#dancetangent

Sardines Shawl - Charcoal on paper, Movement studies in our disciplines nature, Drawing I made in April 2020.

‘It is possible to conjecture that the cave dweller may have pretended to be an animal, when he danced at the dawn of the world, the dances of the primitive man are generally mimetic. He has not learnt to express himself in any other way’.

Crick, Malcolm. Explorations in language and meaning: towards a semantic anthropology. London: Malaby Press.

...I chose to draw sardines and not, starlings as I had first foreseen.

Starlings live on the edge and move by sight, in formations which are still a mystery. The mathematical models are beautiful as well as intriguing; yet scientists do not know why starlings move in cloudy Murmurations.

Sardines! We love playing sardines- but schools of fish move in relationship to their neighbours, in order to maximize foraging, safety for predators and speed of movement. This image is how they move when predators attack them –minus the predators I didn’t draw them in- It required time, discipline, and observation to create the piece. We ll never be able to move like these orderly bastards. Ballet dancers we are not, we haven’t been taught. Then I realized researching further, that schools of fish do not learn to move this way, they evolved. Is there any chance for us? How long does evolution take?

 ‘Dirty Dancing’, 1987- I am showing my age, I know...

Are you familiar with Dirty Dancing? Showy Peacock spiders dance as part of their mating rituals, romantic scorpions waltz, with the overly excited occasional spiking of the female by the venom of his male counterpart. Praying Mantis, also dance to mate, but often end up devouring the males as a result of it…fun fact- 60 per cent of the male praying Mantis is dinner.

Stick and leaf insect also dance, but it is still a mystery as to what purpose.

Cuttlefish, birds of paradise, bung beetles, also dance for courting it appears. But some can adjust their rhythm and dance without reproduction being the objective.

Our honey-loving bees communicate with dance, with complex moves in lines and figures of ‘8’, where they give each other directions with the ‘Waggle dance’- an advanced form of touch communication.

Some argue that plants and algae dance too, albeit this is still debatable and depending on what it is that we define as dance- 

‘We read that non-human animals ‘dance’; however, their ritualized movements are programmed action sequences. They do not voluntarily express or withhold emotions and ideas distances in time and space from immediate stimuli as do humans in dance.’

Megan N. Ramos, Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, Volume 13, 2018 - Issue 1.

Dance does have a well-established sexual connection to the elemental impulses of the perpetuation of a species. And the theory that humankind danced to transcend language barriers and heighten rituals to connect to nature, fellow human beings, and an idea of ‘a creator’ do primarily sound reasonable, especially on the basis of mimicking the natural world.

But what is harder to agree on is whether dance, as a language, can be scientifically dissected and stripped  of human emotion, expression, or thought.

From ballet as a child, to jazz dance to tango to Berlin’s Berghain and Ibiza’s Heart- I for one, certainly dance like I am possessed...

Photograph by Jake Davies, Steel Yard Fox and Badge party, London, 2019.

But WHY did people dance, and do today?

1          They want to have fun and relax?- dance as a vehicle solely for leisure and entertainment?

2          They dance because of biological, organismic or instinctive needs of some kind –the dance as

precursor to spoken language perhaps?

3          They dance because they want to express themselves- that dance as a symbolic activity divorced from real life

4          they dance because they feel sexy or sad, or something- the dance as a prime repository of emotion?

5          They dance because a good, or evil, spirit has possessed them, the dance as a neurotic, hysterical or quasi religious manifestation,

6          They dance to show off or to relieve their over-burdened feelings- dancing as catharsis or the governor on a steam- value theory of human emotion

Crick, Malcolm. Explorations in language and meaning: towards a semantic anthropology. London: Malaby Press, 1976 – P5-6

In reality, it can be either of these or a combination, in no particular order, or to other meand- as we see when looking into Contemporary Choreographers such as Merce Cunnighmam, who used as means to experiment.

 From popular dances in bars and streets among strangers or families and festivals, dance appeared in a more refined shape in courts, who then shaped and cut a much more structured and some would argue refined form of dance, with ballet.

Rudolf Nureyev dances with Rosella Hightower during a dress rehearsal at the B.B.C. television studios in London in 1962. (Photo credit should AFP/AFP/Getty Images)

The Kings of Europe funded classical music, fine art, and ballet into their present form, but one that remains even today exclusively for those who can afford them, both in practice and as an attending audience.

Ballet’ s rigor did not allow for individual input. It is the A-Z of dance and even in its the education, preaches implacable linear precision to perfection.

'She is coming, the dancer of the future: the free spirit, who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet been; more beautiful than all women in past centuries: The highest intelligence in the freest body."-The dancer of the future manifesto, Isadora Duncan 1909.

My recollection is, as a child, of 'The Dancer of the Wind' was one of a white renaissance like clothed women that didn't seem at all like a rebel to me- it is all relative to the times. It turns out rebels are troublesome- to draw even. Especially with a cold head that feels like a sea sponge- but while working on this brief, she spent days in my head, floating, asking to be given some pencilled attention. My mum told me as a kid, a trillion times, not to wear a scarf when cycling or else I would end up like Isadora- She tragically died strangled cycling with her scarf.  

Isadora Duncan was the first woman to decide to break away from the dance convention, move how she thought she ought to move, not adhere to social protocols of what a woman was meant to be and she decided not to wear a corset in public which was naturally a huge scandal. She changed dance forever in search of individual expression and a new identity for women.

'Duncan, placed emphasis on "evolutionary" dance motion, insisting that each movement was born from the one that preceded it, that each movement gave rise to the next, and so on in organic succession. Her dancing defined the force of progress, change, abstraction and liberation. In France, as elsewhere, Duncan delighted her audience.'

Daly, Ann, Done into dance : Isadora Duncan in America (Wesleyan ed.). Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Duncan's ideas ignited and were soon tested in the courts of Russian Ballet with productions such as 'the Rite of Spring' that much shocked the audiences but were welcomed. As an audience, you know what you will see with ballet- mostly- not so in contemporary dance. It was new.

The three most notable schools since the revolution she started-in my humble opinion- I look into briefly.

Firstly and the one we have the luxury to have in London is the one my son spent four years attending.

Laban Contemporary Dance Conservatoire is still teaching the ideas of its founder Rudolph Laban, an Austrian- Hungary dancer-choreographer and dance theoretician whose first school was founded in Munich in the nineteen-thirties.

The Nazi regime and their physical ideas of perfection saw dance as a potential means for political propaganda, so they engaged Laban as Director of Dance and offered him the opening ceremony for the Olympic games. The piece was scrapped after the last dress rehearsal and Laban fled to England- the radical proposals were not in line, and the art form was deemed dangerous and provocative. Laban focused his work in observation of the industrial machinery and movements in factories during the efforts to support of WWII against Hitler.

  His pieces become a political commentary of the time he lived through and included ideas of system collaboration and industrialization.

Laban studied architecture in Paris initially, so his work included ideas of the body as 'living architecture' and concepts of geometry and space in movement. He created choreology, the discipline of dance analysis. He invented a system of dance notation, Labanotation or Kinetography Laban, which recorded movement and choreographic phrases by way of intricate symbols. Laban develops community dance and sets out to reform the role of dance education, emphasizing his belief that dance should be made available to everyone.

 He was also the innovator beyond the first change in hierarchy, were dance precedes music for the first time.

 1926–28 piece Green Clowns, an anti-industrialist work that addressed the fear many artists in Weimar Germany had of burgeoning technologies.

Martha Graham was another female rebel and feminist that redrew the face of dance, yet somehow- became the cultural icon of what America was in the sixties. She was the first dancer to perform in the white house in Her dance, choreography and established technique is also still taught today- My mum did Graham technique with who back then must have been the only gay in tow- dancers somehow were 'allowed' to be gay, acceptably gay dancer and a stigma my son did not feel comfortable with. He wouldn't tell any of his friends at school that he danced, or else he would presumably be deemed gay by his rugby playing playmates. He kept it a secret even from his closest friends.

Gjon Mili, Stroboscopic image of Ethel Butles from the Martha Graham dance group.

Graham wanted dance to be less an entertainment than an art form that addresses our common human traits.

While researching this piece, I realized that Graham was Batsheva's first director in 1965, a dance company I much admire for their capacity to move as one.

Her work was based on the tension between "Contraction and Release" a principle she based on breath and breathing, and promoted female empowerment back in a day when most choreographers were male, most directors were male, and most company owners were also male. Gender politics is a recurrent them in her work, echoing the rise of feminists in other fields like painter Georgia O'Keefe and writer Gertrude Stein.

Her political commentaries did not limit to feminism. 'American Document' was a direct response to Nazi ideology and the excess of "fascist orality" described by Alice Yaeger Kaplan from technological developments and cultural dependency on the radio.

The Graham technique is based on weight, gravity and her notable contraction and release method. "This ancient awareness (contract and release) of the physicality of movement dependent upon the breath and the anatomical changes in the body due to the breathing process was based on her early training in Eastern dance forms in the Denishawn Company".

Horosko, Marian. Martha Graham: The Evolution of Her Dance Theory and Training. University Press of Florida, 2002.