Audience and closeup: first see, then understand, then be
dance
A Cavafy page, first or second decade of the twentieth century
She takes wing to Charleston! Charleston!
He understood the connection between how you dress and how you move
And now he’s dead of coronavirus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/world/africa/aurlus-mabele-dead-coronavirus.html
She raises her arms to the sun and dances forward
At the barre, she feels her body beginning to see into itself
In a profound dream, he conceives of choreography
New York, January 11, 1916: epiphany of Diaghilev
Source: George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014700731/
Interwoven, toe and heel
To dance is to learn from the acts of approaching and penetrating stillness what it is to move, and to love.
Sources:
http://oldadvertising.tumblr.com/image/174875282308. Date of original publication 1921. Photoshopped to restore contrast and color balance.
“Marguerite Agniel in a Buddha position with her legs crossed.” De Mirjian Studios, about 1929. Photoshopped only to remove blemishes. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/a55ztwxc
Symbolist art: the material and its ideal realization
Here in what I hope is a clickable link is Loie Fuller in 1905, when she was smiting the sensibilities of such as Auguste Rodin and William Butler Yeats.
Loie Fuller (1905) [silent short film]
And here she is on her return tour in 2016. Marmoreal now as an image by Rodin, she has gone static at last, and her beauty no longer needs to scowl with the effort of becoming.
Source of the Lumière Brothers video clip: YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dda-BXNvVkQ