Artistry

'The mechanism of dance becomes artistry only when it is inspired by feeling and that feeling perpetuated in your mind will pass into your movements' (Tamara Karsavina in The Flow of Movement).

When I contacted directors of classical, contemporary and modern ballet companies in this country and abroad with a brief survey in 2006, only one director listed 'artistry' as one of the five most desirable attributes they seek in auditioning candidates. All the directors mentioned 'musicality' and perhaps it is all intertwined, but I shall be discussing musicality next month. Other listings in their top five included such ingredients as 'charm', 'charisma' and 'individuality' that I consider to be components of 'artistry'. In the early 20th century, Fokine was scathing about the trend, which he saw then towards virtuosity without artistry, and emphasised strongly, 'the aim of a dancer is not to establish a record; it is to express feeling beautifully'.

In 1977 Ninette de Valois wrote, 'We are nearly back to movement for movement's sake and virtuosity linked to the hazard of the gymnasium.' More recently, in 2004, Barbara Newman commented in her book Grace Under Pressure, 'about 15 years ago I started to miss interpretation in performances ...dramatic characters lost their singular nuances bit by bit,' and she summarised what she observed in dancers as, 'stronger and stronger instruments expressing less and less'. Is there anything that we, as teachers, can do to reverse this trend and cultivate artistry in our students? The view of Maina Gielgud, quoted in Grace Under Pressure, is '...you can't make artists. All you can do is develop a dancer's artistry if it is there in the first place... Often in teenage years it disappears when students become self-conscious'. I believe that dance teachers can help to nurture artistry by providing the best possible environment for, and the highest expectations of their students' work. The more 'artists' seen in a variety of roles the better understanding students will have in how communication can work in dance.

My starting point is to emphasise movement quality in every area of technique taught. Vaganova's students said of her, 'She taught us how to live in each movement... We couldn't do only steps... We had to feel the phrasing of the music and had to move from one transition to another.' Good, appropriate musical accompaniment is often of great benefit in developing artistry.

It is wrong to think that in class, technique and artistry are taught separately. The Canadian ballet critic Fernau Hall wrote: 'The dancer must learn to feel each movement, how to be an artist, from the very beginning of training.' Exercises should not be a chore but the presentation of a performance. The onus is on the teacher to create the mindset and give the preparation to enable a dancer ultimately to forget about technique and concentrate on expressiveness and emotional content enabling each ballet to come alive for an audience. I like the image of the dance teacher conjured up by M. Louis's article in the February 1977 issue of Dance Magazine: 'The teacher stands at the crossroads of the dancer’s world, holding one rein on creativity, one rein on technique, one rein on aesthetics, one rein on the living process, one rein on the future, one rein on the past. All these reins strain at once...' Complicated certainly, but I believe there is truth in it.

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