WHAT THE BODY REMEMBERS IS PARADOX

Dance, at its most essential, is a culture’s embodied barter with human finitude. Invariably, dance practitioners must face the invincible fact of dance as entropy, the truth that what is done in dancing exists only to disappear. To dance is to acknowledge, implicitly, that everything about this form vanishes, just as all human bodies eventually decay, dissolve into dust, and disappear from the face of the earth. But dancing in many cultural contexts is likewise quintessentially an enterprise for undoing the ephemeral, for suspending disbelief in immortality. Virtuoso dancers in many cultures create “lasting impressions” that raise the bar on human attainment. While it is a truism that dance is the most ephemeral of art forms, dance truly makes the transitory something to be remembered.

Responding to this paradox, in practically all cultural contexts, more or less inevitably involves engaging with repetition as an artistic strategy. Working in dance means constantly repeating oneself in order to bring solidity to bodies that are mutable and movements that are fleeting. In building dances, choreographers repeat or interpolate images, gestures, or phrases of movement, thus affording audiences multiple viewings of body motifs in space/ time. Without such direct repetitions or variants, spectators would be less apt to “see” the dance, to recognize and engage with its craft and meaning, either in the passing course of its performance or afterward in recollection.

Memory, time’s shadow, is equally fundamental to dance’s creation through the medium of human bodies: the practice of shaping the body into purposeful expression, as tutored through the rigorous execution of movements deliberately patterned onto the skeletons and sinews of living organisms with minds of their own. Decades ago I visited the Kerala Kala-mandalam, a renowned training academy for practitioners of various classical Indian dance forms. In a dirt-floored hut I watched as a crew of male elders drilled barefoot boys in the intricate percussive footwork of what I took to be kathak. Without a break, the young trainees in short pants thrust their heels into the dust at high speed, beating out elaborate rhythms with unexpected syncopations. The effect was heart-stopping—especially given the tendency of our circulatory systems to synchronize with the speed of these tiny legs moving in brilliant unison. Moreover, the boys’ exacting rigor was not unlike that of young ballerinas at the barre. Indeed, in similar fashion within widely differing cultural contexts dance has been handed down meticulously, body-to-body, for centuries. A relentless regime of repetition prepares novices to assume the expressivity of their progenitors, in effect enabling the most evanescent of art forms to outlast the corrosive effects of time as dances move from generation to generation. And as dances survive through the centuries, dancing propels human survival.

Movement repetitions are not always deliberately chosen, of course. It is unlikely that Siawoh considered other movement options before bringing a resonant cultural artefact into the room by throwing her body down into the dust when memorializing her friend’s sister. Rather, she simply engaged in the known vocabulary of movement expression related to passage from this world to the next. Similarly, when our deceased security guard’s sister opted to spike herself into the dirt—only to be ritually ignored by the entire village—her mode of bodily expression at the 40-day ceremony had been assigned her by the traditions of women survivors who had come before. The codification of these forms of expression and the codification of dance forms as techniques are designed to fulfill an almost identical purpose: to advance the power and duration of human memory in the face of inexorable forgetting. In the village, the woman aims to ensure her loved one a living embodiment there 40 days after his demise. Is it any wonder that this largely futile enterprise of sustaining the life’s breath of one who is no longer breathing should be expressed in a transitory form that contradicts the entire immortality agenda? Dance and funeral rite would appear to be asking the same interwoven questions: In all of human history, where is the balance to be found between mobility and stasis? How feasible is it to realize our collective, universal aim to grasp being itself and fix it in place?