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| This is a surrealistic dance concept I have made. I was watching a group of young kids dance at a party. All of them were doing regular wild kid dances. One kid was breaking the symbols. He stood in the center of the dancefloor and was gradually being mummified, with other kids twisting this white ribbon around his body all while the music played on. I thought this would be a fun surrealistic dance. |
I’ve found certain actions have surrealistic elements that feel like this “mummification on the dance floor.”
So introduced dance floor mummification as a type of surreal anti-dance, new dance or limit of dance. It just seemed striking. During dance floor mummification, you are increasingly bound, successive twists of cloth restrict movement, making the dancer eventually stand still.
How bound to dance is movement? The dance partner (the weaver, possibly arachnoid?) is pushing the dancer (moth?) to stasis the more they dance. Can a dance exist in this end state of zero movement? A stillness, unreactive to the music? The dancer can decorate their mummy with flashy items, sunglasses, a cloak. Can a dancing apparatus be built around the mummy that continues dance? Make a cocoon of reactive motion, but inside something that is still. A spider wrapping the still moth, twists of shadow and spindly arms as the only movement. An unreactive partner.
Complete contrast to the dancing plague of 1518, or hysteric dancing as anti-mummification mode of dance. Hypnotic repetition. In step dancing, you’d bind your upper body focusing on feet and legs. “Flamenco is a downward dance, to ballet’s upward dance” Stillness exists throughout song, blank notes and rests. Can you dance in these spaces in the mummified mode?
When I was skating solo I was trying to deliberately slow my movement, heavy downward pressure while maintaining flow and it actually was pretty fun.
New mummification on the dance floor subtype question I was thinking about, and wanted your opinion on. Do you think you could get equally competent, even if given 10 years, on learning Capricho árabe (or even a less technical song, say beginner intermediate) through just notation (be it tabs or sounds). I’m talking about practicing in your head, or even with an imagined fretboard (gripping a piece lined paper even). I’ve seen this form of a thought experiment before, but I’m talking specifically with a guitar. You’d spend 10 years, in isolation (using any means necessary to develop calluses, finger dexterity etc - outside of holding a guitar) then are given a guitar and the chance to play, virginally.
These images have a quality of mummification on the dance floor. They present themselves to be games, but are static (in medium) but also have a sense of movement to them.
A puppet
Imagining a marionette that that is dancing, the sense of gravity that pulls on the strings and then causes the figure to be wrapped in itself. In a frantic dance the strings wrap around the puppet, confining the freedom of movement. Further attempts to dance only result in further binding, further tangle. Unsolvable knots form.
Still it dances, in stilted awkward tugs.