#dance ii

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Oliver Davis :: Dance II : Second movement

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LEGO lanza un fabuloso set homenaje a Keith Haring con 1.773 piezas llenas de color y ritmo. #EstoesPhusions

Cuando el pop art se construye a mano: LEGO rinde homenaje a Keith Haring (y lo hace bailando)

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One of the most popular dances in the early 20th century dance halls of Paris, such as the Moulin de la Galette, was the Farandole. The ring of dancers features as simplified motif in Matisse’s ‘La Danse’ and ‘La Musique’, inspired by his sketching at the Moulin de la Galette. 

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Matisse vs. Kundera: Dancing the pain away

Recently after finishing Milan Kundera’s ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’, I kept thinking back to the choice of cover art on the book – a circle of naked figures holding hands who seem to be hovering off the ground. I found it very similar to another image I had encountered during the year in my art history course which looked at art at the turn of the twentieth century: the 1910 painting by Matisse, 'Dance ii' (pictured above).

The painting is included as part of the 'primitivism' movement in painting during the late 19th / early 20th centuries. Artists were seeking to portray more ‘natural’ subjects as a way to find a more genuine way of life, in response to the increasingly industrial and mechanized way of modern life. Often these artists would travel to rural or even faraway exotic locations seeking people with a ‘simpler’ way of life to depict – the idea of rediscovering an arcadia in a world that has been polluted by the 'ugliness' of modernity.

There are a number of issues with this movement’s ideas including the assumption that peasants and indigenous people are more primitive – read: simple/ basic - than metropolitan folk. In Kundera’s book I think the referencing of such a recognizable painting from the primitive movement is a way of applying the ideals that valued simplicity into his own crticisims revolving round the political and social issues of the Czech Republic. Instead of using the idea of this simplicity as something positive, instead he shows its immaturity, the fact that aiming for these simple qualities is regressive and a way of avoiding reality.  

The painting itself quite fittingly values simplicity in its composition. I remember hearing in lecture that Matisse had once said that paintings should be a ‘mental soother’. Indeed, I feel the repeated motif of the curved lines of the bodies, the use of blocks of only three colours (a balance of hot and cold), and figures that lack characteristic features value harmony in this painting over chaotic individuality.

In contrast I see Kundera taking the same sort of composition of a dancing circle, but rather than pleasant, it is abrasive for the viewer because of how ridiculous he makes it sound:

                …the dancing young Czechs, knowing that the day before, in the same city a woman and a surrealist had been singing from the end of ropes, were dancing all the more frenetically, because their dance was a demonstration of their innocence, in shining contrast to the guilty darkness of the two who were hanged, those betrayers of the people and its hopes”

Kundera clearly addresses in this passage how dance is linked to escapism – the way he writes makes it seem that not only are the Czech people actively trying to forget, they are quite aware that they're doing so. Kundera constructs the idea of the circle as something that is both unifying and also separating:

This is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation, but a circle closes up, and if you go way from it, there is no way back.

By creating this blissful circle, you are also actively separating yourself from others, in your ignorance you are separating yourself from reality. Kundera is addressing and criticizing the complacency of the Czech people for allowing these deaths and the exile of the poets, scientists (that are constantly brought up in the novel) to happen through their voluntary separation from reality of life.

Two very valid points are brought up - there is definitely solace in ignorance -  in Matisse's 'regression' into a primitive dance everything is simplified, we avoid carrying the burden of the horrible things around us. Why would we want to constantly contemplate the fact that secret police are killing scholars and artists? I think what Kundera wishes to say through his often absurdly humorous manner is that it is quite childish and irrational to behave this way.

Right or wrong, its fascinating how two completely different contexts called for two completely different responses to a circle of people dancing.