Choreographing the present

Alberto Spadolini, Tau – L’ultima colonna del tempio, 1960s.
 Courtesy of Marco Travaglini.

 

 

In front of the supermarket you need to take a number to stand on line. Then inside another number will be given to us, on a yellow laminated card. Sometimes this card does not have a number. A number which is not a number. About two weeks have passed from the last time I went shopping and I did not know about the line outside, least of all about the numbers. I wait. I start noticing that when people arrive, they directly go to the little machine that dispense the numbers. It is the same that is usually used to queue at the counter where cold cuts, ready-made food ad bread are. In front of the supermarket there is a wide rectangular area so that (so that?) people do not stand in a line but are spread here and there. The metre is between us. One metre distance. Minimal security measure. How long is a metre? I need to visualise space. Margaret Atwood has shared the image that Health Canada recommends, a moose that is two metres long [1]. And in Italy? In Italy we are left with the abostraction of metres. However, in the area, there are those who do not care about it or are not fully aware of it and walk too closely to people waiting in order to reach the machine dispensing numbers. Everybody wears masks and gloves, except for me. They are mainly disposable masks. There is a great talking about masks. I ask myself whether those worn by these people are sufficient to protect them, to protect us. I keep the distance placing myself a bit outside the group. Two men are too close and are chatting. Why? Distance, what distance? Masks and security? Space. The body. Bodies. Years ago I read somewhere (or maye I listened to) a choreographer, maybe Mark Morris, complaining about the fact that in the underground people do not have a sense of space, that is of their body in space. Dance, I think, teaches this. Can teach this. The awareness of the body and bodies in space. Rudolf Laban, theorist of the early twentieth century, talked of the kinesphere, “the personal space” [2], that we occupy with our body and that surrounds it. That is the one that, while standing, we can occupy extending our limbs, like arms and legs. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man comes to mind and also the new Vitruvian Woman Rosi Braidotti talks about [3]. This space could exceed the metre if, for example, we opened both our arms laterally at the height of our shoulders. Well, we could not go around with our arms open. O could we?

Health Canada image twitted by Margaret Atwood.

 

Another person arrives, without a mask. She goes straight to the number machine even though close by there is a woman. Why? I recall the famous pas de quatre of the cygnets from Swan Lake (1875-95) where four ballerinas dance holding their hands [4]. It requires coordination ad syncronicity and it is an example of kinesphere sharing, that today is not possible. When I studied dance (centuries ago, now I write about dance, which means nothing to most people), I remember I had to be careful about the distance between me and the people near me, because I could have kicked them or hit them with my arms. Even though at the time I did not know Laban, I was nevertheless beginning to know my kinesphere. 

 

At this point I understood that I need to take a number, otherwise I will never enter the supermarket. To be sure, I ask the man closest to me. He confirms it. Then I ask how can I reach the number machine if clsose-by there are two people. He shrugs and adivises me to go around them, making a long round and passing outside the group to reach the machine from behind. It is an excellent choreographic intuition that I immediately put into practice. Then I go back to my position. Still, standing, in place. The queue which is not a queue looks like a choreography of standing in place. It could look a very limiting posture, but it is not so. For Martha Graham, posture recalls stillness only on the surface, as “the body is poised for most intense, most sublte action” [5]. If I decide to stay still with my legs, I can move my arms, hands, shoulders, neck, head, torso and so on. It is what Linda Rickett-Young defines as gesture [6]. If there is no shift of weight, our body can still move a lot. And I think of Virgilio Sieni’s hands and arms in Nudità [nudity] (2018) [7], of his art of gestures. If I then decide to move my legs, a set of kinetic possibilities opens while standing in place.

 

The cygnets' pas de quatre, Swan Lake, Royal Ballet

The first that comes to my mind, due to my education, is flamenco. I could slightly bend my knees and have my calves go to hit the floor, dancing a zapateado with my planta, punta y taco. I do not do it. They would think I am crazy. And then I think that in this absurd period, we would absurdly need some choreographers to deal with, teach and coordinate people’ movement. And I think of all the dance teachers who have been hardly hit by the pandemic [8]. They are used to deal with moving groups of people (children included) and if they usually do it to get ready for their final year shows, they could do it also on the streets and in closed places and most of all they could teach and transmit this form of knowledge to those who do not have it. We need a choreographic sense of space, we cannot expect people to have sporadic choreographic intuitions each of us can already have. I know, it sounds absurd. Precisely.

Dance scholar Alessandro Pontremoli, talking of body techniques, points out, quoting Eugenio Barba, that we can consider the movements we do every day, like getting up and walking, as “daily body techniques” [9] and the movements that go beyond this range, as lifting one leg upwards, as “extra-daily techniques” [10]. With the coronavirus, people are implicitly asked to reconfigure one’s own daily technques in extra-daily techniques, as standing in palce in an area at the distance of at least one metre (?) in front of a supermarket and walk that bit that allows the queue which is not a queue to proceed, always keeping said distance.

Virgilio Sieni in Nudità.

In phase one we would have already needed experts in choreography (absurd, what am I talking about?), think of phase two where a lot more people will be around. Will they/we be capable of self-organising? I do not think so, because, contrary to what Gia Kourlas provocatively says [11], we are not all dancers, but perhaps we should all become dancers. There are probably other body practices (!), I talk about dance because this is what I know a bit. If it is true that it is now a question of life and death (rhetoric sometimes helps) to keep a certain distance, then developing an awareness of the body in space and therefore the ability not just to keep the distance of at least one metre (?!), but also to keep this distance while we move (in the supermarket, for example) becomes a fundamental requirement. And ignoring (in the sense precisely of not knowing) this aspect could continue to bring people infringing this ethereal distance to take the damned number and enter the circle of queues which are not queues. We cannot give this kinetic knowledge for granted. Many people will have it, many others will not. Kourlas herself, and in this I agree with her, quoting choreographer Ori Flomin, affirms that those who deal with dance, deal precisely with this, organising “people in space” [12].

It comes to my mind the enigmantic painting Tau – L’ultima colonna del tempio by Alberto Spadolini, an almost unknown painter and dancer, who has tansformed many of his paintings in oneiric choreographies. The depicted figures are all at a certain distance. At the centre a man, maybe a dancer with his back to the viewer, in one of his hands a mask (a mask?). The atmoshere is rearefied and surreal. Is it the way we will live now? Maybe. But if we have to reinvent the way we stay together, we have to do it also in choreographic terms (et voilà, I have said it) and not only that. As the architecture scholar, Marta Magagnini has highlighted, “let’s invent new jobs in this covid-19 times! We have many experts 'walking' inside their houses!!!” [13]

I stay standing, feet together, firm and nervous. I ask who has the number before mine, but nobody replies. Maybe somebody has given up. The queue which is not a queue slowly moves with people entering and people standing and taking their place in the front line before the entrance. It is almost a magnetic, funnel movement, where the entrance constitutes the magnet toward which each of us is attracted. Apart from the two men chatting too close to each other, the others are all silent. A woman has a terrified look as if this standing like this, keeping the distance, were still something incomprehensible and nonsensical. And it is. I am terrified.

When Graham was on a small unstable plane, she said to have rehearsed in her mind her choreography, Errand into the Maze (1947) to placate fear [14]. It is a choreography where a woman fights against her demons. Inspired by the Theseus and Ariadne myth, it concentrates on the female figure (Ariadne? Ariadne and Theseus) who fights against the Minotaur, called the Creature of Fear. It has a technical and interpretative depth, alternating the protagonist’s solos and her duets with the Creature. I rethink of its beginning: the dancer stands in place at the back of the stage, her look downward and her hands crossed on her womb. And she breathes. She breatheees. The movement of the inhaling and exhaling torso has inspired Graham in the development of her technique based on contraction and release. If I think about it, a mixture of bitter, very bitter irony grips my stomach. Now that many, too many people are dying of resporatory disease. I think about all this horror that could be avoided and was not [15]. It is an unbearable situation. I do not know if I will be able to stand still, in place, in balance on this labyrinthine present.

It is my turn to enter. I am about to when the person with the number prior to mine appears from the side street. Another choreographic intuition. I take some steps backward and let him pass. 

 

 

 

NOTES

[1] Margaret Atwood, “Proper Social Distancing” Tweet posted on 28 March 2020.
[2] Rudolf Laban, Choreutics, edited by Lisa Ullman [1966] (Alton: Dance Books, 2011), p. 10.
[3] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 21.
[4] Swan Lake, chor. Marius Petipa, Lev Ivanov, music Pëtr Il’ič Čajkovskij revised by Riccardo Drigo, dancers Pierina Legnani, Pavel Gerdt and the Imperial Ballet (Saint Petersburgh: Mariinskij Theatre, 27 January 1875). 
[5] Martha Graham, “A Modern Dancer’s Prime for Action” in Dance – A Basic Educational Technique, edited by Frederick Rand Rogers (New York: MacMillan Company, 1941), p. 181.  I already talked of postures and the act, even political, of standing in 2013. See https://storiadelladanza.blogspot.com/2013/08/stare-in-piedi.html (in Italian) 15 August 2013, (accessed on 22 August 2020).

[6] Linda Rickett-Young, Essential Guide to Dance (Londra: Hodder&Stoughton, 1996), p. 75.
[7] Nudità, chor. and interpretation Mimmo Cuticchio,Virgilio Sieni (Firenze: Teatro Niccolini, 11 October 2018). For more information: http://www.virgiliosieni.it/schede/nudita-2/ (accessed on 13 April 2020).
[8] See the plea made by Alessandra Celentano: “Covid19, Alessandra Celentano lancia l’allarme: ‘Il settore danza è al collasso’”, giornaledelladanza.com, 15 April 2020 (accessed on 16 April 2020).
[9] Alessandro Pontremoli, La danza – Storia, teoria, estetica nel Novecento (Bari: Laterza, 2004), p. xviii.
[10] Ibidem.
[11] Gia Kourlas, “HowWe Use Our Bodies to Navigate a Pandemic”, The New York Times, 31 March 2020 (accessed on 13 April 2020). See also the article by Jason Kottke, “We Are All Dancers Now – Mindful Movement is key to Social Distancing”, in Kottke.org, 2 April 2020 (accessed on 16 April 2020).

The new Vitruvian woman.

 

 

[12] Ibidem.
[13] Marta Magagnini, Post on facebook, 16 aprile 2020.
[14] Martha Graham, Blood Memory – An Autobiography (New York: Washington Square Press, 1991), p. 267. Errand into the Maze, chor. Martha Graham, set Isamu Noguchi, music Giancarlo Menotti, costumes Martha Graham, lights Jean Rosenthal, dancers Martha Graham, Mark Ryder (New York: Ziegfield Theatre, 28 Febuary1947).
[15] See for example the video investigative report “Il virus è un boomerang”, Indovina chi viene a cena, edited by Sabrina Giannini (Rai 3, 29 March 2020), available for now on RaiPlay  (accessed on 13 April 2020). Or also the “Video conferenza con Emanuele Leonardi”, edited by XRItaly, 5 April 2020 (accessed on 10 April 2020).

 

This is the English translation of the article I published on 19 April 2020, here.