“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it”.
- Isadora Duncan
The moment bizarre is not over, of course, until live performance starts up again and this here (now) fat boy loses the five pounds he put on during lockdown. Still, in all, what with the salutary correction in the Weltgeist and a change in direction in categorical imperatives, things do seem to be looking up.
As I have since mid-March I spend long periods on the blood-red Recamier, golden pillow under my head, hearing my heart throb and gazing at the ceiling. My own analyst. My own analysand. As I lie gazing, my Persönlichergeist has often been full of Isadora Duncan, the (re)founder of dance in the modern world. Yes, she is.
Duncan’s autobiography and Jérôme Bel’s Portrait dansé of Isadora Duncan, wonderfully done up by the excellent Elisabeth Schwartz marked me in 2019 as did the performer Ruth Childs, dancing her first solo, fantasia, who gets mixed in with my reflections on the sense of “dance” sense.
The last venue I was at before the lockdown in mid-March this year was Regard du Cygne, a dance-performance theater space in the Belleville neighborhood, metro Télégraphe or Jourdain. Amy Swanson, the founder and guiding spirit of the place, like Elisabeth Schwartz, is a practitioner of dance in the Isadora Duncan tradition. One of the last things I saw performed at Regard du Cygne was Swanson’s piece Ma Robe (“my robe, my dress, my gown”). Robe’s wordless universal sense and personal sensibility in performance recall what I’ve been thinking Duncan is all about.
In her performance of the piece, Zoé Salmon enchants the audience by elegantly uprising her approximate six feet through about 30 yards of heavy gown fabric. She somehow gets across both complex senses of “becoming”: “right and lovely” and “evolving”. And, thereby, somehow, she opens up a vision of the becoming world for witness.
But really, the success of Ma Robe – the sense, it seems to me, to Duncan’s idea of dance – is its ability to appeal to a shared conviction that, “danced”, a robe-dress-gown points to the centrality of self – yours, mine, their – in our world.
Everybody – I, my companion, Karine, the little girls sitting behind and around me, their moms and dads, as well as the other adults in the audience, recognized and accepted that Salmon’s rising so personally, so elegantly, up through Ma Robe was (is), really-truly, the universe becoming.
Terpsichore’s – and Duncan’s – art treat a level of complexity Aristotle and Thomas Carlyle just never imagined. What happens at “dance” (maybe at all live performance) resembles what Saint Augustine said could only be true at the Eucharist: the wine and bread are body and blood, the gown is the universe, the thing represented is the thing itself.
So, as at a Eucharist, Ma Robe’s audience’s shared conviction of witness is not dramatic, is not theatrical, has nothing to do with a “suspension of disbelief” to achieve catharsis, the necessary evacuation of the emotional toxins generated by a set of beliefs. Think of the psychic poison generated by the beliefs that underpin Oedipus the King! Motherfucker!
When we witness “dance” as Isadora Duncan meant it, on the other hand, we are connecting with our capacity (and responsibility) for the sets of belief that construct the world we live in. Think, “connection” and “identification”: kids playing house or a toddler echoing words, trying out a relation or a tool or just trying out the capacity to construct a reality.
So, here is a post-moment bizarre conclusion from the blood-red Recamier.
Before the moment bizarre, I would have said that Isadora Duncan understood my life is movement is dance. No more. I now say that Duncan took “dance” for granted as Emily Dickinson took “poetry” for granted, as Ralph Waldo Emerson took “personhood” for granted. As it never occurred to the (re)founders of poetry and spirituality that poetry might be a function of “language” or that a human being could be other than her own subject, it just never occurred to Duncan that “dance” was other than dance. Terpsichore’s name, after all, means “delight in dance”, and her iconography, sitting with a lyre held up as if a portal, invite her admirers beyond sight and sound to vision and feeling.
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