O TIme, thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me t’ untie!

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Viola, recently shipwrecked but landed safe on Illyria’s shore, falls instantly in love with her new master Orsino, who loves the beautiful but disdainful Olivia, who in turn falls for the young Cesario, not realising that ‘he’ is in fact Viola in disguise… The play explores the complexities of attraction, both openly expressed and hidden. When it seems that untangling the mess is beyond the capability of human endeavour, fate intervenes in the shape of the arrival of Viola’s twin Sebastian, also a survivor of the shipwreck. Olivia settles for the real man and Orsino is happy to accept the true nature of his attraction to ‘Cesario’.

A knot in my mind is a stuckness – is there such a word?! Like a shoelace or a length of sewing cotton or knitting wool that has become knotted, it is a problem to be solved, usually with difficulty. And how to untie? It takes patience, dexterity, perseverance – all qualities which are thin on the ground in Parkinson’s territory. It has to be unravelled slowly and carefully, without breaking the thread. Sometimes one knot leads to several, so that untangling can take hours of unpicking.

In friendships or relationships, often as a result of secrecy or deception, it is the kind of intractable problem that keeps you awake at night or leads to arguments and recriminations. In Argentine tango, the knot is the central dilemma that the dancers attempt to solve in the erotic power game at the heart of the dance. With a shake of the kaleidoscope, however, the perspective changes: ‘tying the knot’ refers to marriage, the kind of commitment that is intended to last a lifetime. It represents security and safety: the image in my mind is of a perfect symmetry, a figure eight, where each thread stands for one half of the couple. The notion of safety is reflected in practical uses, too: a boat tied securely in the harbour, the knots on a climbing harness. Carelessly tied, a knot can spell disaster. On the other hand, a knot in wood, whilst technically an imperfection, can be a beautiful detail.

In dance, the process of untangling or unravelling can take us from tension to release, from tightness to looseness, from pain to pleasure, from a full-body frown to an expression of joy and peace. It can express the scrunching up at the heart of the Parkinson’s experience and the smoothing out of the crumples, the impulse to fight it or a sense of acceptance…

(C) Danielle Jones (Teale) Dance, Collective IDentity, written by Kate Swindlehurst