ROGER COPELAND
audience not think of the dance objectively, or look at it from an
aloof and intellectual point of view,-in other words, separate
itself from the very life of the dancer's experiences;-the audi–
ence should allow the dance to affect it emotionally and without
reserve. It should allow the rhythm, the music, the very move–
ment of the dancer's body to stimulate the same feeling and emo–
tional mood within itself, as this mood and emotional condition
has stimulated the dancer.
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This denial of objectivity characterizes not only the audience's expe–
rience of the dance, but the choreographer's as well. To the early
pioneers of modern dance, it would have been unthinkable not to
perform in their own works-a practice that denied them the oppor–
tunity ever to stand fully "outside" the finished dance.
Nothing reveals quite so much about the primitivists as their
attitude toward language. This attitude was probably expressed
most concisely by Loie Fuller when she wrote, "Motion and not lan–
guage is truthful." Movement, which is thought to derive from a
deeper, more elemental domain of the self than language, presum–
ably circumvents the machinations of consciousness in a way that
language cannot. This led Graham to declare that"movement does
not lie."
According to this argument, words-at the very least-come
between
us and experience. As Bergson notes in
Time and Frer Will:
When I partake of a dish that is supposed to be exquisite, the
name which it bears suggestive of the approval given to it comes
between my sensation and consciousness; I may believe that the
flavor pleases me when a slight effort of attention would prove
the contrary.
Perhaps the most serious "charge" leveled by the primItIVIsts
against language is that it is guilty of having introduced the principle
of duality into human experience. To use language correctly is to
recognize that words are
not
the things they signify. Language bears
an arbitrary, culturally mediated relationship to the information it
conveys; but the gestures of dance are thought of as somehow insep–
arable from the sensations they evoke. Dance is thus celebrated as
the very image of Edenic unity, the last remaining vestige of what
Boehme called
"die sensualische Sprache,
))
or sensual speech (which
Rilke later envisioned as "natural speech by means of the body").
Writing about Martha Graham, Arlene Croce says:
