When I see my baby/What do I see?/Poetry/Poetry in motion…/Her lovely locomotion/Keeps my eyes wide open …See her gentle sway ?/ A wave out on the ocean/Could never move that way!/ Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa/Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa/Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa Whoa!/Poetry in motion!
- Poetry in motion, Johnny Tillotson, 1960
I was to see Elisabeth Saint-Jalmes’ Abri-Trou, “Sheltering-hole”, an installation at Le Générateur the other day. I dragged myself off the Blood-Red Récamier and went all the way across town, on a Sunday, at nap time… On Karine’s bike! And all that, while feeling a certain reluctance to fling myself into crowds of strangers in these days of what has shaped up as The Phony Lockdown…
I made the effort because, at Le Générateur, quite apart from the liberating pleasure in “being there with”, and whatever the shape a performance piece there takes, there’s something in it. If a it can sometimes fails as art, it hardly ever fails as entertainment.
In short, Le Générateur performance pickers have a knack for spotting well-made work.
The knack of picking performance well is rooted, I think, in an implicit grasp of an “art of movement”, of what makes artin a work of movement.
The notion of an “art of movement”, which I’ve previously associated with live performance (On the value of being there with) seems most often used to name “identifiable” dance pieces and performance intended as dance, but seems to spontaneously classify almost any performance that nobody is comfortable formally classifying.
As I see it, this is because “movement” is a short, plausible answer to the question, “What’s all that about?”: “It’s about the world, it’s about movement – all works of movement move”. And intellectually, that response is as satisfyingly insufficient today as “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, --that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” was in its time. Also, “movement” suggests that “startlement” stands in as a non-narrative equivalent to “dramatic tension”. We can then say that movement and drama “a (formal ordered sequence) of wake up calls” that mark out a shape to perception.
In respect to a work of movement, whatever a critic, creator or performer may say about other aspects of their experience or intention – and usually it’s something political, meta-political or moral – movement succinctly covers all or virtually all of the free-for-all of intention and technique that make of a performance a work of movement rather than, say, a work of narrative.
At ground level, the notion of a work of “movement” binds together history, performance genres and concepts. In a way that “a work of dance” could not, “movement” unites the sacred of dance in antiquity to the art in Monteverdi’s Orfeo in Mantua and the Great King’s Ballet de la nuit with Isadora Duncan’s heart, with Radhouane El Meddeb’s Swan Lake in diverse dishabille (Ballet du Rhin, 2018). It links the immediacies and esthetic aspirations of Happening with Niki de Saint Phalle’s assemblages with Andy Warhol’s Couch with any performance work at Le Générateur or her sister venues and through the wide vision of the late Jacques Charaud’s Le Ballet pour demain with all the international performance pieces met with in any given year’s Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine Saint Denis (Demain’s legacy festival). And so forth.
Movement not only binds together the art of works of past and present, it enables a common starting point for understanding today’s apparent riot of actual works on sets (WOSs, performing versions of WIPs).
“Movement” describes a shared sense of the world and esthetic sensibility between theater pieces by creators such as sculptor playwright Nathalie Béasse in work such as Aux Eclats (Théatre de la Bastille), which seems more in debt to cognitive theory than to anything else, and “straightforward” materialized-arts installations such as Katinka Bock’s Tumulte à Higienopolis, transformed from “art exposition” to “performance installation” by Lafayette Anticipations’ architecture-as-art architecture. Movement as shared sense and sensibility joins the broad, broad range of these former works with past and present dance and with it, performance and with them with the upcoming Christo-style “wrapping” of the Arc de Triomphe with all, all contemporary dance happening, up to and including everything between quality contemporary plays on urban dance such Valentine Nagata-Ramos’ unbeatable ungendered break-dance Be.Girl (Théâtre des Champs Elysées) and Ruth Childs’ 100% class contemporary fantasia (Atelier de Paris) with “folk”, “traditional”, “ethnic”, “rock”, “sacred” and “religious” dancings everywhere and, even, with the jiggling, jumping, pirouetting chorus lines and dancing- belles and beaux livening up the electronic media offer… and, maybe especially, movement links all this to the drive in that nervous-looking guy from Africa in ragged gym pants and funky hat doing genius contemporary-dance-street-break around Christmas day on the empty Champs Elysées for spare change before scampering off as the police hove up…
“Formal elements” mark to identify all works of movement in the repertory of the art of movement as well and make them work or not as art. Beyond these is the beauty and truth at which the art of movement aspires. Sound, narrative, visual, tactile and what-have-you art grasps at myriad forms of catharsis or revelation. But, so far, spectators, creators and performers have still to winkle out ends of movement that would let them look, imagine and create works in full knowledge of where it is taking them in the universe of human need and experience.
Spectators and programmers and, especially, writers on dance and performance, if pressed, usually express both the art and beauty and truth in a work of movement by the signifying equivalent of Il y a de la poésie dedans – “There’s poetry in it”.
They mean, “This all gets beyond words. But it’s there there”.
Making an effort to describe movement’s formal elements can at least lay out a point of departure for an exploration of that.
As there’s revolution and paradigm shift in the offing – Once I’ve described the formal elements, I’ll make a stab at interpreting what they mean by it and the beauty and truth the art of that makes an art of movement.
“Movement” is short-hand for the “dynamic world” most of us believe we live in and with which the art of movement concerns itself. Dynamic is as in Heraclitus’ “You never step into the same river twice”, dynamic is as in Schrödinger’s dead-alive cat-in-the-box, dynamic is as in “We are all equal participants in a complex ecology”. It is not culmination of actions that counts in movement, but generation of action.
Works of movement are always dynamic and unique; works are not representations or even models of another thing, a single work makes a unique reality. I know that this sounds like what “sympathetic magic” does but… maybe “magic” has never actually been magic … A work of movement operates by happening, its performers and creators juggling a choreography of intention, setting, forms, styles, figures, figurations, techniques, technologies, psychologies and human action that is – not appears to be – dynamic. Imitation – mimesis – does not enter into happening in a work of movement any more than it was supposed to in the eponymous spontaneous-expression events of the 60s. Though exceptional to the mass and surrounded by incantation, according to Saint Augustine, the transformation of wine and bread into blood and flesh is parallel to happening.
So, looked at in a happening mode, stage tricks, humor and novel figurations are principally there to establish a general sense of dynamism, like the little whirlwinds that add up to a hurricane, rather than pieces of “information” in a puzzle. In work such as Clément Aubert’s hilarious parody-fair, Danse avec le Yak (Regard du Cygne), or Fu Le’s “remake”of the satire Le chant du styrène (Regard du Cygne) or the invented figurations of Madeleine Fournier’s La Chaleur (Atelier de Paris), can be enjoyed for the story-telling. But as works of movement, the real point is to help detach spectators from whatever perceptual terra firma they were attached to before they came through the door.
The key to developing happening in a work of movement, is engaging two types of “sensibility” in the spectator. Sensibility is meant more or less as used in Sense & Sensibility or in contemporary French. It compasses then opens access to happening, involving then transforming the spectator into participant.
The first sensibility is “feeling”. Feeling can be, for instance, the thrill both of hearing Lise de la Salle do her When do we dance and being-there-with (before a barely legal crowd at La Scala after a year and a half of nothing but canned entertainment).
The second sensibility is “encountering territory”. “Territory” references the physical, social, psychological, animate, inanimate and spiritual as encounter-created “geographies”. Encountering territory can describe, for instance, the intrigueinspired by the combination of space, media and intention in Elisabeth Saint-Jalmes’ Abri-Trou (“Sheltering hole”) installation.
As the examples suggests, engaging sensibility is quite straightforward – events in daily life do the same thing, we often unintentionally become part of what’s happening. What makes the art and beauty in a work of movement is more than the mastery of the process(es) of happening – it is transforming the spectator into participant.
Aina Alègre says of her R-A-U-X-A, for instance, that it “pass(es) the body through different environments, dialogues with light, space and live electro-acoustic and modular music”. Yes, indeed, it does, as she says. But because Alègre’s mastery of dance is a circus dare-devil’s, or a high-wire artist’s: she uses ordinary and automatic empathy to let the spectator feel the risks and dangers she has mastered but they have not. Up high in unfamiliar territory, they encounter her territory with her, become participants. Nacera Belaza’s lovely, exciting Le Cercle (Institut du monde arabe – Printemps de la danse arabe 2021) works in a similar way. Belaza uses, among other classic tools, stage lighting to enable feeling the embedded values of chiaroscuro. She follows on by a technique of splashing patches of light into the blackness where human faces are otherwise obscured. The splashing territorializes the visual encounter which creating a geography, transforms spectator into participant, as she writes, bringing “en résonances des propositions formelles nouvelles… ”. Liz Santoro and Pierre Godin’s Mutual Information (Atelier de Paris) use an understanding of “psycholinguistic” choreography and sound to create fascination. Fascination draws spectators into the participative experience of two individuals mirroring-not-mirroring one another.
Built on a dynamic sense of the world, happening, turning on feeling and encountering in execution and participative in performance, the formal elements of the art of movement suggests a certain idea of imagination as its beauty and truth.
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