The significant difference between dance and other arts is that its material means is the human body, which is flesh-and-blood and constantly moving, rather than the human body in space illusion video or picture. From this point, we can find the main aesthetic characteristics of dance art.
1. Expressiveness and lyricism of emotions
Although dance has some characteristics of plastic arts, it can be regarded as a moving plastic arts. However, it is more closely related to music. It is more similar to music in nature, and it is suitable for emphasizing expression and lyricism rather than imitation and reproduction. Dance is limited by human movements, so it is not suitable to directly imitate the plot in life. However, the human body can express its highly generalized mental outlook through rhythmic activities, such as courage, strength, wit and heroism, and express its inner feelings.
There are two views on how to express one's feelings by dancing. One is that dancers express one's feelings. For example, Duncan, a pioneer of modern dance and a famous American dancer, thinks that dancers should "dance according to an internal melody". This kind of "dancer who is natural rather than imitative ... shows something from himself, something bigger than everything in itself".
Secondly, it is thought that the emotion of dance "is the imaginary emotion, not the real emotional state that controls the dance". Susan Langer said: "As far as I know, no one is sure that Pavlova's performance of the slowly failing life in Death of a Swan is the best, and no one will tell Mary Wigman a terrible news a few minutes before she takes the stage, so that she can enter the tragic role in Night Dance." She continued, an excellent ballet master is asking the actress to perform. Instead of saying solemnly, "Your boyfriend asked me to tell you,' Goodbye, let's go our separate ways!'" He can also say to a quiet and beautiful actress who is going to perform a "happy dance": "You should imagine yourself on vacation in California, walking under palm trees and oranges." I will never tell her that there is an exciting date after rehearsal, because that will distract her from the dance and cause her movements to be abnormal.
The two views are quite different, but it makes sense. The key here is their different contexts. Duncan wants to break the stereotypes of classical ballet and regard dance as a means of self-expression of personality liberation first. She often goes to the stage to improvise and dance with classical music, emphasizing that dance is a powerful and emotional stage art, and there is no fixed program. Duncan's improvisation and solo dance, combined with his skillful basic skills, is entirely possible or just to express his feelings by dancing.
Swan Lake and Night Dance cited by Susan Langer are all classic works, such as Swan Lake, which has a dramatic nature, characterization and story telling, and has fixed and difficult amazing skills, which are performed by famous ballet companies all over the world. Therefore, the actors' actions and gestures are no longer the expression of their own true feelings, and the emotions expressed are naturally imaginary emotions. What's interesting here is that the same movements and gestures imitated by ballerinas from all over the world can show the same kind of emotions. That is to say, although body and mind are two different media, body is material and emotion is immaterial, but they can still be equivalent in structural nature. Arnheim, a famous American aesthetician, listed an experiment made by his student Binet, which showed that the formal factors of dance movements and the emotional factors they expressed were equivalent in structure and nature. When a group of students express the theme of "sadness", all the actors' dance movements seem to be slow, and the range of each movement is very small. A person with a very sad mood is also very slow in his psychological process, lacking energy and determination, and all his activities seem to be controlled by external forces.
Second, symbolism and virtuality
Use the gestures of human body to replace the speech and discourse of daily life, and use "music-dance lines" as the lines of character communication and characterization. Therefore, no matter what enters the dance, it must be so thoroughly transformed artistically: "its space is plastic;" Time is musical; The theme is fantasy; The action is symbolic. " Dance is symbolic and virtual.
The spatial modeling of dance is different from painting, sculpture and other spatial arts. Similarly, with the human body as the main material basis, paintings and sculptures are juxtaposed in space and visually visible; Dance needs both spatial juxtaposition and visual appeal, as well as continuous time and auditory musical rhythm. Dance is different from gymnastics and acrobatics. Gymnastics and acrobatics aim at showing the beauty of the human body, while dance takes the beauty of the human body as a medium (means), aiming at revealing certain thoughts and feelings of people and reflecting certain themes, rather than simply showing off skills. The theme of dance is an illusion, a virtual image, which is composed of the basic abstraction-posture movement on which it is created and organized. In the process of dance performance, the plot or emotional content is completely covered by the dance action form, and everything is transformed into a performance posture. Posture is the movement of life, the signal and sign to express our various wishes, intentions, expectations, demands and emotions. Any gesture has symbolic meaning, which can be controlled intentionally, carefully compiled into a set of definite and closely related symbol systems like sound, and can be used as a language, such as sign language. In this way, deaf people or people with different languages often express their opinions, judgments, questions and puzzles by virtue of this simple way of communication. The posture of dance is refined and sublimated from the posture in real life, including the posture of people and other creatures. From the names of Chinese primitive dance "Fu Li", Australian's "Qingwa Dance", "Butterfly Dance", "Wild Dog Dance" and "Kangaroo Dance", North American Indian's "Bear Dance" and "Buffalo Dance", Brazilian Indian's "Fish Dance" and Baica Tribe's "Bat Dance", we can see that the dance posture really imitates man and nature. Only after a long artistic practice, I gradually got rid of these individual "figurative" things, but abstractly sublimated into "programs" and "typed actions", which were widely used in aspects and fields far from the original figurative content, such as expressing people's inner feelings.
Dance uses the tangible and symbolic physical form that can be perceived-the movement of human body posture to create a typical image with strong generality. However, this is an illusion and a virtual entity. We will not see girls walking on tiptoe on the road, nor will we see young people expressing their love for their lovers with lifts in reality. However, this is the case in dance, although all the actors do is to create something that we can really see, but what we actually see is a virtual entity. But it truly reflects the object and its inner feelings.
3. Modeling and Rhythm
belinsky once compared classical ballet to a living statue coming down from a pedestal. Judging from the beautiful artistic modeling created by dance art, this metaphor is quite appropriate. Dancers condense their superb skills into "body modeling" in fanatical emotions. This "modeling" connects the time structure and forms rhythmic human movement.
The western classical dance is to liberate oneself from the earth, look forward to the sky, and seek freedom in the sky. Therefore, dancers always try to get rid of gravity, and their movements are radioactive, trying hard and constantly jumping up and soaring in the air. From the training of western classical dance ballet, people vividly abstract its morphological characteristics: opening, stretching, standing and straight. Spreading the crotch is the most basic human requirement in ballet training, and the legs are lifted forward, backward and sideways.
The most typical ballet stands with its toes stretched, which causes the dancers to rise upward and radiate. Ballet focuses on the movements of the lower limbs, and the most striking thing is jumping. These jumps are not only various, but also frequent. In jumping, pay attention to the aerial modeling of human body extension, which is an important feature of ballet. In the jumping action of ballet, the limbs are mostly spread out. The arms and legs that extend around create a radiant feeling of ballet jumping space modeling.
China's dances, as well as Japanese, Indian, Korean and other oriental dances, show another modeling style. Dancers are firmly standing on the ground, and their movements are connotative and attached to the earth. Generally speaking, they rarely lift their feet high. They move their feet slowly along a certain geometric figure, and their legs almost always bend naturally. The movements of arms and hands are ever-changing, and they are extremely valued. Round arms generally move around the body, and everything seems to be gathered together. In the long-term dance practice, Chinese dancers have intuitively grasped the cohesive features of Chinese classical dance, which are vividly summarized as twisting, tilting, curving and rounding.
In a large number of Chinese classical dances, wrists and ankles are mostly bent and kickbacks, and it is rare to see the phenomenon of stretching straight. Even when walking on the catwalk, the feet are hooked back at every step. In this way, it destroys the radiation sensation caused by the straight line between the arm and the leg, but has the effect of gathering.
The morphological feature that is more universal and general than "Qu" is "circle". The trajectory of the human body's movement on the stage mostly requires a circular or arc shape, and the roundness field shows the characteristics of "circle" most vividly. It requires the human body, especially the legs, to contract inward. When marching, the sole of one foot closely follows the other heel, and it alternately rolls along a circular, figure-eight or serpentine route. The moving trunk tries its best to lean toward the center of the circle, as if attracted by centripetal force.
"Tilting" has its own manifestations in specific postures, such as the human body inclining to different degrees when walking in circles and exploring the sea. However, in more occasions, "tilting" is accompanied by "twisting". From a dynamic point of view, the trunk inclines because it is twisted. "Twist" is common in classical dance gestures, such as the "T-step" that often appears, that is, the feet are at right angles, the heel of the left foot is connected with the middle of the inner side of the right foot, and then the trunk is twisted to the left.
Modern Chinese and Western dances tend to penetrate each other and absorb each other's essence. In today's China dance world, the morphological principle of "opening, stretching, standing and straight" is spreading, tending to radiate and expand, and silently and constantly appearing in China classical dance. However, western modern dance is slowly turning to the nostalgia for the earth. The dance art of German dancer Weigmann was born between the two world wars. She is in a country shrouded by evil forces, so her dance is melancholy and depressed. She is a low-key dancer, completely close to the earth, kneeling, crouching, crawling, lying down, etc., which constitutes her dance action series.
There is a natural connection between dance and music, and it is rhythm and rhythm that closely link them. Dance art requires no less rhythm than music, which is not only restricted by the rhythm of music, but also its own rhythm. The rhythmic movements in dance are called "rhythms". This rhythm is the organizational form in which human movements can be expressed. It is the law of morphological changes composed of the ups and downs of body, movements and postures, the strength and weakness, and the size and Fiona Fang. It is based on rhythm. When music in a strict sense has not appeared, rhythm, as an element of music, has been integrated into the initial form of dance, with atonal beating sticks or drums and simple sound interception, which is enough to integrate the dancer's physical feeling with the wonderful rhythm. Every dancer dances not so much with his partner as with the music, with his own voice and with the rhythm of nature.