Skill and Authenticity in Artistic Performance

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 Alma Aguilar has identified two competing accounts of what happens in (adroit) artistic performance (specially improvisation), for example, in dance:

  1. An openness to expressing our natural and true self. 
  2. The automatized manifestation of expert skill.

In the later tradition, to learn to dance is to learn to acquire certain specific skills that are both corporeal and intellectual. We not only learn how to move our bodies in certain precise ways, but we also learn how to think, i.e., what to pay attention to, how to look at space, how to relate to our bodies and to other dancers’ bodies. In training and practice, dancers acquire a new and sharpened awareness of their own bodies and their place in space. It is the acquisition of these skills that later will allow us, on stage, to perform adroitly movements that will come out automatically, despite not being truly instinctive.

In the former tradition, in contrast, learning is fundamentally a negative process: to learn to dance is not so much to learn to do something (as one learns to, for example, do long division) but to learn how to not do some things that might otherwise come naturally – to avoid certain prejudices about how to move, how to be in space, etc.  However, it is a sort of double negative, because what we learn to avoid are negatives themselves, i.e., prejudices, barriers to the free manifestation of our true selves, to the free movement of our bodies, to their true appropriation of space. Thus, this learning process ends up having a positive, liberating outcome.

These two accounts seem to be in tension because, at least prima facie, the later one presents dance as a very ‘intellectual’ activity, so to speak, while the second presents a more ‘anti-intellectual’ picture of what happens in dance. Aguilar’s project is to determine whether this presents an actual paradox or is it mostly apparent and that once we understand better the epistemic dimension of dance, we can better see how they complement each other.

This tension is intimately linked to the philosophical question of whether and how to criticize a work of art. On the later tradition, criticism is aimed at judging whether the performance adequately manifests the appropriate skill. Here, we usually talk about virtuosity and we wonder at the dancer’s masterful control of their bodies. As Lisa Witt has recently written (2023), regarding piano performance, “Good (and especially great) piano players have full control over their playing, and everything is intentional. If they play a note loudly it’s because that note was MEANT to be played that way.” In the former tradition, in contrast, the best performances are beyond the reach of our critical faculties and we can only respond in awe. What the critic can do, at most, is to point out the defects of imperfect performances, but must remain silent when faced with a truly masterful performance.

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Just as there are “partially aesthetic sports [such] as gymnastics, diving, skating, synchronised swimming, trampolining, ski jumping and surfing” (Reid 1990: 165), we can also talk of dance as a “partially athletic art”. And just as there is ample debate and complexity involved in balancing the aesthetic and athletic concerns in determining what makes for a good routine in synchronised swimming or figure skating, it is also difficult to find such a balance in dance as well. Furthermore, both dimensions of dance have also been oppositely gendered as the athletic aspect is masculine coded and the aesthetic aspect is feminine coded (Adams 2010).

Athletic skill is usually the third attribute, next to technical skill and “artistry” as the three criteria used to evaluate partially aesthetic sports such as figure skating (Fabos 2001: 196). This allows judges a lot of leeway to make judgments that navigate between inscrutable and normatively justified.


REFERENCES

Mary Louise Adams (2010) “From Mixed-Sex Sport to Sport for Girls: The Feminization of Figure Skating”, Sport in History, 30:2, 218-241, DOI: 10.1080/17460263.2010.481208

Bettina Fabos (2001) “Forcing the Fairytale: Narrative Strategies in Figure Skating Competition Coverage”, Sport in Society, 4:2, 185-212, DOI: 10.1080/713999817

Louis Arnaud Reid (1970) “Sport, the aesthetic and art”, British Journal of Educational Studies, 18:3, 245-258, DOI: 10.1080/00071005.1970.9973287

Lisa Witt (2023) “How To Tell If Someone Is Actually Good At The Piano”, Pianote, January 17,  https://www.pianote.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-pianist/

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