The psychological categories of ‘introversion’ and ‘extroversion’ serve as useful markers of two extremes in the character of performed dance…
Introvert: to turn inwards; to turn in upon itself; a person interested mainly in his or her own inner states and processes rather than the outside world.
Extrovert: to turn outward; to make manifest; a person mainly interested in the world external to him/herself; a sociable, outgoing lively person.
The psychological categories of ‘introversion’ and ‘extroversion’ serve as useful markers of two extremes in the character of performed dance. The work of avant-garde dancers and choreographers following Merce Cunningham would fall into the first category. Their work is characterised by a meditative and solipsistic quality. The averted gaze of the dancer and the sense that movement derives from an internal compulsion gives the appearance that the work does not actively seek to connect – though can happily co-exist – with its environment, musical accompaniment or the presence of an audience in close proximity. In its early conceptions, this ‘introverted’ quality was often seen as negative. Describing work by the new wave of American postmodern choreographers, such as Simone Forti, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer, an article by critic George Jackson in Dance Magazine from April 1964 complains: ‘Why do these people want to be themselves so badly that they practice doing it in public?’ Another reviewer criticised a contemporaneous performance by Rainer, commenting that the dancer was so self-enclosed she seemed not to care whether anyone was watching or not.
The psychological attitude of ballet is quite the opposite, with its emphasis on ‘turnout’ (a stance derived from the act of opening the body out from the hip socket down to splayed foot) and the linear shapes and gestures of dancers directed towards the frontal plane of a conventional theatrical setting. If the ‘introverted’ and meditative attitude I have described above gives the viewer the impression that the dancer is somehow privately ‘feeling their way’ through movement (chance methods and improvisation were an important source for the generation of this work), conventional ballet describes bodies performing variations of a pre-existing language. Nineteenth-century romantic ballets, such as Giselle or La Sylphide, were structured through narratives that were communicated directly to the audience in a mixture of ‘pantomime’ language and enchantingly danced ‘divertissement’. Modern choreographers of ballet, such as George Balanchine or William Forsythe, distort and exaggerate the classical lines of traditional ballet, but their movement is nevertheless directed to maximise the audience’s visual apprehension of the bodies in stage view.
The introverted style prioritises individual agency to the extent that the elements of the performance context (performer, musician, lighting design, audience) are autonomous and equal, almost as though they are divided from each other by invisible screens. The extroverted style, on the other hand, rests upon a contradictory hierarchy around the performance’s explicitly engaging visibility: the dancers are there to perform for an audience (in this sense subservient) but, at the same time, they are highly skilled and spectacular (in this sense masterful).
The dance and choreography of Michael Clark forge paths of co-existence between these oppositional states. Clark brings the sense that he is thinking his way through his body – testing out each muscle inch by inch, marking each possible position – together with the display of his virtuoso skills. He sets these two states in dynamic tension. The vocabulary of movement that Clark has invented bears this out: the sense of freedom and ‘release’ emanating from interior exploration of movement ripples through his body so that it appears charged with a sense of radical subjective potential and yet is ultimately controlled. In a section of Would Should Can Did (2003) set to Erik Satie’s Four Ogives, Clark appears unspectacularly in a muted costume as he traverses the stage. But instead of walking plainly in Cunningham-inspired ‘ordinary’ fashion, or tripping lightly as a ‘dancer’, he makes his way in a manner that resembles something between Charlie Chaplin miming a tightrope walk and Michael Jackson moon-walking, via the ronde de jambe sweep of ballet-trained feet. Testing the verticality of his body against the horizontal surface of the floor, Clark simultaneously entertains us with a surprising variation on our own method of getting from A to B, and invents a new and energised dance movement that is both highly skilled and controlled.
Throughout this piece, Clark appears onstage as a kind of occasional eruption of a psychological investigation, anchoring the rest of the movement that we see to his own personal exploration. Clark’s short solo is followed by the appearance of his four company dancers who perform a slow and quirky variation on gymnastic exercises, posing in what look like early modernist sculptural shapes. Coming together in line, the dancers form a ‘can-can’ style train, merging into a curious, lolloping caterpillar-like creature whose straight-legged kicks happen heavily out of synch. Breaking up this formation the dancers stand apart, facing the front of the stage in a breathtaking moment of choreographic unison. Elevated by the light they dance springing movements of ballet, ascending into the air with pointed toes, legs quivering like ethereal butterflies. As the curtain closes on the performance, a spotlight shines on a gigantic Cerith Wyn Evans glitterball in the auditorium. Fragments of silver light scatter around the auditorium, magic-dusting the crowd and connecting the audience to a shared space.
