Notes: Towards an Embodied Art

Framework & Flesh

Just now, some of you are beating your heads on the table, muttering “Forsythe! Forsythe!” How right you are! William Forsythe has been digging in the mines of embodied thought for years, with good results:

You use dance to get in touch with things. Even if it is just moving your hands, sometimes I just arrange my fingers. It is a way of thinking. The body is a thinking tool… I’m conscious of what I am doing. I’m looking at what the body’s possibilities are. I am looking at my hand right now. I’m saying — ok how does the body configure itself? What are the mathematics here? What are the tensions? You say — what are the properties of the present when you are with your body? What am I paying attention to right now?

And:

We all try to with our own means, our bodies, try to say ‘this is my arabesque’ and we have this wonderful ideal that exists, it’s a prescription, but there is no arabesque for example: there is only everyone’s arabesque. You carry it around with you, and if you are going through changes as a person in this civilisation that we’re in, then, I guess, it changes according to what influences or effects you have experienced.

FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH John Tusa FOR BBC Radio (February 2, 2003)

He has the ideas I’m after, more or less — the possible thoughts that might emerge for a physical actor in space, the sense of dancers moving within, having a relation with, a technique. But Forsythe, in so far as he strives to render his ideas in words, is concerned with establishing dance’s intellectual credibility to an audience of scholars and theorists. He uses words like “technologies” and “methodologies”… This was and is a necessary project, but it’s not mine.

Likewise, I know the theorists have been here before me, undoing the split of body and mind. More and more, the thinking we need now is choreographic, architectural: it considers the movement of multiple objects, equal and unequal, through a space that is itself a factor in their movement. Language to describe this thinking exists. But a vernacular does not. We have the framework; we lack the flesh. I want to vivify embodied thought for the lay audience — to come up with ways of writing that evoke the wet look, the insistent flesh of dance.

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