Soul Dancing

Have you heard the new Adele song? You must have – it was the biggest hit of last year. But have you seen the video that goes with it? Normally music videos are rubbish - half the time they don’t have anything to do with the song at all which is okay I guess, as long as it doesn’t detract from it, but sometimes they seem to go out of their way to ruin it. Adele’s is different. It makes a great song even better – it’s what a music video should be. Part of the video features a dancer in a room full of snow. He or she (I couldn’t tell) wields a sword which is twirled around in beautiful arabesques that scatters the fallen snow. It had me transfixed. Here I thought, is an image of my soul.

Putting aside the question of how conceited I am, what is interesting is that someone like me, with no understanding of dancing can be affected so profoundly by it. This shouldn’t come as a surprise I suppose, because dance is probably the oldest form of artistic expression there is. Maybe singing came before it – it doesn’t really matter which came first - but somewhere a long way back in our race’s past, our ancestors learnt that both voice and movement could be transformed into something magical. Maybe they were mimicking animals – I don’t know; and I don’t know what that magic is that infuses the voice or body, and turns sound into song, and movement into dance. What I do know is that song and dance have a humanity about them that strikes a chord in us that goes beyond an intellectual appreciation; perhaps it is our instinctive self that is responding to a memory of our species dawn.

No doubt dance has since evolved into a thousand sophisticated and structured disciplines that bear little resemblance to that first dance, and yet the power of a gifted dancer to touch our soul endures. It may be that our soul is an expression of our instinctive self, as I note that some scientists are beginning to theorise (see for example Griffith at ‘world transformation movement.com).

Sadly, with this talk of soul and instincts I am reminded of the story of Vaslav Nijinsky, perhaps the greatest of all ballet dancers. In the early 20^th century, Nijinsky joined Diaghilev’s celebrated company and so powerful were his performances that he quickly became the most famous dancer in the world. His magnetism was not due to any exceptional technical ability, nor even to his extraordinary power: it was due to Nijinsky’s instinctive ability to lose himself in his dancing to such an extent that all sense of performance would be lost in the truth of his portrayal. As the faun in the Rites of Spring Nijinsky became the faun and the audience were transported as they looked on.

Sadly at the age of thirty Nijinsky began to descend into schizophrenia; soon afterwards he was committed. For the rest of his life he lived in a passive state of near silence. However over a period of six weeks at the beginning of his descent he wrote his famous Diary. Within its often incomprehensible and tragic utterances he conveyed an attempt to escape some deep and terrible anguish by joining with ‘god’. He would repeat the coda “I am god” again and again.

The only explanation he gave was that “I am god through feeling”. I can only guess, but it seems that in order to escape his pain he was attempting to abandon his intellect and retreat to a world of ‘feeling’ where he had no sense of self. The one thing I can be certain of is that it wasn’t an egocentric utterance - not by a million miles. It was in this selfless state of pure feeling that he felt safe, and it was also here that he felt not just connected, but one with god.

It seems clear that Nijinsky’s state of ‘feeling’ was an atavistic, instinctive state. What is hard to reconcile is that he equated this state with god. If we believe that our instincts are selfish, and that our evolutionary heritage is red in tooth and claw then it is hard to see how Nijinsky’s regression would bring him to a religious sensibility. Obviously I am reading a lot into the words of a man on the brink of breakdown, but again I can’t help but note that Griffith has suggested that human’s instinctive heritage is a cooperative one, not a selfish one. Perhaps this line of enquiry provides the key to the riddle of Nijinsky’s exulted descent.

Although it doesn't discuss dancing, you might also find my article The Vampire and Good and Evil an interesting read.