Common ground for artistic dialogue
‘Shinbone’ resulted from a collaborative effort of veteran dancer Tamar Borer and the young musician Tom Kline. While Kline is at his prime, a talented cello player and teacher, Borer is a survivor of an accident which left her paralyzed from the waist down decades ago when she was a budding dancer. Both seemed to look for common grounds for artistic dialogue, as experimentalists with affinity to the creative side of their craft.
Borer, is a disciple of Kazuo Ohno, one of the founders of Japanese avant-garde Butoh dance of the post-World War II era. With time, Borer focused more and more on various Far Eastern philosophies and refined her own niche as a Butoh practitioner. Kline, it seems, has developed a taste for more contemporary and experimental music.
Their meeting seemed to reinforce their preexisting artistic tendencies. The new sound stimulations by Kline gave Borer a chance to pick up the subtle move’s changes, but the core of her idiosyncratic features that are typical of her later work were kept intact. In fact, I also had no reason to believe that Borer’s spiritual world had a great affect on Kline’s.
Borer’s studios offer an aesthetic white cube from the floor up, including chairs and pillows, perfectly in accord with her minimalistic serene ambience, her inner concentration and her patient perception of time. The ultra contemporary musical approach of Kline supports 50 ways to play a cello, including by scratching its strings, and punching and pinching them, as long as they don’t harmonize. At the same time, Borer was playing within her personal universe of understated beauty and building her unique sensitivities that are in touch with nature, thus gaining enormous respect for her elegance, and finding her true artistic zone, noted for its perseverance, tolerance and totality. Yet, ‘Shinbone’ didn’t result in a crystallized product which could surpass Borer’s earlier creations.