I know this for myself from other disciplines. I go to a gallery, I see powerful works of art, I feel them hit me deeply, but they rarely bring about immediate and deep change in how I live my life. I do feel altered, different, but my gut reaction usually softens as time passes and I fold my new knowledge/perspective into my existing world. I don't usually leap to an entirely new way of living.
But being the performer is an entirely different level of knowledge. I remember listening to an interview with Noomi Rapace, the actor who plays Lisbeth Salander; Rapace talked about not being able to attend a post-production party, because she was vomiting her character out of her system. A similar kind of artist experience is promoted in the Black Swan. Portman's character becomes increasing unable to maintain a boundary between her non-dancer self and her character in the ballet.
In the case of Nina, Portman's character, the blurred boundaries between ballet, dance and reality result from an unbelievable mish-mash of popular ideas about art, creativity, mental illness and madness. The film is an utter nightmare on these topics. Portman's Nina lives an inconsistent, overly dramatic, pop-psychologized mashup of self-harm, anorexia and hallucinations with some sexuality anxiety thrown in for good measure, .... I don't even know what to call it. It does no service to the dancers who struggle to survive in a profession that does nothing to nurture and much to destabilize. It does no service to the disabled people who wrestle with prejudice and stereotype every day.
As a dancer, though, I have been asked if my life is like that. Do I wrestle with losing myself in my roles ? I've usually given fairly straightforward answers. I am a modern dancer. The pieces that I am in do not usually lend themselves to narrative psychology. My roles are driven by movement rather than by personhood or personality. I do not have to become a person, much less a character with years of history and interpretation known to critics and ballet-o-manes alike. To the extent that I have psychology to deal with, that understanding arises from the movement itself.
Back in May, I wrote:
One of the things post-modern/contemporary dance does is expose the dancer as individual, person without embarking upon a story. Unlike traditional modern dance and ballet where uniformity is one of the issues being taken on, post-modern/contemporary dance can seek to separate the dancers and acknowledge them for who they are -- as movers sometimes or, even, as people off the stage. Choreographers create for these dancers movements that are perhaps drawn from the individual dancer's own set of preferred movements -- a movement vocabulary -- or that the choreographer thinks is unique to and for them. It's a dangerous and risky project for a dancer: the border lines between who you are, what kind of mover and performer you are, and who you think you are suddenly become blurred. It's scary.I simultaneously struggle with and relish what performance asks of me. And, in a show that has more than one piece, I can move from being sexy, to twitchy, to fiery, to contemplative or to whatever grows within me as the movement of the dance takes over. At the end of a show, I might be completely high and bubbly and/or completely exhausted and nonsensical. It's trippy allowing your body to be such a communicative thing; the emotions of the movement run your emotional experience of the performance. And that is something that I strive for.
I do a lot of work to empty my mind before dancing. It takes practice to turn that inner judgmental voice off -- you look bad, ugly, fat ... you screwed that up again.... do you really think that looks anything like a real dance move? -- and surrender to feeling and communicating only what your body tells you. It takes practice to turn off your technical voice -- OK, just a little bit more to the left, grab here, not there ... lean, lean. .... push hard. Gosh, hope I don't fall.... what comes next again? You have to be able to trust that your body knows what it is doing and that it will do that. And you have to be ready to hear what it has to say.
It's a lot of work to be as responsive to and respectful of your body in these ways. But the thing about body knowledge is that the body knows what it has to do and, if you get your mind and your self out of the way, the experience of the body doing its thing can be exhilarating. If you can let your body lead you through the show, it will process that show with and for you. I experienced this most recently last week. A section of my part was created from a series of static positions -- find ten positions in which it seems that you might be posing for yourself, privately -- or something like that. I let my body help me find the positions. The choreographer took them and worked them into movement. But every time I do them, I still experience the feeling I had in them.
- What? Really? You? I don't care if you check me out.
- I'm completely in control.
- Caught you looking.
- Peekabo
- Shy
- Calm. At peace.
- Oh, the agony! (said with camp irony)
- Uh uh. Not me.
- I can't see you.
- Yahhh.
As vivid as they are for me, I don't know what they mean for an audience member; I just know that this is how my body feels. And when body and I are done with one, we move to the next. Or, rather, I move through my body to the next. By the end of the piece, my body has taken me on this journey; we're both OK with it all and though my mind is probably worried -- was I good? did you like it? how was it? what did you see? I felt too vulnerable, did that come through? -- my body is usually excited, happy, exhausted, whatever. Either way, it's done. The storm that is performance has come and gone.
With this understanding of body-led performance, it's hard to see how I could get stuck in the artistic prisons of Black Swan. To me, that's an outsider's view of dance. I have 20 years of performance experience as a musician and another 3 as a dancer. I know this, and I know how to do this. But this is my blog, and you may have been reading me for a while. I owe you some honesty. I have actually experienced what is was like to not have the body process for me.
You know how body workers are always saying things like -- your body is your memory. Your body remembers trauma. Your body is holding pain, guarding against pain... I've always nodded and just succumbed to feeling better. Nothing better than a nicely warmed massage table. Last November, I learned some of what that might mean.
This piece required a different sort of work. Instead of emptying my mind to listen to my body, I had to empty my mind in order to inhabit different spaces, images, different states. Then, I had to use my body express my inhabitation (if you see what I mean) as movement. So, the impulse to move and feel did not originate in my body; my body became the expressive realization of different conditions, qualities, ideas. I was not accustomed to this. It was a different discipline, one for which I had no training or preparation other than what we did in rehearsal. We certainly rehearsed. But while you might think about rehearsal as a kind of practicing the movements, our practice was one of the discipline. Time and again, we thrust ourselves into different worlds; sometimes, we stayed in one for minutes, but we just as often transitioned in seconds. In each realm, the goal was to be completely and fully present. We did this starting in mid-August for around six hours a day, five days a week.
By the time of the show, I had ceased to process, to clear the material from my body, but I didn't know that. I still don't fully understand why or how that happened. Was it simply that I didn't know how to work in this way? That I didn't have the time to process, either emotionally, mindfully or movement-wise? Or was it that I somehow just lost my grip? I am actually rather scared to find answers to these questions. I definitely should know, because then, I will be able to do something to work better next time. But I am also scared to know. In case the answer is something Black Swannish.
What did not clearing this piece from my body mean? As I remember, there were many manifestations. At first, it was just repeatedly singing and hearing the music. That seemed fine; the music appealed to me. It challenged my ear and drew out my soul. Then, it sort of seemed as if I was constantly in rehearsal in my head. I would hear the music and try to figure out what it meant in movement for me. Even if I wasn't actually dancing at the time, I would feel myself miming dance to myself.
Finally, I noticed that my dance muscle memory was overriding my daily life muscle memory. The performances were over, but I would reach for a coffee cup and feel my arm sliding into a dance reach (as opposed to a simple everyday reach). My dance muscles would engage and my arm would slide out in a nonsensical fashion; the music would start playing, and I would fold my fingers, one at a time, around my cup. The dance would fade as I slurped coffee, but it would come back -- with different music -- almost every time I did something that had a dance equivalent ... arch backwards, release down... whatever. For the duration of that movement and a couple of fragments beyond, I would fleetingly be jettisoned back into those seconds of the piece.
The body knows. The body knows the work. The body knows and holds dance -- I cannot imagine how it would be to hold trauma. My "flashbacks" of the piece faded over time and with physical rest and body work. Eventually, I was able to rediscover and retain some sense of a neutral body, one not "possessed" by that dance. And now, finally, I feel enough distance between myself and the piece that I can write about it and what happened.
I didn't know that things had gone that far for me. And I feel scared/shocked that I lost so much, that I gave so much, that the piece took so much. It's hard for me to talk in terms of gain, though. I now have a much stronger set of dance skills, yes, but ultimately, as for the audiences of the piece, the art passed through me. I am different, yes, but only subtly altered; I cannot tell you how. In writing this post, I have had the music from the piece on in the background. It's a test. Am I over this piece? Have I really regained my autonomy? I've noticed no desire to repeat the movement, no calling, no flashback to memories of performance or of rehearsal. Yes, it is true. Black Swan is a fictional horror film, not a reflection of dance reality. Even my body knows that.
You know how body workers are always saying things like -- your body is your memory. Your body remembers trauma. Your body is holding pain, guarding against pain... I've always nodded and just succumbed to feeling better. Nothing better than a nicely warmed massage table. Last November, I learned some of what that might mean.
This piece required a different sort of work. Instead of emptying my mind to listen to my body, I had to empty my mind in order to inhabit different spaces, images, different states. Then, I had to use my body express my inhabitation (if you see what I mean) as movement. So, the impulse to move and feel did not originate in my body; my body became the expressive realization of different conditions, qualities, ideas. I was not accustomed to this. It was a different discipline, one for which I had no training or preparation other than what we did in rehearsal. We certainly rehearsed. But while you might think about rehearsal as a kind of practicing the movements, our practice was one of the discipline. Time and again, we thrust ourselves into different worlds; sometimes, we stayed in one for minutes, but we just as often transitioned in seconds. In each realm, the goal was to be completely and fully present. We did this starting in mid-August for around six hours a day, five days a week.
By the time of the show, I had ceased to process, to clear the material from my body, but I didn't know that. I still don't fully understand why or how that happened. Was it simply that I didn't know how to work in this way? That I didn't have the time to process, either emotionally, mindfully or movement-wise? Or was it that I somehow just lost my grip? I am actually rather scared to find answers to these questions. I definitely should know, because then, I will be able to do something to work better next time. But I am also scared to know. In case the answer is something Black Swannish.
What did not clearing this piece from my body mean? As I remember, there were many manifestations. At first, it was just repeatedly singing and hearing the music. That seemed fine; the music appealed to me. It challenged my ear and drew out my soul. Then, it sort of seemed as if I was constantly in rehearsal in my head. I would hear the music and try to figure out what it meant in movement for me. Even if I wasn't actually dancing at the time, I would feel myself miming dance to myself.
Finally, I noticed that my dance muscle memory was overriding my daily life muscle memory. The performances were over, but I would reach for a coffee cup and feel my arm sliding into a dance reach (as opposed to a simple everyday reach). My dance muscles would engage and my arm would slide out in a nonsensical fashion; the music would start playing, and I would fold my fingers, one at a time, around my cup. The dance would fade as I slurped coffee, but it would come back -- with different music -- almost every time I did something that had a dance equivalent ... arch backwards, release down... whatever. For the duration of that movement and a couple of fragments beyond, I would fleetingly be jettisoned back into those seconds of the piece.
The body knows. The body knows the work. The body knows and holds dance -- I cannot imagine how it would be to hold trauma. My "flashbacks" of the piece faded over time and with physical rest and body work. Eventually, I was able to rediscover and retain some sense of a neutral body, one not "possessed" by that dance. And now, finally, I feel enough distance between myself and the piece that I can write about it and what happened.
I didn't know that things had gone that far for me. And I feel scared/shocked that I lost so much, that I gave so much, that the piece took so much. It's hard for me to talk in terms of gain, though. I now have a much stronger set of dance skills, yes, but ultimately, as for the audiences of the piece, the art passed through me. I am different, yes, but only subtly altered; I cannot tell you how. In writing this post, I have had the music from the piece on in the background. It's a test. Am I over this piece? Have I really regained my autonomy? I've noticed no desire to repeat the movement, no calling, no flashback to memories of performance or of rehearsal. Yes, it is true. Black Swan is a fictional horror film, not a reflection of dance reality. Even my body knows that.
