Art of the Duet

I would like to talk about the art of the duet, but that will not be possible without first speaking about dance itself and the lunacy of spending one’s life creating things that essentially do not exist, except in the moments in which they are actually happening: in the case of choreography, only when it is being danced. And even then, each image, each cascading bit of architecture, gets glimpsed only briefly, barely enough time for the eye to fully embrace the event before it vanishes in order to allow the next pictorial image to unfurl. And then, that too disappears as it dissolves into the new shape that inevitably follows.

A dance feels right when there is a sense of inevitability — when the series of events open out of each other so naturally that they appear to permit the next to come into being. Each shape in time melding or morphing into the next, justifying itself by the inevitability of the image that is born from it. And on and on, until a series of linked pictorial thoughts are made visible and become a dance, rows of imagined shapes that don’t exist immediately after they have been rendered by the dancer’s body, accumulate in the viewer’s eye into a felt sensation of meaningfulness.

Perhaps that is why we find dance so compelling. We are forced to live in the moment of each visual idea and immediately release our grasp in order to live as fully in the moment that follows. Dance allows no time to get trapped in the past. The motion is always forward. No point in thinking — you will just get left behind...

It’s an experience to be seen, to be looked at, with the intelligence of intuition and the intellect of the eyes. It is, above all, a felt experience, more understood by the murmurings of the heart than the exertions of the brain. I realize that one cannot stop the brain from thinking — the heart beats, the kidneys filter, the brain thinks. But the felt experience of watching dance has its greatest depth if we think with our eyes, the windows to the soul.

It’s not unlike music, requiring that we think with our ears as we keep apace of the rows of entrancing sounds that fly by, evaporating as they pass, until finally at the end of the journey the collected memory of the sounds accumulate into a sensation of meaningfulness that can't be put into words. Like dance, it is best engendered as a felt experience.

But the choreographer sees those sounds as shapes. In the mind’s eye they manifest as images, and due to whatever mental aberration that causes them to create things that ultimately don’t exist, except on dancers’ bodies, he/she/they compulsively desire to make that inner vision an outward reality and a dance has thus begun.

Perhaps it is intended to make the music visible, or to embody the overall sensation of the sound, or describe the drama of the music’s journey, or the architecture of the shifting dynamics over time. Or all of that at once. Personally, I like to think I am painting a picture of the music in space through time. But I also want to create movement that allows the dancer to describe the music with their body. That’s a gift that the best dancers bring to the craft of dance making. It tells the choreographer if what they have done is right or wrong.

Martha Graham used to tell a story of her childhood in which her father warned her that if she lied to him her body would tell him the truth. That’s the way it is with dancers — their bodies don’t lie. But that is only the bottom line. Beyond that, steps are merely empty vessels. A phrase of movement has no intrinsic meaning until the dancer invests it with humanity and finds the poetic depth of the choreographer’s intention.

More often than not, this finds its highest expression in the art of the duet. It’s signaled by that moment in a dance when the grand designs created by an ensemble have charged the stage with energy and spilled reams of large spatial designs into the eyes of the beholder, when the music begins to build up or pare down to suggest that a significant event is about to happen. Action by action, the group swirls and swipes and wipes the stage clean, exiting en masse, leaving the air charged with energy, and at this moment of apotheosis two people are magically revealed, and we sense they are about to tell us the meaning of what the exertions of the group have prepared us for. The lights darken elsewhere but intensify at their location, telling our eyes to look nowhere else.

We have arrived at the centerpiece of the journey and these two movement-poets will take us into matters of the heart. No matter what the choreographer has intended, no matter how abstract the designs or intellectual the pretensions, we will always see a story. It can’t be otherwise. When two human beings touch and combine, we cannot extract the humanity from the moment. When the duet appears, our attention is drawn to the story of two beings sharing space and time with extraordinary equanimity, allowing the other total freedom of expression, but neither of them passing the point where their freedom impinges on that of the other, and their safety guarded by a bond of trust that has been established through hours, days, even weeks spent perfecting a silent language composed of the most nuanced signals of touch, timing, balance, placement of the hand, glance of the eye or quickening of the breath, that indicates to their partner the absolute awareness of each other’s needs and mutual dedication to safety when they are exposing vulnerable emotions or attempting dangerous feats of athleticism.

No matter what the dancemaker has contrived to express, whether it is Martha Graham’s emotional mythologies, or Merce Cunningham’s experimental chance operations, or Balanchine’s music-made-visible, while the dancers are committed to the choreographer’s vision they are simultaneously revealing the intimate story of their dedication to the craft of partnering that defines and makes possible the Art Of The Duet.

I am occasionally asked to explain what a particular dance means. I have never been accused of being subtle, whatever these duets mean is written on the face of them. But you may see them as you wish. It would be gratifying to think that what I have done is greater than the sum of its parts, but whatever the loftier aspirations, at its heart I am endeavoring to create something that stands on its craft — coherent and balanced, with well joined corners and fluid transitions. Like a finely crafted cabinet made to hold precious objects, it has to stand on the strength of its structure if it's meant to support a weightier meaning and touch on themes of the human experience.

_{Copyright © Lar Lubovitch 2023}

_{Rehearsal photo of Lar Lubovitch and Taylor Stanley © Erin Baiano}