Living Is A Form Of Not Being

Great Artists Can Be Uncertain. Of Course They Are While Strugggling To Find Solutions. Tolstoi's Scripts Are Almost Indecipherable. Emily Dickinson Provided Four Or More Alternates For Every Word; Beethoven Wrestled With Endings To The Point Of Exhaustion; In Our Day Jerome Robbins And His Lack Of Decision Are A Byword In The Dance Profession. But All Of These Knew Very Well What They Did Not Want, And What They Did Not Want Was The Current Coin, The Well-worn Usage. What They Wanted Was Something Newly Experienced, And Therefore Unknown And Hard To Attain.

But Remember That Intent Is Everything. One Does Not Just Jump, One Lifts Into The Air, One Rises. In The Same Way The Lifted Leg Of An Arabesque Becomes A Wing, And Not A Mechanical Leverage Like A Raised Trap Door. This Is The Precise Difference Between Dancing And Acrobatics. The Dancer Tries To Express Something; The Acrobat Merely Pulls, Raises, Stretches And Grinds. The Acrobat Is Lost In A Web Of Muscles The Dancer Is All But Invisible In Projected Idea.

Modern Dancers Give A Sinister Portent About Our Times. The Dancers Don't Even Look At One Another. They Are Just A Lot Of Isolated Individuals Jiggling In A Kind Of Self-hypnosis And Dancing With Others Only To Remind Themselves That We Are Not Completely Alone In This World.

The Universe Lies Before You On The Floor, In The Air, In The Mysterious Bodies Of Your Dancers, In Your Mind. From This Voyage No One Returns Poor Or Weary.

Theater People Are Always Pining And Agonizing Because They're Afraid That They'll Be Forgotten. And In America They're Quite Right. They Will Be.