I’ve been reading Mindy Aloff’s Why Dance Matters (Yale University Press, 2022) and was delighted to see this much deserved rave review by Willard Spiegelman in the Wall Street Journal (paywall). The range and depth of Mindy’s dance scholarship is, frankly, astonishing. I’ve had the lucky experience of attending ballet performances with Mindy, and she even agreed to join me at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to screen a film of an obscure ballet (“A Wedding Bouquet” by Fredrick Ashton with words by Gertrude Stein). Mindy’s observations and insights have deepened my appreciation of ballet and now, having read Why Dance Matters, I am even more eager to contionue my exploration of the wide world of dance.
About a third of the way through Why Dance Matters, you encounter several paragraphs that address the question “Why does looking at dance matter?” I’ve often left the theater having been deeply moved by a performance and desperate to hold on to the afterimages of what I’ve just witnessed only to have them slip away when city noise intrudes. Here’s why, says Mindy: “If you consider dancing seriously — as something more worthy of your concentration than gazing at a Lava Lite — then you quickly learn that even for a short, simple number there is quite a lot of information to take in, and to do so requires fast eyes, keen hearing, and a capacious memory. There are elements in any dance, regardless of the tradition or style, that are difficult simply to recognize as they go by, much less to analyze and then discuss, just as there are indeed layers of possible significance to poetry that begin to reveal themselves only after many rereadings.”
And later:
Simply trying to appreciate what actually takes place in a dance — the facts of dance action — is hard enough. A more extreme brain workout is trying to witness what the dancers are doing while remaining aware of the theatrical effects or illusions their movement is intended for the audience to see. If the choreography is coordinated to a musical score, then to recognize and track points of coordination as they happen and be able to recall them later should earn you admission to Mensa. And trying to keep track of all of this while remaining receptive to whatever epiphanies of meaning the dance may provoke — and perhaps while being overtaken by rapture, too–requires a type of multitasking in while your consciousness, so to speak, has one eye on the stage and one watching your brain be a brain.
The reader is then invited to take a walk with Mindy among dances where “the multitasking might prove not only as usefull to brain health as sudoko but even more enjoyable.”
Take the walk! Buy Why Dance Matters here.
Dance matters. You already know this if you’re a season ticket holder to the local ballet company. And it matters if you dance alone while dusting, or with your partner at a wedding or Bat Mitzvah.
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Author: The Best American Poetry
