Hands probably aren’t the first thing you think about when you watch a dance. What about the feet, the legs, the face? But hands are essential.
The hand not only guides the eye but is the body’s finishing touch. When the hands are unintentional and artificial, they become soulless, dragging a dancer down and interrupting the flow of the dance.
There is an alertness to the hands that unlocks the mysteries of a moving body. Hands make what could be a static position come to life. But they also offer a way into how to look at a dancer — and how to look at a dance. A dance isn’t just about what you see on the surface. It’s what you internalize: emotionally, intellectually, sonically, spiritually. As for those hands? They lead the way.
The choreographer George Balanchine compared the hand to a flower. In order for it to bloom, there needed to be five fingers moving individually, five fingers floating above a beautifully rounded palm. They separate like petals. The pinkie is lifted. The thumb curves gently below.
“God gave us four fingers and a thumb,” Balanchine said, “and I want to see them all.”
The opening of Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations” shows the strength and sorrow of hands as they change in shape, making space for emotion. Imploring and taut, they’re the torch on an electric body.
Mikhail Baryshnikov once explained that dance is about the five points of the body: the head, two hands and two feet. “When I look at classical dance,” he said, “if the hands are not telling you something about the interior of a dancer, I’m not interested in the dance.”
In “Baryshnikov Dances Sinatra and More,” a Great Performances broadcast, he said of hands, “Sometimes they are the punctuation to a sentence that started at the other end of the body.”
Sometimes that punctuation can feel sharp, dangerous. In “Moment Marigold,” the contemporary choreographer Jodi Melnick created a solo in which she held a knife as an extension of her articulate hands. The surgical precision of her spiraling body and arms becomes even more heightened against the flickering glint of steel.
In “Paris Is Burning,” Willi Ninja, with sharpness and precision, throws shade with his hands: As he put it, his House of Ninja came out to assassinate.
Forming his hands into a compact, he swipes his face with blush and eye shadow before turning the mirror around to show his opponent, with a withering stare, that he is in dire need of a makeover. The hand is a prop, a tool, a weapon ready to attack in the most subtle of ways.
In flamenco, the arm work, or braceo, has its own rich vocabulary, exemplified by the spine-tingling dancer Soledad Barrio of Noche Flamenca. Her interior life is her dance. In “Soleá,” the articulation of her fingers starts in the center of her body: She doesn’t simply lift her arms; like wings, they rise from deep within the muscles of her back. As a dance action, it’s as emotional as it is physical — and never hands for hands’ sake.
Just as the movement in Barrio’s hands emanates from deep within her body, the cupped or “contraction hand” of the modern master Martha Graham is more than a shape. It’s an action, as Janet Eilber, the artistic director of the Graham company, said, instilled with psychic energy. These hands, immortalized in classic modern works, can be pleading or aggressive as they wield vehemence and strength.
In Graham’s “Primitive Mysteries,” the cupped hand is used as a form of reverence, a spiritual gift to the heavens. Here, the Virgin blesses each dancer who lifts her hands — palms cupped up — in celebration. “It is a theatricalization of a natural gesture,” Eilber said.
For Graham, power starts in the pelvis before traveling to a taut hand, its knitted fingers and thrusting palm emitting invisible sparks. It’s extreme — radical to some, bewildering to others. Here, Danny Kaye spoofs Graham in the “Choreography” number from “White Christmas.”
“Jazz hands” have a special place on the choreographic shelf. Though Bob Fosse presented many variations on hands in his work, he is synonymous with that splay-fingered look. At the start of “Magic to Do” from “Pippin,” the hands, stretched broadly, glow in the dark.
In “The Rich Man’s Frug” from “Sweet Charity,” Fosse’s hand work sizzles with wrist isolations, cinching the arms with tiny sparks.
The spirit of Fosse can’t be erased from the “spirit fingers” made famous in “Bring It On.” In the film, they are an invention of the passionately vehement, somewhat deranged choreographer who refers to cheerleading as “a tiny, pathetic subset of dancing” as he vows to try to turn “robotic routines into poetry written with the human body.”
There’s nothing robotic about FKA twigs whose dancing shows how her music’s sound and rhythm surf through her body. Often she takes the advice of her mother, a dancer, who told her not to forget to use her hands while performing. In the video “Childlike Things,” choreographed by Robbie Blue, she contrasts swirling, stretched fingers with tight fists as her hands attack and retreat and eventually slow down time.
Hands — and the incredible nail art that adorns the tips of her fingers — come to life in Doechii’s full body performances. Here in “Anxiety,” also by Blue, Doechii’s hands mirror the fretful, itching sensation of unease.
And, a close-up on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
But a hand can be sexy, too. There is Will West’s outstretched hand, which seems to shoot energy across the dance floor in Jungle’s viral “Back on 74,” choreographed by Shay Latukolan. What an invitation to the dance. Has a hand ever been more tempting to grab?
But the Balanchine hand is the jewel of them all. “Some people don’t know what to do with the hands,” he says in “Suki Schorer on Balanchine Technique,” by the former City Ballet principal, now a teacher at the School of American Ballet. “Maybe cut them off. I need them. The hands give you strength, force. They give direction.”
In “Serenade,” Balanchine’s first original ballet created in the United States, the hands are the first thing you see in the opening tableaux: 17 dancers stand with an arm raised and the hand flexed as if to shade the eyes from the sun. The arm then slowly lowers. “Mr. B taught us to lift the wrist,” Schorer writes, “which is a sign of life and energy as the palm faces down and the hand extends. If the hand just drops it risks looking lifeless.”
In another moment, five women offer their hands to one another, slowing down to display, in a seamless split, an extraordinary view of the fingers and the movements of the wrist.
For Kay Mazzo, a former City Ballet principal, the port de bras, or carriage of the head and arms, is the way to see if ballet is truly in a dancer’s body. “They have to work on it to get it into their inner self,” she said. “And when that finally is a part of it, then they own the ballet. But if they’re struggling, you see it right away.”
Hands speak, and what they say matters. “I have the shortest fingers in the world,” Mazzo said. “I’ve got this tiny little hand and short fingers and in a way it didn’t matter because as long as you could see everything, it always had a life to it.”
Watching a dance isn’t like looking at a painting. The experience isn’t static. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming, with too many choices of where to look. The point of narrowing in on the hand isn’t to plant the gaze there and nowhere else, but to find an anchor that can help to broaden your focus — to open up more possibilities of seeing or feeling more.
So start at the hand. Trace its energy, both as it flows through the body and releases out of the fingertips. Can you sense a dancer suddenly appearing not just longer, but more complete? Can you see more than the shape of a body, but what its 360 reality is capable of? The secret to watching dance is to see that there is life beyond the skin. It doesn’t happen every time. But the hands can unlock an invisible world.
Video credits: NYCB (Sara Mearns in “Diamonds”); Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (“Revelations” by Alvin Ailey); WNET/Thirteen (Mikhail Baryshnikov in “Great Performances” and “Ballet From A to Z”); Jodi Melnick (“Moment Marigold”); Miramax (Willi Ninja in “Paris is Burning”); Noche Flamenca (Soledad Barrio in “Soleá); Martha Graham Dance Company (“Primitive Mysteries”); Paramount Pictures (Danny Kaye in “White Christmas”); CTV (“Pippin”); Universal Pictures (“Sweet Charity”); Universal Pictures (“Bring It On”); FKA twigs (“Childlike Things”); Doechii (“Anxiety”); CBS (Doechii on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”); Jungle (“Back on 74”); NYCB (“Serenade”); NYCB (Kay Mazzo in “Duo Concertante”).
Video produced by Josephine Sedgwick.
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
The post The Secret Weapon of Dance? Hands! appeared first on New York Times.
