Anam Cara

I remember one evening outside a café in Paris on the corner of a busy street. Lines of people were walking by. There was a large crowd seated outside, people-watching. After a while a street artist began his act. He would go a little further up the street and walk behind somebody, perfectly imitating their physical gait and gesture as they walked past the crowd outside the café. It became a wonderful street show. The victim never knew he was being imitated and when the crowd laughed, he would turn around to see what the cause was. His imitator was always quick enough to turn away. This only increased the drama. Usually the victim sensed it and found him out by the next movement. The comedy derived from the precision of the imitation. It was uncanny how quickly the street artist could decipher the distinguishing physical gait of the person he chose to follow and imitate it perfectly, inhabit it completely. This reminded me of the lovely phrase of welcome from the Aran Islands: ‘Fáilte roimh thorann do chos, ní amháin thú fhéin’: the sound of your footsteps is as welcome as yourself.

Because we carry the weight of the world in our hearts, we know how delightful it is to dance. In dance the human body reclaims childlikeness. When you can dance it is as though you do not have a care in the world. The body gives itself away playfully to the rhythm of the music; the burden of consciousness becomes suspended. For a while the innocence of the dance claims you completely as the mind relents and the body becomes its own celebration. Because the body dwells mainly in silence it loves to find expression in the language of dance. At the beginning, in that blurred time when we had fallen out of the seamlessness of animal presence, perhaps dance was our first language.

‘H

OW

C

AN

W

E

K

NOW

T

HE

D

ANCER FROM THE

D

ANCE

?’

When you truly dance, you’re finding what you never lost.

You can’t just dance: the dance is given to you.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN DANCER

THOUGH ITS ORIGINS ARE COMPLEX AND SOMETIMES DARK, FOLK-dance is usually free and celebratory. It reflects the energy and passion of a place and its people. In dance-theatre the choreography of figures can assume incredible shapes. It is a powerful form. One of the pioneers of contemporary dance is Pina Bausch. Her dances can turn movement into unforgettable narrative. She plays immaculately with space. In her dance, space emerges as a powerful presence, estranged, disturbing, welcoming, creative, shimmering with dream or engraved with memory. Her dance breaks the stillness as deftly as song breaks silence. Great dance is like fluent sculpture. The body arches itself around the emptiness to fashion a sequence of transient shapes that bring out the contemplative depth of sensuousness. Yeats offers a wonderful exploration of the dance–dancer unity at the end of his poem ‘Among School Children’:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

This final verse is a questioning vision which unifies the voices of despair and possibility, creativity and separation which inform the poem. Here at last is a vision of identity focused in the image of the chestnut tree anchored in the elemental clay yet swaying in the freed air. The ‘brightening glance’ can see that true creativity dwells in and emerges from that lyrical, elemental unity where deliberateness, force and separation are subsumed in the beauty of the dance. In the ‘blossoming’, dancer and dance are no longer separable. Memory and possibility dwell in the one fluency. Creativity is a dance where the flow of the eternal gleams through the brittleness of time and the distance of space.

In the West of Ireland one can still see sean-nós dancing. Though its form has its own rigour, this is wild, primal dancing; it is unaffected, without choreography or cosmetic. It is free dancing where the whole body moves to the desire of the music. The dancer dances as if he were obeying invisible figures. It is a dance unpredictable in its urgent vitality as though the music had slipped into the solar plexus of the dancer. The sean-nós dance is from within the music. The dancer allows the dance to take over his name and nature. He becomes the dance. It is actually a wonderful illustration of Yeats’s line, for in this instance, it is impossible to tell the dancer from the dance.

‘O

UR

S

TEPS

. . . W

E

L

OSE

T

HEM WITHOUT A

T

HOUGHT

’

Now I am going to reveal to you something which is very pure,

a totally white thought. It is always in my heart; it blooms at

each of my steps . . . The dance is love, it is only love, it alone,

and that is enough . . . I, then, it is amorously that I dance: to

poems, to music but now I would like to no longer dance to

anything but the rhythm of my soul.

ISADORA DUNCAN