Dance: The Great Leap Forward

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Ah, ballet. Gossamer goddesses tippy-toeing through the glades. Princes bounding about like young stallions. And then, after a twitter of arabesques, the embrace. Ecstasy.

Ah, nuts, says Choreographer Robert Joffrey. "I look upon ballet as total theater. I want to attack all the senses. I want my dancers to express my thing, the now thing, good or bad." Performing at Manhattan's City Center last week, the Joffrey Ballet nightly gave eye-dazzling testimony to that credo.

Running, bounding, diving, vaulting, cartwheeling and somersaulting, a dozen bare-chested male dancers in royal-blue tights flung themselves across the stage like beanbags. Crazed clowns attacked a plastic bubble, which, inflating like a Zeppelin, devoured them alive. Minstrels strutted, samurai cut curlicues in the air. And while filmed images slithered across a billowing screen, a man and a woman simulated lovemaking as strobe lights flickered, spotlights raked the audience, and a raga-rock band screamed bloody murder.

Least Inhibited. Far out, flashy, mod, mind-binding—that is dance today, the most inventive and least inhibited of the lively arts. Not even the new cinema has done as much as dance has to free itself from the rules, clichés and conventions of the past. In the regal prime of classical ballet, the dancer's craft was devoted to polishing and perfecting an established series of formalized gestures; choreography was as structured as a French garden. Today, however, a ballerina may have to arch on point in one sequence, boogaloo in another, then writhe on the floor like a snake on the make.

Nor is choreography any longer an artistic handmaiden, subservient to the greater demands of score. In a reversal of precedence, music is now only one of many elements that contribute to the impact of dance, which is a matter of sight and sound as well as movement. In effect, the choreographer has become the Jack-of-all-arts—the direc tor of a new theatrical form that has a total design for total involvement.*

"The days of Swan Lake and Giselle are gone forever," says Brian Macdonald, the director of the Harkness Ballet. "Today's choreographer can choose any subject he likes." In ballet, the fairy-tale prince of yore is now more likely to be an uptight hippie blowing his mind on pot. Suicide, alienation, bigotry are all possible subjects for dance—as are cerebral abstractions or psychedelic nightmares. As for sex, the prettily stylized love gestures of romantic ballet have given way to body-blending duets that look like lovers' lanes in living color.

Looking Westward. The sets swing too—literally. They reflect the trend of multimedia dance, which means that moving scenery, lights, props, sound effects and film clips have all become an integral part of the choreography, as in Jeffrey's Astarte (see cover picture). Accompaniment ranges from full symphony orchestras and electronic yawping to jazz and, as in the case of Jerome Robbins' Moves, dead silence. Costuming can consist of tossing on anything that suits the moment or, as in Parades and Changes, performed by Ann Halprin's Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco, taking it all off and cavorting around in the buff (although they wrap themselves in reams of flesh-colored paper).