Disappearing Act
As a performing art, dance is often talked about as an ephemeral form. It disappears before your very eyes. From the perspective of both audience and performer, it can vanish as quickly as it has been conceived, making it almost impossible to be fully realised in representative terms. This ephemeral quality is present in the performing arts in general, although dance and movement (as I wish to discuss it here) is unique in that it is a silent art form. It does not always have the safety net of spoken language to support or facilitate meaning and, differently to mime, does not by default use descriptive body language. For a dance to happen, only three key elements are required: time, space and body. The inherent involvement of the body on some level means that the potential for densely-layered and highly subjective generation of meanings – or intertexts – in the act is almost infinite.
As a dance performer, I have too often encountered and felt baffled by having gone on stage, done my stuff and come off feeling like I had very little idea what just happened. The piece escaped me, slipped through my fingers like water. As an audience member of contemporary theatre dance, a similar experience can occur: the movement happens and is gone the instant you have seen it. One feels only to have perceived it. Meaning can be hard to grasp and interpretation can transform before it has even had the chance to solidify. This experience can be alienating if one is seeking narrative and does not find it, if one is seeking something solid, unambiguous and clearly coded. In our bombarding society of advertising, commerce and image production, something which has no apparent usage or instantly discernable message can be coldly received and discarded as having no measurable productive value. I propose that it is precisely this ‘non-sense’ that makes the art of dance and its ephemeral nature peculiar, wondrous and ‘useful’.
Despite the fiction of the theatrical situation, the body is real. It is corpo-real – earthly, worldly, human. In fact, ever in a state of flux and transformation, it is both the most and least consistent thing we have in our lives. It is a place of contradictions; at once the mysterious and concrete site of communication, at once reliable and faulty, at once universal and culturally shaped. It is the interface between us and the world we belong to and create. We all have it. We all are it. The Cartesian notion of body-mind dualism, established in the 17th Century by René Descartes, paints a picture of the body as separate to the mind – the body as base, the mind as rational, creating a clear hierarchy of mind over body. This perspective, which is still prevalent in (actually, seems to be incorporated into) western thinking, undermines the possibility of a much more integrated, whole and globally intelligent being, in relationship with its environment and others in a far more tangible, sensate and yet less ‘intelligible’ way. In this sense, we underestimate ourselves. Acknowledging the innate intelligence of the whole body – ‘body’ including the mind and ‘mind’ being considered as something not only isolated and encapsulated in the brain – just might begin to reconnect us on a deeper level with what makes us human.
To be engaged in movement – the act of dancing or watching dance – is potentially to be paying attention or giving importance in that very moment to qualities which capitalism does not allow time for, so which are not necessarily valued in our contemporary neo-liberal society. Among these ‘under-productive’ qualities, for example, might be perceptive intuition; sensitivity (becoming sensate); engagement with process, rather than product-based goals; and becoming (moving, changing), as opposed to being (or asserting a fixed identity). Live movement and its disappearance intrinsically embrace the possibility of change. This is not to suggest that dancing is devoid of striving, or without desire - for expertise, for pleasure, for ‘doing it well’. These are all the motivations which move movement, allowing something to be communicated with as much clarity as possible, which subsequently lets people in to what they are seeing.
Dance artist and choreographer, Deborah Hay, talks about the dancer as a “site for inquiry, i.e. a bodily presence trained in the performance of parallel experiences of perception”. In her mission statement, she expresses the wish to:
…expand the notion of choreography to include the conditions by which the choreographer transmits a dance to a performer, accounting for the many and often discontinuous threads within a visible and invisible context for beholding now.
- Deborah Hay (2011)
Tara Silverthorn
