"Chroma" by the National Ballet of Canada

(Four Seasons Centre, 15 June 2012)

If tutus had had aesthetic merit, they would have been adopted by popular culture some time in the past hundred years. By contrast, the costumes designed by Moritz Junge are fit to become mainstream. Unisex, unburdened by prejudice, they leave it to dancers to define what is unique about genders. The costumes bare every muscle capable of communicating without distracting. Beige and minimalist, the costumes frame the bodies, never speak on their behalf.

John Pawson's Apple-store-like set is pierced with the sounds that brushing minds make (arranged by Joby Talbot). Lit blindingly even in reflection (by Lucy Carter), dancers project directly onto the viewer, and yet do not intrude. Human body is revealed as the ultimate communicator, the highest form of art.

Ideas are the characters. Ideas animate the more perceptive minds, which light up bodies, are passed onto other bodies, then minds, and live for as long as they are in transit. Bodies live for twenty-three minutes.

Elena Lobsanova is a class apart. Peter Lorre learnt his early English parts phonetically. Similar delivery is often practiced by dancers (from ballet to ballroom) and opera singers. By contrast, Lobsanova is fluent in the language that she voices.

Lobsanova narrates each idea linearly, continuously, with dignity. She is in control of her body (never overstretching for effect; Wayne McGregor's choreography leaves no time for excess), and thus refines ideas, instead of being possessed by them. The knee that bends a little too far, the thigh full, the calf slender, the chest pliable---the Shiva of the peak shift executed right.

One consumes beauty in order to ascertain that the environment is safe and fertile. One produces beauty in order to feel alive. One can recall a fact and take comfort in it; emotions are harder to evoke at will. Hence the need for the constant reassurance of beauty.

"Selected Poems" by Manuel Bandeira, translated by David R. Slavitt (2002)

Humility promotes ideas over autobiographical incidents. Economy and simplicity evoke images, persuasive because one's imagination (unlike reason), once enlisted, cannot evade. Slavitt's matter-of-fact translation, untamed by rhyme, has sincerity of a dinner companion, whose thoughts, even if alien, one would not judge.

Bandeira longs for both death and love, in either order. The confidence in the gratification from each is inversely related to familiarity. The gratification's intensity derives from synchrony, sought in reciprocity, understanding, and the coördination of bodies.

"The Tell-Tale Brain" by V. S. Ramachandran (2011)

Evolution has favoured the skills that transcend simple reflexes. These skills (or culture) are acquired through imitation. Thus enter the social, neotenous human, with the gift for empathy for the like. (Upstage right, fish eat fish. Upstage left, civilization flourishes through calculated empathy.)

Knowledge is created by imagining alternative narratives. The innate taste for narratives and puzzles urges an artist to discover his own narrative, and draws audiences to consume his discoveries. Both art and science prize the economy of expression. Art bypasses consciousness, or at least approaches it through the backdoor. Science is concerned exclusively with consciousness.

Ramachandran's detective work, based on case studies and experiments, uncovers how one's emotional responses change with age or injury, how they can be rewired by persistent thought patterns, and how they constitute a compromise among multiple selves and senses, which present themselves (alone or in company, with or without introduction) to vote (in a secret ballot) on a dominant hallucination, which is then hastily stitched into a narrative. The self is the narrative.