In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

DANCING 69
Fascination with rhythm points to a fascination with the separation
between the human body, which is capable of incarnating (that is, of
becoming and being) a rhythm, and the human mind, which, as source
of the dual-level relation between signifiers and signified, is never fully
compatible with rhythm, because it cannot help associating becoming
and being with meanings (Golston). Putting a body under the sway of
musical rhythm therefore sets this body apart from the mind. In A
Vision, William Butler Yeats has one of the participants in a conversation
on poetry complain about a loss of "rhythmical speech," which (he
believes) results from realism's fixation on representation: "You will
remember that a few years before the Great War the realists drove the
last remnants of rhythmical speech out of the theatre" (33). A conception
of art that focuses exclusively on meaning-constitution and world-reference
must neglect the sensual qualities of its material surfaces: "The
realists turn our words into gravel, but the musicians and the singers turn
them into honey and oil" (34). For Michael Robartes, another protagonist
of Yeats's fictional colloquium, this very insight comes from a paradoxicallove
relationship with a ballet dancer: "I went to Rome and there
fell violently in love with a ballet-dancer who had not an idea in her
head. All might have been well had I been content to take what came;
had I understood that her coldness and cruelty became in the transfiguration
of the body an inhuman majesty; that 1 adored in her body what
I hated in her will" (37).
"Transfiguration," not "expression," is the key concept in Yeats's
reflections. The relation that he sees between the "body" and the "will"
of the dancer is not a relation that follows the binary logic of the signifier
and the signified. It is a transfiguration of one substance into a different
substance. On the multiple social levels of Yeats's, Baker's, and Reinhardt's
cultures, and in a wide variety of forms, dancing responds to this
very distinction between a mode of convergence and a mode of divergence
in thinking the mind/body relationship. This distinction also dominates
the debate about Ausdruckstanz, or "expressive dancing," in Weimar
Germany (von Soden and Schmidt, 152f£'). For a select intellectual
public, Mary Wigman, who stands at the center of this movement,
dances the "expression" of elementary emotions (such as passion, grief,
mourning) and of elementary existential situations (such as idolatry,
prayer, witchcraft). Often she combines her dancing with the recitation
of classical texts-and there is a good chance that Max Reinhardt's