In the early 1980’s Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker choreographed four pieces to different works by the composer Steve Reich. Collectively titled Fases, these works are classics of recent dance. The piece set to Reich’s ‘Clapping Music’ strikes me as especially fruitful for philosophical reflection. The piece is for two dancers and is built from a vocabulary of swinging arms and bouncing up on the toes of both feet and returning to planted feet. De Keersmaker claims that she arrived at this particular vocabulary through observation of children at play. Both motions are plainly expressive of bodily aliveness, but without carrying any particular meaning. Neither movement carries the sense of what Elizabeth Anscombe called a ‘basic action’, the primitive expression of trying to do and accomplish something. Going briefly up on the toes of both feet is not sufficiently stable to aid one, for example, in reaching something; and the swinging of the arms is isolated from its natural role as part of walking. These two movements are then set into short trains of combinations and variations, with the two dancers at first synchronized and then out of phase (hence the title ‘fase’). The general impression is one of immense liveliness generated by the interaction of the intricate quasi-polyphony of movements and claps. In its use of sub-semantic units, its non-narrative quality, and its sense of working out a set of variations generated through stipulative rules, the piece falls comfortably within the ways of working of a great deal of experimental arts of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. How might then we account for the sense that this is a particularly successful instance of experimental art, a way of working when it often seems that the artist’s ambition is fulfilled largely just in doing something that allegedly has never been done before?
One path of reflection suggests itself with the seeming irresistible suggestion that the piece offers an unusually high or intense sense of structured ‘liveliness’. What sort of artistic value is ‘liveliness’? Thinkers from outside the narrow professional focus of art historians and philosophers of art may on occasion offer novel and revelatory perspectives on issues within the professional field. To my mind a recent and surprising instance of this is from Daniel Stern, a psychologist of infants and young children whose earlier work was only known to me through his classic The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985). In 2010 he published Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development. This short book explores ‘vitality’, the sense of being alive without which “the world would be bereft of much of its interest, and human interactions would be digital rather than analogic, whatever that might be like.” (p. 4)
Vitality is expressed above all in movement. A human movement is not a string of poses; rather a movement embodies a sense of temporality through manifesting a kind of “temporal contour or temporal profile,” (ibid) Temporality in this sense implies a style and rate of flow, and a sense of a beginning and end. In addition, all movement is necessarily spatial and so both characterizes and is of a certain space. As self-directed, movement also conveys a sense of forces behind or within the movement, and so animating it. And finally movement is directional in carrying a sense of purpose to go somewhere. Stern concludes that these five elements—“movement, time, force, space, and intention/directionality” (he oddly refers to them as “five dynamic events linked together”)--are typically bound together in a single Gestalt, a “fundamental dynamic pentad,” the awareness of which gives rise “to the experience of vitality.” (ibid)
In order to apply this conception of vitality to the arts, Stern supplements this initial characterization with three points. First, he insists that vitality is not a sensation, because there are different routes to the identification and characterization of vitality and sensation. Sensations on his account are ‘modality specific’ (p. 26), that is, sensations are specifically aural, haptic, visual, etc. The sense of vitality by contrast is ‘meta-modal’. The evidence for this is that the characterization of formal features of experienced dynamic pentads is the same across sensorial modalities: one can characterize the vitality of a range of sensations in the same terms and regardless of their particular sensorial modality. One speaks what one hears, sees, touches, etc. in terms of its spatial and temporal elements, their intensities, and its hedonic qualities. The experienced dynamic qualities of vitality, given in a gestalt, are the ‘forms of vitality’. Second, each art form shows forms of vitality “in a relatively purified form—pure in the sense that the dynamic features of a performance [Stern restricts his considerations to the temporal arts of music, dance, theater, and cinema] have usually been amplified, refined, and rehearsed repeatedly.” (p.75) To achieve this, each art form involves a history experimentation with expressive qualities. In the practice of the art form, artists have isolated and thematized particular forms of vitality, and then invented ‘codes’ that ‘mark’ or express them. (p. 76) But also, third, these forms of vitality internal to the practice of a particular art form possess, like forms of vitality more generally in life, a meta-modal quality. Consequently the rich and varied artistic exploration of forms of vitality is particularly well-suited to the collaborative works of contemporary arts such as dance theater, or those that typically use and integrate different, more conceptually primitive art forms and materials, such as cinema’s use of narration, movement, and sound.
Stern’s actual discussions of the different art forms are quite brief and schematic, but nonetheless stimulating. The most suggestive remarks, to my mind, are those that he makes on dance through a sketch of the method of the analysis of human movement introduced by Warren Lamb in 1965. (pp.87-8). Lamb analyzes human movement into two categories, posture and gesture. Posture involves the mutual adjustment of all parts of the body, whereas gesture isolates some part or parts of the body as bearers of expression. Accordingly posture and gesture can be individually described and their interaction analyzed. The relationships between posture and gesture form a continuum marked at one end by the skilled actions of a well-coordinated athlete to the sense of utter disjointedness between the two. Effects of vitality are generated by varying the relations of discord and concord between the two, and subsuming these relations under further more global structures, such as those provided by music or narrative. Stern gives the simple example of a ballerina who dramatizes her entrance by beginning to move a half-beat ‘late’, so as to have to ‘rush’ in order to catch up to her partner.
Some ways of applying Stern’s account to the analysis of de Keersmaeker’s piece are evident. Stern notes with regard to the theatrical work of Robert Wilson that an artist can ‘uncouple’ posture and gesture with stunning effect. The progression of Keersmaeker’s piece, from synchronization, through the dancers’ becoming out-of-phase and seemingly enacting alternate paths of variations, to the re-synchronization of their movements towards the end, gives the piece a simple and perceptually clear yet powerful sense of vitality. This combines with a range of mechanisms of isolation and re-combination, as well as the primitive expressions of vitality, especially clapping, jumping, and the swinging of the arms, to give the piece as a whole its unusually intense sense of vitality.
This analysis is of course only the briefest of sketches, but it perhaps is sufficient to indicate both one way that vitality is an artistic value in mixed-media works involving dance, and how time-based art forms such as dance and music prominently exhibit the value of vitality. But can this kind of account illuminate the value of vitality in other art forms? Stern explicitly forgoes consideration of literary arts and restricts his consideration of artistic forms of vitality to the time-based arts of dance, theater, and cinema. How might liveliness be embodied the arts less obviously amenable to such an analysis, especially in the ‘static’ arts of architecture and painting? In my next posts I’ll consider accounts from the anthropologist Carlo Severi addressing liveliness in the static arts and from the architect Christopher Alexander considering how the sense of liveliness arises in architecture.