luzbybernal.com

The Art of Summer

The Fluid Human Dance That Is Grand Central

www.nytimes.com



Published: August 31, 2011

Every city has its own choreography, formal or informal. The composer John Cage loved to point out how any street corner is theater of a kind; the dance critic and poet Edwin Denby wrote ardently of how daily life was full of things to see; and when one of Merce Cunningham’s dancers asked what a piece was about, he took her to the window, showed her the view of the sidewalk and said, “That.”

To observe large numbers of people moving and coexisting in complex simultaneity, I chose to make two visits to Grand Central Terminal in August. Its main concourse is among the city’s spectacular locales, giving you the chance to observe the complex patterns made by arriving and departing passengers. Its vast, tall rectangular block of space is framed by high windows, a ceiling embellished with constellations, and double staircases at either end. With its many arches leading to other parts of the station and its central, four-faced clock, it is more than the sum of its exits and entrances: it adds heroic drama to the very thought of travel.
Through the course of my first visit, from 7:50 to 11:50 a.m. on Aug. 15, the many changes in view were remarkable. Before 8:15, almost everyone is in motion, part of one busy stream or another: it’s populous but remarkably quiet. Between 8:30 and 10, movement and stillness are continually juxtaposed: a good many people are stationary — waiting, watching, handling luggage, standing in line for tickets or information, making calls on their cellphones — adding a strong element of visual contrast to the still flowing, though lessening, lines of human traffic. By 10, the hall has largely become a tourist site, with more than 10 people at any one moment taking photographs. Although passengers certainly still come and go, they no longer dominate.
That’s the larger shape of how the Grand Central morning changes. Actually, while you’re there, you can feel how every five minutes brings an alteration of tone, direction, pace. This is truest in the early hours. And it’s also then, when nobody is wielding a camera, that the terminal is most like a movie. It’s easy to see the whole process as impersonal, to feel the station and the city as a machine that processes people as grist to its mill. Seen that way, it’s reminiscent of those long-shot scenes in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” For over an hour, one exit is constantly busy with the flow of bodies all passing up and out into the city.
With multiple exits and doors leading to multiple platforms, the main hall contains umpteen possible paths for people to take. At least four of those paths are thickly populated at this time of day, while others vary according to the trains. Try to cross one of those human streams, and you feel you’re causing civic inconvenience.
It’s funny how this view of real life keeps recalling works of art. Between 8:30 and 10 a.m., enough people stand still, some in groups, to make the floor look like an Italian piazza: those painted by Piero della Francesca come to mind. Earlier, a dancegoer could easily feel the resemblance between the incessant streams of people and the first movement of Jerome Robbins’s ballet “Glass Pieces,” but now the view recalls the scene in the Mark Morris work “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” where, amid the crisscross of four horizontal lines of walking people, a stationary man and woman spot each other.
At times the scene recalls the urban vortex of Busby Berkeley’s “Lullaby of Broadway.” And any Cunningham devotee will recall urban studies like his “CRWDSPCR,” in which the movement of one human being is circumscribed by that of others.
The panorama of all this is mesmerizing. But you can’t watch it for long without being absorbed by its succession of innumerable, overlapping human vignettes. The overview of urban motion is expressive one way, but even at 8 a.m., it is a fabric of innumerable stories, each apparent in an instant. Two men are walking, two yards apart, at the same speed, along the same diagonal toward the MetLife escalator: just what features of their builds and locomotion, seen from behind, make one look like a bulldog, the other like a leopard? Some men swing their arms but keep their bodies stiff, while one man whose upper body is nearly immobile seems to rotate his pelvis with every step.
Two women are walking at the same speed, one behind the other, toward the same exit. The movement of one, in high heels, her short skirt swinging as she goes, has a jauntily amusing quality, but what turns the moment into comedy is the contrast with the woman following her. Less glamorous and keeping her body stiff, she’s wearing a calf-length raincoat and flat heels and moves as drearily as if within a long-familiar prison.
Even right across the hall, someone whose facial features are too distant to be distinct can nonetheless carry himself in a way that seems heart-stopping; it’s his fluency of impetus and the lift of his carriage. His grace can stay compelling all the way across the station until he stops to check a sign, when, suddenly adjusting his body weight, he becomes completely plain.






Page 2 of 2)
Another person is just as immediately affecting in the first instant — something in the wonderful repose of the shoulders and the floating lift of the head — before being swallowed up by the crowd and vanishing a second later into eternity. Most dancegoers know how a great ballerina can be gripping and moving just in the way she walks onto the stage and across it; it’s moving amid the rush of daily life to catch sight of a person with the same rare distinctiveness.

Revisited from 4 to 7 p.m. a day later, the hall was different again, especially after the urban exodus began after 4:25. The spectacle at this point is altogether more complex, and from 5 on, the hall is at its most crowded: people waiting for trains, people photographing one another and the place, people passing at different tempos. Just look at the escalators from the MetLife building. Now people are mainly descending, in a steady stream, but it’s not just their direction that’s reversed.
Body language has altered plenty during the day: there’s a much less economical variety of dynamics, speed and behavior. You now notice many different mixtures of legato, staccato and marcato in the way people walk, and a new liveliness in the way they stand; even those walking briskly now are able to multitask (looking to and fro, consulting phones, rubbing their faces).
All of them look less reserved, as if they’d gotten a load off their chests during the day, but also less touching and less polite; people now are more volatile, funny, sexy and open. (Downstairs the spectrum is ever larger: people run for trains, talk helter-skelter while waiting for them, eat meals.) They aren’t more beautiful or characterful than before, but they’re more animated and communicative. Only on the down escalators do people merge into one single current now. The early morning showed just one facet of city life, but by late afternoon the station reflects the diversity of the city as a whole.
Are the people at Grand Central different? I cannot prove that the elegance of the place rubs off on people’s behavior, but I sense that these same visitors would not carry themselves in quite the same way at Penn Station or the Port Authority. The immensity of the hall’s space makes an impact at all times, surrounding people with drama.
It keeps reminding me of a story my mother used to tell about the days when she worked as an au pair in France. Her employer had a maid from Milan to whom the employer once said politely, “I understand the cathedral in Milan is very beautiful.”
The maid replied: “Oh, but Madame! You should see the railway station!”
Dance


New York Times