"The Dancer Within"

I am on the 8th floor of the Chicago Public Library and I never want to leave. I picked up this book by Rose Eichenbaum and it is a set of interviews of famous artists/dancers. It is fabulous. I don't know why hearing what Martha Graham teach someone or how Alvin Ailey was very respectful of the individuality of his dancers or how Balanchine didn't care who his successor was is such intriguing material to me, but it is. Hearing it firsthand can be quite profound.

Regardless, I wanted to quote some quotes from the book. Maybe I will quote more later...

ETHAN STIEFEL:
“As a dancer your job is to interpret your character or, in an abstract ballet, a story or viewpoint. What’s it like for you when you feel your own identity surface?”

“I can’t really describe what that feelsl ike, but I do know that it’s what keeps me going, even through all these injuries. I can try to explain it with words like joy, fulfillment, euphoria, but these words are insufficient and inaccurate.”

“When you get into that emotionally charged place, do you try to linger there a while?”
“To try to linger there would suggest that you have some control over it. I don’t. I’m only in control of the steps that i’m doing and the training and the musicality I possess. I only have the tools to go for the ride. I’d be foolish to think I control what happens out there. I’d be foolish to want to”.


YURIKO

“Do you remember your first class with Martha?”

“I’ll never forget it. I came in and took a place in the back of the room. Louis Horst was playing the piano. Martha stood at the front of the room and demonstrated a contraction.” Yuriko now sat up, her eyes shining. “As Martha’s torso hollowed I thought to myself, that’s what I want in my body. Here was drama. Here was creativity. I had to find out where it comes from. In time, I understood that the contraction comes from the breath, and that its shape originates from a deep source within the body. This source extends to all the extremities in the physical body. Take for example, Martha’s famous cupped hand,” she said, demonstrating. “This is not a position or a shape. It comes from here,” she said, pointing to her solar plexus and then drawing her finger up the chest, through the armpit, down her arm to the center of her hand. “The body’s center islike the roots of a tree that sends nourishment out to all its branches. A contraction vibrates through the body and ends right here,” she said, pressing her index finger into the center of her cupped hand. “It’s alive. A shape is not alive. To achieve, this, you have to steal it,” she said, looking me in the eye.”


JACQUES D' AMBROISE
“Rose, it’s not really a mission. I simply realized what a transforming experience being an artist is. I wanted to share it. There is great joy in being consumed with an art form and making it your life. And it’s true of all the arts...if you are lucky enough to ‘play’ with tremendously talented people as your teachers, it is a soul-transforming epiphany...”

The Palace of Illusions

I love this book -- a rewrite of the Mahabharata from Draupadi's point of view by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

Here are some quotes I found to be particularly poignant:

"Krishna shrugged. '...Isn't that what truth is? The force of a person's believing seeps into those around him -- into the very earth and air and water -- until there's nothing else.'"
(page 49)

"Remember that, little sister. Wait for a man to avenge your honor, and you'll wait forever."
(page 49)

"Every time I spoke it, it embedded itself deeper...for a story gains power with retelling."
(page 20)

The Mahabharata in essence:
"And so I stood struggling with my ego until the brief moment of opportunity vanished."
(page 173

And in case I over glorify our tales:
"...it is not fitting that a celibate should think too much on the ways of women, who are the path to ruin."
(page 24)
Although, I suppose, it is arguable whether the poet means "all women are the path to ruin for every man" or "for celibates women are the path to ruin" (which would be breaking your celibate vow, in which case the implied meaning is harmless)

Sanskrit Manuals on Dance

A really interesting read I found online.

The quote they used to grab the reader's attention here is:

"These days, the dancers are stupid, and the scholars are not practicioners." -- Vacanacarya Sudhakalasa

www.iias.nl/iiasn/30/IIASNL30_18.pdf

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground... The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"

~Milan Kundera


Doesn't performance do both? The emotions one goes through while performing are most certainly burdens - you are taking the deepest depths of your being, of perhaps your impression of other people's beings and try to communicate them by dredging them up again through movement, song, whatever it might be.  But the act of performance itself, if you talk to any performer...allows us to feel extreme lightness/elevation/deep spirituality only by depicting and emoting and feeling these burdens.  Odd, isn't it?