IU Dance Gala: Part 1 (Cody)

Although I certainly enjoyed Sunday evening’s dance recital, I find that my experience (as well as any pleasure derived from the performances) was greatly limited by my scholarly pursuits in language and, more importantly, literature and narrative.  As we discussed last week with the Reason/Reynolds essay on kinesthetic empathy, our considerations of and emotions felt during a dance performance need not necessarily be dictated or restricted by any prior knowledge of or expertise in the field of dance.  However, putting theory into practice, in my case, presented a different outcome.  Rather than enjoying the dynamism of the dancers’ bodies, I found myself questioning how these specific movements related to the overall narratives of the dances.  Perhaps this reaction is merely symptomatic of myself being pedantically cerebral and not being in tuned with my emotions.  While the latter is more than likely true, my sustained interest in understanding the dances’ narratives seems equally to steam from the fact that the dances presented themselves as possessing a large degree of narrativity.  The first and fourth dances were broken into scenes.  The first dance titularly situates its dancers within a phantasmatic space (the esplanade).  The second dance is intertextually based off of two different ballets (The Rite of Spring and Giselle), both of which have well-known narrative trajectories.  The third dance also situtates the staged movements within a specific space (the bedroom), using a maitress as indicative of such locality.  While none of the latter definitively demarcates these performaces as finite, comprehensible narratives, each dance possessed markers of narrativity, of diegetic progression, of conflict(s), etc. that pulled me into this game of narrative interpretation.  This sort of reaction, I feel, prevented me from experiencing the kinesthetic empathy that Reason/Reynolds explored in their essay.  Nonetheless, since I have relatively little experience with dance, I wonder what my reaction to these dances would have been if these performances did not present themselves as being charged with narrative/narrativity?  When I read poetry or prose that seems to have no narrativity or narrative comprehensibility, for example, I usually surrender myself to a more visceral, experiential reading of the language.  But, of course, textuality allows for return and re-readings whereas, following Phelan’s onotology of disappearance, these dance performances are ephemeral, presenting a finite temporality that does not allow for a repeated experience.  As such, while watching dance as a non-expert, I would need either to reach this moment of narrative surrender much more quickly by virtue of the performance’s transience or to abandon the quest for narrative interpretation at the onset.  And yet, I’m not sure if giving up the quest for narrative is really worth it.