Dance, art, artists, beauty, and faith

although, not necessarily all together, but in order of importance to me… or not #

(TL;DR, Everything and everyone needs a context. Remove the context and you simply have a bunch of things without meaning. This is likely several posts. But read what you want, come back to read more. The title is also the table of contents.)

I thoroughly love my career in the performing arts and being mostly involved with dance, dancers, choreographers, and artists working with dance—the musicians, composers, designers, visual artists, et. al. For me dance is this perfect triangulation of visual art, sculpture, and music that is also its own thing. As a lighting designer dance always makes me rethink what I mean by lighting design. As a production manager I love to help choreographers realize their vision, even finding echoes of my own voice in their creations as we collaborate.

All art is an act of faith. Every time an artist creates—a painter paints, a singer sings, a musician plays, a dancer dances—they have to have faith that the hours, days, years of practice, rehearsal, study are going to pay off in some way shape or form, that their voice is going to emit and emanate into something, anything, but not nothing.

For the dancer, every act of movement is a moment of truth. There is no lip synching. There is no playing a fake instrument to a recorded sound track. there is no opportunity to fix it in post, overdub, no redo or mulligan. That movement of the arm, the leap, the fall, it is out there, right or wrong, good or bad, perfect or mistaken. And everyone who is part of the experience, audience and performer, has to live with it and make the most and best of it.

This is a major reason why the process of filming or video recording dance is so difficult. First, there is the fact that video and film is an entirely different medium. What makes something a compelling visual recording is not the always same thing that makes something an interesting dance performance. Video artists love to zoom in, move the camera, shoot from other angles than what might be a natural viewing angle for the eye.

The reason this is antithetical to dance (though not antithetical to video recording) is that the face lives in relationship to the body and the body lives in relationship to the space. Zooming in on the face may be an interesting shot for the camera, it is not necessarily an interesting moment of dance.

Ron Colton, artistic director emeritus for Augusta Ballet and Dance Augusta in Augusta, GA, used to tell videographers, who were to video performances for the company, to watch some Fred Astaire movies to see how to properly capture dance on film or video. Dance is about the whole body in space. Give the body a space to move in when framing the shot. A dancing body needs a context, an environment within which to exist. Dance is a response to, within, or even against space. Remove what it is responding to and you remove its soul.

The Analogous #

Art
When advocating for art, the fight is right. It is a righteous position. But when we argue for “art” without context it is merely a logical argument without meaning. We can’t really ask people to support art because art. That doesn’t mean anything.

When a state legislator fights government financing of the arts, the moment of truth comes when her daughter decides she wants to take ballet but the local ballet company could no longer afford to keep their doors open because of the loss of financial support. When art becomes personal, when it finds a context, that is when it becomes real.

In reality no one is truly against art. Who can really imagine going through their day, much less life, without hearing music, or looking at simple box shaped buildings, or living in undecorated homes? What they are against is “that” art, whatever “that” is and whatever “against” means. That’s why no top ten list of why to support the arts changes anyone’s mind. It never addresses what they are against. Then it becomes an argument about arguing, rationalizations of why those talking points don’t really add up to anything substantial.

Art needs a context to have meaning. That context needs to be the human soul. If art does not have a connection to the soul of a person, then no argument for art or a work of art, no matter how logical, will make sense or make a difference.

Process or goal oriented artists

Art makers and creatives fall into the same trap when creating. An artist’s soul is expressed through their process, but the process is not always the goal. It is usually a means. It doesn’t exist on its own. The process can be extraordinary, but if what it produces cannot exist on its own, justify itself, then an artist should rethink what is really the artistic goal.

The mistake is understandable. An artist’s process is usually, wholly or in part, their context. This is where the artist finds, or at least uncovers, their meaning. And while this can be of interest and insightful for the audience, this is not where they should find meaning. Can it be a spring board or inspiration for their own meaning. Sure, why not. But ultimately they should find their own meaning.

The test is this—should the viewer discover that the artist was untruthful of their process or something additional was discovered about their process that may seem contrary to what was known, does that affect their view of the work, the meaning they find?

I won’t lie. I suffer from this affliction. When I learned what a complete ass Gauguin was to Van Gogh, I completely lost interest and respect for his work. I can’t even look at his work now without seeing the jerk. I hate that this happened to me. Maybe one day I will change, maybe not.

Beauty
Beauty doesn’t just need a context, it doesn’t exist in our world without it and at the same time transcends it. While not at the mercy of relativism, beauty is relative in that it is contextual. While nudity can be beautiful, even when erotic, pornography is an affront to the beauty of the nude.

To me, Beauty is the purest form of the Universal. While it exists transcendently, we can only apprehend it, find meaning from it, through the particulars. That’s why it is so difficult to quantify, to measure, or to define objectively, efforts not withstanding. We only quantify the particular, not the universal.

Beauty cannot be destroyed, though many may try and others may feel the need to defend it from destruction. Beauty exists without us, does not need us, yet is most powerful when expressed through us and discovered by us.

This section goes hand in hand with the next section.

Faith without works
It seems this part should go without saying, yet here we are. But, why is faith without works dead? I think all this is the heart of James’s admonition. This is the heart of Jesus’s instruction that the world will know us by our love for one another.

Protestant Christians love to proclaim a personal Lord and Savior, but we insist that people obey impersonal rules and impose laws based on faith. Do we really, truly believe we are not saved by works? Our actions say otherwise. We also seem ready to condemn other based on their “works”.

And why are we so insecure in our faith that we want to keep others away both culturally and legislatively? Is our faith really called into question if someone else is gay?

Faith is not a set of legislative actions, a rational and logical argument to win intellectual debates. Faith needs the context, the space of love. Love is that space, faith is the body, life (“works”) is the dance. And nothing is more beautiful than to love one another, to love your neighbour as yourself, and to love God with your whole heart, mind, body, and soul.

To focus or zoom in on sin (whatever you think that is) is to miss the whole body in its environment, the response of and to love, provided and shared, of each other and God.

Should we sin? No. But we are all from dust and to dust we return. We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That should be humbling first and foremost to the Christian who believes this. This is not a moment of lording over others.

This moment of truth alone should call us to serve one another because our faith depends on that act of beauty. Without it faith is dead, meaningless. While dance may not have a second chance once performed, this is ours. This is our act of faith that we want to emit and emanate into something, anything, but not nothing. Don’t waste it.

Maybe this made sense to you, maybe it didn’t. Either way, I would love to hear from you. Shoot me a note if you are so inclined.

blogATnatureofthebeatDOTorg

Thanks for reading,
Joe