This evening A and I, during our tutoring session, read the story of Narcissus from Greek mythology, then worked on his brochure about Poseidon (feels like a bit of a contrived assignment - make a brochure about a Greek god - but the literature is fun). I know very little about Greek mythology, so the stories he's reading are new to me. Hera seems like a real pill.
Last night Katharina told me about a dance concert tonight at the cultural palace, so rather than go home after working with A, I stayed downtown and went to a falafel shop. While I ate a sandwich, I read this article about poetry in translation. It seems this French poet, one of the forefathers of modernism, wrote poems so abstract and cryptic that many readers don't bother pursuing them. Reading some of the extracts in the article, I smiled thinking about how my 11th grade classes, who had enough to roll their eyes at with Ted Hughes's ambiguity, would have gone to pieces over such pieces.
As it turned out, such abstruse extracts as that below ended up being the perfect pre-reading for the dance concert:
The virginal, enduring, beautiful today
will a drunken beat of its wing break us
this hard, forgotten lake haunted under frost
by the transparent glacier of unfled flights!
A swan of old remembers it is he
magnificent but who without hope frees himself
for never having sung a place to live
when the boredom of sterile winter was resplendent.
His whole neck will shake off this white death-throe
inflicted by space on the bird denying it,
but not the horror of soil where the feathers are caught.
Phantom assigned to this place by pure brilliance,
he is paralyzed in the cold dream of contempt
put on in useless exile by the Swan.
Once at the cultural palace, I settled into a full house to see a piece that would take over an hour. Sometimes one dancer, sometimes five. Sometimes no music, sometimes percussive vocals, sometimes suspenseful strings, sometimes electronic vibrations. Sometimes brightly lit, sometimes so dim I could only see glimmers shining on the shapely shoulders of the dancers.
It was one of the best dance concerts I have ever been to. The technical mastery of the dancers created an all-engrossing audience experience, as I was drawn into every movement. There was no perceptible story, a fact which clearly irked my German row mates, but which I liked. I didn't find myself missing context or storyline. The movement and energy was enough, and then some, to carry the piece. The length was essential to the success of the piece. As it went on I became more and more deeply embedded in the experience of their movement, and when, toward the end, they began repeating some of the opening motifs, I felt my stomach lurch - "No! Don't end!"
Like the Mallarmé poem, the piece felt to me most invested in putting into dance what cannot be put into words. I cannot describe the feeling I had watching them, and I think that's appropriate. Tonight, for me, art reached the place that is not accessible with the words that we deal with in the classroom. What a good thing it is that we have more than one art form. Literature can't do it all, neither can dance. But they are marvellously complimentary in their attempts to capture the complexity of our experience.
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