So. If in each section or piece, Ida has an ideal object, which is the picture carried in the mind, and she rehearses the steps to reach it and from these steps come phrases of movement; the phrases either head off into unknown territory or already suggest the ideal object but are simply not it rather gesture towards it; then there is a rhythm of more or less rapid but distinct phrases, allowing repetitions, again, the repetitions are not constrained to having an immediate relation to the ideal object; as if she tests the steps, finding some, even the helpful ones, lead off in different directions; but she invests each with the import, intent, or sense to be reached by the final picture; because the smallest movement in a single direction involves a full bodily commitment, a plexus, and this smallest unit can be called the clinamen, there exists in it a chance element which can only be analysed as it resolves, that is, when it has leapt from the quantic world up on to the plane of representation by way of the nervous system of the dancer in the instant, where it receives its full import, by way of intent, and its sense, in regard to, and in the regard of, the ideal object; so every phrase of movement has about it this intense optimism; what the chance element throws up may be a fall, in terms of a catachronous movement, in terms of the fact that it enters the time of representation through a small hole, the appearance of which exists by chance and through a commitment by the dancer to the total bodily risk involved; therefore, this optimism is also an affirmation of risk that a given phrase might lead to the ideal object as well as that it might not; however much such a non-goal-oriented approach resembles play, insofar as it contains the accidental and the determined, it is not; and it is not not by the authority vested in the symbolic picture carried in the mind or the height from which the ideal object views the futility of the dancer’s optimistic gesturing, it is not play because everything is at stake at the instant of the fall into representational time, a chance event; what analysis means, insofar as there is a point of view at work in the making of the phrase, in forming the movement, and what can be analysed is neither the starting point, the chance event, nor the proximity or distance of the movement in the phrase from the ideal object (and let it be said that the movement is already in repetition, the point of view taken by analysis being one of its repetition and the point of view given by its repetition in the phrase) but how the phrase works and exactly where it is in relation to a totality in which it is included and in which the picture in the mind is also included and has its own relative function and position and sense; both the phrase and the ideal object are constitutive elements with an assymetrical relation one to the other, since the chance event through which the whole series of movements making up the phrase passes encounters the picture in the mind only at the level or time of representation and only then puts it into motion, anatomising the ideal, reproducing it as a second series; this destabilising and decentring of the ideal object so that it stretches out in series, like a series of hopes of which we may repent, phantoms betrayed at each step by the optimistic traits of the first series, this anatomisation belongs to the figure, a passional body of points (points as on a die and points localisable in space and time); finally, these points are the very points of contact and encounter between the chance event and the series of movements: a generative contact and a transforming encounter in the physical instant of the dancer’s steps, movements and phrases. So. If this, then can we say that for each section or piece of our project in rehearsal there is for Ida, the dancer, a figure and begin to assign figures as if a given piece had already thrown up on the screen of the mind an ideal object? For example, in the piece the Francis Bacon character has, that starts, My theory of beauty is…, we’ve already talked about the inverted crucifix of Cimabue, the worm of God. And might we begin our dancer’s portrait with this initial betrayal?
{ 2007 08 02 }
