Thursday, March 24, 2011

An Outsider’s Look into Dance: The Language of the Body, Part 2, by Joe Pierangeli

…let it be beautiful as it may, but get
at least a little meaning in,
this not-much for which we always settle.
            -Hayden Carruth

           
As darkness steals the world from the window frames and the rain continues to fall and the cold refuses to let go, rehearsal enters its third hour. These are the moments no one gets to see. The sweat and the agony. Skin makes a much sharper squeak against the hardwood than socks do. After three hours you begin to empathize. Rehearsal is slated to run four hours tonight.
Hemingway was once challenged to write a short story in only six words. This is what he wrote, “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” The point was to see how much content he could squeeze into a space too small to contain it. Every medium has its physical and conceptual limitations. These must be overcome. Artistic creativity is capped only by the scope of the artist’s imagination. This must be contained. Here are the parameters. I am your audience. Reach me. Make me feel.
The body’s relationship to space is defined by movement. The stage is inherently a limited space. I watch the choreographers pace the boards, hand on hip, pencils twisting up their hair. They lead the dance then watch. Stop the music, give direction, start the music, lead the dance and watch again. They run through the same pieces over and over and over. Measuring space. Pacing the movements. There is no magic formula. No epiphanic moments. Just hard work, dedication and love for the craft and for the form.
 Watching a dance rehearsal is like watching a sculptor work. Only the body is far more fluid than stone or metal. The choreographer shapes it, finds the angles, the posture, the motions that unite them, and the dancers make it breathe. A collaboration the old masters must have envied. Imagine Rodin telling ‘The Thinker’ to change hands. Just to see how it looks. Then change back.
Would it matter if ‘The Thinker’ rested his chin on the left hand versus the right? Rodin thought so. They say 90% of communication is body language. Dancers just throw out the leftover ten. I suppose it’s up to the individual. But the next time you are introduced to someone, try to shake their left hand.
There is an essential disconnect in the artist/audience relationship. Actually there are two. The first is in the transposition of content from the artist’s mind to their medium, be it dance, literature, painting, sculpture. The second exists between the medium and the audience. It is in these disconnects that the challenge, the trick, the terror and the joy of art dwell. They are the birthplace of symbolism. They are why critics have jobs. They are why no love poem now or ever has said ‘I love you’ twelve lines in a row then ended. To tell your sweetheart how you feel, one must talk about everything except love. Only then will your feelings translate. Don’t say I love you, rather say, “…I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have laid my dreams beneath your feet. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”
This is all the more true in the case of dance. How would one communicate the frenetic air of a wedding party? The sadness of a funeral, using only the body? Try it. Write a love poem. Choreograph a dance. Then ask again whether or not the right hand versus the left matters.
At one point during Barbara’s piece a dancer asked, “Where are the arms on this?” She held them out, one to each side and I thought, why is she asking? There they are, right there, what’s the problem? She was asking: are the elbows straight or bent? Held firmly or soft?
Each audience member brings their own imagery, their own back story. This is one of the great gifts and challenges of art. Enter essential disconnect #2.
For me, when her arms were bent I saw a tree branch, something soft, pliable, something that sways with the wind. When they were straight I saw a steel beam, rib of the skyscraper, post and lintel, something strong upon which lesser objects stand. Barbara answered that she wanted the elbows bent and relaxed. But what I remember most is that the wrists were to be bent also, held softly and when she showed Barbara her interpretation of this, the dancer held her hand just so, and the wrist was there, at such an angle, that it looked just like the hand of Michelangelo’s Adam, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, reaching for the hand of the creator. Amen.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

An Outsider’s Look into Dance: The Language of the Body, Part 1 by: Joe Pierangeli

We flipped on the light and opened the curtains. The windows looked out on the clouds and the moving trees. We swept the floor while the dancers filed in. They began their warm up. Fascinating, the movements of a dancer. Not just in the act of their art, but in mundane every day things. Walking across the room. That last sip of water. Changing a pair of socks. There is a vitality, an awareness of motion lacking in the average man, the average woman. It is more than the interplay of muscle and bone and the angle of the sidewalk. There is intention. There is grace.
            Dancers talk with their bodies. In plain conversation. Telling, perhaps, a story from the work week, or where they ate dinner last night, the toe will tap this way or that to emphasize specific points. A flourish of the hand. A sudden change of stance. It comes naturally to them, like fingers touching the chin of a poet in thought. Or an astrophysicist walking past his front door. This was my introduction to the language of dance.

            Rehearsal started when the iPod dock came out. This particular dock cycles through the colors of the rainbow while playing. Music and the body are the only tools a dancer needs to create their art. And sometimes they don’t need the music.
            “How do they remember all that?” I asked Barbara Caioli, choreographer and artistic director, in reference to a staccato list of instructions from resident choreographer Rochelle Rapaszky to her dancers as the music blared.
            “Your body remembers.” She said. “You use your brain until the body takes over.”
            It must hurt to slam your feet and knees and elbows on the hard stage over and over. One dancer wore a wrist brace and I thought about that until they started dancing. As a writer, I couldn’t help but try to quantify how many words are contained within a single movement. Take for example, hands clutching the throat that certain way, or falling prone to the floor. The body is more than a means of conveyance from birth to death, a biological system that once wound down can never be started up again. The body is a tool of expression, a voice, common to all cultures, all languages, yet owing to none. As their movements flowed from one to the next like rhyme, the choreographers spoke about projecting emotion to inform the movements and determining focus to bring the steps to life. This is the content of dance. The language of the body.