'Clement Crisp is in the House' - Mediated Delineations of the Composer's Role in Dance

In 2004, Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance Company gave the premiere in London of his AtaXia, danced to the complete score of Michael Gordon’s Trance (1994), a major work wellknown in modern music circles and twice commercially recorded. Yet dance reviewers of AtaXia 28 described the score in terms of ‘background sounds’ and ‘a tape’, even though the music was played live by a chamber orchestra. This paper examines causes for this level of mediation, where here the score precedes the choreography, or where elsewhere the compositional impulse is misjudged by those interpreting events for public representation.