Personal

Sign, Symbol, and flicking the vees

Feature by Mark Harding | 30 Aug 2010

Gesture is the most basic communication. This communication might be something to which we could apply the label ‘speech act’ (or ‘narrative’ in the terms of this discussion), such as Wittgenstein famously discovered when an Italian economist flicked the vees at him, or the communication might be part of a wider ‘language game’ of animal call and response. After all, flicking the vees usually carries a message about the flicker’s emotion towards the flickee and calls a corresponding emotion from the flicked-upon. Dance is the purest expression of this emotional interaction - where a caress can express the flavour of a love better than any words.

If, as Wittgenstein says, ‘the face is the picture of the human soul’ then dance is the art form that transmits from soul (= body-neurone-learned response-phenomenological complex) to soul, at the nearest level to the nervous system.

Yet humans are infinitely complex, and dance practice merges into other mediums – visual art, theatre, conceptual art, poetry, sculpture – to reveal (even create?) the subtleties and complexities of our emotional lives. Such exploration in dance (as with philosophy) requires skimming against the boundary of nonsense - a vital component of any serious, exploratory art.

Like what? I hear you ask.

Like the wordless, pre-thought nightmare of primal-slime body-shock horror in the Chapmanesque opening of Co. Theatre's Phantom Pains.

Like the way the most innovative physical theatre practitioners, such as Idle Motion, are explicitly taking on Hollywood's visceral wide-screen (3D!) movie effects and achieving them with a mere actor's glance.

In theatre, it has seemed that the boundary of language and meaning has been pushed to breaking point and even abandonment, such as in Beckett's wordless play Breath.

Mongrel forms of dance crossed with theatre perhaps show a way out of this impasse. Scottish Dance Theatre's The Life And Times of Girl A, for example, opens the raw emotional wounds of Girl A (a self-deluding character drawn in a manner reminiscent of Pinter) yet uses dance to go beyond language for a conclusion that is nonsense in terms of narrative - yet emotionally has complete veracity.

The more complex forms of dance can be demanding – in our culture, the dominant arts are narrative-based which provides audiences with the wrong training for the visceral, nerve-pulsing experience that dance provides at its best.

Of course, the danger for dance - as a communication medium without codification (symbols) - is that it is inherently ambiguous. The use of non-narrative emotional communication and response (with all the richness of what I’ve called ‘emotion’ – expectation, unease, joy, disquiet, ‘indefinable’, and more) creates the problem for the original artist that his or her own personal emotional references in the work must be distinguished from those that are able to be felt by the wider community. Without this, the work becomes a private language of the artist, and by definition, meaningless. In dance, this distinction is a fine line; a line that can only be explored in an atmosphere of respect for an honest, hard-won failure.

On a personal level, for me, the clarifying performances I’ve seen this year are SDT’s Girl A and Janice Parker Dance Company’s Private Dancer. Both works use words – the tools we use for narrative – yet both pieces use narrative as a launch pad to create an experience that is not about words: Private Dancer, in particular, breaking with the expectations of dance theatre, to focus on the unmediated personal connection that is the gift of dance.

In this view, the role of the critic is not to obscure the work with narrative commentary, the key is to remember the primacy of the emotional content and simply say ‘look: this works’ or ‘this fails, but the failure is interesting.’

The end point of critical activity should be to highlight the unique, paradoxically solipsistic/universal, experiences felt when confronting works of art - and to try to assist in that experience being as widespread as possible.