Boxing, Ballet and the Passing of Time
A month ago I made a video to go with my song Towel. It’s a composite video mainly featuring two boxers and two ballet dancers. To be precise, it’s footage of Muhammad Ali boxing against Joe Frazier in 1974, overlaid with film of dancers from the Royal Ballet performing duets in 1970. You can see how the two performances are reflected in each other — both graceful and full of vitality, both expressions of human drives, both exemplars of humans at the peak of physical ability. You may also enjoy the boxing referee dancing around the ring in his best-supporting-actor role.
While compiling the video, watching the Ali-Frazier fight was a strangely nostalgic experience for me because I think I’d seen the original live as a 13-year-old, though now in 2020 I’d forgotten the outcome so I still felt the tension of not wanting to see Ali get hurt. These days I don’t watch boxing because I long ago came to the conclusion that it’s barbaric and should be banned. It should, shouldn’t it? In 1974, like most of my friends, I saw Muhammad Ali as a heroic figure. His audacious ‘I am the greatest’ call and other memorable lines of poetry, most notably ‘Float like a butterfly, Sting like a bee’, became catchphrases recognised worldwide. As I got older, my admiration for him grew as I found out more about his political philosophy and anti-war stance, and the reason he’d changed his name from the ‘slave name’ Cassius Clay to his Muslim ‘free name’ Muhammad Ali, meaning beloved of God. Muhammad Ali was a supreme artist who transcended boxing.
Ballet? It had always been beyond my appreciation. It still is mostly. Of course I can see the grace and understand that at one level it is trying to express profundities through movement — now, there’s a challenge! — but I think its lack of freedom is what I don’t like. Aren’t the dancers restricted by the choreography? — like wearing a suit and tie, buttoned-up and formal instead of free. But I didn’t come to bury ballet, I came to praise it! Within the restrictive forms and lines of the choreography the dancers are expressing beauty in their coordinated movements, flowing together — artists trying to express nature and its timeless beauty. By combining the grace and coordination that otherwise would not spring up in nature unbidden, the choreographer performs a similar role to a musical composer — an intermediary deliberately choosing different elements and moulding them to express human emotions.
Within a week or two of finishing the Towel video I came across two tweets that poignantly contrasted and highlighted two of the song and video’s themes — timeless beauty and the passing of time.
The first tweet featured a photo of Muhammad Ali taken by Zenon Texeira in 2016 just weeks before Ali died at the age of 74. It was quite harrowing and unbelievable to look at. Although I’d caught glimpses of Ali in his later, post-boxing years, and seen him shaking with Parkinson’s disease, I still had a stubborn mental image of him as an all-conquering athlete, an image that had been refreshed and reburnished in my mind by watching him against Smokin’ Joe. Texeira’s photo shows an initially unrecognisable face, which is naturally ravaged by time. I look at this old Ali and imagine he still carries some secrets of life. He’s still someone I’d like to have a conversation with, someone that the world would be better for listening to. The photo was another reminder of that dreaded truism that we sensibly choose not to think too much about: time marches on.
The second tweet was equally harrowing and uplifting. It featured a video of a former ballerina, initially slightly hunched over in a wheelchair. Not too much biographical detail is available about this elderly woman, though her name was Marta Cinta Gonzalez and she seems to have been a Cuban prima ballerina in the 1960s.¹ So she would have been in her dancing prime at the same time as Muhammad Ali was the ‘undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world’. The video of Gonzalez was recorded by a Spanish charity, Asociacion Musica para Despertar, which uses music therapy to help its patients suffering from dementia.
The succinct caption below the video prepares you for what you are about to watch: ‘Ballerina with Alzheimer’s hears Swan Lake, begins to dance’. It’s emotionally powerful to see Gonzalez being transported back to her prime as Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is played — the grace and wonder return as she performs the flowing arm and hand movements in her wheelchair. It could bring a tear to your eye, even if you watched boxing when you were a youngster.
The video for Towel is here. Admittedly, it may not be quite as moving as Swan Lake or Muhammad Ali in his prime, but at least you get to see the Ali Shuffle and the grace of boxers and ballerinas for whom time has not yet marched on.
¹ This Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article pieces together a few strands of Gonzalez’s biographical info https://bit.ly/3nO1Vam
