Slow Dancer: Moving In The Material World

This article, published in Animated is an adaptation of a paper by writer, researcher and consultant François Matarasso given as the keynote speech at the Country Dancing? symposium, held in the UK in May 2005.

Here is a teaser...

"Whatever else it may express, dance values health and life in the present, celebrating the human animal’s being and worth. Although, in some forms, dance has become tyrannical in its pursuit of certain ideals of physical beauty, one of the most heartening aspects of its recent evolution has been the recognition that people with all kinds of physiques and of all ages can be marvellous dancers. As Fergus Early has written, ‘We who are working with dance and older people are challenging the 'general misunderstanding […] that ageing is about the failure and disintegration of the body.’ The acceptance of wheelchair users, blind people or elders in contemporary dance has enormously enriched its language. However abstract or complex the ideas in a dance performance become, they cannot escape – indeed cannot want to escape – the physical reality of the performer and their humanity. Because the body is the medium of dance, it is also necessarily its subject. And what a subject: there is nothing it does not touch, from ethical questions of how the body is used and by whom, to philosophical speculations about the nature of existence. Understanding of the body is now being interrogated in new ways as a result of medical and genetic advances; dance will help define what it is in future and, more importantly, champion its integrity in the face of attack, whether from natural causes of nutrition, disease and age, or from human ones like war, terror and torture. It can do that because dance is an art that, in the end, always comes down to what someone can communicate through gesture, expression and movement: and that is the most fundamental human interaction."

To continue reading the entire article click here.

- R