First position

I live in Utah, so many of my neighbors and some of my friends own and use guns; mostly, they hunt, though some are into shooting at targets, including stop signs and rusted out cars left in a gully up in the mountains. Having grown up in liberal old Seattle with pacifist parents (despite that my dad was an ex-Naval officer), this all seemed weird to me at first, and deeply, deeply wrong. But mostly, in the eight years I have lived here, I have managed not to let it intrude on my day-to-day life; in other words, I have been a quietist about guns.

After last week, of course, it is much harder.

What does this all have to do with ballet? Well. First, there is this post: http://thehealthydancer.blogspot.com/2012/12/using-dance-to-heal.html, by a ballet teacher who helped a school of elementary kids cope with the stress and grief of the massacre through dance. I thought of the adage I once heard, "It is impossible to be sad when you are dancing." At the time I first heard this, I wondered if this was really true: so much dance (especially ballet) is about really, really, intense sorrow -- Giselle, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet... but on the other hand, what is being danced and the emotional sensation of dancing can be quite far apart. I have heard other dancers describe an overwhelming sense of exhilaration when performing a grief-stricken scene (La Bayadere, Nikiya's dance with the flowers at the wedding), and certainly, even when the music is really schmalzy and the choreography super somber, I am less sad, than immersed in the physical experience of telling that sadness... and that experience itself is not sad, but intense and in a strange, somber way, joyous. In fact, the first time last week that I wasn't dwelling on last Friday's events was in ballet class on Tuesday night. Even at yoga on Saturday morning, I could not stop thinking about those children, their parents, and the horror of it all.

Also, dance has, as an art form, often been used to speak against violence; Kurt Jooss' The Green Table, for example, is an overtly anti-war ballet, and Anthony Tudor's heartbreaking Dark Elegies, set to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder,("Songs on the Death of Children") is even more to the point here. These lines, from Friedrich Ruckert's lyrics strike me as especially poignant, in light of the recent killings:
Oft denk’ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen!
Bald warden sie wieder nach Hause gelangen!
Der Tag ist schön! O sei nicht bang!
Sie machen nur einen weiten Gang. 
(I often think: they have just gone out!
Soon they will be coming home again!
It’s a lovely day! O don’t be afraid!
They are just taking a long walk.)

Dance, too, is a fundamentally nonviolent art form. Not to say it cannot portray violence; it is quite good at that. But because it is rooted in the human body, and the interaction of that body with space, time, and other human bodies, it constantly brings us back to and reminds us of our physical frailty, our earthbound existence, our interdependence. That a dancer's body can seem, for a moment, to defy gravity or the laws of anatomy is only a way of underlining the fragility of these vessels in which we live, their permeability, mutability, mortality. As such, dance is not an art form that can revel in the fragmentation of the body; even Jerome Robbin's The Cage is really mostly about the women's bodies, and not about the bodies of the men they are devouring. And the violence is implicit, not Hollywood gross-out spectacle. In fact, that makes it the more sinister, the more alarming; maybe too the contrast between those voracious female bodies and their quite evident human physicality. They are muscle and bone, and just a liable to dissolution as any other body.  Also, when it's well danced, the ballet is really a cautionary tale about human cruelty and necessity of compassion, not a horror movie about females who kill and eat their mates.

What about war dances, then? Since antiquity, and across cultures, people have used dance as a ritualized expression of aggression -- in Utah last year some police officers of small cultural literacy actually arrested some teenaged football players for performing a Haka dance before a match, thinking the kids were actually physically threatening one another (having seen a Haka dance, I can sort of understand their perception). However, I think exactly the point of hyper-aggressive dance displays is that they contain and structure the violence, the rage, and the hatred that they express; a "dance war" or a "battle of the dance teams" may involve a huge amount of adrenaline, very real and very passionate feelings of enmity, and many other elements analogous to those of war or violent brawling, but where actual war leads to death, dismemberment, and destruction, a dance war is creative, often resolving or at least alleviating the tensions and conflicts that fed it in the first place. Of course, it doesn't always work... sometimes the dance war devolves into real conflict, but I think that's probably the exception.

I am not so naive as to think that somehow just by dancing we can change the world and make it a less violent place; that a plie can be translated into sane gun-control policies that would let my friends and neighbors who use their firearms responsibly retain them for the purpose of hunting or target shooting or even, yes, self-defense (though I think that I've heard statistically one is more likely to be hurt or killed by one's own handgun than to defend oneself successfully with it against a genuine attacker); that a grand-battement could kick policy makers in the ass and get some decent mental-health care options going in this country; that a tour-jete could make the violent and the homicidal lay down their guns and spare the lives of innocent children (the majority of children who die of gun-related injuries, by the way, are not suburban schoolkids, but black children in our inner cities -- the outrage just isn't there for them, because they tend to be killed one by one, not twenty at a go... and that's a generous view of why nobody's screaming mad about it).

Yet I hope that by teaching, learning, and sharing all the participatory arts: dance, music-making, mural-painting, and so forth, we can slowly, slowly turn the face of culture in which we live from the blank stare of the film-goer or video-game-player mesmerized by fantasy mass-murder and destruction, toward a more thoughtful, reflective, engaged, and life-celebrating view. Who knows, if Adam Lanza had been enrolled in a dance program, maybe this would have prevented the tragedy. But that would presuppose a system in which we care for the fragile and the wounded and the broken among us as diligently as we care for our own immediate interests.

In conclusion: though I may still be reticent to express the full strength of my antipathy towards gun culture, I have been forcing myself to be clear, when I talk with my friends and neighbors here, that I feel unequivocally that it is time for more stringent gun-control measures. I have also been taking some notes on an idea I have for working with a colleague who is a dance and movement professor, and collaborating with our local ArtsBridge program, to start a dance-in-the-schools initiative with a focus on non-violent conflict resolution.