Which is the witch: dance versus order and authority By Nora Amin
In the beginning of the twentieth century, when Isadora Duncan emerged with her wild dances and her free spirit, she was considered an outcast. Isadora Duncan followed her heart and chased behind her imagination in all freedom and authenticity, with her own signature she created what she called the natural and free movement, what would be later considered as a pioneering trend for modern dance. Her life was her dance, and her dance was her life. She choreographed her dances in the same wildness that choreographed her life. She even created a school to teach the arts to the children, she invested in the future and she followed her dream. Women of that sort are dangerous to the status quo, artists of that sort are equally dangerous to the notions of order and authority whether in the sociocultural sphere or the artistic sphere, they challenge the established systems of behavior as much as they challenge the acknowledged systems of creativity, and dance is among them. Our movement in the public sphere is coded, it is contained and tamed, our bodies are shaped by education into a specific and socially accepted behavior. Dance is a form of physical behavior and activity that defies those social and cultural codes of public collective movement, by bringing in personal and creative patterns of physical presence and of expression while communicating esthetically beyond the formal discourse of daily life, dance explores another free physicality to the dancer that shows a body liberated from the public and general codes of movement, it reinvents the body, unless it is the dance embedded in the traditional rituals of that culture or society. The ritual protects the dance, stylizes it and puts it into the general codes of the society, often with a spiritual color that deviates the physicality and the sexuality from their realistic references and impacts, and elevate them, in that context the dance becomes tamed and accepted. Yet, until today, in most cultures, a dancer is considered threatening to the public morality, and in most cases is not admitted into the official social structures of recognition and acceptance. Nevertheless, and paradoxically enough, staged dance has also produced its tradition of codes, borders, taboos, authority and order. It is equally difficult to challenge the dance institution as it is difficult to challenge the socio-cultural institution. The female dancer on stage liberates her body as well as the bodies of the spectators - from the frame of accepted and imposed physicality. She becomes the delegate of this liberation, the model that this dreamt freedom is projected upon. She dissects herself from the public and collective physicality to plant herself in the alternative personal and physical reality that can only be achieved through performance. Hence performance becomes the artistic bridge that connects between the outside reality which is ruled by order and the alternative imagined identities that dwell in the bodies of the spectators and emerge via the body of the performer. 1