My Life in the Theater (Part III)

A couple weeks ago, we attended a dance concert, the Cleveland Dance Festival in the Westfield Insurance Studio Theatre in the Idea Center. Looking about, I saw a couple hundred people I had never seen before, which was fascinating. I always recognize at least a few folks in any theater audience.

But those would be theater people. These were dance people. A completely different population. It was fascinating.

Dance is weird. Non-verbal performance – abstract, movement based performance – it can be alien, and that by itself is disquieting to me. We use words to describe our world with specificity. But dance is an entirely new language, a visual, physical language.

Freshman year, one of the very first exercises we were asked to prepare for Acting 101 (I don’t think it was called Acting 101 but you get me) was to lip-synch a song from a musical. I chose "Heaven on Their Minds" from Jesus Christ Superstar. Our instructor, a grad student, then picked apart our choices.

Why that song? Why hide your eyes with sunglasses? Why spend so much time standing still in a pose, wagging just one finger?

That last one stuck with me. We can be myopic about our bodies, we think we are making a “Grand Gesture” when we point with our finger. We feel our entire self projecting through what is, in visual reality, a very tiny part of your body, the tip of your index finger.

Use the whole self! Do not neglect one single part of yourself! Be aware of your entire person, and use your entire person! Know how you appear to others.

At the same time, I was also taking a modern dance class. It’s the only time I have taken a course in dance, and as with so many other courses, I was exposed to a whole history of artists of whom I had been entirely ignorant; in this case, it was those who had broken with classical, traditional, acceptable forms of movement for something entirely new and different, to discover another way to communicate, to express through movement.

And I was learning it all for the first time, and it was awkward. Lanky, six foot teenager, flailing about, sometimes literally flailing, attempting grace. Not aspiring to it, merely attempting.

You can’t fake it. I would soon become aware of just how many of my achievements to date had been accomplished by faking it, by not doing the work, instead relying upon my experiences to simulate knowledge, wisdom, or understanding.

Acting is pretending, but you can imitate what you don’t know. And you can’t pretend to dance.

To be continued.