Let’s start with an apparently unrelated question: how do you record dance or the performance of an exceptional performer? There was a time, way before smartphones and tablets, when dance would be performed and disappear in the very minute it was seen. Today, dance is still ephemeral; it still disappears in the moment of its performance with only a few images lingering a little longer in our memories, but is massively recorded. Technology has changed everything, casting light on something that could only be seen in the dark of the theatre. But let’s take a few steps back.
In late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century dance, elusiveness fascinated many writers (Mallarmé, Valéry, W.B. Yeats, G. B. Shawn to mention but a few), who went to the theatre and tried to record dance through words, producing symbolically cryptic texts and some illustrations. With the introduction of photography the first images of dancers became available. Even if the images gave the impression of motion, more often than not they were staged – as in the famous picture of Ruth St Denis as Radha, in which invisible threads lift the hem of her skirt, giving the illusion of twirling movement.
With the first Hollywood films, dancers where occasionally asked to perform or to choreograph, like the Denishawn dancers in W.H. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance. In Sunnyside, Charlie Chaplin parodies Nijinsky’s Faun:
Even so, unfortunately, many jewels of the past, such as Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, have gotten lost and entered mythology. If dance has benefited from any innovation, surely it has benefited most from the moving image, with easy access to video recording and today streaming. Considering that for most of dance history, dance could only be transmitted orally (quite an Homeric task!), video has become an additional support in the pupil-teacher relationship. Still, video will never replace liveness – some details are invisible on video – and dance will always retain a little of its elusive quality.