DAY EIGHTEEN

Today's post is a work of fiction, or rather the imagination, as I have no direct experience of what I speak - dance.  (Spoiler: I refute that statement completely by the end of this post).

In thinking of everyday creativity what could possibly be easier than dancing? No need for materials or equipment, no real need to think, you have everything you need to hand. Your body, your self. Move it, jiggle it, wave it about, you're done.

But what has been created, what communicated? And is it - dreadful question alert - Art?

Dance is for me the most inaccessible of creative endeavours. I don't get it. Don't begin to get it. 
 
I'm not just talking of the high art of ballet, or the mysterious meanings of subtle hand movements in Indian or Japanese dance forms. I'm talking about discos, raves, Strictly Come Dancing and the kitch performativity of line dancing. What is it? What is to enjoy in it either as a doer or a watcher?
 
One of the underlying purposes of this blog is to encourage and respect any form of creativity which may give someone pleasure in the making and may help towards their sense of wellbeing, so I'm not going to gainsay the pleasure or satisfaction others may gain from dance. All I'm really articulating is my inablity to make sense of it.

That last sentence gives me a clue to the problem, I think. 
 
I think. I try to make sense of things. That is the difficulty. Of all art forms and expressions dance is the one least open to intellectual analysis by the non-cognoscenti I would suggest. If you want to analyse it, at the high culture end, or simply at the cultural artefact end, you have to know the codes in play, the signals and their significance. But so much of dance, the everyday end, the demotic end, isn't built on codes or signals, it's just expression, or maybe not even that; it could be simply movement, for the sake of it, for the fun of it, movement 'just because'. If I carry on in this vein I could end up sounding like a snob about it.
 
Having started out thinking I was completely distanced from any knowledge or understanding of dance, in the writing of those few paragraphs I realise that was wholly wrong. Truth is I'm not so immune to the attractions of dance as I've just described.
 
For one, I used to enjoy modern dance or pysical theatre such as DV8, The Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehoughs, and the work of Pina Bausch even though I had not the slightest idea what was going on most of the time. An arts centre I went to as a teenager would host touring dance companies and that was my experience even back then. It is the physicality, the abandonment, the spectacle, even the danger which is so enthralling. They commit totally to their performance in a way which to the uninitiated like me seems to carry genuine physical risk.
 
And then it comes back to me that I was on the country dance team for my school and well remember the attractions, chief amongst which was getting closer to the girls without attracting disapproving or cow-eyed looks from grownups. I also remember the hot, sweaty, puffed out feelings of joy and elation at the end of a class or competition, not all of them caused by proximity to the girls on the team. It was a visceral pleasure arising from movement and energy, and satisfaction in successfully performing intricate moves and routines, and it was a joy in performance itself. 
 
Culturally this kind of pleasure often seems to be presented as something lesser, that this form of expression or creativity carries less value, is of less importance, than say, great paintings or fine architecture. Perhaps it's something to do with their ephemeral nature; they exist only as long as the performance or participation, apart from in people's memories. How skilled a writer would one have to be to successully describe a dance performance to someone who wasn't there, I wonder? 

But lesser or not, all things considered, when push comes to shove, I've realised that if I had to choose, I would choose to recapture the joy and 'simple' pleasures of movement, of dance, of giving in and letting oneself go to any measure of understanding, intellectual insight, or skill in some other creative endeavour.          

Perhaps I understand more about dance than I supposed at the top of this post.

Onwards...physically.

 
Picture Credit: Rdsmith4, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons


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