Choreographer
The arts are long voyages of the spiritual in the material reality, unleashing the imaginary, freeing the phantasms, exploiting the miracle of representation. Without being as rich as the other artistic branches in events meant to shape its history, the dance offers a path of permanent, inexhaustible metaphors. In its scenic development, the dance evinced a pursuit of wholeness, of the supreme artistic synthesis, crossing thus the multitude of the outermost limits of human sensitivity, from music to painting and then to literature, engaging in a "metaphysical trade" with the world. The dance springs from an archetypal status of Necessity – movement is a necessity of the universal, a sine qua non attribute of the latter. It is not fortuitous that the dance figures that "illo tempore" with a ritualistic functionality, being, as it seems, the main bond between the human body and the universal body. Taking a voyage inside the gesture, in its essence, the dance ends up in a voyage of forms; sometimes it is more consistent and less focused on form, at other times the formal is dominant and cultivates the ornamental part of the gesture, sending the content approach to the background. On such grounds of emptying and filling, of de-territorialization and re-territorialization of intentions, the dance relies on the beauty of the forms achieved by an anatomy compelled to performance; it becomes thus a game of pleasure and perversion. The movement, this crucible of energies that need to be unleashed, finds in the performer, creator, and spectator different mirrors, deforming or not, clear or less clear, with an overt message or a hidden one. Therefore, the dance works by flexible discourses of the individual topos. There is in the dance itinerary an emotional clutch and an enactment of several themes, thoughts, states, a becoming and a burnout that enhance the data archive but also, paradoxically, the ephemerality of the discourse. In the spatial and temporal play, the scenic body tries to seduce and lets itself be seduced, being aware of the audience's eyes directed toward it. The gestures of the dance protect firstly its own beauty, being often narcissistic. A dance performer is in a great proportion idolised; what brings us closer to the dancing body is the fact that we find in him the other, fragments of reality with a simulacrum status; in this game of otherness, reflections of our phantasms are echoed. The choreographic construction can evince the mark of heaviness, of resistance or of emergence; it can vibrate through the feminine ineffability and uniqueness or through a strong sense of direction, it exists through a temptation of the infinite. The structure of the gesture works in an architectural manner, by the visual emphasis on the relation between form and content, adding to it a polyphonic component. There is a corporeal orchestration in which the parts of the body execute various scores, with polemical evolution, of antithesis, and others with harmonious valences, inducing contemplation. Gesture by gesture, movement by movement, it is connected into phrases, like the verbal or sonorous discourses. This connection evinces the poetry of rhythmic organisation, capable of making the spatial temporal, and the temporal spatial. There is a mystery of the choreographic texture, there are choreographic thoughts untranslatable "into concepts" as Webern would say, remarking the existence of "musical thoughts" which cannot be expressed by words. Towards this status of "mystagogue" of the choreographer, as I. P. Culianu would define it, converge the movements with overt meaning and the insert-movements in which the gesture had ornamental value; the dance operates with "time-images" and "movement-images" due to its filmic valences, illustrating a reality that needs to be read as an "opera aperta." In its itinerary, the dance offers some performances which objectify to a great extent the audience's involvement, while others work empathically. In most cases, the art of the choreographic performance handles both dimensions: the movement virtuosity objectifies, the plot connects empathically, re-fills us, triggering reactions that border on fusion. The dance deals with an image-body and is fed by making our perception ideological, establishing with every new performance, the politics of a new visual code; there is hence, a real phenomenology of the dance performance, a "hic et nunc" of any choreographic gesture. Schilder noticed "a continuous transfer between parts of our image and the body image of 'the other'," and Lacan mentioned in Leonardo in the mirror: "his writing in the mirror is connected to his own position towards himself." However, the itinerary of the dance reflects lately an inflation of representations in which the metaphysical disappears and the play of otherness is an alienating one. The ludic settles in excessively and the human body is displayed only as an object.
by Raluca Ianegic
