Imagine two dancers moving through space. Now divide that motion into an uncountably infinite number of instants. An instant has no duration, and so the dancers are motionless at each instant. But how, then, can these perpetually stationary figures move along in their dance; where in all these instants can one find their motion? This is one of Zeno’s famous paradoxes, formulated two and a half millennia ago. It has received many resolutions since its construction, mostly of a metaphysical or logico-mathematical nature, but I am more interested in what it points toward: the phenomenon of motion precisely as we experience it.
For if we examine our own experience, we see that one cannot divide time into a sequence of independent instants, except as a limiting process in which the limit is never attained. Each of our actions requires a finite duration and thereby presumes a contextualization in the past and a continuation in the future; when my finger moves to strike a key, for me that motion contains within it the context that preceded it, the reason and “cause” of its motion, and I do not presume that it will suddenly cease just short of striking its intended key. The present is a movement, a rising-up of the past toward the future. Our experience at each moment is as a continuation of something already arisen, something that necessarily existed beforehand, and as something that will continue toward something soon to be. Thus, when we see two dancing figures, at each “instant” we perceive their past position retained within their present position, and we already look toward their future position immanent within their present.
And therein abides the essence of the transfixing beauty of Pas de Deux. Using multiple exposures of backlit dancers moving in a void of blackness, it presents those dancers to us as reflections of themselves, as shadows of themselves, and finally as continuous pluralities. As the dancers’ glistening white outlines pile atop one another, the film abstracts away from our notions of a body’s physicality and self-identity; the dancers cease to be things and are dissolved into their pure motion. And that motion is a multitude. The past and the future that were inherent in the dancers’ movements are drawn forth and displayed side-by-side. But the images oscillate rhythmically between this pure motion and fixed bodies that remind us of what is moving. The motion is constituted by the dancers and the dancers are constituted in their motion. All is flux, and our perception is its synthetic union.
