Dance History II

5/9/03

Professor Burchfield

Meditations on Dance as Metaphor

Dance is Like Water
Water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Without these two elements water would be something altogether different. Likewise dance is dependent on two crucial elements: space and time. Take one away, and there is no dance. If you cannot hold on to it, if you cannot control it, if you cannot pin it down, how do you then submerge yourself in it? How do you know “the dance” if the dance is always escaping you? Does this mean you can only know it in the moment? The memory of the dance is not sufficient. The video of the dance is not sufficient. The notation of the dance is not sufficient. Merce Cunningham said in an interview,
Yes it’s difficult to talk about dance. It’s not so much intangible as evanescent. I compare ideas on dance, and dance itself, to water. Surely, describing a book is certainly easier than describing water. Well, maybe… Everyone knows what water is or what dance is, but this very fluidity makes them intangible. I’m not talking about the quality of dance, but about its nature (Cunningham, 27).

Cunningham further illuminates his claim by noting the difference between dance and music. He says that at least music has a notated score that can be read in order to gain some understanding of what the music sounds like, whereas dance is often notated in memory. He says,
Also, and this is obvious, dancers work with their bodies, and each body is unique. That is why you can’t describe a dance that hasn’t been seen, and the way of seeing it has everything to do the dancers, and that’s the trap. Personally, I find it marvelous. How could one experience dance except through the dancer himself? (ibid 27)

Cunningham is implying that there is no dance without the dancers. The human beings that express through the form of dance make dance visible. A video, a photograph, a set of notations of a dance is not the dance. It is an image of the dance once or twice removed. The dance exists in the flesh.

Dance is Like Religion
I have noticed that some people pursue dance with what could be perceived as an irrational devotion. This is not to say that the daily practice of dance is inherently religious. Irrational obsession with a form does not signify religious or spiritual greatness. The form itself is what signifies greatness. I argue that the ability for dance to act as a vehicle for transcendence is what deems it religious for those who strive to transcend. Although it may be impossible to quantify transcendence or recognize it in is purest form, some dancers have written about this very quality of dance. For example, (problematic as she is) Ruth St. Denis claimed in her essay Religious Manifestations in Dance that she came to a spiritual awakening around the age of sixteen that she describes as, “It was my first dance urge to relate myself to cosmic rhythm,” (Sorell, 13). This moment of spiritual enlightenment (so she claims) is interwoven with her desire to dance. She writes,
I believe that my whole creative life stemmed from this magic hour under the stars on that hilltop. It was then that my religious consciousness emerged to flower years afterward into definite forms of religious dancing in which there is no sense of division between spirit and flesh, religion and art. It is the same unity that inspires and governs my every vision for the votary dance of the future (ibid 14).

Interestingly, Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan had two different ideas about religion. Ruth St. Denis claimed of Isadora that she was “dancing God right in front of you (Mazo, 36).” Duncan, who happened to be an atheist believed in “the religion of the beauty of the human foot” (ibid 36).” It has been said that, “What Ruth St. Denis called God and found outside herself, Duncan discovered in her own body and the breathing world. Her dancing was pagan (ibid 36).”
If Ruth St. Denis believed in her ability to access the cosmos through dance, then I believe it was possible. Although Isadora Duncan was an atheist I believe that she too could access the cosmos through her dance. In 1903 Isadora Duncan said, “She [the dancer] will realize the mission of the woman’s body and the holiness of all of its parts.” It is clear that she searched for, and many would argue was successful in, finding “God” inside herself rather than from an external source.

Dance is Like Emptiness
As an American artist I asked myself after September 11, “How do we continue making art?” When life becomes absurd and our small daily routines seem insignificant how do we find importance in our existence? Dance has the capacity to fill the void. I imagine I might have asked myself these same questions if I was a Japanese artist living in Japan after the bombing of Hiroshima. Native to Japan, butoh dance came about in the late 50’s and early 60’s in post World War II Japan (Stein 376). The important butoh dancer, Kazuo Ohno, is well known for his tribute Admiring La Argentina. About his performances, which are structured improvisations, he writes,
The empty stage, the bare stage you appear on, without any preparation, does not mean that it contains nothing…The vacant space is gradually being filled and in the end, something is realized there… It may be the kind of thing that takes a lifetime to learn—in my case I instantaneously knew the fact that the empty space actually was filled and I danced in joy and excitement (382).

Dance is Hip Hop
“I belong to the church of hip-hop.”
–Eisa Davis, Feminism and the Art of Hip-Hop Maintenance
Marginalized and pushed to the fringes of society, modern dance is empowering for those who tend to lack power in society. Similarly, the form of break dance was developed on the streets by minority cultures as a vehicle for empowerment. Break dance is racialized in the sense that the racist practices and institutions that oppress black people have historically prosecuted black dance, and then shamelessly exploited it. For example, in 1980 the High Times Crew was arrested in the New York subway for what the police mistook to be “fighting.” The supposed “fighting” was actually break dancing (George, 18). In 1984 the San Bernardino City Council “votes to impose a fine for public dancing because it interferes with mall shopping,” despite police reports that show that breaking had actually decreased gang violence (ibid, 23). Only one year after police arrested members of the High Times Crew, ABC’s 20/20 airs a report in classic blaxploitation style on the new “rap phenomenon.” Shortly after, 1983 release of the film Flashdance “hastens the burnout of breaking” (ibid, 22). Pop culture’s fascination with break dance brought negative consequences. Racist ideologies inscribed in US culture were used against b-boy culture, as it happened to be mostly non-white. The stereotype of the “violent” black man was perpetuated by the police’s assumption that groups of “b-boys” were automatically gang members, and therefore violent by nature. Similar racial stereotypes attached to hip hop culture are that MC’s and DJ’s are Black, breakers are Puerto Rican and graffiti writers are White.

Dance is Like Change
Steve Paxton wrote in his essay Improvisation Is a Word for Something That Can’t Keep a Name,
Improvisation is a word for something which can’t keep a name; if it does stick around long enough to acquire a name, it has begun to move toward fixity. Improvisation tends in that direction.

Dance is the art of taking place. Improvisational dance finds the places.

-to be continually continued (Paxton 426).

Steve Paxton’s ideas about improvisation are similar to Merce Cunningham’s ideas noted earlier about dance and water. They are both illuminating dance in its ephemeral nature. Dance may be like water as Cunningham argued but that does not mean that water is like change. Cunningham was known to reference Einstein’s notion that “There are no fixed points in space.” Applying this idea to dance magnifies its relationship to space and time. No points are fixed which means no bodies are fixed and therefore the dance that is fleeting in the moment is not fixed in space. If there is stillness, in the dance or in the world, is this simply an illusion? I would argue that Cunningham and Paxton both would say that stillness is an illusion. Movement is integral and essential to our existence as human beings. One could say: it is true that we are always in a state of change. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus believed that everything is in a constant state of flux. How are we to name a thing or ourselves if it is always shifting into something it previously was not? The point is that things exist as they are in a state of change. Changing makes them what they are. If change is constant and points in space are not fixed then dance is an art form well suited for the rules of the physical world.

Dance is a Politic
It is impossible to fully understand the dance without viewing the bodies that dance it. Somehow in that viewing, the distance from the viewer and the dancer, or the viewer and the dance for that matter becomes laden with the possibility of political opinions. There is a “politic of seeing,” as bell hooks puts it in her book Art in My Mind, and “the perspective from which we approach art is overdetermined by location” (hooks 2). Seeing is political. The politics of vision can convolute the true meaning of an image-if there is such a thing as true meaning. If anything, the politics of what we think and see when we look at art is complex, laden with relationality of the viewer to object/subject and vice versa. The range in between the intimacy or distance one feels in relation to art allow multiple meanings to occur. If art is ontologically indefinable, which I believe it to be, then the definition comes from the meaning we give it. In other words the meaning is there because we put it there.

Dance is Poem
Winds of May, that dance on the sea,
Dancing a ring –around in glee
From furrow to furrow, while overhead
The foam flies up to be garlanded,
In silvery arches spanning the air,
Saw you my rue love anywhere?
Welladay! Welladay!
For the winds of May!
Love is unhappy when love is away!
-James Joyce (9).

Dance is Communal
Simply put, dance brings people together. To experience the rapture of a human body next to another is unlike any feeling I know. It certainly validates my sense of community and furthermore my place within that community. Mark Eby, a filmmaker wrote in his essay Ancestral Memory about why he uses dance in his films.
The reason I make films about bodies that swirl in the midst, and shuffle in the dark, and sway in long parallel lines in the midday sun—bodies that circle and step to the beat of the drum and the ipu and the shake of the rattle, voices that cry out in ancient song to the rhythm of the heart pumping—the reason I re-create these performances frame by frame is that they invoke a spirit rarely remembered by the world that is becoming networked and codified through the tentacles of its own digital technology. A world where bodies sit rigidly transfixed by a glowing screen, only the fingers performing a rapid tap dance on the attached keyboard, as they practice contemporary art and communication that requires no bodily contact, no presence (Eby 256)

Our bodies are estranged and separated from each other. Somehow there is the illusion that through technology we are being brought closer together. Artists like Eby see this as a lie. The false sense of intimacy created by technology and the Internet cannot replace human ritual like dancing together. Dance is inherently communal. A dance is often made a dance when it is viewed. Observers that witness the dance complete and validate its existence. Dance belongs to community. It must be seen so that we can see each other.

Dance is Transcendence
“I am going to put my estranged body in a place where it can be free from the trappings of consciousness.”
-Anzu Furukawa (Viala 54).
Dance relies on the physical body to communicate. The physical body is the vehicle for transcendence as well as the hindrance. It grounds us to the physical world. But, then again human beings are of the physical world. Right? Tatsumi Hijikata a Japanese butoh dancer wrote, “Our concept of the body is truly anarchic. The poet Sakutaro Ogihara wrote, ‘Beneath the hat, there is a face.’ The fact that there is a face beneath the hat is obvious, yet the Japanese still find it strange. We immediately feel that the body is bound up with something strange (Viala, 184). Another butoh dancer, Min Tanaka wrote, “I don’t dance in the place, but I am the place, (ibid 158). Many butoh dancers speak of transcending the physical body. It is almost as if they are rebelling against their own bodies. Another butoh dancer describes what I perceive as embodiment by saying, “I keep one of my sisters alive in my body when I am absorbed in creating a butoh piece, she tears off the darkness in my body and eats more than is necessary of it—when she stands up in my body I sit down impulsively, (ibid 73) Butoh is a powerful form. It seems as thought through the practice of butoh one can transcend not only the world but more specifically themselves.

Bibliography

Cunningham, Merce. The Dancer and the Dance. New York: Marian Boyars Inc., 1980.
Davis, Eisa. Feminism and the Art of Hip-Hop Maintenance. In to be real: Telling the
Truth and changing the Face of Feminism. Walker, Rebecca, ed. New York:
Anchor Books. 1995.
Eby, Mark. Ancestral Memory. In Envisioning Dance: On Film and Video. ed. Judy
Mitoma. London: Routledge, 2002.
George, Nelson. Buppies, B-Boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture.
New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press, 1995.
Joyce, James. The Works of James Joyce. London: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1995.
Mazo, Joseph H. Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America. Princeton:
Princeton Book Company, 1977.
Paxton, Steve. Improvisation Is a Word for Something That Can’t Keep a Name. .” In
Moving History/ Dancing Cultures. eds. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
Sorell, Walter. The Dance Has Many Faces. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company,
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Stein, Bonnie Sue. Butoh: “Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty, and Mad.” In
Moving History/ Dancing Cultures. eds. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
Viala, Jean and Nourit Masson-Sekine. Butoh: Shades of Darkness. Tokyo: Shufunotomo
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