The way of the ribbon and the sword

Walk down a short flight of stairs on Lincoln Street, though, and you pass from that world, as frantic at play as it is at work, into another place and – if you stay long enough – into another time as well.

Seven students, all dressed in white, are carving space out of the air around them with their arms and legs. They do not move so much as ripple. They turn and bend, twist and flow, as though the basic human geometry has surrendered to a kind of fluid dynamics. At one point, they pick up swords. Some of the swords are metal. Some of them are wood. They are all solid and substantial. But somehow the bending and flowing and rippling seem to run through the students and out through their blades, making them wavery presences in the air.

It as though each student has constructed a personal world with its own physics and that the movements themselves conform to the unique natural laws of these individual worlds. In the front row, in the middle of a line, there is a tiny woman doing all the same things that the students are doing, but her world seems to be more perfectly round, the equilibrium of her movements deeper and more profound than the kind that you see in the students around her, some of whom sneak looks to see what she is doing. Below the sidewalks of Boston, as a Friday night gathers itself on the streets above, this is a self-contained universe of individual worlds, all orbiting around the tiny woman in the front, who is its center and the source of the power that keeps the room in balance.