I've been waiting up all night/But you never show/You said it'd be all right./But I just don't know/Can you teach me how to dance real slow?
“Up All Night” – Oliver Tank
Tempo is the key, tempo is how the dancer or choreographer control the flicker of consciousness. Acting on “expression” or sensibility, tempo makes a dance in the same way it makes a song of the eight nouns and verbs among the 29 words of “Up All Night”.
It’s all relative, of course, and scored with caveat, but, basically, speed up the tempo too much and the sensibility sloshes away into the iffy septic pit of artistic failure. Slow tempo down too much and the spectators will be watching the exits with more restrained anxiety than paratroopers in heavy flak.
Get it just right, and people are putting you on their listening lists and Philip Chbeeb and René Kester are using your music as accompaniment for their video fables. Get the tempo just right and you’re Marie-Caroline Hominal and her “Taxi Dancers”.
As I’ve indicated previously, it was my unexpected discovery of Céline Le Tixérant, draughtswoman of color and painter of dancing, that set my mental gears rolling and ticking about why I like dance, what I think dance is made of and how it works.
Thought, even about something as important as dance, cannot be separated from ordinary life and feeling or experience. That said, I can now offer some explanation for why I so much enjoyed Hominal’s “Taxi Dancers” when I saw it first about two years ago.
It had been bothering me because my ex-squeeze, Karine – a very sophisticated admirer of contemporary dance, mind and very often a most welcome companion – spluttered about this piece for an hour together.
She (unjustly) accused me of taking her out to see any dumb ol’ thing because I just can’t sit still at home and just talk, for once. But, ‘though - as there always must be with such trash - there is some truth to all of this, such small truth does not justify one’s turning in one’s seat and hissing that I therefore have no esthetic discernment and that, in a way that no gentleman would ever do, allow Karine, herself, to be bored and uncomfortable because of, ahem, (unnamed) “eccentricities”.
Despite all the parentheticality, underlining, italicizing and quotemarking, the plain fact is that Karine just didn’t like “Taxi Dancers”. Because the dancers hardly move for 45 minutes and she’s afraid to be uncool by admitting that she doesn’t bother to distinguish between what she likes in dance and what is good dance. I did/do like “Taxi Dancers”, a lot, and especially pleased with the dancers’ hardly moving for 45 minutes. I do distinguish between what I like and what is good dance; while I am sometimes bored, I am never disappointed. So there. I’ll bet Karine was even less pleased with these latter facts than with the former half-truths.
In the same way that some people think that singing is about the command of voice, melody and harmony – singing on key or off key and such – Karine, at bottom, thinks that dance is about agitating body parts well. Like fucking.
“Taxi Dancers” doesn’t move much, so it’s not much like the fucking I’ve been involved in.
All the same, it works: at 2% movement and 3% faint rustling and 95% expressed sensibility, “Taxi Dancers” makes 100% sense.
We saw it in Aubervilliers, just over the walls of 1871, above La Villette, where it featured as part of the program of Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis. The department of Seine-Saint-Denis, often called affectionately by its post-code “93” – neuf-trois – by its inhabitants, is an economically dynamic place with a lot of poorer young people trying to get ahead in it. Rencontres internationales uses the large number of good-quality performance spaces in the neuf-trois to feature solid contemporary dancing from Europe and outside Europe. For instance, last year in Montreuil, you could enjoy the lucid choreographer-scenographer Keren Levy from Israel. “Taxi Dancer” creator Hominal is from Switzerland.
Her performance rolls out within the story of “taxi dancing”, a commercial sex-substitute service half-way between prostitution and lonely-hearts, in its time, viewed as risqué but not taboo.
Taxi-dancing was popular in early- to mid-20th century America, when most courtship still included dancing and did not, theoretically, at least, go much beyond kissing and a feel. A “taxi dancer” sold what is erotically or sentimentally consoling in a dance in the same way a sex worker sells the customer an orgasm, or its subjective equivalent, in a sex act.
Taxi dancing is said to be still current in some parts of the world. They must be dull parts indeed.
It is clear that firm, professional, control of the flicker of consciousness is absolutely essential to any successful esthetic consideration of taxi dancing.
Anything else would be anthropology, not dance. Watching an actual evening of it would be the entertainment equivalent of watching Karine eating a honey melon, for which she has a feral passion.
But Karine’s passion and manner of passionate eating, though much more interesting to me personally than the commercial allurements of taxi dancing or taxi dancers ever could be, is no more a work of art than any other passion or practice. Alas, Karine’s melon eating is just her, Karine, just as taxi dancers without Hominal’s intervention would be just themselves.
“So, Karine,” I might say to Karine, today, during a tense meeting someplace in town, and without a trace of bitterness, “Here’s why Hominal’s quasi-movementless ‘Taxi Dancers’ is good art and why your judgments are plain wrong and your treatment of me was scandalously unjust.”
I might or might not say this while looking her in the eye and add that I knew then that she was planning to dump me and just using the occasion to prepare the big push.
Your command of your melon-eating tempo, Karine, I’d continue, unlike Hominal’s command of her taxi-dancing, I’d say, is entirely determined by and inseparable from, your story of yourself. The melon passion is just a subsection of your way of eating anything you really like, ma chère, my dear ex-compagne: slow and steady she goes, look, lick, suck in, loll around, grind, swallow, long breath… your body tension rises, your upper back, exquisitely between the sharp points of your shoulder blades, lightly heats and slightly wets, then, as the taste spreads through you, your tension slackens…
It’s gorgeous really, even now, Karine, it all makes me breathe hard, but it isn’t art, or, even, porno for poor sots.
It’s just you.
Love or passion for a story, a person or a thing, I’d continue to say, is often mistaken for esthetic appreciation, as esthetic emotion is often mistaken for love. But the only thing the two feelings share is the power to make you laugh or cry, move mountains or throw yourself from same.
While you might learn to control your tempo, Karine, as Hominal controls the tempo of her piece, and thus take power over the flicker of my consciousness, while you might learn, Karine, even, to instrumentalize your melon-eating passion in pursuit of some goal outside of yourself, it would be, precisely, for yourself, with your tempo matched to your sensibility and the needs of your ongoing story.
God, I wish I’d known this before.
Unlike the person Karine, the choreographer Hominal does use her control of tempo to alter my consciousness of the sensibilities framed within the suspended and circumscribed taxi-dancing story.
Counter-intuitively, the sense in the inevitable slow stickiness of taxi-dancing is best got at by slowing everything down to near motionless.
To do the same as Hominal, Karine, I’d lecture, you’d have to make up a story called something like “Honey Melon Eater”, about a “Karine” that can never be the ongoing you.
Didn’t you once tell me, I’d say, pointedly, that I was doing just this, making you into a work of art and then treating you as my finished masterpiece? I might, at this point, wave my hand to order a beer, sitting quietly awhile, Hemingway-like, letting my thoughts develop.
When the beer arrived, I might take a sip and continue that a loving observer might be able to enjoy watching your honey-melon eating, Karine, just as a client might enjoy looking at comely taxi-dancers. But since, like an actual working taxi dancer, you are simply expressing, being, yourself in a way I like or already understand, I am a just a voyeur, welcome or not, not a spectator enjoying a work of art.
You see, Karine, I’d conclude, perhaps clapping my hand to my contracting breast, ‘though my life is a path littered with error, I could never, ever, mistake you for a performance piece.
I might now take a long draught of my beer, then, abstractly slap my pockets for cigarettes – when I first knew her, I was smoking. Fifteen kilos less.
Emerging from my abstraction, I might tell Karine that controlling dance tempo is not without challenges for a spectator. “Predator species such as Hominins or Velociraptor,” I’d say, “use movement to identify edibles, including stories, sensibility and sense. So, slow or absent tempos, as Taxi Dancers features, require some self-discipline (and perhaps only eccentrics are capable of it).”
She would flinch guiltily at that, bless her heart.
But I would ignore her discomfort.
I might continue that once a spectator gets a little past his or her own ordinary savagery, he or she sees that the quasi-immobility of the “Taxi Dancers” performers enables the spectator, indeed, forces the spectator, to focus hard on the sensibility represented.
The sensibilities of the taxi dancing tableau, or of taxi dancers, are obscured behind a series of codified movements, gestures and expressions. Slowing it down, slowing them down, enables the spectator to consider them a little – a huge percentage of what goes into taxi-dancing or sex working, it seems to me, is attitude, posture and promise, not action.
So, Karine, I might say, decisively, bref, it is the non-movement part of the performance that makes “Taxi Dancers” a good contemporary dance piece.
“Finally,” I would tell her, raising my right index finger in the air, as if to poke it up God’s ass, “Taxi Dancers” is certainly art and certainly the art of dance, but even after seeing it, I can’t tell you specifically what the sex-equivalent consolation of taxi dancing might be.
True, as you know, I’ve read the Brothers Karamazov, more than once, too, and still don’t understand life, despite Zen meditation supplements.
Also, I still identify with Sade and Raskolnikov more than with Jesus and Buddha.
So, Karine, I might say, maybe my inability to learn anything specific is no surprise.
Besides, should I learn anything?
“Taxi Dancers,” aside from being a good piece of dance and entertaining me into the bargain, reminded me that I do love a slow.
In waking that memory in me, what Hominal showed me comes down to something much better than learning, to that da-sein thing that is so good in a slow dance, whether it’s with you, Karine, I would like to say, or even with a certain Scotch floozy – Do you remember?
Do you remember when you pulled me off the couch to kiss me hard in the bay window while we danced Mylène Farmer’s “California”?