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keeping other people off it. Which supposes special battle tactics. The battle the dancer fights, Pontevin calls ““moral judo”; the dancer throws down the gauntlet to the whole world: who can appear more moral (more courageous, more decent, more sincere, more self-sacrificing, more truthful) than he? And he utilizes every hold that lets him put the other person in a morally inferior situation.
    If a dancer does get the opportunity to enter the political game, he will showily refuse all secret deals (which have always been the playing field of real politics) while denouncing them as deceitful, dishonest, hypocritical, dirty; he will lay out his own proposals publicly, up on a platform, singing and dancing, and will call on the others by name to do the same; I stress: not quietly (which would give the other person the time to consider, to discuss counterproposals) but publicly, and if possible by surprise: “Are you prepared right now (as I am) to give up your
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    All politicians nowadays, Pontevin says, have a bit of the dancer in them, and all dancers are involved in politics, which however should not lead us to mistake the one for the other. The dancer differs from the politician in that he seeks
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    April salary for the sake of the children of Somalia?” Taken by surprise, people have only two choices: either refuse and discredit themselves as enemies of children, or else say “yes” with terrific uneasiness, which the camera is sure to display maliciously, the way it displayed poor Berck’s hesitations at the close of the lunch for the people with AIDS. “Why are you silent, Doctor H., while human rights are being trampled in your country?” Doctor H. was asked that question at a moment—in the midst of operating on a patient—when he could not respond; but when he had stitched up the open belly, he was overcome by such shame for his silence that he blurted forth everything one could want to hear from him and then some; after which the dancer who had harangued him (and here’s another grip in moral judo, a specially powerful one) snapped: “Finally. Even if it does come a little late. …”
    Situations can arise (under dictatorships, for instance) where it is dangerous to take a public position; for the dancer a little less dangerous than for others, because, having stepped into the spotlight, visible from all angles, he is protected by the world’s attention; but he has his anonymous admirers who respond to his splendid yet thoughtless exhortation by signing petitions, attending forbidden meetings, demonstrating in the streets; those people will be treated ruthlessly, and the dancer will never yield to the sentimental temptation to blame himself for having brought trouble on them, knowing that a noble cause counts for more than this or that individual.
    Vincent raises an objection to Pontevin: “Everyone knows you loathe Berck, and we’re with you on that. Still, even if he is a jackass, he’s supported causes we consider good ones ourselves, or, if you insist, his vanity has supported them. And I ask you: if you want to step into some public dispute, call attention to some horror, help someone being persecuted, how can you do it nowadays without being, or looking like, a dancer?”
    To which the mysterious Pontevin replies: “You’re wrong if you think I meant to attack dancers. I defend them. Anyone who dislikes dancers and wants to denigrate them is always going to come up against an insuperable obstacle: their decency; because with his constant exposure to the public, the dancer condemns himself to
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    being irreproachable; he hasn’t made a pact with the Devil like Faust, he’s made one with the Angel: he seeks to make his life a work of art, and that’s the job the Angel helps him with; because don’t forget, dancing is an art! That obsession with seeing his own life as containing the stuff of art is where you find the true essence of the dancer; he doesn’t preach morality, he