Last Friday, I saw something remarkable. Something life-changing. My ballet teachers are all in the dance company at the school I go to. They performed in a show, with the rest of the company, that included three short pieces, "Scramble" (Cunningham), "The Elements of Style" (Nash), and "The Seasons" (Alston, with music by John Cage). Since I can't get these pieces out of my head, I figured I should write about them. I'd call this a review, but there's really nothing that qualifies me to "review" any ballet. But that doesn't stop The New York Times, so let's call it a review!
I had underestimated the importance of watching ballet regularly when I started taking classes. It should have been obvious. The reading and theatregoing I do is so essential to the plays I write. Being an observer is essential to being a doer.
"Scramble," the first piece up, was choreographed by Merce Cunningham, a man whose work is currently in the midst of a global retrospective. Can you imagine being so good at something that the entire world, collectively and simultaneously, decides, yeah, let's do this? From "Scramble," I can see why. The movements begin simple, contemplative, almost intentionally unstable. As the dance advances, it evolves in complexity, but still retains enough ambiguity to tease out audience engagement. For me, I liked how the quieter moments of the piece invited me to project my own internal thoughts, feelings, and struggles onto the stage. Art is, after all, the swirling of two projections: what you're projecting onto it, and what it's projecting onto you. This intermingling meant that, though my interpretation of "plot" was surely different than the person next to me, it was just as valid because it was built on a solid foundation of both textual reference and reasonable personal inference. I cannot help but wonder if, for at least some of dance, the spectrum of such interpretation isn't greater than it is for the written word, where it's easy for me to feel confined to the page, unless I'm reading Gertrude Stein, of whom I am a huge fan. In fact, now that I think about it, Stein's liberation of words from the page feels almost "ballet-ic" in nature. Words, for Stein, tend to dance, but intentionally so. "Scramble" strikes me similarly.
The evening also featured two musical interludes by people who seem to just be able to pick up the nearest instrument (in this case a cello and a piano) and just go to town. I found that when I closed my eyes, their music instantly started to draw a landscape. I see people close their eyes when they listen to music. I've tried doing this in the past, but it's rare I truly start to see anything vivid. For some, I assume this comes more naturally. Maybe it speaks to my mental state when I sat down for this performance, but I truly enjoyed the effect.
But the real crux of the evening, for me, was "The Elements of Style." This is what was life-changing. Here, Matthew Nash took an otherwise dry, grammatical guidebook and electrified it through interpretation and extrapolation. Rules that are otherwise instructional became playful. And why shouldn't that occur? The English rules for possession become exciting when we open up the word "possession" to all of its other meanings. As per the dance, an announcer reads the rule for the apostrophe "S," and then we hear his example: "Charles' friend." Two dancers, during this, enact, briefly, the plot of Charles having a rendezvous with a lover, who, facetiously, yes, is his "friend." By overlaying this meaning of "friend" and "possession" atop the traditional grammatical and syntactical definitions of both, as per Strunk & White, we're invited to bust the text wide open and consider it as a guidebook not simply for grammar, but for life. This makes me consider what other books are hiding. What purely functional works could make for amazing and meaningful ballet? Let's make dances based on Ikea instructions. Better yet, let's take Judith Butler's incredibly deep but often dense writing and juxtapose it with gender in action via ballet. Nash's "The Elements of Style" practically begs us to do this, to play with the traditional. And, if anyone instructs me to play, well, I'm more than happy to abide.
Alston's "The Seasons" asks us to do something similar, except instead of using a written text, he uses the natural "text" of seasonal progressions. This dance was cast in such a way that it seemed to be saying something meaningful about male interaction. The male or masculine dancers all had moments of interaction that situated the female or feminine touch within the context of male/masc movement. I felt like I was watching a grander version of what I experienced in class with "running feminine" (see Lesson 10 for more on that). Here, two or three male/masc dancers were involved in combining traditionally gendered movement in unexpected ways. To be clear, though: I'm speaking about this via how it felt. I don't know enough about dance to actually say if the movements they were performing are truly traditionally gendered feminine, like the running in Lesson 10.
All told, the evening was cathartic. I had always known, through working with amazing choreographers on plays of mine, that dance had this power. Now, I'm able to unlock some of it on the technical side. That only deepens its importance. It's like Richard Feynman and the flower. Feynman said that an understanding of the science of a flower only helps one appreciate its art. The same, evidently, goes for dance.
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