Attempting to define these terms, I found myself lost. Considering how I rhyme and repeat within my own work, as a choreographer of dance to music, I realized that I could not discuss rhyme or repetition without including rhythm.
Rhyme is a pair of things that agree.
Repetition is something that happens again.
Rhythm is the establishment of a time period.
All three require a minimum of two events. I can’t tease them apart, so I won’t: they are impossible to disentangle, as all three are interwoven in use and in description. Therefore let Rhyme + Repetition + Rhythm = R.
I’m thinking of R principally from the angle of dance/music, but inclusive of poetry, cuisine, architecture, visual art, sport, and nature. The three components are each a form of matching—of tension, suspension, release. In the microcosm of the theater, which is the natural habitat of my work, I see R as something like this: the “beat,” or “foot,” is a dot, a point in an arc of time, with time being the duration of a performance. It takes a minimum of two beats to establish R. There is a pattern of R in just about any occurrence of any duration: the beat, the measure, the phrase, the movement, the full “piece,” the evening, day, week, month, year, etc., infinitely large and small in every direction.
I believe that fundamental R is based on heartbeat, on breath, on bilateral symmetry; the body spatchcocked, split down the middle; pairs of eyes, ears, knees, thumbs, ovaries, lungs, feet, nostrils, and nipples. Bipedalism freed the arms to swing in coordination with the legs, and to clap hands, row a boat, knit. Songs and chants, and their R, unite people in actions such as pulling ropes, moving water, herding livestock, lulling an infant, plaiting hair, dancing and singing. Walking is a steady beat, a pulse, a repetitive, rhyming rhythm…and it gets you somewhere; you’re striding through space and time.
When I start to think about these subdivisions and accents of time—of R—I go nuts. There are so many examples, so many tangents, that it is hard to pick a few to pursue. I’ll skip that part in favor of the general.
It’s all about arriving, albeit temporarily, in consonance, satisfaction, completion. R lets us know when to stop: the rhythm, the repetition, the rhyme all meet on the terminal beat, the tonic, the end of time and of tempo. The punchline, the terminal cadence of the symphony, the “cherry on top,” the orgasm, the “button,” the “Tristan chord,” the sunset. R bears us, seduces us willingly through the whole experience, to the end. We made it! R creates memory, ritual, satisfaction, nostalgia.
At the resolution of even the most densely complicated figures in American square dance, the four couples of the quadrille head back to their start positions: “Home.” It is a re-set, an end-rhyme, a conclusion. A task completed, with style. Home.
Mark Morris is the artistic director of the Mark Morris Dance Group and the author, with Wesley Stace, of the memoir Out Loud.
