While valuing freedom of movement as the sine qua non for making dance expressive, his overriding goal, Michel Fokine nonetheless maintained that a dance could be beautiful only if it followed “the rigid laws that govern the creation of one of Shakespeare's sonnets.” As far as Fokine was concerned, setting dances was “all pure brain work, extracting and using the magical harmonies and rhythms that lie hidden in nature.” The “natural law” of choreography that Fokine postulated had as its main precepts principles governing rhythm and plasticity. This paper discusses Fokine's dance aesthetic, its validity, and the degree to which his aesthetic was actually realized in his work. A context for this discussion is provided in the form of a recapitulation of the principal facts of Fokine's career arid of related aspects of the careers of his forerunners. The materials with specific reference to Fokine available for study include current versions of a few of his ballets, films of a somewhat larger number, critical responses to his work, recollections of people who came into contact with him or his work, and his own statements and writings.

Scholarly studies explore dance from many points of view. They may focus on the historical development of a dance form, examine the context in which a particular dance event occurs, explore the background of those who dance and how this relates to social structure, or explore the movement process itself—the dancing. While all approaches to the study of dance provide potentially meaningful data and insights relating to the role of dance in its socio-cultural context, the heart of dance is the movement. Dance research that ignores the dancing (except for very broad descriptive statements) ignores a major component that has potential for revealing a great deal about those who create and use dance.

American researchers who have explored the movement process have, on the whole, worked independently (of each other or of other research projects), without working toward developing a widely understood methodology for examining dance movement and exploring its potential uses in other dance research. While such studies contribute to the knowledge of specific dances or dance forms, they overlook the need for common tools necessary for cross-cultural and comparative studies. To allow for the most meaningful research to be carried out, a discipline must develop tools and methodologies that have a certain consensus of validity and broad applicability. Only through use of such research procedures will it be possible to interrelate apparently diverse studies and evolve broad concepts relating to dance as human activity.

The recurrence of an uncomplicated step pattern made it possible for 18th-century ladies and gentlemen of varying abilities to perform the Minuet. In 1762, Giovanni-Andrea Gallini, director of dances at the Royal Theatre in the Haymarket, London, said that the success of the Minuet stemmed in part from “the possibility of dancing it to so many different airs, though the steps are invariable.” Thirty-seven years earlier the dancing master Pierre Rameau describes the emergence of a simplified version of the pas de Menuet that replaced a more demanding step. Eighteen-century European dancing masters, such as Charles Pauli, repeatedly describe the Minuet step as natural, plain and unaffected—a step that is “perfect” for performance. Because the Minuet steps were successful and widely performed, dancing masters taught its established steps, not steps based on their own whims or creations. An analysis of a wide range of 18th-century manuals reveals that a preferred version of the Minuet step emerged in the literature and remained relatively unchanged to near the end of the century.

Notation plays a very important role in today's society. It acts as a communication medium between inventors and those who will implement their ideas. Without notation our knowledge of the past and present would be limited by our memory and prone to errors in oral transmission. Although we take for granted the existence of a suitable notation in almost all fields of human study, this is not true in the field of human movement. For example, in Western theatrical dance, no adequate means to record masterpieces existed until the twentieth century and thus most works from the past have been lost. In response to the literacy problem in dance, a number of systems have been developed in the past five centuries to record human movement, but most of these have failed to be practical under rigorous working conditions. Only a few have attracted substantial professional interest. The difficulty is that a dance notation must capture on paper a precise record, at each moment in time, of the position of each body part in three dimensions of space, as well as provide comprehensive information about movement dynamics and choreographic intention.

“Dance is movement that has been organized so that it is rewarding to behold,” writes Anderson (1974, p. 9), and many of those who talk or write about dance have attempted to explain the way in which dance rewards the beholder by considering the processes by which dance communicates. Anderson goes on to say: “…dance communicates because it prompts responses within us. Dance is not simply a visual art, it is kinesthetic as well; it appeals to our inherent sense of motion” (p. 9). This distinction between visual and kinesthetic communication is one which many dancers find appealing. The kinesthetic communication is not analyzed further, but rather, it becomes an easy way of stating the special status of dance as an art form. That is, there is a special sense for which only dance can provide aesthetic satisfaction.

Alvin Toffler made an eloquent plea in 1967 for the construction of cultural statistics that would give artists, policy-makers and social scientists a reliable map of where the arts enterprises had been and where they seemed to be going. Only slow progress has been made since then.

To take the example that will concern us in this research note, how much solid information do we have concerning the “dance boom” that reportedly took place during the Sixties and Seventies? A “dance boom” can refer to many things. It can mean rapid growth in the size of the dance audience; in the number of dance companies; in the amount of amateur participation in the art; in the number of dance performances; and so on. These aspects of the art might not all show the same trends. For instance, the number of dance performances might have increased faster during the “boom” than the number of companies—or vice versa—suggesting two very different developments. Actually, the only firm documentation we possess concerning the boom in the amount of dance activity has to do with the size of the audience, and we have that only for the Seventies, not the Sixties. Surveys done by the Louis Harris polling organization put the percentage of Americans aged 18 years and older who attended at least one live dance performance in the years 1973, 1975 and 1980 at 9%, 16% and 25%.

The Biblical story of Salome, whose dance before Herod led to the beheading of John the Baptist, has been choreographed and danced in hundreds of versions during the past 85 or 90 years. From Loïe Fuller and Maud Allan at the turn of the century to Maurice Béjart and Flemming Flindt in our own time, important figures in modern dance have interpreted Salome and her story. Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most obsessive, involvement with the story was that of California choreographer Lester Horton.

Horton's creative imagination first went to work on Salome in 1934, when he was 28 years old; and he returned to the story again and again, at intervals, until the time of his death in 1953. What follows concerns itself primarily with this period of 19 years. Tracing the course of Horton's involvement with Salome, seeing what he made of her story in many different versions, may be interesting in itself. Doing so may also provide insights into the development of the art and craft of this important choreographer, because the story occupied his attention at so many points during his life-as-an-artist. Choreography outlives the choreographer; Horton's Salome survived Horton. The last section of this article surveys productions of the work in the years since 1953.

This second group of works published in 1978 is organized in the same way as Part I (DRJ 12/2, Spring-Summer 1980). There are books and articles in nine categories. The seven indexes guide the reader to time, place, and area of subject matter; to people, dance works, and institutions named in the references; and to authors, editors, translators, etc.

Many people have contributed to the 1978 list and for subsequent years as well. I wish to thank Genevieve Oswald and Dorothy Lourdou of the Dance Collection of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York Public Library, for providing catalogue work sheets for all relevant items that are processed into that collection. I am also grateful for substantial assistance from the staffs of the Honnold Library at the Claremont Colleges, Claremont, California; Oviatt Library at California State University, Northridge; and the SIRLS Database at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada; and I appreciate very much the references contributed by Ingrid Brainard, Lynn Matluck Brooks, Selma Jeanne Cohen, Daniel Cole, Nancy de Wilde, Roderyk Lange, Alfred E. Lemmon, Irma Vienola Lindfors, Gita Sellman, Mary Grace Swift, Henning Urup, and Kate Van Winkle Keller. Work on the project has been partially supported by research grants from California State University, Northridge, and University of California, Irvine.

My original idea was not to stay with this project forever, but to get it started and then turn it over to others. The 1979 list is being completed by Lois Benson-Talley (Reference Center, University Library, California State University, Long Beach, CA 90840), and will be finished within the next few months.