Style and the Stylized

I’m late to the parade on Edwin Denby, but glad I finally got there. Almost everything he says about dancing translates to writing, or any of the arts involving humans, because he’s really less interested in this or that piece than in art as a kind of teaching of living. The Denby ethos includes clarity, sincerity, unpretentiousness, enjoyment, youth, unselfconsciousness, expression over perfection, and individuality within a collective of others allowed to develop as individuals. Part of the fun of reading his reviews of performances over half a century gone is the way he connects dancing to other registers of life—movies, lindy-hopping at the Savoy, basketball games, musicals, that new billboard in Times Square—so that everything seems part of one thing: “Civilization is really a great pleasure.” More O’Hara than Ashbery, but you can see how Denby set the stage for both.

Here’s Denby on the “stylized”—the artifice that paradoxically makes everyday life more visible (and makes individual “style” accountable to collective social life.) He’s talking about motion, but it’s not much of a jump to move from there to poems.

“What is a ‘stylized movement’? It is a movement that looks a little like dancing but more like nondancing. It is a movement derived from what people do when they are not dancing. It is a gesture from life deformed to suit music (music heard or imagined). The pleasure of watching it lies in guessing the action it was derived from, in guessing what it originally looked like, and then in savoring the ‘good taste’ of the deformation.”

—Edwin Denby, “On Meaning in Dance,” July 18, 1943 in Dance Writings