I went to a dance concert Friday night. Crystal Pite. Premiere performance tour of Lost Action. The dance was unique. The dancers movements used the total body. Too often I feel modern dancers focus on arms to the loss of the torso. But here there was a repetitive, rhythmic, often jerky use of every part of the human body. The movements were constantly repeating, with variations. The repetition was to underline the ephemeral quality of dance. Just when I felt I had seen enough jerky gestures, the movements became lyrical for a while.
In the program, she says
Dance disappears almost at the moment of its manifestation. It is an extreme expression of the present: a perfect metaphor for life. Dancers sculpt space in real-time, working inside a form that is constantly in a state of vanishing. We have no artifacts. I find it strangely beautiful to be creating something that is made of us—made of our breath and blood and bones and minds. Something that is made of the space we occupy and made of the space between us. We embody both the dance and its disappearance.
I’ve often thought of the differences in art forms, how music only exists when it is heard. How writing also exists in the reading although a book “exists” to be read. With painting, the painting is there whether someone is looking at it or not and the act of looking takes less conceptual thought, perhaps, than reading. It’s something that can be glanced at, passed by, be used as background or as a piece for contemplation. I need repetition in painting because there are so many possibilities of the same combination. It’s not about vanishing, as in dance, but still, it is about embodying space and time.