I enjoy watching dance …. and indeed in my younger days I enjoyed several different dance forms. Recently there has been a very interesting series of documentaries on our TV about dance, under the general title Why do we dance? My wife and I have enjoyed watching it together. The latest edition, screened the other night, examined the link between dance and sex. I found it very thought-provoking, and not only in relation to dance.
The episodes covered a wide range of situations in which dance refers to sexual experience, ranging from the (very chaste) plea of a traditional Indian dancer for her lover to come to her, to the extremely explicit activity of a contemporary (German) group. One thought remained with me at the end of it all, namely, that the degree to which dance captured the essential characteristics of sexual experience seemed to vary quite independently of the extent to which there was any explicit representation of sexual acts.
I found that the most erotically intense of the dances was an Argentine tango, which discovered that intensity largely through innuendo. The occasion on which the dance involved a female dancer grasping the crotch of her male counterpart, while he fondled her naked breast, was just coarse and devoid of any emotional significance. These were mere arbitrary gestures. Less, as has often been said in other contexts, conveyed more.
I find that this is so often the case more generally with art. The widely-repeated idea that anything is necessarily achieved by “pushing the boundaries” is mistaken, I’m sure. Personally, for this reason, I find the work of Guilbert and George to be generally pretty pointless and self-indulgent, to take one example. Art needs to work by stimulating the imagination, and not by the mere iteration of observations.