Denise Levertov once commented that dance is inherently inferior to the other arts. Referring, especially, to ballet, she noted its dependence on narrative, as in the popular ethereal plots from the Romantic era. Sickly peasant maidens who, crossed in love, die and turn into Willis do not have much connection with the complex reality of experience, obviously. But there seems to be something more to her statement. Today ballet, and dance in general, still may rely on narrative, but many works are based in the formally abstract. Levertov was speaking of the limitedness of dance—how its specialized movement is removed from the movement of real life, how it must always reference back to a human narrative because its medium is the human body.
The body, however, has it own language (hence “body language”) and, as such, is capable of building its own vocabulary. We often praise actors with this ability—Tom Hanks in Cast Away when he’s stranded on the island with Wilson or Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind with his idiosyncratic twitches and nose-rubbings. We don’t often realize, however, that method acting has its basis in mime, which developed hand-in-hand with ballet in 15th century France.
Pilobolus is one of those that has ventured to develop a distinct dialect within their art form. Named after a heliocentric fungus that throws its spores long distances, this touring dance company from Connecticut boasts four artistic directors, all with backgrounds varying between Landscape Design, Intellectual History, Philosophy, and Biophysics. Its dancers serve also as choreographers—a rarity in that most modern companies form around a specific choreographer’s vision (i.e. Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor). Employing a form of weight-bearing improvisation, their acrobatic quality recalls the contortionists of the Ed Sullivan era; the dancers might be comfortable balancing tea sets on their metatarsals while bent over backwards on their hands. The scope of movement, however, is capable of embracing both humor and gravity, human nature and biology, and movement and concept.
Sometimes this occurs within the same piece, although not always successfully. “The Brass Ring,” the opening piece, used an overlaying circus theme to metamorphose from amoeba-like shapes, to gambling individuals, to nebulous cosmic entities. Familiar music lent a farcical quality to their gymnastic feats, but the changes in tone seemed too abrupt and too dissimilar for the audience to be able to leap from guffaw to poignancy. The sudden appearance of stars on the backdrop at the end were gimmicky, at best. “Walklyndon” was a more skittery, nonsensical comedy piece reminiscent of the Judson Church movement. Without music implemented, individuals hurriedly and repeatedly cut across the stage. When their paths crossed, they kicked, slapped, and laughed at each other, although no one seemed damaged by the cruelty they experienced.
The clear masterwork of the evening came in the form of “Symbiosis,” in which two organisms slithered and leaned on each other then appeared to evolve into crawling insectoid forms. Almost always in constant contact with one another, their homogenous forms became more diverse as the male dancer took on tree-like characteristics that provided a climbing apparatus for the female and a protective, supportive structure for her activities. The scientific allusions of biology and physics were ever-present, but more obvious in the last piece, “Sweet Purgatory.” More abstracted and instinctually ordered, I was continuously reminded of cell behavior observed through a microscopic field. The dancers weaved among each other, created canons of movement, and suspended each other in unshaped lifts.
In contrast to The Doug Varone Dance Company, which is centered on human relationships, or even Cunningham’s abstract formations of improvisation and movement, Pilobolus is using human relationships and abstract formations together to try to “talk” about the way our world is organized and layered. This is what I think good poetry does and probably what Denise Levertov attempted with her own writing. But dance, unlike gallery-oriented art and “serious” creative writing, has difficulty escaping the girdle of entertainment. Twyla Tharp may have tried occasionally venerating her choreography by taking it into Central Park in the ‘60s, but the stage is still the conventional way to present dance forms. Its link to theater is intrinsic and hard to escape, demonstrable in the fact that The Kansas City Ballet is performing Giselle this season, as many ballet companies frequently do, because it is a classic and an audience-pleaser. The Houston Ballet has even attempted to revive the story ballet in the last decade through vehicles like The Snow Maiden and Cleopatra.
Dance, reasonably, struggles more than the visual arts, writing, and music to validate itself. It has a harder time considering itself intellectually. The potential, though, of dance to express complex things comes through our immediate empathy for the human body and the human situation—the very same perceived limitedness of its medium.
Irony has gotten a bad rap recently. I first became aware of the war on irony from the comments of Jedediah Purdy on NPR a few years ago. One of his favorite targets was Bill Clinton, who, in his statement “I did not have sexual relations with . . . that woman” was supposed to be a prime example of problem irony run amok.
I have news for Mr. Purdy (as late as it may be): Bill Clinton was lying, not being ironic. You see, the audience for irony must be in on the joke–that is, they must have some sign of the ironic content of the message in the nessage itself, and there’s no indication that Clinton took any care to indicate that his meaning was the opposite of his actual statement. The fact that his statement was a lie is immaterial: he meant what he said, and he meant to lie. This, in turn, points out that there was no joke to be in on in the first place. Had Clinton been joking, it would have been in extremely bad taste, and, again, there’s no indication he was (Joking, that is. The whole incident was in bad taste). Clinton’s was simple case of someone lying and the lied-to not believing him.
Which sets us up nicely for the next thing irony requires: it requires a point. One of the things irony does best–the case of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” comes to mind–is point out hypocrisy. If Clinton was attempting to do that, it was his own hypocrisy he was pointing out. He at any rate succeeded, but, again, I don’t think his intention in making that statement was to wreck his presidency. Johnathan Swift, however, had a very serious point in “A Modest Proposal.” He was very seriously concerned with the welfare of the poor of Ireland. He used the power of irony to point out the role of the rich landowners in causing that poverty by suggesting that the children of the poor be used as food for the rich. The dramatic irony of a play like Oedipus Rex while not comic like Swift, also deals with important ideas like fate and humanity’s ability to choose, and how human nature plays a part in weaving the cloth of a person’s destiny. Without his “fatal flaw,” after all–Oedipus’ rage–he would never have been so inextricably bound to his fate; without his decisive leadership qualities he would never have solved the riddle of the Sphinx and risen to power, would never have tried to escape his fate, would never have had it revealed to him in the end. The irony demonstrates important ideas about how our best qualities are also our greatest flaws. Clinton reveals this about himself in his statement, but, again, there is little to suggest he intended to.
I’m not sure why Purdy chose Seinfeld as another target of his ire, but he seemed to think that Seinfeld’s sardonic take on New York, New Yorkers, and people in general was a great cause–or maybe indicator, that was never clear–of cynicism in America. Again, I have news: America has been cynical for a long time, at least since Watergate, but if the Beats are any indication, since before that, or if The Lost Generation is credible, since long, long before. All cynicism is the creation of disappointment that hasn’t killed you yet. (On the surface this is ironic, but it really isn’t.) It’s that disappiontment that Seinfeld set out to expose. By billing itself as a show “about nothing,” it became, by default, about everything. But mostly it was about the human condition in all its frailty, pettiness, cynicism, and, yes, irony. Irony is an important comic element, but its presence almost always indicates a more-or-less serious subtext, in this case that people are really disappointing. By naming the show after himself, Jerry Seinfeld sets himself and his friends up for ridicule. Irony is used for exposing hypocrisy here–a considerably more sophisitcated and important move than Purdy gives it credit for being.
It isn’t runaway irony that’s the real danger these days anyway; it’s our own utter inability as a nation to see the plain truth. The truth is the Bush administration lied to us about WMDs in Iraq; that the air, earth, and water is being poisoned and destroyed by nearly every act of contemporary life; that America’s problem with obesity is because we eat too much and exercise too little; that our sacred free market is more than willing to sell our jobs to anywhere labor is cheaper–which is everywhere excpet Germany and France. If anything, given the ability of well-used irony to expose the truth, we need considerably more of it, and we need it soon.
At least they didn’t wedge a lime-green New Testament between my teeth. Dressed in the impeccable attire that is their standard, two well-shaven, gel-haired young men approached me on campus today, and, intercepting, deigned to inquire if I’d ever heard of the Church of Latter Saints.
Well, if you’re going to ask, then hopefully you’re prepared for the answers.
In response to several polite but persistently personal questions about my familiarity with Mormonism, whether or not I believe in God, what lead me to my current beliefs, and what I think the meaning of life is, I talked about reading the Bible, how I came to view its inequities in terms of the humanness rather than sacredness it exhibits (nod to Mr. Ewy), how the reality of death effects life, and how morality can be derived from existentialist thought.
Then he told me how blessed he felt to be Mormon.
Well, bake yourself a cake.
I liken evangelism to a grapevine-intoxicated, fairweather friend. It’ll extract your most tender, intimate confessions, then, with the formulaic proficiency of Freud, slander those things precious for its own acclaim. And no matter how nicely it’s dressed, it is still that creature.
The Missouri Review Rejects George W. Bush’s Poem
Dear Mr. President, I speak only for myself and not the entire editorial staff of the EastWesterly Review, but we would publish your poem for a small fee — let’s just say it would be less than $80 billion dollars. You do understand how things work when submissions are not of our expected quality, right? Via Metafilter.