Psychology of a choreographer
Dance has always been my first love. Early in my study of
it I discovered that movement and music captured states of feeling which eluded
words and my ability to communicate them. These early experiences led me to the
belief that art, in all its forms, captures our emotional experience in situ,
and it has followed me through my training as a psychologist and psychoanalyst,
remaining at the heart of my psychotherapy work. When I am moved, I understand
from the inside. Words alone can only hint at the depth and complexity of our
emotional experience, but art, and in this case, dance, accesses and transmits
emotions directly, bypassing spoken language and reaching us in deeply personal
ways.
How a choreographer moved the people, according to
Psychology.
Dance one of the tremendous thing in this world. Everyone
loves the dance and love to dance. That’s why the Michael Jackson became the
world’s craziest man because he is an ultimate dancer.
Dance has always been my first love. Early in my study of
it I discovered that movement and music captured states of feeling which eluded
words and my ability to communicate them. These early experiences led me to the
belief that art, in all its forms, captures our emotional experience in situ,
and it has followed me through my training as a psychologist and psychoanalyst,
remaining at the heart of my psychotherapy work. When I am moved, I understand
from the inside. Words alone can only hint at the depth and complexity of our
emotional experience, but art, and in this case, dance, accesses and transmits
emotions directly, bypassing spoken language and reaching us in deeply personal
ways.
The German modern dance master Pina Bausch understood
this and built her opus around it. Through her Tanztheater (“dance theater”),
Bausch created a direct link to our emotions, speaking to us through multiple
narratives of movement, music, theater and performance. Her work addresses our
first language, the language of affect, a language that needs no translation.
The bodies of her dancers embodying emotion subjectively – – they become its
creator, carrier, choreographer and narrator.
Choreographers have always aimed to reach us through the
movement of their steps, but for Bausch the use of movement as emotive gesture
and as carrier of an individual’s experience is expressed physically and
through the body of her dancers. It is her dancers as subjects, telling their
own stories and experiences that communicate meaning and move us to our own.
They are not only the performers but also the subjects of the emotions in
question. This constitutes a huge departure from ballet and other types of
modern dance, where the bodies of dancers disappear into the dance becoming
objects that interpret the vision of the choreographer. Until Pina Bausch
created Tanztheater, dancers executed an aesthetic vision. In her work they
embody the experience.
Bausch’s interest in the emotional experience of the
subject cost her dearly with dance critics. She has been accused of being too
much, not subtle enough in her pieces; theater, not dance, it has been said.
But Bausch was not interested in how people move but, rather, in what moves
them. Her dancers come in many shapes, sizes, ages, colors. They are often the
authors of the dances, providing memories, experiences, bits of their lives
which power the movement that follows. Bausch did not consider herself a
choreographer, even though her Tanztheater pieces had a structure, a purpose, a
meaning. She was interested in the expression of feelings in the best way that
they could be conveyed, and for her this involved movement and dance. Bausch
would begin many of her pieces by asking dancers for a movement that expressed
a particular emotion and on that basis build a dance. To my mind she was
building emotional mind-body circuits created in relation to another, and in
her dances those circuits are alive and firing away between the dancers and us.
That art – again, in all its forms – generates a map that
guides our bodies toward emotional states that are otherwise unattainable has
now been documented by a growing body of neuro-biological research. Yet,
artists have always known this implicitly, and to my mind, this is one of the
many reasons why we need art: it helps us to access internal experience
directly, and through its movement within the self, (momentarily) symbolizes
affective experience for us. It touches and accesses what is implicitly known
and makes it known in our bones, connecting us to the echo of early experience
and its resonance in the present. Art in all its forms finds us, surprises us,
awakens us and envelops us in the deepest of personal meanings. This is likely
because art operates on multiple orders – symbolic, inchoate, and unformulated
(sensual registers if you will) in the creation of such meaning. Art is capable
of accessing even what has been dissociated and exiled within us because it
speaks to us in our first and most basic language – the language of affective
experience.
It is the story of many artists that their particular art
form narrates their means of surviving. With Pina Bausch, dance emerges as the
very basis of a different language, the language of human experience, a
language that must access emotions directly and, through that reach, go further
into the emotional resonance of others. Dance thus becomes the language of
trauma re-worked and extended through our common bond – our humanity. Her dance
becomes the means of accessing narratives that escape the preciseness of
language, yet demand to be understood, processed, and finally spoken.
Paradoxically, the acquisition of language relegates un-processed, non-verbal
experience to that which is lived and felt as opposed to those experiences that
can be verbally represented and spoken. We are thus left with experiences that
carry no verbal signifier and cannot be accessed through everyday language,
where words are not enough and yet meaning is present. Where rhythms, tones,
and traces are perceivable as colors and frequencies, as movement that is there
and yet to be signified. These psychic inscriptions which constitute (at least
in part) the glue of our internal-object relations are the area of language
that is porous and escapes the word but is captured in the work of Pina Bausch.
Bausch uses dance to breach language and choreography in
their conventional use and reach beyond them. Through her pieces we are moved
to experience, personally and viscerally what words alone cannot convey. What
it touches in me is both alike and different than what it touches in you. Such
is the nature of emotional experience and the creation of personal meaning.
Words give us a way to speak about it, but dance (and art) reaches us directly.
It moves us.
Bausch begins with a specific emotion and builds movement
around it, using repetition to highlight it, expand it, explore all sides of
it, and drive her point home. For me this is alike to the repetition involved
in psychological trauma, where one may continue to repeat the same experiences
with the hope of understanding and perhaps reparation. In the dances of Pina
Bausch, repetition becomes an important element and structuring device: she
makes sure that we do not get away from the emotions she wants us to feel. We
must stand at attention. We must feel it again and again, sometimes without
end. Bausch grabs us and pulls us into her pieces. Her language is the language
of raw emotion, of what people do to each other, of what people are capable of,
of what all of us are about: love, despair, violence, aggression, beauty.
And so it is for her sets and costumes, which aim to
highlight, embellish, aggrandize the emotion, becoming subjects of the dance
themselves – another visual means of stirring emotion and complementing the
dancers’ personal aesthetic movement.
The internal reservoir of emotional understanding that
art and dance contacts and converges with is implicitly known to all of us. It
is the language of our senses and the relational configurations that it is
based on. Through Bausch’s pieces we are open to a different connection to, and
grasp of, the other’s experience as our own. All conveyed through movement and
its echo in us.
While as a psychoanalyst I rely on words to reach,
translate and extend meaning to my patients, sometimes they refuse my words,
momentarily enraptured in meaning so personal and profound, that it resists
words. The experience of being with a particular patient at such times, and my
experience of them, becomes a powerful carrier of meaning. I am often in a
position of being the container and receiver of many moments which convey a
meaning of their own through their powerful affective pull, and challenge me to
find words over and over. When words fail, enter implicit knowing, enter the
world of emotions, enter art and its aesthetic movement through the self and
the self-in-relation. Enter Bausch and her implicit understanding of the power
of emotions. Enter dance as the language of emotion and its reverberations
through self and other.
In the recent documentary entitled Pina, the
cinematographer Wim Wenders gives us a film that is “implicitly” about Pina
Bausch, because we learn about her through the feel of the dancers. We get to
know the woman through experiencing her aesthetic movement. The film is in 3-D
and envelops us within it, reaching out and inviting us to participate in it.
For Bausch, words only hinted at our lived experience.
“Dance, dance!” she implored, “for without dance we are
lost”.
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