March 6, 2008

Wrestle Me Beautiful

I have just started reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies. Call me a Forsythe wannabe if you like, but I think that post-structuralism has a lot of resonance for dancers. I know Forsythe and other choreographers have read and been inspired by Barthes and Derrida, and I really think that the post-structuralists have tapped into issues that are highly pertinent to the field. Barthes writes in his preface, "The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of 'naturalness' with which newspapers, art and common sense  constantly dress up a reality  which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history." (11)

What we consider to be a 'natural' dance is, as pointed out by others, anything but. Theatrical dancing, although it is one of my favorites, is most certainly a genre determined by the normative history it has acquired throughout the ages. Nature and history, Barthes says, are not to be confused. So where are those pre-conceived notions of naturalness in dance? How is our history represented? Barthes talks about the determining 'petit-bourgeoisie' values that determine the idea of the 'natural' within the medium? How do those manifest?

It seems to me that, far too often, the dancer is still a sylph; dehumanized, and generally subjugated to the ideologies of the cult of the 'body beautiful' or music visualisation. Dance remains transcendental, and thus inaccessible. Barthes writes subsequently about the theatrical value of wrestling: "There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private... Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler's gesture needs no anecdote, no décor, in short no transference in order to appear true." (19) Wrestling's appeal, according to Barthes, lies in the fact that it is a (semi-)composed theatrical act, in which the physicality requires 'no transference' or suspension of disbelief to be engaged with. The sylph, who with her ethereal grace defines that which is beyond mere human physical expression, creates here appeal the opposite way. Through playing the transcendental, mystical card, such dancers (and the choreographers who use them) impose such a huge burden of transference upon both the dancers and the audience. Dance is one of the only fields that has actively cultivated lack of plausibility and elimination of immediacy. Particularly in America, where performance after performance is done in a black box on black Marley with black curtains on either side. The space effectively eliminates history, or any points of history, immediacy or interest. The space gives the audience nothing to grab on to, and the dancer leads the audience even further away. It primes the pump of the transcendentalism and etherealism that dance has come to rely on. The wrestler gives his audience immediacy. Dance, most often, deliberately evades immediacy; virtuosity with a pretense of ease seems to be the epitome of that attempt. If we are going for any sort of verismo, that direction of effort seems to be misguided.

While I don't know what Barthes' would say about black box theatres vs. use of spaces that cultivate histories, I would tend to think that rethinking space and encouraging the décor that Barthes sees as anecdotal, would at least offer the performer, choreographer and audience the opportunity to interact with pressing physical realities; an immediacy of a sort. I think it iss important to realize that when you elect to use a black box, you are choosing the absence of something.

On a slightly different note, I think Barthes expresses what I was trying to say about figure skating, except he does it much much better. He writes, "It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle." (20) I think you could probably replace wrestling with figure skating in that sentence.

Let's try it with dance:

"It is not true that [dance] is a sadistic spectacle..."

Oh dear, I've seen some performances lately that have put that much to the test.

"...[dance] is only an intelligible spectacle."

That's just false.

Let's work on that.

And now, some more wrestling:

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill & Wang, 1972.

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