The post was originally a discussion paper for an elective theology class in my MFA work.
One of my favorite things about theatre and dance is their evanescence. They are fleeting. No moment will ever be the same again. An actor may deliver the same line the next night; the dancer may dance the same step. But the moment is never recreated. S/he is bringing more experience to it the following time around. Each audience is comprised of a new collection of people, each with his/her own expectations. Live art is a reminder that everything in our lives is happening for the first, last, and only time.
In a way, live art is its own apophasis. As soon as it is experienced, it is gone. It can only be recounted or remembered but never re-experienced. As we recount or remember the act, we are connecting with ‘a quality’ rather than ‘an object’ (Miller, 138). A quality, or as Miller calls it, ‘adjective’, is what fuels the imagination (139).
Miller uses poetry as an example in his essay for the apophasis of the body. Theatre and dance seem to me to be better examples, as the body is a necessary instrument for their full execution. The body is the instrument of both the actor and the dancer. Each repetition of a performance etches the character, the movement, deeper into the muscle memory of the performer. Ideally, it becomes instinctual, unconscious. When it does, it ceases to be a performance.
In becoming fully embodied, the actor and dancer have ‘said away’ the acting and dancing. Rather s/he has become the character or become the dance. It may be for only that line or step. It may be for a scene. It may even be for a whole evening. But eventually, the performer must come back to his/herself. While their bodies and minds may allow them to ‘say away’ their actual reality for the world of imagination, it is only momentary.
Dancers and actors constantly confront what they are not. They allow audiences to suspend their disbelief and to stay away from the world around them for a few hours. Those audiences are left with only the qualities that have enlivened their imaginations as souvenirs of the moment they were able to find transcendence, led there by artists. Dance and theatre are apophasis in practice.
Miller, David. Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and
Relationality. Edited by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, Fordham UP,
2010.