The mind in the dancer's body

I too loved the "White Out" performances.  I've seen a lot of dance companies, and I often find myself doing a funny little ritual at the beginning of each dance.  I count the number of dancers, and note how many are women, how many men.  Eight, I think, or twelve, or six, and then I try to keep track of who's on stage, who's not.  But only if I'm bored, if the choreography doesn't engage me.

At "White Out," I lost track of the dancers and enjoyed the dances, the wild family gathering of "Pass the Goddamn Butter"; the haunting blend of dance and paper art sculptures in "Paper Song," which seemed to me to be about mourning and the afterlife (though the stage imagery is expansive enough to invite numerous interpretations); and the wacky energy of "Getting There," which ran as an anthology of dance styles held together by both sly and broad humor.

My favorite, though, was "Trigger."  I loved how the choreographer's voice spoke about the dance he'd choreographed, how he said he was mainly interested in the minds of the dancers, but when he asked them to speak into a microphone on stage to express their feelings about the dance, he almost immediately cut them off!  Now that's an unreliable narrator . . .

That dance reminded me of my own past with dance.  In the way, way back, when I was a sophomore in college, my then girlfriend, a sophisticated daughter of a diplomat, took me to my first dance performance, an interpretation of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" by the Béjart dance company from France.  The event stunned me, and I decided I wanted to write about it, so the following year I took dance classes, and a music class as well as my usual writing workshop, and tried to write a long story about a dance performance, from the perspective of the dancers and the musicians.  The less said about that little project the better.

But strangely enough, my future writing ended up being deeply influenced by taking dance.  As a "mind in a body" being ordered about on stage by choreographers, I felt myself as a participant in a three-dimensional story, moving about the other characters.  This taught me a lot about how to create scenes in fiction, which have their own choreography.  Learning how to move "in time" with music helped me begin to develop a sense of rhythm in my written sentences.  And learning about the structure of music taught me much about how important structure is in works of fiction.  Eventually, my studies of the structure of Bartok's 4th string quartet influenced the way I put together my second book, The Art of the Knock: Stories.

So, I'm delighted to read the students' posts, how so many different art forms you're being introduced to excite you.  Their influences may make their way into your future in unexpected ways!