A Dance That Cannot Be Described In Words
According to the dance film ManFei, if the person is not present, the dance is not present. The question I am still thinking about Can dance be written？
I can explain a movie, a song, a novel, a play, or an impromptu chat, but I've never figured out how to describe a dance. Dance is always too enigmatic and fragile to pursue. I used to say this about Kontakthof: "The Pina's dancers on stage, they show off their emotional outlets and human flaws. And after witnessing the female protagonist's unexpected dance in the film The Thirteen Hairpin, I wrote: "My eyes were filled with afterglow, and as I stared and stared, I mistook the tears for dawn. What is left behind, fashioned by words, is different from the dance's genuine look.
Dance is "invisible"
The way word in China "舞 (dance)" is written in the oracle bone script, Li Xiaoding's Collected Interpretations of the Oracle Bones, says: "Dance is like a person holding an object in his hand, if not a cow's tail or a branch. The word for Dance and the word for infinite nothing is the same in the oracle bones. Still, in the Jin script, the word for Dance has two feet with different toes going in a different direction, not towards a certain place, but in situ with two feet alternating hands waving a branch, an act that is Dance.
The "无 (nothing)" in Jinwen is somewhat substantial, and the branches in the bottom portion of the Dance are gradually tossed into the fire with other wood, so there is nothing in the hands, and the Dance is over when the branches are burned out, and the fire is put out.
The people disperse it all and come back to nothing. I have always believed that Dance as an art form has always been about leaving, fading away, removing the sense of time before and after, and passing like a flash of lightning. It's like a journey, a process that leaves a memory. Of course, I could briefly describe what I saw in the audience, but that would be pointless. But I don't think these are dances. As I write, the minute hand on the clock goes around, and I don't know how many times, and the Dance is gone.
While there are numerous words to explain and illustrate dance to express our sentiments, the initial communication always begins with body language. According to John Cage and Merce Cunningham, "Is it possible to describe anything in a few words? Are we thinking too simplistically?" With words, is there any need for dance?
When people see a dance performance and try to explain their sensations in words, the words themselves pale and have been silently locked off by the individual mind, but the body is still attempting to express itself.
"The body can reveal and speak, as well as overflow its capacity to feel and see into the outside world, to come into contact with other objects through the gaze, and to discover the expressive aspects in all things," writes Merleau-Ponty. Words can only express specific intellectual symbols and cannot tell what we truly feel on the inside. However, biological feelings can do so.
This reminds me of a dance piece I saw in Beijing, A Dance That Cannot Be Described In Words.
About the content of the dance:
The choreographer of this piece completely subverts the primary form of "dance" created by using the technique of interplay between the real and the imaginary, allowing the audience to wander between performance and non-performance, making the audience an essential part of the work: 1 The stage space is divided into a 3 x 3 nine-box diagram using the longitudinal section of an apartment building. By walking one frame at a time, one enters a room.
The audience participates in the completion:
After the actors have completed the action form for the first time in the different rooms, the audience participates in the judgement by defining the content of the action form they have just performed. The following are the definitions of the audience in the scene:
Room 202: A man has fallen. Why? I don't know.
Room B01: A person writes something repeatedly, supposedly to a lover.
Room 101: A person is releasing himself and decompressing.
Room B02: A person doing a dance they don't like.
Room 102: A person keeps telling stories waiting for someone to give them a banana.
Directly deciphered live:
With the performers constantly busy in four dimensions and the audience still unaware of what is going on after several iterations, the piece is designed to invite the audience directly onto the stage and have them read it aloud in the same way as the text in the novel depicts the characters' plots:
Room 202: A historical researcher: Bin Laden's death, but I'm going to study him extremely hard to see how he is still alive and how I think he will still influence global security. At the moment, the image of Bin Laden's death comes to my mind.
Room B01: A wartime intelligence officer in a basement, not sleeping for 36 hours, recording information.
Room 101: A couple hosting a grand party in a luxury flat, singing "poker face" in Cantonese while doing a spirited repetition of the rhythm of the guests' banging.
Room B02: A deserter and a beautiful, mysterious Shanghainese woman live here, playing the role of a psychic rice diviner for a living, dancing to ask for rice manifestations.
Room 102: A man who studies the spoken language of the tribes, constantly encroaching on them with what he thinks is a civilised language, only to flee on his own because, as he discovers, it is the very thing they fear most. The civilisation that he speaks.
Dancer\Choreographer: Xiaolin Jin(2019), Beijing LDTX Dance Company, The name of this work does not describe its content
The result of this decipherment made all the viewers exclaim: "That's a big difference!" But then they thought, "That's right! That was the definition I gave when I saw the dancers' performance; there's no need to think the same way as everyone else!" In the interaction between the dancer and the audience, there are many possibilities for interpretation, and these multiple interpretations may vary, but they are all valid. So, yes! There is absolutely nothing wrong with the audience's answer. Dance is a vocabulary of emotions expressed by the human body, which cannot be accurately described by written language. Finally, I understood the choreographer who gave the work a memorable name: "The name of this work does not describe its content". Indeed, no matter what name is given to it, it will not accurately convey the content of the work.
According to phenomenologists, I become a sensation, and something happens via sense, one through the other, one in the other. In this piece, the viewer and the performer are both subject and object, providing and receiving experiences. We can only feel the feeling by entering the dance and establishing the unification of perception and sensation.
Of course, the unkind words I use to describe this work seem even more feeble and uninteresting, but I'd want to look at the self that was present. If I had the chance, I would definitely go back and enjoy the dance again, and the body would feel like a three-dimensional ball, so sensitive and sensual.
Reference:
1. Li Xiaoding(1965). Collected Interpretations of the Oracle Bones
2. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton (1987). Dance and the Lived Body a Descriptive Aesthetics
2. Merleau-Ponty, M., & Smith, C. (1979). Phenomenology of Perception
3. Dancer\Choreographer: Xiaolin Jin(2019), Beijing LDTX Dance Company, The name of this work does not describe its content