Sylvie is famous. The sort of indie-famous, like after performance friends would come to the stage front to greet her while she’s sorting the cables and synthesizer, though the venue is always tiny and only had devoted fans like a secret inner circle.
The tinniest concert I’ve ever been to has only five people showed up, the keyboard slash vocal from BC sold me a $10 ticket and it had to be split by two bands and supposedly the venue. She’s mildly famous.
Actually, not quite.
Sylvie is famous in a sense that her movements are delicate enough to attract deserved attention. While shifting her body across the studio, the popping sound from the wood floor scattered throughout her path, following the soles swiftly. Mostly her feet move horizontally without lifting very much her ankle, drawing a cursive line so close to the ground. It is light and calm, seemly without even disrupting the air, as if you can hear the stillness surrounding her lower body.
I don’t really know why would that be impressive; I remember seeing Misty Copeland’s legs, with an almost angular calf of which the edge of the muscle beautifully represents the functionality and capability it possesses, supporting her gesture to the precision. A fine machinery I almost want to say, that’s the kind of complement I make to a ballerina.
Sylvie is not Misty Copeland, of course; she barely knows ballet. In fact, we met in an evening contemporary dance class, where dance is rather therapeutic than pedagogic.
But that’s probably the point, that her naturally cultivated habits and tendencies, rather than technicalities and formations, demonstrate quite genuinely a light-hearted but sophisticated mind, that tiny pieces of information about her leaked spontaneously through gestures despite scores. When she listens a sensible mind chases the rabbit in a fleeting wonderland that we share. But mostly she dances into a mind space that seemly secluded, and stretches back occasionally to the quotidian normality.
I don’t really know her well; I know that she studied theatre but not quite sure why Molière would be taught in French literature instead of department of theatre, or maybe it is. But I do know that when the motion flows though her fingertip it seems to me a performing art, and I would watch the piece regardfully.
The Fleeting Moments 