Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  6. KNIFE, SPOON, FORK

  A secular trinity—knife, spoon, fork.

  No hierarchy. The list can only be varied, systematically. As in knife, fork, spoon. As in knife, spoon, fork. As in fork, knife, spoon. As in fork, spoon, knife. As in spoon, fork, knife. As in spoon, knife, fork.

  Seemingly immutable (after all that history).

  They lie there, flat. On a plain (plane) surface. Perpendicular to the edge of the table.

  A trialogue.

  A stately relationship. Not all on the same side of the plate. Three divides into two and one. Fork on the left side. Knife and spoon on the right.

  The knife is scary by itself. But as part of a setting, something else. Lying beside the spoon, the knife becomes quite domestic. Knife and spoon: the odd couple. They don’t go together, you don’t use them together. But they are together.

  The fork is solitary. Always is. Even in an ampler setting, all you could have next to it is another (smaller, larger) fork.

  That’s how they’re arranged at the start of the meal, one step down from the plate. Escorting the plate on either side.

  No excuse now to eat with your hands. Civil eating (versus gluttony).

  After finishing eating you arrange them neatly on the plate.

  Not alphabetically. Not in order of importance, if there were one.

  A trinity but quite contingent.

  They seem to complement each other.

  We have learned to use all three. But they can be used separately, of course.

  7. DANCERS ON A PLAIN

  On a plane? An airplane?

  On a plain. As open (borderless) as feasible.

  Low, level. Don’t try for any of those old heights. Depths.

  What is essential about a surface that makes it different from another surface? How do we register smoothness in a surface, a movement, a sound, an experience?

  Smoothness?

  Yes. Something continues, plausibly.

  Pleasurably. With parts.

  What does it mean to be one part of something (a surface, a movement, a sound, an experience)?

  The old heights. Mirroring. Look down. These are my genitals.

  Be more modest; elegant.

  Sometimes light, sometimes heavy—it’s all right to be heavy sometimes.

  Makes it new. Yes. And make it plain.

  8. SYMMETRIES

  Dancers on a plane. No center. Always off-side. Any place is the center.

  We seem symmetrical. Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs; two ovaries—or two hairy testicles. But we’re not. Something is always dominating.

  A mirror image: a fantasy of symmetry. The right the reverse of the left, or vice versa.

  We seem symmetrical. But we are not.

  They cross-refer (knife, spoon, fork). As in the brain. Right-handedness means the left side of the brain is dominant. Left-handedness means the brain’s right side dominates.

  How to find out which side of your brain is dominant. Close your eyes, think of a question, then slowly think of an answer to the question. If while you’re doing this you turn your head slightly to the right, that means the left side dominates.

  And vice versa.

  The question-master.

  An art that asks questions.

  How do we understand how one part of a surface, a movement, a sound, an experience relates to another? Note: you have a choice of questions. But if that’s the question you choose to ask, you can be sure the answer will include a bias toward asymmetry.

  “The non-relationship of the movement,” Cunningham has declared, “is extended into a relationship with music. It is essentially a non-relationship.”

  The dancer must be light. Food makes you heavy.

  You eat with your hands, dance on your legs. Eating can be right-handed or left-handed. Is dancing left-legged or right-legged?

  Any place is the center.

  A real symmetry: chopsticks.

  9. SILENCES

  Lots of prattle. That, too, is a kind of silence. (Since there is no silence.) The deaf hear their deafness. The blind see their blindness.

  Controlling through silence. Whoever speaks less is the stronger.

  Is there a warm silence?

  The noise of ideas.

  Take it to language.

  No, take it to babble. Cut up the words in strips, like raw vegetables. Make meals out of words. A culinary relation to words …

  Suppose Knife, Spoon, and Fork are three people. And they get together on a plane (plain). What would they have to say to each other?

  I know. “Who brought the marshmallows?”

  Mushrooms, surely you mean mushrooms.

  As I said, marshmallows.

  That’s not what I had in mind. Then what?

  Then they get very particular about how the marshmallows are to be cooked.

  All three of them know a lot about food. (About eating. Preceded by gathering, preparing, cooking …)

  But these are just marshmallows. American junk.

  You can be fastidious about anything. And marshmallows can be botched, too; can disappoint. It’s a question of (yes, once again) the relation of inside to outside. The inside has to be cooked very well, while not letting the outside catch fire. Ideally the outside will get crusty but not burnt, while the inside melts. Then, right before it falls off the stick, you pluck it off with your fingers and pop it whole into your mouth.

  Stick? What happened to the fork? Don’t you toast marshmallows with a fork?

  All right, the fork. But this is better as a gooey experience than as a refined one.

  “Everywhere and at all times,” Lévi-Strauss has observed, “the European code of politeness rules out the possibility of eating noisily.”

  And you don’t always have to be polite.

  10. IN MEMORY OF THEIR FEELINGS

  In the first—buoyant, allegro vivace-painting, this is real flatware that has been painted white. In the second painting, the artist has cast the utensils in bronze.

  Repeating as a means of varying. Accepting as a way of discriminating. Indifference as a form of emotional vitality.

  Use me as you will.

  Savoring non-relatedness. Put the emphasis on savoring. “I am more interested in the facts of moving rather than in my feelings about them” (Merce Cunningham).

  Would you like to play chess? Chess seriously.

  We were younger then. Who would have thought then—when we were younger; then—that it would be like this?

  We meet. This could be at a dinner party (forks, knives, spoons, et cetera).

  We say things like, How lovely to see you. I’ve been busy. I think so. I don’t know. That must have been very interesting. (Everything is interesting. But some things are more interesting than others.) Probably not. I’ve heard. In Frankfurt, in Illinois, in London. Next year. What a pity. He’s gone away. He’ll be back soon. They’re organizing something. You’ll get an invitation.

  We smile. We nod. We are indefatigable. I think I’m free next week. We say we wish we saw more of each other.

  We eat, we savor.

  Meanwhile, each harbors a secret idea of ascending, of descending. We go on. The plane’s edge beckons.

  [1989]

  Dancer and the Dance

  LINCOLN KIRSTEIN, the finest historian of dance and one of its master ideologues, has observed that in the nineteenth century what the prestige of ballet really amounted to was the reputation of the dancer; and that even when there were great choreographers (notably Petipa) and great dance scores (from Adam, Delibes, and Tchaikovsky), dance was still almost entirely identified for the large theatrical public with the personality and virtuosity of great dancers. That triumphant mutation in dance taste and in the composition of dance audiences which occurred just before World War I, in response to the authoritative intensity and exoticism of the Ballets Russes, did not challenge the old imbalance of attention—not even with the subsequent invention by Diaghilev of dance as an ambit
ious collaboration, in which major innovative artists outside the dance world were brought in to enhance this theatre of astonishment. The score might be by Stravinsky, the decor by Picasso, the costumes by Chanel, the libretto by Cocteau. But the blow of the sublime was delivered by a Nijinsky or a Karsavina—by the dancer. According to Kirstein, it was only with the advent of a choreographer so complete in his gifts as to change dance forever, George Balanchine, that the primacy of the choreographer over the performer, of dance over the dancer, was finally understood.

  Kirstein’s account of the more limited perspectives of dance publics before Balanchine is, of course, not incorrect. But I would point out that the exaltation of the performer over all else pervaded not only dance in the nineteenth (and early twentieth) century but all the arts that need to be performed. Recalling the effusive identification of dance with the dancer—say, with Marie Taglioni and with Fanny Elssler—one should recall as well other audiences, other raptures. The concert audiences ravished by Liszt and Paganini were also identifying music with the virtuoso performer: the music was, as it were, the occasion. Those who swooned over La Malibran in the new Rossini or Donizetti thought of opera as the vehicle of the singer. (As for the look of opera, whether it was the staging, the decor, or the often incongruous physique of the singer—this hardly seemed worthy of discussion.) And the focus of attention has been modified in these arts, too. Even the most diva-besotted portion of the opera public of recent decades is prepared to segregate the work from the performance and, within the performance, vocal prowess and expressiveness from acting—distinctions fused by the inflatedly partisan rhetoric of extreme reactions (either ecstasy or the rudest condemnation) that surrounded opera performance in the nineteenth century, particularly early performances of a new work. That the work is now routinely seen as transcending the performer, rather than the performer transcending the work, has come to be felt not just in dance, because of the advent of a supremely great choreographer, but in all the performing arts.

  And yet, this being said, there seems to be something intrinsic to dance that warrants the kind of reverential attention paid in each generation to a very few dancers—something about what they do that is different from the achievements of surpassingly gifted, magnetic performers in other arts to whom we pay homage.

  Dance cannot exist without dance design: choreography. But dance is the dancer.

  The relation of dancer to choreographer is not just that of executant to auteur—which, however creative, however inspired the performer, is still a subservient relation. Though a performer in this sense, too, the dancer is also more. There is a mystery of incarnation in dance that has no analogue in the other performing arts.

  A great dancer is not just performing (a role) but being (a dancer). Someone can be the greatest Odette/Odile, the greatest Albrecht one has ever seen—as a singer can be the best (in anyone’s memory) Tosca or Boris or Carmen or Sieglinde or Don Giovanni, or an actor can be the finest Nora or Hamlet or Faust or Phaedra or Winnie. But beyond the already grandiose aim of giving the definitive performance of a work, a role, a score, there is a further, even higher standard which applies to dancers. One can be not just the best performer of certain roles but the most complete exhibit of what it is to be a dancer. Example: Mikhail Baryshnikov.

  In any performing art which is largely repertory, interest naturally flows to the contribution of the executant. The work already exists. What is new, each time, is what this performer, these performers, bring to it in the way of new energies, changes in emphasis, or interpretation. How they make it different, or better. Or worse. The relation of work to performer is a musical-structural one: theme and variations. A given play or opera or sonata or ballet is the theme: all readings of it will be, to some extent, variations.

  But here as well, although the dancer does what all executants of a work do, dance differs from the other performing arts. For the standard against which dancers measure their performances is not simply that of the highest excellence—as with actors and singers and musicians. The standard is perfection.

  In my experience, no species of performing artist is as self-critical as a dancer. I have gone backstage many times to congratulate a friend or acquaintance who is an actor or a pianist or a singer on his or her superlative performance; invariably my praise is received without much demurral, with evident pleasure (my purpose, of course, is to give pleasure), and sometimes with relief. But each time I’ve congratulated a friend or acquaintance who is a dancer on a superb performance—and I include Baryshnikov—I’ve heard first a disconsolate litany of mistakes that were made: a beat was missed, a foot not pointed in the right way, there was a near slippage in some intricate partnering maneuver. Never mind that perhaps not only I but everyone else failed to observe these mistakes. They were made. The dancer knew. Therefore the performance was not really good. Not good enough.

  In no other art can one find a comparable gap between what the world thinks of a star and what the star thinks about himself or herself, between the adulation that pours in from outside and the relentless dissatisfaction that goads one from within. The degree and severity of dancers’ self-criticism is not simply a case of performers’ raw nerves (virtually all great performing artists are worriers, skilled at self-criticism), of artistic conscience—a déformation professionnelle. It is, rather, integral to the dancer’s formation professionnelle. Part of being a dancer is this cruelly self-punishing objectivity about one’s shortcomings, as viewed from the perspective of an ideal observer, one more exacting than any real spectator could ever be: the god Dance.

  Every serious dancer is driven by notions of perfection—perfect expressiveness, perfect technique. What this means in practice is not that anyone is perfect but that performance standards are always being raised.

  The notion of progress in the arts has few defenders now. If Balanchine was the greatest choreographer who ever lived (an unverifiable proposition firmly held by many balletomanes, myself among them), it is surely not because he came after Noverre and Petipa and Fokine, because he was the last (or the most recent) of the breed. But there does seem to be something like linear progress in dance performance—unlike the other performing arts largely devoted to repertory, such as opera. (Was Callas greater than Rosa Ponselle or Claudia Muzio? The question does not make sense.) There is no doubt that the general level of dancing in unison in companies like the Kirov and the New York City Ballet (which have probably the two best corps de ballet in the world) and the prowess and power and expressiveness of the leading dancers in today’s great ballet companies (the two just mentioned, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Ballet, and the American Ballet Theatre—among others) are far higher than the level of the most admired dancing of the past. All dance writers agree that, a few immortal soloists apart, the dancing in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was technically quite limited by today’s standards.

  Raising the level is the function of the champion: a considerable number of people found they could run the four-minute mile once Roger Bannister had done it. As in sport or athletics, the achievement by a virtuoso dancer raises the achievable standard for everybody else. And this is what Baryshnikov, more than any other dancer of our time, has done—not only by what he can do with his body (he has, among other feats, jumped higher than anyone else, and has landed lower), but by what he can show, in the maturity and range of his expressiveness.

  Dance demands a degree of service greater than any other performing art, or sport. While the daily life of every dancer is a full-time struggle against fatigue, strain, natural physical limitations and those due to injuries (which are inevitable), dance itself is the enactment of an energy which must seem, in all respects, untrammeled, effortless, at every moment fully mastered. The dancer’s performance smile is not so much a smile as a categorical denial of what he or she is actually experiencing—for there is some discomfort, and often pain, in every major stint of performing. This is an important difference between the dancer and the athlete, who ha
ve much in common (ordeal, contest, brevity of career). In sport, the signs of effort are not concealed: on the contrary, making effort visible is part of the display. The public expects to see, and is moved by, the spectacle of the athlete visibly pushing himself or herself beyond the limits of endurance. The films of championship tennis matches or of the Tour de France or any comprehensive documentary about athletic competition (a splendid example: Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad) always reveal the athlete’s strain and stress. (Indeed, the extent to which Leni Riefenstahl, in her film on the 1936 Olympic Games, chose not to show the athletes in this light is one of the signs that her film is really about politics—the aestheticizing of politics in totally ordered mass spectacle and in imperturbable solo performance—and not about sport as such.) That is why news of an athlete’s injuries is a matter of general knowledge and legitimate curiosity on the part of the public, while news of dancers’ injuries is not, and tends to be suppressed.

  It is often said that dance is the creation of illusion: for example, the illusion of a weightless body. (This might be thought of as the furthest extension of the phantasm of a body without fatigue.) But it would be more accurate to call it the staging of a transfiguration. Dance enacts both being completely in the body and transcending the body. It seems to be a higher order of attention, where physical and mental attention become the same.

  Dancers of unrivaled talents like Baryshnikov (among woman dancers, Suzanne Farrell comes first to mind) project a state of total focus, total concentration, which is not simply—as for an actor or a singer or a musician—the necessary prerequisite of producing a great performance. It is the performance, the very center of it.

  Merce Cunningham and Lincoln Kirstein have both offered as a definition of dance: a spiritual activity in physical form. No art lends itself so aptly as dance does to metaphors borrowed from the spiritual life. (Grace, elevation …) Which means, too, that all discussions of the dance, and of great dancers, including this one, fit dance into some larger rhetoric about human possibility.