ABSTRACT
To begin a twenty-first century essay on dance analysis with an extract from a poem written at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, by the English visionary painter and poet William Blake (1757-1827), might seem to strain credulity, since dance research is very much a newcomer as a discipline, one which could hardly have existed at that time. Furthermore, Blake’s spiritual convictions were strongly held in the face of the growing imperative of scientific rationalism, as his biographer, Peter Ackroyd (1995) illustrates, whereas at the beginning of the twentieth-first century this is no longer contentious (except in fundamentalist religious contexts), but rather the taken-for-granted modus operandi of everyday life, and of many disciplinary investigations. Nevertheless, like most effective art, this poem might be seen as timeless:
not only is it a well-known and evocative poem, it also speaks to the present as much as to the past. Blake’s poetry, it has been suggested, carries a link to the present in its ‘biblical motifs and images’ (ibid.: 25).1 That this is effective largely though metaphoric relevance, rather than factual connection, is a demonstration of the power of the image, whether visual, verbal, danced or musical, to speak across different aesthetic environments and time periods, even when the fundamental mode of rationality changes from a theological to a scientific one. Arts scholarship today inhabits a paradoxical position, evoking a history of images which, in turn, suggest other times and places, dealing with ideals and ideas in a mode which is imaginative and expressive, rather than scientific. I suggest that this extract from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence
(in Keynes 1966: 431) may be seen as a metaphor for the process of analysis
of dance, bringing attention to the relationship between the single moment and the whole of an experience, in an act of interpretation, whether of life, of a dance or of a poem. The analogies that suggest themselves are several. Firstly, the poem points up the momentary nature of experience, highly relevant to the perception of dance, since the moment is all we can see. We cannot appreciate this time-based art all at once like a painting, so, like music, we observe (and usually hear also) a moment-by-moment shifting landscape – knowing full well that this is a fraction, a slice, a tiny part that fits within a larger whole of the dance (Adshead 1988). Each moment thus takes on the character of ‘infinity in the palm of your hand’, referring simultaneously to the significance of the moment and to the meanings of the whole. In each single moment we realise the dance as ‘the world in a grain of sand’ or, expressed another way, the entire dance becomes encapsulated in a single movement. Yet, as it is extended before our eyes, each moment presenting itself before us in turn in this physical, yet metaphorical way, each sequence followed by another, and another, the dance reaches towards infinity (or more prosaically towards the end). In the wholeness of the moment we see ‘heaven’, in the exquisite connectivity of elements, distinctively formed in this way in this dance. Therefore, in looking at dance analytically, a notion that does not in itself
exclude either interpretation or metaphor, we have to observe the single moment intently, to register its completeness while also seeing its movement toward something else – another moment – what it shares with the next, and how it differs. This accumulation of moments, marked by similarity and difference among and between them, culminates in wholes of varying sizes and ultimately in the ‘dance’, something that has a beginning and an end even if it is without conventional beginnings and endings.2
