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Dec. 25th, 2023 | 01:03 pm
It is often said that dance is the creation of illusion: for example, the illusion of a weightless body. (This might be thought of as the furthest extension of the phantasm of a body without fatigue.) But it would be more accurate to call it the staging of a transfiguration.
Dance enacts being both completely in the body and transcending the body. It is, or seems to be, finally, a higher order of attention, where physical and mental attention become the same.
(..)
Merce Cunningham and Lincoln Kirstein have both offered as a definition of dance: a spiritual activity in physical form. No art lends itself so aptly as dance does to metaphors borrowed from the spiritual life. (Grace. Elevation. . .) Which means, too, that all discussion of the dance and of great dancers, including this one, fit dance into some larger rhetoric about human possibility.
(Susan Sontag, 1987)
Dance enacts being both completely in the body and transcending the body. It is, or seems to be, finally, a higher order of attention, where physical and mental attention become the same.
(..)
Merce Cunningham and Lincoln Kirstein have both offered as a definition of dance: a spiritual activity in physical form. No art lends itself so aptly as dance does to metaphors borrowed from the spiritual life. (Grace. Elevation. . .) Which means, too, that all discussion of the dance and of great dancers, including this one, fit dance into some larger rhetoric about human possibility.
(Susan Sontag, 1987)