As I read Arnheim’s discussion of Balance my mind fled to the question of imagination. All of
the conceptions Arnheim wrestles with (tension, psychological forces, the question or problem whether those forces are an
illusion, and the effect of intrinsic
interest and knowledge) can be the material of the creative imagination.
How is the dynamic experience of perception related to the creative work of the
imagination? Writing this now, I wonder if this is simply putting Arnheim’s
motivating question in different terms. In a sense, it must be since art is the
work of the creative imagination. But I really do wonder how fair that judgment
is. If what is imagined may be “free” from what is observed and experienced
what is its relationship to questions of perception that are so profoundly
concerned with what is observed and experienced.
Of course imagination lives in dialectic tension with
experience, but its essentially unpredictable and unknowable character reminds
us of the peculiarities and particularities of the individual. An awareness of
individual difference (or cultural and social difference for that matter)
inevitably challenges any psychological or artistic claims to the universal.
Perhaps, paradoxically, it seems that the dynamic, dialectic Gestalt approach
which strives to understand and appreciate the whole actually reminds us that
we can’t know the “whole story,” reminds us that we can’t achieve balance. Try
as we might to enjoy the balance of “whole understanding” or “complete
perception,” there will always be a fundamental imbalance between what is
created and perceived, what is meant and what is felt, what is observed and
what is understood—and that’s exactly why we need to try nonetheless. As
Arnheim writes, “Seeing is the perception of action” (16). Seeing itself is
also ceaseless action. By continually striving (and inevitably failing) to
perceive “the whole,” by approaching art and experience with an awareness of
the infinity of tensions and connections within any individual imagination it
seems possible to find our way from to the (possibly) universal through the
particular.
The choreographer Pina Bausch took a holistic, experiential
approach to dance that defied category. Her work is dance and theater, modern
and classical, abstract and realistic. When she died at the age of 68 the
Sadler Wells dance theater in London collected tributes from fellow artists.
The actor Alan Rickman said, "Pina
Bausch pins you to your seat. It's like she's connected to your bloodstream or
something. She knows about fears, fantasies and dream-life. It's like meeting
your own imagination." Bausch in her work and Rickman in his words reveal the feat of
perceiving art. Somehow perceiving the creation of another illuminates and even
strengthens our own imagination.
Working within the medium of dance/performance, balance
played a technically important role in the choreography of Bausch’s pieces
while the dynamic tension, the intentional imbalance, between imagination and
reality, the familiar world and the dreaming world engaged her audience, her
dancers, her self. As she famously said, “I’m not interested in how people move
but in what moves them.” Her
pieces wrestle with the mystery of motivation again and again. Though it does
not fit comfortably into any category, it is modern. It is avant-garde. It
displays the impulses of modern dance Arnheim described when he wrote, “The
stylistic preference for overcoming the downward pull is in keeping with the
artist’s desire to liberate himself from an imitation of reality…Modern dance
has run into an interesting inner conflict by stressing the weight of the human
body, which classical ballet tried to deny, and at the same time following the
general trend in moving from realistic pantomime to abstraction” (31). Bausch
work thrives on this conflict, looking deep into weighty, observable,
experienced, familiar, gravity-bound reality and pushing through it to offer a
liberating experience of imagination.
The visual artist Antony Gormley (whose work confronts the
issue of balance head on) said of Bausch (in the same Sadler Wells collection
of tributes):
Pina
Bausch has enriched the language of dance and theatre and made it into a kind
of rite of passage, taking it back to its early roots in ritual as well as
forward to a form of collective psychotherapy. I am inspired, challenged and
indebted to Pina, not least for her acute sculptural sense of body in space.
The notion of art
that reaches new heights by embracing its foundations might be a form
“collective psychotherapy” is exciting. Rather than understanding behavior by
citing a “death instinct” or “pleasure principle” or “Oedipus complex” how much
more creative and frankly generous to strive for a whole, to acknowledge an
infinitely complex web of experience and imagination. I sincerely appreciated
the alternate view of the human offered Arnheim offered in response of Freud’s
conception of the “death instinct”:
A
human being in good physical and mental health finds himself fulfilled not in
inactivity, but in doing, moving, changing, growing, forging ahead, producing,
creating, exploring. There is no justification for the strange notion that life
consists of attempts to put an end to itself as rapidly as possible. Indeed,
the chief characteristic of the live organism may well be that it represents an
anomaly of nature in waging an uphill fight against the universal law of
entropy by constantly drawing new energy from its environment. (37)
I think Pina Bausch
would agree. Just like Arnheim she does not deny the importance of balance by
presenting work that resonates deeply with this conception of human experience,
but finds the creative potential of balance in the tensions it creates and
illuminates. The weight of her movement balances beautifully with the weight of
its meaning. So it is a tremendous, joyful, heartbreaking pleasure to imagine
what that meaning might be.
It’s lots of fun to
YouTube Pina Bausch. Wim Wender’s 3D documentary Pina is wonderful and out now. In the movie, Bausch
discusses the emotional effect of the direction of her gaze. Her company has
come to BAM and I keep hoping they’ll come back. Here’s a link to the movie
website (with good information and a great trailer) and also a link to a BAM
trailer of a performance of Vollmond (Full Moon) I saw:
Movie website: http://www.pina-film.de/en/about-3D.html
BAM trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGhulhiBliI
(Interesting that the huge rock on stage
is on the right)
Links to Antony
Gormley’s work featuring bodies in space:
Hey Sarah,
ReplyDeleteI just had to comment on your post, having seen Wender's Pina just a few weeks ago in NYC as well as the work of Antony Gormley in a screening of Alex Gabbay's "Just Trial and Error" at the Rubin Museum yesterday. Now that I have read Arnheim, I'm reconsidering the aspects of Pina's work in relation to what Arnheim particularly discussed on pg. 77 and 78, regarding subdivisions to a piece of art and how they end up integrating in relation to the whole:
"When shapes are less clear-cut and more complex [in a work of art], the structural components are not so obvious. Mistakes in the comprehension of an artistic structure are easily made when a viewer judges by relations within narrow limits rather than taking into account the overall structure. The same mistake may also lead to faulty phrasing in the performance of a musical passage, or to an actor's misinterpretation of a scene. The local situation suggests one conception, [while] the total context prescribes another..."
and
"No portion of a work of art is ever quite self-sufficient. The broken-off heads of statues often look disappointingly empty. If they carried too much expression of their own, they would have marred the unity of the whole work. This is why dancers, who speaks through their bodies, often wear deliberately blank facial expressions...the same is true for completeness. A truly self-contained subwhole is very hard to accommodate. Good fragments are neither surprisingly complete nor distressingly incomplete; they have the particular charm of revealing unexpected merits of parts while at the same time pointing to a lost entity beyond themselves."
Bausch's work expertly toys with Arnheim's idea of how parts can relate to the whole either harmonically or dissonantly (that is, the parts form subwholes which are harmonic or dissonant to the piece on the whole), and that how they are considered at the local level will not necessarily generalize effectively to the global level. Her choreography of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring exemplifies what happens to the overall feeling of a scene when dancers alternate between acting as harmonic subwholes and acting as dissonant ones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXVuVQuMvgA
From the beginning, everyone is their own unique subwhole, harmonic at the local level but dissonant at the global one. The music, however, is in a major key (i.e. very harmonic) and it sounds very pastoral. Both the unique subwholes and major key are done away with at 1:23, when the subwholes are joined by a similarity of movement and the key changes to a minor (with a sudden quieting of the brass section and changing of register for the clarinet); this reverses what was true previously, now creating harmony for the dancers but dissonance in the music.
This reversal is repeated dramatically again 3:17 and especially at 3:39, where the dancers have literally joined side-by-side (forming their own subwhole, harmonic to the piece globally) facing the red dress (also its own subwhole, and harmonic to the piece globally), creating global harmony for the viewer on the stage as a whole; a harmony is never actually achieved, though, as the music and dancing suddenly become violent and terrifyingly dissonant and primal.
I feel these reversals between equal proportions of harmony and dissonance are very much reflective of the tensions Sarah has discussed, as the constant switching of harmonic and dissonant subwholes force the viewers' own emotions into a volatile state. If ever the piece was wholly harmonic, we would enjoy it at first but become bored; if ever the piece was wholly dissonant, we would cover our ears and walk out. Bausch puts us exactly in the middle ground, starting off with a human emotion that manifests itself as a balanced entity on stage through the dancers, which then gives way to imbalance, which itself then gives way to balance again, etc etc.