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Article: RECONSTRUCTIONS: DEAD DUCKS DO NOT FLY.
- Article from:
- Dance Magazine
- Article date:
- August 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Dance Magazine, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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My favorite quotation on choreography comes from the late David Lichine, the choreographer of, among many other ballets, Graduation Ball. Years ago Lichine suggested that "choreography was moisture in the mouth of an orator." I forget the actual context of the remark, but the image itself, with its strange sense of art and evanescence, has never left me. Choreography is an art that exists in space and time, but the time itself is fleeting; it unreels with the dance, spooling forward but never back. To some extent this is true of any performing art--that very unreeling is the actual performance. But with music, say, or even drama, the residual record can be pretty much ...