Terpsichore’s new Bodyspeak
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "The nine muses." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1844 - 1861. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e4-643e-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
As the ancient Greek muse of Dance, she is a fashion icon that cyclically sheds her skin to reveal new trends of fusion and cross-pollination. Whether she wears Roman sandals or Nike sneakers, whether she is barefooted or iron clad she is constantly shifting as part of an evolving body culture. What does Terpsichore’s contemporary dance vocabulary look and feel like today? Intangible, elusive, fluid and freewheeling - in a state of flux.
From the austere angularity of Graham’s earthbound kinetic idiom, we have for the past 80 years refined our “bodyspeak” as dancers through physical theater, release, contact improvisation and post-physical performance to a newly coined concept of FLYING FUSION & ALTERED STATES. Both concepts draw on post-modern deconstructivism and ultra-contemporary flow.
The sense of urgency, agency and fluency takes over codified form and elegantly lends to a cross-pollination of genres, styles, experiences and somatic embodiments. All this experimentation in an attempt to yield a new physical verbiage that is off-balance and free to hinge in any direction.
Precisely, today contemporary dance is a statement, not a form. It is devoid of any principles of movement and purely based on engendering experiences that evoke multiple soul shifts and paint vast and deep soul scapes. There are still vestiges from neoclassical or lyrical jazz infused with a flavor of hip hop or breakdance, but at the very core contemporary dance has become visceral, somatic and immensely fluid.
The sense of gliding and free flow ushers all of us dancers into a kinesphere of distilled emotions that suspend in time and space and curl back into the original impulse. It is a cyclical, spiral, winding ,waxing and waning syncope of rediscovery and fall that has allowed us to excavate a vocabulary – less rigid, more membrane-like.
Our bodies have shaped into this undulating membrane that expands as it contracts, diverges as it converges and seeks a polycentric relationship with gravity. Is it the arial levity of a hammock or the bouncy springboard of a trampoline? Perhaps, a little bit of both!
The new dance form or rather dance scape feed off a constantly changing and shifting paradigm of our human condition where we see the potential breakthrough in the breakdown phase. In dance language, this process creates an urge for a greater suspension before the recovery and a lingering into the fall. By creating more freefalling suspensions within polycentric, off beat patterns of swirling and a movement in and out of orbit we become like a whirling Dervish who picks up momentum from the perpetual axial oscillation. In the same way, an ultra-contemporary dancer gains momentum from suspension and rebounds coupled with off-center twirls. The direction looks the same, the spin is different. It is a response to the turbulent epoch that we are blessed and cursed to live and explore in.
As we learn to live in these paradigm shifting times, our bodies cultivate new codes of coherent movement. There are no movement cuts in a spiral. It progresses and regresses naturally and perhaps that principle translates strongly into contemporary dance when the somatic coherence is honored and the movements are linked with invisible breath-strung thread.
Most currently, we exist in a single time line where past, present and future have morphed into a wise progression. Trying to undo the past, or foresee the future is futile and irrelevant. But abiding and dissolving in the present moment with no regrets and anticipation brings us back into the ancient body of Terpsichore that was rooted in singularity and ritual.
Singularity holds that the brain is not separate from everything else and its ability to interface with all other realities it creates shapes its neuroplasticity further. How do we translate this neuroplasticity etching in a dance idiom? What is the trending dance craze of today in our identity shedding and value resetting world?
It is the singularity of all our views directed into the “multiversality” of our creative expression. And that knows no bounds. It is the dance idiom of transcendence. Will we continue to transcend the human condition and advance consciousness to manufacture transhuman genius in non-human bodies, or will we preserve the sanctity of our body culture and sow the seeds of a new form of levity and fluidity. Will we digitalize the physical body into a megabyte and catapult it in free space to spawn new amorphic form or echo a voice unadulterated, yet re-imagined? Is the growth of information and knowledge outstripping our power and appreciation to understand it?
We are making the big leap from the informational to the experiential realm and in Contemporary Dance that trust translates in an attempt to excavate states of mind through shapes of body. The emphasis goes to the body of water that we hold and the memory that it contains. We are gently reminded to tend to our avatar bodies the way we tend to a garden - metaphysically and emotionally.
Will we leap back into the future or regress into the future past? Who knows what the era of Liquid Modernity holds in store? It’s up for grabs, it is up to us to re-imagine the dance speak and put Terpsichore in our runaway shoes.
Overground Physical Theater’s reflections on the currency of Contemporary Dance.