The Black Dancing Body, cont.

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• Pages 260-261 •

Contentwise, any dance can capture the spirit. It is not a matter of what a dance is about—the what—but the dancing body’s performance, the living dance in the present moment—the how—that is the essential ingredient. Nevertheless, there are certain movement techniques and motifs that help to harbor spirit. Alvin Ailey’s work is based in part on a modern dance vocabulary known as the Horton technique. Developed by West Coast choreographer and legendary teacher Lester Horton (who was white and trained a host of exquisite dancers, including Ailey, Carmen de Lavallade, Janet Collins, Bella Lewitsky, Joyce Trisler, and James Truitte), this way of dancing holds exceptional possibility for spirit catching. For example, in one of the signature Horton “layouts,” the dancer, with her spine in a deep, deep arch (so that her back is nearly parallel to the floor—“laid out”—with chest and face open to the ceiling), simultaneously lifts one leg forward and stretches it so far up and out—simultaneously high and away from her body—that the pelvis and standing leg are pulled forward from her center of gravity by the force and direction of the lifted leg. It looks as though she will tumble but she doesn’t, because one or both arms are stretched overhead (meaning parallel to the floor) pulling her in the opposite direction and, thus, creating a seesaw counterbalance. This kind of dramatic movement, a reaching of every part of the body in opposite directions, is a metaphor for human longing, for aspirations beyond our means and desires beyond our human condition—paradoxically, body tension implying mind/spirit release. Besides this stretching technique, another spirit catcher is the torso articulation that is integral to all African-based movement forms. Just as in traditional Africanist religions, where cosmic forces are embodied through similar torso motifs, the articulation of shoulders, rib cage, stomach, pelvis, buttocks, and neck with rolling, undulating, shaking, circling, or rocking motions, combined with syncopated rhythms and movement repetition, are known means of calling forth the spirit. There is an undeniable connection between these kinesthetic (muscular and motional) movements and their ability to generate certain affective (emotional and spiritual) states. Another aspect of the technical potential for spirit in concert as well as liturgical dance forms lies in the gaze. Eyes may look outward, upward, seemingly beyond the physical to the supernatural. Head and chest may follow through, lifted up and open or thrown back. The savvy dancer may luxuriate in these techniques and, like a Method actor, fill them with her subjective subtext for whatever this kinetic challenge may suggest on the affective level.

Like the movements involved in tap dance, social fad dances, and the holy dances of African American Christianity and traditional African religions, the movements described above are abstractions. I’ve never understood why “black” dance has been characterized as narrative. Africanist dance is symbolic movement. It may tell stories, but these stories are about the movement itself and about concepts—the body dancing its symbols. And no dance form is more abstract than tap, where the “story” is the rhythm. If a floor-scrubbing, drug-taking, or bird-flying image is woven in, that realistic flash acts as a momentary anchor in an ocean of free-floating signs. These aspects of daily life or nature, though used thematically, are seldom literal or linear representations of, say, an ostrich or a battle. Instead, they evoke the ostrich quality of the human body, an abstraction from nature placed in the conscious artifice of the dancing body; or the essence of battle through a codified, stylized, theatricalized war dance (and traditional black dance genres place high value on technique and artifice in the service of expressiveness). Part of the excellence in representing a bird or a battle (and part of what Africanist aesthetic criteria rest upon) is the level and degree of personality and meta-commentary brought to bear on the performance by the individual dancing body. It’s not about the thing-in-itself (for Africanist art forms are seldom naturalistic, which is why there is no landscape art or portraiture in traditional genres), but the reinvention of the thing through the self,” if you will. As for Revelations, critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote that it “is not an illustrative work but an abstraction of certain emotional states. A ballet version might offer a more pure-dance approach. It would look more plotless but not necessarily as abstract in the sense of extracting the essence of a quality.” (note 1) Thus, in Kisselgoff’s usage and in mine, the word “abstract” as applied to this dance genre indicates choreography that may include symbols or emblems from naturalistic practice but is dependent on creating a life of its own, generated by and through a motivating idea or thesis (such as those expressed in this chapter by Ailey and Ronald Brown). Like the work of Martha Graham, Ailey’s and Brown’s abstraction is based on the dramatic use of human affect (emotion, expressiveness) rather than the suppression of it.