Why must there be a struggle between spirit and body? Surely there may be reconciliation?
S. M. VOLKONSKY1
Describing theatrical technique at the beginning of the 1920s, Sergei Eisenstein simply observed: ‘Everyone raves about yoga.’2 It is well known that twentieth-century theatre experimented with esoteric or quasi-esoteric conceptions. Konstantin Stanislavsky took up yoga and rhythmics (and indeed invited rhythmicists to lead activity with the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre); Mikhail Chekov, eurythmics; Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotovsky, Georgy Gurdjieff’s system. In all these systems of body techniques, the accent on the individual body and movement, and on sensing that movement, turned out to be especially valuable for the theatre. Indeed, a range of very different people came to the idea that kinaesthesia helps the actor, not necessarily through conscious volition, to attain the condition of ‘presence’, to concentrate on the ‘here and now’, and in that way not so much to play a role but to live on the stage, to sense being authentic and real in the role. This ideal was summoned up with substantial help from physical activity, experienced kinaesthetically.
In the years on either side of the Revolution, Gurdjieff, drawing on yoga, practised exercises that strained, then freed, the muscles, as well as exercises to concentrate attention. With the experience of movement exercises in mind, the eurythmist Jeanne de Salzmann, who, as we shall see, was largely responsible for the creation of Gurdjieff’s ‘sacred movements’, identified cognition with experience: ‘The Fourth Way is a way of understanding that is to be lived.’3 We look again at this ‘way of understanding’ in order to illuminate the place of movement in at least one branch of esoteric modernism. This chapter takes the story of kinaesthesia along what some have known as a mystical path. The first part of the story goes through innovations in stage lighting, opening up a new account of the importance of light in creating dynamic effects, that is, in creating experience of movement. In the following chapter, we return to the mainstream of Russian theatre.
The seeker and mystic Petr Dem’yanovich Ouspensky, in 1911, published his book, Tertium Organum (The Third Organon), a new canon of thought. (The first was the medieval collection of Aristotle’s texts, the second, the Novum Organum of Francis Bacon.) He wrote:
And the future belongs not to man but to superman, who is already born and lives among us.
A higher race is rapidly arising from the bulk of humanity, and it is arising through its own peculiar understanding of the world and of life … And not only is this race coming, but it is already here.
Men approaching the transition to this new race are already beginning to recognize one another; watchwords, signs and countersigns are already being established.4
One such ‘watchword’ was ‘India’, or, collectively, ‘the East’. Unlike the West, which had taken the road of external, material progress, the East, Europeans thought or imagined, had taken the way of human self-knowledge and fulfilment. Belief that Indian culture implicated a higher step in the spiritual development of humanity was widespread across Europe, and it accompanied enthusiasm for yoga, Buddhism, Theosophy and Anthroposophy.
The interest was especially vibrant in artistic circles. The composer Aleksandr Scriabin, for example, worked on a mysteria that included proposals for an instrument of light, ‘Luce’, and for the final performance to take place on the banks of the Ganges. Stanislavsky studied yoga, and his method of acting drew on an understanding of prãna (breath of life), ‘ray-emission and ray-perception’, ‘the freeing of the muscles’, ‘the sternum’ (connected to breathing) and ‘higher consciousness’.5 Jaques-Dalcroze selected as an emblem for his Institute of Rhythmics in Hellerau the yin-yang sign of balance and harmony of opposites. With the help of music and rhythm, he dreamed of educating a ‘new race’ of people with unbounded consciousness of their possibilities. Dalcroze saw in rhythm the co-ordinated beginning of the unification of body and soul, the means to achieve a single, harmonious whole.6 In Russia, the main propagandist of rhythm, as we have discussed, was Prince Sergei Volkonsky. When, in the autumn of 1912, he opened the Rhythmic Courses, a filial of Dalcroze’s Institute, and in the following spring began to publish Pages of the Courses of Rhythmic Gymnastics, he used the same emblem on the cover of his journal.
The coming of war closed the Institute in Hellerau and the Courses in Petersburg. It also caused Ouspensky to return from a journey through India and Ceylon. In one of the Moscow newspapers, he then read about a ballet, Struggle of the Magicians, in which an alleged Indian intended to present, with a display of Eastern magic, the miracles of the fakirs and holy dances. So, in the spring of 1915, Ouspensky made the acquaintance of the author of the idea of the ballet, Georgy Gurdjieff (Gyurdzhiev). Gurdjieff said that his ballet was not a ‘mystery’, but rather a drama or pantomime with song, music and dances. He proposed including dances of different peoples – Ossetian, gypsy, Arab, Georgian, Persian, Indian – and scenes that would picture schools of white and black magicians and the struggle between them, as well as student movement exercises.
It is thus clear that, by this time, Gurdjieff had thought-up the system of exercises which continued to be a fundamental part of the esoteric group he subsequently directed. The exercises were similar to those practised in yoga, Sufism and other spiritual traditions of the East. He placed the same hope in the movements, called ‘holy movements’ or ‘holy dances’, as Dalcroze placed in rhythm, the hope that they would open a new path for humanity. Gurdjieff called his path ‘the Fourth Way’, counting the first ‘the way of the fakir’, the fulfilment of the body, the second ‘the way of the monk’, the way of belief and asceticism, and the third ‘the way of yoga’, the way of knowledge and reason.7 Although Gurdjieff thus positioned the Fourth Way separately from yoga, and though his movements had different gymnastics and rhythm, it had much in common with yoga and rhythmics. We shall follow the history of Gurdjieff’s Institute of Harmonic Development, which opened a little later in Tiflis (as Tbilisi, Georgia, was called in the Russian Empire), and trace the thread that stretches from there directly back to Dalcroze.
In spite of war, or perhaps because of it, people placed hope in the healing power of art, in art that would re-establish broken ties and re-create wholeness. In this spirit, in 1916, the Kamerny (Chamber) Theatre in Moscow premiered Phamira Kithared, after the play by Innokenty Annensky. The deep, tragic, aesthetic performance, according to the critics, was one of the best of the season. Aleksandra Ekster’s decorations and costumes, in the Cubist-Futurist manner, attracted special notice. The critics also praised with one accord the sketches of the costumes, shown at the exhibition of the group, ‘The Jack of Diamonds’, for their theatricality and dynamism. Ekster prepared an album of her drawings, which she entitled, ‘Break, Movement, Weight’. Both the critics’ language and Ekster’s work thus took for granted the place in staging of kinaesthetic perception. But the year 1917 came and the album did not appear; there simply was not the material means.8
Aleksandr Tairov, the director, saw in the play an expression of Dionysian and Apollonian themes. Thinking about how to stage the themes, he conceived of them in contrasting rhythms, the kinaesthetic representation of which would give the play form:
In front of me, with the construction of the maquette, two rhythmic tasks, which should run together, arose at the same time. It was necessary, on the one hand, to create a construction for the low and satirical moments of the spectacle; on the other hand, the stormy inter-weavings that inspired and ripened Phamira’s loveless tragedy, required for their plastic development a completely different construction, based on the precise and even flow of the Apollonian rhythm, in opposition to the Dionysian rhythm of the first.9
For this reason, he created two completely different styles for the performance, Cubist decoration and costumes in style moderne. Tairov demanded a clash, dynamism, even in the decoration. With significant consequences for the history of the stage, he also tackled the problem of achieving dynamic movements with the active participation of light in the events. Alisa Koonen recalled that when ‘working with Ekster on the construction of “Phamira Kithared”, Tairov thought a lot about how the spectacle had to be lighted. He said that the very construction of the piece, its unusualness and the inspiring atmosphere of the verses, demanded special lighting.’10 Light was required not only to enhance the dramatic effect but also to follow the author’s own stage directions. Annensky had prefaced every scene with a special description, summoning-up qualities that would serve at one and the same time as instruction and symbolic image: ‘Scene One. Pale-cold’, ‘Scene III. Still crimson rays’, ‘Scene IV. Light blue enamel’ and so on.11 To transmit such dynamic effects, the colour and light needed to be of an absolutely special kind.
Tairov had always counted light as a full participant in a spectacle. Accordingly, he went to great lengths to bring a young lighting artist from Hellerau to Moscow, Alexandre de Salzmann, who had recently succeeded in turning the auditorium in Hellerau into a space ‘lit with light’, not just a lighted space. Audiences there had been thrilled: they had seen movement in light that was dimmed ‘from azure fortissimo’ to ‘shaking, trembling twilight’.12 Volkonsky gave this description:
The Hellerau hall is something absolutely special in itself. It’s strange even to use the word ‘hall’ applied to this ‘space’, to the surrounding white flatness. Above and to the sides, white canvas, nothing else; it is saturated with wax and behind it are unseen electric lamps; when they are lit, they are started with a surprisingly sustained gradualness, and one is as if immersed in a lighted bath. Never with more clearness did I feel what a deceptive thing it is to show the source of light. Light! A surprising element of nature, without which it’s impossible to see but which one mustn’t see. The lighting arrangement in the Hellerau ‘theatre’ is the handiwork of our compatriot, Salzmann. All the joy is in the fact that you don’t see the source of the light, you see the being of light, if one may thus express it; it is not a lighted hall but a hall of light. The participation of light in the Hellerau musical pictures has a large part in the surprising totality with which they act on the viewer. All the four elements of this aggregate impression acted together: music, man, movement, light.13
The use of light in Dalcroze’s and the director, Adolph Appia’s, staging of Gluck’s opera, Orpheus and Eurydice, was a special success. The whole opera was presented in 1913, with light as a full actor: the singer performed the role of Amore behind the stage, and the light ‘sang’ in the hall in her place. At first, on stage there was nothing besides a staircase saturated in gloom and grey curtains. In this mysterious space, the light of Amore, suddenly appearing, unexpected, made a striking impression. Volkonsky recalled:
But there was a greater degree of unexpectedness when, after the disappearance of Amore, with a ceremonial unfolding, the last curtains in the depths [of the stage], on the very top of the staircase, suddenly draw apart. A split opens, lighted with such strength that all the rest of the stage is laden in gloom. Victorious ceremonial sounds of the orchestra mount the brow of Orpheus, waking to a new life, and, rhythmically taking step after step, with spread arms he comes out from the gloom of earthly sorrows to a light of other-worldly promises.14
Such a radically new staging of Gluck’s opera, like no other production, brought the audience an echo of ancient mystery. All the European beau monde, including Diaghilev, Anna Pavlova and Nijinsky, were present at the premier. Isadora Duncan, by telegram, invited her friend Stanislavsky to come to see ‘a unique, one in the world’ Orpheus.15 Paul Claudel excitedly reported that ‘the milk-white’ light in the spectacle creates ‘an Elysian atmosphere which restores the rights of three dimensions and turns any body into a statue’.16
Salzmann himself asserted that light ‘interests us only as the elemental form of inner experience’. The action of light is to enable reality, including movement, to be seen as it is, to disclose things, again including movement, in themselves:
For us, then, light does something more than tell stories about the sun, moon and stars. We do not demand of it that it produce effects. Nor must it make things pretty, nor evoke moods. It must only give to colors, surfaces, lines, bodies and movements the possibility of unfolding themselves. None of these elements should act at the other’s expense, least of all the lighting itself, which should function as a binding force. A ‘reverberating light’– that is what we seek. Needless to say, such light must fill all the space at hand, including both the audience’s and the performers’ space.17
In Moscow, there was unanimous agreement that Salzmann’s lighting, in Phamira, organically connected with the artistic plan of the spectacle as a whole. He filled all the space of the stage. None of the footlights, soffit lights or spotlights took part in the lighting. The light was transparent, at one moment weightless and joyful, at another moment gloomy.18 He distributed the light sources behind a neutral horizon, and he displaced paint by light as a means of marking-up surfaces. In ‘the tonal light’ used for the staircase in the spectacle, Ekster discovered that cubes and cones were more monumental, costumes were brighter and the movement of the actors was more conspicuous. The canvas backdrop ‘was saturated with greatly different tints from moon-blue and orange-opal to crimson-red’.19 Tairov, for the first time, saw objects lighted by contrast, so that the characters on the stage acquired relief and appeared especially sculptural.
Salzmann used light, first, as the medium for the aesthetic expression of soul and body as two sides of one reality, and second, to create a whole new range of ways in which to perceive the spatial and moving qualities of events on the stage, extending the kinaesthetic imagination of the actors and audience alike. The lighting ‘immersed’ the stage. One might say that light ‘embodied’ the spectator on the stage rather than communicated an object to a subject in the auditorium. No one involved picked out the kinaesthetic world for explicit or special notice; rather, they built this world into a search utilizing the sixth sense of intuition of the living, moving body, to achieve total harmony of all the arts on the stage.
The war and the impossibility of writing abroad for necessary technical parts of equipment prevented the full application of Salzmann’s system. Then, when the spectacle was revived in 1919, Salzmann had abandoned Moscow. Following the Revolution, he returned with his wife to his family home in Tiflis. He was the son of a well-known architect in Georgia, the academician Albert Salzmann. The son studied painting in Moscow and Munich, where he associated with, among others, Kandinsky and Rilke, co-operated with the journals Jugend (Youth) and Simplicissimus, and worked as a theatre artist. He got to know Dalcroze, and through him met and married Jeanne Allemand-Matignon. She was one of the best students of the maître, and accompanied Dalcroze on all his journeys to demonstrate rhythmical gymnastics.
By the summer of 1919, Gurdjieff was also in Tiflis. The composer Thomas de Hartmann (with whom Kandinsky had worked), who had joined Gurdjieff’s group, introduced Gurdjieff to the Salzmanns. This was a fateful event for all of them.
Jeanne Salzmann had a studio of rhythmic gymnastics, and the students, girls from ‘the best families’ in Tiflis, exercised in the spacious hall of the Salzmanns’ house. The activity, in which actors from the local theatre participated, brought in a reasonable income. Using the studio as a base, the inventive Gurdjieff opened the Institute of Harmonious Development of Man and gave thought to how to stage the ballet, Struggle of the Magicians, which he had conceived earlier in Moscow. He wanted to present a joint evening of the studio and the Institute at the Opera Theatre. In the first half of the performance, Jeanne Salzmann’s students were to show rhythmical exercises, and in the second half, they and Gurdjieff’s other followers were to demonstrate the movements that he at once began to train them in. At the rehearsals, Gurdjieff shocked the girls with the absolute precision he said ritual dances demanded and with the drilling he then put them through.
The joint demonstration of rhythmical exercises according to Dalcroze’s and Gurdjieff’s systems took place in the theatre on 22 June 1919, the Dalcroze exercises in the first part and the chorus from the ballet, Struggle of the Magicians, a fragment of a mysteria, ‘Exile’, and Gurdjieff’s exercises in the second.20 It is difficult to judge whether several of these exercises were taken from mystic practices or from rhythmics. The exercise ‘Stop!’, for example, in which the participants, on command, suddenly halted and held their poses for an undefined time, had been used by Dalcroze, when it was called ‘Hop!’. Designing the spectacle, Alexandre de Salzmann did the scenography, the costumes, the lighting and the decorations.
There is a fine testimonial of the evening which saw the creation of a number of forms of new movement within the framework of a search for unity of activity and substance:
Jeanne Matignon surrendered to imagination and presented the spectators with an incomparably greater, higher grade [of performance] than all the ballet affectation that we had seen [before] in Tiflis.
But, moreover, then the bead-like Chopin … Why not replace it with a neurasthenic drum!…
Gurdjieff starts motion with a push of the will, sharp straight movement.
A finely rehearsed mass movement of the students, a simultaneous throwing-up of hands, then arms, then legs; ideal lack of restraint of these movements, and straightness, brought the public the impression of stunned relaxation.…
It was completely unimportant to us to know [according to the information of the composer Hartmann] that Gurdjieff studied the holy dances of the East. That is his business! It’s necessary simply to walk on one’s head and in the air! The rest will fall in place.21
From that time, the Salzmanns placed themselves and all that they knew how to do at the full disposal of Gurdjieff. When in the autumn of 1920, faced by the advance of the Red Army, Gurdjieff transferred his Institute of Harmonious Development to Constantinople, the Salzmanns followed him. Gurdjieff gave lectures on philosophy, the history of religion and psychology, his wife, Iulia Ostrovskaya, led ‘plastic gymnastics’ and Jeanne Salzmann taught ‘harmonious rhythms’, apparently some kind of synthesis of Dalcroze’s and Gurdjieff’s systems of movements.
Gurdjieff’s group exercises conveyed to viewers a strong impression of the group’s disciplined, well-co-ordinated, fine-working mechanism. This was very similar to what spectators saw in performances of the rhythmicists, where they were struck by the precision of ‘the harmoniously organized mass’.22 Dalcroze, in theatrical performances, wanted la foule-artiste (the artist of the people) to take the central place and ‘display in movements, gestures and poses his sensations and experiences’; at the same time, however, he sought ‘the orchestration of movements’ of the mass of performers.23 He called this correlation of mass and soloists ‘polyrhythmic’. Having moved to Europe, Gurdjieff, with the help of Jeanne Salzmann, tried to recreate part of the former Rhythmic Institute at the location of Dalcroze’s school in Hellerau (which in 1925 moved to Vienna), though he did not succeed.
A rhythmicist with great experience and elevated musical culture, Jeanne Salzmann notably influenced the teaching of ‘holy movements’, for which Hartmann wrote music, in Gurdjieff’s tightly controlled circle. Thus, one of the most difficult exercises, in which the arms, head and legs had to move in different tempi, derived, through her, from Dalcroze. It is said, however, that, encouraging her capacity for dance, Gurdjieff at the same time made an end of her own artistic career. Moreover, in 1930, he finally drove Alexandre de Salzmann out of his group. Madame de Salzmann, as those around her respectfully came to call her in France, stayed as Gurdjieff’s posthumous representative, living to be more than a hundred. She had two children, a daughter, with Salzmann, and a son with Gurdjieff. The son (Michel Salzmann) became a well-known psychiatrist and, until his death, led the Gurdjieff movement.
In published notes and conversations with students, Madame de Salzmann did not recall Dalcroze. Sometimes she quoted Gurdjieff, but for the most part she spoke about the foundation of her own experience, and in this it is possible to discern the influence of the rhythmic gymnastics that she had studied in her youth. One of her declarations about rhythm, for instance, bears the impression of argument with Dalcroze, and particularly with his intention to divide the body and isolate different parts of it so that each could move with its own rhythm. Madame de Salzmann opposed this: ‘I am “in a rhythm” – what does it mean? Not that one part is one rhythm and another in another, nor that I do one position in the rhythm but not the next. The energy is everywhere the same.’24 On other questions, for example, on the unity of soul and body, she agreed with both Dalcroze and Gurdjieff. Touch, she insisted, is the means by which to feel the being of the body in unity with the energy of the world.
I need to see that what is lacking is a connection with my body. Without a connection I am caught in thoughts or changing emotions that give way to fantasy … I have to feel the body on the earth, the ground. I do this by sensation – sensing its weight, its mass, and, more important, sensing that there is a force inside, and energy. Through sensation I need to feel a connection with my body so deep it becomes like a communion.25
In effect, she put into words the significance of the yin-yang emblem that Dalcroze had placed above the entrance to his Institute. The unity, or harmony, of soul and body is in the energy of movement. ‘If we could truly perceive their meaning and speak their language, the Movements would reveal to us another level of understanding’, Madame de Salzmann declared.26
Dalcroze and Gurdjieff, by contrast, agreed in valuing movement not for itself but for demanding the special concentration of attention. In order to strengthen attention, they devised a number of rhythmic exercises that required beating out different rhythms at the same time: for example, the head, two beats in a bar, the arms, three, the legs, four. Dalcroze’s students achieved this virtuosity. He justifiably affirmed that rhythmic gymnastics educate decisiveness and harden the will – ‘where there is a will, there is a way’, we might say. One observer, Sergei Mamontov, having seen a performance, excitedly wrote that on receiving a task, the dancers ‘strain with concentration, even frown, but almost always come out victorious from all the difficulties posed’.27 Dalcroze’s adherents enthusiastically endorsed the skills of full control over the body, and critics, with equal vehemence, who convicted rhythmics of formalism, mechanism and absence of emotional feeling, disliked them.
Having come to the Russian capitals – Petersburg and Moscow – just at the time when Volkonsky unleashed a storm of propaganda on behalf of rhythmics, Gurdjieff most likely heard about the practice, and perhaps he saw demonstrations. Nevertheless, his own exercises, which, according to Ouspensky, he began to lead in 1916, differed from both gymnastics and rhythmics. In particular, he created movements that brought his exercises closer to yoga. A participant at Prieuré, Gurdjieff’s centre in France in the late 1920s, Charles Stanley Nott, recorded this experience:
The movements and dances were extremely interesting. I did not find them difficult in the way some people did, but, as with everything else that I had acquired in ordinary life, I had to begin over again and forget what I had learned. It took me a long time to learn to sense and feel each movement, gesture, posture. Such a simple thing it seemed, ‘to sense’, but being English, brought up on physical drill and army training, I had to be reminded over and over again to ‘sense’ my body.28
For Nott, habituated not to sense but to strengthen the muscles and to ignore negative sensations of pain or tiredness, previous experience did not help; on the contrary, it disturbed the precise completion of Gurdjieff’s tasks. It was so difficult to switch to a new way of completing movement (of responding to the kinaesthetic world) that Gurdjieff had to explain it to him in rather categorical terms:
The first ‘obligatory [exercise]’ I began to do as if it were a series of physical jerks. At last Gurdjieff rebuked me severely in front of everyone, which so mortified me that I left the platform and sat down. In a few minutes he came up to me and quietly explained something. I returned to my place in the class, and from that time began to understand something of the inner meaning of the dances, and I spent every spare moment of each day for practising.29
In this ‘inner meaning’, bodily sensation and spirit fused.
Gurdjieff led a group of followers who lived communally. He wrote out orders for physical work, like prescriptions for medicine, which served the same task of unification as the exercises. He himself came from a family of craftsmen and knew excellently how to work with his hands. In his wanderings in the East, the future guru had earned a living, in part, by creating a ‘universal workshop on wheels’, where he repaired everything, from samovars and sewing machines to guitars and accordions.30 Ouspensky recalled Gurdjieff sitting on the floor engaged with the repair of a carpet in his house outside Moscow. Knowing the value of physical work, Gurdjieff made it an instrument in his group. To one of his followers thirsting for immortality, he said: ‘For the sake of immortality, you must work, get stronger. But now I will show you how it’s necessary to work. For a beginning, let go the servant and begin to do everything yourself.’ Sometimes he gave both men and women heavy physical work, for example, sawing logs. Undertaking this work, they experienced something different, their self-feeling changed, they now ‘sensed themselves’, ‘remembered themselves’, and this was with joy.31 One purpose was to direct both the movements and the physical work so as to help a person ground herself, strengthen the ‘I’ and develop individuality. Gurdjieff’s ‘Fourth Way’ lay through experiencing embodiment.
The creators of what they significantly named ‘free dance’ had set out on a similar road: through exercise to concentrate on sensation, to feel movement from the inside, kinaesthetically. They devoted attention not so much to exteriority and the appearance the dancer achieved as to inner sensation and feeling. They presumed that kinaesthetic perception helps to focus not on the sense of external appearance but, rather, on learning to trust inner feeling. Their language and intent came close to an argument about becoming an authentic person in one’s own right. With such purposes in mind, the teacher of free dance, the American Margaret H’Doubler, for example, gave out blindfolds to her students. Also for such purposes, the Russian Duncanist, Ella Rabenek, threw out the mirror from the practice room. She also advised students to dance ‘as if you sleep’, possibly considering that it was thus easier to display individuality. ‘Gesture,’ affirmed the dancer, ‘must grow of itself from each new musical beat, changing, varying, being transformed in accordance with the individuality and mood of each pupil.’32 The Duncanists ‘gropingly’ came to the understanding which, a little later and with the great help of yoga, Dalcroze, Stanislavsky and Gurdjieff formulated: kinaesthetic perception is the mother of individuality. Stanislavsky said to the students of his Opera Studio: ‘Dances and gymnastics don’t give plasticity while there is no inner sensation of movement. It’s necessary in connection with walking for energy to roll along all the vertebrae and to leave by the legs … Then there will be suppleness.’33 Gurdjieff formulated the exercise, ‘I am’, for the integration of emotion and sensation as the substance of the personal ‘I’:
In a collected state I come to the feeling ‘I.’ I direct it into my right arm – ‘I’ – and then have a sensation in my right leg – ‘am.’ Thereafter, I have a feeling, right leg: sensing, left leg; feeling, left leg; sensing, left arm, feeling, left arm; sensing, right arm. I do this three times, each time feeling ‘I’ and sensing ‘am’.34
Gurdjieff borrowed this exercise from where Stanislavsky also took it, from yoga. Stanislavsky himself brought in a rule of play-acting, which he called ‘I am’: ‘There you have real truth, faith in your actions, the state we call “I am” … If you sense the truth in a play subconsciously, your faith in it will naturally follow, and the state of ‘I am.’35 Such thought has been at the centre of the twentieth-century search to achieve ‘presence’.
Full appreciation of the modern culture of dance and movement requires doing justice to an enthusiasm for movement that is vastly wider than the interests of the avant-garde. There is sport, obviously, not to mention the worlds of the disco and of street performance. Our history, pointing in this chapter to the roots of movement culture in rhythmics, free dance and esoteric practices, tells only part of the story. Moreover, no one could simply claim that, during the course of the twentieth century, movement practices spread from the avant-garde through so-called popular culture. The latter brought its own customs and activity into the equation and was very far from being a passive recipient of what the avant-garde had thought up. For instance, just at the time when rhythmics and free dance attracted notice, quite independently the tango and African-American ‘animal dances’, the forerunners of the sedate foxtrot, were hugely popular.36
We might make one suggestion for a wider history. A century before free dance, belief in what we are calling a sixth sense widened, and what had been belief in a vaguely formulated sense of intuition, a sense on the margins of cognition, took on, in part, a delineated existence as muscular feeling and in due course became the subject of considerable, systematic psycho-physiological inquiry. The sixth sense, understood in this way, was comprehensible to a large public, and people quickly took up the notion of kinaesthesia once it had been introduced. It was hardly news that life was embodied in movement. Then, in the early twentieth century, the artistic avant-garde embraced this theme and introduced a whole range of ways of exploring movement, and the perception of movement, in new kinds of productions. All the same, the different publics of the time, caught up in the massive translocation to city life, did not have to be, and were not, taught by this route about the nature and qualities of movement. Daily movement was experienced with a new kind of self-consciousness in the crowd, pressure, strain and speed of city life. This was a leading theme of the social psychologist Georg Simmel’s much cited essay, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, of 1903.37 To a significant extent, the kind of movement discussed in this chapter was a reaction against the excess of movement experienced in the city, rather than an influence on it.
Trying to take further such large questions, linking the arts and social change (so often, distressingly vaguely, called modernity), social theorists and anthropologists of dance and the movement arts draw in the concept of ‘presence’. In the background is the belief that movement, whether in avant-garde or ‘popular’ arts, achieves a special and much-desired condition of embodied being, or wholeness, in the world. As we have seen, speech and writing often treat movement as a state in which divisions of mind and body, subject and object, ‘high’ and ‘low’, nature and culture, disappear. The belief is as relevant in thought about skateboarding as about rhythmics.
There is precedent for this in the principle that Madame de Salzmann formulated in her reflections: ‘“I am” in movement.’ Thanks to movement and its perception, kinesis and kinaesthesia, she argued, a person achieves a special quality of experience of self in the world. She called this special quality ‘presence’, which was for her a full apprehension of kinaesthetic sensation, attention of a special quality, attention to the body’s way of being.38 Martha Graham, who so influenced the development of free dance in the United States, working in the same tradition of understanding, is supposed to have observed that movement never lies. While surely questionable as a philosophical premise, such a saying points to the reasons why ‘presence’, known in movement, became a pivotal category of the anthropology of dance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The word gave modern expression to the old claim that in touch there is unmediated knowledge, ‘encounter’, with the world. When there is ‘presence’, one is ‘in touch’.
In the twentieth century, the concept of ‘encounter’ was elaborated by the phenomenologists, following Husserl’s lead. Husserl had argued that kinaesthetic feeling and haptic sense (active touch, and touch active in vision) give conscious awareness an unmediated character: we grasp being in the world, and we are not an observer, through sensory mediation, of the world. This is the theory implicit in believing that movement tells the truth. As we mentioned in the introductory chapter, there was a history to this way of thought going back to the analysis of touch in the eighteenth century. The belief was a commonplace of nineteenth-century science and philosophy. The Russian physiologist Sechenov, for example, considered the muscular sense not conditional, but direct, issuing from the root of subjectivity: in contrast to vision, ‘muscular sensations … are purely subjective; they always reach our consciousness in the form of some kind of effort’.39 The originators of free dance, along with esoteric practitioners like Gurdjieff, then grasped, however, that ‘the unconditional’, or unmediated, character of movement sensation was not just material, neutral in relation to values, but moral and indeed spiritual. They returned to language, the language of ‘closeness’ and ‘movement with’ or ‘movement towards’ or ‘movement by’, its status as intuitive expression, the expression of a sixth sense, the expression of relatedness. What Jeanne de Salzmann called ‘presence’, Emmanuel Levinas, in the context of philosophical ethics, referred to as ‘a relationship with unity without mediation by any kind of principle or ideal’.40 Merleau-Ponty even compared unmediated feeling-sense, which has kinaesthetic sense at its centre, with the Holy Eucharist. Experience is ‘a certain way of being in the world suggested to us from some point in space, and seized and acted upon by our body, provided that it is capable of doing so, so that sensation is literally a form of communion’.41
Both Mikhail Bakhtin and Martin Heidegger, however differently, also described this supposed direct, unmediated connection with reality with the help of the category of presence (nalichie or nalichnost’, in Russian). According to Bakhtin, a person achieves ‘presence’ only in special circumstances, of which one, a principal one, is plyaska. (Bakhtin, we recall, was a member of the circle of Zelinsky’s students in Petersburg which avidly discussed the theatre of Antiquity.)
In dance, my exteriority, only visible by others and for others who exist, flows together with my inner, self-aware, organic activity; in plyaska, everything inner in me strives to come out, to combine with exteriority, and in plyaska I must strengthen being and join the being of others. My presence (confirmed as a value from without), my Sophia [sofiinost’, divine wisdom], dances in me, another dances in me.42
In his seminal work on Being and Time (1927), Heidegger invoked ‘presence’ in the context of an argument to restore to philosophy its concern with Being, the Being that a human has, that is, the kind of Being that has awareness of temporal Being. Heidegger identified an overlaying in the form of metaphysics in Western philosophy, and he sought to show that real ‘presence’ had roots in a more fundamental phenomenology of ‘being with’ or of being ‘to hand’. This in turn was one of the starting points for Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. He questioned the continued existence of metaphysics in Heidegger’s own work, since Heidegger appeared to take for granted the condition called ‘presence’, rather than question its place as a term in dualistic language, ‘presence-absence’. Derrida convicted the Western tradition of engaging in the metaphysics of ‘presence’, of privileging ‘presence’ over absence, building presumptions into thought. These and other discussions ensured a place for ‘presence’ in modern philosophical language, where it signifies the ‘here and now’ and, often enough, reiterates some version of the privileging of ‘presence’ that Derrida had set out to deconstruct.
Philosophy resonates with recent changes in performance studies. If earlier theatre studies centred around notions of image and representation, the new performance studies focus on ‘the real body’ and ‘the real space’. The interest is no longer in fictional characters in an imagined world created by the art of acting. There is a suspicion that representation linked to so-called grand narratives instantiates power and control, and there is a hope that ‘presence’, on the contrary, involves immediacy, authenticity, completeness, integrity and other such values. The concept of representation is embodied by the character of a drama; the concept of ‘presence’ is brought to life by the actor’s body.43 In contrast with the actor’s semiotic character, the actor’s ‘phenomenal body’ depends for its impact on her or his physical attractiveness, erotic appeal and, of course, capacity to move well. Theatre, understood in this way, is inseparable from dance. One drama actor even received praise for ‘how he commands the space – with an almost dancer-like freedom of movement!’.44 The actor’s ability to control space and ‘magnetically’ attract the attention of the spectators defines ‘presence’.
One of the authors of the relatively new discipline of anthropology of the theatre, the Italian director Eugenio Barba, defined ‘total presence’ in terms of movement and energy; it has nothing to do with strength, being under pressure or in search of speed. The actor may be concentrated to the utmost, unmoving, but in that absence of movement, she affirms movement with all the energy in her arms, like a strained bow, ready to let go the arrow. What contemporary Western theatre refers to as ‘presence’, Barba wrote, Eastern culture attributes to spirits or energy. On the island of Bali, there is speech about taksu, ‘the place of concentration of light’, and it is understood that the actor is lit by a special energy, and that this energy influences the public.45 Alexandre de Salzmann, we have argued, understood something of the energy of ‘presence’, ‘the place of concentration of light’, and used it in his stage lighting. Jeanne Salzmann understood it in rhythmic movement.
The artists of the avant-garde and the esoteric practitioners arrived at one and the same point:
to know oneself is not to look from outside but to catch oneself in a moment of contact, a moment of fullness. In this there is no longer ‘I’ and ‘me,’ or ‘I’ and a Presence in me – no separation, no more duality. To know means to Be.46
In such unity, the capacity to move, the capacity to carry out precise rhythmic patterns or to improvise dance, became one with the knowledge, or feeling, of movement. As in many ancient traditions, in the East but also in the West, profound, concealed knowledge, including what has been called ‘higher sensitivity’, is deeply practical. To understand something means to know how to do something. This was certainly the case with plyaska; it remains a principle underlying modern discussion of body performance in all its forms.
Madame de Salzmann lived a very long life, long enough for there to be scientific recognition of the wisdom which Dalcroze and Gurdjieff announced to her, the wisdom to know how and to be. In the first half of the 1980s, for instance, Howard Gardner put forward a theory of multiple intelligence, arguing that intelligence has many different aspects. He called one of these aspects the bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence, a person’s capacity to correct movements and handle objects.47 Speaking about this kind of intelligence, Gardner cited the work of the Russian physiologist Nikolai Bernshtein (mentioned in the early part of chapter 2), who was one of the first to demonstrate that the direction of the body involves a special type of mind, which everyday speech denotes as agility. One of Bernshtein’s students, Victor Semenovich Gurfinkel, also an eminent physiologist, illustrated this with a story. After the Second World War, Bernshtein taught the physiology of movement in the Central Institute of Physical Culture in Moscow. One day, he orally examined a female student, a sportswoman, active in diving. By way of a supplementary question, he asked the girl to give an example of cyclical movement. She answered with a silly remark: ‘a dive’. Nevertheless Bernshtein gave her the highest mark: ‘she knows [has the ability] to dive’, he explained.48
Alain Berthoz and Jean-Luc Petit, in their book, The Physiology and Phenomenology of Action, had a chapter titled ‘From the cogito to kinaesthesia’. To bring our arguments to a conclusion, in the following chapters we move in the opposite direction, from kinaesthesia to the cogito.