Akim Volynsky on the art of the human body

    Ballet deliberately emphasizes the dancer’s figure, leaving the head almost unnoticed. Why? Akim Volynsky makes the remarkably perceptive point:

Similarly the body by itself speaks, sings, and occasionally shouts more fully and sonorously than the human word. In the same museum you will find many figures without heads – they have fallen off over the centuries – and when you compare such headless figures with similar statues that have managed to remain intact, you stop regretting the broken-off heads, for the heads on the statues of the early period of Greek sculpture are usually not very expressive. How vividly these fragments of the torso live, how much they say to us through the waves of pleats in their tunics, which Goethe called the thousandfold echo of the human body. In the Athens museum there is no dead flesh.

    (Quoted from page 134 of Ballet’s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911 - 1925, by Akim Volynsky. Translated and edited by Stanley J. Rabinowitz. Yale University Press. 2008.)
    For a brief biography of Akim Volynsky and a review of the cited book, click here. For images of or related to Akim Volynsky, click here.