Asie, Ligne et Mouvements

I have the hopeless awareness of a burial by the surge of countless images, which hide and obscure, suffocate and cancel, blind and diffuse a new ugliness leaving us without replies.

However, some dancers resist and bring their sensitivity to the finest tip. They show, often alone and little or badly seen, our shadow and our light, our pure presence, rid of the weight of incessant speech and cursed chatter.

They are rare.

Do not hesitate to go very far to meet them.

The lamp bearer

Swee Keong LEE is dancing a dance, understood not just as a thought but as a poetics of movement.

To be the blank page and then the hand that draws, to be the light and the opposite of the day, to be a sensitive animal in the eternal present and the soul that ponders the blackness that comes from the abyss. Being absent in order to embody the presence, being before the word and yet address it.

“It is the night of the world that advances here to meet each of us” wrote Hegel. The phrase comes to mind when you see him dancing. His motion is a shadow casted. He comes from this “dance of darkness”, Japanese Butô. He has discarded its excesses to retain its depth, its awareness of a world of piercing pain and its ambition to embody it.

He dances the night that walks inside us.

It is rare, in fact, to see a man dancing. Most of the time something is wrong. It’s hard to say exactly what.

The impression is of a simulacrum, a more or less skilful gesticulation that takes place while forgetting the need for a real statement.

” A dance that’s not worth it” to paraphrase Chabrier.

So we turn back to nature, the animal moving from the very place that dance seeks, the tree whose branches, captive to the wind, move space with the tact and intelligence of the arm and hand finally subjected to the motions breathed into them.

All of nature guides us towards the right gesture, that is to say, unwillingness, patient listening, true animation, harmonious singing that rises effortlessly from all that tends to live and silently accepts death. And then, the lightning and its liveliness, the gush, the leap of pure joy out of the wave.The stillness, at last, just before darkness, the sudden silence of the living, preparing for “the dreadful night ».

He goes, like Diogenes of Sinope, carrying his dance like the other carries his lamp, a living flame in the blinding day.

This is what this dancer carries with him. He is there, facing us, upright and courageously laden with the burden that falls to us and that we neglect. This burden, our deep humanity and the inhuman darkness that makes it up, is what lifts the weight of truth from every dance.

Without it, what’s the point?

Master Lee’s lesson

A man was addressing me insistently and had not stopped doing so. He was seeing me and waving.

Hiding behind my camera, I didn’t listen to him.

But he was showing me the unfinished thing, the thing we can’t achieve, but the gesture that remains, the stripped-down form, the purity, the thing to which we aspire and to which, sometimes, we have devoted our lives.

He was showing me a whole man and nothing but the man himself,

master and gardener of a splendid flowering of movements like so many simple flowers constantly blooming in the hollow of trembling hands.

Yes, it’s fear that we have to fight, and in the face of death, we have to stand tall, unguarded, and sing our Chanson de geste.

There is no before, no original intention. There is something that wills and wants.

We are alive, now, in the Openness.

You also have to see, hear and listen. Do not be fooled by your confusion.

I wrote to Master Lee to thank him for his availability. Wishing me luck, he sent me a text by Chuang Tzu, the wandering master of ecstatic walks.It’s about a man in a boat in the middle of a lake. The title is “The Empty Boat”.

This is what true man is, an empty boat in the immense emptiness of  the Tao.

Er Ge

A small young woman with a patient body stands before you with reserve. The dance takes her over, and it’s an explosion of beauty. I mean, this conflicting twisting between what you see and what should be and yet isn’t and which changes every second with a vivacity barely human. It is slow and then fast, held, contained and, given, abandoned, surrendered and delivered and yet kept secret, buried inside, like a treasure, a light, an ancient jewel of the Celestial Empire.

It takes hard work, determination, courage and deep intuition, year after year, in the face of short-sighted audiences and polarised critics, to find the strength to fight and bring out the full richness of a culture that is so ancient that our own, next to it, seems barely born.ER Ge in Chinese means  Princess, and other things too that I’ve yet again forgotten. Her parents named her well, making her the heir to a long dynasty of women and men who have mastered the art of thinking with and through the body.

This dancer resembles the handwriting of Shi Zhou, the great calligrapher and master of the Paintbrush Forest. Rounded and angular, crazy cursive, incredibly virtuosic.

She is the ink too, the black smoke swirling in her chest. Her heart is like an ink stone that grinds the black wood needed to inscribe of every true, gesture.

This dancer is a lone warrior, discreet and gentle, who shoots without flinching the sharp arrows of her beauty.

She will never abandon her high and necessary solitude, but if you run into her, her dance will pierce you.

Credits

Heddy Maalem

heddymaalemartwork.com