Sculpting Movement and Time: Making Slow Dancing

Slow Dancing, David Michalek’s video installation featuring larger-than-life, hyper-slow-motion video portraits of dancers and choreographers, offers insight into the physics of movement and the essence of creativity.

With these images, Michalek conjures a fluid stillness, creating a meditative time and space amidst the rush and crush of contemporary life. Slow Dancing engages the senses and the mind in an encompassing experience of awareness. The work also transforms Harvard Yard, calling forth its symbolic significance as a place for contemplation.

Michalek stresses the importance of incorporating different styles of dance as not simply pluralistic, but also as aesthetically interesting. A ballerina’s split-second pirouette drags out across an agonizing span of time, and each muscle’s contraction gets a starring role in its own few moments of screen time. Meanwhile, on a neighboring screen, a break-dancer’s gravity-defying movements change at a glacial, gorgeous step. Creative imagination, says Michalek, lives in that tension. And the work itself is driven by his desire to create “a little oasis of contemplation—a secular chapel—” in the midst of our daily bustle.

In the 1599 Ratio Studiorum of the Society of Jesus- the official edition of the Ratio throughout the 17^th and 18^th Centuries- the First Rule of the Professor of Rhetoric specified the goal to be pursued in the final year of pre-university studies: Eloquentia perfecta. Seeking to clarify this succinct phrase the drafters indicated in the same First Rule that the three elements were included: praecepta dicendi, stylus et erudition, which might be paraphrased as “rules of persuasion, skill in Latin, and humanistic learning.” For a full understanding of these expressions one must review the historical roots from which this educational ideal slowly grew.

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In teaching Law and Ethics, I aim not only to give students the skills they need for distinguished professional performance, but also to teach them to be leaders who are sensitive to justice and service and who can exercise their power with competence and compassion.

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In life Gerard Manley Hopkins did not live even to celebrate his golden jubilee of existence. He died on June 8, 1889, before his 45th birthday, unknown, unprized, unlamented even within the comparatively small circle of his acquaintance. Not one of his poems had been published; and apart from his poems he left nothing to his contemporaries worthy of note or record. All things considered, he was left at death- as he complains in one of his last poems, whose only reader was his friend Robert Bridges- “a lonely began.” And so he died, as he seemed to have lived, a sad failure in everything he had attempted, or what he calls in the same poem “time’s eunuch.”

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Timothy S. Healy, S.J.

When I first came to Georgetown twelve years ago, the most frequent comment I heard was, “It must be a great change from City University.” I responded easily at first by citing City University’s 250,000 students and 18,000 faculty members and adding that I was responsible for the care and feeding of twenty college presidents (which incidently gave me a less than adoring fix on the breed). It took me some years before I realized that the honest answer was “Yes, and Georgetown is more complicated.”

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James R. Kelly

I was late in discovering that Ed Cuffe was my favorite teacher. For more than a decade he was my unfavorite teaching, someone a clumsy sociologist might call a “negative role model.” In and out of class he was nervous and twitchy, he did not cover the “discipline” (literature), and he gave odd assignments. He dressed like and e.e. cummings poem.

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