Beginning
Module 2: Threads of interest appearing
Module 1 was a wonderful challenge for me especially as I
was inundated with work and travel. I am
looking forward to spending time exploring as I begin module 2, and especially
reconnecting with everyone on MAPP DTP because I have felt quite absent.
These are things that have preoccupied me over the past few
weeks that may or may not be connected but that could never the less be
interesting to some of the themes that the beginnings of module 2 seem to be
touching on. I have also included links - possibly interesting. I would love to hear from some of you.
In the interim of study I had time to once more engage with
literature, and aspects of culture that always interested or engaged me but
with once again fresh eyes. I love the
variety of resources to be found on youtube.
The flavour of January were definitely Sam Harris’s videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fajfkO_X0l0
The break was an enjoyable relief especially from the final
pressure of compiling my portfolio for module 1. Now that I am moving on to the next module,
it is lovely to be able to find themes within it that may provide a feeling of
continuity not just with personal interests but my work as a dancer, performer
and teacher.
I decided having read
the Handbook to take on what seems like quite a challenge of starting to
formulate my own ideas surrounding dualism/monism, embodiment and perhaps look
at Task 1. I took a look at my book
shelf and found Nietzsches’ ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ and felt
these were the entry points for me to then engage with some of the set
texts. I am currently finding ‘Nietzsche's
dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the revaluation of Christian Values’ (Kimerer
L. LaMothe, 2006) very helpful for drawing relationships between the beginnings
of phenomenology and early modern dance.
It's giving me an opportunity to look further afield – maybe this will
help for finding a theme to research (although I have some ideas). It flows beautifully on from my January’s
work as I was involved as a performer in a dance-theatre production of Sophocles’
‘Oedipus’:
Oedipus, through solving the riddle of the sphinx and so
breaking the curse, is the infinitely wise (unsurpassable in logical reasoning)
saviour, and as a consequence, king, of the plague stricken city of
Thebes. The tragedy follows his journey,
from blindness to full realization of his true nature, that he is the murderer
of his father and husband to his mother.
His final enlightenment is symbolized when, at his own hands as an act
of self-revulsion and despair, he is physically blinded (and thus absolved into
the world of the unseen/unknown, Nietzsche’s ‘Dionysian abysses’ p89, 1967),
and his banishment from the city of Thebes, and subsequent journey back into
communion with nature. Nietzsche talks
of connection with nature as knowing reality, with this achieved through the
figure of the Dionysian satyr (‘..the image of nature and its strongest
urges...and at the same time the proclaimer of her wisdom and art – musician,
poet, dancer and seer of spirits all in one person’ (1967, p65-66)). Nietzsche writes passionately of the unity of
all living things and primordial nature as reality, with experience of these
coming not through critical reasoning and understanding but through
experiencing transformative art. In critique
Nietzsche writes of the ‘divine’ Plato
that he ‘only speaks ironically of the creative faculty of the poet, insofar as
it is not conscious insight, and places it on par with the gift of the soothsayer
and the dream-interpreter: the poet is incapable of composing until he has
become unconscious and bereft of understanding’ (1967, p85-86). To me Nietzsche implies that understanding
once translated into conscious thought, into knowledge gained through reason
acts merely as an illusion to the reality of the world experienced through
artistic impulse. He writes:
‘The idyllic shepherd
of modern man is merely the counterfeit of the sum of cultural illusions that
are allegedly nature; the Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature in their most
forceful form and see himself changed, as by magic into a satyr’. 1967, p62
Nietzsche’s description of the satyr is of a being absorbed
in their sensory reality. For the central
figure of Sartre’s ‘Nausea’, a tree in a city park, experienced from the
perspective of his embodied self, one immersed within the sensory world, comes
to represent to him the reality of existence in its entirety. In the presence of the lived reality, the
word ‘tree’ becomes absurd in it meaninglessness (‘I was thinking without
words, about things with things....I am struggling against words’ (1965,
p185)). The distance between words, the
symbol of the thing and the reality, creates an unsettled disturbing sensation
(like Nietzsche’s contrast between the image of the idyllic shepherd in common
culture and the reality of one directly experiencing nature). In this state the inanimate world becomes to
him unstable, filled with movement (the tree ‘floats’, ‘shrivels’, ‘crumples’,
‘penetrates’ (1965, p191)), consciousness through the subjective experience
becomes everything, and ‘knowledge’ of the world slips away, ‘...neither ignorance
or knowledge had any importance, the world of explanations and reasons is not
that of existence.’ (1965, p185). Interestingly,
whilst explaining what seems to be an understanding of life through an embodied
awareness, a sensory consciousness, Sartre nevertheless still posits knowledge
as separate, as belonging to the mind, and like Nietzsche, the realm of logic
and the written word. If what the
embodied self experiences and understands (intuitively, instinctively or by
some other process) cannot be rendered in words without something of its
essence being lost or distorted, what do we mean when we say that the body can
be a site of knowledge? Perhaps we could
see knowledge simply as a way of experiencing/understanding the world that can
be passed on/communicated to someone else.
Dance therefore becomes a means of transference from individual to
individual. The dancing of a contact
improvisation jam for example immediately comes to mind as a direct non-verbal
form of communicating understanding.
‘The
Triangular Clock’, Salvador Dali from:Penguin Surrealism http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2007/04/28/penguin-surrealism/
I am currently thinking about the possible need for ‘entry
points’ into the sensory world and the consciousness of our moving reality. That entry point may be a movement motif in
itself, touch or physical contact with something or someone, a rhythm. For the protagonist in ‘Nausea’ it is the
image and feeling of the tree. The smell
of coffee in the morning enlivens and awakens me into dynamic movement. Memories are awakened – an image used in a
piece of choreography or technique class can evoke memories of past sensations,
emotions and ideas, which in turn work to intensify the present experience. Sartre’s protagonist sees the black colour of
the tree as ‘...melted into the smell of wet earth, of warm moist wood, into a
black smell spread like varnish over that sinewy wood, into a sweet, pulped
fibre’ (1965, p187). I am currently
thinking about ideas for research surrounding the relationship between music
and dance but from a personal, individual perspective.
Thank you for taking the time out.
References
Nietzche, F., (1967), The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner,
Toronto: Random House.
Sartre, J.P.,
(1965), Nausea, Middlesex: Penguin
Books
