Archetypes of dance and design-objects

Материал из HEPTACHOR.

ARCHETYPES OF DANCE AND THEIR FUNCTIONING IN THE ART FORM OF DESIGNED OBJECTS

Ludmila Freivert (Moscow)

The founders of free dance dreamt of a universal language that would bring unity to twentieth-century culture. Their thoughts coincided with the beginnings of another cultural movement, with powerful social and communicative qualities, which is design, or “industrial art”.

Design and free dance share much in common. Both are linked to philosophy, being the non-verbal form of the latter. They symbolise the relationship of person with the world and give their own answers to questions about order, rhythm, nature and meaning, body and soul.

Dance, as well as the design-object, involved a turn to the entire person, not divided into body and spirit. Resemblance between the ideas of dance reformers and of major artists and creative educators, such as I. Itten, one of the founders of the Bauhaus, is not accidental. Itten wrote that a creative person should train his or her body as an instrument of the soul. This is the basis on which both dance and the design-object include both aesthetic and utilitarian qualities, care of both bodily and spiritual health.

Besides their common objectives, dance and design share similar approaches to solving their tasks. We suggest that there are several universal archetypes that dance shares with the other arts. They are as follows:

• 1. canons and rituals;
• 2. the archetype of a “pas”, a formal and conventional gesture, best expressed in classical ballet;
• 3. the archetype of a “vocabulary”, or construction of the phrase out of ready-made elements;
• 4. the archetype of a statue which is brought to life;
• 5. the archetype of “moving geometry”.

1. Canons, models and patterns of all sorts in relation to art are reflected in the principles of selection, the will to style and order.

Free dance is not a naturalistic pantomime. It is free of utilitarian and everyday-life goals. It has its own broad but sufficiently well-defined range of movements.

Likewise, designed objects also presuppose a certain range of a person’s acts and actions. Their character, shape, the amount of effort needed for their creation, the degree of bodily and mental comfort they provide, all are the subject of a special discipline, ergonomics. This discipline models the system of physiologically and psychologically justified movements and anticipates their visual and kinaesthetic perception.

2. Dance is unthinkable without formal and well-defined movements, each of which is similar to a word. But, unlike the latter, a “pas” does not have to have a strictly defined meaning and does not have synonyms. Structural elements of design objects cause the patterns of the user’s “pas”. They have structure and linear parameters, for instance, in opening a door, pressing a button, etc.

3. Like the writer, the choreographer works with a “vocabulary” of words. This vocabulary has “grammar” as well as “phraseology”. And both the designer and the specialist in ergonomics resemble the choreographer. In this case, position, shape and other material characteristics of the objects and its parts dictate the scenario of movements. The designer composes a kind of plot – opening a package, taking a device out of its box, combining two parts, switching on, etc. Though the user depends on the designer, he or she should not be burdened by this dependency. The movements should be well designed from the point of view of ergonomics, psychology, and aesthetics.

4. From Galatea to contemporary mobiles, dance is compared to a statue brought to life. The boundary between static and moving is not impermeable. Design contributes to transgressing the boundary: for most designed objects, the analogy with sculpture is self-evident. Often their shapes are anthropomorphic. Thus, in the words of one author, the shape of the ЕСх1 Samsung camera “is a symbiosis of an elephant’s eyes and of a photographic device itself” (Zherdev, Metaphors in Design, pp. 115-6).

5. The archetype of moving geometry refers us to architecture. In contrast with the previous archetype, of the statue brought to life, here we have an object inscribed into a particular context. Through the “geometrical movement", the designer can cover space and absorb the whole world into his or her “dance”. This work can also be likened to writing a plot.

The artist is not a machine for creating forms. Itten wrote: “There is an original relationship between the person’s constitution and art forms that he creates. If the person is sincere, everything he does is a mirror reflection of his power to shape things according to himself. Any subjective object making is true if it corresponds to the human constitution and temperament”. Yet dance and art in general are not limited by this. According to Paul Valery, “dance does not aim at completing a movement; it aims at causing and maintaining a certain state by means of movement which itself is caused and controlled by audio rhythms”.

The objective of free dance is wider than giving pleasure to the spectator. It is also to perfect the dancer, overcoming therefore the gap between art and life, the creator and the audience. This creates meaning for such twentieth-century cultural movements as dance, design, and some new developments in literature. They affirm the rights of freedom and creativity, at the same time leaving space for initiative and perfection.