Among the waterfall of visual and sound content that is circulating during the confinement on the networks, I have received a video that you may know (and if not, please look for it). In it, some thirty artists from the Paris Opera Ballet perform, each from the confinement of their home, the wonderful and overwhelming 'Dance of the Knights' by Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet . It lasts only 4 minutes and 30 seconds, but it is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever seen. Poignant until tears start. I posted it on my Facebook, and a reader as shocked as I was, Sabrina Bonifacio, commented: "This made me think about how beautiful humanity is." That's how impressive it is.
There is something about dance that has always excited me a lot. Perhaps it is for the absolute sacrifice of the dancers, for the way in which they have to bend and torment their bodies to turn them into an ephemeral drawing, in a trace of aerial writing made with the meat. And all that unprecedented effort, the endless hours of rehearsal and the pain they must endure, culminates in a show that perhaps they repeat five times. That is, they kill themselves for getting just a few minutes of beauty. For achieving the miracle of transmuting into music.
The profession of dance is so laborious and at the same time so fleeting that, if you think about it, it is perhaps the craziest art, that is, the purest, the most sublime. He who really has as his main motivation the desire to touch beauty. The young artists of the video, in short, move their disciplined bodies with a very difficult facility. They lift a majestic leg in the bedroom, turn their tortured feet into perfect curves in the dining room, or dance in the kitchen alongside a little girl dressed in a tiny tutu. And they do everything in time with Prokofiev's terrifying piece, a magnificent musical choice, because it is both threatening and beautiful. The threat of the virus; and beauty as a desperate but luminous weapon of human beings against pain. There is a phrase from the painter Georges Braque that I often quote: "Art is a wound made light." Indeed, what can we do with life's wounds but try to turn them into light so that they don't destroy us?
The pandemic has shown us, once again, the null control that we humans have over our destiny: we are defenseless and kicking ants. But, unlike ants, we are touched by the wonderful madness of beauty. And that dream of harmony, that transcendent and great passion that unites us, is so important to us that in the most tragic moments of humanity we risk our lives to preserve it. As risked by the curator of the Louvre who, during the German occupation of Paris in World War II, took La Gioconda and hid it. In the midst of a colossal tragedy and the extermination of millions of people, that man risked his neck for an old board smeared with colored pigments. And the most fascinating thing is that we understand it.
There is a sad and tender joke about a sparrow pecking for food between the train tracks when he sees a locomotive approaching. He tries to take flight, but notices that his little leg is hooked under the rail. Pull and pull the leg, flaps with all his might as the iron monster comes at him; and when it is inevitable that it will run over him, the sparrow straightens, swells and sponges the chest and exclaims: "Well: if it derails, derail it." The same thing happens to us humans: in the face of monumental horror, in front of the locomotive of the pandemic, we arrogantly raise a perfect dancer's leg, an instep with an admirable curvature. And you know what? Art is really such a powerful weapon for us that watching the video of the ballet I thought: if all the inhabitants of the planet managed to connect at the same time in this oceanic feeling, in this acute perception of the beautiful; If we all thought about how beautiful humanity is at the same time, we would generate a positive energy so brutal that we would not only be able to end the virus, but even alter Earth's rotation. I am so sparrow.
