On the characteristics of artistic conception of dance works

Dance is an art of human beings, and it is an art that shapes artistic images, expresses emotions and reflects social life in rhythmic continuous movement with living human posture as the material medium. In modern life, dance has become an important form of people's aesthetic activities, and dance as a form of aesthetic education has become a consensus.

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 the video or picture of space illusion. From this point, we can find the main aesthetic characteristics of dance art.

First, emotional expressiveness and lyricism

Although dance has some characteristics of plastic arts, it can be regarded as a dynamic plastic arts. However, it is more closely related to music. In essence, it is more similar to music, and it is suitable for emphasizing expression and lyricism rather than imitation and reproduction. Dance is limited by human movements and is not suitable for directly imitating the plot in life. However, the human body can express its inner feelings through rhythmic activities, showing a highly summarized mental outlook, such as courage, strength, wit and heroism.

There are two views on how to express one's feelings in dance. One is that dancers express their feelings. For example, Duncan, a pioneer of modern dance and a famous American dancer, believes that dancers should "dance according to an inner melody". This "born dancer instead of imitating" ... shows something about himself, something bigger than everything itself.

The second is that the emotion of dance "is an imaginary emotion, not a real emotional state that controls dance". Susan Langer said: "As far as I know, no one is sure that pavlova's performance of 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 and let her enter the tragic role of Night Dance." She went on to say that an excellent ballet master is inviting the actress to perform. Instead of solemnly saying, "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 "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 the rehearsal, because that will distract her from the dance and cause her movements to be abnormal.

The two views are quite different, but they make sense. The key here is their different backgrounds. Duncan wants to break the stereotype of classical ballet, first of all, he regards dance as a means of self-expression of personality liberation. She often improvises on stage and dances with classical music, emphasizing that dance is a powerful and emotional stage art without fixed programs. Duncan's improvisation and solo dance, combined with his skillful basic skills, are entirely possible or just through dancing to express his feelings.

Swan Lake and Night Dance quoted by Susan Langer are both classic works. For example, Swan Lake is dramatic, characterization and story-telling, with fixed and difficult amazing skills, and is performed by famous ballet companies all over the world. Therefore, the actions and gestures of actors are no longer the expression of their true feelings, but the emotions expressed are naturally imaginary emotions. What's interesting here is that ballet dancers all over the world imitate the same movements and gestures, but they can show the same emotion. 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 aesthete, listed an experiment made by his student BBinetet.Alfred, 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 seem to dance slowly, and the amplitude of each movement is very small. A person with a very sad mood has a very slow psychological process and lacks energy and determination. All activities seem to be controlled by external forces.

Second, symbolism and virtuality

Body gestures are used instead of everyday language, and "music-dance lines" are used as lines for character communication and characterization. Therefore, no matter what enters the dance, it must be so thoroughly artistic: "its space is plastic; Time is music; The theme is fantasy; This 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, painting and sculpture are juxtaposed in space and visible visually; Dance needs not only spatial juxtaposition and visual appeal, but also time continuity and auditory music rhythm. Dance is different from gymnastics and acrobatics. The purpose of gymnastics and acrobatics is to show the beauty of the human body, while dance takes the beauty of the human body as a medium (means), aiming at revealing some thoughts and feelings of people and reflecting some theme, rather than simply showing off skills. The theme of dance is an illusion, a virtual image, which is composed of basic abstract-posture movement, and it is created and organized on this movement. 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, and it is the signal and sign to express our various wishes, intentions, expectations, demands and emotions. Any gesture has symbolic meaning, can be controlled intentionally, and can be carefully compiled into a set of definite and closely related symbol systems like sound, which 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, doubts and puzzles by 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 China's original dance Liv, Australian's Blue Tile Dance, Butterfly Dance, Wild Dog Dance, Kangaroo Dance, North American Indian's Bear Dance, Buffalo Dance, Brazilian Indian's Fish Dance, and Baika Tribe's Bat Dance, it can be seen that its dance is indeed imitating human and nature. Only after a long period of artistic practice did they gradually get rid of these individual "figurative" things, but abstractly sublimated into "procedures" and "typed actions", which were widely used in aspects and fields far away from the original figurative content, such as expressing people's inner feelings.

Dance creates a typical image with strong generality by using a tangible and symbolic physical form-the movement of human posture, but it 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 elevators in reality. However, dance is like this. Although all the actors do is to create something that we can really see, what we actually see is a virtual entity. But it truly reflects the object and its inner feelings.

Third, 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 superb skills into "body modeling" in fanatical emotions. This "modeling" connects the time structure and forms a rhythmic human movement.

Western classical dance is about liberating yourself from the earth, looking forward to the sky and seeking freedom in the sky. So dancers always try to get rid of gravity, their movements are radioactive, they try hard and keep jumping and soaring in the air. From the training of western classical dance ballet, people vividly abstract its morphological characteristics: opening, stretching, standing and straight. Hip spreading is the most basic human requirement in ballet training, and the legs are lifted forward, backward and on both sides.

The most typical ballet is standing with toes extended, which makes the dancers 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 diverse but also frequent. In jumping, pay attention to the aerial modeling of human body stretching, which is an important feature of ballet. In ballet jumping, most of the limbs are spread out. The arms and legs extending around create a radiant feeling of ballet jumping space modeling.

China's dance, as well as Japanese, Indian, Korean and other oriental dances, presents another modeling style. The dancer stands firmly on the ground, and her movements are meaningful and attached to the earth. Generally speaking, they seldom lift their feet very 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, which attracts much attention. Round arms generally move around the body, and everything seems to be gathered together. In the long-term dance practice, China dancers intuitively grasped the cohesion characteristics of China classical dance, which can be vividly summarized as twisting, warping, bending and rounding.

In a large number of China classical dances, wrists and ankles mostly bend and recoil, and the phenomenon of straightening is rarely seen. Even when you walk the catwalk, your feet are hooked back at every step. This destroys the radiation feeling brought by the straight line between the arm and the leg, but has the effect of gathering.

The more common and general morphological feature than "flexion" is "circle". The trajectory of human movement on the stage is mostly required to be circular or arc, and the circus shows the characteristics of "circle" incisively and vividly. It requires the human body, especially the legs, to contract inward. When marching, the sole of one foot follows the heel of the other and alternately rolls along a circular, figure-eight or serpentine route. The moving trunk leans towards the center of the circle as much as possible, as if it were attracted by centripetal force.

"Tilt" has its own performance in specific postures. For example, the human body will tilt to different degrees when walking in circles and exploring the sea. But on more occasions, "tilt" is accompanied by "twist". From a dynamic point of view, the trunk is tilted because it is twisted. "Twist" is a common gesture in classical dance, 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, and tends to radiate and expand, silently and constantly appearing in China classical dance. However, western modern dance is slowly turning to nostalgia for the earth. German dancer Weigmann's dance art was born between the two world wars. She lives in a country shrouded by evil forces, so her dance is depressed. She is a low-key dancer, completely close to the earth, kneeling, squatting, crawling, lying and so on. , constitutes her dance action series.

Dance and music have a natural connection, and it is rhythm and rhythm that closely link them. Dance art requires no less rhythm than music, which is not only restricted by music rhythm, but also restricted by its own rhythm. The rhythmic movements in dance are called "rhythm". This rhythm is the organizational form that human movement can express. It is a law of morphological change composed of ups and downs, movements and postures, strength, size and Fiona Fang. It is based on rhythm. Before music in the strict sense appeared, rhythm, as an element of music, has been integrated into the initial form of dance. The atonal beating of sticks or drums and simple sound interception are enough to integrate the dancer's body 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.