Walking has a double, which is dance

“The prose-poetry distinction does not reside only in the two accepted meanings of one relationship. It also arises from two ways of using them, and the effectiveness of one or the other. Poetry first arose, it would seem, out of play. Man, who in order to live and subsist must have rapidly put together sign-alphabets, or simply manipulated objects, assembled solids, used his limbs, perceives they can be used gratuitously and with absolutely no apparent purpose. Prose and poetry then begin to be dissociated in many fields. Walking has a double, which is dance. Writing and drawing for utilitarian purposes also have doubles: the mystic sign, figurative drawing, which itself found a double in abstract art, etc…

(page 151)

Pierre Schaeffer. In Search of a Concrete Music. Trans. Christine North and John Dack. Berkeley: U of C P, 2012.

Found while browsing the stacks of the Belzer Library, SFU, Vancouver.

One does not use oneself

“[Dancing] tends to draw its significance from the fact that in it the dancer’s self is transformed: to say that a dancer’s body is either the medium or the instrument of dance, though not actually false, is misleading. One does not use oneself, and if one truly used one’s body one would do so not as a wholly embodied being but as a spiritual or cerebral entity to whom the body was extraneous.”

(page 5)

Francis Sparshott, A Measured Pace: Towards a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance.

Found via an online community for performance philosophy studies.

An elastic space with volitional vectors

“The system of positions in space whereby movement in general is charted becomes, in the human case, a system of places from which one is displaced and to which one returns, and so on. Such a space is elastic, with volitional vectors; some of these vectors are defined in relation to the stage, or other circumscribed dance space, and others are generated by the danced action. As humans watching humans, audiences cannot help construing what they see in terms of such fields.

However the dances are seen, a dance is normally danced in a space. It is danced on a surface, which has a relevant character as a field for movement. It will be flat or tilted, rough or smooth, single- or multi-levelled, in various ways. The danceable surface will have or lack determinate boundaries. Its limit may be abysses or walls, or simply prohibitions (taboo areas), or conventions of abstention from dancing. The surface if limited, will have a shape and proportions; even if unlimited, it may have contours of relative undanceability. Access to the dancing space may be limited for the dancers (by doors, wings, ramps, conventions of entry) or for the audience (physically by proscenium arch, thrust stage, amphitheatre) or conventionally, by understandings of what it is proper to see, and so forth.”

(page 123-124)

Francis Sparshott, A Measured Pace: Towards a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance.

Found via an online community for performance philosophy studies.

Exultant and recalcitrant bodies

“Dynamic rhythmicality is not simply a matter of the ordering of time but relates such ordering to our vital experience of life with exulting and recalcitrant bodies in an encouraging and resisting world.”

(page 171)

Francis Sparshott, A Measured Pace: Towards a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance.

Found via an online community for performance philosophy studies.

The difference between conveying a meaning and being meaningful

“There is a difference between conveying a meaning and being meaningful. All sorts of facial expressions, movements of hands and arms, even shiftings of the body are meaningful; they reveal to us the quality of experience and will of the moving person, without our being able to say in words what it is that is conveyed. But there are also gestures, especially of the hands, that convey meaning that have verbal equivalents.”

(page 247)

Francis Sparshott, A Measured Pace: Towards a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance.

Found via an online community for performance philosophy studies.

Dance thus conceived as powers moving out into the world

“Dance thus conceived as powers moving out into the world can function (as calligraphy, tracing the hand’s “dance”, can also function) as the central art of a culture, because activity expressive of life assumes therein a form that is at once natural and eloquent; its technical transformations (like that whereby calligraphy yields to typography) change it into what symbolizes natural movement by violating it.”

(page 462)

Francis Sparshott, A Measured Pace: Towards a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance.

Found via an online community for performance philosophy studies.

The dance itself that seems to be their sole reality

“The Graces […] are neither gods nor women, but dancers. They are quite ordinary. They are unaware of any possible onlookers, not because they gaze out into a void, but because their attention is held within the confines of their dance. They are absorbed, not in themselves or each other, not in the pose they are holding or the movements they are making, but in the dance itself that seems to be their sole reality.”

(page 460)

Francis Sparshott, A Measured Pace: Towards a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance.

Found via an online community for performance philosophy studies.

To plumb the depths of the human corporeal imagination

“Cunningham and Halprin shared an interest in reflecting in art the arbitrariness of modern life through radical juxtapositions of disparate activities, undercutting narrative logic. Both also reacted against the emotional colouring of the modern dance establishment. If Cunningham rejected the expressionism of modern dance by looking outside the self to chance procedures as a way to generate and structure movement, Halprin at first chose the opposite extreme – going deep inside the self through improvisation. This was not, as she has said, for the purpose of self-expression. Rather, it was to plumb the depths of the human corporeal imagination, to discover capabilities that had been stymied by the conventions of modern dance. Halprin penetrated the interior of the body/mind, guiding her dancers and students to scrutinise individual anatomical workings as well as unconscious needs and desires, in the voice as well as with movement. This led to a surrealistic effect in which untrammelled psychological and movement behaviour rubbed against the cool tasklike performances produced by scientific kinesiological explorations.”

(page 3)

Essay by Sally Banes in, Anna Halprin, Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance. Lebanon, NH: University Press Of New England, 2000.

What is one’s ‘own’ is tierra incognita

“In dance we find most radically expressed what is true for postdramatic theatre in general: it articulates not meaning but energy, it represents not illustrations but actions. Everything here is gesture. Previously unknown or hidden energies seem to be released from the body. It becomes its own message and at the same time is exposed as the most profound stranger of the self: what is one’s ‘own’ is tierra incognita.”

(page 163)

Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. Oxford: Routledge, 2008.

A kind of spacious identifying occurs

“After some time of practice, a kind of spacious identifying occurs, where the attention of the improviser is not narrowed by what happened, instead, happenings occur within the awareness of silence and space. The improviser merges within each happening and simultaneously rests within the space that holds each happening. This is not experienced as a split of attention. There is always a sense of a completely unified moment – moment to moment. There is a magic in this.”

(page 54)

Ruth Zaporah. “What’s on My Mind Now.” Contact Quarterly 27.1 (2002)