Pina

I went to see Wim Wenders’s documentary last Sunday. I went with a friend. We both loved it. Arresting. I came out exhausted. Not because it was dramatically intense, though it contained a good amount of dramatism built primarily by movement and music. Yes, it was dance. But it was also corporeal movement, disciplined, beautiful, graceful, methodical, free, structured and bold movement. There was nuance  in all the choreographed moves. Yes, there was. But it was in a very forceful way. The documentary left me thinking a great deal about dance, symbolism, meaning, language–verbal and otherwise–repetition, moves emptied of any particular signification without in the least being insignificant. I am still thinking all of these through.

Discussing the documentary with a colleague, I confirmed anew the obvious. Reception of any aesthetic object or piece varies as much and as deeply as the individuals who witness it. She and I read the moves that characterized Pina’s work extremely differently. We gave very discrepant meaning to the repetition that becomes one of the primary substance of her work. She saw repetition as the creator of meaning, signification. Conversely, I saw the repetition in Pina’s dance as the mechanical repetition of emptying and redoing. She saw accumulation. I, on other other hand, saw nominal singularity. Each repeated move was both a copy of the previous one and entirely new.