Dancing with all of my elbows
(Nimue)
Learning to use the pointy bits is important for all kinds of arts. As a child, I studied ballet from an early age. That dance form is all about smooth curves and elegant lines, it is all about grace and flow. There are a lot of things you can’t express with grace and flow. It wasn’t until much later in life, in a 5 Rhythms class that I started to use my elbows when I dance, and it has made me a much more capable dancer. I’ve become alert to the staccato beats in other kinds of dance, and the power of contrast between the sharp and the smooth.
On the visual art front, there was a time when the smoothness of photoshop work seemed to epitomise what professional art looked like. I work in physical media, I’ve never been and never will be a digital artist, but that means my work has a spiky quality to it. You can see the pencil lines, the brush marks, the physicality of the oil pastels. The arrival of AI has taught me to love and appreciate these things. It is the messy realness of physical media that makes the humanity of it shine through. The textures of paper, the process of putting down colours and marks. It’s all very real. It is easy to tell art created this way from art created by a machine. It’s a process of recognition that brings up similar feelings for me to using my elbows when I dance.
I’ve known where my elbows were for singing purposes for some time. With music, there are two kinds of harmony available – you can have smooth, comfortable harmonies or you can have crunchy, exciting ones. Too much smoothness makes the music bland. Too much crunchiness makes it unpleasant. It’s all about getting the right balance. I’m now trying to bring that elbow quality into my fiddle playing as well. Amusingly enough that will be quite literally about how I use my right elbow around managing the bow. It’s the spiky elbow movements that bring the sharper and more energetic sounds that I want to add to what I do.
When art is too smooth, there’s no life in it. To make something effective you often need to allow space for what’s messy, spiky, a little bit raw. Smoothness isn’t the only kind of beauty available, and sometimes we need the jagged edges and the dissonance. There’s no point seeking some notion of ‘perfection’ in all of this – as that tends towards bland and insipid. Rougher, more complex voices are often more interesting to listen to than ones that can create really pure notes. Whatever you’re doing, bring your elbows. Bring the raw parts, the ungainly parts, because when you can incorporate all of that, it opens up the way to deeper expression.
