig just a little less deep into the past, however, we find that the lines are not so clearly demarcated. As early as the 1920s the choreographers of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes were redefining ballet, stretching its capabilities and definitions. Bronislava Nijinska was incorporating acrobatic elements into works such as Les Noches (1923) and Le Train Bleu (1924). Influenced by the Russian constructivists, she was interested in the geometric forms that the body could create. In 1929, the young George Balanchine’s Prodigal Son incorporated human pyramids, bodies linked together caterpillar-style, and pas de deux that saw the female dancer use the male as a climbing frame.
Fast-forward to Australia at the end of the 20th century and we find Meryl Tankard putting dancers of the Australian Ballet on bungee cords for her 1996 work The Deep End. Who can forget that moment when three scuba divers sail out of the darkness and over the heads of the surprised and delighted audience? Tankard shows us that the balletic space can be truly three-dimensional...
This is an extract from "Is it Art?" in the Dec/Jan edition of Dance Australia, OUT NOW! Buy the new issue at your favourite magazine retailer or subscribe here, or purchase an online copy via the Dance Australia app.