Her phrases are so impeccably danced that they seem to spell out a clear meaning, even when if you try to translate them back into words, that meaning immediately fades away again—as usually happens when anyone tries to explain dance or music. Gradually, watching this video recording of the ballet and its reenactment of a ritual, I begin to understand one of the deeper layers of the story Copland tells in the piece—about how the failure of most marriages can be explained as a change from a regular transitive verb (to fuck the other person) to a phrasal transitive verb (to fuck the other person
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