The passage of time in the body
Philipa Rothfield
I’ve always admired the fact that in Japan you can see older Japanese artists, acknowledged and admired for their mastery, performing Kabuki, Noh and Butoh. The same cannot be said for Western concert dance. Ballet in particular, the subject of the following discussion, retires its dancers when they reach their 30s. To what extent is this ideal of youth inextricable from Western dance? Does beauty exclusively and only belong to the young?
In The Dance Dramaturgy of Aging, Nanako Nakajima, a master Odori practitioner, dramaturg and researcher, has curated a conversation with Chinese director and choreographer, Mengfan Wang.(1) Wang has recently created a work (WHEN MY CUE COMES, CALL ME AND I WILL ANSWER), with Nakajima as her dance dramaturg. The work features two retired ballet dancers, former members of the Chinese National Ballet. Their provenance is awesome. CAO Zhiguang was one of the first generation of post-revolutionary ballet dancers to be trained by the Soviets in the 1950s. He was part of the making of The Red Detachment of Women, a masterpiece of the Cultural Revolution. For 10 years, this was one of only two ballets that could be performed onstage. Such a state of affairs is testimony to the way in which ballet in China emerged from an odd coupling between western aesthetics and Chinese revolutionary ideology. Wang speaks of the sense in which artistic practice in China functions as an arm of cultural propaganda. Similarly, aesthetics is a matter of the collective and not the individual artist, at odds with individualistic, western conceptions of choreographic auteurship and performative virtuosity.
I am intrigued as to how this works at a corporeal, kinaesthetic level. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes of the social and political inscription of bodies.(2) For Foucault, as a body becomes more capable – through the rigours of dance training, for example – it becomes more powerful (in individual terms) but also more useful on a societal level. Following Foucault, we might ask whether the trained Chinese ballet dancer is a site of individual agency – virtuosic and capable – or a mere vehicle of propogandist messaging. Or both?
For Foucault, habit-formation is the means whereby a body acquires skill. When a habit is embodied, it becomes ready-to-hand, an ability or skill which is able to be deployed. Habits are acquired through training and implemented through practice. The repetition and ongoing daily practice associated with classical ballet creates not only ingrained habits, it embeds a certain sensibility in the very subjectivity of the dancer. The balletic sensibility forged during the intensity of the Cultural Revolution served a greater social purpose. It is no wonder that Wang’s criticisms of The Red Detachment were not welcome, for dancers from that period were inextricably part of the cultural-political machinery.
There is a certain tension however between ballet’s repertory, its critique and embodiment. For example, the female dancer in Wang’s work, LIU Guilin, learnt Giselle. Although the choreography entered her body and permeated her habits, she also learnt to critique the choreography as bourgeois. Does criticising the ideological elements of a work interfere with the impact of the work on the body? It would seem from the discussion that elements of Giselle crept into LIU Guilin’s body despite its dubious political status. The Red Detachment of Women similarly combines the classical lexicon of western ballet with messaging from the Communist state.
Despite the passage of time, and we are talking decades here, there is a sense in which habits stay forever young. My movement signature was formed decades ago. It is still discernible. Similarly, CAO Zhiguang and LIU Guilin are wedded to the training and practice they engaged in over decades. Wang spoke of the three months it took for them to be able to walk onstage in an ordinary, everyday sense. I remember ballet classes where we had to run from spot to spot in dainty steps. Such mannerisms are second nature to these dancers: 50 years old perhaps, but powerful as ever.
WHEN MY CUE COMES, CALL ME AND I WILL ANSWER confronts these tensions, between the old and the new, between youth and aging, habit and its reformulation. So many contrary tendencies. The venerable wisdom of old age is expressed in a body which has the habits and aesthetics of a youthful past. Wang draws on somatic practices such as Feldenkrais to stage an archaeology of the present. Delving into the corporeal past is no simple matter however. Who has authority in this reworking of the past? There was a difference of opinion over whether Wang or the dancers were the teachers in the work. Wang’s response was to insert herself onstage and begin a conversation about aging in the midst of the piece. So many layers, changing how we think about age in dance, through the lens of classical ballet.
I am reminded of Katarzyna Korza’s video installation of the Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s ode to youth re-staged with the bodies of older people.(3) Christel Stalpaert claims that the dissonance between a work about youth and its expression in the aging body challenges us to rethink our clichéd thinking about old age.(4) CAO Zhiguang dances in a chair. Although grounded, he works gravity in relation to the upward effortlessness of the ballet. I am reminded of my Qi Gong, drawing qi from the earth, feeling its upward flow as I simultaneously connect downwards.
Whatever the different cultural inflexions to aging east and west, there is something revolutionary about staging an encounter with aging in dance. It is delightful to observe women such as Nakajima and Wang delve into the complexities of aging in the context of dance in order to recast our prejudices and prompt us to rethink the passage of time.
(1) An online research seminar sponsored by the Kyoto University of the Arts, held on 31st January 2021.
(2) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Penguin Books, 1977.
(3) See Katarzyna Kozyra, Casting, exhibition catalogue, M. Sitkowska, H. Wróblewska (eds.), Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 2010.
(4) Christel Stalpaert, “Dancing and Thinking Politics with Deleuze and Ranciere”, in Choreography and Corporeality, edited by T. DeFrantz and P. Rothfield, Palgrave, 2016.
Philipa Rothfield is an academic, a dancer and a dance reviewer. She is an honorary staff member in Philosophy and Politics at La Trobe University, Australia, and honorary professor in Dance and Philosophy of the Body at the University of Southern Denmark. She is Creative Advisor at Dancehouse, Melbourne. She is an author of Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny Philosophy in Motion (2020) co-author of Practising with Deleuze: Design, Dance, Art, Writing, Philosophy (2017).