October already!
Daily life has definitely been regaining substance.
Neighbor photographer Sarah Meunier has turned her lens back to life in public, especially to our newer, neighbors.
From the bright and shiny evidence, some of these youngest sweetest neighbors, at least, must have only just learned their break, just when it became an Olympic sport.
But break stays dance, right? Just like ballroom dancing – “dancesport”?
Dance as sport. How can that happen?
Though I’m sure tourist-board marketing geniuses have been toying with the pairing since France got the 2024 games, I only touched on the topic just before the Covid lockdowns, with Christina Towle, the programmer at Regard du Cygne. At the time, Christina was putting together her Bounce Back, a choreography for four that mixes contemporary dance, basketball and electronic music.
I went back to Christina, who is now working on a new sport-dance choreography around the 400-meter relay tentatively titled Près feu (“Ready, set”), and asked about the relationship of sport with dance. She was fairly definitive.
Sport is strictly-coded choreography, she says, adding that movement analysis bears her out on the choreography part of the equation. The strict coding - there are moves you always must and always must not do in sequence to achieve certain results - which generally allows scoring by points, also sets sport apart.
There are athletes that use the strict coding to go beyond “sport” and become dancers. Christina cites Muhammad Ali, reminding me that the greatest boxer of all time described his boxing method as “float(ing) like a butterfly, stinging like a bee”, and consistently referred to himself as a dancer. The video evidence and my own memory suggest Christine isn’t wrong.
Christina’s experiments in bringing out the dance in sport apart, for me, anyway, the theme of “sport” + “dance” has been floating around only since late Spring, when Carreau du Temple hosted a Festival Jogging. Part of the city’s “Formes Olympiques” program to drum up interest in the 2024 games, Jogging, which picked up again as Atelier de Paris’“Dansez sport!” in early September, featured quality choreographers and performance such as Valeria Giuga & Anne-James Chaton’s Coaching, Marine Colard’s Le Tir Sacré and Alban Richard’s Vivace.
Roughly, but close enough, Coaching and Le Tir Sacré treat shared sport-dance themes of unity of body and mind, elegance & perfection, as well as surrounding language or rhetoric. Alban Richard’s Vivace sews an incredible variety of dance intentions and styles into a vivacious 35-minute relay race.
“Dansez sport!” had a family-oriented pedagogical complement, highlighting in-practice links between sport and dance, offering, among many other beguiling workshops, a “Krumpfest back to school de Wrestler Danse”, complete with battle. Krump is a particularly expressive form of break dance: very apt to make one think about the sense and sensibilities of its performers. Also on offer: classes on break-dance footwork, table tennis, roller and blade skating and sports commentary. 2024 Olympic visitors might do well to look at dance activities at Carreau du Temple and Atelier de Paris, as well as other dance-venues, to liven up and deepen their experience.
Since he took up the directorship of the National Dance Theater at the Palais de Chaillot just a few years back, Rachid Ouramdane has been playing with the dance + sport/athletics theme, especially through his work with the 19-member cie XY circus troupe. Cie XY is, perhaps, an expression of Ouramdane’s looking to blaze a trail, as he told the webzine Danses avec la plume, towards “diversity within a common culture” - e pluribus unum, as the US dollar puts it.
Karine and I saw Cie XY’s Möbius in early September. The show was first of all a demonstration of very intense, carefully choreographed, up-close and physical interaction. From the beginning, a seeming casual confidence in which truly remarkable feats were executed highlighted the individual responsibility of each performer to the rest as well as to the whole troupe. Real physical contrasts among performers and an obvious distribution of roles by tested capacity and choreographic goal rather than by gender or even size and other “visible criteria” – catching a body that has casually leapt 20 feet in the air takes more than will, after all, even if the catcher doesn’t have to be male, 7-foot high – drove home this reified interdependence. Think of Möbius as a perfection in which proprioception, empathy and compassion have replaced common sense, morality and reason.
Karine and I both saw dance in it. But a pair, at least, of our fellow spectators, felt Möbius remained sport, saying dance is a story the performers tell about themselves while sport is a test of the human body. For them, while the performers did tell their story, the performance lacked “poésie” – that quality of going beyond itself, the “self-transcendence” where Christine Towle sees sport becoming dance. Karine agrees but claims that the perfection of cie XY’s movement together by itself created dance. Insufficiency in the self-story and poésie, she says, is the responsibility of the choreographer, adding that the same disconnect of performance-movement and choreography-performance happens in Swan Lake – “dance dance”.
So, I think I’ve identified about seven ways of approaching the couple “dance + sport”. Sport becomes dance by surpassing itself; sport is a form of dance; dance is a form of sport; dance and sport are part of a larger art of movement; movement is dance, whatever you call it. As to my own idea, for the moment, I have decided that while dance cannot be competitive, sport must be. I’m with my fellow Möbius spectators: the goals make dance and sport chalk and cheese. It’s intention and perception that make them different and physics that makes them alike.
Sarah Meunier is a great photographer. Many thanks for this post.
Posted by: Walter Carey | October 07, 2022 at 12:28 PM