The Gilded Serpent presents...
Painting Dance -Fabulous!
By Najia El-Mouzayen
February 3, 2003

My life has always been filled with the color and mystic of paintings.  The walls of my home are covered with paintings, both real and prints, some very old ones from the middle of the19^th century and into the 20^th.  I love the graphic arts and should have been a painter, except that my parents and school counselors always insisted that a girl of my era needed to be practical and “always have a vocation to fall back on” in case the marriage or just life itself didn’t quite work out the way it was hoped.  Because drawing and painting were among my earliest creative interests, I often describe dance in terms of drawing, composition and painting technique in my dance workshops. 

I have always believed in a profound similarity and congruity between all the arts. I'd like dancers to understand how the ideas of color, texture, tone, shading, etc. can also apply to the art of speaking through movement.

Certainly, sooner or later, all students in my dance clientele have been introduced to my views about composition and choreography. (I include here the spontaneous choreography that seemingly just happens but is, in fact an abstract, intuitive, and quickly determined set of movements.) If you have attended my classes or dance workshops, the chances are that you may have saved your notes listing ideas that more commonly are associated with painting and drawing compositions on paper or canvas.  You may have forgotten and now puzzle about what the word “color” or “texture” could possible have to do with dancing.

At the time that I explain my logic and lay out my method in the lesson, it all seems so clear and self-evident that often students are extremely reluctant to “waste precious class time” to take notes or to take them in enough detail.  Sometimes however, the result is that haste and insufficient note taking result in forgotten or incorrect recall of important dance ideas. I insist that dance students must stop the continual execution of movement during a lesson long enough to process the dance concepts being discussed. It is effective to put ideas into writing, and therefore, hopefully, retain them and recall them when they are next needed.  (I am opposed to the practice of instructors simply handing out pre-fabricated notes at seminars for this reason.)  When students review hastily scribbled notes months, or even years later, poor or hasty notes don’t make any sense because the student did not really understand what she/he had heard. For one glorious moment while the class is still in session, they seem to believe that the concept was insight on a self-evident level.  However, encouraging note taking is sometimes the only way a teacher has for evoking questions and clarification.

Negative Space 
When artists draw or sculpt, they do it in a real space, and it is both positive and negative in nature.   The negative spaces where you do not draw are equally important as the lines (positive spaces) you have drawn.  The same is true in dance movement. It is easy to understand positive space but art also has to treat negative space as a reality. Negative space is as much an influence upon floor plan and moving through actual space as it is to sculptural poses of the body of the dancer. Perhaps you have already experienced this effect in the study of Hatha Yoga, also a movement of the human body. In Yoga movement, it is thought that the point of beginnings and ends of movements are only as important as all the nearly infinite points in between the beginning and the end. I see this as an integral part of dance technique also.   All movement points are to be approached with equal value, pressure, and personal spirit, intent, and dedication. 

What differs from the graphic arts is that the dancer’s body is all one piece and must proceed logically from one point to another while the graphic artist’s hand can lift and return with a new application tool and a new color or type of stroke. While the graphic artist is free to skip about the composition making changes here and there, the dancer is limited to a logical and natural time line and is limited and guided by the musical composition.  (…Or should be guided by the music! I have noticed that many dancers seem to need to do everything they ever learned in each and every presentation, whether the music asks for it or not.)

So, the places on the stage that you occupy are equally as important to your composition as the areas in which you are not moving.  The spaces your body uses are no more important than the spaces you have left unused. 

Sometimes dancers have to suspend movements for more dramatic impact.  Pauses provide a more restful quality or, sometimes, they introduce an element for setting-up your audience’s expectations of what dramatic content will occur next in the composition.

  Negative spaces and/or pauses compliment the action and sculpted shapes by giving the eye longer to take it all in. In a sense, sustained motion or elongated movement can be a form of relative pause because the human brain seems to connect the dots with after-images.  The after-image exists in the brain’s memory much like the taillights of a car photographed at night by prolonged opening of the camera’s iris.  If dancers made better use of this phenomenon, they would not turn out the frantic, frenetic, wild and meaningless performances seen so commonly today. 

Those dancers who are intuitive often have an insight into human emotion that is similar to that of the painter who attempts to say something in his painting beyond the recording of a moment in time as would a camera.

Actual colors evoke emotions that flood the viewer with memories from his own past that parallel those experienced by other people.  By using movements that evoke emotions, it is quite possible for the dancer to cause an audience to understand a message conveyed by our dance movements.

Audiences can be manipulated into an emotional uproar like unexpected tears or gripped fists and grinding teeth.  Once a dancer has experienced the power of this type of emotion-evoking movement, it is impossible for her to sit patiently through empty performances by fellow dancers who haven’t a clue about use of abstract color/emotion in movement.  I have just one cautionary word about using dramatic content, though: a dancer has to be quite careful not to confuse the use of melodrama and mugging with the artful pause or the emotionally pointed gaze of focus.  Overt mugging and the frozen smile are bizarre and false.

Following musical tone upwards and downwards with body parts is a starting point or guideline only.

  It makes visual sense to an audience and is emotionally satisfying to viewers for whatever reason.  It makes no sense, however, for one to become a slave to the tonal meanderings of music.  If music drifts relentlessly up the scale, a tonal slave can soon find herself on tiptoes, arms skyward, stretched to the limits!  One has to know when to bail out and start over. One has to “know when to hold and know when to fold” as the Johnnie Cash song says—and so also, does the dancer.

How hard the dancer executes a movement, timed with and appropriate to the music, gives the audience a sense of how important the message or intent of the movement is to the dancer and his/her interpretation of the musical composition.  This is why we claim that dancing can be an art, but only when it is left open to the dancer’s imprint of artistic judgment. 

If the dancer is executing someone else’s choreography however, all bets are off. A committee cannot accomplish artistry; someone gets to be the artist and someone else has to be the skilled technician. It is wise to know which you would like to be.

The dance teacher who encourages cookie-cutter dancing in groups all alike in precision lock step, is absolutely wrong if students want to learn to be fine solo dancers.

Sometimes troupes are nothing more than a clever rouse to rally students around their “star” teacher or to appear professionally without having to take complete responsibility for a performance. Troupe work is not a step along the way in becoming a professional dancer; it is a separate path that requires a technician rather than an artist.

Line
The concept of line as it applies to Oriental dance is twofold.  It mostly refers to the postural lines a dancer makes that is pleasing.  Often these are lines that lead the eye from one point to another.  In paintings, line is accomplished by placement of items and their edges or colors that somehow relate to each other.  In the dancer, this sense of line can be as simple as drawing the energy from fingertip to toe in an unbroken sweep across the torso. 

Poor dancers frequently break their line without awareness because they forget to involve the shoulders in the line of the arms.

They apparently feel more comfortable and solidly balanced when their spines are erect and square as opposed to being pulled away from the true dance center, stretching into arm alignment. 

Of course, I have actually put the cart before the horse by using this description since it is more rightly stated that the arms should create a line built upon the slope or tilt of the upper torso, the container of the core or heart of the dance.  (This is sometimes referred to as “the seat of the dance” which resides in the solar plexus rather than the pelvis, groin, or even, uterus, as romantic feminists used to claim in the 1960s Think about it: if the movements properly began in the uterus, men would be incapable of dance).

The second way that a dancer can relate a sense of line is in movement through space to which I referred when I was discussing the concept of positive and negative spaces.  Perhaps you will recall it as the “tail-lights in the photo phenomenon”.  Since the human mind sees in this fashion, the dancer must be very careful to complete all movements and to make each shape in space have its fullest execution, starting from the solar plexus and ending there also.

Every movement has a point before its execution that comes from the body’s center.

  Like a swing of a golf club, baseball bat, or tennis racquet, it moves (at times nearly imperceptibly) in the opposite direction of the swing and has no power whatsoever if it does not emanate from the central core or “heart of the movement”.

How would we ever develop artistic judgment if we never suffered through beginner’s recitals? 

The road without any potholes and nothing noteworthy to view is the road to drowsiness and ennui.

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