A quote from Isadora:
"For three hours i sat tense with bewilderment, watching the amazing feats of Pavlowa. She seemed to be made of steel and elastic. Her beautiful face took on the stern lines of a martyr. She never stopped for one moment. the whole tendency of this training seems to be to separate the gymnastic movements of the body completely from the mind. The mind, on the contrary, can only suffer in aloofness from this rigorous muscular discipline. This is just the opposite from all the theories on which I founded my school, by which the body becomes transparent and is a medium for the mind and spirit."
I know what she means. I was thinking on this exact theme just half an hour before reading it in ballet class. We were working on some step where the arch of the foot rests against the inner ankle bone - heel facing forward, toes pointed and behind. And I couldn't help chuckling at the extremity of ballet. Everything is done to the maximum. Muscles stretch and pull in strange directions, not necessarily done in an efficient physiological manner, but done with full concern for the aesthetic. This is a performance dance. Some of the exercises are so strange. Walking is probably the strangest for me, because I have done so much work on my walk in partner dances. To walk in turnout with your legs straight is odd indeed. I, however (unlike Isadora), have not waged war on the ballet. (I suppose that I must support a cause fully before I could wage a war..) But I enjoy the exercises, strange as I find them. It is in fact the strangeness and difficulty that keeps me coming back.
I was just reading the account of Isadora's premiere in Russia. She says she dances Chopin's preludes as she understood them. Oh to see that. I wonder how someone fully expresses themselves in dance, how, as she says, one dances with the spirit. And what would it mean to do other things in this manner? To live and work with the spirit? To eat? To shit?
