It’s full of sculptures of his famous melting clocks,
creatures with the bodies of elephants and the legs of giraffes, lots of
unusual religious imagery and the famous Lobster Telephone.
In a word, it’s surreal!
The sculpture that struck me the most was Homage à Terpischore. It’s a bronze
sculpture of two female figures, each facing the other, reaching out with an
arm in a ‘mirrored’ high-five gesture. One of the figures is smooth and
polished. All her lines are curved and she looks like a representation of a
woman from classical mythology. Her counterpart is a cubist sculpture, all
sharp edges and angles. The two figures together, according to the sculpture’s
description, “represent the real and surreal aspects of the Dance”.
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| Salvador Dali's Hommage a Terpsichore. 1977-1984 Bronze. Espace Dali, Paris, France. |
Terpischore, as it turns out, is one of the nine Muses
and the goddess of dance and the chorus. Upon reading this, I had an instant “I
knew it!” moment.
I just had a feeling
it had something to do with dance. There was something about the way the smooth
figure was poised on her toes and the cubist one was reaching out to her. I
like feeling rewarded for paying attention to details that make something
interesting and captivating.
Such as a beautiful bronze sculpture, where the smooth
figure represents “the Grace, the elegance, the beauty of the art”, and the
cubist figure shows “Dalì’s vision of what is beyond the visible surface…the
chaotic rhythm of modern life”. It’s a tribute to the duality of dance, of grace
and chaos.
Can a truer description of dance exist beyond those two
words?
A dancer’s mind can be a chaotic place - all that
remembering of choreography, keeping track of counts, spacing and the ensemble,
being aware of alignment, managing expectations and pressure. But that chaos is
met on the other side by the grace the dancer exudes, which the audience
witnesses and responds to. The chaos can also be released through the emotion
of the piece, its accompanying music and the pure movement.
I think of the chaos of fitting dance into my life: juggling
time, transportation, responsibility, job-search, and the physical and monetary
cost. But those moments of grace, when I grasp the barre, feel my mind quiet
down and my body responds, are all worth putting up with the chaos.
But looking back at the sculpture, I noticed something
else: Terpischore’s looking into a mirror and seeing the smooth grace or the
sharp chaos of dance reflected back. She’s not resigned to it, she’s reaching
out, through time and space, in an act of invitation to her counterpart and she’s
saying:
“Come dance with me! You’re part of me and I’m part of
you!”
Because Chaos and Grace are the constant, always present
partners of any dancer - of anyone going about their life.
There is grace and chaos all around us, in everything and
every moment: in family, homesickness, friendships, career, love, expectations,
joy, grief, and laughter. There are smooth, classic moments and there are
sharp, jagged-edged moments in life.
Isn’t that why we dance and create art –
to reflect that which we experience in real, messy, beautiful, everyday life?
Aren’t these things the very same that inspire us, like the
Muses, to create and to share? Don’t we need the grace and the chaos in equal
parts to live fully?
Terpischore isn’t putting up with chaos; she’s dancing
with it, because, as one of my favorite spoken-word poets Sarah Kay says, “getting
the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they
like the taste of air.”
And she’s not just dancing with Chaos, she’s high-fiving
it, in a weird, wonderful and surrealist way.
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| I signed the graffiti wall at Espace Dali! Now we're part of that weird, wonderful place! |
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