A little wisdom is no doubt possible; but I have found this happy certainty in all things: that they prefer—to dance on the feet of chance.
Friedrich Nietzsche, This Spoke Zarathustra
[Contact improvisation] came out of Grand Union. We were in residence at Oberlin College, I saw that there were a number of young men and this was a winter term kind of thing where people just volunteered to be in it and, you know, sort of out of school time. So I set a men’s class and I had never taught such a thing before, and I decided to teach a kind of, a gymnastic throwing your weight around solo, but I realized I would have to figure out how to communicate what kept me safe in this or what would keep them safe in it. So then I started digging through all my physical knowledge and decided that really the major issue was how to open up the senses to the movement. The movement was going to be random, improvised and rough, and it was going to be done on a mat so there wasn’t a kind of falling problem, but in a way that freed us to be a bit more relaxed about what we were actually doing. So I wanted the senses quite acute. I wanted the sphere around the bodies to be quite lively. I wanted people working all the way to the periphery of their vision. I wanted them able to fall, I wanted them able to bump into each other without, you know, and, and know how to do it. I wanted to, them to be able to roll on the mat, so if they fell they could translate that toppling into a, a movement that agreed with the surface that they were falling onto. They took the force parallel to it, things like that. So I learned how to teach these things, found out that people were, in fact, pleased to learn them and wanted more. And that wanting more is what finally got us to contact improvisation. That’s why it’s called something like contact improvisation because there is a third entity between the two dancers. It’s really a kind of, the leader is the movement. So once it gets into momentum, the, you, you very clearly have something to follow, which is neither one of you leading. It is the momentum that has been established. It’s the reality that you’re in that is the entity, the flow, the danger, the survival of the graceful capitulation to whatever event occurs.
Steve Paxton, “The Origins and Value of Contact Improvisation in the Words of Steve Paxton”, pillowvoices.org, 22/08/2020
A finality without means (the good and the beautiful as ends unto themselves), in fact,
is just as alienating as a mediality that makes sense only with respect to an end. What is in question in political experience is not a higher end but being-into-language itself as pure mediality, being-into-a-mean as an irreducible condition of human beings. Politics is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the act of making a means visible as such. Politics is the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is the sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human thought.
Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Politics” (1992), in Means Without End: Notes on Politics
Giorgio Agamben, over the course of a series of profound essays, has endeavoured to identify a space of politics that is neither subservient to the logic of a means to an end, a means to an end beyond itself (politics as poiesis, production), nor to the idea of an end in itself, lacking a means (politics as praxis, action). Politics is rather a means without ends, a “carrying on”, an action “endured and supported”, what Agamben calls gesture or res gesta. “The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them.” To open up this “sphere of a pure and endless mediality” is to reveal and enter upon what is properly an ethics and a politics: the sphere where a gesture interrupts the gesture as a means to an end or as an end in itself (interrupts transcendencies), a sphere where the open remains open – is “endured and supported”, where that we are and what we are become one in a permanent possibility of non-realisation, and of multiplicity and metamorphosis; a sphere without beginning or command, an an-arche. (Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” (1992), in Means Without End: Notes on Politics)
We may, by analogy, compare the ethical-political gesture with dance. (And here we bind this reflection to the work of the recently deceased dancer, Steve Paxton). Dance produces nothing; it has no object beyond itself and nor is it an end in-itself (unless grasped exclusively in its aesthetic dimension). “If dance is gesture, it is so, rather, because it is nothing more than the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal movements.” (“Notes on Gesture”)
We want to force the analogy further, with a short essay by Paul Valéry of 1936, entitled “Philosophy of the Dance”; an essay inspired Valéry’s attendance at a dance performance by Antonia Mercé y Luque, also known as La Argentina.
For Valéry, as for Agamben, dance is without a purpose or object. And while his reading of it may tend towards dance’s aestheticisation – rendering it as end in-itself -, it is precisely this anesthetization that may take us further.
Dance, for Valery, creates a kind of time, “a very distinct and singular species of time”.
It seems to him [the philosopher-spectator] that this person who is dancing encloses herself as it were in a time that she engenders, a time consisting entirely of immediate energy, of nothing that can last. She is the unstable element, she squanders instability, she goes beyond the impossible and overdoes the improbable; and by denying the ordinary state of things, she creates in men’s minds the idea of another, exceptional state – a state that is all action, a permanence built up and consolidated by an incessant effort, comparable to the vibrant pose of a bumblebee or moth exploring the calyx of a flower, charged with motor energy, sustained in virtual immobility by the incredibly swift beat of its wings.
A life, a bodily life, emerges with this “new” time, governed or rhythmed by ” all the sensations of the body, which is both mover and moved, are connected in a certain order – . . . they call and respond to each other, as though rebounding or being reflected from the invisible wall of a sphere of energy within the living being.” The body is “free” in its movements, “aware” of itself but seemingly “unaware of its surroundings”, except for one other object, “a very important one, from which it breaks free, to which it returns, but only to gather the wherewithal for another flight. . . . That object is the earth, the ground, the solid place, the plane on which everyday life plods along, the plane of walking, the prose of human movement.”
The dancer enters upon/creates another time-world, separate from the earth, through her/his own rhythmed gestures. “And in that world acts have no outward aim; there is no object to grasp, to attain, to repulse or run away from, no object which puts a precise end to an action and gives movements first an outward direction and co-ordination, then a clear and definite conclusion.”
“Everything happens as if. . . . But nothing more. Thus there is no aim, no real incidents, no outside world. . . .”
The philosopher exults. No outside world! For the dancer there is no outside. . . . Nothing exists beyond the system she sets up by her acts – one is reminded of the diametrically contrary and no less closed system constituted by our sleep, whose exactly opposite law is the abolition of all acts, total abstention from action.
He sees the dance as an artificial somnambulism, a group of sensations which make themselves a dwelling place where certain muscular themes follow one another in an order which creates a special kind of time that is absolutely its own. And with an increasingly intellectual delight he contemplates this being who, from her very depths, brings forth these beautiful transformations of her form in space; who now moves, but without really going anywhere; now metamorphoses herself on the spot, displaying herself in every aspect; who sometimes skillfully modulates successive appearances as though in controlled phases; sometimes changes herself brusquely into a whirlwind, spinning faster and faster, then suddenly stops, crystallized into a statue, adorned with an alien smile.
But this detachment from the environment, this absence of aim, this negation of explicable movement, these full turns (which no circumstance of ordinary life demands of our body), even this impersonal smile – all these features are radically opposed to those that characterize our action in the practical world and our relations with it.
In the practical world our being is nothing more than an intermediary between the sensation of a need and the impulse to satisfy the need. In this role, it proceeds always by the most economical, if not always the shortest, path: it wants results. Its guiding principles seem to be the straight line, the least action and the shortest time. A practical man is a man who has an instinct for such economy of time and effort, and has little difficulty in putting it into effect, because his aim is definite and clearly localized: an external object.
Everything here cited from Valery’s “Philosophy of the Dance” points to the kind of aestheticisation, of an art for arts sake or an art as an end in itself, that Agamben is so eager to criticise, especially if we keep in mind that the reference to dance is supposed to function, in his case, as an analogy to a type of action separated from any means-end logic, a type of action where means and ends fade in a “zone of indifferentiation” or are rendered “inoperative”.
But as dance in movement “carves” out a time-world for itself, as this world endures, its “separation” from the earth cannot perdure. It may have no end to bring it to an end, but end it will, due to that which it does not master the conditions of its very possibility. The dancer cannot but return to earth.
… the dance is the exact opposite [of a practical or instrumental act]. It moves in a self-contained realm of its own and implies no reason, no tendency toward completion. A formula for pure dance should include nothing to suggest that it has an end. It is terminated by outside events; its limits in time are not intrinsic to it; the duration of the dance is limited by the conventional length of the program, by fatigue or loss of interest. But the dance itself has nothing to make it end. It ceases as a dream ceases that might go on indefinitely: it stops, not because an undertaking has been completed, for there is no undertaking, but because something else, something outside it has been exhausted.
Or as Valéry also says:
… our philosopher may just as well compare the dancer to a flame or, for that matter, to any phenomenon that is visibly sustained by the intense consumption of a superior energy.
Dance, for Valéry, as for Agamben, “interrupts transcendencies” – in the latter’s language -, that is, transcendencies internal to the action that in turn justify it (again, as a means to an end or as an end in itself), but it does not escape, against Agamben, the external conditions of its possibility.
Separation therefore reappears; Agamben’s res gesta is fragile, foundational, but fragile; the “sphere … where that we are and what we are become one in a permanent possibility of non-realisation, and of multiplicity and metamorphosis; a sphere without beginning or command, an an-arche“, as we said above, rests in turn upon something beyond itself.
Nietzsche described this as dancing “on the feet of chance”. And we can fill out this image with a further analogy between dance and politics, through Hannah Arendt’s reading of “action” (within the category of “active life”) as the defining quality of political life.
Arendt’s study of active human life (The Human Condition, 1958) divides activity into three kinds: labour, work and action. The first is concerned with those practices that are necessary for the maintenance of human life; its objects are biological processes and the basic needs of existence and its acts are largely ones of consumption. Nothing permanent results from this activity and in this respect, among the three types of action, it is the closest to other animal species or the least distinctively human.
Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process
of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and
eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed
into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life
itself.
The second kind of activity, labour, is creative. It is both techne and poiesis, a maker of worlds that perdures beyond acts of labour and which frames the latter, thereby bestowing upon them a meaningfulness beyond mere consumption.
Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of
human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality
is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work
provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from
all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is
housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend
them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.
Finally, action, is the quintessentially political sphere, for of the three kinds of activity, it is the only one that is free: negatively, free of the necessary consumption of labour and free of the instrumentality of work (i.e., submission, as means, to ends of of work) and, positively, free to self-create, repeatedly, a collective of pluralities.
Freedom, in this case, for Arendt, is an end in itself, but it is an end that is lived with others and without whom, freedom, which is to say politics, would not exist. In other words, it is not an aesthetic intention or purpose, or a decision, that renders action an end in itself – action does not create something as its goal -, but the exposure and sharing of our actions with others as a form of life, in which “we” tell and re-tell the stories of ourselves. Above all, in what Arendt calls politics, “we” are who we expose ourselves as to others and we expose ourselves to others through the telling of who we are.
Furthermore, Arendt’s distinction of these three kinds of activities must not be read as suggesting that they exist separately from each other, even though each is governed by its own internal logic. The action of politics cannot exist without work and neither can exist without labour. But this relation of dependence, for Arendt, functions only in a single direction. Politics is not an inevitable feature of human life and according to her, our contemporary world is increasingly colonised by the logic of labour; active life is dominated by a “bio-politics” that is characterised by an exclusive concern with securing the conditions for the preservation and re-production of the “best” lives, that is, those lives from which the greatest quantity of energy can be extracted, at the least expense.
The only possible bulwark against such a scenario necessarily involves a reaffirmation of politics against the expansion of labour and the impoverishment of work. And this remains a permanent possibility because with each new “generation”, human action can be initiated anew, even through revolution.
If it is not the task of politics to concern itself directly with labour and work, as Arendt understands these concepts, it also cannot ignore them. And if it is work that gives meaning to labour (beyond mere temporary survival), so to it can only be action or politics that can provide the frame and manner in which the first two activities and carried out. If we can affirm that politics teaches, then in this regard, its activity molds the other two spheres, channeling them in directions which render possible freedom, rather than undermining and destroying it. It also teaches that it is itself fragile and that it therefore calls for an appropriate institutionalisation. And yet as this latter is never flawless, nor immune to corruption, nor assured of the engagement of “citizens”, political life may always wane. And without a new foundation – a “revolution” -, it can die.
In Arendt’s “ontology” of human activity, freedom is not an individual property inherent to human nature, but a possibility of shared and narrated collective life. It is at this level that freedom is discovered; and it is here also that we learn that it can be lost.
By analogy to dance (to return to our theme and to Steve Paxton), action engenders a fragile reality – the sphere of politics – that is without “transcendencies” (again, Agamben), but not thereby divorced from the needs met through labour and the created worlds of work. Politics can come to end in the very same way that dance does, for reasons extraneous to it, but reasons that are nevertheless ever present, as permanent contingent possibilities.
Dance, as interpreted by Paul Valéry and in the guise of Steve Paxton’s “contact improvisation” (in “contact improvisation [to cite Paxton’s words as they appear in the epigraph to our post]: … there is a third entity between the two dancers. … the leader is the movement. So once it gets into momentum, … you very clearly have something to follow, which is neither one of you leading. It is the momentum that has been established. It’s the reality that you’re in that is the entity, the flow, the danger, the survival of the graceful capitulation to whatever event occurs.), reveals a form of human activity that creates new worlds, without those worlds being separate from the moment of dance. These dance-created worlds display a way of being in the world that is “free” in the moment of their expression – they are not subservient to any purpose or object beyond themselves -, without thereby being completely “free”, that is, radically separated from the fact that one always dances with an “other” (even if that other is “oneself”) and from the conditions that make them possible.
In dance, as described by Valéry, and in politics, as analysed by Arendt, an an-archy is revealed (following Agamben). But as this anarchy can be revealed, so too it can be covered over. And the only that we have to keep this space open is through a form of impermanent “institutionalisation” (against Agamben). At one moment in Steve Paxton’s life as a creative dancer, he called the latter “contact improvisation”. In the political sphere, we call the desired institutional form anarchism.
This reflection is meant as a very modest – and perhaps misguided – tribute to Steve Paxton. His words and his dance were the motivation to explore dance as an image to capture the anarchy of anarchism. As Valéry also wrote in his essay on dance:
Philosophers have a great taste for images: there is no trade that requires more of them, although philosophers often hide them under dull-gray words. They have created famous ones: the cave; the sinister river you can never cross twice; or Achilles running breathlessly after a tortoise he can never overtake. The parallel mirrors, runners passing on the torch to one another, down to Nietzsche with his eagle, his serpent, his tight-rope dancer. All in all quite a stock of them, quite a pageant of ideas. Think of the metaphysical ballet that might be composed with all these famous symbols.
And with no desire to abuse the metaphor, it is today the image of Steve Paxton in movement across stage that inspired these, our words.
We close with Paul Valéry’s essay, “Philosophy of the Dance”
Before Mme Argentina captivates you and whirls you away into the sphere of lucid, passionate life created by her art: before she demonstrates to you what a folk art, born of an ardent and sensitive race, can become when the intelligence takes hold of it, penetrates it, and transforms it into a sovereign means of expression and invention, you will have to resign yourselves to listening to a few observations on the art of the dance by a man who is no dancer.
You will have to wait a little while for the moment of the miracle. But you are quite aware, I am sure, that I am no less impatient than you are to be carried away by it.
Let me begin at once by telling you without preamble that to my mind the dance is not merely an exercise, an entertainment, an ornamental art, or sometimes a social activity; it is a serious matter and in certain of its aspects most venerable. Every epoch that has understood the human body and experienced at least some sense of its mystery, its resources, its limits, its combinations of energy and sensibility, has cultivated and revered the dance.
It is a fundamental art, as is suggested if not demonstrated by its universality, its immemorial antiquity, the solemn uses to which it has been put, the ideas and reflections it has engendered at all times. For the dance is an art derived from life itself, since it is nothing more nor less than the action of the whole human body; but an action transposed into a world, into a kind of space-time, which is no longer quite the same as that of everyday life.
Man perceived that he possessed more vigor, more suppleness, more articular and muscular possibilities, than he needed to satisfy the needs of his existence, and he discovered that certain of these movements, by their frequency, succession, or range, gave him a pleasure equivalent to a kind of intoxication and sometimes so intense that only total exhaustion, an ecstasy of exhaustion, as it were, could interrupt his delirium, his frantic motor expenditure.
We have, then, too much for our needs. You can easily observe that most, by far the most, of the impressions we receive from our senses are of no use to us, that they cannot be utilized and play no part in the functioning of the mechanisms essential to the conservation of life. We see too many things and can do nothing with: the words of a lecturer, for instance.
The same observation applies to our powers of action: we can perform a multitude of acts that have no chance of being utilized in the indispensable, or important, operations of life. We can trace a circle, give play to our facial muscles, walk in cadence; all these actions, which made it possible to create geometry, the drama, and the military art, are in themselves useless, useless to our vital functioning.
Thus life’s instruments of relation, our senses, our articulated members, the images and signs which control our actions and the distribution of our energies, co-ordinating the movements of our puppet, might be employed solely for our physiological needs; they might do nothing more than attack the environment in which we live or defend us against it, and then their sole business would be the preservation of our existence.
We might lead a life strictly limited to the maintenance of our living machine, utterly indifferent or insensitive to everything that plays no part in the cycles of transformation which make up our organic functioning; feeling nothing and doing nothing beyond what is necessary, making no move that is not a limited reaction, a finite response, to some external action. For our useful acts are finite. They carry us from one state to another.
Animals do not seem to perceive or do anything that is useless. A dog’s eye sees the star, no doubt, but his being gives no development to the sight. The dog’s ear perceives a sound that makes it prick up in alarm; but of this sound the dog assimilates only what he needs in order to respond with an immediate and uniform act. He does not dwell on the perception. The cow in her pasture jumps at the clatter of the passing Mediterranean Express; the train vanishes; she does not pursue the train in her thoughts; she goes back to her tender grass, and her lovely eyes do not follow the departing train. The index of her brain returns at once to zero.
Yet sometime animals seem to amuse themselves. Cats obviously play with mice. Monkeys perform pantomimes. Dogs chase each other, spring at the heads of horses; and I can think of nothing that suggests happy play more fully than the sporting of porpoises we see off shore, leaping free of the water, diving, outracing a ship, swimming under its keel and reappearing in the foam, livelier than the waves amid which they glisten and change color in the sun. Might we not call this a dance?
But all these animal amusements may be interpreted as useful actions, bursts of impulse, springing from the need to consume excess energy, or to maintain the organs designed for vital offense or defense in a state of suppleness or vigor. And I think I am justified in observing that those species, such as the ants and the bees, that seem to be most exactly constructed, endowed with the most specialized instincts, also seem to be those most saving of their time. Ants do not waste a minute. The spider does not play in its web; it lurks in wait. But what about man?
Man is the singular animal who watches himself live, puts a value on himself, and identifies this value with the importance he attaches to useless perceptions and acts without vital physical consequence.
Pascal situated all our dignity in thought; but the thinking that raises us – in our own eyes – above our sensory condition is precisely the kind of thinking that has no useful purpose. Obviously our meditations about the origin of things, or about death, are of no use to the organism; and indeed, exalted thoughts of this kind tend to be harmful if not fatal to our species. Our deepest thoughts are those that are the most insignificant, the most futile as it were, from the standpoint of self-preservation.
But because our curiosity was greater than it had any need to be, and our activity more intense than any vital aim required, both have developed to the point of inventing the arts, the sciences, universal problems, and of producing object forms, actions that we could easily have dispensed with.
And moreover, all this free, gratuitous invention and production, all this play of our senses and faculties, gradually provided itself with a kind of necessity and utility.
Art and science, each in its own way, tend to build up a kind of utility from the useless, a kind of necessity from the arbitrary. Ultimately, artistic creation is not so much a creation of works as the creation of a need for works; for works are products, a supply presupposing a demand, a need.
Quite a bit of philosophy, you may think . . . and I admit that I’ve given you rather too much of it. But when one is not a dancer; when one would be at a loss not only to perform, but even to explain, the slightest step; when, to deal with the miracles wrought by the legs, one has only the resources of a head, there’s no help but in a certain amount of philosophy – in other words, one approaches the matter from far off, in the hope that distance will dispel the difficulties. It is much simpler to construct a universe than to explain how a man stands on his feet – as Aristotle, Descartes, Leibnitz, and quite a few others will tell you.
However, it seems perfectly legitimate for a philosopher to watch a dancer in action, and noting that he takes pleasure in it, to try to derive from his pleasure the secondary pleasure of expressing his impressions in his in his own language.
But first, he may derive some fine images from it. Philosophers have a great taste for images: there is no trade that requires more of them, although philosophers often hide them under dull-gray words. They have created famous ones: the cave; the sinister river you can never cross twice; or Achilles running breathlessly after a tortoise he can never overtake. The parallel mirrors, runners passing on the torch to one another, down to Nietzsche with his eagle, his serpent, his tight-rope dancer. All in all quite a stock of them, quite a pageant of ideas. Think of the metaphysical ballet that might be composed with all these famous symbols.
My philosopher, however, does not content himself with this performance. What, in the presence of the dance and the dancer, can he do to give himself the illusion of knowing a little more than she about something that she knows best, and he not at all? He is compelled to make up for his technical ignorance and hide his perplexity under some ingenious universal interpretation of this art whose wonders he notes and experiences.
He embarks on the task; he goes about it in his own fashion. . . . The fashion of a philosopher. Everyone knows how his dance begins. . . . His first faint step is a question. And as befits a man undertaking a useless, arbitrary act, he throws himself into it without foreseeing the end; he embarks on an unlimited interrogation in the interrogative infinitive. That is his trade.
He plays his game, beginning with its usual beginning. And there he is, asking himself:
“What then is the dance?”
What then is the dance? At once he is perplexed, his wits are paralyzed. He is reminded of a famous question, a famous dilemma – that of St. Augustine.
St. Augustine confesses how he asked himself one day what Time is; and he owns that he perfectly well knew as long as he did not think of asking, but that he lost himself at the crossroads of his mind as soon as he applied himself to the term, as soon as he isolated it from any immediate usage or particular expression. A very profound observation. . . .
That is what my philosopher has come to: he stands hesitant on the forbidding threshold that separates a question from an answer, obsessed by the memory of St. Augustine, dreaming in his penumbra of the great saint’s perplexity:
“What is Time? But what is the dance?”
But, he tells himself, the dance after all is merely a form of time, the creation of a kind of time, or of a very distinct and singular species of time.
Already he is less worried: he has wedded two difficulties to each other. Each one, taken separately, left him perplexed and without resources; but now they are linked together. Perhaps their union will be fertile. Perhaps some ideas may be born of it, and that is just what he is after – his vice and his plaything.
Now he watches the dancer with the extraordinary, ultralucid eyes that transform everything they see into a prey of the abstract mind. He considers the spectacle and deciphers it in his own way.
It seems to him that this person who is dancing encloses herself as it were in a time that she engenders, a time consisting entirely of immediate energy, of nothing that can last. She is the unstable element, she squanders instability, she goes beyond the impossible and overdoes the improbable; and by denying the ordinary state of things, she creates in men’s minds the idea of another, exceptional state – a state that is all action, a permanence built up and consolidated by an incessant effort, comparable to the vibrant pose of a bumblebee or moth exploring the calyx of a flower, charged with motor energy, sustained in virtual immobility by the incredibly swift beat of its wings.
Or our philosopher may just as well compare the dancer to a flame or, for that matter, to any phenomenon that is visibly sustained by the intense consumption of a superior energy.
He also notes that, in the dance, all the sensations of the body, which is both mover and moved, are connected in a certain order – that they call and respond to each other, as though rebounding or being reflected from the invisible wall of a sphere of energy within the living being. Forgive me that outrageously bold expression, I can find no other. But you knew before you came here that I am an obscure and complicated writer. . . . Confronted by the dance, my philosopher – or a mind afflicted with a mania for interrogation, if you prefer – asks his usual questions. He brings in his whys and hows, the customary instruments of elucidation, which are the apparatus of his own art; and he tries, as you have just perceived, to replace the immediate and expedient expression of things by rather odd formulas which enable him to relate the graceful phenomenon of the dance to the whole of what he knows, or thinks he knows.
He attempts to fathom the mystery of a body which suddenly, as though by the effect of an internal shock, enters into a kind of life that is at once strangely unstable and strangely regulated, strangely spontaneous, but at the same time strangely contrived and, assuredly, planned.
The body seems to have broken free from its usual states of balance. It seems to be trying to outwit – I should say outrace – its own weight, at every moment evading its pull, not to say its sanction.
In general, it assumes a fairly simple periodicity that seems to maintain itself automatically; it seems endowed with a superior elasticity which retrieves the impulse of every movement and at once renews it. One is reminded of a top, standing on its point and reacting so sensitively to the slightest shock.
But here is an important observation that comes to the mind of our philosopher, who might do better to enjoy himself to the full and abandon himself to what he sees. He observes that the dancing body seems unaware of its surroundings. It seems to be concerned only with itself and one other object, a very important one, from which it breaks free, to which it returns, but only to gather the wherewithal for another flight. . . .
That object is the earth, the ground, the solid place, the plane on which everyday life plods along, the plane of walking, the prose of human movement.
Yes, the dancing body seems unaware of everything else, it seems to know nothing of its surroundings. It seems to hearken to itself and only to itself, to see nothing, as though its eyes were jewels, unknown jewels like those of which Baudelaire speaks, lights that serve no useful purpose.
For the dancer is in another world; no longer the world that takes color from our gaze, but one that she weaves with her steps and builds with her gestures. And in that world acts have no outward aim; there is no object to grasp, to attain, to repulse or run away from, no object which puts a precise end to an action and gives movements first an outward direction and co-ordination, then a clear and definite conclusion.
But that is not all: in this world nothing is unforeseen; though the dancer sometimes seems to be reacting to an unforeseen incident, that too is part of a very evident plan. Everything happens as if. . . . But nothing more.
Thus there is no aim, no real incidents, no outside world. . . .
The philosopher exults. No outside world! For the dancer there is no outside. . . . Nothing exists beyond the system she sets up by her acts – one is reminded of the diametrically contrary and no less closed system constituted by our sleep, whose exactly opposite law is the abolition of all acts, total abstention from action.
He sees the dance as an artificial somnambulism, a group of sensations which make themselves a dwelling place where certain muscular themes follow one another in an order which creates a special kind of time that is absolutely its own. And with an increasingly intellectual delight he contemplates this being who, from her very depths, brings forth these beautiful transformations of her form in space; who now moves, but without really going anywhere; now metamorphoses herself on the spot, displaying herself in every aspect; who sometimes skillfully modulates successive appearances as though in controlled phases; sometimes changes herself brusquely into a whirlwind, spinning faster and faster, then suddenly stops, crystallized into a statue, adorned with an alien smile.
But this detachment from the environment, this absence of aim, this negation of explicable movement, these full turns (which no circumstance of ordinary life demands of our body), even this impersonal smile – all these features are radically opposed to those that characterize our action in the practical world and our relations with it.
In the practical world our being is nothing more than an intermediary between the sensation of a need and the impulse to satisfy the need. In this role, it proceeds always by the most economical, if not always the shortest, path: it wants results. Its guiding principles seem to be the straight line, the least action and the shortest time. A practical man is a man who has an instinct for such economy of time and effort, and has little difficulty in putting it into effect, because his aim is definite and clearly localized: an external object.
As we have said, the dance is the exact opposite. It moves in a self-contained realm of its own and implies no reason, no tendency toward completion. A formula for pure dance should include nothing to suggest that it has an end. It is terminated by outside events; its limits in time are not intrinsic to it; the duration of the dance is limited by the conventional length of the program, by fatigue or loss of interest. But the dance itself has nothing to make it end. It ceases as a dream ceases that might go on indefinitely: it stops, not because an undertaking has been completed, for there is no undertaking, but because something else, something outside it has been exhausted.
And so – permit me to put it rather boldly – might one not – and I have already intimated as much – consider the dance as a kind of inner life, allowing that psychological term a new meaning in which physiology is dominant?
An inner life, indeed, but one consisting entirely in sensations of time and energy which respond to one another and form a kind of closed circle of resonance. This resonance, like any other, is communicated: a part of our pleasure as spectators consists in feeling ourselves possessed by the rhythms so that we ourselves are virtually dancing.
Carried a little further, this sort of philosophy of the dance can lead to some rather curious consequences or applications. If, in speaking of this art, I have kept to considerations of a very general nature, it has been somewhat with the intention of guiding you to what we are now coming to. I have tried to communicate a rather abstract idea of the dance and to represent it above all as an action that derives from ordinary, useful action, but breaks away from it, and finally opposes it.
But this very general formulation (and that is why I have adopted it today) covers far more than the dance in the strict sense. All action which does not tend toward utility and which on the other hand can be trained, perfected, developed, may be subsumed under this simplified notion of the dance, and consequently, all the arts can be considered as particular examples of this general idea, since by definition all the arts imply an element of action, the action which produces, or else manifests, the work.
A poem, for example, is action, because a poem exists only at the moment of being spoken; then it is in actu. This act, like the dance, has no other purpose than to create a state of mind; it imposes its own laws; it, too, creates a time and a measurement of time which are appropriate and essential to it: we cannot distinguish it from its form of time. To recite poetry is to enter into a verbal dance.
Or consider a virtuoso at work, a violinist, a pianist. Just watch his hands. Stop your ears if you dare. But concentrate on the hands. Watch them act, racing over the narrow stage that is the keyboard. Are they not dancers who have also been subjected for years to a severe discipline, to endless exercises?
Remember that you can hear nothing. You merely see the hands come and go, stop for a moment, cross, play leapfrog; sometimes one waits, while the five fingers of the other seem to be trying out their paces at the other end of the racecourse of ivory and ebony. You begin to surmise that all this follows certain laws, that the whole ballet is regulated, determined. . . .
Let us note in passing that if you hear nothing and are unfamiliar with the music being played, you have no way of knowing what point in his piece the performer has come to. What you see gives you no indication of the pianist’s progress; yet you are quite certain that the action in which he is engaged is at every moment subject to some rather complex system. . . .
With a little more attention you would discover that this system puts certain restrictions on the freedom of movement of these active hands as they fly over the keyboard. Whatever they do, they seem to have undertaken to respect some sort of continuous order. Cadence, measure, rhythm make themselves felt. I do not wish to enter into these questions which, it seems to me, though familiar and without difficulty in practice, have hitherto lacked any satisfactory theory; but then that is true of all questions in which time is directly involved. We are brought back to the remarks of St. Augustine.
But it is easy to note that all automatic movements corresponding to a state of being, and not to a prefigured localized aim, take on a periodic character; this is true of the walker; of the absent-minded fellow who swings his foot or drums on a windowpane; of the thinker who strokes his chin, etc.
If you will bear with me for a few minutes more, we shall carry our thought a little further: a little further beyond the customary, immediate idea of the dance.
I was just saying that all the arts are extremely varied forms of action and may be analyzed in terms of action. Consider an artist at work, eliminate the brief intervals when he sets it aside; watch him act, stop still, and briskly start in again. Assume that he is so well trained, so sure of his technique that while you are observing him he is a pure executant whose successive operations tend to take place in commensurable lapses of time, that is to say, with a certain rhythm. Then you will be able to conceive that the execution of a work of art, of a work of painting or sculpture, is itself a work of art and that its material object, the product of the artist’s fingers, is only a pretext, a stage “prop” or, as it were , the subject of the ballet.
Perhaps this view seems bold to you. But remember that for many great artists a work is never finished; perhaps what they regard as desire for perfection is simply a form of the inner life I have been speaking of, which consists entirely of energy and sensibility in a reciprocal and, one might say, reversible exchange.
Or think, on the other hand, of those edifices that the ancients built, to the rhythm of the flute commanding the movements of the files of laborers and masons.
I might have told you the curious story related in the Journal of the Goncourt brothers, about the Japanese painter who, in a visit to Paris, was asked by them to execute a few works in the presence of a little gathering of art lovers.*
But it is high time to conclude this dance of ideas round the living dance.
I wanted to show you how this art, far from being a futile amusement, far from being a specialty confined to putting on a show now and then for the amusement of the eyes that contemplate it or the bodies that take part in it, is quite simply a poetry that encompasses the action of living creatures in its entirety, it isolates and develops, distinguishes and deploys the essential characteristics of this action, and makes the dancer’s body into an object whose transformations and successive aspects, whose striving to attain the limits that each instant sets upon the powers of being, inevitably remind us of the task the poet imposes on his mind, the difficulties he sets before it, the metamorphoses he obtains from it, the flights he expects of it – flights which remove him, sometimes too far, from the ground, from reason, from the average notion of logic and common sense.
What is a metaphor if not a kind of pirouette performed by an idea, enabling us to assemble its diverse names or images? And what are all the figures we employ, all those instruments, such as rhyme, inversion, antithesis, if not an exercise of all the possibilities of language, which removes us from the practical world and shapes, for us too, a private universe, a privileged abode of the intellectual dance?
And now let me give you over, weary of words but all the more eager for sensuous enchantment and effortless pleasure, to art itself, to the flame, to the ardent and subtle action of Mme Argentina.
You know what prodigies of comprehension and invention this great artist has achieved, what she has done for Spanish dancing. As for me, who has spoken to you only of the dance in the abstract – and too abundantly at that – I cannot tell you how much I admire the labor of intelligence with which Argentina, in a noble and deeply studied style, has revived a type of folk dance that has been so much cheapened lately, especially outside of Spain.
I think she has achieved her aim, a magnificent aim, since it meant saving an art form and regenerating its nobility and legitimate power, by an infinitely subtle analysis both of the resources of this type of art, and of her own resources. That is something very close to me, that concerns me passionately. I am a man who has never seen a contradiction – indeed, I cannot conceive of one – between intelligence and sensibility, conscious reflection and its raw material, and I salute Argentina, as a man who is precisely as pleased with her as he would like to be with himself.
* Valéry tells the story in “Reflections on Art.”
(Conference presented at the Université des Annales on the 5th of March 1936. The English language translation was published in Salmagundi, Spring-Summer 1976, No. 33/34, DANCE (Spring-Summer 1976), pp. 65-75.)
Child’s play
It has no RULES
Just the exuberant streaming of energies…
Until the muscular armoring process – schooling,
which Dance seeks release from…