While valuing freedom of movement as the sine qua non for making dance expressive, his overriding goal, Michel Fokine nonetheless maintained that a dance could be beautiful only if it followed “the rigid laws that govern the creation of one of Shakespeare's sonnets.” As far as Fokine was concerned, setting dances was “all pure brain work, extracting and using the magical harmonies and rhythms that lie hidden in nature.” The “natural law” of choreography that Fokine postulated had as its main precepts principles governing rhythm and plasticity. This paper discusses Fokine's dance aesthetic, its validity, and the degree to which his aesthetic was actually realized in his work. A context for this discussion is provided in the form of a recapitulation of the principal facts of Fokine's career arid of related aspects of the careers of his forerunners. The materials with specific reference to Fokine available for study include current versions of a few of his ballets, films of a somewhat larger number, critical responses to his work, recollections of people who came into contact with him or his work, and his own statements and writings.

The recurrence of an uncomplicated step pattern made it possible for 18th-century ladies and gentlemen of varying abilities to perform the Minuet. In 1762, Giovanni-Andrea Gallini, director of dances at the Royal Theatre in the Haymarket, London, said that the success of the Minuet stemmed in part from “the possibility of dancing it to so many different airs, though the steps are invariable.” Thirty-seven years earlier the dancing master Pierre Rameau describes the emergence of a simplified version of the pas de Menuet that replaced a more demanding step. Eighteen-century European dancing masters, such as Charles Pauli, repeatedly describe the Minuet step as natural, plain and unaffected—a step that is “perfect” for performance. Because the Minuet steps were successful and widely performed, dancing masters taught its established steps, not steps based on their own whims or creations. An analysis of a wide range of 18th-century manuals reveals that a preferred version of the Minuet step emerged in the literature and remained relatively unchanged to near the end of the century.

“Dance is movement that has been organized so that it is rewarding to behold,” writes Anderson (1974, p. 9), and many of those who talk or write about dance have attempted to explain the way in which dance rewards the beholder by considering the processes by which dance communicates. Anderson goes on to say: “…dance communicates because it prompts responses within us. Dance is not simply a visual art, it is kinesthetic as well; it appeals to our inherent sense of motion” (p. 9). This distinction between visual and kinesthetic communication is one which many dancers find appealing. The kinesthetic communication is not analyzed further, but rather, it becomes an easy way of stating the special status of dance as an art form. That is, there is a special sense for which only dance can provide aesthetic satisfaction.

Alvin Toffler made an eloquent plea in 1967 for the construction of cultural statistics that would give artists, policy-makers and social scientists a reliable map of where the arts enterprises had been and where they seemed to be going. Only slow progress has been made since then.

To take the example that will concern us in this research note, how much solid information do we have concerning the “dance boom” that reportedly took place during the Sixties and Seventies? A “dance boom” can refer to many things. It can mean rapid growth in the size of the dance audience; in the number of dance companies; in the amount of amateur participation in the art; in the number of dance performances; and so on. These aspects of the art might not all show the same trends. For instance, the number of dance performances might have increased faster during the “boom” than the number of companies—or vice versa—suggesting two very different developments. Actually, the only firm documentation we possess concerning the boom in the amount of dance activity has to do with the size of the audience, and we have that only for the Seventies, not the Sixties. Surveys done by the Louis Harris polling organization put the percentage of Americans aged 18 years and older who attended at least one live dance performance in the years 1973, 1975 and 1980 at 9%, 16% and 25%.