Ejercicios de coordinación

This theme relates to self-transcendence and forming part of a greater whole, as in Pini’s (1997) study on rave dancers. It also connects most strongly with a phenomenological framework as it is fundamentally concerned with a bodily connection with the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1968), a bodily connection with the outside/inside of the subject inherent in the different aspects of physicality of performance, music, audience, etc. It represents a highpoint of emotional, physical and spiritual integration of the self within the context of others and the world, an extra-discursive moment of body-mind fusion (Carey, 2000).

These moments emerged from the repetition of an established practice, of what Foucault and Butler have called a reiteration of ‘correct’ acts that serve to define the body-subject on an ongoing basis, but they have not been attended to by these theorists as a possible means for ensuring continuity of normative performance. On the other hand, resistance to established movement patterns emerged as a possible antithesis to dancing being experienced as addictive in those participants who practiced it. I suggest that such resistance resonates with Diprose’s (1994b) notion of the ability of the self to transform itself through action; that is, via resistance to an established practice, of subverting (normative) consistency of body-identity through strategic forms of practice.

Comments from the participants described the practice of dance in a variety of ways: as a passion, a drug, a compulsion, a feeling of completeness, a routine essential for wellbeing, a ‘rhythm that I need’, a ‘love for life’, as tied to the participant’s embodied experience of self to the extent that a ‘break’ from dance practice is felt as a form of physical ‘unease’ or ‘anxiety’.

Martin (41, dancer): “Dancing is definitely a passion ... it’s a passion that

could also be extended into an obsession as well. Because a dancer, if you’re hooked you’re hooked, it’s like a drug, you need to, you know if you’re on holiday for a couple of weeks you get this frustration you feel. You may not know why, but as soon as you get into a class, it all just disappears.”

Meredith (31, dancer): “It’s like a drug. I’m a really shitty person when I don’t

dance. I really am. It’s just something I have to do, it’s really a very compulsive thing ... and I love it, yeah, I really love it, and the few times in my life when I haven’t been dancing regularly, I’m different.”

For others, the physical responses to doing class are a form of bodily habit (a ‘routine’, a ‘need’) that becomes meaningful as a form of catharsis:

Sylvia (43, dancer): “I go in, I’m not feeling fantastic sometimes, and you go

in, you do class, you sweat, and your body collects itself, and your mind starts to work really well, and everything starts to move, and then you go on stage and it’s complete, it all comes together. I love what I do and so I need it, I need to do it. I need to do that for now. It keeps me going. It’s a routine that I’m used to, and that routine gets me going, keeps me going through the days and performing makes it complete ... it’s a little bit like breathing.”

Dancing is also experienced as ‘like a drug’, a substance to which the body has become addicted through years of engagement:

Marie (49, dancer): “I just fell in love with it, and I never stopped loving it [...] I think by having danced so long in my life, so many years, my body ... it’s like a drug for me.”

Nicholas (63, dancer): “I love to dance, and I think that’s my food, that is my

drugs, my passion.”

The connection between dance training and the dancer’s sense of embodiment is evident in reports of the physical experience of ‘feeling different’ when dancers take time off from practice, analogous to suffering withdrawal symptoms. There is a sense of catharsis in the regularity of training in, and performance of, ballet- based dance, connected to a ‘mastery of the body’:

Susan (53, dance academic): “Any time I stopped I became extremely

distressed at some level, and that has continued throughout my life.”

Vera (49, dance academic): “I find that if I’ve missed doing ballet I’m very untogether.”

3.3.5.1 Bodily reiteration and resistance to change

The addictive, cathartic nature of routine practice was not shared by dancers engaging in more experimental dance practices, such as Ruby, Joanne or Alana, who consciously adopted a method of ‘resistance’ to established movement codes in order to discover new connections. These participants, who moved from ballet-based training to more experimental dance practices, felt that continuous and ongoing training can also become a form of bodily ‘resistance’ to alternative movement possibilities, effectively ‘closing off’ the body from new experiences. For example, Joanne’s experience of ‘training deprivation’ became a productive time for taking new directions in movement, rather than being perceived (as in

ballet) as a regrettable lapse in peak body condition.18 _{Others were trained in, or} practiced, bodily resistance to habitual movement:

Joanne (48, dance academic/performer): “Even before I had children, I found

that, when I had a period of time away from working on technique classes— this is more in the dancerly tradition—if I had a break away, new information was actually able to come into the body, because it didn’t have this resistance of an ongoing practice. So I’ve always been quite open to those periods where you go into something else ... It allows it to be open for change to occur ... I think I had that work ethic through classical ballet, for such a long time, that my body actually enjoyed being given the space.”

Gabrielle (55, independent dance performer): “My teacher always said you

have to learn to work against you, don’t follow your spontaneous intuition, build resistance. Resistance was a very important word for her. We are always in resistance to something, to the air, to our own intuition sometimes, to go wilder, to discover, she said you must be very courageous to discover, don’t always follow the movements you like, that you can do already, discover.” Alana, whose initial training was in classical ballet, describes the initial difficulty she experienced in ‘letting go’ of her habitual forms of moving, which she encountered while attending an international institution for experimental dance:

Alana (choreographer, experimental movement practitioner): “It was a big

shift. It was hard at first, because ... a lot of the release stuff you were just lying on the floor for days [laugh], and I was just busting to move, I’d been doing acrobatics for years, so I was kind of like pumped up, you know muscle-bound, probably tense as hell, but anyway ... eventually, after a few months I realized I just had to let go of everything I knew and submit or I wouldn’t learn anything. And that was a real turning point.”

The maintenance of established corporeal codes forms a closed, repetitive practice that does not allow new structures to form. Instead, the dancer compulsively reinscribes herself or himself, through a reiterative process whereby the original meaning of the structures dissipates over time. Changes in the physicality of the dancer’s body in the process of ageing also make such reinscription increasingly problematic for older dancers.

Ruby (50, dance artist): “There’s a lot of talk that goes on about older dancers, keeping on working, but it’s actually very difficult. (Economically?) Yeah. Well, economically; that’s one big thing. But also physically, because if you don’t have a way of moving, of getting true making material that’s not based on what you used to know, then you haven’t got a hope in hell, really. You’ve got to sort of reinvent your own way of doing things in a way.”

3.3.5.2 The embodied experience of sublimity

There are instances in the participants’ narratives that suggest a link between the bodily passion for dancing and the experience of a heightened state of self- awareness and connection to the world, a momentary and ineffable experience of sublimity. This experience is a visceral, embodied and kinesthetic one.19 Experiences of sublimity constitute an important mode through which bodily experience can bypass language (the sublime is literally untranslatable). Importantly, its occurrence is not confined to dancers in their physical prime, but also extends to the experience of older dancers. Perhaps one of the reasons why dancing becomes a bodily addiction is that it can lead to such moments. These experiences, I will argue, are also independent of chronological age and do not appear to diminish with corporeal ageing.

class, the company notices it; three days without class, the audience notices it.

19 _{Both Kant and Lyotard have addressed the sublime in their writings, Kant with reference to}

beauty and missing content, and Lyotard as that which is (discursively) ‘unpresentable’. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, in Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, discusses both perspectives in relation to modernism in art (Gilbert-Rolfe, 2000).

Gabrielle makes the following comment in relation to her experience of the sublime moment as one informed by a process of reduction to basic simplicity:

Gabrielle (55, independent dance performer): “Everything is in harmony, but

harmony in a strenuous way, not harmony in a pleasant way; everything fits together. Everything, every little detail, fits together ... And you feel it. And in this moment you don’t have any materialistic wish. You are ascetic. You are pure, simple ... you really feel, for moments, as a whole ... complete.”

Dance is one site that offers such opportunities for heightened bodily experience, although there are other art forms through which it can be obtained. Margaret’s comment below draws a similarity between listening to certain forms of music and dancing in evoking a timeless moment (“everything stops”). She situates the sublime moment in dance within an extradiscursive domain (“you can’t say what it is”):

Margaret (49, high school teacher): “You’re talking about touching the soul,

something like the second movement of the Ninth Symphony is just … you know, the goosebumps come out, the tears come out; and certain parts of Mozart, also ... You live the music, and it’s my way of being free. Because … I want my freedom … because everything stops. You know, at that point, you can have no idea how amazing you feel; you’re connected with something else.”

This timelessness is echoed in Cilla’s response to the question whether she ever ‘got high’ on dancing. It is suggestive of a heightened awareness of the embodied self that in that moment temporally transcends its immanence:

Cilla (37, independent performer, teacher): “That thing of everything’s in the

right place at the right time, everything just meets in this one moment, and that moment lasts forever, and if it’s in the middle of a jeté, or if it’s in the middle of something, it’s just like, everything stops, and it’s just, you’re there. And then you move out of it, but ... just for a minute, everything, everything

comes together, all those different aspects of the physicality and the performance, and ... everything comes together, it works.”

The embodied experience of such epiphanous moments through dance is not only timeless in the sense of being disjunctive from (linear) temporality, but also ageless, in the sense that it is not confined to young bodies alone. That is, despite the biologically based changes in bodies over time, that are interpreted as markers of ‘decline’, bodies remain capable of such experiences for a lifetime, and one of the means of accessing them (but by no means the only one) is through dancing.