A Dictionary Of Dance Essay, Research Paper
F is for Flatley – or is it?The new Oxford Dictionary of Dance must rank as one of the year’s most authoritative-looking volumes. Its dust jacket is coloured in sober greys and blues, while its contents are laid out in uncluttered, readable type. The facts seem to march confidently from one column to the next, almost as if they had written themselves. But as one of its authors, I know how slippery and quarrelsome those facts really are. I was commissioned to write the dictionary five years ago, together with another dance critic, Debra Craine of the Times. Both of us, I think, had a notion that we would be dealing with some fixed body of knowledge that would just be waiting for us to sort it into shape. Neither of us had any idea how much detective work and difficult choices would be involved. Our book had a predecessor – Horst Koegler’s impressive Dictionary of Ballet, last updated by the Oxford University Press in 1987 – but our brief was to start again from scratch. Our editors wanted a more reader-friendly book that would encompass the volatile energy of today’s dance scene. While retaining all the major historical information, we also needed to open the book up to more populist aspects of dance, such as the Riverdance phenomenon, salsa and hip-hop. But the inclusion of so many new entries meant that we had to delete a lot of those listed in the previous dictionary, and selecting our victims was often difficult – though it did produce the occasional, illicit, iconoclastic thrill. We intended to include many dancers and choreographers who had emerged in the last 20 years or so, as well as predicting the future prospects of younger artists. Having finally settled on our list, we started the long haul of researching and writing. But the wider we cast our net for source material, the more inconsistencies we encountered. The most trustworthy-seeming tomes started to feel unnervingly inconsistent and it began to dawn on us that there was no such thing as a 100% reliable reference book. Errors by proofreaders and typesetters had leaked into some texts. Worse, we had to navigate sprawling grey areas of interpretation. However objective writers seemed to be, opinion and taste inevitably influenced their descriptions of an artist’s career or a company’s history. We knew, too, that what we would eventually produce was going to be “the world of dance as seen by Craine and Mackrell”. There were other practical difficulties. We had a hard time winkling out the birth dates of several artists. Dance is a youth-obsessed profession, and many of the men and women we approached were reluctant to disclose their ages. Dancers’ geography can also be hard to pin down, though while I was working on some of the early 19th-century entries I was reminded what a nomadic profession it has always been. There were ballet masters who routinely commuted between Paris and St Petersburg during this period, while in 1840 the ballerina Fanny Elssler embarked on a tour of the Americas with a schedule that would be exhausting even today, with modern methods of transport. Had we realised what teeth-grindingly frustrating work writing this dictionary would be, I’m not sure we would have embarked on it. But the discipline of reading around the entire subject of dance did throw up some compensatory gems. We had decided early on to incorporate some extra essays and generic entries – partly as background for non-specialist readers, partly as a bit of light relief. I had serious fun writing our brief entry on socialist realism, sifting through the wackier Soviet examples. (Belsky’s Coast of Hope, for instance, contrasted the lifestyles of two fishing villages: a shiny, happy communist village and a grimly exploitative capitalist one.) Researching entries that I thought had only a 20th-century dimension – such as sport or feminism – also threw up ballets of which I’d known nothing. One was Sports of England, choreographed in 1887 by Katti Lanner, a fascinating figure who virtually ran the London ballet scene at a time when directors and choreographers were almost exclusively male. Another was the work La Révolte au Sérail (1833), which portrayed the inmates of a harem banding together with local working women to overthrow the tyranny of men. It was choreographed by a man, Filippo Taglioni. Spare as most of the entries had to be, some did contain germs of wonderful stories from which we had to drag ourselves away. Before I wrote this dictionary, I had no idea that the dancer and ballet master Leon Espinosa was apparently captured by Indians in 1850 during a tour of north America, nor that the egocentric dancer Louis Duport so incensed the Parisian authorities with his demands that he allegedly escaped their wrath by slipping out of the city disguised as a woman in the company of a former mistress of Napoleon. But these tales will have to wait for another book • The Oxford Dictionary of Dance is published today, price ?25.