Some years ago, when I first knew her, Karine leaned a little across the table we were at and asked me if I thought of her as different.
She and I didn’t share culture or nationality or gender or background experience. Is that difference?
I won’t say she coquettishly shook back her tight blond curls when she said it; I won’t say that when I hear “difference” I am ready to think some sort of demand for special consideration is on the way. The right to bore me, for instance, or the right to speak frankly about my failings.
But also, I loved Karine. Above all, that the woman knows that, for me, our hearts beat as one.
I told her, No, I didn’t think her different.
She exploded with indignation, demanding, yes, demanding, that I take into account her difference.
Was she about to end our relation?
A claim of difference is really a claim for a different relation, right? Difference means changing the relations of the all the subjects and objects involved: Karine and me, for example, or me and anybody, or anybody and everybody or everyone and everybody.
Also, when are we not different? When is there no difference? When we are dead, when we are all truly equal, that’s when.
I saw Gluck’s Orpheus & Eurydice the other day. It underlined the point. The glory of Hell is its un-differentiation. No bumps or hard edges in the underworld. That smooth homogeneity of death is why Gluck’s Eurydice is reluctant to leave without some assurance that Orpheus’ love will soften the 400 coups of the new life to come.
When I regained countenance, I pretended to listen intently. I grabbed her hand – and a fine, dry, cool hygienic-soap-roughened hand Karine’s hand is. Yegods! I clumsily rasped it across my unshaven cheek.
I swore that difference was all my study.
But aside from knowing that uncountable differences establish Karine’s being and mine, I don’t know much, really.
Except maybe now that expecting difference might, as may all expectation, mislead.
The terrible moment of Karine’s demand for difference, the KDD, came to mind when – quite by chance – I saw Cheng Tsung-lung’s lovely Full Moon at the Palais de Chaillot last year, as part of the Sydney Dance Theater’s offering.
I was at the time – quite deliberately – researching millennial choreographer Yu-Ju Lin, trying to understand Sponge, her first piece to get wide attention in Europe. Sponge was a featured piece at Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint-Denis 2018.
Thumbing through the program, I learned that Lin is an alumna of Cloud Gate 2, the choreographic development-oriented part of the Taipei Cloud Gate Theater, where Cheng has been for some years artistic director.
As an experience, Cheng’s Full Moon dance performance is as brilliant a non-verbal version of the dream-essences of Midsummer Night’s Dream as a spectator is likely to find. The titular “full moon” limns mystery that is evoked in costume and set while a sense of mystery sweetens the choreographic trope of coupling.
The choreographic mechanics of the evocation are so perfect the piece seems almost more a tableau vivant than a dance.
Full Moon, I thought, is a dance painting, inspired by painting.
This thought about painting was enough to get me thinking of Cheng’s “Chinese approach” – genre, “moon above hills”, where the onlooker contemplates the object’s essential identity through its multiple and diverse reproduction – rather than, genre, a moon evoking (or pointing) an emotion, as in a painting by good old Anglo-Saxon American Winslow Homer…
And, let me be clear, I made Full Moon what I think of as a painterly Chinese piece while full possession of a body of knowledge of Chinese painting that could comfortably find legroom among any number of overweight angels on the head of a pin.
Also, I understood all along the experience of the piece, probably thanks to Cheng’s mastery of choreographic language, ne c’est pas? that “full moon” was used in the choreography in a literary way, as garden variety metaphor, rather than as icon or traditional symbol.
Yet I was miffed when, after the show, I read Cheng’s comments in his note on Full Moon, “The light that animates modern cities fascinates me… and it occupies the spaces between what I see and what I feel… The moon clarifies what I see and helps me pierce the mysteries of the unconscious world”.
So, if Chen is a dance painter or a painter of dance or something similar, it’s Winslow Homer he’s like, not the old master Shen Zou.
The rub that really gives me blisters here is that in giving weight to the little god of difference I could ignore the personal ability and accomplishment of Cheng the person.
And anyway, isn’t individual culture making the best of the imprint of what place and with what people and with what stuff you grew up and developed? And isn’t this sufficient honor to what difference there may be?
And isn’t a person’s genius measured by how an individual handles his or her places, people and stuff? And isn’t acknowledging a single person’s accomplishment sufficient honor to his or her difference?
Comments