What, I've often wondered, is the language of choreography? How is the idea of movement communicated; how does it evolve? What lives within that mysterious shift space of motion and narrative?
When I began to take ballroom dance lessons from the choreographer Jim Bunting, at DanceSport PA, I had the chance, at long last, to ask questions. Ultimately I had the chance to visit Jim while he was at work on a piece with two young dancers—to watch him yield his story to them. I wrote a bit about all of this in a piece that recently appeared here, in The Dance Journal. The essay opens with these words:
Love walks down the street and sits in the park in the sun. It tenders its hand in apology or desire, corrupts the knees, revokes the arch of the foot. Love is the story, never finally told in words and, perhaps, never finally told at all, though one gets fleeting glimpses of it in the choreographic work of Jim Bunting.
It was not a good day; it was not. It was a day in which I was reminded of just how difficult this writing journey can be—of how hoped-for support from a publisher does, indeed, fail to materialize, even if that support is as simple as putting a book forward for an award. Even if it is as simple as simple faith and advocacy.
But there was, in this day, a foxtrot-waltz with Jim. There was my son reading from his newest work, and oh, my son is a writer, a real one—funny (he's always been), plot smart (reliably so), dialogue rich (better than me), and now (wholly, fully) compassionate. And there was So You Think You Can Dance, which is not some mere TV show. It is a place where artists go to work and where people like me, who need artistry, who cry when it materializes, who are fierce and complicated and sometimes broken by the way they choose to live, go for communion, community.
Tonight Melissa and Ade danced a Tyce Diorio routine that portrayed a woman imperiled by breast cancer. Melissa, in this dance, fought to survive and to hope. Ade fought to believe in her journey, to lift her up. The whole was, in a word, unforgettable. It was strength and power and release and it was, damn it, don't take this life away from me. I cried, I couldn't stop crying, for the beauty of the dance and for the reality of one of my very best friends, one of my oldest, dearest friends, who has been fighting this cancer battle for an entire year now. She has fought, she has not complained, she has believed, and she is out there, raising her two sons, cheering them on at baseball games, and asking, when I call, How are you, Beth?.
How am I?
My friend's journey has broken my heart, and tonight she was danced for. Tonight all of those in the fight were danced for, and we were reminded of what matters.
I was.
I am thinking this morning of the fractions we make, the contradictions we provoke, the black clouds we send up over our heads. I think of the comments we make in a moment of hurry or exhaustion, the tossed-off observations, the words we use to delineate one thing from the other, to set one thing to the side of another, at the awful expense of that other. These things echo; they reverberate. We don't see the ramifications coming, but they will come: you wait, they'll be there. There is nothing we can do to scrub the thing we might not have said, the hurt we should have never inflicted, from our record. We can apologize, and we do. But we can't retreat to the before.
Lately I have been taking dance lessons from a choreographer who, in so many ways, silences the negative. You doubt yourself, and he asks you not to. You hear yourself making some ironic observation, and it goes strictly unacknowledged. You ask him a question and you discover, in his answer, no manipulation, no deceit, no cunning. You make a mistake, and he does not shame you. The lesson isn't soft, the learning is relentless, the stakes keep getting higher—and yet: the negative doesn't enter in. Nothing is gained at the expense of something else. There is, quite simply, gain.
The best teachers teach us more about life than they do about anything else. They give us the chance to be slightly better people. Taking ballroom dance lessons is a self-indulgence of the highest order. But oh, I still have so much to learn. And oh, I am so desperate to get some part of this living right.
Leave it to Jane Satterfield, the poet, memoirist, and teacher, to instruct me, again, in what I did not know but should have. We met at Bread Loaf, Jane and I. I've been learning from her ever since.
So that yesterday it was an email that contained, among other gifts, a link to this 2003 Robert McDowell interview with Rita Dove. The title? "Poet at the Dance: Rita Dove in Conversation." I probably don't need to say more.
Except that I will. I will quote from this terrific interview, and I will say, for myself, this: Last week, and the week before, something happened at the studio, a letting go (again, more) that enabled me, for the briefest moment, to skim the floor the way Dove describes such skimming. To trust so completely the dancers who kindly danced with me that I could also trust myself. I'd ruin things, of course. I'd break the spell. But for an instant I grasped what it must be to have the knowing of dance in one's bones. I grasped it. I wanted more.
From Rita Dove:
Poetry is a kind of dance already. Technically, there's the play of contemporary speech against the bass-line of the iambic, but there's also the expression of desire that is continually restrained by the limits of the page, the breath, the very architecture of the language--just as dance is limited by the capabilities of our physical bodies as well as by gravity. A dancer toils in order to skim the surface of the floor, she develops muscles most of us don't even know we have; but the goal is to appear weightless. A poet struggles to render into words that which is unsayable--the ineffable, that which is deeper than language--in the hopes that whatever words make the final cut will, in turn, strike the reader speechless.
What, I've often wondered, is the language of choreography? How is the idea of movement communicated; how does it evolve? What lives within that mysterious shift space of motion and narrative? 
Love the exerpt. Something about dancing that really is an amazing expression of love - in all forms: agape, eros, philia. M/b b/c touch is such essential part of each?
Choreographers have amazing vision and understanding of how motion can speak volumes.
I love the way you've captured the choreography.
oh, your words are delicious! i am dreaming of dancing these days and this post is perfect. *off to read the whole essay*