The baby's sleeping in the crib up top/And baby's sleeping above you/You will lift him to the parking lot…/I would like to see a little more propriety,/Cooperate with me and answer me/I know now, I know now, I know now,/ I'm never gonna tell on you… /The lady's got no clothes she's at the shop./But if she'd knew then she'd kill you./The bugs are out cause they come out at night,/Usually they just bite our hands./Cause normally we have clothes on without a fight…/And baby's sleeping against you./I think he'd pray for an old motor car./Or any bed made without you…
“Baby’s Romance” – Chris Garneau
It’s not a coincidence that Orpheus embodies music, poetry, prophecy and dance together. Dancing is a natural expansion for a poet who has not ruined herself or himself by poetical excess; dance is a natural topic study when vice has done its work. Not everybody knows that Emily Dickinson had a little secret dancing spot near the left-hand flower pot but she did. Everybody knows that Walt Whitman, as does still Lana Del Ray, sang the body electric; I once saw Alan Ginsberg wriggle his hips on the Berkeley campus midway.
I also want to tell readers that contemporary dance works pretty much like Chris Garneau’s lovely “Baby’s Romance” does – parts are cited above. And dance works for pretty much the same reasons and with pretty much the same elements of composition.
And I want to say that I like dance a lot, a lot not just because I’m a poet but because dance, especially contemporary dance, always speaks to what concerns me in ways that touch me even when it bores me to tears.
This is worth notice because into the end of 2017 and the first part of 2018, I – and I hope others will, too – be writing around, sometimes, on, sometimes about, sometimes, up contemporary performance actors – choreographers, dancers, circassiens (contemporary circus performers) such as Jann Gallois, Oona Doherty or Cécile Mont-Reynaud – as well as variously tinted visual artists, culture creators, actors or facilitators such as Emilie Chaix, Céline Le Tixérant, Pierre Ajavon, Carla Querejeta Roca, Philippe Rillon or Caroline Wei or Tatjana Jankovic.
I say writing “around”, “on”, “about”, “up” rather than “commenting” or “critiquing” or “reporting” on them, or on the many others I’ve met these past years because I see myself in ongoing conversation with them, in the same way that I am conversing in thought word and deed with my remembered and unremembered pasts and presents, especially, with songs off the radio.
My notion of “conversing with being and perceiving” is what I think Jann Gallois meant when she told me this past summer that every encounter has meaning – she used the word “signification”, which connotes “importance” as well as “meaning”.
French usage implies, and I personally believe, that a signifier is always significant. What is meaningful sticks to your life, and is, of course, important for you and yours.
There really isn’t any option: the meaningful either makes itself a part of you or you make yourself a part of it.
That’s how people generally work. Or is it?
Isn’t it?
Just how do people work, really?
I thought I did know but now I am sure I don’t. Maybe I can’t.
There are clues, though, that come through to me through dance, both through the ongoing conversation and because of its nature.
Northern Ireland’s up-and-coming performer-choreographer Oona Doherty told me that she had believed that sectarian prejudice was a thing of the past… until she started working on what I think of as her “joy and gladness” dance project, Hard to be soft.
Sectarian comity, it seems, has not replaced sectarian hatred chez elle any more than personal identity has replaced “race” identity chez moi – I mean you, America!, who still haven’t done the right thing by those damned h-bombs...
Apparently, the hatreds of religion, like the hatreds of race, have just been displaced…
So, what are people? And, if we aren’t on the road to perfection through replacement of our doubtful parts, how does displacement work, and how can it be made to work in favor of human virtue, exactly?
Dance won’t tell me, of course, but it’s corporal nature lets me look with my eyes, roughly, wordlessly. Unlike the poets, priests and politicians, dance will only ever show human beings – no amount of choreographical megalomania or political blithering will ever lift that blessed optic of silence.
Look!
Sergei Polunin is flying! So that’s what “Take me to church” was really about!?
Jann Gallois synchronizes bodies. Human fusion is perfectly possible!?
Betrand Russell, I knew that pain ain’t exactly subjective!?: Doherty makes bread and butter portraying pain!
Even on stage, even in the Espace Cardin, even on the Champs Elysées, dance lets Kaori Ito split her Dad off from that crabby old guy who’s been mooning around her Mom since she can remember!?
So how does dance work for me?
As with song, contemporary dance, in particular, but dance in general, too, works makes sense of “sensibility” – like Jane Austen meant it in her other classic book: sensitivity with spontaneous feeling and emotion.
“Sense” can mean lots of things. For Jane Austen I think it meant “employed sensitivity, reason with emotional restraints”.
Today, I think “sense” means a savant structure of reason, intuition and emotion that adds to soft rather than hard knowledge. I’ll say, with reserves, that I know “sense” when it’s there and, especially, I know when it’s not.
As with song, dancing is the art of control of tempo, specifically, for dance, control of the flicker of consciousness of the spectators. Choreography gets human consciousness moving faster or moving slower through instrumentalizing corporal expression and, through expression, sensibility.
Tempo is done within a “narrative frame”, as we said in my college days.
I define “narrative” largely since both the means of perceiving and perception structure what is perceived even without the intervention of “story” – that is, any sort of intentional formatting of structure.
The structuring principle of perception and the sensibility contained in words is why Baby’s Romance works ‘though you can’t make head or tale of the story.
Bringing these four elements of story, tempo, sensibility and sense in the proper pot and seasoning them with luck, technicity and talent or genius, or both, will generate a delicious ragout of sense for choreographers, performers, crew and spectators together.
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