*This is not the official title of the show.
Urbanity Dance
Apollon Musagete (the story, one version)
Apollo (the muses)
Apollo (the construction of, with Seth Orza, principal dancer, Pacific Northwest Ballet)
Apollon Musagete (one dance, Mathieu Ganio, Myriam Ould Braham, Mathilde Froustey and Charline Giezendanner, Paris Opera)
Apollon Musagete (another dance, with Marta Romagna and Roberto Bolle)
Apollon Musagete (a third dance, with Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, New York City Ballet)
Apollo Musagete (the full dance, with Jacques d'Amboise, Jillana, Francia Russell and Diana Adams, New York City Ballet)
The story of 'Apollo' speaks about how learning and growing is a process. We start at birth and open new processes each day. For example, I began this blog, Paper Moons, today. Betsi, our director, has given us questions about gender, the male gaze, the female gaze, their meaning and their power. The show will happen in 3 weeks and we are performing with A Far Cry, an amazing orchestra that specializes (להתמחות) in Stravinsky.
ReplyDeleteSome questions for you : What is meaningful about a male person's gaze? A female person's gaze? What does gaze mean in general? When does anyone gaze?
Your answers will help us to build the dances!
"Gaze," to me, implies a particularly uninhibited focus/fixation. Certainly there are romantic/sexual connotations with the word, but my first association with it is actually that of a young infant's gaze -- the kind of wide-eyed stare when recognizing one's reflection in a mirror or seeing one's mother's face close up. When we're older, we learn that it's impolite to stare, and so we learn to divert our eyes around someone's face as we speak with them, not lingering too long anywhere lest they worry about an unspoken criticism. In some ways, the gaze of a child is pure curiosity, like a slow inhale when you want to remember a smell.
ReplyDeleteMariel, you have offered much to consider. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of gaze as 'focus', as an intangible connection between the one who focuses and what they focus on, has been mentioned in rehearsal. Right now, we the dancers do not look at one another. Instead, we look out, beyond one another. We avoid looking not because we want to be aloof, unaware of each other, but simply because we don't need to look. 'Apollo' (Ayako Takahasi) does not need to see the muses to feel their inspiration. Similarly, the three muses (Ryan Valente, Rossi Lamont Walter, Brian Washburn) are messengers who are connected to sources that are much greater than themselves (dance/music, poetry and mime/religious hymns, respectively). The muses do not need to look at Apollo in order to transfer these gifts to the newly-born. Their focus is instead outward and far beyond, to suggest that these forces exist beyond their own finite presence, in the swirling darkness of that which is unspoken and unable to be seen, but still known, still received.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts Mariel.
Here are some things that others said about 'gaze" :
ReplyDelete- a "slight threat of monitoring" or "offering with their eyes" JAH
-"Without eye contact, it is much harder to decipher what a person means. When someone doesn't look you in the eye, you have a tendency to believe that the person is hiding something or not telling the truth. To "look someone in the eye" is an important part of our interaction with them. Also, gazing is much different than staring. Gazing can be romantic or curious, staring is most often rude. Perhaps I shouldn't, but I love to look people in the eye when walking down the street or in a crowd. You'd be surprised how often you share a smile or a laugh with a total stranger. It reinforces the common thread of humanity in us all." SH
-"It's a heteronormative structure, in a broadly Foucauldian sense, that is both indicative of male privilege and also of the commodifying nature of human interactions under the system of capitalism." MR, PhD
More comments from others :
ReplyDelete-"[I]t's potential evolutionary function. Humans are the only primates that have evolved whites of the eyes. It is proposed that is the case because it is socially advantageous to be able to easily know and follow where someone else's gaze. I haven't read any research on gaze and body language to support this theory with experimentation, but it makes sense to me." MC
Love this idea, thanks for sharing ! Keep it coming . . .
Another comment!
ReplyDelete- "The most powerful tool of the performer is their focus. The eyes are revealing or concealing . . . they communicate the emotional life behind action." MMJ
More! More!
Also from MMJ :
ReplyDelete- Gaze is "an understanding of commonality or discontent *within the environment of the performance* [my emphasis]."
Brilliant.
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ReplyDeleteThere are all kinds of things to be said about gaze and the structure of subject/object interactions, but I have a different, kind of quirky idea to throw at you that goes back to your response to Mariel's comment, when you characterized gaze as creating an intangible connection between the object of focus and the focuser. Reading this, and thinking about the sensuous space of dance, I'm reminded of something I read about shadows recently. In Becoming Animal, David Abram (http://www.wildethics.org/becoming-animal-main.html) talks about the surprisingly material life of a shadow- normally we think of our shadows in peter pan terms, as 2D forms splashed across the floor, without substance and disconnected from our body. The insufficiency of this idea becomes clear, however, when for example a butterfly flutters between us and our shadow on the earth, and passes through a patch of darkness. In this moment, it becomes obvious that our shadow is much more 3D than we might have thought, with a sort of substance or spatial life; in fact, it inhabits a space that is determined by a range of factors, including the angle and intensity of light in space and the physical objects between our body and the floor, and creates a cooler, darker, physically other environment, not just an image. Anyway, that was a longwinded way of suggesting that you might be able to think of GAZE in the same way, and this is where it gets weird/interesting. What if you imagine the line of sight as embodied in some way, or as hot/cool/sticky... so that the energy of your gaze is not just transferred from your eyes to the object in a disembodied leap, but must rather travel just like a beam of light (which is probably physically more true in some sense, as well as being creatively interesting) between you and where your sight ends. So if someone passes through that beam, they can feel the energy somehow, or it can be used/interacted with/manipulated in some way. Could be cool, or completely unworkable...
DeleteThat was brilliant, Ben. I have passed it on to the director.
ReplyDeleteHere is another comment, from a dear friend, who quotes Susan Sontag's work "Camp", which speaks more specifically to the role of gender and gazing :
- "[T]his is in response to something of yours about gendered gazes that i saw on my newsfeed, since i was reading this essay this morning, and this part made me stop and think for a while:
From Susan Sontag's Notes on "Camp"
"As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Examples: the swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in Art Nouveau prints and posters, presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex. **What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine....** [RLW emphasis] Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn't: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms."
Thanks for sharing my dear brother BE.