Anam Cara

5

T

HE

J

OY OF

S

HAPES

T

HAT

D

ANCE

Sound and gesture are contemporary, identical and

indistinguishable . . . Linked to its own past, the gesture fills up

with music and becomes rounded, like the universe . . . The

beauty of gesture renders time visible.

CATHERINE DAVID

STILLNESS IS THE CANVAS AGAINST WHICH MOVEMENT CAN become beautiful. We can only appreciate movement against the background of stillness. Were everything kinetic, we could not know what movement is. As sound is sistered to silence, movement is sistered to stillness.

B

REAKING

S

TILLNESS

:

T

HE

R

IVER AS

I

DEAL

S

EQUENCE

.

IT IS LOVELY TO SIT ON THE RIM OF A RISING VALLEY AND WATCH along its depth-line the grace of a river’s journey. The long flow of its water traverses each field at the same time but with an ever new continuity. The river unfolds equally all along the one line of its one journey. From source to sea it is one flow; nowhere does it pile up. Nowhere does the water break to leave an empty space. From source to sea, it is one unbroken song of flow – ever changing yet always one. The grace of a river is a reminder of how nature seeks elegance and achieves immense beauty of cohesion and balance. A river blends music of movement with an enduring and accompanying depth of stillness. Again its journey is always out of silence, and this silence dwells deep in the river too. If only our lives could achieve, or indeed allow, such grace and elegance. If we could but find a rhythm of being which could balance a contemplative grace, a poetry of motion and an accompanying stillness and silence, our pilgrimage through this world would flow in beauty through the most ragged and forsaken heartlands of confusion and dishevelment. It would continue to hold a clear flow-line between the memory and depth of the earth and the eternal fluency of the ocean and never lose the passion of flowing towards the ever new promise of the future.

A river somehow illuminates the beauty of time. In a river, past, present and future coalesce in the one passionate flowing. A river is continuous flow of future. Though it flows through landscape, it never divides space into ‘sooner’ or ‘later’, ‘before’ or ‘after’. The river is a miracle of presence. Each place it flows through is the place it is. The river holds its elegance regardless of the places it flows through. Though a river maintains a line of direction, it somehow turns still, fixed space into the embrace of a flowing circle of presence. It gives itself to the urgency of becoming but never at the cost of disowning its origin. It engages the world while belonging always secretly within its memory and still strives forward into the endless flow of emerging possibility. In the sublime and unnoticed artfulness of its presence, the wisdom of a river has much to teach us.

T

HE

R

ESTLESS

B

EAUTY OF THE

O

CEAN

I was born by the sea . . . my first idea of movement of the dance,

certainly came from the rhythm of the waves . . .

ISADORA DUNCAN

THE WORDS ‘SEA’ AND ‘OCEAN’ ARE TOO SMALL TO IMAGE SUCH wild divinity. The ocean is beyond language. The flow of the ocean presents a most beautiful dance. She is eternally restless and delights the eye most with the structured rhythm of waves. The seashore is a fascinating threshold. With sublime elegance, the ocean approaches and embraces the landscape and each wave has a unique grace and rhythm. The grandeur of ocean movement is consistently enthralling yet there is consolation and consistency in the faithfulness of the ocean. Water stirs something very deep and ancient in the human heart. It satisfies us in a more intimate way than the other elements. Our eyes and hearts follow its rhythm as if the flow of water were the mirror where time becomes obliquely visible. The image of water can hold such longing. The faraway force of the moon that draws the tides to dance is a vivid metaphor for the passionate kinship of the elements that stirs across infinite distance.

The ocean often puts on a display of beauty that is charged with danger. When the ocean becomes angry the fury of its charge against the cliffs makes powerful drama. It fills the heart with awe and makes us understand how the ancient Greeks could believe that the ocean was the God Poseidon. To watch the Atlantic pummel into the cliffs at Dun Aonghusa on the Aran Islands is incredibly exciting. Within a wave, tons of water blast into the cliff and rise into the sky in white fury as though some caged force has broken free in the depths and wants revenge on the silence and impassive stillness of the watching island. Yet, even in its wildest passion, the ocean still holds dignity; it builds in every form of wave. The ocean surface is incessantly restless with every conceivable crest and blister of water. Yet the ocean maintains poise. However and wherever it throws itself, it never falls outside of itself. It can spread and scatter every which way, yet it is always held within the shelter of the one rhythm.

Unlike the land, which is fixed in one place, the sea manifests freedom: she is the primal dance, a dance that has always moved to its own music. The wild divinity of the ocean infuses the shore with ancient sound. Who can tell what secrets she searches from the shoreline? What news she whispers to the shore in the gossip of urgent wavelets? This is a primal conversation. The place where absolute change rushes against still permanence, where the urgency of Becoming confronts the stillness of Being, where restless desire meets the silence and serenity of stone. Beyond human seeing and knowing, the meeting of ocean and shoreline must be one of the places where the earth almost breaks through to word.

The ocean remains faithful to the land, it always returns. As Keats wrote: ‘It keeps eternal Whisperings around/ Desolate shores . . .’ When the tide goes out, the seashore is exposed, its eroded stone pockmarked and chewed by tide. Between tides this line of fragmented shore seems vulnerable as though exposed in an arrested posture from which it cannot stir. It is reminiscent of edge-lines in your life where fluency abandons you. In such times of emotional devastation, the woundedness and fragmentation stand out, naked and exposed. The natural ease of rhythm seizes up. Each gesture, thought and action has to be deliberately willed. Everything becomes extremely difficult. What you would have accomplished without the slightest thought now becomes an action that seems impossible. Yet hope whispers that the tide always returns. Transfiguration graces you gradually. You stood exposed and atrophied, unable to move in the grip of pain; even the ground was naked and broken beneath you. Now gradually fluency returns. You recover your spontaneity and new buoyancy raises you up and your heart is again relieved and glad as when the ocean returns along the shoreline and everything becomes subsumed in the play and dance of young waves.

When I was studying in Germany, I missed the West of Ireland and especially the wild callings of the ocean. In Tübingen one felt in the centre of the European landmass. The ocean was so far away. Driving home after my first year, I was excited at the prospect of seeing the ocean again and when I finally reached Calais, there she was. Suddenly, tears overwhelmed me. I began to cry. I had absolutely no warning that this would happen but I began to realize how deeply I had missed the ocean. Without knowing it, my body had been lonely for the sound, the sight and the effervescence of the ocean. The Irish word for the ocean is feminine: an Fharraige. In the musical sequence of its syllables, you can almost hear the buildup of a wave, and then it disperses in the ‘ge’ like the fall-away of an outward breath.

T

HE

W

IND

MOVEMENT IS A SIGN OF LIFE. IT IS INTRIGUING THAT THE presence which has the most grace and swiftness cannot be seen, namely, the wind. In the Hebrew tradition the word for wind, ruach, was also the word used for ‘God’. The wind has power and huge presence. It symbolizes pure freedom. In the New Testament in a conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus likens the way of the Holy Spirit to the rhythm and energy of the wind; it is presence as spontaneity:

The wind blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. That is how it is with all who are born of the Spirit.

JOHN 3 : 8–9

To dwell in new spirit is to enter a complete spontaneity of direction; this is a voyage of trust imbued with passion – any destination is possible. In phrases like this we glimpse the wild heart of Jesus.

At times the wind has a haunting, poignant music. When it rises in the night and shores against the walls of the house, it sounds out a great loneliness. Perhaps the wind achieves poignancy because it has no name. It is nothing and from nowhere. Yet its cry is almost a voice and sounds as if the sorrow of stone and clay, of the dead or those seeking birth, has somehow become a force of emptiness. Their longing has transformed their nothingness into a cry. This atmosphere of wind has unreached realms of longing. It is a keening that no mind could ease. At other times the wind is utterly buoyant, rousing and refreshing. When you walk into that mood of wind, it cleanses your mind and invigorates your body. It feels as if the wind would love you to dance – let you surf its undulations and steal you away from the weight of your body, casting you hither and thither like the shimmer of dust. Such wind is wild with dream. One of the loveliest images of earthly movement is how a bird plays among the high geographies of wind-force, soaring, sliding and balancing on its invisible hills and waves. Before ever the human mind became fascinated with the rhythm, structure and meaning of movement, the birds knew how to enjoy and play within the temporary landscapes of the wind.

T

HE

G

RACE OF

A

NIMAL

M

OVEMENT

ANIMAL MOVEMENT CAN EXHIBIT WONDERFUL GRACE. ANIMALS have a native closeness to the earth and they move in the sure rhythm of this belonging. This shows the dignity of animals. They enjoy an inner composure and coherence. The serrated confusions of the human mind are not their burden. Animals have fluency of presence.

Cats are a joy to watch. They rarely walk without rhythm. They relate to space fluently and gracefully. A cat moves as if his body were not an object but an unfurling gesture. He inhabits a sureness that seems deft and weightless. And at times even the daintiest kitten can assume the regal aura of the tiger. The sense of movement is often more graceful and beautiful in the wild where animals have not been intruded upon, or forced into the brittle world of domestication.

W

HEN

W

E

F

ELL

O

UT OF

A

NIMAL

P

RESENCE

W

AS

D

ANCE

O

UR

F

IRST

L

ANGUAGE

?

THE HUMAN ANIMAL MAKES THE MOST COMPLEX MOVEMENT. IN ITS every gesture the long, upright body of a person is weighted with consciousness. More often than not the inner gravity of thought is heavier than the gravity of the clay. Being invisible, thought does not take up space. Yet sometimes there is nothing as heavy as a thought. A deeply troubling and painful thought can load the body with the dead weight of a stone. The body is never merely an object among others. The indwelling of mind makes the body somehow luminous. The simplest body movement is always more than itself and it becomes the outer language of our hidden, inner world. It is quite astonishing how helplessly our bodies speak us out, how the language of the body bears the unique signature of our individual difference. Each of us moves so differently. We look differently and reach towards things distinctively.

I remember one evening outside a café in Paris on the corner of a busy street. Lines of people were walking by. There was a large crowd seated outside, people-watching. After a while a street artist began his act. He would go a little further up the street and walk behind somebody, perfectly imitating their physical gait and gesture as they walked past the crowd outside the café. It became a wonderful street show. The victim never knew he was being imitated and when the crowd laughed, he would turn around to see what the cause was. His imitator was always quick enough to turn away. This only increased the drama. Usually the victim sensed it and found him out by the next movement. The comedy derived from the precision of the imitation. It was uncanny how quickly the street artist could decipher the distinguishing physical gait of the person he chose to follow and imitate it perfectly, inhabit it completely. This reminded me of the lovely phrase of welcome from the Aran Islands: ‘Fáilte roimh thorann do chos, ní amháin thú fhéin’: the sound of your footsteps is as welcome as yourself.

Because we carry the weight of the world in our hearts, we know how delightful it is to dance. In dance the human body reclaims childlikeness. When you can dance it is as though you do not have a care in the world. The body gives itself away playfully to the rhythm of the music; the burden of consciousness becomes suspended. For a while the innocence of the dance claims you completely as the mind relents and the body becomes its own celebration. Because the body dwells mainly in silence it loves to find expression in the language of dance. At the beginning, in that blurred time when we had fallen out of the seamlessness of animal presence, perhaps dance was our first language.

‘H

OW

C

AN

W

E

K

NOW

T

HE

D

ANCER FROM THE

D

ANCE

?’

When you truly dance, you’re finding what you never lost.

You can’t just dance: the dance is given to you.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN DANCER

THOUGH ITS ORIGINS ARE COMPLEX AND SOMETIMES DARK, FOLK-dance is usually free and celebratory. It reflects the energy and passion of a place and its people. In dance-theatre the choreography of figures can assume incredible shapes. It is a powerful form. One of the pioneers of contemporary dance is Pina Bausch. Her dances can turn movement into unforgettable narrative. She plays immaculately with space. In her dance, space emerges as a powerful presence, estranged, disturbing, welcoming, creative, shimmering with dream or engraved with memory. Her dance breaks the stillness as deftly as song breaks silence. Great dance is like fluent sculpture. The body arches itself around the emptiness to fashion a sequence of transient shapes that bring out the contemplative depth of sensuousness. Yeats offers a wonderful exploration of the dance–dancer unity at the end of his poem ‘Among School Children’:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

This final verse is a questioning vision which unifies the voices of despair and possibility, creativity and separation which inform the poem. Here at last is a vision of identity focused in the image of the chestnut tree anchored in the elemental clay yet swaying in the freed air. The ‘brightening glance’ can see that true creativity dwells in and emerges from that lyrical, elemental unity where deliberateness, force and separation are subsumed in the beauty of the dance. In the ‘blossoming’, dancer and dance are no longer separable. Memory and possibility dwell in the one fluency. Creativity is a dance where the flow of the eternal gleams through the brittleness of time and the distance of space.

In the West of Ireland one can still see sean-nós dancing. Though its form has its own rigour, this is wild, primal dancing; it is unaffected, without choreography or cosmetic. It is free dancing where the whole body moves to the desire of the music. The dancer dances as if he were obeying invisible figures. It is a dance unpredictable in its urgent vitality as though the music had slipped into the solar plexus of the dancer. The sean-nós dance is from within the music. The dancer allows the dance to take over his name and nature. He becomes the dance. It is actually a wonderful illustration of Yeats’s line, for in this instance, it is impossible to tell the dancer from the dance.

‘O

UR

S

TEPS

. . . W

E

L

OSE

T

HEM WITHOUT A

T

HOUGHT

’

Now I am going to reveal to you something which is very pure,

a totally white thought. It is always in my heart; it blooms at

each of my steps . . . The dance is love, it is only love, it alone,

and that is enough . . . I, then, it is amorously that I dance: to

poems, to music but now I would like to no longer dance to

anything but the rhythm of my soul.

ISADORA DUNCAN

IN HIS DIALOGUE ‘DANCE AND THE SOUL’, THE FRENCH POET PAUL Valéry has written of the beauty of dance. He describes the thoughtlessness of our normal walking: ‘Our steps are so easy and familiar to us that they never have the honour to be considered in themselves, and as strange acts . . . in the simplicity of our ignorance they lead as they know how; and according to the ground, the goal, the humour, the state of the man, or even the lighting of the way, they are what they are: we lose them without a thought.’ He contrasts this with the way the dancer walks: ‘A simple walk, the simplest chain of steps! . . . It is as though she purchases space with equal and exquisite acts, and coined with her heel, as she walked, the ringing effigies of movement. She seems to reckon and count out in pieces of pure gold what we thoughtlessly spend in vulgar change of steps, when we walk to any end.’ Later in the dialogue, he offers a eulogy to the dancer:

who divides and gathers herself together again, who rises and falls, so promptly opening out and closing in, and who appears to belong to constellations other than ours – seems to live, completely at ease, in an element comparable to fire – in a most subtle essence of music and movement, wherein she breathes boundless energy, while she participates with all her being in the pure and immediate violence of extreme felicity – If we compare our grave and weighty condition with the state of that sparkling salamander, does it not seem to you that our ordinary acts . . . are like coarse materials, like an impure stuff of duration . . .

In dance the gravity of the body is released. A fluency and lightness invest each gesture and stir the whole body. Stillness breaks in waves of visible grace. Writing of the Countess Cathleen in Paradise, Yeats has these lines:

Did the kiss of Mother Mary Put that music in her face? Yet she goes with footstep wary Full of earth’s old timid grace.

One of the most intriguing forms of dance is when an object is cut against the stillness in such a way that it becomes filled with the suggestion of movement.

S

CULPTURE:

T

HE

S

TILL

D

ANCE

Abandoned stones which I become interested in invite me to

enter into their life’s purpose. It is my task to define and make

visible the intent of their being.

ISAMU NOGUCHI, The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum

SOMETIMES WE UNWITTINGLY HAPPEN UPON THE SECRET LIFE OF objects. One day, some years ago, I was out on the mountains herding cattle. I had walked for hours and I lay down on the mountainside to rest. It was a gloomy day of muted light. Just as I was about to arise, I looked over my shoulder across the broken limestone pavement to see a small limestone version of the Egyptian Sphinx looking across at me. I gazed at it for a while, enthralled again by all the shapes of natural sculpture with which these stone mountains are bestrewn. I eventually got up and walked on; then I turned back for one more look, but try as I might, I could not find the sphinx again. Whatever light, vision and space had conspired to render that image explicit among the stones had now vanished.

For the new infant, becoming acquainted with objects is a real adventure. The other day I watched a new lamb interrogate a group of daffodils on the hill outside my window. She seemed amazed at how a rush of breeze could make those yellow aliens dance. Like the little lamb, to the human eye there is no end to the mystery of objects. Forced by fire and tension from beneath and carved by glacier, time and weather above, the forms of a landscape are primal sculpture. Though it is hard to analyse, the surrounding shape of the place where we live must exercise considerable influence on the rhythm and weather of our minds; perhaps outer sculpture does influence the inner sculpture we call thinking.

Thought is our great mirror and lens of vision. Though it might carry a world, a thought is light. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why even the simplest objects remain mysterious to us. Everything we feel, think and do is mediated through thought: thinking is the air in which the mind dwells. The wonder of an object is that it is not a thought. A thing is first and foremost itself. An inconsequential pebble picked up on the side of the road has preceded us by anything up to four hundred million years, and its face will be brightened still further by rain that will fall here thousands of years after we have vanished. We might change things in the world, yet the most minimal, seemingly insignificant object outlasts us.

T

HE

D

AZED

S

TONE

The beauty of a composed intricacy of form; and how it may be

said . . . to lead the eye a kind of chase.

WILLIAM HOGARTH

AN OBJECT LOVES SPACE. WITHOUT SPACE, THE SHAPE, COLOUR and presence of the object remain unseen. Most of the objects in the world lie buried under earth or under water. As a child I remember being fascinated by this as I watched my uncle and father clearing land. In levelling a field, the ground would be opened, the tightly packed layers of caked earth broken and freed; then sometimes an inner mound would reveal where a huge rock lived inside the earth. They’d dig around it, and then with crowbars they’d hoist the stone up out of its lair. For days and even weeks afterwards, the stone looked dazed and estranged, standing unsheltered and alone in the severance of wind and light, a new neighbour in the world of eyes, weather and emptiness. Some stones seemed to take ages before they began to look comfortably at home in the outside world. As they slowly took on the accretions of weather and its erosive engravings, time enabled them to forget the underworld. In a sense this is the disturbance, the revelation and strange beauty that a new piece of sculpture causes in the world.

Sculpture arrives; it makes an entry, draws attention to itself and invites the eye to take it into account and rearrange its inner world accordingly. Sculpture is different from all other art. Whether it is stone, metal, clay, wood or external assemblage, it is a sensuous concrete thing, another object in the world – to be seen, touched and placed. Usually a piece of sculpture inhabits stillness, yet the stillness is not dead or vacant. It is a stillness that is shaped with presence. In a way, a piece of sculpture is a still dance. Recently I gazed at a majestic piece by Barbara Hepworth. Its pleasing green shape had a simple aperture near the top; the whole dignity of its restrained elegance reminded the heart of some vital form, perhaps something lost or something dreamed that is still to come. Sculpture can have this poignancy when the shape and stillness of the silent thing stirs something in the heart that thought could never dredge up.

The arrival of a piece of sculpture changes the space. Though we dwell all the time in space, we are often blind to the wonder of its emptiness and how it allows each thing to be there. When the sculptor is working on a piece of stone, she might be releasing the hidden shape within it, as Michelangelo believed. What she certainly is doing, however, is altering the conversation between space and matter. As the word voices silence, so shape states stillness. Space gathers itself differently around the piece of sculpture. Our eyes are drawn to the piece, but they also register how it charges space with the emotion of its presence. Sculpture sculpts space, that silent and still continuum that allows us to be and in every moment bestows upon us the privilege of whereness. Space is faithful to us in a primal way; it offers the ‘where’ that permits us to be here. It does not have crevices that we could fall through to disappear into nowhere. A piece of sculpture can render space visible and vocal. It frees the eye and the heart to glimpse the embrace of the invisible.

Sculpture also suggests and sometimes unveils the mystery that resides inside what we blandly call ‘matter’. Humans are so easily contented, addicts of the familiar, willing to remain satisfied with outside description. Yet all around us so-called ‘matter’ is brimming with secrets in its inner dance of alteration. In a beautiful sculpture called The Stone Within, the Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi brings out the colours, textures and inner light of the basalt rock. Noguchi said of this piece: ‘To search the final reality of stone beyond the accident of time, I seek the love of matter. The materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity – not what might be imposed but something closer to its being. Beneath the skin is the brilliance of matter.’ The inner secrets of stone cannot be pre-empted. Everything depends on that precarious moment, where and how the sculptor starts. Perhaps in no other art does the moment of beginning hold the future so definitively. Noguchi puts it this way: ‘In working stone, the primary gesture, the original discovery, the first revelation, can never be repeated or imitated. It is the stroke that breaks and is immutable. No copy or reproduction can compare.’

A

RCHITECTURE:

T

HE

D

ESIRE TO

D

WELL IN

B

EAUTY

WHEREAS SCULPTURE SEEMS LIKE STILL DANCE, THE SHAPES OF architecture have been compared to ‘frozen music’. Architecture is one of the most public and permanent stages on which a culture displays its understanding of beauty. Much of our sense of the beauty of an ancient culture derives from the ruins of their architecture. In its Greek roots, the word ‘architecture’ literally means ‘weaving of a higher order’. A whole world-view is woven through and becomes visible in great architecture. The shapes of our dwelling places have always inspired human creativity. Of all the inhabitants of the earth, the ones with the most complex and reflexive interiority also have the most complex dwellings to reveal and shelter interiority.

Beautiful architecture like Chartres Cathedral elevates the soul and mirrors its heritage and possibility. Yet architecture can also reveal some of the secrets that lie at the heart of beauty. When architecture manages to mirror the inner order of nature, the result is frequently beautiful. We respond intuitively to the order, harmony, proportion and rhythm that great architecture incarnates. The creative architect pulls his design from that concealed order which underlies all difference and fragmentation. Yet we are easily deceived by nature: simply because it is always there, we become blind to its intricate and dynamic weave of structures and how it works through laws that are simple yet profoundly subtle. As Claude Bragdon says: ‘We are all participants in a world of concrete music, geometry and number; a world of sounds, odours, forms and motions, colours, so mathematically related and coordinated that our pygmy bodies, equally with the furthest star, vibrate to the music of the spheres.’ Beautiful architecture in its design enters into this rhythm of order and renders it visible in the proportions, tensions and harmonies of building.

Goethe said: ‘A noble philosopher described architecture as frozen music . . . we believe this beautiful idea cannot be more aptly resurrected than by calling architecture music that has merged into silence.’ One of the most exciting contemporary architects who manages to make that music flow is Santiago Calatrawa. His brilliance lies in his mastery of art, sculpture, architecture and engineering combined with an incredible ability to express all of these competencies in his works. He shows a profound understanding of the principles of natural order that are inherent in beauty. The result of course is that Calatrawa overcomes the false division between integrity and function, between beauty and use. His buildings and bridges function wonderfully but they also become huge, new presences of beauty in their environments. People look up and see matter that is usually staid and still completely embracing a soul-elevating design which dances.

Etched as they are against the stillness, shapes that dance can evoke great beauty. Yet the stillness is never absolute: in waves and particles light is the continual dance which adorns the countenance of the earth with colour. Music too breaks the silence and the stillness through waves of sound. These are the vital thresholds where the wonders of beauty arise. The angel of these thresholds is the imagination.