Tag Archives: the dance

Dance: a Pocket Paradise

Among the leaves of a tree the sight of man looks in the hope of fruit. Among notes and beats, your mind longs for the polar points of the musical structure, and tries to seize them by means of the captain of all gestures: the foot that meets the floor.

When you dance following rhythm with your gestures, energy does not diminish due to the accomplished work, but rises with the soundness of the musical sensation. And if the game of legs is well done, then the attitude takes possession also of your trunk, arms and hands, up to the articulations of fingers. Body structure is put in the service of music structure, as if it was a puppet of manifold possibilities, and simple gestures that trace beat are followed by a more elaborated editing.

In adventure films there are secret tiles, and when someone tramples by mistake on them, hellish traps spring up and palaces crumble. In this video-real-game instead, there is a secret G point inside the concret moving just under the surface, like a big worm of Dune. When you succeed in following him with your steps, the floor comes to life and becomes an animal to be ridden. And if you lose his traces you have to stop still, like a silent statue waiting for the intuition to find the position again.

But we are not in a twentieth century theatre workshop, and the one who is dancing is not an athlete, interested in developing tougher muscles for more powerful jumps. He’s a citizen of the sad empire, which, by profession, does something else, and uses with love the body available to him to play the score, without getting angry about the limits of his instrument. It is not the intensity of the physical performance ruling in this game, but the syntax of the words of movement that the inner director disposes of.

And there where fatigue lets its voice be heard, the dancing citizen interposes immobile pauses or lessens the intensity of every movement beyond measure, till it remains only a nod of the head or the look. But never does he give up about getting charmed by the fire-flies that kindle in the magic triangle among body, mind and the organized sound.

The Book of Man teaches us a dance to build up the kingdom of here and now, giving a sense to the enterprise of facing the different coming against us as days go by. It’s not a dance to comply with the visual taste of a public; it’s a form of beauty that is not observed by the ones outside, but by the unique one inside.