Knowing "The Dancer from the Dance..."

Technology is everything that amplifies and extends our reach, our capacity. A pencil and paper comprise a powerful technology. Or regard the technology of language, a technology that makes and defines humanity. One of the greatest technologies emerged first in China and then became available for the masses of the world, the technology of printing, and from that, the printing of books. Writing was a variant technology which crystallized language on paper. For me there still is nothing more exciting that entering the world of others through the miracle of books. Thus I am drawn to places where there are books, especially those wonderful street vendors with their magnificent piles of used books, out of print masterworks waiting for the right reader, an explorer in search of a new vision, a new truth.

Imagine my excitement that while teaching and learning with a class of young artists, many of whom are dancers, that I should come upon a book on the street, Dancers and the Dance, stories by Summer Brenner. It was published by Coffee House Press in 1990, and was waiting in this street bin for me on a sultry summer afternoon in NYC on West Fourth Street. Inside, on a blank page before the Table of Contents was:

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

---WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

It is such a privilege to discover and read this book, which is as fine a celebration of the dance as one would hope to find. This discovery awakens my own days of dancing ( you know those kinds of memories: "I could have been a star... I could have been somebody!")

Dance has contributed a great deal to modern technology as computers and cameras have pursued various approaches to motion capture, enabling us to break apart the vocabulary of movement while also learning how to use such motion capture in creative contexts.

Indeed, the dancer is the dance, a fundamental realization that can be extended to all of the performing arts. In dance, the body is the instrument, and learning to tune this instrument should be one of the fundamental standards of education: understanding the unique qualities of an instrument we inhabit for a lifetime.