it figures.
Describing his efforts to draw the dancer María Muñoz, John Berger hints at the unlikely links between drawing and dance, both of which use visual representation to suggest forces that become—whether through fleet of foot or sleight of hand—attached to the material. “The effort of my corrections and the endurance of the paper have begun to resemble the resilience of María’s own body,” he explains. “The surface of the drawing, its skin, not its image, makes me think of how there are moments when a dancer can make your hairs stand on end.”
In drawing as in dance, Berger suggests, something slips through our fingers, darts past the corner of our eyes, that we seek to capture, or at least to evoke. “We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination,” he writes. One sees deeper surfaces beyond the surface, bodies within the body. One glimpses positively into negative spaces. For Berger, “you lose your sense of time when drawing. You are so concentrated on scales of space,” he explains.
“Drawing María in the Bridge position was like drawing a coal miner working in a very narrow seam,” Berger contends. We feel it in the drawing, in the dance. We sense it. We almost touch it. Then it vanishes.
Perhaps only through something like the repetitive technical labors of drawing and dance can we affix presence to that absence. Call them riveting art forms.