The history of dance, like the history of art in general, is developing every day. Dance, in this case, is the branch most prone to active modification and transformation, in comparison, for example, with the same music.
Every year, new directions of modern dance appear, new dance styles (basically, each of them differs in its own plastic language), which are difficult to classify due to their diversity. The most convenient classification is within the framework of the so-called "schools" - conglomerates formed by followers of great, world-famous choreographers. Each school has its own bright, famous "handwriting", elements of which can be traced in the productions of its representatives. Often, several "schools" can be mixed in the work of one choreographer, which is due to the fact that many dancers, before starting their path as a director, study at several dance schools. Most of such schools have a territorial connection and their own characteristics. But every year we can increasingly assert that there are as many choreographic styles as there are leading choreographers, since everyone strives to develop, create their own author's language of communication and transmission of a picture of their inner world with the help of gestures, movements, and plasticity. Many have characteristic gestures-intonations, a kind of "business cards", by which you can find out who the author of a particular production is (we can observe something similar in music for a very long time: the monograms BACH and DSCH, Rachmaninov's subdominant, the Promethean chord, etc.).
The very concept of "contemporary dance" is very broad, and it is probably impossible to establish its clear boundaries, because the dance genre develops according to the principle of striving to blur genre boundaries. We can identify the general principles inherent in this direction and trace the trends in its development.
Music had a very significant impact on the transformation processes of the ballet genre. The constant searches of composers of the 20th century, experiments with sound, timbre, form, searches for new instruments and means of expression, expansion of genre boundaries of music became a catalyst for changes in choreography. Starting with Stravinsky's ballets, a new era of active development and change opened in choreography. To convey the content embedded in the new music, the usual classical steps turned out to be insufficient. There was a need for a new language, different from academic ballet and based on other principles. At the beginning of the 20th century, the "modern" style emerged, when the pioneers of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Rudolf Laban, and others emerged. Decided that dance needed to return to its original significance. The direction of "modern" developed, and already in the 60-70s of the last century, new authors' techniques began to appear, which to a greater or lesser extent used modern techniques, as well as oriental martial arts, yoga, dance and movement therapy, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, physics, and much more. It became clear that this was no longer "modern", this was something new and even more modern. Then the concept of "contemporary dance" arose.
Contemporary dance is a modern style that is constantly transforming. This is the niche in choreography where the search for language and expressive forms is still underway. This is not a single unambiguous style, but a combination of dance techniques taken from Western (classical dance, jazz-modern) and Eastern (qigong, tai chi quan, yoga) art of movement and physical practices based on the ideas of philosophy and spirituality. In this direction, dance is perceived as a tool for developing the dancer's body and forming their individual choreographic vocabulary. The means of this are the synthesis, actualization, and development of various techniques and dance styles. Modern dance is characterized by a research orientation, due to the interaction of dance with a constantly evolving philosophy of movement and a complex of knowledge about the capabilities of the human body.
We will consider the peculiarities of the interaction of musical and plastic series, as well as the degree of influence of music on the choreographic component in contemporary dance, using the example of the production of "Smoke" (1995) by the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek. This production belongs to the genre of film ballet. It was staged in 1995 for the solo prima of the London and Paris ballet, Sylvia Gillem, and her partner is the most famous European dancer Niklas Ek (Mats Ek's brother). The production is based on the feelings of two people, a man and a woman, from two different worlds, and a feeling arises between them that allows them to live and create. Then the relationship falls apart, and only memories and hope remain. The three sections of the ballet highlight different aspects of the relationship between a man and a woman: the first section is a merger and close relationship, the second emphasizes the complexity (contradictions and contradictions) of the relationship between the sexes. The third part is a solo episode performed by Sylvia Gillem.
His approach to working with musical material is ambiguous. In his elaborate plot productions, such as Giselle, Carmen, and others, he perceives the musical text as a given, on which he layers his own figurative and dramatic layers, little mastering the musical composition in choreography. In this case, what is important to him is not the structure of the work itself or the traditional form of choreographic interpretation of this fragment, but the dramaturgy of each specific image from its plastically verified universe, developed in the language of everyday attributes, etc.
In the case of Smoke, the choreographer follows the same path. The performance features three works by Pärt: the first part is set to the composition Für Alina, the second to Sarah was 90 years old, and the third to Spiegel im Spiegel. The musical text is significantly shortened and completely subordinated to the plot-like canvas. “Mats Ek, as a rule, chooses for his ballets intricate, unstructured music, and sometimes it seems as if he wants to show us how the purity of the violin and piano can be emphasized and enhanced with the help of dance.” To be more precise, the music used in his productions is not unstructured; rather, the choreographer himself, by his method of work, levels the compositional division of the musical text and creates a certain stage context for its perception. At the same time, Mats Ek actively uses the voice (namely, the screams of the dancers) and everyday noises in the sound score of the performance, which are designed to contribute to an even greater monolithic nature of the musical works.
The scenography of the performance is ascetic: black walls and floor, a table in the middle of the room, a small staircase leading to nowhere, and a window. An interesting move was found to visually connect the parts of the performance: the only element of the scenery - the table in the first picture takes up half of the stage space, in size it exceeds human height, and the first solo with its plastic language demonstrates this dominance of the object (not only in size, but also in image and content) over the dancer. The beginning of the second part begins with a close-up shot of the same table, only after a couple of moments, it becomes clear that this is a game with scale, and it is no larger in size than a children's toy table, which the performer throws away in annoyance. Here, the visual design minimizes the pressure of the environment, and the emphasis shifts to the relationship between the characters. In the third part, the same table appears again, only now on a normal scale and in a new context, this time of everyday life. The first part can be formally divided into two fragments: the solo of the main character and a tender love duet. Throughout this part, a looped musical composition sounds, while it does not change in character, rhythm, or tempo throughout the first act. The choreographer's music is important here as a necessary emotional accompaniment to the main theme of the performance. This fact once again confirms the principle of Mats Ek's work with the musical component, which is based not on the features of its structure, but on its atmospheric and emotional order.
The solo is transformed into a duet. Different in character, mood, and plastic language, it is set to the same music as the solo, endlessly lasting and piercing. In the duet, just like in the first solo number, the plastic language of everyday gestures is actively used. It organically weaves into the sphere of pure dance, and a convincing image emerges, full of allusions to our everyday life. The emotionality in the contact of the performers creates an expressive effect, in the plastic solution of which there is a lot of childishness and touchingness. The two fragments of the first part differ in the artistic design of the costumes – in his solo, the dancer is dressed in classic men's trousers with a vest, ti,e and shirt, while in the duo, Silvia is in a nightgown, Niklas in a T-shirt and shorts. This is due to the more intimate nature of the second fragment and the choreographer's desire to emphasize this through the visual design of the costumes. The second part of the performance, set to “Sarah was 90 years old,” tells us a new story of these relationships – a story full of quarrels, conflicts, and contradictions. In this part, smoke as an artistic device is not used at all. The conceptual series of this fragment is built on the image of “little people” with all their problems, quarrels, hatred, and aggression directed at each other. “Sarah was 90 years old” is written for percussion instruments. The choreography of this episode is strikingly different in character from the previous on,e with its sharpness and some stiffness of movements, although it retains formally similar plastic solutions. The constant shouts of the dancers at each other and the absence of any melody only enhance the feeling of conflict. Along with the character of the duet, the performers' clothing has also changed: now it is a stylized everyday outfit: he is wearing a full-fledged men's suit with a jacket, she is wearing a dress with a jacket and a hat, which looks a little ridiculous on the dancers due to the deliberate stiffness in the plastic.
The second part ends somewhat surreally and no less dramatically. After the last screams, the performer pushes her partner away, and he disappears, absorbed in the darkness. The episode ends with a statuesque pose and an expressive look of the dancer, turned towards the viewer and full of horror and regret for what she has done. The longest third is set to the play "Spiegel im Spiegel" - this is a solo female number. This episode is a mirror-reverse reflection of the first part and represents a similar situation in content, but dressed in the plastic language of a female character – the same story about loneliness, but told from a different position. The music to which the final part is set, with its repeated repetition of one melodic line, cyclicality in Mats Ek's interpretation, emphasizes the nervousness and obsession of the main character rather than creating an image of divine beauty and peace. At the same time, the choreographic motifs appear in contradictory interaction with the calm and meditative nature of the music, full of light contemplation, which creates a bright contrast and further emphasizes the state of the dancer.
The expressive language of the performer is filled with well-recognizable everyday gestures. In the dance text, one can also find a plastically played pocket mirror into which the dancer looks, a telephone, the receiver of which she so nervously picks up, as well as binoculars, a violin, a wristwatch, and much more. The number of these everyday allusions is so high that it significantly outweighs the pure dance in proportion. That is why the audience can so easily read her state of nervous anticipation. Due to all these details, a sense of stage space is created. This nervous madness ends with a "reverse mirage": now the performer appears in the frame, circling in a waltz with the dancer, after a couple of rotations, they freeze, and when she takes off his hat, the artist's head starts to smoke.
In addition to the artistic means of musical theater, this film-ballet also actively uses cinematographic techniques to make the figurative order of the film-performance more expressive: the principle of montage and repetition of the same frame, close-ups, sometimes shot from a very unusual angle, playing with the scale of objects, with focus, changing the position of the camera in space, which transforms the static point of perception of the viewer (as in the theater) into a dynamic one and helps to create an expressive form also due to the composition of the frame. The performance turned out to be multidimensional, with a large number of semantic structures, which are present in its plastic language. The composition of the entire performance is clear, mirror-reversible. Three parts, each dramaturgically continuing and developing the other, are united by Arvo Pärt's music, a general scenographic solution, and, finally, a common story, full of tragedy and doom. Despite the originality and unusualness of his creative method, the choreographer managed to create such a plastic language that is intuitively understandable even to an unprepared viewer due to the presence of everyday elements and emotional fullness. His interaction with the music of Arvo Pärt is complex due to the fact that the composer's works are placed in a special stage context, which in itself forms a multifaceted emotional and symbolic field, which often comes into conflict with the figurative and emotional structure of the music and, in fact, subordinates it to itself. We can say that Mats Ek's work with musical material is a masterful game, where choreography enters into complex relationships with music: from organic interpenetration to explicit counterpoint.