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DIFFERENCE, LIMITATION AND
CREATIVITY: accepting our state of incomplete
assimilation into a given pattern
Rogerio
Migliorini
In the first year of my training, I studied with Mrs. Maria Duchenes. Mrs Duchenes
introduced Laban’s methodologies in Brazil. His methodologies value the inner aspects
that motivate movement and accept diversity once they can be applied to pupils with
different training, age, and physicalities.
Laban’s wide approach to movement is only possible because he studies human movement
as whole, and not only specific patterns of movement proper to this or that dance
style. Therefore, people trained in Laban usually observe movement in general, be
them mechanic, human or animal in their nature. One of the applications of Laban’s
method of movement analysis, for instance, is in the analysis of animals non-verbal
communication, such as that of dolphins, wolves, and bears.
Thus, my approximation to and identification with Laban’s methodologies, suggests
that in my professional life I have searched for diversity and difference, i.e. not
necessarily for those things that fit the models defined by the majority.
Following my studies with Mrs Duchenes. I moved to Campinas in order to study dance
at University (UNICAMP). Although the school there was relatively closed to different
ways of thinking and expressing dance, the time I spent over there was most rewarding
both, personally and professionally speaking. Nevertheless, one year after my graduation,
I had to go through a neurological surgery and the after-effect of it was a hemiparesia,
which means I had half of my body partially paralysed.
Naturally, I was so shocked by that that I came to believe that dance was definitely
out of my life. A “dark” period began, and it was much longer and much more painful
than I could have consciously realised. Nevertheless, many great reflections came
out of it.
At first, there was a period when I did not even want to see videos of dance. Let
alone meet any of my colleagues who were dancing, or who could be seen performing
or doing any sort of work within the dance field. It was even worse to meet people
who had had other kinds of training but who worked within the dance field, or who
danced out of sheer pleasure. It seemed that all these possibilities had been denied
to me. During this time, I withdrew from the dance and art fields, trying to avoid
my colleagues as I often had feelings of shame, failure, and inferiority when I saw
them. I also felt a silent revolt, and undoubtedly together with the other feelings
that I had, it showed a feeling of self-pit.
This mourning phase ended when I realised that the surgery and its after-effect had
not stopped me from dancing. I noted that I had had negative thoughts about myself,
and about most other things throughout my life. Most of them were supported by beliefs
that I was already examining but that I came to examine more thoroughly after the
surgery, and which were showing to be false. They had made me stop performing, not
the surgery itself.
Undoubtedly, the most important thing that happened during this period was that I
realised this mechanism. Because of I was preventing myself from fully experiencing
all the feelings of satisfaction, and all the happiness and fulfillment still possible
to me, I was making the losses I had gone through much more painful than they actually
were. Therefore, I was protracting and increasing my suffering, and sentencing myself
to an unhappiness much worse than what had actually been determined by the damage
of some physical skills. In short, I was holding tight to an old psychological mechanism.
Little by little, instead of carrying on running away from dance, I started to look
at my differences and at the limits of my movement with different eyes. I started
to value what I intended to convey with the dance rather than how fit I was, or my
physical skills. Then, I gradually started to get close to dance again in a possible
and comfortable way to me. I first started to attend a study group about dance and
started to share the company of dancers and dance scholars again; afterwards I attended
a course on a somatic practice that took place in a dance studio which was a gathering
place for people with physical abilities and bodies that I no longer had. After that,
I went back to giving dance classes, and finally, I took heart to go back to performing
again within a dance language and a method that had always been very important for
me, but that I had come to neglect and forget.
At this point, I have to stop and say that some of my ex-teachers and mainly, some
of my ex-class-mates, actually all my friends, were fundamental to this process by
encouraging me, and by being nice, friendly, and respectful to me. They never ever
saw any reason for me not to keep on dancing, just as they never ever saw or treated
me as somebody who was not a dance thinker, an artist, and a dancer. In other words,
most of the beliefs and prejudices I had about disabled dancers actively performing
on stage, were mine not theirs.
Nevertheless, this process is not finished yet, although it has already lasted for
almost 15 years. It represents the retaking of a central axis. Each minor step in
this way is very important, and fundamental to me. It is a path that embraces happiness
in itself. By walking along it, I wave away the vultures of negative feelings I have
circling about me; by exploring it, little by little I find, and start to recognise
myself again.
Now, during the period described above, it was common to hear encouragements like
the need to overcome limits, or the need to deal with the new limits of my body.
These plus my gait and my way of moving visibly different, besides the presence in
my body of an imagined inability and ugliness, made me think a lot about difference,
limit, illness, and ability.
Then, a line from one of the poems by Carlos Drumont de Andrade (a great Brazilian
poet) called my attention. It says: “When I was born, a crooked angel like one of
these that live in the darkness said: ‘Go, Carlos! and be gauche!’”. This little
line that a great poet quoted a wise angel as saying, tells of difference and of
its need to creation. Besides the reference to an angel that does not fit the usual
characteristics of heavenly beings, the poet employs a French word that means left,
but also twisted, graceless; ill-done, clumsy, rude; impolite, awkward, ungainly;
useless; complicated; embarrassing, unpleasant, improper, graceless, inapt, unskillful
and left-winger. By extension, it means everything that is not right, straight, correct,
fair, honest; adequate, convenient; healthy; normal; exact; real, rightful; or everything
that does not agree with something else, is not in a straight line, or is not true,
proper; or consistent with the rules. When I read this line I cannot help but smile,
for to be gauche is not but the poets’, artists’, creators’, and freethinkers’
fate.
And do those people just mentioned think all of us are different?
I do not know about them. But I particularly think so, and the reason I give for
that is that before I got disabled I used to think everybody was just equal to everybody
else (or, at least, to the majority of them). My disability threw right on my face
the differences that I already had but that I could not see. The same way, other
people who are not visibly different from anyone else have invisible differences
also, and by ignoring and comfortably projecting them on to the other, stigmatise
them.
Therefore, in my opinion different physiques, tastes, traits of personality, life
history, etc., are inevitable Even if we have some similarities, our individual differences
will always prevail. For instance; even twin brothers that were brought up within
the same culture and family, that went to the same school and social clubs, and that
share the same friends, will have different experiences.
By quoting this thought by Samuel Butler:
You will have a black sheep or two, and probably a long tailed one or two, and
a sheep with only one eye, and another with a wart on its nose, and so forth. These
ones will be your marked sheep, and if you find all of them you may be satisfied
that the rest are safe also.
I cannot help but think that some differences are apparent, and some others are invisible,
but all of us have a wart on our nose, or a longer “tail”. All in all, we all have
some imperfection, or slightly deviate from an ideal form. All of us spot something
we do not like, something we want to make a clean sweep of, something we do not trust
to the world, and often, not even to ourselves.
Along history, men has always pursued eugenics; i.e.: the norm, the common, the sameness,
the perfection; and has always tried to eliminate that which does not fit in with
the norm. Nevertheless, total equality, a complete fitting in with the norm, or with
what is common, does not exist in nature or in the real world.
Barbies and super-heroes are inhabitants of this ideal world. In it, ballerinas do
not ever grow old, kings and queens never go to the toilet, doctors do not ever get
ill, dentists do not have toothache, and teachers do not ever fart. But without such
a thing as difference, fingerprints; human, animal, mineral and vegetable variety;
the evolution of species, the several urban and natural landscapes; the cultural,
linguistic, architectural, and artistic diversity that enrich life and make it much
more interesting would be impossible. Total equality would make the world extremely
stable, and immutable. Life would not offer us any surprise, nor challenges. Boredom
would reign. Ultimately, there would be no movement.
But difference has always been, and no matter the trials to eliminate it, there are
reasons for it to be kept on existing.
One of the roles of those who ostensibly spot it has been to wash the stains, or
to purify the other from any deviations by taking them upon themselves. Then, they
must go to the desert in order to die there, instead of the person they “disinfected”.
(1) Therefore, only with the total elimination of self-difference projected on to
somebody, the other can perpetuate the illusion that he himself is not devious. Some
people, then, function as escape-goats, and must die in the desert, be stoned to
death, burned alive in flames or kilns, subjugated, enslaved, made an outcast, an
so forth. And escape-goats invariably are the ones who spot any difference, or are
they not?
Then, a big physical difference may entitle anybody to be a escape-goat, but the
same may happen because of any other difference. Even if they are insignificant,
they can assume great proportions and entitle the person to become an escape-goat
anyway. All in all, what we want is to mark, or to point somebody out, and tell his
or her differences, but not our own.
So, we are comprehensibly terrified of being spotted as different. Nevertheless,
we cannot always prevent it from happening. There are differences that cannot be
hidden nor concealed, and at moments, we get face to face with the human reality,
with our fragility and finiteness.
We may take these inevitable moments of exposure as real calamities able to finish
with our lives. But, is that really so?
As we said above, a more positive function of difference is to put things into motion,
to propose the new, to initiate disturbance, to question and destroy what is already
established, and finally to allow creation and modification. An everyday example
of difference related to movement is the water that streams down rivers and falls
in cascades because of the different levels of the soil it encounters in its way.
For the same reason it can be used to generate electricity, and exist as running
water in our houses.
(1)
The origins of the word escape-goat was told to me by Mariângela Guelta, a
visual artist, art-therapist and philosopher.
Kali, the Hindi goddess of death and destruction, is another example, although rather
uncommon, of the same thing. Note that all Hindi deities are simultaneously good
and evil. I dare to think that she may embody difference, once that positively speaking,
death destroys the old and creates the new.
I understand that Shiva also, is the incarnation of movement for he is the god of
dance, and though the movement of all the other things and his own, he enables creation.
But what about limit?
I do not regard limit as something that can be overcome. I believe that a real limit
is given. For instance: if we can run more and more, or stay underwater for a longer
time, or dance despite any disability. in all these cases we are not breaking a real
limit. The best diver does not stay longer underwater than a globefish, just as the
best runner cannot beat a cheetah The best parachutist needs a parachute otherwise
he will fall freely from the aircraft, and he will not recover his shape afterwards
as it happens in the cartons. In all these cases a false limit is broken. What is
discussed here is rather our belief that we have capabilities much smaller than they
actually are. Our belief is altered, not our limits.
In the visual arts, especially in drawing, we can see that the limits of a given
shape are given by its contour. Without contour or limit though indefinite, there
can be no shape. For instance, a blot can only exist because of the limits that highlight
it from its background. Without this demarcation, we would not be able to see any
blot. In nature everything has a limit also. We are not able to imagine the world
without limits. Without it there would be no sky, clouds, raindrops, puddles, creeks,
rivers or seas. Not even thoughts and ideas. Limit is form, and even our thoughts
and ideas are forms.
Still in the visual arts, let us look at the pictures Picasso painted when he was
young. Then, he would draw a bull thoroughly. In his maturity, though, he would synthesise
the shape of a bull with very few strokes and lines. Similarly, if we take a close
look at one of the paintings by Rembrandt in his mature years, we will see just blots
of stained paint. Nevertheless, if we see them from some distance, these blots will
reveal blazes, transparencies, jewels, and draperies as rich as the ones he used
to detail in his youth.
Thus, the great artists draw limits to themselves. They know that the human person
only acquires weightiness as a free spirit by doing so. Limit has to do with ingenuity,
ability, real mastery of a technique, maturity, and with true freedom.
Now, if we focus on the matter rather than on men themselves, we will see that the
materials with which they work present us with immutable characteristics such as
their chemical and physical properties. if, for example, we take wood, stone, metal,
plaster of Paris, glass, clay, etc., we will see that not all of them can be sculpted,
carved, modeled, or cast. Their plasticity varies. Each of them must be worked in
a different way, and what results from each is something just as different. The dancers
physicalities, the time and space necessary for our physical actions and motion,
the laws of Physics, the exertion of the force of gravity upon our body, the number
of words that can be written in a given text, are all examples of limits.
In order to deal with limits we need to tackle them face-to-face. They simply can
never be ignored. Reality imposes limits, but unlike we usually think, they are not
coercive nor prevent us from fancying or expressing ourselves. On the contrary, limits
consolidate creation. Like the margins of a river, or the coast and the continents,
the limits allow us to explore the deep water safely because we will always be able
to return to the safe ground whenever it is necessary. In creation, we simultaneously
deal with the immutable reality together with fancies, for reality without fancy
becomes bear and crushing whereas fancy without reality is no better than madness
and insanity.
Therefore, adequacy stands for creativity rather than originality. It is not creative
to do whatever one wants whenever one wants; rather it is creative to do exactly
the necessary without waste or greed. In other word, to be creative is to be elegant.
All in all, differences stands for limits, limits stands for form and limits are
fundamental for creation. Even if apparently they have nothing or little to do with
each other, appearances are deceiving, and they relate to each other as the different
facets of men.
I should finish here, but this cannot be so without my touching in another important
subject summarised in the question: Do limit and illness have a creative potential?
Oliver Sacks, an English neurologist who lives in the USA, answers this question
with a sound yes. He believes that illness has to do with the way we see it rather
than with the need to bring the person back to the state previous to it. In his book
“An Anthropologist on Mars” Sacks relates the case of a painter that after a car
crash became unable to see other colours than black or white. After a period of shock
and total psychological unbalance, when he would do nothing else but to brood over
his loss, he started to paint beautiful black and white canvases with shades of these
colours that just he could see and obtain. His work was unique and the hardest people
tried to copy it, the less they would succeed in getting the same results. After
being so well adapted to his new reality, cured as I see it, when he was confronted
with this possibility, he refused to go back to what he was before his “disability”.
Goya is another example of a similar case. He is known as the best European painter
of his time, once the originality and emotion that flow from his paints, and the
freedom of his style, highlight his work at the end of the eighteenth, and beginning
of the nineteenth centuries.
Despite his huge production, only after he was forty he created really original works.
Something very important to this change occurred in 1792. Goya was, then, taken by
a severe illness. Consequently, he was temporarily paralysed, partially blind and
permanently deaf.
In opposition to the neoclassical works of art in vigour at that time, and that aimed
to deny the subjection to the cheap matter by praising highly the purity of form
and the ideal order, Goya, perhaps because of his confront with the fugacity and
imperfection of the flesh, chose to face matter concrete reality instead of denying
it. Through his art, he fought darkness, and the tyranny and imposture the French
Revolution then became.
According to Goya’s visual messages, the Revolution was a light that turned into
darkness, since the domination of most of Europe by Napoleon, and the consequent
wars. By accepting the fatality of matter and by answering to an apparent restriction
caused by suffering, Goya says that we overcome the cosmic powers or the violent
strikes of history, because of our spiritual dimension. In reference to his paint
Madrid shootings of the 3rd of May of 1808, as well as to his works about
the horrors of war, Jean Starobinsky, in the book 1789, the label of reason
says: “Tempest and storm, as well as the bullets and the chopping knife, proclaim
the annihilation of our sensible existence, but they also wake up in us the certainty
of our escaping the limits with which it has bounded us.”
Thus, I think the creative human being must not deal only with beauty. He must deal
with human life as a whole, in its beautiful and hideous aspects. Goya witnessed
beauty and brightness turning into darkness exactly because of the denial of this
totality. He saw that matter and the things created from it weigh, last for a period,
and wear out. He found out that death and suffering are facts of life. He recognised
that solitude is everyones burden, independently of how civilised he or she is. He
ultimately showed us that the independence of ideas and their power lies in our ability
to accept and learn how to deal with solitude.
We must urgently review our values built in the habit of our whole history, the same
ones through which we oppress and annihilate the other different from us. Through
those values we fell free to project our “dark”, “negative”, “violent”, “stupid”,
“fragile”, “evil”, “ignorant”, “primitive”, side on to others. It is time we stop
throwing stones at other peoples glasshouses and take upon ourselves exactly what
we mostly want to hide. It is time we begin to think, backed up by several examples,
that the reverse face of darkness is light. By accepting our utmost frailty, our
ugliness, we can find out our strongest power, our immense beauty.
REFERENCES
BUTLER, Samuel. A first year in Canterbury settlement. In SEAR, James. New
Zealand dramatic landscape. Wellington, New Zealand, Milwood Press, 1979.
DRUMONT DE ANDRADE, Carlos. Poema de sete faces In DRUMONT DE ANDRADE, Carlos.
Poesia e Prosa (org. by author). Rio de Janeiro, Nova Aguiar, 1998
MIGLIORINI, Rogério. Diferença, limite e criatividade. On-line
Magazine Aplauso. http://superig.ig.com.br/aplauso/links.asp, São Paulo, 2004
MIGLIORINI, Rogério. Assumindo a Marginalidade. Unpublished, Unicamp,
2001
MIGLIORINI, Rogério. Pensar com o movimento e dançar com palavras.
In FERRETTI, Vera Maria Rossetti (org.). Dançando através do Pós-Modernismo.
Magazine of Instituto Sedes Sapientiae Art- Therapy Dept - Special Edition,
focusing the 3rd National Congress of Art-therapy. São Paulo, Ano V, número
4, 2000/2001
OSTROWER, Fayga. Criatividade e processos de criação. 8th Ed.
Petrópolis, Vozes, 1991.
OSTROWER, Fayga. Universos da Arte. 4th Ed. Rio de Janeiro, Campus, 1987.
SACKS, Oliver. Um Antropólogo em Marte: sete histórias paradoxais.
6th Ed.. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2001.
WINNICOTT, D.W. Textos Selecionados: da Pediatria à Psicanálise.
Rio de Janeiro, Fco Alvez, 1988
ABOUT ROGER
Roger started his educational dance teaching and career as a creative dancer in 1983.
He first trained with Mrs Maria Duscheness, who studied with Laban himself, and introduced
his movement theories in Brazil; later on Roger got his dance bachelor and teaching
degrees from the second most important university of Brazil and besides that, he
also holds a diploma in Art-Therapy. Roger was also a Rotary exchange student in
Auckland, New Zealand in 1980.
After a brain surgery in 1992, Roger became one of the few disabled persons worldwide
that have complete dance training and works in the area in various ways, performing
included.
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