Painters have canvas and pigment, writers have words and delusions, musicians have strings and wood and air. But dancers? They’ve got meat and bone and the ticking clock of their own deteriorating ligaments. Every arabesque is a negotiation with gravity and mortality. You can’t separate the art from the artist because the artist is the medium, and the medium is already dying, has been dying since birth, and will stop working sometime before they’re ready.
That’s the rawness of it. That’s what makes it real. That’s the geometry of dying.
And here it is happening inside a museum, that mausoleum for dead things made permanent, with Bank of the West’s logo somewhere in the credits, because everything beautiful needs a sponsor now, everything ephemeral needs corporate backing to justify its existence. But the bodies don’t care about any of that. They’re just doing what bodies do when someone finally gives them permission to transcend the mundane machinery of getting from point A to point B.
The thing about these photographs is they’re lies. Beautiful lies, but lies. Because you can’t photograph dance any more than you can photograph music. You’re just documenting the aftermath, the crime scene. The real thing happened in real time and then it was gone, and these images are just evidence that something occurred, somewhere, when specific people inhabited specific geometries in space for reasons that made sense in the moment.
But we need the lies. We need the documentation. Because otherwise how do we prove to ourselves that it happened at all? That for a few minutes, some humans decided to use their bodies for something other than sitting in traffic or staring at screens or slowly calcifying in office chairs?
Dance is the art that reminds you that you have a body, that the body can do things, that it can mean things without needing to explain itself in a podcast. It’s the art form that says: this is temporary, this is fragile, this will never happen exactly this way again, and that’s not a bug, that’s the whole fucking feature.
