While the flesh-and-blood dancer cannot be as perfect as the puppet, the subtle dancer projected by the latter into the altered realm certainly can. It seems that Kleist (in his “On the Marionette Theater”) sticks to the dancing flesh-and-blood person, not perceiving superimposed on him or her the subtle dancer he or she projects.… The training of the dancer is not to change his or her flesh-and-blood body into a perfect one adequate to that most spiritual, incorporeal earthly thing, music (a crazy temptation and goal), and to the spatial and temporal conditions produced by dance, such as crossing two dimensional objects, etc.; but rather to enable him or her to project the subtle body that alone can be adequate to music and the spatio-temporal conditions of the altered realm. What the protagonist in Tharp’s dance Catherine’s Wheel does not grasp is that it is not she, but her subtle dancer who has to emulate the electronic dancer.

A thematic project by Jalal Toufic (March 16-25, 2009)