An arresting speaker with a flair for gnomic utterance, Graham never rejected verbal communication she read constantly, especially poetry. “Movement never lies,” she regularly said. Read: Why the dancing makes ‘This Is America’ so uncomfortable to watchįor the legendary American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, what defined the language of dance was truthfulness. (This concept explains why some of us wince at contortionists.) Bypassing speech to hit the body, dance can elicit a muscular as well as an emotional response, conveying ideas and feelings that resist language, even predate it. It works its effects in part through what the critic John Martin called “kinesthetic sympathy”: The viewer, in a kind of “inner mimicry,” imagines what it would feel like to carry out the movements she sees. Yeats selected dance as his image of how human beings express themselves through action: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”Ĭhoreographers often describe dance as a language. But even the most committed melancholics have found in dance a model for life lived in time, bound to constraints but offering chances for creative response. Such a blissfully aesthetic attitude may strike us as Pollyannaish: life as a cabaret. We are all “natural choreographers,” continually navigating through space. If we look at the world through Parson’s eyes, we find that dance is all around us, in people stretching or hugging or standing in line. City life, especially, requires dancelike coordination: Strangers streaming down the sidewalk must find a “group rhythm.” It is more like the natural, everyday motion of strolling down the street, which, after all, involves considerations of line, space, and tempo. Parson, an acclaimed choreographer best known for her genre-bending work combining dance with theater, offers an exuberant, if lightly sketched, conception of human life as a collective dance, winding and unspooling in endless variations as we move through time and space. By making dance resemble life, they show us how life, in turn, resembles dance.Īnnie-B Parson’s new book, The Choreography of Everyday Life, makes a more radical claim, rejecting the distinction between dance and life altogether. Such performances narrow the distinction between offstage and onstage movement, reminding us that dance is ordinary and ubiquitous. Others have highlighted such mundane actions as walking, skipping, kneeling, or toe-tapping in their works. Some choreographers have turned to amateurs instead of trained performers. (The choreographer Elizabeth Streb’s 1995 piece Breakthru, for example, requires a dancer to leap through a pane of glass.) But today’s artists are also keenly interested in integrating everyday movements into dance. Much contemporary choreography emphasizes virtuosity and difficulty, incorporating aerial or acrobatic movement or feats of physical daring. Dance returns us to the earliest mysteries of human creation. Anthropologists, meanwhile, have found expressive or ecstatic movement at the core of many religious rituals: healing rites, initiation ceremonies, funerals, weddings, preparations for war. Psychologists have argued that group dance supports social bonding. Some scientists, having observed that chimpanzees occasionally sway and clap while listening to piano music, believe that the desire to dance predates humanity. Cave paintings show that humans have been dancing since at least the Stone Age. This takes years of training and enormous sacrifice-and for what? An audience composed of a sliver of the urban intelligentsia a career butterfly-like in its brevity, inevitably cut short by age or injury.Īnd yet: Dance is also spontaneous, elemental, universal. Dancers are, in the words of the choreographer William Forsythe, “Olympic-level athletes” whose aim is a perfect synthesis of athletics and artistry.
#DEATH NOTE GIF LIVE ACTION PROFESSIONAL#
The demands placed on professional dancers are so punishing that those of us who live outside this spartan vocation may struggle to understand the labor involved. Concert dance is one of the most elite art forms imaginable. The status of dance in American culture is deeply paradoxical.
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