It's more relevant to next week's discussion (Phelan and Reason). But there ya go.
"You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls."
(Merce Cunningham, from Time's Farewell. Dec 16 2009)
His wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merce_Cunningham
His wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merce_Cunningham
Ah, dear Merce, may he rest in peace. Dance, perhaps my favourite performance genre, actually has a rather rigorous system of documentation. Still, choreographers love citing its ephemerality, which I admit to wholly buying into. Here's our own Crystal Pite on the subject:
ReplyDelete"Dancers sculpt space in real-time, working inside a form that is constantly in a state of vanishing. We have no artifacts. I find it strangely beautiful to be creating something that is made of us—made of our breath and blood and bones and minds. Something that is made of the space we occupy and made of the space between us. We embody both the dance and its disappearance."
Peter