Choreography

This past week I happened to see a rather ugly news report about a bunch of sports fans who got into a fight while watching a game. (I turned the television off before hearing the details, so I don’t even know where it was, who was playing, or even which sport.) But as I reached for that off button, it occurred to me how absolutely unattractive un-choreographed fighting appears to be. Definitely unlike the movies when heroes defending their honor or their heroine lean back for a well-planned punch, or a Rocky-like boxer receives a right jab to the jaw that sends a torrent of slow motion sweat showering off the boxer’s cheek. These men in the news story just sort of flailed their arms, anger (and likely alcohol) contorting their faces. In fact, they looked a bit like children in a temper tantrum.

Of course my husband told me some real fights can look a lot more like the movies: hockey fights, for example, where the players have more experience at fighting.

But the short, unpleasant little snippet I saw on the news started me thinking. In books, as in movies, everything is choreographed. Every little piece fits the story like one giant puzzle. In a scripted fight on screen or on the page both parties are meant to portray something: the good guy courage, strength, stamina, the bad guy strength and stamina, too, but used for evil or domination or just plain meanness. In a movie both parties appear somewhat graceful. After all, if the audience is to be inspired to cheer for someone or root against someone else, you don’t want it looking like a playground fight at a nursery school.

And so the writers and directors work out the details. We assign steps to our characters and choreograph every move we give them so they represent either the nobleness of a hero or the toxic force of the villain. Everybody has to live up to the part they’re assigned to play.

Romantic scenes can be that way, too, not just fight scenes. Real life romance might be different from the larger-than-life romances filling screens or books, but the essence is similar and meant to be portrayed in a way that keeps the reader turning the pages or the viewer in their seat. For me, romantic stories remind me of how much I love my husband. They stir my heart and make me glad I found someone so worthy to be loved. So even if a romance is larger-than-life, the way most of fiction is, I know it’s choreographed and so it works to entertain me.

There is only one kind of love we shouldn’t try to choreograph. That’s the love God offers. I think some of us picture limits on God’s love, and yet when I look around at creation or when I think of what Christ did on the cross I’m reminded there’s only one limit on God’s love, and that’s the condition that we accept it.

That’s one dance that’s just too big to be choreographed.