Let me come to what brought me to this chapter.
I was in the first floor of a block with Ayush, at the fag end of the day, both of us tired amidst the loud noise of students practising. We had found a relatively quieter place and were chatting about Heidegger and life in general, and were casually watching the students practising dance on the ground floor. That was when I asked him, “Do all these stuff they do make any sense to you?”. He said “no”. I asked again, “Is that why this is enjoyable?” He nodded. I went on: “Will it be so good to watch if we could perfectly make sense of the whole thing?” Our conversation went off like that. We asked ourselves whether a dance movement could be ultimately enjoyable if it is completely nonsense. No it won’t be.
Rather, their dance is sense as well as nonsense. “These girls are saying one thing with that jump and gyrating of the hip but with the slicing-the-demon-in-the-air movement were saying something else. It is fun since we are looking at each little movement in isolation. It is so liberating that they aren’t making a holistic meaningful text through their actions. The non-correlated brokenness is the ultimate fun part, I would say.” Then we went on to debate this further. A jump up in mid-air expressing elation is more fun when it is delinked by the following movement, which takes us closer to our Being. Dance is liberating when it sounds like a toddler is tottering towards his mother after watching something interesting and wants the mother’s presence suddenly to make whole sense of it, and while tottering towards the object of his need he stumbles, falls and without completely falling raises himself midway and resumes his elated progression. All these little acts mean nothing when put together, but they bring immense happiness to the onlooker (the mother). Dance in its purest form is similar to this toddler’s movement.
While music is abstract in its language, dance follows a language of signs. They call these signs mudras in the classical Indian dance Bharatanatyam. These signs are highly visual, and they rely on posturing, gesturing, flexibility of the body, shifting of the body in relation to the space it is in, as none can dance without moving and when moving without constantly altering one’s locatedness in the space. Dance seems to be so enjoyable owing to its constant change, fluidity and its rational linking of signs in parallel with its non-rational and consequent delinking of the signs.
To explain the last remark a little further, let me talk of how you make sense of a dance happening right in front of you. Take up a sentence like “I am so elated, so over the moon, that I want to scream in joy”. When you read or hear this sentence, the word that has gone before the next arrives still stays in your memory. You don’t see “the moon” alone; you read or listen to it in relation to the preceding “over”, and “over” is never completely detached from “so”, and so on it goes. Which is why we often go back to the previous word or sentence during reading and ask people to “come back again” when listening to a monologue, a ranting or a complicated speech, or even when we are half-listening to someone at the other end of the line with our eyes on the smartphone. We constantly go back and forth in language to make sense, and then put the individual sentence in a frame or structure of logic. We freeze a sentence like we pause a video and watch the rest of the action. We freeze and resume quite so often while reading and listening unconsciously that we hardly realize we are doing so. But dance is one kind of expression that does not let us freeze and rationalize since signs are constantly moving and changing – we make sense of a dance non-rationally.
(From “Plop: Notes on Heidegger”)
(From “Plop: Notes on Heidegger”)