Take the “Fantasia on the Dargason” Challenge this World Ballet Day
An Experiment in Thinking Choreographically and Dramaturgically
A choreographer invents movement for bodies in space—often to music, always to time. To think choreographically is to ask: what kind of movement might belong to a particular complex of sounds? What does this moment in the score look like? What shifts when the harmony thickens, when the rhythm doubles, when a new instrument enters or drops away?
Eventually, this grades into a different kind of imagining. What are the dancers wearing? How are they lit? Does the curtain rise with the music or before it? What story—if any—is being told? We’ve now moved into dramaturgy, into the realm of structure, framing, and interpretation. Where does this go on the program? Who is dancing it, and why? Is it part of a narrative? A mood? A memory? Would a title help the audience—and do we want it to?
This is something anyone can do. You don’t have to be a choreographer to listen actively, to feel what might move in the music, or to picture shapes and gestures without needing the right terms for them. So here’s a suggestion for this World Ballet Day:
Try listening to the final movement of Gustav Holst’s (of The Planets fame) Second Suite in F for Military Band—Fantasia on the “Dargason”. It’s a brisk three minutes of early 20th-century British wind ensemble music, built on two old tunes: “Dargason” and “Greensleeves.” The “Dargason” begins in the saxophone and dances through the orchestra (starting on page 8 of the condensed score), trading sections and gaining weight. It’s quick—6/8 and slightly too much, almost undanceable until you remember Stravinsky’s tarantella from Pulcinella. (Which perhaps comes to mind because both feel a bit like Christmas to me in the way the overture to The Muppet Christmas Carol or a Bracebridge Dinner do.)
Measures 1-24 of ‘Fantasia on the Dargason’
At some point, the familiar “Greensleeves” theme appears, but Holst doesn’t pause or modulate or make a big show of it. He simply lets it float in—a soft, legato 3/4—right on top of the still-churning 6/8. Suddenly you’re hearing a measure of six eighth notes counted two ways at once: duple below, triple above. Holst’s conductor’s note instructs: conduct it in one. Try it. Tap your foot. Snap your fingers. You’ll see what he means.
Measures 49-72
But even before that moment, there’s plenty to listen for. When the saxophone passes the melody off and starts the bagpipe-drone, when the clarinet leaps up the octave and the harmonic support begins to thicken—what kind of movement does that suggest to you? When the percussion enters with jingle bells? When it explodes with bass drums on the upbeat? When the lower brass hangs onto the Dargason pulse while the treble goes briefly into 2/4 eighth-notes?
The “B.D.” is for bass drum
This is the work of choreography—of matching shape and time—and it’s never purely technical. It’s a blend of instinct, architecture, musicology, and feeling. And it leads, inevitably, to the next (or sometimes prior) question: what is this for?
You’ve encountered this piece here, in a blog post from Madison Ballet Special Projects. But imagine for a moment that Holst’s Fantasia on the Dargason had, in fact, been a piece of music that people wanted to dance to, or see in a concert-dance setting, or use for a ballet... What would that ballet be?
Would it be a neoclassical work—bodies in motion, musicality as narrative, form as content, something that shows the viewing and hearing audience the music in a way they could never have imagined? Or given its demotic origins, something more specifically evocative—an imagined village festival, a solstice ritual, or… (given the deft handling of folk elements with lush, clever orchestration and a bit of chromaticism and understated showmanship) an English-themed Act 2 Nutcracker divertissement that never was?
And then what if we allow ourselves to be time-travelers, or think about our choreography anachronistically?
Holst composed the Second Suite in 1911. That’s Fokine’s era. It was published in 1922—the beginning of Balanchine’s. Suppose a Diaghilev-like impresario—touring the Anglosphere with a Russian company—identified or commissioned an English homage for the London run. What might Fokine have made of it? What might a young Balanchine have seen in it ten years later? And what about you?
What would your “Fantasia on the Dargason” look like?
Would it be festive or elegiac? Bright as its brass or warm as cozy candlelight? Would it call for pointe shoes or bare feet, Shropshire lads and lasses or Edwardian lords and ladies? Would it close the evening, or open it, or (as I imagined in my Tchaikovsky/Holst alternate history) be something like a Nutcracker “English Toffee” we’ve not yet seen on this Earth?
Below, I’ve linked again to a public domain recording and a reduced conductor’s score. Even if you don’t read music, glance at the score as you listen. Watch how the ink thickens as more parts enter. There’s a choreography to that too.
So take the challenge—on World Ballet Day or any day—to see what this little fantasia makes move in you.
-CF
File:Gustav Holst - Second Suite in F - IV. Fantasia on the "Dargason".ogg - Wikipedia
