The ends of love - Dance Drama

The Ends of love is a dance drama commissioned by the the Stuat Pimsler Dance & Theater group. Staged at The Ritz, across the Mississippi, on University & 13th Ave NE, what amused me to start with was the composition of the audience. With the exception of me, it was all white. And there were two distinct age groups in there. One, college students. And the other, elderly people. You could count the number the people between ages 25 to 45 on your fingers.

Having said that, the performers were actually a wonderful mix of people - mostly white, but it did have a couple black artists, & a Brazilian. The story, if you do not follow the theater scene to all its nuances, is broadly about the various aspects of being in & out of love - rejection, possession, tiffs, battle-of-the-sexes & all such ways that love manifests in. Nothing all that new there. What really made the show worth the time & money (22 USD, general seating), were the dances, & the trifle arrhythmic & somehow still temporal music.

If you're interested in the aesthetics of human movement, you'll not be disappointed. Some of the movements were absolutely feline, some a byword on levitation, a reversals of roles where women carried the men, a climbing upon some two silken apparels that hung from the ceiling, tangling & disentangling, & then a fall back to the stage - with the two strands of silken apparel twining around the falling man.

The separation of men & women & the futile attempts to become again a part of a cogent whole was probably the best piece of the show. It goes from a classic one man show to a frenzy of arms, legs & bodies- together but not united; they each had their own singular focus, they all moved together, they all moved the same way but they could not form a communion - & the consequent pain of not being part of a more meaningful whole came across wonderfully.

It is a very difficult medium to tell a story, & my own cultural distance made it even more difficult to grab the nuances; however, the wonderful thing about all of this is that across the world the broad commonalities of expression & feeling are about the same - & a dance, more than text, falls back on such shared & very basic commonalities.

Apposition

Constricted francophile byways. The barren sea, the sodium winds of its womb, a dilapidated jetty holding on to hope. Walking within. Jaundiced bars of bonhomie - some canopied, some celestial. Apparitions, renegades, saints and the adolescent moon. Long shadows and dark skins.

Pondicherry.

Blasphemies

Music.

Pinnacle of human magnificence. A million ramifications. Seven notes.

The guitar of picturesque roads. The flutes of sirocco. The drums of Africa, the violins of our sorrow, the piano of our sacraments.

The fish do not understand all this.

And I do not think that they pray.

Or, need to.

Claritivity

Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar takes a step forward and times the swinging red leather ball through the open cover region for a scintillating boundary. He stands and nods. A million cheers go up. You stop yawning midway.

However, a certain S. Gavaskar may tell you that it was more about the precise length of the stride that took him closer to the ball, thus helping him to cover the swing; that his bat came down from an angle not wider than the first slip so that he presented the full face & the meat of his willow; that he met the ball right under his eyes; that the arc of his follow through was impeccable; that he was able to play that shot because the pitch offered even bounce; that he stood because he knew it was a fast outfield with the grass trimmed finely and that his heavy bat imparted enough momentum to carry the ball through.

Art or science, inspiration or method, dramatic awe or clinical routine?

Cover driving may perhaps never be considered an artistic expression outside the world of cricket enthusiasts, primarily male, but it can stir up emotions strong enough to manifest bodily as goose bumps, just like some of our finest poetry does.

Extending the analogy, therefore, was there a process behind our most melodious compositions, was the Monalisa painted with reasonable hues, and did Neruda think his poems out?