This is not a critique. I don’t consider myself a critic when i come to watch a dance performance. And when i try to write something out of a critic’s mind i stop seeing the thing i want to write about and instead i only see my own thoughts and words. “it’s only a rehearsal” is the name of a dance peace choreographed by Ina Christel Johannesen and performed by Line Tørmoen and Dimitri Jourde from the Norwegian Zero Visibility Corp.
Some time while watching the performance tonight i remember myself thinking how important it is to have dancers because they can show us what we can do with our bodies. One way in which dancers do this is to show movement that is fascinating because it’s fast, accurate, organic etc… This is done in the most beautiful way in “it’s only a rehearsal”. But i guess that more than just the movement possibilities the dancer can also show us how reading the body and the movement of another person touches us so effectively. Maybe you are sitting in the audience and are enjoying what you are seeing or maybe you interperet the dancer’s movements as expressing some emotion. And maybe at the same time your body, your nerves, your muscles and tendons and ligaments and bones take this information and store some part of it for future reference. The dancer is a person, just like you, and so he or she can tell you something about you. Even if our bullshit culture makes you forget this, your body knows it because your body is (mostly) not cultural.
Now, a bit surprised and pleased by these thoughts that came to me while writing, i feel that the dancers Line and Dimitri gave me and everybody in the audience tonight a gift, engaging every cell in their bodies to communicate with all of the bodies sitting in the audience, and whisper to them something no one of us can hear, something from a long time ago.
Michael Shapira 