I grew up dancing. In fact, in the 30 years I’ve been alive the amount of years I devoted to dancing is longer than the amount of years I haven’t so it’s still difficult for me not to identify a huge part of myself as such. And even though I no longer get paid to be on stage, I will forever be a dancer.
But what does it mean to be a “dancer”? Is it when one performs for an audience that the work, and subsequently the dancer, become actualized?
When a longtime dancer takes his/her first leap in deciding against their professional career path (”quitting”) there is a period of time where they go through withdrawal from performance, withdrawal from being watched, withdrawal from being “seen”, withdrawal from expression. A huge part of a dancers identity feels shattered and caged and it is this “unseeing” that easily removes them from the title of “dancer”. One of the most fulfilling moments a dancer can experience is the fleeting moment of vitality and bliss that they encounter on stage...when the blazing lights beats upon their glistening sweat, when the audience is pitch black and their body becomes an antenna. The dancer communicates with their fellow dancers and the audience. They feed off of their counterparts on-stage and they feel the presence of hundreds of people watching. The power of the collective becomes larger than life.
“Dance is communication” - Martha Graham
In order for a dancer to communicate, they must be completely precise in their movement and incredibly in-tune with their body. The studio is a place where a dancer finds precision within themselves. It’s a space for self-exploration and in a sense, a space where a dancer is in total competition with themselves. “They are striving to be the dancer that they ultimately want to become”, as Graham states in the video below. The studio space is for refinement, constant, exhausting repetition for the sole purpose of achieving perfection. “Perfection” in this case is for the body to achieve precise clarification and for the body to communicate in it’s fullest capacity ultimately, for its audience. But, it’s in this achievement of clarity (technique) where freedom is found in control.
The studio has an intrinsic personal value to the dancer. It is a place where they can safely explore, open-up and be vulnerable without anyone in sight, and in this way, this is a sacred ritual for a dancer. In 1957, Martha Graham made a short film titled “A Dancers World”, which happened to be filmed in an isolated space of the studio. In it, she describes what it means to be a dancer in practice, study, and performance alongside experts of her company dancing different pieces from their repertoire that further illustrate her philosophy.
*Side note: It’s also really entertaining to watch because you get to see just how eccentric Graham really was.
“Performance” specifically for the dancer on the other hand, is a different realm of possibility and responsibility (responsibility in the sense that the dancer(s) must communicate with ultimate precision to its audience in order for it to be effective, emotionally resonant, and culturally relevant). It’s interesting to point out the metaphor here for the modern world today: the “dancer” doesn’t exist without performance (but only when they’ve polished or finely curated their method of communication), so their identity as “dancer” doesn’t exist unless they’re seen by others. It’s safe to say we feel this way in our own notion of the “self”. We perform our identity to others in order to understand it for ourselves, for self-validation. (See term definition: “Performativity” here and Judith Butler describe “gender is performative” here). Today we all live in a world where everyone is performing in public, constantly putting themselves on display, commodifying themselves through their self(ies) while simultaneously being surveilled (Perform or Else, McKenzie, 2001; Singularities; Dance In the Age of Performance, Andre Lepecki, 2016).
The idea of “performance” is a hefty topic these days and there is something to be said about comparing both the dancer’s world to that of modern day existence. It should be less about the aesthetic beauty of the dancer (or the person who uploads their most interesting photo) and more about the collective meaning that dancers exude to their audience. It’s within that relation where freedom and a sense of catharses for all participants can be found.
To insist on the social function of the theatre as a social gathering space, and to acknowledge that the dancer’s labor is inseparable from the conditions of the world ... dancers and audience all produce, and are produced by a shared bio and necropolitical nervous system.
Singularities; Dance In the Age of Performance, Andre Lepecki, 2016
Dance's ephemerality suggests the possibility of an escape from the regimes of commodification and fetishization in the arts. Its corporeality can embody critiques of representation inscribed in bodies and subjects. Its precariousness underlines the fragility of contemporary states of being.
Dance (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art), Andre Lepecki, 2012
For the dancer though, performance of movement is so much of how a dancer receives their ultimate high, their validation of existence, their heightened experience of life through their intense relation with the audience. In a way, dance could not exist without its audience. Many would argue that art itself can not be considered art without its audience:
Sartre’s existential aesthetics is concerned mainly with how the artist exercises his/her own freedom and how the artist offers the audience an opportunity to exercise their freedom. What separates existential aesthetics from a theory of beauty that is concerned with the creative freedom of the individual is that existential aesthetics wants to do something with both the artist’s and audience’s freedom in the sense that what a work of art should aim to do is inspire a certain free action on the part of the spectator. Therefore the artwork involves a freedom that is not just that of the artist, but also that of the audience.
Elijah Alexander Guerra, Sartre Existentialism and Aesthetics, pg. 14
But some dancers venimenytly disagree, and with opposition comes counter-culture. Being Watched is a book the captures Yvonne Rainer’s famous rebellion against dancing for the audience’s sake, a rebellion that nicely coincides with the revolution of the 60′s and 70′s. Rainer is significant not only as a choreographer but as a symbol of questioning spectatorship.
The image above is part of a series photographed by Warner Jepson. In the cover image above, the dancer turns away from the camera, raising an arm slightly behind her. Her hand is out-turned and blurry quite literally suggesting: stop looking at me, I am not meant for you! This notion of course, not only holds meaning for the dancer, but for the dancer as female.
In her dance and performances of the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer famously transformed the performing body -- stripped it of special techniques and star status, traded its costumes and leotards for T-shirts and sneakers, asked it to haul mattresses or recite texts rather than leap or spin.
Being Watched, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, 1999
Additionally, women are still the symbols of ballet in the popular imagination, and those who create the work (choreographers) are dominated by men, thus many famous classical ballets are pure examples of the male gaze.
But if women are still the symbols of ballet in the popular imagination, chances are it is as ballerinas performing dazzling, demanding steps that were devised for them by men. When it comes to choreography, at least at most major companies, ballet remains overwhelmingly a man’s world. Breaking the Glass Slipper: Where Are the Female Choreographers?, NYTimes
The dance realms of 19th-century ballet were harems (sometimes literally, as in one all-female scene of “Le Corsaire,” where odalisques and concubines dance on point with flowers in happy captivity). From the Romantic ballet, initiated by “La Sylphide” in 1836 to the classical creations of Marius Petipa in late-19th-century St. Petersburg (“The Sleeping Beauty”), feminine loveliness was the climate amid which a man looked, traveled and found love. Of Women, Men and Ballet in the 21st Century, NYtimes
See also: Dance Magazine, Does NYCB Have A Gambling Problem?
So, is the art of dance not “dance” unless someone is watching? What does it mean if a dancer must be validated by someone else’s eye? Is it a coincidence that dance has been historically dominated by white men, while constantly seeking their validation as an expert? If I dance in a studio alone, without another body in sight and feel the tension and release of my muscles, the sensitively my skin feels against it’s bones, the suspension of time when I jump in the air, the pure expression of movement against the notes of music, where does the definition of “dance” then lie?
Dance, in its essence, lies in the sensitivity of the body and in its pure movement, where the body becomes the antenna, transmitting signals to their surroundings. But if we think of dance purely as “movement”, then all humans are dancers. Movement is one of the many ways we identity each other, the way one walks, sits, stands, and even the way one listens is very telling if you’re paying enough attention. And so, I leave this post with a final quote from the famed choreographer, Ohad Naharin, describing his revolutionary modern technique known as the GaGa technique. What I adore so much about this explanation is not only its post-modern approach in thinking about dance, but that it focuses on the paradoxical notion of movement and thus, the paradoxical experience the dancer is constantly going through. He leaves out the notion of an audience completely, it is only about the way in which one chooses to be present in their movement and in this way, they are most present in life. This isn’t just an explanation of dance, this is a metaphor for existence.
"Gaga challenges multi-layer tasks. We are aware of the connection between effort and pleasure, we are aware of the distance between our body parts, we are aware of the friction between flesh and bones, we sense the weight of our body parts, yet our form is not shaped by gravity... we are aware of where we hold unnecessary tension, we let go only to bring life and efficient movement to where we let go . . . We are turning on the volume of listening to our body, we appreciate small gestures, we are measuring and playing with the texture of our flesh and skin, we might be silly, we can laugh at ourselves. We connect to the sense of "plenty of time”, especially when we move fast. We learn to love our sweat, we discover our passion to move and connect it to effort; We discover both the animal that we are and the power of our imagination. We are "body builders with soft spines". We learn to appreciate understatement and exaggeration, we become more delicate and we recognize the importance of the flow of energy and information through our body in all directions. We learn to apply our force in an efficient way and we learn to use "other" forces.
We discover the advantage of soft flesh and sensitive hands, we learn to connect to groove even when there is no music. We are aware of people in the room and we realize that we are not at the center of it all. We become more aware of our form since we never look at ourselves in a mirror; there are no mirrors. We connect to the sense of the endlessness of possibilities.
Yielding is constant while we are ready to snap...
We explore multi-dimensional movement, we enjoy the burning sensation in our muscles, we are aware of our explosive power and sometimes we use it. We change our movement habits by finding new ones, we can be calm and alert at once. We become available . . ." - Ohad Naharin
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