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THE DRAMA OF THE HOLY
BY
T. R. Young
and Linda DeLeon Bowman
So the shortest day came and the year died. And everywhere down the long Centuries of the snow white world came people, dancing and singing to drive the dark away.
...Yule Song
Journey to the Realm of the Holy In a very great many societies,
the dance is used as an integral
part of the Drama of the Holy. Dancing is used for those very
special occasions in which a sense of the Holy is to be called
forth and embodied; embodied and thus, vivified. Around the world,
people use dance as part of the language with which one creates the
realm of the holy. Every dance of the Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne or
Navajo is a dance which calls forth and celebrates the Holy. Such
dances call forth the sun or rain and thus ensure the cycles of
human life, they heal spiritual sickness, they cleanse one after
one has violated a moral teaching and they affirm the commitment of
each dancer to the drama of the Holy.
I wonder whether any one has put it as well as Gabrielle Roth in her reflections on dance. Roth, who taught movement and dance over the past twenty years at Esalen, suggests that the rhythms of the body and of the earth are the way to begin to reunite ourselves with the whole of earth. Rhythms of the sea, rhythms of the wind, rhythms of speech and rhythms of walking help bring out that dancer and poet in us. In so doing we recapture our lost heritage of shamanic wisdom.
Roth says that we all can be shaman; that since we are all part of the entire world, we must honor it if we are to honor ourselves. We are part of the water, part of the sky, part of the earth and we have to reclaim the shamanic vision of the oneness of life if we are to survive. But, as Roth notes, we are more than part of the Earth and all within it, we are the thinking part of the Earth. That gives us a special responsibility to create the realm of the Holy. We start that holy task with our own self creation...we can use the shamanic wisdom to bring out the dancer in us; bring out the poet in us, bring out the lover and the mystic in all of us.
The shamanic part of our heritage is not better than the scientific part; not to be a unique choice but rather is complement to scientific knowledge. In that sense, Roth, locates herself in the more holistic portion of the post-modern movement. She does not reject science nor does she castigate it; she simply adds love, beauty, grace and joy to it and thus encircles it as part of the dancer's language.
Aspects of Dance There are many aspects of dance that make it a most useful instrument with which to engage the drama of the Holy. These features often include but are not limited to:
A. A change in gait from a series of interrupted falls to
smooth, graceful motion.
B. A change in body space from a tight, controlled space
limited in step and arm swing to a much wider occupation
of the space available to the body.
C. A change in rhythm from a regular cadence to a plurality
of periods in movement of body parts.
D. A change from solitary ambulation to paired or group
movement. Such contact includes contact of body parts
that stimulate and are stimulated by others.
E. A change in body chemistry and blood chemistry which
increases carbon dioxide levels, sugar levels, and other
body fluids which trigger endorphins.
D. A change from psychological states oriented to
instrumental tasks in the profane world to solidarity
task in the realm of the Holy. These states include
feelings of awe, of wonder, and of connection to the
rhythms of earth.
E. A change from attentiveness to some instrumental task to
an openness for sub-liminal thought.
F. All these changes converge to enable the dancer to
perform physical and psychological feats that are
otherwise impossible.
In ballet, in Voodoo dance, in communal dance in Uganda or in the whirling dances of dervishes in India, everyday worries and concerns are set aside. Extra-ordinary feats of endurance and movements are called forth to astound and to stimulate dancer and danceless. Extra-ordinary states of body chemistry converge to engage parts of the brain and parts of the body not otherwise plumbed. All these together call forth the poetic genius of the mind and the poetic potential of the body.
It is, perhaps, the changes in rhythms and body chemistry which do the most to engage the drama of the Holy. Body chemistry changes, especially endorphins, create an extra-ordinary receptivity to internal thought which lends itself, easily, to interpretations of spiritual contact. In that heightened receptivity, what we are aware of is, in my opinion, our own poetic genius too often pushed aside by the more pressing affairs of the day. Recognizing and appreciating that genius and comparing it to our ordinary psychological capacities, we tend to attribute it to a greater intellect than we suppose we possess.
In that same heightened receptivity, we are aware of the beauty and elegance of the natural world which escapes us in our more instrumental uses of it. In dance, we can feel the rhythms of the wind or sea and thus, acknowledge them. In dance, we can sense the more animal potentialities of our bodies and thus, feel akin to the beasts and birds of the field. In our belief that we engage the larger truths and facts of being, we are, in the consequence ready to consider them.
There are many other pathways to the Holy which produce extra- ordinary body states, extra-ordinary psychological states which join with dance to open one to the insights and experiences which one interprets, in some situations, as the Holy. Food, drink, risk, violence or threat can alter body states and, in the context of a quest for divine inspiration, serves the drama of the Holy. The preparation and consumption of exotic foods, of large amounts of food, of ordinary foods prepared with special care and love, of foods reserved to sacred occasion; all these uses of food lend themselves to the generation of extra-ordinary body states rightly interpreted as proof demonstrative of that which is holy in us.
There are many beverages and condiments which alter body states in such a way as to depress ordinary perceptions and/or induce extra-ordinary experience. Tobacco, coca leaves, peyote, alcohol, marijuana and other condiments alter body chemistry and thus, facilitate both inner and external sensory capacities.
Pain, threat, and violence alter body chemistry and, when contained and controlled, offer parallel pathways to the Holy. Gambling, the reading of cards, of sticks, of entrails all put aside ordinary linguistic systems and call forth sub-liminal thought processes with which to deal with the problems and purposes of a person or a society.
All these psychogenic activities and supplies are used in concert with each other and with dance to put aside ordinary time and space; to enter into the drama of the Holy in order to see what it holds for the problematics of life. I have reviewed these other sacred supplies elsewhere; here I want to focus upon dance as an enduring pathway to the realm of the Holy.
Dancing in the World Around the world, there are many other variations of dance from the slow measured pace of a Coronation or a burial to the graceful roll of an African warrior telling all who watch him walk that he is a Prince and embodiment of the Gods...one can still see young men in the streets of New York and Chicago walking that very special walk that is testimony to their heritage and sense of self as sacred.
There are the delightful, engrossing dances of Central Europe: polkas, shottisches, square dances and hops. These celebrate the rural community as a whole. There are the graceful dances of Europe; the waltz and the quadrille. They tend to celebrate class and status divisions. There are the frenetic dances of Western youth: twists, rocks, shakes, rattles and rolls in which body parts are displayed and eroticized. These celebrate the youth culture.
Most of us know the close contact dances of Western society in which the couple bond is set and sanctified. However, most societies use dance to celebrate a larger unit...a pride of male warriors or a rhapsody of senior women. Some societies sanctify gender division in the dance of the Holy. In some, a single individual dances until the Holy spirit enters him or her; then that person becomes a messenger from the gods.
Dance such as the Ballet celebrate and sanctify the myths of a society...the morality tales in which the wisdom of millennia are kept. Just as do children's dance. But most dance for most of history is best understood as a journey to the realm of the sacred.
The Wisdom and the Mission of Shamanic Dance In Bali, dance is a
prayer to please God
and to demonstrate a reverent respect for the spirit world. The
Balinese religious festival centers around the dancers. The Topa
dance in order to keep the world beautiful. The Topa believe that
it was made beautiful and the spirit of the Holy requires that it
stay beautiful. Dance is essential to the success of the festival.
In the dance, the Topa affirm that everything comes from and must
be returned to the gods...to the world and to the spirit of the
world.
The dancer brings the space alive in which he dances. The dancer dances, not to please those who do not dance, who look on, but to create a holy space. The dance is not to be looked on at all; it is to be experienced like the rain or sun or wind. In the dance are all the forces of life and all the hopes of the living.
The Topa wear masks in order to show their current feeling
toward the spirit world. The masks embody the spirit of the wood;
from wood to mask to man, a spirit flows. The spirit dances in the
dance of the wearer of the mask; man, wood, mask, spirit and beauty
are one. If the mask is a smiling mask, then the Topa want to show
that they are pleased with one or more of the gods. The dance is
a happy greeting to the gods; to the entire living universe. If
the mask is an angry mask, then the spirits of the Balinese world
know that there is something wrong that they must put right.
The Gogo In Tanzania, the men who are most holy conduct an
annual dance for rains and for the fertility of their fields.
Part of the cycle of dance is the cidwanga dance; a dance in
which the spirits of the dead are saluted and remembered.
The Efik In Nigeria, the sea god, Ndem is created and invoked
to help fulfill the most fervent wishes of the Efik society.
People dance in order to express the desire for a safe
journey; a woman may dance in petition of pregnancy. The more
energetic the dance, the more likely Ndem will grant the
petition.
Ubakala Another Nigeria society, the Ubakala take the
spirits of their ancestors into their bodies during a dance;
they are their ancestors...and thus celebrate them in the same
moment the continuity of life within the run of history is
acknowledged. Dance is also used to define and to sanctify
gender divisions. The Ubakala use the dance to resolve
conflict much as the caribou Inuit use song.
They also dance to escort the spirits of the dead to their
waiting place. Respected men and women are given dance when
they die, the Nkwa, in homage to them and in encouragement for
them to have patience until they are reborn in another child.
Such a dance helps the family and friends cope with
grief...and thus survive such a traumatic event.
Yoruba The joy of life and delight in community is expressed in
dance among the Yoruba. The god, Shango loves to be
entertained and sponsors dances which the Yoruba enjoy
greatly. Thus the construction of a god who appreciates
entertaining dance and festival, in the same moment, creates
a society in which good fun and festival thread through life.
Masai Masai men, in male solidarities, dance for hours to make
contact with the holy. The men stand in a circle and bounce
up and down in ever higher bounding. They enter a trance as
they dance and in that trance, gain revelation of the spirits
in the land of the dead.
Kung! The Kung! enter into a trance dance that is prelude to
healing or to other intervention by making contact with the
gods. Women start the dance by sitting in a tight circle,
chanting and clapping in a complex beat. Men gradually enter
into an outer circle dancing with great exertion until they
enter a trance. The dancing produces a ntum, a magical power
in the stomach which becomes hot as the dancer dances. Ntum
boils over to the spinal column and then to the brain at which
time, the dancer enters the trance. In the trance, thought of
as 'half death,' the spirits of the dancers leave the body
along threads of spider silk until they reach their heaven.
There they do what must be done and return along the thread to
their own body.
The Kalabari The Kalabari believe that '...men make the gods
strong when they dance,' so their dances are elaborate and
dramatic. And when a god ceases to be beneficent, the
Kalabari cease dancing for it and thus, destroy the god.
These people believe that those who die childless; those who
were despised while alive; those with unsatisfied grudges must
be given all due respect else they contrive to make things go
badly for the living.
In such a dance, childlessness, unresolved grudges, and poor
behavior are, in the moment of placating them, shown to be
problematic for the living. On the face of it, the dance is
for the gods but, since the dancers also know what is
transpiring, the dance is also a moral lesson: get and honor
children; get and honor friends; avoid or resolve
disputes...all pointed toward the reproduction of the society
and toward making social life amiable.
The Sandawe The gods of the Sandawe are activated by an erotic
dance, phek'umo, in which the act of love is mimicked in
embrace by the dancers. The Moon is seen to be part of the
cycle of fertility; in the cycle of months and in the menses
of women...so people dance by moonlight and adopt stances and
postures in the dance which represent the phases of the moon.
This dance embeds the necessity for human and earth fertility
in the body, mind, and spirit of the dancers as they work the
fields or the banana in Tanzania.
The Tiv Death and disease are the subject matter of dance around
the world. The Tiv mimic the more threatening forms of
disease in their dance, treat it, and heal the dancers of the
disease in pantomime. Dropsy is parodied when the dancers
distend their bellies, dangle their arms, cross their eyes,
and take on idiotic grins. One of the dancers rolls over with
stiffened limbs, dead. He is quickly healed. One dancer
affects to doubt the efficacy of the healing dance and is
'slain.'
Thus is the message given off by the dance that faith, trust,
and social power come together to heal those who have dropsy
or other disease. The power of faith healing lies in such
dramas of the dance.
The Bemba Dance is often used to conduct young people from one
social status to another. Among the Bemba of Zambia, each
initiate must be 'danced' from one status group to another,
more adult group if she or he is to become part of the social
base of the second group. The women in charge of the rite of
passage of young women use the dance to effect changes in the
body and spirit of the young woman so she is ready to take her
place as an adult women.
The KaKadu of Australia use the dance to renew the Spirit of the
Land. From sun-up until sundown they dance...those senior men
who are initiated dance their way into the Dreamworld. There
they meet the spirits of dreamworld animals. They tell the
animals of their oneness with them; they tell the dreamworld
animal spirits that they should not be angry that animals are
killed in the real world.
The Kakadu have lived in peace and harmony with the land and
its spirits for over 40,000 years. Now only a handful of very
old men know the rites by which one can enter into the realm
of the Holy and keep harmony among the inhabitants of the good
earth. When they are gone, there will be no one left to make
sure that the land and the animals continue to live in
harmony. The time approaches when all of Australia will be
used as if it were profane; as if it were simply property,
commodity, and raw material.
The Maori of New Zealand dance to drive away enemies and evil
spirits. The men tattoo their faces with blue dye, stick out
their tongues, shake their spears and terrorize all those who
land on the shores of the islands of the long cloud. Their
dance is the dance of the warrior who will kill and eat the
enemy who comes to harm the Maori or the Island on which they
live and depend.
AMERICAN NATIVE DANCE American plains Indians danced in celebration of the seasons; in preparation for predatory raids; in petition for rain or for good hunting of the buffalo; in therapeutic activity and in honoring of the spirit of the tribe. Indian tribes celebrated the holiness of all life and all of nature in a wide variety of dance, chief among which is, perhaps, the Sun Dance.
the Sun Dance is most sacred dance of many nomadic tribes in the
great plains of North America. The Sun Dance has two generic
purposes: the first is oriented to personal vows or the well
being of the tribe which dances it. The second is to renew
the linkage between the heart and the sun; that is, to teach
and to learn that the sun is the heart of the universe and the
heart is the sun of the human soul. The dancing man takes the
spirit of the eagle and flies toward the sun in an affirmation
of his personal commitment to the Great Spirit (if one is
Chippewa.) or Great Principle of Natural Harmony (if one is
Navajo).
the Sioux dance the dance of the good red road in which the West
wind brings revelation and grace; the North wind purifies and
gives strength, the East wind brings knowledge and peace and
the South wind is the source of life and growth. The Good Red
Road begins at the South wind and is the way of well being and
bliss.
The Ghost Dance was, arguably, the last desperate scream of
defiance of the Plains Indians and, perhaps, the last sigh of
an oppressed peoples. The elements of the Ghost dance
included a prophecy that, after the end of the world, the
valiant dead would return and create a new world in which the
natural harmony of 'the people' would be restored. The Ghost
Dance rendered those who wore a white shirt invisible to the
bullets of the U.S. Cavalry and sanctified a cause sacred to
the Indian world view. On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Cavalry
slaughtered 180 Sioux; men, women and children. The dance was
in preparation for confrontation with U.S. armed forces,
themselves just returned from a savage internecine war between
the North and the South. After so many years of brother
killing brother, it was easy to kill native Americans.
the Hopi dance out the myth of origin and social organization of
their society. By dancing, the young people learn of the ways
in which society is organized and learn that it is part of the
sacred...and thus society and self are linked in the realm of
the sacred. The Hopi call themselves 'the people,' that is
what the word, Hopi, means. Those who have danced in the
presence of the founding spirits come to be people by virtue
of the fact of that dancing. Many peoples call themselves,
the people and, in the social construction of reality, dancing
reifies and deifies such people as part of the realm of
sacred.
the Navajo have 20 or 30 dances which heal the broken spirit
through the Blessing Way, drive away angry spirits, restore
personal harmony, affirm tribal solidarity, celebrate the vast
splendor of western desert and canyon, enable one to walk in
beauty, reassure the totem of other species, signal the time
to plant and to harvest and help young women through their
menses to maidenhood.
The Iroquois of New York and Canada are a matriarchal matrilineal
society. They have a dance called the Dark Dance in which
women perform healing dances at night in complete darkness.
The Aztec priests trained some young men to sing and dance in
celebration of the feudal-like social organization in which
peasants paid tribute and slaves served despots in some 60
Aztec political units spread out over the Mexican basin.
Higher officials and nobles danced the stately, Nobleman's
dance.
The Mayan came together from all over the Yucatan peninsula to
dance the Dance of Standards. Six to eight hundred people at
a time might dance it. There were dances for priests, for
women, and a fire dance for the more devout in which they
would dance over coals and hot ashes. The Spanish invaders
used dance dramas to depict the struggle of the Catholic
Church against its foes and to proselyte/convert people of the
middle Americas.
The fiesta dance ties together villages and tribes in the northern
highlands of Bolivia while migrant groups in Lima, Peru,
sponsor dances which bring together members of extended
families and offer a meeting place for newly arrived villagers
to meet and to find mates and friends in a hostile city
environment.
LOST INNOCENCE AND DANCE In more innocent times in frontier
America, dances brought together the
entire age spectrum of a town or rural village. The barn dance,
the square dance, the ethnic dances for Poland, Germany, England
and Greece helped bring people together in fun and good spirits and
thus bond them together as a solidarity. Such dances celebrated
harvest, anticipated the return of Spring, served as courtship for
young people, offered a place to resolve personal animosity and
repair grudges over land, water, and stock. They animated the hard
and wearing life of early settlers and thus brought color, charm
and drama back into such lives.
The raucous western dances shook open the souls of men and women and forced them into a more human connection than solitary work on farm and ranch permitted. These dances were often held in conjunction with house building, barn raising, marriages, baptisms and other rites of passage so important to the moral growth of a people. One can still find bars and taverns in the rural West where the dances immigrants brought with them are danced in the company of friends and strangers who are, for that moment, not stranger at all. Young men, working on farms, ranches, and construction meet young women who work in village restaurants, shops and business. They join, with rare good fun, in dances with aged men, elderly widows, portly farmers, earnest housewives and occasional visitors to redeem the encircling poverty and uncertain future they face in a declining political economy.
In the first half of the 20th Century, the big band era grew up in the core cities...and big bands went on tour to mid-size cities in North Dakota, Tennessee, Michigan, and Iowa. With the advent of the radio and phonograph, the big band era reached into every pocket of the country. Couples, just coming into the fullness of their sexuality danced closely to the music of Glenn Miller who put them 'in the mood.' The marriage/couple bond was celebrated and sanctified by Tex Beneke with such songs as, 'Don't Sit under the Apple Tree,' 'Kalamazoo,' and 'Chattanooga Choo Choo.' Al Jolson sang to couples of dancing on the night they were wed; Perry Como sang an anniversary song to remind them that each had taken a vow; 'I'll Be Loving You, Always,' while Dinah Shore sang of a sentimental journey back home to one we love. Couples took those songs seriously.
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance;
how can we know the dancer from the dance?
...Yeats
In New Orleans, jazz, blues and dance are joined is sad homage to those who, having lived with us and loved with us, died. The funeral march of the dead in New Orleans is at once a bitter-sweet affirmation of life, of friendship and of respect for those now gone. The St. James Infirmary Blues catches this affirmation and sets the framework for lament, salvation, devotion and dance within which the boundaries between life and death are first drawn and then opened to the souls of those present.
POST-MODERN DANCE As with all modes of embodiment of the postmodern spirit, dance too lends itself to the critical enterprize. In most forms of commercial dance, the dancers act as a window upon the past, reincarnating one of its many time-space expressions. Folk dance recreates the spirit and social structure of the village with its male solidarities and gender stratifications. Ballet reproduces in new time-space, the old structures of European and Asiatic feudality with its princes and servants, slaves and harems. Swing dancing to the sound of Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Billie Holiday or Teddie Wilson recreate the lost innocence of genteel revolution which inspired such music.
As in all postmodern art forms, the critical spirit can take myriad forms, engage myriad directions, embody many degrees of resistance and rebellion. In Oklahoma! the ballet form was reappropriated to a country and western ethos thus liberating it from its feudal origins. In Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the rape of the Sabin women was recreated in the country-western form and thus returned once again to celebrate alienated gender relations.
In the Greatest Little Whorehouse in Texas, run by Dolly Parton, protected by Burt Reynolds and used by Charles Durning for political purpose, ballet was appropriated to record the use of sex by a football coach to reward the Texas Aggies for crushing their opponents thus celebrating the primal predatory economics that football recapitulates. In the locker room scene, the dance mimed the holiness of the male solidarity. In the backyard of the whorehouse, dance was used to mime the holy, yet alienated use of the temple prostitute. Even so, both dance scenes, beautifully and elegantly danced, produced disparate fragments of the post-modern spirit; on the one side, the structure of racial privilege and animosity was absent while at the same time, the commodification of human sexuality was treated as natural and healthy.
Most contemporary dance is to be admired more for the skill, versatility and energy of its dancers than for its politics or its physics. Song and Dance, An Andrew Lloyd Weber creation on the London stage, offered a melange of dance forms; jazz, ballet, free form, folk and romantic episodes with no story line, no pedagogy, no morality. Yet the songs offered in the second, unconnected part of the presentation did have such. Tell me on a Sunday, Please recapitulated the problems of women in forming satisfactory gender relationships. In the song sequence, we follow a middle aged woman through the course of several relationships, all of which turn out badly. There is no rape, no brutality, no dramatic scenes, merely the revelation of successive relationships that fall to the privatized needs, wants, desires, and preferences of the offstage male.
The stage presentation has no dialectics, no principles of life to sell, no moral to announce...just simply the anguish of a woman who is caught up in the amoral life of her generation. Evita, on the other hand has politics, ethics, a certain dialectics of perspective and an agenda for human emancipation that embodies the best of post-modern morality.
In Evita, Che Guevera is given a heroic voice to stand against the voice that the Great American Propaganda Machine gives him. Evita is made to be all too human in her real compassion for the poor from whence she came. Peron is unmitigated evil as is the pimp who first used Evita to whore for him. In this play, song and dance is tied much more directly to a humanism agenda and thus is radical in the first two dimensions of art as praxis.
Other contemporary stage presentations use dance with less grace and wit. Les Mise'rables, staged by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, used dance as a club with which to beat its opponents rather than as an arm to embrace them. The stage version of Victor Hugo's novel loses most its revolutionary potential by keeping its politics tied to the past and its evil located in the person of its characters rather than in the structure of its society.
It does offer post-modern ideas of justice if not of politics. Javert, the generic policeman is allowed, by the author, a chance to abandon the linear, technicized version of justice which he embodies for a more human and humane version. Over the course of the play, Javert pursues Jean Valjean with relentless dedication only to lose him in the end to his own compassion. This is a simple story which uses the French revolution as a convenient envelope in which to package the idea that Reason should prevail over rationality; that people are more important than is abstract Law; that people are multidimensional and can change in ways that machines and animals can't change; distinctly post-modern ideas. Still, the miserable of the earth find little succor in such stagings.
But in their use of time-space; in their view of morality, society, culture and physics, post-modern dance has many lessons to learn. The freedom to dance as one pleases is a valuable freedom but there are larger freedoms, larger obligations to the human condition. Dance can still take us, as we enter the 21st Century, into that future in a variety of modalities. It can reproduce the dialectics of the past; it can celebrate the present or it can offer us new visions from among which to choose in concert with others.
The pathway to the Holy can be found in post-modern dance if those who dance gain a vision of how the Holy can be created in the future without the baggage of pre-modern religion with its gods, angels, miracles and magic taken from the humans who construct them and used by their leaders to oppress them. Post-modern dance must locate both mystery and magic; both good and evil; both past and present in a form that will extract the best of these and thus redeem the bitter imperfections of each of these.
The Dance of the Oppressed Political theatre and political dance
gives a way to dramatize the sources
of human problems and the solutions which seem to be the most
useful within a given socio-cultural conjuncture. The drama of the
dance sanctifies the people who are the victims of oppression;
elevates them to human status; empowers them with a vision and a
legitimacy; and enjoins them to work for change and renewal.
The Ghost dance gained favor among many Indian tribes in the 1880's as the U.S. Army became more a threat to the integrity of social life among societies in north America...the dance invoked the spirits of ancestors and the spirit world to halt the invasion of this terrible people. Indian organizations in the 1980's use the Pow Wow and its dances to venerate the value of traditional Indian social philosophy over Standard American commodity culture and individuated mass society.
The Saginaw Chippewa have reinstated the Drum in order to reunite the past with the future of the tribe. The entire tribe, led by senior males, dance to bring new life into the Indian culture. The Drum specifically renounces the values of Anglo society with its individualism, its possessive materialism, its profanation of the land and spirits of animal life.
Dances, feasting, songs and prayers are elements of the Ojibwa pathway to the sacred. The Drum symbolizes a circle, symbolizes continuity. Among the Ojibwa people there is a prophecy that if the drum is ever silent, the people are silent.
Each year, those who call themselves the People of the People; the flesh of the flesh, gather from the cities, campuses, and remote hogans to which they are dispersed for the Coming Home of their ancestral spirits. The Shalako are dancing messengers of the Acoma, laguna, Zia, Hopi, Isleta, and other Brothers of the Pueblos. The dancers beseech the Zuni gods to send the clouds and give the precious rain. While the rain may come or go apart from the dancing of the Shalako, such sacred dancing and ceremonial feasting nonetheless call forth many other blessings of the gods; families and phratries are defined and reunited. Those who are sick are healed. Those who are isolated are once again joined in larger purpose and larger body. The ancient wisdom of the Old People is called forth and used to deal with the very real problems of death, disease, exploitation and oppression in the mass, market- oriented, remote societies of the new people.
The socialist revolution in the U.S.S.R., China and Cuba used dance as a language in which to explain and to transform feudal and capitalist relations. China changed the meaning of ballet from its celebration of the problematics of a feudal or bourgeois elite to a celebration of the masses and the problematics of their life. The Soviet Union did little else but attempt to perfect a ballet which sanctified privilege in its performers and performances. In return, they got Baryishnikov and other defectors who took the message of the ballet to heart.
In China, the People's Army introduced dance to the areas it liberated from Warlords and from the Chiang regime. In China, the People's Army introduced dance to the areas it liberated from Warlords and from the Chiang regime. The ballet form symbolized the energy of socialism and celebrated the themes of socialism.
After the triumph of the revolution in Cuba, the Cuban government used forms of folk dance to celebrate and to sanctify the peoples left out of the Spanish-Tourist culture that dominated Cuba before the revolution. Cuban dancers were given government support for the African dances which had been part of their heritage. The ballet form is used extensively in Cuba to celebrate economic democracy in the workplace.
The Ludruk dance in Indonesia offers social space to those who live at the margins of society to find dignity and joie `d vivre. The women's dances in East Africa led to an uprising there in 1929. The mbeni dance is forbidden in East Africa since it mocks and ridicules elites.
'Modern Dance' Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman offered 'modern' dance as a revolution for women...it offers an escape from the highly ritualized dances of Western Europe in which women were controlled...led...by men. In its grace, spontaneity, and freedom, it signals more control over body and space than permitted by European forms of dance. Just as Jazz broke with the formulas and conventions of classical music; modern dance, jitterbugging, break dancing breaks with the conventions and locked steps of the waltz, the fox-trot, and the minuet.
Dancing is the unity of force, time, and space;
bound and unbound by inner rhythm. Dancing can be
done by anyone who has desire and love.
....Mary Wigman
Dancing on Glass The Karas dance troupe from Japan features the philosophy of dance of Saburo Teshigawara. When he dances on glass fragments, he incorporates the sense and sensibility of light in his dance. He tells his dancers to think of glass as light and dance as a way to be part of light. When he tells his dancers to think of air, he tells them to be part of the air around them; part of the world of nature yet apart from it.
Teshigawara uses space and distance in his philosophy of the dance to communicate a sense of loneness and loneliness that embraces modern society--mass society. Distance is used to separate the dancer emotionally from the dance that the dancer might dance more freely. Space is used to create falls in dance that would be, in modernist understandings of dance, mistakes and errors on the part of the dancer. Yet falls are the common lot of even the best of us. Some societies offer little but the possibility of a fall from grace. In his concern for how to use dance to lead the way into the future, Teshigawara and his dance ensemble embody the idea that dance is politics; in its Eastern heritage, his dance says much while speaking little.
Dance and Disenchantment In mass societies; capitalist as well as bureaucratic socialist societies, the state claims to be the receptacle of social power and disenchants the holy. Dance is a casualty to this secularization process. The dance is produced and distributed to unknown others for unshared purpose.
When a society transforms into a mass society, each person is treated as a separate individual for purposes of hiring, firing, policing, prosecuting, housing, feeding or schooling it. The procedures of the bureaucratized school, church, shop, political party or factory treat each person as a separate part in a depersonalized, hence desocialized, process. The power advantages to the factory owner, the retail store, the party elite or the school administration are obvious and fuel the transformation toward massification.
In Western societies, especially in Europe and the United States, dance is commodified. But the potential of the dance to contribute to the drama of the Holy must be stripped off such activity if profit is to be made; costs are to be controlled; mass demand is to be generated and supply is to be guaranteed. The producer of commodity dance in the bars, taverns and theaters of a commodity culture can permit the close and intimate relationship that bespeaks love and compassion to develop between customer and performer.
When a man (or increasingly a woman) stops in after work at a topless bar to drink in redemption of his alienated work of family life, one can see the pretheoretical effects of commodity dance. Watching an attractive woman dance nude does not redeem the lost honor or pleasure of work. Still less does it imbue marriage bonds with the special awareness of two persons to each their needs and desires.
Nor does the dancer take pleasure in her dance; she is hired to attract lonely males and thus entice them into drinking themselves into oblivion. By artful contrivance, she can simulate the appearance of real connection to a given customer for the given moment but, should she allow the connection to last beyond the dance, she endanger the commodification process. The sense of the Holy is too powerful a form of social power to permit exploitation, oppression, suppression or management is to take place. The solidarity of the realm of the sacred has to be dissolved in order for individuals to be treated as separate, hence disposable, cogs in the machinery of life. The producer and dancer of commodity dance knows this and keeps the dance on the profane side of the drama of social life.
In such moments, commodity dance has little redeeming social value and much that is harmful to the human project. Disemployed women take such demeaning work in order to buy the necessities (and perchance, the luxuries) of life. They are turned into thighs, legs, breasts and rumps that men might fantasize a more entrancing sexuality. Commodity dance, in its more alienated moments, substitutes a fantasy world for the real world. In so doing, it encourages one to give up on the hard work of making the real world a Holy place in which to live for self and others.
Should a group of men visit such a bar in Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, Amsterdam, Hamburg or Tokyo, the meaning of commodity dance (and commodity sex) is a bit different. Males use alcohol, gaming, dance and sex to help create a solidarity that, in many societies, answers to the drama of the Holy. Such male solidarities often develop and reproduce patriarchy and gender privilege--and in so doing, demean and degrade women. In Western patriarchal societies, the degradation of women is not seen as problematic.
In modern Western cultures, the meaning of such visits to nude bars for dance and drink is less than an expression of the drama of the Holy. The men who buy such supplies, consume them in ways that offend our intuitive sense of the Holy. We know, at some pretheoretical level of knowledge that such commodification subverts the drama of the Holy. Shared consumption of drink, dance and sex in the American experience has lost even the solidarity potential, hence sacred character, that it might once have had in ethnic male solidarities.
The men who stop at a nude bar to drink a few beers and watch a few young women dance do not form a solidarity which helps each other through the worst moments of life. After such excursions, men go their separate ways and forget each other. When jobs are threatened or homes foreclosed, the various men turn away from each other and assume the state or the family will help. When divorce occurs or alcoholism develops for one, the others suggest professional help rather than offer their own time and compassion.
Dance and Mystifications I once attended a performance of the Ukrainian folk Dance in Moscow in the Kremlin. The dance was marvelous on its own terms. Yet, on a larger scale of understanding, it was an exercise in mystification; an attempt of the Soviet leadership to redeem an oppressive and failing socialism. After the concert, I went backstage to congratulate the dancers for their wonderful and elegant dances to find the director screaming invective at them for some flaw he perceived. At that scale of observation, the dance was a reproduction of the arrogance and temperament of a petty tyrant.
I once ran across a dance troupe in Uganda. They had assembled in front of the hut of the Kabaka to reaffirm his role in the drama of the Holy they embodied. The dancers paid no attention to me or the few other 'Europeans' standing around. They made absolutely no effort to collect money or to involve us in the dance at all. As they danced, they entered a trance and moved still further from us. Contrast that to the production of Song and Dance by Anthony Lloyd Weber which openly solicited money as a fee for watching the dance. I was seated in the first few rows in the London production and could see the sweat flying, the jaws clenched and the muscles strained. Yet withal the commodification of the dance, the dancers were obviously entranced by their roles as were the spectators; the dancers knew we were there and were very concerned that we were entranced by their dancing.
I once attended, to my shame, an Indian dance in Ogallala, Nebraska put on each noon for the tourists. The dancers were listless, the dance perfunctory, and the owners of the store unconcerned with the profanation of a sacred dance. The purpose of the dance was to generate an audience that could be turned into a customer for the cheap artifacts made on contract or the more sacred artifacts stolen from the Indians. A few years later, I attended a Pow-wow of the Chippewa Indians in Michigan. Their dance was open to the public but the Indians took little notice of those of us who came to gaze. It was a reaffirmation of the worth of Chippewa culture and a tribute to the Holy Spirit they evoked.
Attending a conference of physicians interested in the psychiatric practice of medicine, I went along with a group to a dance in San Francisco. The dancer was famous for her skill and her physical dimensions. She was adept at drawing the audience into her dance. A psychiatrist and I became the front and rear of her tassel dance. We laughed and basked in our brief fame for the rest of the evening. The larger setting in which such commodity sex occurs was bracketed and set aside by a professional group ostensibly concerned with sexual pathologies. The tawdry nature of tourist entertainment and the fragmented lives of the workers who put such shows on in San Francisco, Las Vegas, London or Berlin is taken for granted in a culture where therapy for alienated sex is itself a commodity.
Under such conditions, dance is disenchanted. Dance becomes an individual thing for individual purpose. It loses its mystery and its connection to the Holy. Each individual dances alone or in some episodic contact with a partner...a contact that is too brief to invoke the Holy while the Holy is too powerful to permit a casual joining.
The dances of the youth in such societies becomes soliptic and an occasion of display of costume or body parts. Costumes and body parts are displayed in casual mating encounters which end after two or three days or weeks. Few survive the year.
In such societies, the drama of dance disappears from the field; from the factory; from the church; from village life and from socialization processes. Every thing is scientized, regimented, and routinized...and the children grow up to view themselves as outside the realm of the sacred...just workers, citizens, customers, or client...nothing more to the large scale organization that feeds, houses, schools, imprisons, or cures them.
Drama in general and dance in particular becomes concentrated in smaller and smaller pockets of society winding up in theaters and video tapes to be purchased and watched by passive consumers along with other religious supplies: music, costume, chants, foods, tattoos and face paints.
With the disenchantment of dance comes the dissolution of the
sphere of the sacred; with the disappearance of the Holy comes the
death of God.
Men make the gods strong; when the gods
betray us, we stop dancing for them.
Kalabari saying.
Judgments It is very difficult to sort out the times and occasions when dance is obscene and when it is redemptive of the human project. One cannot look at the message of the dance alone. In both sacred and profane dance, a dancer may be communicating sensuality and the pleasures of eroticism. One cannot look at the technical features of the dance alone. In both virtuoso performance and in the awkward gyrations of teen age girls, there may be a message that speaks of love and fidelity. One cannot look at the locus of the dance alone. In the seclusion of the home and amidst a crowd, dance may be energizing, delightful and made joyous to all present.
Such judgments take wisdom and poetic genius not found in the mechanical application of formal law or court room protocol. One must balance the solidarity needs of males with the sensual needs of couples. One must reconcile the advantages of the impersonal market with the advantages of solidarity and mutuality. One must set Reason against rationality in such a way as to sustain the drama of the Holy without being rigid or simple minded.
Such judgments are possible but they require one to elevate the Drama of the Holy above the dynamics of a free market. Yet a free market in concerts, dances, festivals, and ceremonies has its advantages. Think of the thousands of artists, dancers, musicians and dramatists that a market economy encourages. Glenn Miller, Joel Grey, Duke Ellington, Hubie Laws, Fred Astair, Joan Baez, Artie Shaw, and Woody Guthrie join thousands of other poetic geniuses to contribute to the American experience.
Judgment must be flexible enough to endorse and encourage such entrancing poetic genius while limiting that genius which exploits, degrades, objectifies and separates human beings one from another. Judgment must be wide enough to embrace experiments in social life that seem wrong, evil, corrupt and sinful to some of us while they offer change and renewal, variety and surprise to others of us. Judgment must be tolerant enough to sustain the drama of the Holy of other cultures without subverting the Holy in each of us. As the poet William Blake put it in his essay on natural religion,
Principle 3: No human can think, write, or speak from the
heart, but that they intend truth. Thus all sects of
religious philosophy derive from the infinite variety of the
poetic genius of truthful but differing humans.
The Drama of the Dance The dance, around the world is, then, a
spectacle, a miracle, a dramatic enactment
of that which is central to the core of a culture; that which is
essential to the social life of a people. The most dramatic
elements of voice, music, body movement, costume as well as many
psychogens converge to produce the sacred sphere...and to empower
the people to achieve their socio-cultural goals.
Great preparation is made for dances of the holy. Elaborate masks are carved; whole bodies are tattooed; special cloth is woven; special drinks are prepared; special foods are cooked; ritual purifications are made. The actual dance releases, calls forth boundless energy, boundless ecstasy.
In these dances of life, devout belief is elicited; auto- suggestion and auto-intoxication are experienced; body states are altered and extraordinary psychic experiences occur which are interpreted in terms of contemporary problematics.
The physical energy expended to perform the dance concentrates metabolic products in the blood stream to activate endorphins and other body chemicals. The altered breathing patterns during chants and songs increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood stream to shut down cerebral cortex activity and to facilitate concentration. The ingestion of psychogens such as beetle nut, peyote, hashish, alcohol, or coca derivatives all create dramatically different body states from those of everyday life.
Body decorations are carefully prepared which allow the spirits to enter the body while dancing in New Guinea and in South America. Headdress and special clothing are prepared and worn in order to heighten the dramatic impact during dances of love; of war; of healing, or of atonement. The rhythm section gives an underlying beat to which the rhythms of the body can respond in dances in the Balkans and in India. Food of rare animals or in great abundance contribute to the drama of the dance.
These practices together in the dance; extraordinary body movement; extraordinary body chemistry; extraordinary music; extraordinary foods; extraordinary costumes along with extraordinary and sacred words, sacred chants and sacred songs do, in fact, create the Holy. These are the drama of the Holy. It would take a very retarded person or a very foreign person not to respond and to feel the presence of that which most peoples call the holy spirit...the spirit of society assembled and acting in concert to solve the problematics of life through the mysteries of dance.
There is no province of social life that is not the subject matter of dance...politics, sex and marriage, economics, child rearing and socialization, health, housing, travel, the stratification of power and status, death and loss...all are the subject matter of dance every where dance is done.
In those societies which use dance to deal with the problematics of life, there is no division between the holy and the profane...one does not find secular, scientific procedures given priority; preempting the holy. The holy suffuses all of social life as do other forms of art: painting, weaving, carving, singing and sculpting.
I think that I have run out of sensible things to say about dance and its connection to the Drama of the Holy. Still there are more things to say of dance of which I know not. To that end, I append a section of poetry about dance. Poetry is, in fact, the dancing form of the mind while dance is as close to poetry as motion can achieve. Let us now enjoy a different format and different truth about dance and dancing.
CENTURIES OF DANCE
So the shortest day came and the Year died.
And everywhere, down the long white Centuries
of snow came people dancing, singing
to drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the Winter trees.
They hung their homes with evergreens.
They burned beseeching fires
all night long to keep the year alive
And when the new day Sun blazed awake,
they shouted, reveling.
Through all across the ages you can hear them.
Listen, echoing behind them,
all the long echoes
sing the same delight this shortest day
as Promise awakens
in the sleeping land.
They carol peace,
give thanks,
and dearly love their friend
and hope for Peace.
And so do we,
here,
now,
this year and every year.
From the Revellers, Inc., Boston.**
The Little Dancers
Lonely, save for a few faint stars, the sky
Dreams; and lonely, below, the little street
into its gloom retires, secluded and shy.
Scarcely the dumb roar enters this soft retreat;
And all is dark, save where come flooding rays
from a tavern window; there, to the brisk measure
of an organ that down in an alley merrily plays,
two children, all alone and no one by,
holding their tattered frocks, through an airy maze
of motion lightly treaded with nimble feet
dance sedately; face to face they gaze,
their eyes shining, grave with a perfect pleasure.
...Laurence Binyon
WE ARE THE DANCERS OF OLDEN DAYS
My heart beats to the feet of the first faithful,
long ago dancing in Broceliande's forest.
Now the dancers come down from the mountains, and the piano player strikes up such a sound the fiddler sails away in the waving and waist-clasping rounds of it.
The people, then, are the people of a summer's night over and gone, the people of a Polish dance hall before the last war, in the sweat and reek of Limburger cheese and Bermuda onions, sweltering in beer and music, Kansas country evangels, or summer people in the Catskills who have taken up square-dancing as the poet takes up measures of an old intoxication that leads into poetry, not 'square' dancing, but moving figures , the ages and various personae of an old drama...
coupling and released from coupling,
moving and removing themselves, bowing
and escaping into new and yet old
configurations,
the word 'old' appearing and reappearing
in the minds of the youths dancing
...so that I remember I was an ancient man in that part of the dance, Granpaw, I was nineteen and yet ninety, taking the hand of little Nell, dolce-doeing,
and the dance,
the grand seance of romancing feet in their numbers
forward and back...we were the medium
for Folk of the Old Days in their ever returning.
The dancers come forward to represent unclaimed things.
...Robert Duncan 1968
THE GAY DANCERS
Moon lit Dancers
like butterflies
encircled the moon.
Gay light feet to dance around
the graves we left there in the ground.
With rapt eyes, I watched,
my heart pondering,
was sadly wise.
To be so lightened,
pain left behind;
fetters fallen down;
dark sins forgave
by gods so kind.
No memory of the crimes
we did ere they were born,
no vestige of the ancient blight,
women raped and village torn;
pain we visited upon strangers
to pay for their young delight.
I went into the darkness there
to be alone; I joined
the gay young crowd
rather than dance alone.
...T. R. Young
THE DANCER
The tall dancer dances
with slowly taken breath:
In his feet music,
and on his face, death.
His face is mask,
still and white;
his eyes are shut
to close the light.
Round the walls
the people stand
praising the art
of the dancing man.
But he dances there
as if kin were dead;
clay for thought,
and lightening tread.
...Seosamh MacCathmhaoil
Joseph Campbell wrote in the Gaelic. The poem was translated from that language and from that tradition.
LORD OF THE DANCE
I danced in the morning when the world begun
and I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun.
I came down from Heaven and I danced on the earth
and thanks to Heaven I had my birth.
Dance, dance, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance said he,
and I'll lead you all wherever you may be
and I'll lead you all in the dance with me.
I danced for the Scribes and the Pharisees
but they would not dance and they wouldn't follow me.
I danced for the fishermen for James and John
they came with me and the dance went on.
Dance, dance, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance said he,
and I'll lead you all wherever you may be
and I'll lead you all in the dance with me.
I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame;
the Holy people said it was a shame.
They whipped and they stripped and they hung me on high,
they left me there on a cross to die.
Dance, dance, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance said he,
and I'll lead you all wherever you may be
and I'll lead you all in the dance with me.
I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black
It's hard to dance with the devil on your back.
They buried my body and they thought I'd gone,
But I am the dance and I still go on.
They cut me down and I leapt up high,
I am the Light that'll never never die;
I'll live in you if you live in me,
I am the Lord of the dance said he.
Dance, dance, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance said he,
and I'll lead you all wherever you may be
and I'll lead you all in the dance with me.
Chorus as long as you want to sing it.
....from the Revellers, Boston
DANCING IN GALILEE
Dark eyed,
O woman of my dreams,
Ivory sandaled
There is nothing like thee among the dancers;
none with swift feet.
I have not found thee in the tents,
in the broken darkness.
I have not found thee at the well-head
among the women with pitchers.
Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark,
thy face is as a river with lights.
White as the almond are thy shoulders;
as new almonds stripped from the husk.
They guard thee not with eunuchs;
not with bars of copper.
Gilt turquoise and silver are in the place of thy rest.
A brown robe with threads of gold
woven in patterns has thou gathered about thee,
O Nathat-Ikanaie, 'Tree-at-the-river.'
As a rill among the sedge are thy hands upon me;
thy fingers a frosted stream.
Thy maidens are white like pebbles;
their music about thee!
There is none like thee among the dancers;
none with swift feet.
...Ezra Pound
ONE DANCE LEFT
I've had my ups and downs
but wot the hell
wot the hell.
Yesterday's scepters
and yesterday's crowns
wot the hell
wot the hell.
There's one dance left in the old girl yet
wot the hell, wot the hell.
From Mehetibel
e.e. cummings
DANCING GIRL
The young girl dancing lifts her face
passive among the fading flowers;
the jazz band clatters sticks and bones
in a bright rhythm through the hours.
The men in black conduct her round
with small sensations they are bound;
Unhappy, still, and far away,
awaits the bright wreck of day.
....Walter James Turner c. 1890
BEG-INNISH
Bring Kateen-beug and Maurya Jude
to dance in Beg-Innish,
and when the lads from old Dunquin
have sold their crabs and fish,
wave fawny shawls and call them in.
And call the little girls who spin
and seven weavers from Dunquin,
to dance in Beg-Innish.
I'll play you jigs and help you prance
where nets are laid to dry,
I've silken strings would draw a dance
from girls both lame or shy.
Four strings I've brought from Spain and France
to make your long men skip and dance
till stars look out to fill the sky
where nets are laid to dry.
We'll have no priest or peeler in
to dance in Beg-Innish;
A keg with porter to the brim,
that every lad may have his whim,
till we up sails with M'riatry Jim
and sail from Beg-Innish.
...J. M. Synge
modified a bit
Synge studied music in Germany and France; met Yeats in Paris in
1898 and advised him to go live among the Aran people and express
a life that had never found expression. The poem comes from that
life. A peeler is a police officer...after Sir Robert Peel who
founded the English police force to try to tame workers and the
Irish. They forbade drinking as did the Catholic church.
Three Dancers
today
I saw the whales
and I was healed.
I can tell you now
of the dancers, of
the three girls and
the dark wet highway
and the car that came
hurtling into their
young lives.
And how the rain
fell five days
as we followed slowly
behind black limousines
three times with our lights on.
But the sun returned this morning
and the rain washed the air clean
and brought the ventana mountains
in so close they cut my eyes.
Sometimes it hurts to see
things clearly.
For those girls
the dance
had just begun.
But they went out dancing
trailing veils behind them.
Somehow this simple act
tells me that they too
paused somewhere along the way
and saw the whales
moving south
along the coast
on a day like today.
I hope you will forgive me
for trying to put order
and sense to it all
but if I don't
can you tell me
who the hell will?
...ric masten 1977.
TARANTELLA
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and spreading
of the straw for a bedding
and the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers
of the young muleteers
who hadn't a penny
and weren't spending any
under the vine veranda, Miranda
do you remember?
And the hammer of hands at the doors
and the din of the Inn, Miranda,
do you remember?
Of the girl gone chancing
the girl gone glancing
the girl then dancing
back and advancing,
snapping and clapping,
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
do you remember an Inn?
No sound now falls in the halls,
no sound on the walls of the Inn,
Miranda, no sound now falls.
Only the boom of a sound like doom
I hear in the Inn in the High Pyrenees
with fleas that tease,
and wine that tasted of tar, Miranda.
Only the crash and river's lash
I hear in the halls of the Inn, Miranda.
I wander alone in the Inn where once
you danced the Tarantella,
and I remember Miranda.
...variation of a poem by Hilaire Belloc c. 1870
Let it be a Dance
Let a dancing song be heard
play the music say the words
and fill the sky with sailing birds
and let it be a dance.
Learn to follow learn to lead
feel the rhythm fill the need
to reap the harvest plant the seed
and let it be a dance.
Everybody turn and spin
let your body learn to bend
and like a willow with the wind
let it be a dance.
A child is born the old must die a time for joy a time to cry take it as it passes by and let it be a dance.
The morning star comes out at night
without the dark there is no light
and if nothing's wrong then nothing's right
so let it be a dance
let the sun shine let it rain
share the laughter share the pain
and round and round we go again
so let it be a dance.
....Ric Masten 1975
One can dance too
I couldn't help but note
that she was the only one
in the room
up and dancing
doing the tango.
she explained
she'd always been a time stepper
stepping forward
stepping back
stopping through
only long enough
to repaint the bedroom
the usual blue
a quality she had always been partial to
and he
coming in from the office
where he really lived
and died
surprised by her dropcloth and bucket
enough to speak his mind
for the first time
in a twenty nine year old marriage
told her how much he despised her
cobalt
turquoise
vicks bottle
point of view.
...author unknown to me
THE DANCERS
We loitered down the moonlit street
we caught the tread of dancing feet
and stopped below a harlot's house;
Inside, above the din and fray
we heard the loud musicians play
the Treues Liebes Herz of Strauss.
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
making fantastic arabesques,
the shadows raced across the blind.
We watched the ghostly dancers spin
to sound of horn and violin,
like black leaves whirling in the wind.
They took each other by the hand
and danced a stately saraband;
their laughter echoed thin and shrill
and slid into a slow quadrille.
Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
a phantom lover to her breast,
sometimes they seemed to try to sing.
Sometimes a horrible marionette
came out, and smoked its cigarette
upon the steps like a living thing.
Then, turning to my love, I said
'the dead are dancing with the dead,
the dust is whirling on the dust.
But she...she heard the violin,
and left my side to enter in;
love passed into the house of lust.
Then suddenly the tune went false,
the dancers wearied of the waltz,
the shadows ceased to wheel and whirl.
And down the long and silent street,
the dawn, with silver sandaled feet,
revealed a creeping, frightened girl.
Variation on a poem by
Oscar Wilde
THE DANCING DERVISH
Stars in the Heavens turn,
I worship like a star,
and in its footsteps learn
where peace and wisdom are.
Man crawls as a worm crawls;
till dust with dust he lies,
a crooked lie he scrawls
between the earth and skies.
Yet God, having ordained
the course of star and sun,
no creature hath constrained
a meaner course to run.
I, by His lesson taught,
imaging His design
have diligently wrought
motion to be divine.
I turn until my sense,
dizzied with waves of air,
spins to a point intense,
and spires and centers there.
There, motionless in speed,
I drink that flaming peace,
which in the heavens doth feed
the stars with bright increase.
Some spirit in me doth move
through ways of light untrod,
till, with excessive love,
I drown, and am in God.
...Arthur Symonds
SLOW DANCE
In the slow turn of dance
we meet and slowly feel
a gentle beat. In the
very turn of dance, we come
to know the full romance.
Without the need of word
or cause, we come to know
the force of laws buried
deep within our flesh
from whence comes our
need of dance.
We move as one
our bodies joined
and in the midst of more
we dance alone
Lost within the rhythms
there, we come to move
beyond and share the long
slow mystery of love which
in the dance the mystery solve.
T.R.Y. ...1989
THE FAERIES DANCE
The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
the wind blows over the lonely of heart,
and the lonely of heart is withered away,
while the faeries dance in a place apart,
shaking their milk=white feet in a ring,
tossing their milk=white arms in the air:
For they hear the wind laugh, and murmur and sing
of a land where even the old are fair,
and even the wise are merry of tongue;
But I hear a reed of Coolaney say,
'When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
the lonely of heart has danced away.
...Wm. Butler Yeats
AN AGED MAN
An aged man is a paltry thing
a tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and dance, and louder sing
for love and hope in its mortal dress.
...Yeats (modified a bit).
DIALOGUE FOR THE SOUL
When such as I cast out remorse
so great a sweetness flows into the breast
we must dance and we must sing,
we are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
...Yeats
AN ANCIENT TO ANCIENTS
Where once we danced, where once we sang,
Gentlemen,
the floors are sunken, cobwebs hand,
and cracks creep, worms have fed upon
the doors. Yea, sprightlier times were then
than now, with harps and tabrets gone,
Gentlemen!
In dance the polka hit our wish,
Gentlemen,
the paced quadrille, the spry schotticsche,
'Sir Roger.' --And in opera spheres
the 'Girl' (the famed 'Bohemian'),
and Trovador,' held the ears,
Gentlemen.
And ye, red-lipped and smooth-browed; list,
Gentlemen;
Much is there waits you we have missed;
much lore we leave you worth the knowing,
Much, much has lain outside our ken:
Nay, rush not: time serves: we are going,
Gentlemen.
...Thomas Hardy 1922
THE TEMPTER
Ah, lad, upon the road of life 'tis best to dance with Chance's wife and let the rains that come in time erase the footprints of the crime.
The Dancer that dances in the hearts of men Tempted him to sin again; 'Look! I have shown you this before; from this mountain-top I tempted Christ with what you see now of beauty--all that's music, poetry, art in things you can touch every day.
I broke away and rule all dominions that are rare; I took with me all the answers to every prayer that young men and girls pray for: love, happiness, riches...' O Tempter! O Tempter!
...Patrick Kavanagh
BREUGHEL'S DANCERS
In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess, the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedles of the Bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles, tipping their bellies (round as the thick-sided glasses whose wash they impound); their hips and their bellies off balance to turn them around.
...William Carlos Williams 1944
THIS LITTLE DANCER
this little dancer with the tightened eyes with good teeth and small important breasts crisp ogling shoulders and the ripe quite too large lips always clenched faintly, wishes you with all her fragile might to not surmise
of a time when the beautiful most of her will maybe dance and maybe sing and be abslatively posolutely dead, like coney island in winter.
...e.e. cummings 1923
TO MAKE SPRING DANCE
my father moved through dooms of love through sames of am through haves of give, singing each morning out of each night my father moved thro ugh depths of height
and should some why completely weep my father's fingers brought her sleep: vainly no smallest v oice might cry for he could feel th e mountains grow.
keen as midsummer's keen beyond conceiving mind of s un will stand, so strictly, (over u tmost him so hugely) stood my father's dream
his flesh was flesh his blood was blood: no hungry man but wi shed him food; no cripple wouldn't creep one mile uphill to only see h im smile.
Scorning the pomp of must and shall my father moved thro ugh dooms of feel; his anger was as rig ht as rain his pit was as green as grain.
his sorrow was as true as bread: no liar looked him i n the head; if every friend beca me his foe he'd laugh and build a world of snow.
...e.e. cummings
Dancing Spring
My father moved through theys of we, singing each new lea f out of each tree and every child was sure that spring danced when she hear d my father sing.
then let men kill which cannot share, let blood and flesh be mud and mire, scheming imagine, pa ssion willed, freedom a drug that' s bought and sold.
...e.e. cummings 1940
Also Morgen Tanzstunde (The Dancing Lesson)
Tell us who it is you are before the Dancing Lesson is started; Tell us who it is who gave you help before the Dancing hour has parted.
Laughing, screaming, cursing men laughed and screamed and at them swore; Tell us whence the papers came tell us or you'll dance once more.
Waiting with their aching bone, women sat on floors of stone.
Waiting for the morning dance Women looked at evening stars. Wondering how the dance would go women waited for the show.
Aufstehen! Alles 'raus, machen schnell! Women off to dance for men in hell.
In a line against a wall women waited for the call.
Roaring laughter at their tricks men faced the dancers to the bricks. Strutting, laughing, cursing breath men watched women dancing death.
Shaking, quaking, trembling girls danced for men in trembling whirls.
Turn of shoulder, line of sweat fresh young thigh with water wet. Curve of ankle, curve of breast curve of dancers all at rest.
Line of dancers, line of fire line of men, their dance desire.
Aufstehen! Alles 'raus, machen schnell! Men machen women dance through Hell.
...T.R.Y. 1989
Dedicated to Kitty Felix who, with dozens of other women were made to dance by their SS captors in Nazi Germany.
The Joys of Art
As a dancer dancing
in a shower of roses
before her King
(A dreamer dark, the King)
Throws back her head
like a wind-loved flower,
and makes her cymbals ring
(O'er her lit eyes they ring;
As a fair white dancer strange of heart and crown'd and shod with gold, My soul exults before the Art, the magian art of old.
...Rachel Annand Taylor