Why Were New Dances in the Early 20th Century So Often Described as Plastique?

Ever since dance was established as a theatrical art form in Western Europe, it has had a constitutive relationship with other dramatic, plastique, and musical arts. In being described as relying on these other art genres, dance works were often regarded as secondary creations. Ballets, for example, were works likened to narrative tableaux that tell stories without words, with music as their indispensable accompaniment, animating the dancing bodies. In the early 20th century, however, the relationship of dance to other art genres was fundamentally shifting. Towards the end of the 19th century, art works were to be envisaged on the basis of a musical model instead of plastique arts hitherto, and dance as an individual art genre was thereby to be redefined, independently of other art genres, as its own medium, its own material for human creative activity. In dance the human body was being recognized as its medium, and the body’s nature, as encompassed in the “plastique,” was to be scrutinized. The usage of the term “plastique” in dance must then have evolved.