Dance dance dance

I have been learning of late. Inexorably learning, which is why I haven’t been writing. I have been too slapped in the face by Learning New Things that I’ve not been able to write about it. I am sure everyone experiences this, in some way, sometimes your duty to [write/reflect/make sense of things] gets overtaken by your need to exist and live a normal-paced life.

I have learned of a dancer named Martha Graham who probably invented contemporary dance. She was an all-out American who was born in the Victorian era and lived through the 1960’s Free Love movement and them went on to teach the likes of Madonna. She basically lived for a century and her autobiography about dance called Blood Memory was so damn dramatic, emboldened and atavistic that I had to keep putting it down on the coffee table to take a breather.

Martha Graham dropped quotes like this, quite easily:

"A dancer dies twice — once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful."

“All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.”

“The only sin is mediocrity.”

So, I’ve started working at a dance school. I can watch students do mid-air acrobatics and a hundred push-ups before I’ve finished my morning cup of coffee. Dancers are something else. They have honed self-discipline by working-out (they call it “conditioning”) every day, but not pushing themselves too far to avoid injury. They have hyper-spatial awareness because in a room full of swinging galloping bodies no one ever slams into one another, nor even grazes another's hair by accident. They have immense physical control because I’ve learned from watching ballet that it’s actually the slower movements which are the hardest, rather than the back flips (who’d have thought?) Not shaking when you extend a leg way above your head like some slow-motion bucking horse is the height of balletic beauty.

Energy as you enter a space

Performative qualities

Musicality

These are all new concepts to me. I just didn’t know how hard it was to become a top dancer, and as a commoner, I do think it’s crazy. You work yourself so hard and then your career is so short lived. But can you imagine being able to fling yourself in the air with abandon and to sail through it with grace? No way. 

Also, all of the classes are done with live musicians. Pianists and bongo players. When I watch a class through the studio windows the rhythm being beat out by the instruments and the stamping of the choreography is felt and seen. The musicians work with the dancers to play with tempo and carefully arrange different movements. For me it’s the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing Live Art. Living art? Because the music is materialising through the dancers’ bodies, or the dancers’ movements allow the music to take on a new life. Music and dance are inextricable, and they likely co-evolved together.

There’s a dance paradox, I think, which is that dance is universal. It’s probably the most universal physical activity. Children do it automatically when they hear something they groove to, and it’s more easy to grasp the concept of dancing than say, football. But then, if you come to a conservatoire you see dance as the most elite, peculiar and physically demanding activity people have ever done. So, what’s this disconnect between dance like we do it in our knickers in the bedroom Vs. dance as it’s shown on stage at Sadler’s Wells? 

Martha Graham