Violent Dance
When you pare life down to the essentials — removing the incessant distractions that assail modern man (internet, television, books, games etc) and prevent him from ever being bored — you come to really notice the psychological effects of what you see and do.
It sometimes seems as if the onslaught of modern culture is primarily a means to dilute the impact of any experience you might have. Even if you happened to see something of unparalleled beauty (e.g. Bergman’s sublime Winter Light), its impression fades fast when you turn immediately to a barrage of daily news.
On Saturday we went to see contemporary dance* at Tramway that attempted to translate Nietzsche, Sade, and Sacher-Masoch into dance. It started with a perverse representation of the sadistic intent in Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walking and then one of the male dancers delivered a frenetic monologue listing “suicide, cunnilingus, pain, orgasm, fucking, fellatio, masturbation, torture”. The effect of this on audience was for them to break out in nervous laughter. I’m not sure what the alternative was.
The rest of the performance used more conventioanl contemporary dance tropes — lots of jerking movements, entangled limbs, and passionate stretching — all of which makes this viewer’s spirits soar and his body feel lighter. However violent the dance became, there was always something fragile about the dancers that kept you engaged. The only slightly disappointment was the lack of contrast between violence and silence*: it was all violent.
* CAS Public, a French-Canadian dance group, performing Helene Blackburn’s Suite Cruelles as part of New Moves International’s annual New Territories festival of dance and performance.
* The first contemporary dance I ever saw was Saburo Teshigawara’s Absolute Zero in 2000, where the contrast between the tiniest movement of a finger tip and a sweeping gesture of the whole body was sublime.