Dance is an art that exists in both space and time. In 2016, MoveScape Center will be offering a series of workshops about space, focusing on Rudolf Laban’s Choreutic theories. As 2015 draws to an end, however, I want to focus on time.
Space is multi-dimensional. Time, on the other hand, is uni-directional. It flows in one irreversible direction — from past to present to future.
In reality, we exist only in the present moment. The past is gone; the future may never come. Yet, paradoxically, we carry the past in our bodies and minds as we simultaneously project ourselves into an anticipated future.
We have no sensory mechanism for perceiving time. And yet we are aware of time as a phenomenon closely related to movement. On some uncanny occasions, time appears to stand still. But mostly time seems to move like a dancer – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.
“Dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point,” observed Marcia Siegel. “At the moment of its creation it is gone.” And yet, as Rudolf Laban wrote, “Each bodily movement is embedded in a chain of infinite happenings from which we distinguish only the immediate preceding steps and, occasionally, those which immediately follow.” In every bodily action, “both infinity and eternity are hidden.”