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May 31, 2018
 


What it’s like to watch someone dance into a gravitational singularity



The Bolshoi Ballet theater’s seating capacity (.pdf):  2,153

La Scala's, in Milan: 2,800

Royal Opera House's, in London: 2,256


However, Graham Harman might suggest that no attendee at a ballet at any of these locations or others has ever actually “seen” the dance:

The proper object of aesthetic judgment in dance, then, is its composition: its choreography, we could say.  If   OOO   is right that every aesthetic object is inherently withdrawn, it is the choreography that recedes behind its sensual qualities or surface appearance. . . .


The choreography that is the object of aesthetic judgment is something over and above the actual movement of the dancers.  It is a certain style, a “spirit of the thing” that endures even if  --  within reason  --  a certain number of changes in detail are made to the choreography itself. . . . [I]t is hard to describe exactly what this is . . .

In the case of music, Kant speaks of the wonderful sound of a flute or violin as examples of charm. . . .

While charm is a matter of sensual delight rather than of the aesthetic object per se, it is “of the same kind” as our liking for that object. OOO explains this by pointing out that the tension in charm between the sensual object and its multitude of glittering qualities is clearly analogous to that between the hidden real object and the swarm of qualities it leaves behind, orbiting it like dust spiraling into a black hole.


The above is taken from Harman’s “Dance and Philosophy,” which appears in Movement Research Performance Journal # 51 (April 2018).


TiR is unsure whether all of what GH has to say in the essay is earth-shatteringly original ("original" -- ha! whatever that even means -- whotheyellknows) (e.g.,. Yvonne Rainer: "Dance is hard to see," etc.), to the extent that GH’s meaning(s) penetrated the thickness of TiR’s skull in the first place.  

However, Harman’s essay is the first of his in quite a while that TiR actually finished reading.






posted by TiR at 7:01 AM

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