Archive, Conversation with
Conversation with Charlotta Smeds
A conversation about freedom, fashions, maturing, the fear of death, the longing for beauty – and hieroglyphs. In Norwegian and Swedish only, I’m afraid. You can listen here.
To do something beautiful for its own sake, for the intrinsic delight of it, without thought of gain: this, I’d say, is a way of beginning to live chastely in this world, poised to balance elegantly on whatever surging billow providence provides as a means to bear us homeward, towards the shore. Could it be that such gratuitous seeing and acting in pursuit of beauty is stranger to men than it is to women? Perhaps no form of concrete human enterprise grants a premonition of the body’s possible ascent towards transcendent beauty more clearly than dance, an art form in which iron discipline enables, over time, breathtaking freedom of expression.
From Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, to be published on 12 October.
Viktorina Kapitonova and Roberto Bolle in Giselle at the Ballet in Zurich