6 The New York Review
with you,” Milo said to me one day,
“is that you know the steps, but you
don’t.. .”—and here he gestured with
his arms, bringing them across himself
in a gesture of defense, so that I knew
exactly what he meant. “You don’t hold
yourself open.” It was true, I was fright-
ened; but of what?
Milo wanted me to look. The look, as
any ballet dancer will tell you, is part of
the figure the body makes. Mine was at
the ground. It was not that I was check-
ing what my feet were doing, it was that
I was shy of acknowledging that I was
dancing at all. If I didn’t look at my
partner, perhaps he wouldn’t see me.
I was like the child who shuts her eyes
and believes she has disappeared. Milo
set me a task. I was to stand two feet
away from one of the studio mirrors and
execute a series of simple steps, again
and again, looking myself straight in
the eye. Reluctantly, I began. An agony
of shame. Nowhere to hide. I desper-
ately wanted to look away—anything
but this witnessing of myself. “This is
torture!” I cried. “I know,” he said.
After about twenty minutes of this
torment he jumped, suddenly, into the
small two-foot space between me and
the mirror—he became the mirror—so
that I was forced to look directly into
his face, inches from mine. I was seeing
and being seen. I just about managed to
keep dancing.
What was it I didn’t want to see? Per-
haps the answer is simple: I didn’t want
to see the ridiculous hash I was mak-
ing of the dance. I was embarrassed
by my own lack of expertise. I wanted
to be able to dance by accident rather
than by design (talent rather than hard
work), and I was ashamed of the effort
I was having to make, self-conscious
about trying. Between the person mess-
ing about and having fun on the dance
floor and the fully fledged performer
there lies the world of the amateur with
its codes and rules and conventions, all
of which can be inhabited with more or
less skill.
The professional performer (whether
dancer, musician, or actor) overcomes
the limitations of his or her own body
to express the essence of the artwork—
or that is what is supposed to happen.
By contrast, amateur dancers are still
themselves when they dance, and argu-
ably they are more themselves than
when they are not dancing. Unclothed
of the routines and rituals of everyday
life—no speech, no distraction, no ac-
cidents of style—you become naked
in your own body. You are reduced to
body, and all the more so because you
are body framed by the dance—body
squared. In order to dance at all I had
had to leave at the door my own idio-
syncrasies of style, the ones in which I
clothe myself to perform the me that
functions in the everyday: the par-
ent, the teacher, the lover, the friend.
Masks, all of them, but useful ones.
What I didn’t want to see, in the mirror,
or in the faces of the dance partners
who were my own personal audience,
was myself made plain by being uttered
in another voice. Stripped of personal
psychology, we are exposed by the lan-
guage of the dance.
Milo wanted me to look, but para-
doxically all the danger in dancing lies
in too much looking. It is the danger of
self-consciousness. (That is why part-
nered dancers like Nureyev and Dow-
ell’s tango need an unseen audience to
do their looking for them. The glory of
that scene in Va le nt i no lies not simply
in the fact that they dance their tango
effortlessly, but that they appear to
dance without thought for how they ap-
pear.) In his 1810 essay on the puppet
theater, Heinrich von Kleist has a hard
time accepting his dancer friend’s in-
sistence that puppets are more perfect
than people because their movements
are governed only by the law of grav-
ity. Lacking souls, they are free from
the risks of affectation. But Kleist (or
his quasi-fictional narrator) is happy to
accept the idea that self-consciousness
prompts an immediate fall from natu-
ral grace. He recalls a beautiful fifteen-
year-old boy at the baths, who
loses his charm the moment he
becomes aware of himself:It happened that we had re-
cently seen in Paris the fig-
ure of the boy pulling a thorn
out of his foot.... My young
friend caught sight of him-
self in a mirror just as he was
putting his foot up to dry it,
and this reminded him of the
statue. He smilingly drew my
attention to the resemblance.
As a matter of fact I had just
made the same discovery
myself; but either because I
wanted to put his charm to
the test, or perhaps to act as
a slight curb on his vanity, I
laughed and said it was only
his fancy. He blushed and
lifted his foot again, so as to
convince me; but his attempt
very naturally failed. After a
third and fourth attempt he
became quite embarrassed;
ten times he tried, but it was
no use. He was incapable of
reproducing the original move-
ment. Worse still, the movements
he made had something so comic
about them that I could hardly
keep from laughing.The fact that the boy looked like a
Greek statue wasn’t the cause of his
self-consciousness. The problem arose
from his attempts to imitate one. It’s the
difference between unconsciously fol-
lowing an example and trying to claim
the status of the exemplary. The boy’s
self gets in the way of his body, and it
happens at the point when the couple
(the boy and his double in the mirror,
or even the boy and the Greek statue)
becomes a triangle. The boy wants his
twinning to be witnessed, but it’s the
intrusion of the other man’s gaze that
causes the discomfort, turning smiling
to blushing and damaging the grace of
the unconsidered movement.
This concentration on and of the body
is of course one reason why dancing at
parties is associated with sex whereas
dancing on stage usually isn’t, no mat-
ter how sexy it may be. The answer to
the question of where one person ends
and another begins isn’t obvious, and
sex is probably a more popular way of
testing that boundary than dancing.
But although one may sometimes lead
to the other, dancing and sex are not
analogous. There is a difference, even
at parties, between the desire that ex-
presses itself in wanting to touch to
music, and the desire to “just dance,”
even with another. Yet the intense con-
sciousness of my physical being that I
suffered in front of Milo’s mirror is in
tension with the dissolution of bound-aries between two people dancing
together that I have also described.
Another way of putting this is to ask:
When I dance, am I attempting to be-
come more me or less me?The painter and designer Sonia De-
launay was in her mid-eighties when,
in 1970, she produced one of her last
significant artworks. Avec moi-même
is a series of ten etchings and aquatints
presented together in a plexiglass box
with a lithographed title page announc-
ing Plato’s maxim in French: “Penser
c’est pour l’âme s’entretenir en silence
avec elle-même” (Thinking is the soul’ssilent conversation with itself). In the
prints, Delaunay does enact a kind of
silent speech with herself, a conscious
self-reflection. By the time she made
them she had been on her own for
nearly thirty years (or perhaps not al-
ways on her own, but without Robert
Delaunay, her lover, husband, and ar-
tistic collaborator since their meeting
in 1909 to his death in 1941).
Avec moi-même revisits the semi-
circular blocks of prismatic color, the
abstract patterns of bisected circles,
wheels, squares, and triangles that
were the patterns of her years with
Robert. In one of her best-known early
paintings, Le Bal Bullier—a huge can-
vas stretching to nearly thirteen feet in
length—the geometric blocks of paint
represent a scene from the popular
Parisian dance hall on the Boulevard
Saint-Michel. The painting teeters
on the edge of abstraction. Its circles
of color, radiating spheres, evoke the
gaslights flickering above the dancers
who hold each other in close embrace.
Their bodies are distinguished by the
repeated curves of thighs and buttocks
and arms, and by their hats, delicate or
jaunty.
They are dancing the tango perhaps,
or trying to. The craze hit Paris in the
early 1910s, and Delaunay’s painting
was exhibited in Berlin in 1913, before
the pre-war world of Le Bal Bullier was
swept away. In 1914 Guillaume Apolli-
naire recalled the Delaunays standing
at the foot of the orchestra on Thurs-
day and Sunday nights, both decked
out in clothes made by Sonia on the
principle of contrasting or complemen-
tary colors. (“Here is, for example, anoutfit of Mr. Robert Delaunay: purple
jacket, beige vest, black trousers. Here
is another: red coat with blue collar, red
socks, yellow-and-black shoes, black
pants, green jacket, sky-blue vest, tiny
red tie.”) Apparently they didn’t dance.
They watched, and the dance happened
on the canvas.
In their repetitions of shape and
color, the late prints of Avec moi-même
allude to a lifetime of work. The etch-
ings provide a way for Sonia to contain
herself in her life story as much as ex-
pressing herself. Le Bal Bullier hovers
like a ghost behind the images, but for
the viewer the challenge of these late
works is knowing how to interpret all
the gray. Unlike her full-color
oil paintings, watercolors, and
silkscreen prints of earlier
years, the gray scorings De-
launay made with the etching
tool are dominant here. She has
substituted a sort of graphite
scribbling for paint; she shades
in shapes roughly rather than
blocking them out. What is
she saying? “I am fading out”?
Or, perhaps, “I am in a hurry
now”? “There is no time left”?
Actually, those engraved scor-
ings would have taken a lot of
time and effort, so maybe the
prints do not say, “My colors are
dying,” but rather, “Here I am,
all gray, and still determined.”
Time and its passing are visi-
ble in the relationship between
Delaunay’s early paintings and
the late prints of Avec moi-
même, but in the prints them-
selves time is absent. Narrative,
story, and perhaps the idea of
experience itself are all external
to the works. And the fact that
there are ten etchings, all dif-
ferent but gathered together under the
same rubric, reinforces the sense that
these are momentary iterations of
thought, little stabs at solo composition
figured on paper. No partner neces-
sary. Yet despite the title of the series,
speaking in silence to herself was not
enough for Delaunay. Why, otherwise,
the plexiglass box and the gallery ex-
hibitions? Self-sufficiency—witnessing
herself—wasn’t enough. In seeking an
audience she was looking for reflection.
She looked for more than the face in
the mirror; she looked for the face that
would tell her that she was there.But for the dancer—no presentation
box, no captured after-image. There is
a past of the dance, but it is external to
the act of dancing. From West Africa
via Buenos Aires and Montevideo to
Paris and back; from the Deep South to
Harlem to Hollywood—social dances
develop as an accretion of the histories
of the people who have danced them,
and the unequal relations of power, in-
cluding commercialization by the film
and leisure industries, that determine
them. It’s a racialized history, and it
doesn’t disappear just because we ac-
knowledge it.
Another kind of past is held in the
body of the dancer herself: the past of
practice, knowledge, convention, and
physical experience. What gets called
“muscle memory” is just part of it. The
memory into which you step as you
begin to dance includes all the dances
you’ve ever danced before, all the
partners you’ve ever had, all the prac-
tice you’ve put in, all the music you’veTrisha Brown: from Untitled (Set One), 2006Graphicstudio