Ma

Robart’s work emphasizes the exploration of dancing and singing as a window into a deeper and larger view of the human being and creativity. Her approach to form, in both dance and chant, widens the experience of the body by going beyond the inherited cultural viewpoints that consider it as a tool of the mind to create patterns. In the context of her research, the body is an entity of relatedness, an interface that connects our consciousness to the external world perceived through the senses, as well as to the inner, subjective world— what we feel within our body and psyche. In Robart’s work, the body is an open door to the present, past, and future, to all beings, to the most mundane and to the most sacred in the human being.

 In Robart's research, form, articulated either as dance or chant, is the expression of the dynamics between the subject’s pulses of creative awareness and its responses to those same pulses. Robart calls the pulses of creative awareness élan. For her, élan is more than a physical or kinesthetic impulse. The source of élan is in the heart. Élan is fervor and will to go beyond our limited human condition to be in freedom— it is propulsion toward God.  Dance and chant are simultaneously a call and a response to that call. The call represents an innate need to overcome our limitations and realize our transcendental nature. The response is expressed through the evanescent forms our body is capable of constituting through chant and dance.

Realizing that form itself is the expression of the creative power of life may lead the individual into an evolutionary process of his consciousness, identity, and quality of action. Such a change is accomplished in a new perspective on life and art. To consider Robart's research and ideas leads us to explore their relationship with notions of body and perception, peculiar to modern phenomenology.

Testimony

RELATEDNESS' PRAXIS

This writing is based on a recorded conversation between Robart and I on July 6, 2013, as well as on my own experience in her research. 

Robart’s praxis is about the experience provoked by an approach to art in which the dance, the chant, and the artist are not viewed as isolated phenomena but as processes or organisms , which in turn are part of an organic whole, whose parts are interdependent. This notion derives from a worldview in which reality is also like a living organism in which one part is not more important than the rest but all become one through their interactions. Thus, the subject is not a primary entity that relates things to itself, swallowing them into its singleness. Instead, entities and phenomena grow together and enrich each other. Another way to consider the chants and dances is as it they were holograms, which independently of the perspective or angle from where one sees them, one can perceive the tridimensional rendering of the totality to which they belong, which includes, not the person, the chant or the dance, but the matrix containing all of them. 

According to Robart, her work places the subject face to the enigma of life.  In practical terms, she explained, her work is about relatedness because relatedness exists in all levels of life, and there is no life if there are not interrelations among things.  She considers the human body as an entity of relatedness. It connects or relates us with the air, the birds, the sun, other humans: all worlds within and around it. She laughed and mentioned the following poem anonym African poem**, 

A canvas and my body speak
I throw myself to the left

I throw myself to the right

I make the fish

The bird flies, 

flies, flies, flies

Goes away, comes back, passes

Ascends, glides, and falls

I am the bird

Everything lives, everything sings and dances.

One of the aspects of her work is the development of intimacy with the body in order reach the consciousness that the body is a body of relation, because it is made for that. That is why we have senses. The eyes see; the nose smells; the ears hear; and the hands and the skin sense the world around. 

In our culture we have the tendency to reduce everything to I and mine, but relatedness has nothing to do with the isolated individual. Robart’s idea resonates with the Japanese notion of human being conveyed by the expression ningen 人間, which includes the character 人 (nin, hito, bito, pito, jin) for human, and 間 ma (pronounced gen in the compound).  The   Japanese character 間 ma is translated as: “among”. “Interval”, “gap”, in Japanese aesthetics it is used to describe the negative space between artistic objects. Ma introduces an active quality into ningen and establishes the relational and relative nature of the human being. For Pilgrim, ningen “also carries an experiential connotation: for persons to stand in relationship to other persons is for them to experience each other.” 

For Robart, by becoming conscious of the interrelatedness of the beings and things in the world we can understand why one and one’s body are there, as well as one’s mission in it. In order to experience the relatedness, the subject has to arrive to its “zero point”, where the ego is silent and the tendency to judge and individualize experience ceases; only then, the body can resonate and enter in relationship with everything around it. Robart’s pedagogy aims to bring the participants to the intuition of relatedness. She does not want to convince them with theoretic indoctrinations. Her way is not speculative but rigorously practical, she creates the conditions to give the participants the opportunity to discover by themselves and allow their bodies to be bodies of active relatedness. 

The essence of her practice is what the person directly experiences through the body. The chant is not separated from the dance, and vice versa, because nothing happening in the body is separated from the rest. 

Singing and dancing come alive through the body, which, as a field of relatedness, is their conduit; it connects the world in which they originate with ours.  However, the idea that they arise only from the body would be too limited. Indeed, they are closely connected with a deeper notion of life. Robart’s praxis operates in a context of relatedness, in which Wisdom embodies itself: there Wisdom is chant, Wisdom is dance.

Pablo Jimenez 

 *A system with many parts that depend on each other and work together” Merriam-Webster Online

**  Ellwood, Robert S., and Richard Pilgrim. Japanese Religion: a Cultural Perspective. Prentice-Hall, 1985.