Session #9 – 9 Feb 2022

Moving away from Singaporean texts, we explored an American text next, but with a classical theme of Greek myth. This text is adapted from Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses, with the characters removed and presented as a prose-poem. We chose this as a text with narrative and descriptive elements - something we had not danced yet.

Bodies, I have in mind,

and how they can change to assume new shapes—

I ask the help of the gods, who know the trick:

change me, and let me glimpse the secret and speak,

better than I know how,

of the world’s birthing,

and the creation of all things, from the first to the very latest. Before there was water and dry land,

or even heaven and earth,

nature was all the same: what we call "chaos," with neither sun to shed its light,

nor moon to wax and wane,

nor earth hung in its atmosphere of air.

If there was land and sea, there was no discernible shoreline, no way to walk on the one, or swim or sail in the other.

There was neither reason nor order, until at last, a god sparked-- --glowed, then shone like a beam of light to define earth and the heavens and separate water from hard ground. Once these distinctions were made and matter began to behave, the sky displayed its array of stars in their constellations -- a twinkling template of order.

The sea upon which they shone quickened with fish, and the woods and meadows with game, and the air with twittering birds. Each order of creature settling in to itself. A paradise, it would seem, except one thing was lacking: words. And so-- --man was born. He was born that he might-- --talk. Some say the god perfected the world, creating of his divine substance the race of humans... ... others maintain that we come from the natural order of things. But one way or another, people came-- erect, standing tall, with our faces set not to gaze down at the dirt beneath our feet, but upward toward the sky in pride or, perhaps, nostalgia.

Mary Zimmerman, 1996

Once again, we started with Aiden dancing without having seen the text.

<<insert first dance for Metamorphoses>

Compared to the plainer speech-style of the previous texts, this text presented more challenges because of the florid style of expression, as well as the rich descriptive passages. Aiden found himself echoing the text rather than dancing simultaneously.

We applied Speech Act Theory to the opening paragraph and interpreted it as an incantation, seeking aid from the gods to tell the story. This allows the whole piece to be seen ritualistically, and the story as an offering to the gods, or a sermon for devotees.

We spent the session responding the Aiden’s improvisations, then discussing the text to unearth new elements Aiden can explore.

We also discussed what approach Sze Min can take to help evoke some of the chaos and creation mentioned in the text.

<<insert 4th dance for Metamorphoses>

After dancing this text four times, the team found that the narrative sections tempted the dancer to either be very literal and unnecessarily illustrative, or be deliberately abstract. What other strategies are there to help the dancer find a middle course; while engaging with the narration more closely? This question will need further exploration. For now, we decided to forego this text because of time constraints. We hope that the next phase of Moving Text will enable us to tackle this – narration is likely to form a large proportion of the texts that dancers might be working with, since all performers are storytellers.

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