Brand new dance company OtherShore debuted in October 2008 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Howard Gilman Theater to sold out audiences and enthusiastic reviews from Claudia LaRocco of the New York Times, Deborah Jowitt of the Village Voice and Dance Magazine among others.
Come to see our exclusive performance taking place at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in the framework of APAP’s festival, this Sunday at 4pm!
company: www.othershorenewyork.org
directions: baryshnikovdancefoundation.org

To suggest that hysteria and dance are linked beyond their thematic coincidence or visual resemblance is not to view dance from an anti-theatrical perspective (typing it as madness)(reductively), or to diminish the kinds of discipline that distinguish it from performative hysteria. Rather, it entails consideration of how visuality works (on stage and in the clinic) at a particular historical moment; what the audience (dance aficionados or medical practitioners) are looking at, how they look, and what they see.
Of course, that involves to read dance’s visuality in relation to its silence… again.
Dancers are not patients, however in choosing not to speak, dance displays a special affinity with hysteria and with a production of symptoms… Even though the conditions of the dancer’s silence are different from the hysteric’s, it is the dancer’s withholding of speech that makes her (or his!) art enigmatic, multivalent, and thus not only available for the projection of signification on it, but also rich in signification!

Like the dancer in the art literature, the hysterical patient is almost always gendered female in the medical literature. Despite statistics of male hysteria and medical developments in the understanding of the sickness, hysteria remains, in the cultural imagination of our society, a feminine sickness, still linked conceptually to the womb from which it gets its name… and still frequently treated as a sexual disorder.
Observed and understood in its resemblance to dance, hysteria can -and should!- very clearly be not only in the background, but actively in a curious and relevant foreground of dance production and reception…

Musicality is a learned awareness, just as dancing is a learned awareness.

I have a rhythm when I walk, I have a rhythm when I speak, I have a rhythm standing next to somebody when I’m about to interact with them. It’s a kind of inner clock.

In most classical dance classes, the rhythmic work is very often directly linked to the music, whereas I recently realized that most of my dance classes are hardly ever counted at all.

I suppose that movement is originated first by muscular rhythm: how long does it take to do a specific move. The point is: do you want a slow arabesque… or a fast arabesque?

One should always choregraph to silence and add the music, or sound -if there is any- after. If a dance cannot stand on its own silence, with its own internal phrasing and its own dynamic build, external sound is never going to help it.

When you are doing a physical move with your entire body, it’s like a clock chiming somewhere inside you, just pick up on the rhythm, and you know if it is just that bit faster or not.
This also involves reading dance’s (an music’s) visuality in relation to its silence…

Silvia comes from Luxembourg and will be collaborating on Sang Bleu’s performative intervention at Colophon 09.
She studied at London Contemporary Dance School and currently owns her dance company based in Luxembourg: Missdeluxedanceco!

Check her myspace! http://www.myspace.com/sylviacamarda

(… Why does Samuel Butler say, “Wise men never say what they think of women”? Wise men never say anything else apparently.)