"The Ideal Qualities of the Human Form"
"When words and music are addressed to God, it's a
rare choreographer who can accompany them with movement that looks anything
other than piffling. Dance -- by showing the ideal qualities of the human form
and/or by making use of time and space -- can reveal the sublime, but it usually
looks thin when it tries to address the religious. The Israeli choreographer
Emanuel Gat thinks otherwise. In "K626," which his company is presenting at the
Joyce Theater, he is not just setting a Requiem; he's tackling the most sublime
of all composers: Mozart."
On
Thursday, Alastair Macauley reviewed Emanuel Gat (see above quote). One
(relatively) good thing about Alastair Macauley is his frankness about his
aesthetic persuasions, but the fact that the New York Times head dance critic
understands dance as an attempt towards the sublime through the vehicle of
idealized human bodies appalls me. And his understanding of Gat's work
as accompaniment to its music: equally irritating. Macauley's understanding of
dance is so reductive, and unfortunately, it is so prevalent. The ideologies in
"successful" or "uptown" American dance seems to be a) the body beautiful or b)
music visualization. These ideologies generally subordinate dance either to
music or perpetuate fetishisation of the body (and often racial and gender
bias). These dangerous, unscholarly, pre-conceived notions about dance keep
dance transcendental and thus inaccessible. The very idea about attaining the "sublime"
seems to be about anti-humanism. Your standard issue human body is certainly
not sublime, so, according the this ideology, we need highly rarified, crafted
bodies to bring us closer to the divine. Using the body to confound and defeat
the body. Using the body to be more than merely human. It is a very reductive
view of what dance can be, and it's really disappointing that after everything,
we've only come this far.
I seem to be ranting again.
Posted by
Jacob Peter Kovner on April 1, 2008 8:32 AM
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