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September 28, 2005
Trotsov listens to opera
Tortsov must be a fan of opera. I connected to Stanislavski cynical point of view as he described his encounter with Tortsov. I agree that everything changes when put on a stage. Maybe it has something to do with the sudden jump in elevation or the chance to be the superstar you always hoped to be. Everything ceases to be natural and we begin trying and perform “better”. We become more conscious of our posture, how far our feet are apart, if our toes are pointed forward, one foot directly in front of the other. However unnatural it seems, putting our body in this awkward position must some how be better than we normally conduct ourselves. Is the way the dancer contorts his self into a complex pose better than how I stumble into my regular slouch? The dancer may be viewed as more graceful and elegant, but in no way can it be considered more natural; artificial comes to mind. I look opera the same way, the human voice being contorted into an inhuman wail. Trotsov seemed so adamant that it takes constant awareness to walk correctly, taking every muscle, bone, and nerve into consideration, as if everyone had been walking incorrectly all along. Yet Stanislavski felt that people thought him drunk as he practiced Tortsov walking exercises in public. I thought of Marey and his studies into movement. The most inane movements such as walking, hammering, standing from a sitting position, became beautiful and elegant as Marey separated the changing positions over time. There is no “correct” way to walk or to stand from sitting, beauty arises simply form the movement. I would imagine that Marey’s studies into movement would show irregularities in people’s walks as unique variations on the standard waddle of modern man.
One thing that I did have to reevaluate was Tortsov’s idea on a continuous line of movement as in music. First, I wondered what Tortsov would think of Drum & Bass music and break dancing, where disjointed starts and stops directly link to the dancer to the movement. Then Tortsov transferred a motion down his arm as he counted the timing of a 4/4 rhythm. It seemed to me that he had disproved his theory of a continuous line, cutting the single movement into four separate segments, but then I recalled his detailed description of the sequence of muscular events required to take a single step and realized the linear path that is innate in all movement and music. I like the idea of a linear path more than a continuous line. Maybe it’s the time we live in, with all it’s non-linear capability and wonderment, that make me skeptical of accepting that everything is always a continuous line mp3 vs. 8-track cassette, break-beat vs. opera.
Posted by Leif Mangelsen at September 28, 2005 09:21 AM