DANCE AS PRIMAL LANGUAGE : THE ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATRE IN ACTION

Clifton Brown, Linda Celeste Sims, and Constance Stamatiou

from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre doing an excerpt  from a dance

 This video is part of a growing revelation  for me of the power of dance. Particularly compelling is the progression of the dance from the point when, after they have been dancing for a short while, the male dancer falls to the floor and the female dancer steps over him.

I find amazing the uncanny virility evoked by the slow thrust and rotation of her hips after stepping over the male figure, a movement whose enigmatic potency is amplified by being  repeated twice, an assertion of power that explodes in a wild and yet controlled gyration as she spins in a serpentine  movement.

What could this mean? Perhaps its meaning is encapsulated in its form, in whatever beauty we are able to perceive in the dancers' movements. This way of looking at dance suggests that, like much of music, it is trans-verbal, going  beyond language, operating at a level of communicative power that is more visceral than conceptual, more instinctual than reflective, drawing from the unity of body and mind an acknowledgement of values that escape reification, escape fixing in terms of particular conceptions but which sink into the self to spread outward like ripples in  a lake, leaving the self to respond as it is moved to do. 

 Something even more primal to beings than sound is. Possibly something, that, according to Rolling.out.com's documentary  on the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, existed before and is more primary to life on earth than the peculiarities related to the emergence of humanity, emerging "long before humans set foot on the planet". 

Ancient ceremonies come to mind, fertility dances, temple dances that combine the sacred and the erotic, the Hindu concept of the kundalini, the serpent of consciousness and transformative power coiled at the base of the human spine to rise when aroused by effort, ascending  up the spine to the crown of the head to explode in a burst of illumination; a courtship dance; an evocation of the stages of a relationship; a suggestion of episodes in my own history-all these rise to the surface of the mind, stimulated by this dance centred in the duet between the male and female dancer and the rhythm of motion, falling and rising that shapes that dance.