Tag: dance

Looking Around Is Educational

Julian Fellowes (the writer who gave us Downton Abbey) followed up with a 2018 movie called The Chaperone about a girl named Louise Brooks who became a global superstar, especially in Weimar (pre-Hitler) Germany:

Louise Brooks is a rebellious 15-year-old schoolgirl who dreams of fame and fortune in the early 1920s. She soon gets her chance when she travels to New York to study with a leading dance troupe for the summer—accompanied by a watchful chaperone.

Louise Brooks starts as a would-be dancer, “inducted” into an avant-garde dance school. This is the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts (founded in 1915 by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in Los Angeles, California), which helped many perfect their dancing talents and became the first dance academy in the United States to produce a professional dance company.

Upon Louise’s “induction” into the school, one of the founders says to the girls, “Remember you are not in your body, your body is in you.”

The listener wonders: What could this possibly mean?

The answer is this: In one sense you have a body, but in another, you are your body. The first body is the “thing” you weigh on the bathroom scale. This is your interaction with gravity, as measured in conventions like pounds. On the other hand, you are also “somebody” (i.e., some body). To have and to be are entwined here. In philosophy, say in the writings of Gabriel Marcel during the fifties, the body you weigh is “corporeal” and the body you are is “existential.”

Very roughly, the first body is objectively weighed, the second subjectively sensed as your experience of yourself.

Physics and Dance (by Emily Coates and Sarah Demers), a recent book from Yale University Press, gives you the dancing body as a biomechanical problem. Dancing itself is the expression through biomechanics and movement based on physics, but apart from this, it’s also an art form.

The student will see that a moment in a movie—in this case The Chaperone—can open a door to a whole set of domains, realms and phenomena. Education at its best comes from learning how to go from such instantaneous accidents on the street or screen to a larger canvas.

Thus the declaration, “Remember you are not in your body, your body is in you” explains that biomechanics is an infrastructure, while the artistry of the dance is an art form (i.e., a kind of “communicative action,” to use a Habermas phrase).

Zorba the Greek: The Tragic Layer Underneath Zorba’s Feigned Happy-Go-Lucky Style and Dancing

There is a deeper and more tragic layer to the famous movie Zorba the Greek (1964) with Anthony Quinn as Zorba. It’s not about unalloyed good-natured buffoonery or high spirits alone, as everyone seemed to think.

Zorba makes a tragic and transformative spontaneous confession about his past in a dialog with Basil (Alan Bates the introverted British character with whom he takes up).

Like every soulful human who wishes to stay happy and relaxed in life, Zorba also has his tragic fate on his back. Zorba is no different, he also has a dark past. His crimes and atrocities were endless when he fought for his country against the Turks and Bulgarians.

As he tells Basil that he killed people, burnt villages and raped women. But he puts all this in his tragic past and tries to restore peace in his life. He is married but has left his family behind.

He is trying to some extent to kill his inner pain, just revealed to Basil, through the famous dancing:

Sirtaki or syrtaki (Greek: συρτάκι) is a dance of Greek origin, choreographed for the 1964 film Zorba the Greek. It is a recent Greek folk dance, a mixture of syrtos and the slow and fast rhythms of the hasapiko dance.

The dance and the accompanying music by Mikis Theodorakis are also called Zorba’s dance, the Zorba or “the dance of Zorba.” The dance has become popular in Greece and one that is identified with the Greeks.

The name sirtaki comes from the Greek word syrtos—from σύρω (τον χορό), which means “drag (or lead the dance)”—a common name for a group of traditional Greek dances of so-called “dragging” style, as opposed to pidikhtós (πηδηχτός), a hopping or leaping style. Despite that, sirtaki incorporates both syrtos (in its slower part) and pidikhtós (in its faster part) elements.

Thus Zorba the Greek is a tragic story of a broken man—Zorba—trying to dance himself into an anesthetized state. It’s not about Falstaffian “clowning around.” To a large extent, Zorba is trying to run away from himself or “jump over his own shadow,” so to speak, but this must fail because hyperactivity of his type won’t help him from re-colliding with his life and his past.