<a href=“The%20passage%20is%20by%20a%20choreographer%20who%20worked%20with%20the%20influential%20dancer%20and%20choreographer%20Martha%20Graham%20(1894-1991).%20It%20focuses%20on%20the%20use%20of%20space%20and%20gesture%20in%20dance.”>i</a>*</p>
<p>I am not an adept aesthetician, and I could not presume to analyze Martha’s sense of design or approach toward design. But I believe she dealt with the elements of line and direction with the instincts of a mathematician or physicist, adding to each their emotional relations. For example, a straight line rarely, if ever, occurs in nature, but it does occur in are, and it is used in art with various telling effects. Direction works similar magic. An approaching body produces one kind of emotional line, a receding or departing body another; the meeting of two forces produces visual, kinesthetic, and emotional effects, with a world of suggestibility around them like a penumbra that evokes many ideas and emotions whenever there forms are manipulated. Basic human gesture assume, therefore, and almost mystic power. The simple maneuver of turning the face away, for example, removes personality, relationship. Not only that, it seems to alter the relation of the individual to present time and present place, to make here-and-now other-where and other-time. It also shifts the particular personality to the general and the symbolic. This is the power of the human face and the human regard, and the meeting of the eyes is probably as magic a connection as can be made on this earth, equal to any amount of electrical shock or charge. It represents the heart of dynamism, life itself. The loss of that regard reduces all connections to nothingness and void.</p>
<p>“Turning one’s back” has become a common figure of speech. It means withholding approval, disclaiming, negating; and, in fact, in common conduct the physical turning of the back is equated with absolute negation and insult. No back is turned on a royal personage or a figure of high respect. This is linked with the loss of visual contact and regard. One cuts dead by not meeting the eyes.</p>
<p>We know much about emotional symbols. Those used by the medieval and Renaissance painters were understood by the scholars and artists of the time—but, more wonderful, they mean to us today spontaneously just what they meant them; they seem to be permanent. We dream, Jung (a Swiss psychologist) tells us, in terms and symbols of classic mythology. And since, according to Jung, all people share a “collective unconscious,” people from disparate traditions nonetheless dream in the same terms. Is it not also likely, them, that certain space relations, rhythms, and stresses have psychological significance, that some of these patterns are the universal key to emotional response, that their deviations and modifications can be meaningful to artists in terms of their own life experiences and that these overtones are grasped by spectators without conscious analysis?</p>
<p>These matters are basic to our well-being as land and air animals. As plants will turn to sunlight or rocks or moisture according to their nature, so we bend toward or escape from spatial arrangements according to our emotional needs. Look around any restaurant and see how people will sit at a center table unless the sides are filled up. Yet monarchs of old always dined dead center and many times in public.{what’s the deal about seating arrangements??}</p>
<p>The individual as a personality, then, has a particular code in space and rhythm, evolved from his or her life history and from the history of human race. It is just the manipulation of these suggestions through time-space that is the material of choreograph.