Prompt 19, Dance Gala (Ming)

I wonder how much I can “review” a dance performance when I'm not an experienced viewer. Actually, one of the most lasting awarenesses I think I'll have from this course, as a spectator, is that of ghosting. I hadn't before thought of what goes into the business of being an “experienced” viewer before reading Sofer and Reason and Reynolds—and how being an experienced viewer necessitates/presupposes ghosting. If performances "mean" more to experienced viewers, “meaning” necessitates narrative; the narrative here (and perhaps anywhere) is a series of ghosts—though whether it's a person, a dance move, a musical score, or something else is a question of the mind of the viewer.

I thought of the various lenses that could be used during tonight's performance: as clearly the top-billed dancer up there, Lalah Hazelwood perhaps drew people who came to see her in something. They might compare her performance tonight with seeing her in other things, perhaps at other ages—other Lalahs from other times, littler Lalahs from other years. For those people, various other Lalahs come into the “room”--the space of the mind of the viewer. Or, a viewer of “Esplanade” could be partial to any modern dance that uses Bach, and entire other dance companies come into the room, any other people the viewer has seen perform Bach.

It gets me thinking about how crowded the mind-space gets in an auditorium or stadium or lecture hall. If in some other dimension what people thought about, remembered, or compared the performance to (if they're even paying attention to the performance) were somehow visible or the way in which it was present took up some kind of visible space, what all would we see? A viewer who wishes she could jump like that, who remembers the last time she felt really fit? A viewer of “Straight Duet” who remembers a really terrible off-Broadway production in which the only prop was a mattress? How many things can be ghosted? An object like a mattress, which perhaps can only be itself, or at least has a narrower spectrum of “being” than a certain movement like Pirouette, which necessarily is different every time it's done; or a musical recording which arguably is more “the same” than a mattress or a pirouette every time it's played (and therefore, Phelan and Artaud might argue, anti-theatrical?). Are any of these descriptions even true? I don't know if I agree with my own categorizations.