The Book of Artists Pavel and Natalia Martynenko Hand-to-Hand Dance: The Experience of Receptive Aesthetics

Abstract

A book of an artist is a specific object of art presenting an authorial utterance overcoming the bounds of book-printing, in which either a text or a picture can be present. At the center of attention in the article is the book Rukopashnyi tanets. Istoriya lyubvi i sopernichestva, ob"ektivno otrazhennaya v dokumentakh i skhemakh, gde prichudlivo splelis' dva iskusstva: muzykal'no-khoreograficheskoe i voenno-rukopashnoe [Hand-to-Hand Dance. The Story of Love and Rivalry, Objectively Reflected in Documents and Schemes, in which Two Arts Have Fancifully Entwined: The Musical-Choreographic and the Hand-to-Hand-Military] (2010) created by Russian artists Pavel and Natalia Martynenko, which is examined in the angle of receptive aesthetics. The edition includes archival documents, photographs, drawings and schemes. On the basis of studies of this material, the author of the article interprets the artistic conception of the book in a philosophical sense. In the present art-object the notion is realized according to which life is a dance. Meanwhile, the process of the self-development of a personality involved in such a life appears in a ceaseless struggle with itself, as well as with the circumstances of life, which makes it possible to understand the title of the composition better. The book is begun and completed by music pages copied by hand by an anonymous music lover in the early 20th century. Such an artistic solution leads to the understanding of music by the ancient Greek sages. In particular, for the Pythagoreans music demonstrated itself as a sort of “Ariadne’s thread,” which determined the path towards the mysteries of existence, initiating the human being into universal harmony and thereby providing the opportunity of acting in unison with cosmic vibrations. Appealing to the opinion of Boris Asafiev, who asserted that gesture, along with mimic and dance, serves as a reference point in the creation of musical speech, the author arrives at the conclusion that the protagonists who become alive on the pages of the artist’s book, are led through life by music.

Keywords: hand-to-hand dance, book of an artist, Pavel and Natalia Martynenko, dance as thinking, music as playing