dancing

Ruth St Denis on the beach, 1916. NYPL digital gallery Image ID: DEN_0543V

This is Ruth St Denis dancing on the beach in 1916.  Unlike classical ballet where energy flows off the body in smooth waves, St Denis, who changed dance radically with Ted Shawn in the 1920s, flings off energy from her body but then snaps it back with a tweak of her wrists.  

It is similar to what one sees in some of the drawings of Patkau Architects in the 90s: a retaining wall shoots across the plan and then, when normally it would subside with a sigh into the ground where the topography finally meets the level, the Patkaus would crank the end and all the energy of the weight behind that retaining wall would jerk back toward the house.

It is a powerful ploy, no less in dance than in architecture, to embody resistance.  What was Ohm's Law?  resistance = voltage/current?  This is the problem with going with the flow, no voltage, no resistance, no energy.  Things change when energy is interrupted.