Written By: Jimmy Long
Jimmy Long
Dr. Younger
FYS 1000
29 April 2024
Art is meant to be consumed, interpreted, and tell a story. Concert dance and fairy tales are no exception to that. Concert dance is a form of dance that uses ballet, modern, contemporary, and jazz styles in performative showcases, rather than the commercial style hip hop dancing seen on a worldwide tour with a super big pop star. While they have the similarity of storytelling, the way they do so is quite different. It makes sense that two different art forms tell stories in different ways, but what is very intriguing is the difference in the method of imagination and interpretation in both. Concert dance and fairy tales relay their messages very differently because in concert dance the story is visually displayed but the moral of the story is up for interpretation while fairy tales are usually written or spoken and make the moral of the story clear.
As fairy tales evolved, their primary audience became children which forced authors to make their main message comprehendible for younger consumers. Tales are used as a tool to teach children basic life lessons while also giving them room for imagination. Kids can create a world using fairy tales as a creative outlet, but when it comes to the lesson in the tale, it is never ambiguous. The term “pedagogical reduction” has been used to describe this simplification. The method of “pedagogical reduction requires the interpreter to consider which story to choose as well as how the story should be told, such that the hermeneutical conditions of understanding are kept in mind” (Lewin). Finding the etymology of the term can help understand the meaning of the word. The word pedagogy comes from the Greek word paidagōgia meaning “education, attendance of boys”. Reduction is known to mean making something smaller or simpler. As Lewin describes, pedagogical reduction is used so that children can be able to comprehend the messages behind them. In the article, it also dives into the creation of the concept of childhood. This is prevalent because when the idea of childhood became popularized, it was realized that children are very impressionable when they are younger. Adults took advantage of this, and made children’s literature that had centralized moral concepts that could be easily understood through pedagogical reduction so that they could help teach children what is “right” or “wrong”. Teachers and parents used (and currently still use) children’s literature, such as fairy tales, as a tool to help teach their children lessons that they believe to be critical in forming children’s moral compass. In certain fairy tales, the moral of the story is sometimes blatantly written out so that there is no confusion. In fairy tales that have been read in class, there was a section after the tale that details what the reader should be taking away from the story. For example, in Charles Perrault’s version of the story Little Red Riding Hood, he fully writes the moral saying “From this story one learns that children, especially young girls…are wrong to listen to just anyone, and it is not at all strange if a wolf ends up eating them…but watch out if you have not learned that tame wolves are the most dangerous of all” (Perrault 35-36). Rather than giving the child the room to figure it out themselves, Perrault felt the need to make the comprehensibility of the message so clear that he wrote it out so everyone who read the story would learn the same lesson.
Even though dance paints a visual picture, the message behind concert dance pieces is always left up to the audience’s interpretation. When a choreographer starts creating and choreographing a piece, there is always an intention behind what the piece is truly about. However, the intention of the choreographer is never clearly stated or displayed during the dance. This allows the audience members to be able to take away the message that they want from the choreography they are watching on the stage. At Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the dance major program had a senior thesis project where the senior dance majors were tasked to choreograph dance pieces that had an intention or meaning behind them. The article goes on to detail the first piece of the entire showcase. This piece was an adaptation of the popular fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, and the piece was titled “Alternatively”. This dance used a spoken narration of the well-known Hansel and Gretel tale rather than using music which is typically used in concert dance. At the beginning of the dance, a trio does choreography to this narration. Then the performance resets, and the background transitions from a typical forest where the original tale takes place to a cityscape with the blaring sounds of traffic you would expect to hear in a cityscape. From there the dance is repeated by three new dancers with the same choreography. By the end of the piece, the narration was repeated 4 times as the city and forest backgrounds started to blend together. As this was occurring the narration was continuously getting more distorted as well. The choreographer of this dance, Steven Fields, discusses his experience choreographing this piece saying, “the choreography process has been more about exploring abstract ideas through movement, and I wanted to get back to that love of storytelling” (Fields). Having the process include the exploration of these abstract ideas showcases that, even if the piece did have an original meaning to the choreographer, the meaning of the piece is up to the audience’s interpretation of what they want to take away from the piece. Dance is not necessarily catered to children, which is why the ideas behind dance pieces are allowed to be a lot more abstract than the fairy tales we read in class. It takes a different kind of imagination for someone to be able to see abstract art like dance and be able to figure out what the message behind it is for themselves.
Dance tells stories while also being self-reflective. However, fairy tales are for an external audience that is not the author. In the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, anthropologist Dr Karin Eli and dance company owner Rosie Kay worked together to implement dance into the healing process of eating disorders. For their research, they used girls from the ages of 19-31 who all had varying experiences and eating disorders. For eight weeks seven participants would gather in a dance studio without mirrors where they would have time to be creative through dance for two hours a week. After each session, they would have a sit-down discussion to reflect on the choreographic experience. Toward the end of the eight weeks of the creativity dance workshop, the participants were asked to choreograph a solo based on their experiences with their eating disorders. After the workshop was over they interviewed the participants. One participant Lauren talked about her experience saying, “I’ve done quite a lot of therapy, so I’ve done quite a lot of the talking thing… but I think I connected with stuff in a different way, I, I actually felt stuff in myself inside me, that you can think about, but it feels different when you go back to that place and you feel that stuff again” (Lauren). When a dancer does their choreography, like Lauren, it puts them into the story that they created. So, when a choreographer bases their piece on an experience or trauma they had/have, it causes the dancing and choreographing to become more self-reflective rather than performative. Rather than telling a story to an audience, Lauren was re-telling herself a story that she experienced. That makes dance so much more personal. Also, the fact that Lauren got to tell her own story through her own body, rather than her words made the message behind the choreography more personal because only the choreographer knows the true intent behind every single dance move as they put the moves together to create a story that can later be interpreted by others. Lauren made the dance for herself rather than for an audience to view. In my contemporary jazz dance class I took this past semester for my dance minor, we analyzed this video of Ulysses Dove’s choreography.
Dancing On the Front Porch of Heaven (Start at 1:03)
I found this extremely interesting because, in the beginning of the video, Dove goes on to explain what the dance means to him which then puts the piece into perspective when we watch it later in the video. Dove talks about loved ones passing and the toll that the grief took on him. Even though this piece was performed for an audience, it was still extremely personal because it allowed Dove to “come to some kind of terms with the issue of loving people and losing them” (Dove). He used choreographing this piece as a tool for self-reflection on coping with the grief of losing loved ones. Unlike concert dance, fairy tales are very different because they are not personal to the author/creator whatsoever. Fairy tales have been passed down and adapted for centuries. Our textbook even discusses how “no one person can claim to be an authoritative source for a fairy tale” (Tatar 8). She then goes on to quote the author of The Virago Book of Fairy Tales Angela Carter saying “Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definite recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of the domestic arts. This is how I make potato soup” (Carter). That quote exemplifies how a fairy tale cannot be claimed as their own because the author of these adaptations of ancient fairy tales did not create the characters or the story. These tales have been told by word of mouth for centuries. This makes fairy tales not personal at all. Also, these tales are always for an audience and never for oneself. As we talked about earlier, fairy tales have been marketed towards children to teach them lessons, meaning that these authors are not creating these stories for themselves. They are doing it to teach impressionable children life lessons that they think are important for them to learn before they get older and become adults.
Fairy tales and specifically concert dance are both art forms that use their art to portray stories completely differently. They differ in the way imagination is incorporated into the storytelling. Fairy tales allow the reader or listener to create a whole world in their head, but the moral of the story is always extremely clear in order to make sure that everyone can understand and learn the same life lesson. Concert dance paints the scene for the audience members with movement and choreography. However, dance is more abstract than fairy tales which causes the message behind the piece to become vague. This lets the people watching the dance interpret the message of the dance for themselves. Also, dance allows the choreographer to make the message more personal. The choreographer intentionally picks out each individual move and puts them together in order to tell a story that can be personal to them. Fairy tales have been passed down by word of mouth for centuries making it impossible to trace the origin of them. This makes the tales we are reading not personal at all. The author’s intent is not to tell their own story in these tales but to adapt an old tale in order to get a very clear and basic message across. Overall, fairy tales and dance are both different forms of art that tell stories, but they do so very differently.
Work Cited
Eli, Karin, and Rosie Kay. “Choreographing lived experience: dance, feelings and the storytelling body.” Medical Humanities, vol. 41, no. 1, 2015. BMJ Journals, https://mh.bmj.com/content/41/1/63.
Joy, Tara, and Arts. “From Folk Dance to Fairytales, Senior Dance Theses Tackle Intricacies of Storytelling.” University Wire, Apr 04, 2019. ProQuest, http://electra.lmu.edu:2048/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/wire-feeds/folk-dance-fairytales-senior-theses-tackle/docview/2202993142/se-2.
Lewin, David. “Between horror and boredom: fairy tales and moral education.” Ethics and Education, vol. 15, no. 2, 2020.
Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) (pp. 9, 35-36). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. Ullysee dove dancing on the front porch of heaven. YouTube. (2023, August 12). https://youtu.be/JwXMUtaUyJU?si=7TNiTyR1CtbBQkxm
