A Study in Equilibrium

I recently won this piece of ephemera from 1910 on eBay. It is currently being matted and framed so it will shine in all its 4 inch by 8 inch glory. I  can remember as a young boy having my parents tell me about a show they had seen on a recent trip to Las Vegas. They referred to one of the acts as “Living Statues” I later found out it was a celebrated hand balancing act called David and Goliath. When I finally did see the act a few years later, I understood the original description. In their little gold bikinis, covered from head to toe in gold paint, and moving through a series of gravity defying poses, they indeed looked like something Michelangelo would have hewn out of marble or poured from liquid bronze. But what really struck me was the tension that they were building and the slowness at which they moved. As if they were literally carving their bodies into shapes. In the moment, they WANTED us to know exactly how difficult it was. In ballet, when we do pas de deux work, the point is often to make it look NOT difficult. NO one wants to see a male ballet dancer grunt or grimace when he is lifting his partner overhead. Likewise, we do not want to see ballerina’s muscles popping out from the strain of holding a pose. But sometimes it IS necessary to show the audience that there is some bit of tension between the dancers in order to make the dancer’s poses seem as if they are connected to each other. A visible shared energy. This is especially important in one of the ballets in our upcoming show, TANGATA. Without tension, a tango is nothing. Oh and just to be clear that isn’t a picture of David and Goliath (Fred Randall and Jerry Howard). The turn of the century duo are Ottley Coulter and Charles Shaffer, whose act was billed as A Study in Equilibrium.