afternoon of a dance

In an exhibition at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, there are two particularly arresting images on display. One of these is a photograph of Anna Pavlova. She is standing on the bank of an ornamental pond, which is encircled by a short, thin fence with a low hedge of rushes behind it. Pavlova stands behind the hedge, which obscures her legs almost to the knee. She wears a stiff, pale tutu, the shade of which is impossible to determine from the black-and-white photo. She bends forward from the waist, and the stiff arc of the tutu fans out behind her like the tail of a bird. Pavlova is reaching out her arms, and looks down at the pond with an expression of yearning. In the pond are two swans. One of them is a little blurred, fluffing its feathers. The water ripples around them as they swim. The only discernible motion in the photo is from the swans.

Another image in this exhibition is a print of Vaslav Nijinsky in costume for “L'après-midi d'un faune” (from Bakst’s 1912 painting). Nijinsky is naked from the waist up. He has pointed ears, and his legs are spotted with large black-and-white blotches, like a dairy cow. He wears a sandal on one foot, and his bare foot is raised. Nijinsky bends in a series of curves from his knees, his waist, his tilted head, and his reaching arms. His eyes are closed in absorption. A thick torrent of scarf fills the air around him, and matches the angles of his body. The scarf is bright blue with yellow spirals. Nijinsky almost seems to move, but he is held there. He will never put down his raised foot.

A dance cannot be communicated or recreated on the page, since dance is fundamentally a movement, which can’t be transmitted to stationary media. Even video can’t fully capture a dance—Nijinsky didn’t allow his performances to be filmed, since he believed that film didn’t do them justice. Video never preserves the essential human element of dance. It is strangely affecting to see a dance being made in front of you by bodies like yours (in the broad, human sense), that are moving and living in your immediate space. The spectator’s legs and belly tense involuntarily at the sight of the dancing, in a sort of physical sympathy. This touching effect is either absent or much less pronounced when one watches a video. A dance only exists once, at a specific moment. Dance is thus painfully ephemeral. As Christopher Caines puts it, “But at least if you love a poem or a novel you can often reread it; and if you love a painting or a sculpture you can visit it in a museum…To love a dance makes the least sense of all, for you can hardly ever see the dances that you cherish; they exist almost all the time only as afterimages; and video or film, compared to the living choreography on stage, is nothing.”

Since a dance cannot be fully experienced in separation from the physical bodies that create it, the real dance is imbedded in time. To recreate even an instant of the dance is as impossible as reliving a heartbeat that has passed. Yet we are desperate to hold dances still, so that we can enjoy them even when they’re over. A recent column in The New Yorker tells of the excitement caused by the emergence of several “films” of Nijinsky, films which were in fact engineered using photographs. We hate to acknowledge that once a dance is over, it can never be remade in the same way again.

Dance reminds one of passing time, of lives that move a little closer to their end with each breath. This memento mori function of dance is heightened by the fact that dancers’ professional careers tend to be very brief, since the body cannot maintain the required level of physical ability for long. A pessimistic spectator may even reflect that a dancer’s every gorgeous, marvelous leap brings her closer to the end of her career.

However, the reminder of death contained in dance also infuses each movement with a poignancy inaccessible in works that are relatively unaffected by the passage of time. The dance is passing away before our eyes, so we’d better pay attention.

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Works:

“Sergei Diaghilev and Beyond: Les Ballets Russes”, March 16 - June 26, 2009. Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Caines, Christopher. “Lilac Garden,” in Reading Dance. Robert Gottlieb. ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. 365-372.

Acocella, Joan. “Fool’s Gold Dept., The Faun”. The New Yorker. 29 June 2009. 25-26.