linda hesse du preez

Author:                  L du Preez

Title of article:        The Dancer's Moment

Title of journal:        Art South Africa (IBSS accredited journal)

Journal information:     Volume 12; Number 2;           

Month/Season:            December

ISSN/ISBN Number:        16846133

Pages:                   122 to 123

 

 

The Dancer’s Moment

 

Stumm.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe proposed that ‘we should talk less and draw more. Personally I would like to renounce speech altogether, and like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches’. Goethe recommends us to be ‘Stumm’ (mute). Gadamer (1977:83) refers to the ‘speechless language of the pictorial image’ or, in the case of this essay, the artefact.

 

An artefact is an object created or resulting from human action. Artefacts are containers of human experience, embodiments of thought and knowledge made into material form (Jacobs 2013). Susan Findlay describes them as powerful tools for researchers to use in different ways as they have the ability to ‘evoke visceral and emotional responses in ways that are memorable’ and have the ‘capacity to help us empathise and provoke new ways of looking at things critically’ (as cited in Knowles & Cole 2008: 47).

 

The artefact is the active reflection that manifests itself in the engagement between the mind and the body (Diaz-Kommonen 2004: 3). According to Irigaray; ‘we are creatures of volume, meeting volume, procreating and creating volumes’ (cited in Betterton 1996:13). The artefact has the ability to interpret and communicate the ineffable, a ‘feeling’, into the three-dimensional and tactile. Husserl noted that speech normally bridges the outside and inside (Krauss 2011: 24), but artefacts, being evocative and tactile forms-in-space, can express the embodiment of emotion more accurately than text.

 

To create an artefact is to produce a form in space that describes a body in space that includes an interior/invisible space. The unpacking or ‘reading’ of an artefact involves what Simon defined as a boundary between the inner (invisible) environment (that which comprised the substance and organisation of the artefact), and the outer (visible, tactile) environment (that which consisted of the surroundings in which the artefact operates), and an interface as the meeting point between these two realms (as cited in Diaz-Kommonen 2004: 1).

 

Artefacts occupy and demand a three-dimensional space, as does the human body. They are fragile, sensuous, balanced and tactile, visible and invisible as the human body. Concepts of the body and its sensual experiences like pain, pleasure, desire, emptiness are central to feminist cultural practice (Betterton 1996: 17). Barbara Hepworth (1970: 283) asks aptly: “Could I, at one and the same time, be the outside as well as the form within…?”

 

In Hepworth’s opinion, one can’t make a sculpture without involving the body as site and source of movement, feeling, breath and touch (Nemser 1995: 21). My aim in creating artefacts and in teaching the practice of their making is via a process of becoming aware of what needs to be communicated from the inside – the emotive body – to the outside, and how the inside is reflected on how the outside appears and evolves. Contrary to Leder (1990), the body is never absent or dysfunctional. The ex-corporated body, even in suggestion, is fully present, inside and outside. The surface or skin only superficially/visually denotes the division between the inside and the outside. Openings, entry or exit points, are like the orifices of the body where the inside meets the outside. They are points that are invested with power and danger, symbolising vulnerability (Douglas 1966: 64).

 

The artefact results from an embodied reflective practice that focuses on an increased self-awareness grounded in physical sensation.

 

Sehnsucht.

‘Sehnsucht’ can be translated as longing, yearning or craving or intensely missing. It describes a deep emotional state. Sehnsucht may lend to life ‘a vividness and coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present’ (De Botton 2002:15).

 

Sehnsucht represents thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. This produces what has been described as ‘an ambiguous emotional occurrence’. Nothing is finished.

 

Sehnsucht may be the human mind’s attempt to come to terms with the concept of infinity (Lokke 1982). Sehnsucht lies in the possibilities in the unfinished. It is in the open space in the horimono tattoo in Tan Twan Eng’s novel The Garden of Evening Mists. The artefact is never finished.

 

Commenting on her video work Touch (2002), Janine Antoni (2003) reflects: “If I could walk along the rope and - as it dipped - that, just for a moment, I would touch the horizon, which would really talk about the incredible struggle to get to that place of the imagination. And then, every so often in the video, the rope fades away. I wanted to leave the viewer alone with the horizon, to sort of be in their thoughts, to spend some time with the sound of the sea and think about what the horizon represented to them.”

 

The horizon becomes a place of contemplation that doesn’t really exist. If we were to try to go to that place, the horizon would just recede further. Sehnsucht and the artefact (her embodied body) meet.

 

Chad and Pina are dancing.

An underwater camera captured the moment Chad le Clos touched the side of the pool during the 2012 London Olympics, beating Michael Phelps. After the race, Le Clos explained that during the last and winning seconds of his swim he consciously incorporated or embodied Phelps. He affectively responded through his lived body (Leder 1990: 94). Merleau-Ponty lyrically refers to this state of incorporation when writing: “I call up the visitation of sleep by imitating the breathing and posture of the sleeper” (as cited in Leder 1990: 58). The image of the embodied swimmer’s hands gliding through the water to touch, describes the infinite moment of Sehnsucht.

 

In the 2011 Wim Wenders documentary Pina, Pina Bausch reflects on the contemporary dance piece ‘Café Mueller’ and how she embodies her character when her eyes look down when closed and not when her eyes look straight forward when closed. This slight shift in invisible bodily motion dramatically informs the meaning and intention of the dancer’s movement and interpretation.

 

The Dancer’s Moment

Intense emotional states are felt in and through the body with heightened sensory intensity and visceral awareness. Emotive states give rise to a search for interpretation and understanding (Leder 1990: 78). According to Deleuze, the arts produce and generate intensity: that which directly impacts the nervous system and intensifies sensation (Grosz 2007:3). This self-awareness, mindfulness or sense of embodiment allows the reflective arts practitioner to be conscious of their own thoughts, the environment, in which they find themselves and the reactions that they have. The reflective process is a somatic experience (Bailey & Leigh 2013).

 

To Leder, the body is absent in times of healthy functioning. I disagree: the body, when functioning at a heightened or optimum state of sensory awareness is situated in The Dancer’s Moment. In The Dancer’s Moment, the body in motion is intensely aware, present, poised, fleeting and occupying an extraordinary moment. It is Chad and Pina’s moment of realisation. It relates to Lefebvre’s ‘the necessary critical moment’ (Lefebvre 1991: 11). The Dancer’s Moment is the lucid yet slippery point(e) when body and mind, object and intention, reach outside the sensual self and transcend the self to become something more. At this point(e), what Barthes refers to as the grain, body and mind create the embodied artefact. At this point(e), the embodied artefact evokes response.

 

The artefact is ‘Stumm’, yet embodies intelligence and knowledge (Jacob 2013). The artefact remains poised in a liminal, transient and yearning Dancer’s Moment. Just there.

 

REFERENCES

Antoni, Janine. 2003. Interview.  http://www.art21.org/texts/janine-antoni/interview-janine-antoni-touch-and-moor.

 

Betterton, R. 1996. An intimate distance: women, artists and the body. Routledge.

 

Gadamer, H. 1977. The relevance of the beautiful and other essays. Cambridge University Press.

 

Díaz-Kommonen, L. et al. 2004. Expressive artifacts and artifacts of expression. Working Papers in Art and Design 3. Retrieved 28 August 2011 from URL http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/
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Eng, T. 2012. The garden of evening mists. Myrmidon Books.

 

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Leigh, J. & Bailey, R. 2013. Reflection, reflective practice and embodied reflective practice. Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy: An International Journal for Theory, Research and Practice, 8:3,160-171, DOI: 10.1080/17432979.2013.797498.

 

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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), pp. 421-429 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/429973. Accessed: 14/10/2013 02:52.

 

Nemser, C. 1995. Art Talk, conversations with 15 woman artists. HarperCollins.