What's A Curve
What’s a curve?
What’s a curve? In fact, what’s a form? Because curves are so readily available to us (just make a circle with your arm, or finger), let’s start with curves.
So, make a circle with your arm, a big circle, from your shoulder, across the front of your body. Now make a smaller one and a smaller one than that. Next, make a circle from your elbow, and then one from your wrist, and now one from your finger. Four different centers from which to generate circles. As you are doing this, imagine that you’re holding a piece of charcoal in your hand as you make these circles, and it is tracing out the forms, permanently, on a large sheet of paper. Choose one of these gestures and now do it again, but jerkily and rhythmically. And again, only this time with little loops in place of the jerks. Or with little z-shaped saw-toothed movements. So far, we have generated a series of circles of varying sizes with smooth to serrated circumferences.
Now, change the speed of the movements; do them fast (throw a fastball) and do them slowly, then very slowly, in excruciatingly slow motion. Next accelerate from a standing start to a whip. And then do them with deceleration (Put on the brakes!). As you do these, imagine that you are holding a fat paintbrush, filled with red paint and it leaves a tracing on the sheet of paper of movement and speed. Change the direction from up to down, or the reverse. Change the orientation. If your circles have been generated across your body (parallel to your chest), try some going at right angles to that, or horizontally, parallel to the floor, like twirling a lasso. In place of the full circles, perform an arc. Do the curves iteratively, over and over, as if you were painting a wall.
Next, let’s try doing these shapes in three-dimensional space, forming spirals, like springs, coils or helixes. Have them expand conically, or contract. Try having the curves start large and get increasingly tighter by first starting from the shoulder, then elbow, then wrist, and finally finger. Now do the arm movement while rotating your body in space.
Is it still a curve if it is made out of a series of short, straight segments? What if there is one bend? What if it is composed of a sequence of still positions in space, like a movie reel? As in old films, how jerky can the movement be for it to hold up as a continuous curve? What if it starts as a planar curve and folds into another plane?
Even a ball dropping down to the ground in a straight line, has a curve embedded in it: the curve that shows its acceleration, and as it bounces, its deceleration, and dampening effect.
The point here is, or begins to be, that whatever we might have started with as an image of “curve” can be seen to be quite limited in contrast with what else can be generated as a series of variations.
And all this, for a dancer, is only the beginner’s manual. There is so much more, more subtlety, richness and complexity available. How does one movement combine with another simultaneous movement? How does one segue into the next? How do you begin, and end?
How do the arm circles combine with a series of pirouettes? What three-dimensional shape do they make in space, as you run? If you were holding a laser, what shape would it make in space; what shape would it trace on the wall?
From the vast catalogue of movement, how do you create a dance, a piece of music, a painting, architecture, a financial recovery plan? What are you trying to do – what is the design intention? Or is it OK to just be fooling around and see what shows up?
And while we are seemingly exploring choreographic movement, gesture and dance, we are also generating spatial examples that can be transformed into other media. What would each of these movements sound like if they were played on a saxophone? Or a piano or guitar? What would they look like as paintings or sculptures? Blown up to a really large scale, how would they appear as architecture? Can you imagine a taste curve, or how a masseuse would translate curves into a body massage?
[ILLUSTRATIONS: Guggenheim Museum, Zaha Hadid, Jackson Pollock, Martha Graham, Edgerton photographs, Eames chair, the Birdcage - Beijing Olympics]
Let’s be clear that none of these physical, graphic, sonic or other gestures in themselves have any inherent meaning, but as creators we often intend for them to be expressive, literally, or emotionally, or to refer abstractly to something else. A sweeping horizontal arm movement is meant to convey all-inclusiveness. A little vertical finger wag says, “Come over here.” Two fingers in a “V” say “peace.” An upraised fist means “power.” A middle finger….
After all, it’s just another form of (non-verbal) language. What is the meaning of an orchestra conductor’s gesticulations to his musicians? He is communicating physically, and symbolically, to indicate musical rhythm, volume, and mood – the abstraction of sounds.
Most of the time, even verbal language is a substitute for experience: the word “green” is not green – it simply is a common sound or, in writing, a visual indicator for the color of most leaves. ( It is actually a frequency range of light that our brain register s as “Sad” is not sad – it indicates a kind of mood or feeling – abstractly, but in a way that we can understand and experience.
Our imagination is limited to what we already know, and we’re satisfied with that. But, as we have seen, there’s no creation in that; repetition, reorganization, rearrangement, perhaps, and there’s nothing wrong there, just no creation. Frank Lloyd Wright, Jackson Pollock, and Martha Graham really invented new forms.
What, then, is a form? What is anything? What can you imagine it to be? What else? You could ask “What else?” a thousand times, and more. How many variations can you come up with? None of them are right or wrong; maybe one is more appropriate, or is, intuitively, to your liking, or expresses an idea best.
How do you know? How can you tell?
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