Ode to Black Waltzes

On the Importance of Dancing Among the Ruins

Part I – P’shat

I am in the car with my daughters, and, weirdo that I am, we are listening to St. Vincent’s “Paris is Burning.”

The song is full of historical and literary allusions, and I play it when I’m in a certain mood.  “What’s a black waltz?” my daughter asks.  So, I try to explain that the song is about war survivors coping with death and destruction, of experiencing both the euphoria of being alive and the sense of tragic absurdity and guilt that accompanies witnessing devastation.  It’s a song about dancing among the ruins and ashes, aestheticizing both the sorrow of loss and the joy of being alive to witness beauty. 

That reminds me of James Baldwin, when he writes about revolution in The Fire Next Time: “But what will happen to all that beauty?”

In explaining the black waltz to my daughters, I introduce the trope of the “danse macabre,” which I tell my daughters is a motif that has a centuries-old presence in Western art, showing them some of the examples, as well as its handmaiden, “death and the maiden.”  I explain that the danse macabre is meant to signify the universality of death, that we all die, and then I show them a clip from the film adaptation of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk – a play about generational curses, wandering souls, a Jewish exorcism, and the dangers of entering the enchanted abyss through Jewish mysticism.

 

The clip occurs on the young maiden’s wedding day, and her symbolic dance with death is prelude to her wedding.  I need to revisit the 1937 Yiddish film, which preserves a world of ghosts who perished in the Holocaust, but in the play, I remember that the bride visits the graves of her departed relatives before the wedding in order to be blessed by their spirits and ward off the evil eye / evil spirits when she embarks on her newlywed life (a practice still observed in Orthodox Judaism).  When the person wearing the death mask approaches the maiden for the dance, she initially resists and refuses to participate.  Over the course of the dance, however, we see the maiden surrendering to Death and becoming a willing participant in the danse macabre.  The backstory to this scene is that maiden was engaged to someone else before her present engagement. Her first betrothed died mysteriously while summoning dark magic through Jewish mysticism / kabbalah, thus becoming a dybbuk (demonic, wandering soul).  The dybbuk summons the maiden through the death-mask dancer and then migrates into her, finally possessing her body.  It is a doomed love story.

After we watch the clip, we listen to “Danse Macabre” by Saint-Saëns.

We create a story to follow the music, trying to map what is happening and what emotions are foregrounded at each turn of the music.  We decide it’s a story about a maiden who is kidnapped.  She dances with Death before being spirited away to the Underworld, which of course reminds us of Persephone, so then we watch a clip of the opera Persephone by Stravinsky.

Two other songs we listen to: “Death and the Maiden” by Schubert

and “Tum Balalaika,” a Yiddish folk tune.

On “Tum Balalaika”:  While the subject matter is happy, this rendition of the waltz itself is tinged with melancholy and sorrow; it feels like a danse macabre, perhaps anticipating love’s loss even before it begins, or anticipating the next catastrophe to befall the community singing it. 

Do you agree or disagree?  Does the song sound sad to you, the way it does to me?  Or am I projecting my own feelings here?

Of course, this performance of the song occurs in the post-Holocaust /post-apocalyptic context, trying to resurrect the culture, music, and language of a people who have been decimated.  It reminds me of the French film À la vie, To Life, (l’chaim in Hebrew) about three French women who survived Auschwitz.  Outwardly, they look like carefree, fashionable French women, and when they spend a seaside holiday together, their past inexorably floods back.  In one scene, they huddle on a beach together, a song in an extinct language from a former life takes over, and they sing in unison: “Tum bala, tum bala, tum balalaika….” So, now I am imagining “Tum Balalaika” in Auschwitz.  What songs followed those who marched into the death camps?  According to Theodor Adorno, poetry died in Auschwitz, but the truth is that it survived, sometimes morphing into black waltz.

With my kids, the conversation about the danse macabre leads to discussing memento mori in art, and I show them the anamorphic skull in “The Ambassadors” by Holbein.

Didn’t John Berger discuss “The Ambassadors” in one of his episodes of Ways of Seeing?  Anyway, my kids are delighted by the optical illusion in the painting, and the lesson ends there.

Part II – D’rash

My daughers and I had been discussing black waltzes, danses macabres, and death and the maiden. When I looked up Death and the Maiden, the eponymous play by Ariel Dorfman populated in my search, so I listened to it on hoopla digital and watched the 1994 film version with Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.  My mind went to the 1985 documentary Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo about the direct action protests of mothers of the desaparecidos / disappeared in Argentina, to what I knew of the terror under Pinochet’s Chile (anyone seen that great film about the No campaign, No?), to South American dirty wars, to Operation Condor, and to an activist couple I knew in Chicago during my community organizing days, Jim and his wife Matilde, a torture survivor from Guatemala.  Matilde had been featured in the documentary Beneath the Blindfold, and I hadn’t watched it yet, but after watching Death and the Maiden, I decided that it was finally time.  Beneath the Blindfold brought me back to my activist/organizing days and to subjects and consciousness-raising that people don’t talk about anymore: the School of the Americas (the US training ground for death squads and torturers all over the world), the US government’s history of torture experiments in collaboration with universities, War on Terror blacksites and invisibilized atrocities, the abrogation of civil liberties.  I also watched The Pinochet Case, which narrated the events leading up to the British extradition and Spanish prosecution of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (actually a spine-tingling story that restores your belief in humanity),  interweaving these developments with interviews of bereaved family members of the desaparecidos and also torture survivors. The play Death and the Maiden and the documentaries Beneath the Blindfold and The Pinochet Case, while different, all ask, how do people heal and move forward with their lives in the wake of horrendous violence and suffering? 

That actually might be a tangent.  Back to black waltzes.

I want to clarify for myself what the danse macabre is and isn’t.  In my reading, the danse macabre involves a hypnotic, trance-like, blissful surrender to Death the Seducer.  The danse macabre refers to art created in that momentary state of entranced transformation from dancing with death.  Actually, I interpret Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950) as a danse macabre, with Death as Seducer, and it seems that both death and poetry (a proxy for all art) have a hypnotizing and erotic allure, that they lead us astray from the centrality of our familial bonds and duties of life, that they are endlessly diverting and addictive and therefore dangerous.  Apparently this is a heterodox interpretation of the film and the orthodox one is about mirrors and immortality, which I haven’t figured out yet.  I’ll have to read about it.

The danse macabre is not a literal death but a dress rehearsal for death and a brief sojourn to liminality; the dancer is constantly crossing between the living world and the spirit world.  The danse macabre exists in a space where the veil between the living and the otherworld is permeable but not entirely dissolved, where it is instead the dancer who experiences temporary body dissolution.  In briefly descending into madness, the dancer discovers occulted beauty and an absolute truth about the world which cannot be accessed otherwise.  The danse macabre is neither the defiant Romantic spirit, yearning to break free of its chains in mind or body (no matter how much I love that aesthetic); nor a permanent succumbing to despair and depression that ends in suicide; nor is it an aestheticizing of pain and suffering.  I want to stress this; the danse macabre does not dishonor and cheapen tragedy by making it splendid or exquisite.  Perhaps instead it offers a journey into the dream world, the spirit world, or the mirror world, where the bereaved and afflicted can reunite with the departed, and, upon safe return, become wiser than before.  In this way, the danse macabre exists in the interstitial, connective space between grief and joy.

For me, the trope of the danse macabre brings an artistic mood that I inhabit from time to time, and I don’t always trust art that doesn’t at least have some hint (double negative alert) of the danse macabre’s feeling of beauty and wonder tinged with a remembrance of melancholy, the ecstatic surrender that presupposes consciousness of (but not residing in!) despair, the attempt to transcend such dark knowledge while also teetering on the abyss and dancing with ghosts.  Maybe this is the aufheben in Hegel’s dialectic, where the thesis is the primordial knowledge of brokenness (thesis  = despair), the antithesis is the reaching for light and wholeness out of the depths of darkness and brokenness (antithesis = affirmation of life and beauty), and the synthesis is the danse macabre, something that tries to contain both while paradoxically transcending and cancelling both, or neither.  I think the danse macabre is essential for people recovering from grief or struggling with their own mortality.  It’s a liberating surrender to the beauty of experiencing the paradox of life and the boundary-crossing possibilities of peeking beyond the veil.  Is it for all the time?  No, absolutely not.  Is it for difficult times? Yes, most certainly. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” The world is both destroyed and created anew every day. We are always at the apocalypse and in the midst of rebirth. In conversation with someone, I asked, why am I drawn to darkly beautiful art and literature? My response was that art that inhabits the danse macabre creates space to hold the pain of others. It’s a release valve and outlet for being sensible to the pain in the world.

By the way, all of Leonard Cohen’s music can be described as a danse macabre, in my opinion.  (A few of my favorite songs are “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “The Partisan,” and “Who by Fire,” “You Want It Darker,” and “Anthem.”)  This is actually a great tribute album, even though it doesn’t have Damien Rice in it. (I would listen to anything and any tribute album with Damien Rice in it.)

The danse macabre is also distinct from the realm of the invisible, minor acts of resistance and life-affirmation that characterize “minor literatures,” which, to borrow from Saidiya Hartman and Kara Keeling, are written in a minor chord and participate in the witch’s flight.  I will try to elucidate these terms and ideas in a subsequent post.