July 12, 2015

Excellent evening of dance at the Wortham with Motion Dance Theater, all new pieces, elegantly performed. There were videos of explanation before the dances, which someone should have told them to omit, for the works were better than the theory allegedly behind them. And somewhat contradictory to it. One of them, called D.E.J.A., was a masterpiece. It also had the least repellent self-summary, being mainly about how different bodies affect the unfolding of a dance. I think I know where people got the idea that art is process– from schoolteachers and ignorant, well-meaning committee persons who want to democratize what is essentially an elite enterprise-- but the visible truth is that no good art ever comes from fixation upon process, but only from concern for product. There is no lasting process in art, only enduring product. People profess in opposition to what they actually do. I want to talk to the dancers and choreographers about this, beginning with the statement that I loved their work. Modern dance is difficult to be precise about in words. My nature inclines me to impose a narrative on everything–or, to put it the way I actually see it, to assume there IS an essential narrative to all things, which they want me to extract and regard. But the dances at many points seem deliberately to be thwarting narrative. Perhaps that IS the narrative. Anyway– lovely night, with drinks at Aloft on both ends.  Our waitress was ecstatic that we new a little about her home country of Macedonia.

Still a little wacky from the anti-inflammatories, which must be at least in part pain-killers. Didn’t stop me from writing hugely at the Charlotte Street Starbucks as the sun rose.