August Asides
Is Dance about its Expression?
ASIDE: Where's the beef?
So many times I have been asked if what I do is “expressive dance.” This question is said with a kind of knowing as if the barer holds an understanding of what dance does – it expresses. My answer is, “no, I don’t do that," ... although I know that necessarily I do, we all do. I guess I want to leave them wondering. While dancing does express, it is the least of what dance is possibly doing. Let’s explore the idea that provokes my “no.” This idea is that expression is the frosting on the dance cake. Without the cake, expression is ooh, too much, too sweet!
And now I also think of the old 1984 commercial in which a little old lady looks at her fast-food hamburger which is filling only a fraction of her bun and asks, “Where’s the beef?” So many dance concerts leave me asking, “Where’s the beef?” This is because dancers often reach to express themselves through movement, without understanding that expression is a result… the same kind of result that is smoke; where there is smoke there is fire. Smoke can’t exist without the fire that produces it. And expression can’t exist without the relationships that provoke movement. The fire is the substance of a burning relationship. Smoke, albeit important is, nevertheless, merely a result.
We love expression. It is one of the primary ways people in conversation understand what is being said to them. The intonations in the spoken word, “love” convey the information that the listener seeks to breathe in with their lungs as well as their ears, so that the whole of the body feels its restorative value. Said disingenuously, it feels hollow. The way a person greets us at the airport, the way we pick up our phone, walk past a tree, move within a forest defines much about our experience. Each of these actions contains expression. Yet none of them are the beef, the substance of what we care about. The expression of love, of greeting, is not what is important, cannot be the goal, cannot be the substance of any world as it dances. Expression only appears to be the currency of exchange. It is not the change element that shapes any relationship: the physicality of the bodily felt love as it enfolds, the eyes that absorb the object of love, the protection of a tree’s canopy, the physical expansion a whole forest speaking together with you. The physical job is done by the function of the action … the thing that is done by the action of the relationship. Expression is present as a consequence of doing, not as the motor or the making of the action of relationship. It lacks functional ability.
Yet, for dancers and choreographers, this distinction is often missed. Inside every action there is the thing that the action is doing. Pound a nail with a hammer, the nail moves. That action and its consequence is the function of the action. The way you pound that hammer, the quality of the tool and the power you put into it, that is the expression which is awesome and gorgeous to see. But without the relationship of the hammer and its object, the nail, the expression of pounding could not carry all the meaning it does. Function brings beef to expression.
