Posts Tagged dancing
Coppélia: Dolls Tired from Dancing
So The Australian Ballet’s latest is the rather bizarre ballet Coppélia, and they were nice enough to ask me to write for their programme about how modern special effects were leaking onto the stage in 1870s Paris. Primitive automatons! Magic shows! Uh… exclamation points!
Coppélia (Leanne Stojmenov) and Dr. Coppelius (Damien Welch). Photography by Branco Gaica.
Mostly, I focused on the ballet’s villain, Doctor Coppelius. He’s depicted as a sad and lonely inventor, surrounded by his odd mechanical creations – some half-finished, some almost human. In the original horror story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though, he’s an alchemist suspected to be ‘The Sandman’, and is much more monstrous. (Like stealing-childrens’-eyes more monstrous.)
Yet he’s not the most horrific thing in the story. That role belongs to his beautiful, artificial faux-daughter, Coppélia. In the ballet’s programme, I write:
“The existence of a lifelike doll in Hoffmann’s original tale is not a charming curiosity. After the truth of his creation is revealed, Hoffmann describes lovers forcing one another to sing and dance off-key and out of time, just to prove they are human. Otherwise how can they be sure?”
Popular culture has provided us with more supposedly scientific ways to test if someone’s human, like the Voight-Kampff machine made famous by Blade Runner. The movie’s production designer described it like this: “Basically it was a lie-detector machine. The lie is, I am not a replicant.”
In fact, as I saw the frail Doctor Coppelius appear on stage, I was reminded of J. F. Sebastian, Blade Runner’s old inventor, living alone except for his toys. The nursery rhyme his toys sing to him – “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig” – still plays in my head with alarming regularity.
Blade Runner – and a gazillion other science fiction stories too, of course – are designed to make us wonder if we’re human after all. How can we really tell? Singing out of tune and moving off the beat? Close analysis of our pupil dilation at embarrassing questions? Maybe it’s just as the theme song ‘Coppélia’s Coffin’ from the anime series Noir says:
“People are dolls tired from dancing / Sheep on the altar / The mechanical dreams / Where are they headed?”
We’re all just dolls, tired from dancing. Coppélia tries to dismiss these question with the light-hearted farce and energetic dancing at its beginning and end – but they remain bubbling under the surface of the stage while we’re in Doctor Coppelius’ lair.
An odd postscript: Coppélia’s choreographer, Arthur Saint-Leon, isn’t only famous for his ballets; he also invented an early form of notation to record these all-important steps. Ironically, he failed to record his work on Coppélia, and it only survived as its popularity kept it in almost constant circulation – even though it was initially interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war. What if it hadn’t been so lucky?
And another: in 2007, Japanese scientists offered a strange solution: a human-sized robot that could mimic the steps of a human dancer. In this way, the specific movements of folk dances could be perfectly captured and replayed, even after its original performers were long dead. “My impression is that there would still be a human element lacking,” one English folk dancer is quoted as saying. “The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.”
We keep telling ourselves that – but I can’t help feeling like it’s just modernity’s equivalent of whistling past a graveyard.
The Thirsty Mayor
Halfway through watching the ballet Scuola di ballo, I was interrupted by the Thirsty Mayor.
Scuola di ballo (The School of Ballet) is the second of the three pieces that comprise the latest production by The Australian Ballet: the ambiguously-but-sleekly named Concord. Choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, it’s the story of an egotistical buffoon in charge of a dance studio and the lengths he’ll go to in order to ditch his worst dancer, Felicita, onto an unsuspecting impresario. Eventually, though, the authorities dance in to put a stop to the schoolmaster’s schemes, and…
Hold on. The authorities dance in? Sure. I mean, it’s a ballet. That’s fine. Everyone dances.
But then… I mean…
If everyone dances, all the time, then why is there a need for a dance school? Is the dancing they do in the school somehow different than the dancing they do when they dance at home, or out of bed in the morning, or through the aisle of the local grocery store? Or is everyone forced to attend a dance school in order to learn some basic steps? If they don’t, they must be shunned the rest of society. Imagine if everyone was dancing around you at all times – friends, family, strangers – and you were just putting one foot in front of the next like a nobody. Imagine the name-calling. Imagine the self-loathing.
Furthermore: are they born with these steps already encoded deep inside their nervous systems? Perhaps they attend the school to learn a complicated selection of steps that they can use during various commonplace social events! A ‘happy’ dance, a ‘sad’ dance, a ‘my schoolmaster is trying to palm off his worst student and I wonder if he’ll succeed’ dance…
You accidentally ask one question; that question clatters into the next; before you know it, the entire premise of the fictional world has ceased to make sense.
Somehow, I’ve taken to naming these moments of complete logic meltdown after the Thirsty Mayor. It’s a reference to a quick joke from The Onion: “Thirsty Mayor Drinks Town’s Entire Water Supply“. This story was used as an example in a behind-the-scenes piece by beloved radio show This American Life on the hellish pressures of The Onion’s writer’s room. They describe how most writers thought the Thirsty mayor headline was ridiculous enough to be instantly funny – but one writer needed more. Some kind of reason. Why was the Mayor so thirsty? What does the joke actually mean?
(The answer that placated him was that the Mayor had “…deeply mismanaged city resources”.)
You can find the Thirsty Mayor everywhere. He’s particularly at home in superhero comics. The interconnected universes of Marvel and DC lead to exactly the kinds of logical fissures that the Mayor finds irresistible. Every kid has asked themselves why Batman doesn’t just call his indestructible pal Superman to solve 99% of Gotham crime without breaking a sweat, right?
These disjunctions are not only between different characters. They’re often contained within just one. For example, Batman (the all-to-human street-level vigilante who beats up punks on the streets of Gotham) must coexist somehow with Batman (the teleporting, dimension-hopping, alien-fighting member of the Justice League of America). Or take his relationship with fellow Justice Leaguer Zauriel. Zauriel was an angel. An actual, literal, from-heaven-above angel. Would you expect this undeniable proof of the existence of the Almighty would make Batman wonder about, say, his beloved dead parents and their eternal afterlife? You’d be wrong.
You can see the Mayor’s footprints all over commercials, too, especially those for food or alcohol. I remember one beer ad where animated bottles walked up to a bar, and the bartender (who was also a beer bottle) popped off all their bottle caps, and then, uh, I guess they happily drank themselves. Did they metaphorically drink the beer that was already inside their own glass bodies? Or slosh their internal fluids into each others’ mouths? And does that make the bartender-bottle some kind of sadist, or murderer, or…
The Mayor is very, very thirsty. Try not to think about it.
Final Fantasy’s Dancing Corpses
Years ago, I watched Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), supposedly the first ‘photorealistic’ computer-animated feature film. I remember exactly zero percent of the plot. My memories were overwhelmed by the lead character’s 60,000 individual strands of hair forming a hypnotic CGI shampoo commercial atop her head.
The one thing I remember clearly is an easter egg tucked away on the DVD that features the entire cast of the movie doing the dance from Michael’s Jackson’s “Thriller”. And it’s as creepy as hell. Watch:
I was reminded of this by writing about the anthropomorphic mutants living in M&M’s World, but also when putting together a piece on art that features forced dancing as punishment. It’s something seen in everything from the classical ballet to “Once More With Feeling”, the infamous musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Sometimes – as in the original Brothers Grimm telling of Snow White – it’s the kind of torture that wouldn’t be out of place in the next Saw sequel. The queen’s feet are placed into red-hot iron clogs until she ‘dances’ herself to an agonising death.
In other examples – such as Hans Christian Anderson’s The Red Shoes or the ballet Giselle – it’s forced dancing through magical possession. That’s somehow even worse. Moving against your will taps into the fear inherent in the cartesian split: that your body is not your own. Your brain might be screaming commands, but your limbs aren’t listening. It means the choice of “Thriller” here is more than just novelty. When the Final Fantasy characters are animated without individuality, they become zombies – corpses, jerked around on invisible strings.
Despite the fact that the BBC ran a hilariously panicky story on how human actors could quickly find themselves replaced by these ‘synthetic actors’, the stars of Final Fantasy are never exactly convincing. So why is watching them dance like Jackson – with soulless expressions and in perfectly calibrated clockwork time – so disquieting?
Chalk it up to the peculiar narcissism of human beings. Remember the rumbles of controversy about the Oscar-winning documentary March of the Penguins attributing comforting human motivations to its feathered stars? (The New York Times quipped in an articled called “Penguin Family Values” that it “…may be fun to find a moral lesson in that enthralling penguin movie, but anthropomorphism, like after-shave, is best used sparingly.”)
In his book on the mechanics of sequential art, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud says that we’ll often see anything with two dots and a line as a human face – and we’ll be more invested in it, too, because of the extra imaginative work we’ve had to do to turn the abstract into the familiar. It’s one reason why comic art is so involving; it’s also why everyone with a beating heart loves the socks-with-eyes that are the Muppets. We can’t help it. We’ll anthropomorphise anything we can get our human eyeballs on, and we’ll certainly attribute souls to stiff and charismaless Final Fantasy stars. McCloud goes on to say:
We humans are a self-centered race.
We see ourselves in everything.
We assign identities and emotions where none exist.
And we make the world over in our image.
We’re unable comprehend how anything could be, or think, or feel differently than us. Sure, it’s narcissism – but at least its side-effect is sometimes random excesses of empathy.