DANCEHOUSE DIARY ISSUE #8 by Dancehouse

CEHOUS N DA iary E D ISS U E 8 / 2 01 5

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Dancehouse Diary Issue 8 / 2015 PG. 3 Encountering the Ethical PG. 4 Encountering Causalities PG. 7 Opening into Otherness, Iyengar Yoga as corporeal ethics PG. 9 The Ethics of Criticism PG. 10 Anti-Obscurantism PG. 12 Chitty Shuffles at Night PG. 14 Evolution(s) of Ethics PG. 16 Diary Entries PG. 20 Ethics of Touch PG. 22 Dancing in The Dark

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Contributors Kate Barnett, Alice Cummings, Liz Dean, Louisa Duckett, Martin Hansen, Alice Heyward, Elizabeth Keen, Fleur Kilpatrick, Gary Levy, Jana Perkovic, Antonia Pont, Philipa Rothfield, Margaret Meran Trail, Benjamin Woods.

Editorial Board Philipa Rothfield is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy program, La Trobe University. She is a dance reviewer for RealTime arts magazine and Momm magazine, Korea. She is co-convenor of the Choreography and Corporeality working group, International Federation of Theatre Research. She has been dancing on and off for some decades. As a philosopher, she writes on French philosophy, political philosophy, feminism and postmodernism, specialising in philosophy of the body. She is currently writing a book on dance and philosophy. She has published on dance in relation to Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead, Nietzsche, Klossowski and Ravaisson.

Dancehouse would like to warmly thank all the contributors to this issue and most particularly: the incredible Dan Perjovschi for so kindly accepting to delight us with his witty drawings; the flamboyant Antonia Pont for her great guest editing work and Chloe Chignell for her thorough research and proofreading.

What is Dancehouse Diary? THE DANCEHOUSE DIARY is a free regular publication published by Dancehouse, Melbourne, Australia. DANCEHOUSE DIARY is a unique dance publication based on discourse, dialogue and connection with other art forms and wider societal issues. The DIARY is deeply rooted in Joseph Beuys’ reflection on the artist’s power to be a social sculptor though movement, action and thought, thus inspiring us to live more creatively. It aims not only to cultivate a taste for dance, but to provoke cross-disciplinary thought and to articulate a most necessary connection of our bodies with our minds, of how we move and exist in the world and for the world.

Antonia Pont is Senior Lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University and the founder of the Australian chapter of Vijnana Yoga International, a community of thinking and making yogis currently practising out of West Space Gallery. She publishes poetry, short fiction and theoretical prose, and is currently working on a philosophical/creative arts manuscript called Strange Doings – a theory of practice-in-itself.

More on the Diary www.dancehousediary.com.au More on Dancehouse www.dancehouse.com.au

Angela Conquet is Artistic Director of Dancehouse and founder of this publication. She has worked extensively in the independent dance sector as artistic director, presenter and producer and her work experiences took her to different context and countries. She is also a translator and interpreter.

Dan Perjovschi is a visual artist mixing drawing, cartoon and graffiti in artistic pieces drawn directly on the walls of museums and contemporary art spaces all over the world. His drawings comment on current political, social and cultural issues. He has played an active role in the development of the civil society in Romania. His work has been presented – as exhibition, installation and performance – namely by MoMA, Basel Kunsthalle, Tate Modern London, Aichi Triennial, Centre Pompidou. He lives and works in Bucharest.

All illustrations: Dan Perjovschi Graphic Design: Famous Visual Services famousvs.com

Dancehouse 150 Princes Street, North Carlton, VIC 3054, AUSTRALIA t: +61 3 9347 2860 f: +61 3 9347 9381 www.dancehouse.com.au www.dancehousediary.com.au

www.perjovschi.ro

The views and opinions expressed in this Dancehouse Diary are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of Dancehouse.

Supporters of Dancehouse The Movers THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF DANCEHOUSE / JAMES & LEO OSTROBURSKI / MICHAEL ADENA & JOANNE DALY The Shakers JANE REFSHAUGE The Explorers MURRAY BATCHELOR / ROSEMARY FORBES & IAN HOCKING / SHELLEY LASICA The Enthusiasts The Ostroburski Family Fund / Phillip Adams / Amelia Bartak / Emma Batchelor / Sarah Brasch / Kara Burdack / Samantha Chester / Robert Francis Coleman / Maxime Conquet / Michaela Coventry / Elizabeth Day / Wendy Batchelor / Luke George / Lucy Guerin / Sue Healey / Claire Hielscher / Becky Hilton / Lauren Honcope / Gillian McDougall / Fran Ostroburski / John Paolacci / Jerry Remkes / Philipa Rothfield / Clive Rumble / Suzanne Sandford / Jack William Silloray / Helen Simondson / Anouk van Dijk The Starters Annette Abbott / Niels Bienas / Bec Dean / Katharina Dilena / Claire Gilbert / Tom Gould / Richard Gurney / Antony Hamilton / Elizabeth Harvey / Shane Marble / Robert McCredie / Bronwyn O’Brien / Carl Nilsson-Polias / Lucy Parakhina / Steve Rothfield / Lorna Sim / Yana Taylor / Canada White / Jamima Wu

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Encountering the ethical Philipa Rothfield

Ethics is intimate, personal, in your face, more so than the political. There is a proximity to ethical relations. Ethics is based on touch. The body materialises these relationships, puts a material face to their potency. We are touched by others, touched literally, metaphorically, directly, indirectly. How to think these encounters? Is there something particular to dancing that teaches us something about the ethical realm? Can the body teach us and, if it can, what is that? What does learning have to do with ethics? For Spinoza, ethics arises in the encounter between bodies, on the dance floor, in the studio, in the kiss, slap or punch. It is not a matter of some abstract law we must obey, rather a question of what a body becomes in light of the encounter. The good arises for Spinoza when a body acquires and exhibits greater agency, more power or capacity: does a body become better, more capable, more powerful? Does it realise more of its potential, or is it diminished, lesser, weaker? As elaborated later in this issue (cf Dance Thinking), these are the key ethical questions for Spinoza, whose answers lie within and between bodies, in the flux of life. The body in all its richness and complexity can teach us how to live, how to act. Antonia Pont looks at the fine metrics of the bodily encounter, at the capacity for the body’s sensations to become the teacher. The same holds for encounters between bodies. The Ethics of the Encounter section in this issue illustrates the point. Does touch enable a body to become more capable? Is the one being touched alive and active to that touch? If so, if a body gains in agency as a result of the encounter, then Spinoza would say this is good. Somatic practitioners aim to facilitate greater agency, capacity and understanding through their encounters. The same might hold between dancing bodies, inasmuch as training and teaching aims to facilitate greater capacity. Another way of putting this would be to focus on agency, as the measure of capacity. Elizabeth Keen writes of a touch that listens, as a means by which to facilitate agency (rather than passivity) on the part of the receiver. In Spinozan terms, this is an encounter or intervention which positions the other in active terms, leading to greater empowerment. Alice Cummins also addresses the sense in which listening can open up a terrain of new possibilities, for the self as well as the other. Kate Barnett raises an ethical question with

respect to intervention, framed in terms of a fear that touching interrupts, patterns or habits. The worry is that intervention may be destructive and thereby unethical. Is destruction bad? Conversely, can destruction clear the way for new growth? What is destroyed in becoming different? Jodie Vandekerkhove also raises ethical questions around ballet, with respect to its production of docile (passive) bodies. In Spinozan terms, the issue would depend upon an increasing or decreasing power of the trained body. Perhaps this isn’t enough. Power is complex. If we move beyond liberal conceptions of power (as always outside the self), we can see that power is exercised on us, in us and by us, that power circulates and permeates. The encounter can always go the other way, towards a lessening of capacity. Can we really say that forced detention of asylum seekers is ethical, that some good is achieved through such confinement, intimidation and coercion? Is it good for “us” to keep others out? Who is empowered, which bodies become more capable in this perversion of justice? How does fear work in the exchange between bodies near and far, and who is protected in such instances? To speak in this way is to suggest that social and political forces can determine what bodies count and what counts as a body. Martin Hansen looks at the capitalist demand for the body to represent the individual, such that social and political forces commodify, individuate and hold responsible certain kinds of heterosexualised bodies. This is contrasted with an underlying fluidity of corporeal boundaries. Margaret Trail poses an alternative fluidity, via the figure of ventilation, suggesting a porosity between bodies which fosters their ability to affect and be affected. To speak of bodies in this way is not reduce the person to a body so much as bring the body into the picture, to locate human activity in the material exchange of forces. There is a powerful tendency to locate the ethical in a non-bodily dimension, in the mind, in abstract rules and norms. But really, mind and body are co-existent, intertwined, inseparable. Dancers know and like this. Ethics is practice-based. It’s located in what we do and in what happens through what we do. Aristotle writes of practical wisdom (phronesis), of virtues cultivated

through practice. The good habit is the one which trains the individual to experience pleasure in the good. Good practice finds the golden mean, the middle ground between morbid extremes. It’s not always easy to find the right balance. Consider the regime of criticism. Is the ethical critic the one who always supports the artist? Is the good critic honest? Is the critic embodied? Fleur Kilpatrick floats the idea of an ethical pact between artist and critic, Ben Woods, the dynamic interplay between the work and its audience. Susan Foster writes of the kinaesthetic empathy that resonates between performer and audience. How might we think an ethics of kinaesthetic empathy, expressed in words? For Louisa Duckett, words empower when combined with a kinaesthetic practice such as postmodern dance. Words, bloody words. Two authors in this issue have responded to the Paris shootings of writers, cartoonists and editors. Jana Perkovic writes of performance as an affective sphere, a place where work has an impact. This is in contrast to the disembodied notion of a public sphere, a masculine, rational space free of bodies. Live performance brings bodies together. They touch each other, affect each other. For Alice Heywood also, art touches us. How then to think ethics in conjunction with dance in conjunction with performance in the context of all that is, in relation to conflict, violence, and oppression? While we may invoke notions of free speech in light of recent events, Liz Dean reminds us that bodies aren’t exactly free. We find ourselves within situations not entirely of our own making. This isn’t merely existential. It’s political, social, habitual, and kinaesthetic. There is, for Dean, an aspect of otherness within our own bodies, the possibility that engaging with that otherness enables change in the body-self. How else do we change our habits, of thought and movement? Luckily, others can help. Leonie Hearn, a Feldenkrais practitioner, speaks of her touch offering possibilities beyond the subject’s habits. Alexander technique faces up to our bad habits. Alexander teacher Gary Levy writes of the gap that arises once habitual patterns are interrupted, as a space of possibility. The ethical cultivates this space, tends it, refreshes it. Not knowing beforehand what that space is like, is no reason to hold back.

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Encountering Causalities Antonia Pont

The distinction between morality and ethics is a fizzy topic. Morality often seems to involve a kind of code-withcontent, that’s to say, there are categories and actions fall into them or they don’t – no matter when, where or with whom. Ethics, in comparison, would speak to principles of action, those from which we might derive responses that we, and others, can live with in certain moments and contexts. Ethics considers the how of navigating a life rather than what’s to be coolly assessed.

Years ago, I was in a first-year Chinese Medicine lecture at Victoria University on dietary therapy and food as medicine. Nearing the end, questions had devolved into a kind of table tennis of ‘what if...’ and ‘what about [insert food type here]?’ Finally someone yelled, with a hint of bravado, ‘what about diet coke? What are its medicinal qualities?’ The lecturer paused, then packing up his papers, archly replied: “Just drink a lot of it and see what happens.” The distinction between morality and ethics is a fizzy topic. Morality often seems to involve a kind of codewith-content, that’s to say, there are categories and actions which fall into them or they don’t – no matter when, where or with whom. Think of the big to-do lists of world religions. Respecting parents – tick. Coveting wives – cross. Morality, if we follow this take, seems to begin with content that one then slots into columns. Ethics, in comparison, would speak to principles of action, those from which we might derive responses that we, and others, can live with in certain moments and contexts. Ethics considers the how of navigating a life rather than what’s to be coolly assessed. But already we have a clue. Take an action, any action. If you run it through the filter of morality, it’s much faster. Check the table. Nup, can’t do it. Ethics means more hard work and definitely making mistakes, perhaps quite costly ones, and probably some accidental innovation. Ethics means more pondering, more doubt, and therefore less external back up (from church or state). Morality-as-code is prêt-à-porter.

Ethics are designer. You design them yourself, in consultation with tradition, people you admire, disasters you unleash, regret, hope, and so on. To cultivate an ethics means to work towards a way of asking questions, either for oneself individually or for a collective. Ethics means staying within questioning for longer. Such ponderings may produce very tangible positions on certain matters, while others throw the inquirer back on themselves and into a refreshed space of uncertainty and responsibility. Ethics is lonelier but arguably has the potential to build living, contesting, tender community. Morality can let one identify quickly with others who insist on the same code as oneself but can shut people out with its rigidity and therefore be more barricaded. The TCM lecturer made something else clear in his response: that in considering a certain food substance (and hence eating as a way of treating a body), we can simply take note of the food’s cumulative effects. If the substance has a ‘nature’, then this nature becomes more explicit the more of it we expose ourselves to. The practice of noticing was the point of instruction. Where the student wanted a rule, the teacher recommended a process, throwing responsibility for any decision back onto the inquirer. Now, this is clearly more arduous – more precarious, too – than consulting a table of foodstuffs. There are plenty of these around, and unless one understands what ‘descending’ or ‘cooling’ or ‘dispersing’ might mean, it’s all a bit esoteric. The lecturer implied that in order to get a sense of the lived feeling

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of what a food (read: kind of relationship) really does, rather than just deploy a rule to eat more or less of a particular thing, one could embark on an experiment. The practitioner who tastes and feels the effect of a food’s flavour (read: kind of relationship) exceeds any prescribed framework and enters the realm of nuanced decision in relation to cumulative effects. In other words, they encounter causality, and the causality of encounters. Causality (or causation) is not necessarily something to be taken for granted. In the 18th Century, David Hume famously abstained from concluding that when A and B always happen together (constant conjunction) that it’s possible to affirm that A causes B. We tend, psychologically, to slide towards assuming their causal linking, but caution around this can be at best productive or, at least, precise. Hume reminds us that we may not be able to know for sure.1 Curiously enough, the Sanskrit term karma, often smeared in its use, also simply means the law of cause and effect. Acknowledging Hume’s wariness, I have no difficulty with this term, which would seem merely to recognise that our actions continue to ripple out from us, having consequences that we cannot predict in advance, but which may align with some notions of what we deem desirable and undesirable in a life. If the notion of karma plays a role in aspects of the moral (and class) codes of Hinduism, we have some clue that one way to think into morality (as code) and ethics (as research) can involve a honed interest in cause and effect – an interest that can be enthusiastic, as well as cautious in the spirit of Hume, and cognisant of the idea’s vulnerability to distortion.

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Dance and other movement forms, therapies of many kinds, and certain artistic modalities, I’d like to suggest, reflect – often unintentionally – this approach. Whereas certain discussions of both ethics and morality can become entangled and fraught – slippery within imprecise vocabularies – working with the body allows truly serious queries to unfold explicitly and playfully, in the intentional laboratory of the studio or the clinic. If ethics involves refining our ways of asking questions about how to live a life, then dance-as-practice can be an exemplary opportunity to live this out, involving – as it does – an encounter between the practitioner, their desire, their preconceptions, their limited insight, and the constraints operating in a space. Eliding easy binaries of morality or ethics, the movement practitioner arguably embarks on a journey that uncovers morality’s very ontology and is at once an ethical inquiry (if we also allow the latter to include the exploration of the distinction between the so-called ethical and unethical). Movement practice is a case in particular thanks to its potential to play out and reveal in action how ethics and morality are not opposites but rather inflections of a related field – simply more and less condensed. Their difference is one of register. Morality is our shorthand. Were the desire to nick something from the milkbar to rise up in me, I can quickly flick to the tab on stealing in my own morality ledger (personally derived from a life of experiments in ethics, and a memorable encounter, aged four, with a terrifying pharmacist and a bottle of 4711...) to see that I don’t want to do it. It’s just quicker. Morality, as I’m defining it (and perhaps for some readers here, in a far too indulgent way...) is just the sedimentation of umpteen processes that I can’t reenact each time I meet

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a situation. Morality can be the sedimented processes of long histories of communities, nations and religions. Sometimes, dare I say it, we don’t give these systems enough credit (which can be due to having been casually and persistently brutalised in their name). Moral codes, when compared in their iterations, are remarkably similar and plausible. The problem, however, with sedimented systems is that they are always-already-immediately out of date. Like your smart phone, they never stop needing an OS update. Additionally, our shared dilemma is that each generation needs to uncover its own version of the code, even though much of its content will repeat. And, we still struggle to find the balance between what must be incontrovertible (killing? torture? exploitation of the vulnerable?) and what we can allow some stretch on (white lies that serve courtesy?). In short, we have to allow people their suffering and their misdemeanors (to take these away is also a kind of stealing). How much, however, of the consequences of this same suffering and experimentation can we responsibly allow, given their impact on others? As Adam Phillips notes in his recent book, One Way and Another, for some people, happiness truly involves cutting the feet off live rats. Is this a happiness that one should have the right to pursue? So, I seem to be saying that ethics is a necessary experiment and involves inevitable costs, and that without eventually stable codes, our quotidian lives would be unfeasible, a tangled knot of endless rumination. Being an adult might mean to have experimented thoroughly enough to relieve the sense that one is simply complying (to have transformed certain resistances), and having devised a workable code, to know then all the flaws and aporia of this undertaking. To be an adult is to tolerate, to some

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degree, the tension between having to decide, and knowing that life and causation are impossibly complex. For this reason, moral codes are often most useful to the very young, and those for whom daily research is simply too much effort, or still too conceptually demanding. In Raja Yoga, for example, the yamas (the ‘restraints’ – such as non-greed, non-stealing, non-harm etc.), as distilled fairly reliable ‘rules’, are the very first thing a new practitioner is advised to grapple with. Yoga does not begin with poses, but rather with a mini-laboratory of restraints. (Restraint, of course, is magical at revealing and clarifying relationships to anything.) Once the yamas are introduced, one can experiment with them in the context of poses (‘things we are trying to do that are a bit difficult’). I often wonder what it means that we have – as a ‘secular’ culture that is a little suspicious of ‘morality’ – so few of these restraints that we collectively and explicitly subscribe to. Start with a code (as a small human) and then – if you’ve got enough energy, nous and privilege – use it as a springboard to construct a nuanced ethics. So why argue that working with the body inevitably involves an encounter with ethics? If ethics is less a code than a process of questioning and noticing consequences, the body – as a participant – is very straight-talking. When working with students, I always try to emphasise that the body never, ever (never, ever!!) lies. It has no ruse. It inevitably reflects back, and often promptly, the consequences of how we interact with it. Interaction here might involve how we place its bones, what we feed it, with whom we ‘move’, and how we speak to it (the tone of the whispers of the super-ego...) We may have little interest in heeding the body’s replies, but most movement practitioners are people who have been encouraged to listen in this way. If there were one skill pursued by movement practitioners, I’d wager this would be it. Phillips also notes (in his example, as a caution to therapists) that listening for a particular answer is not really listening... This is equally valid for movement practitioners. Sometimes when there is a little catch, a little sliver of pinch or pain, we pretend to listen, but we don’t really want to hear, and so we only ‘listen’ for the answer we want, the one that would say: Keep going, maybe if I go a little harder and faster, if I’m tougher, this ‘wrong’ answer that my body is giving me will evaporate. For movement practitioners, injury is the unambiguous communicator. It is the impartial, frank authority. It’s not that some authority (your parent, your boss, the godhead) decrees ‘don’t bend the knee in that way’; it’s rather that the knee, when not listened to, is changed and

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enters a causal trajectory that can only be later integrated rather than reversed, since there is, as Deleuze notes, in the synthesis he calls the ‘living present’, a ‘direction to the arrow of time’.2 It’s a version of the student’s diet coke question. What happens if you use the knee like a ball and socket joint? Well, the answer – in terms of ethics, in terms of process – is just do it over and over, and see what happens. The moral equivalent is the movement teacher declaring that the knee is a hinge joint, and the student simply obeying out of compliance or respect for the more experienced teacher. The process of moving/dancing involves the likelihood that the knee will anyway be sometimes used in diverse ways, and will lead to an embodied understanding of how the knee moves, even in the absence of any bookish anatomical know-how. (The obstacle that injury can be to practice, however, is a trickier topic. It’s not that injury says ‘stop’, rather it says ‘stop doing like that, but keep going – differently and more intelligently.’) When we practice with the body, ethics becomes real and immediate. In my experience, questions of sustainability, structural stability (over time) and a changing notion of ‘beauty’ unfold. We still learn via ‘mistakes’, but they are ours and become part of a practice that is increasingly revealing. I force the knee in a lotus pose, for example, because I’m hasty, or because I haven’t checked the hips and they are for some reason different today. Pain ensues, sometimes damage, and often cost – since injuries are expensive! If patience is a virtue in some moral codes, when working directly with the body, I learn why. I’m not conforming to a code; I’m devising and deriving an understanding from my studio practice that I would call ethical. The knee is sore (for three days, three months) and I begin to appreciate slowness from within. I increasingly value patience and understand its relevance to traditional codes, without feeling that I obey it as a rule. My behaviour towards my body comes to align with ‘moral’ codes, but I’ve arrived there via a very different trajectory than compliance. Rather than fear from the outside, I have inner caution and wonderment – for what is possible and of what mightn’t be. The restraint, as with most creative work, also serves to open up potential, rather than shut it down. In this sense, movement-as-ethical-laboratory reflects the idea of ethics as a calculus of consequences, playing out the dynamics and shifting relations over time. The simple notion of morality, then, would seem to offer us a portable, practical snap shot. Ethics is when we pan out, and see through time what unfolds – or seems to often or reliably unfold, acknowledging Hume – when

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we do certain things. There is no ultimate ratification for these findings, which can easily be contaminated with other factors – superstition, our gender training, family propaganda, internalised memories of punishment, environmental variables. In this way, although the body doesn’t lie, sometimes we can’t decode what it’s saying. That is why the listening never stops, why some things crystallise as sound training, and why it’s always possible that the body will intimate something totally unexpected. That’s why – as we learn to feed our body differently, but not less deliciously – we turn up in the studio, time and time again. Antonia Pont is Senior Lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University and the founder of the Australian chapter of Vijnana Yoga International, a community of thinking and making yogis currently practising out of West Space Gallery. She publishes poetry, short fiction and theoretical prose, and is currently working on a philosophical/creative arts manuscript called Strange Doings – a theory of practice-in-itself. She is Guest Editor of this issue.

1 For an accessible account of Hume’s thought on causation go to: http://www.iep.utm.edu/hume-cau/ (retrieved 17/2/2015) 2 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, P. Patton (trans.), New York & London: Continuum, p. 91 (2004)

Adam Phillips, One Way and Another, Hamish Hamilton, (2013), particularly the chapter ‘My Happiness Right or Wrong’.

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Opening into Otherness, Iyengar Yoga as corporeal ethics Liz Dean

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes, ‘the body is free in the bindings of the world, or no place at all’. She reminds us that there is neither freedom from our bodily situations nor are our relational bodies fully determined by our social circumstances. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes, ‘the body is free in the bindings of the world, or no place at all’. She reminds us that there is neither freedom from our bodily situations nor are our relational bodies fully determined by our social circumstances. How, then, are some bodies still brought to bodily awareness through negative portrayals which can limit bodily movements? How might Iyengar yoga practice be a bodily practice of corporeal ethics that can assist becoming other and openness to specific others? Can a person’s Iyengar yoga practice undo some of the socially acquired bodily regulations? The accumulation of socially learnt bodily habits assists our everyday movements. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, they inform the appearance of spontaneity and support future movement possibilities, without having to consciously attend to our bodies and the processes involved in each movement. In other words, habitual bodily movements create a certain freedom from constraints that are sometimes associated with unfamiliar bodily expectations and allow alternative bodily capacities to emerge. Acquired habits though, when lived as repetitious bodily movements, can overtime also become lived as bodily restrictions. The social attainment of habits also informs our sensory perception. Linda Alcoff writes about how perceptual habits participate in misrecognising ‘race’. For example, within Australia’s contemporary neoliberal political framework, some non-white bodies are configured as pathological. After The Little Children are Sacred Report (2006), many remote living First Nations Australian men were constituted as mostly abusers of women, children, alcohol, drugs and petrol. Remote communities became “social problems” and their members were seen as vulnerable, passive and/or pathological. The federal government’s response to this report, the implementation of the Northern Territory intervention in 2007 (and the 2012 ten-year extension), in part, operated as both a stultifying and affective address. Franz Fanon describes a child’s alarmed cry, “see the Negro! I’m frightened!” as an affective gesture which reduced his humanity to racialised historical meanings attached to the colour of his skin. This type of interpretative address denies, situates and reproduces

an idea of black bodies. In this way, social relations can impact upon bodily agency, bodily awareness and how a person feels about her or himself. As many community elders comment, they are ‘shamed’ at being told how to live and the generalised stigmatising portrayal of their communities as dysfunctional. This is an example of Emmanuel Levinas’ argument, that an other only emerges as other if their differences are not decided upon by what it is we think we know about others. As Luce Irigaray shows when discussing representations of woman, if sexual difference is grounded in hierarchical relations that measure the other through the self, there is no passage for the other – woman – to becoming a subject. There is though, always corporeal excess. These are the unrepresented affective bodily elements that expose the confines of representation. Similarly, remote living First Nations Australians have always been, and are always more than these limited and regulatory habitual modes of seeing. This highlights the tension between the perceptual and political processes of subjection and how bodies are lived. To rethink relations with irreducible difference, Irigaray and Levinas’ accounts of corporeal ethics move away from Kantian ethics where the freedom of the subject who decides how to act and what actions are to be taken, are subjected to law. Here, ethics pivots on decisionmaking, calculation and judgements that regulate self-conscious subjects and are separate from sensory perception. Corporeal ethics emerges from sensible affective relations. Levinas locates an ethical encounter in an address posed by an other’s difference.

The possibility for ethics rests on the difficulty of having to respond to the irreducible difference of an other. Responsibility for an other’s difference, alterity, paves the way for an ability to act. ‘I’ come into being through my subjection to the unknowability of an other. In having to respond to this unknowability of the other, responsibility as ethics emerges.

Irigaray writes that ethical and political possibilities require an (im)possible and limited form of ‘recognition’ of the non-representational elements of sexual difference. It is this limit which can generate respect for two, woman and man, and potentially create specific modes of becoming and autonomy for woman and man, which has not yet been approached in thought and in our political economies. Iyengar yoga practice can be a practice of corporeal ethics. This practice can negotiate bodily experiences and unknowable bodily responsiveness at the realm of the body. In practising postural sequences and breath, bodily responsiveness refers to encounters, which can mediate the implicated forces, energies, resistances and processes that are ‘our’ relational bodies. Iyengar formulates practising attentive bodily awareness to learn from our bodies and to respond to their needs as a kind of ‘witnessing’ of body, in practice. He points out that in the process of learning yoga, attention to body contributes to becoming open to a more ‘mobile’ shifting bodily ‘centre’ specific to each posture. In concert with a focused practice, this potential for ‘settling into’ a posture’s demands comes from a person’s bodily renegotiation of habitual capabilities. Openness to the otherness of ‘my’ body creates the potential for subtle bodily transformations that also challenge habits of thought. This attending to body by way of practising postural sequences, learning from teachers, props and ‘my’ body, also performs a ‘letting go’ of the self. In some more difficult postures, extensive use of props support each person’s particular bodily capacities so that the primacy of the self in practice can be passed over. In this Hatha yoga tradition to hold onto the self, to the familiar, becomes an explanation for why I cannot do a yoga posture that physically could become available. Such supports in Iyengar yoga practice function so as to enable openness to bodily shifts and assist with the possibility to alter habitual, perceptual and actual (as acquired) bodily constraints. With practice, a body can learn to respond in another way, adapt and inhabit the demands of each Iyengar yoga pose. Rather than simply reproducing a static ground which is always resistant to bodily changes, this

Mo r e Thoughts

possibility for re-shaping bodily unities can occur with repetitious bodily practice and by encountering and negotiating the resistance to such changes. As openings towards becoming other, bodily responsiveness in a posture can both encourage subtle bodily extension and also interrupt this possibility. Despite striving to bring attention to my body in order to learn from its sensations, ‘my’ bodily responsiveness acts without my knowing. This is the productive limit, which exists in Iyengar yoga practice, between aiming to become aware of bodily opportunities for extension and being unable to comprehend the responsiveness that can break and assists a posture. Here, unknowable affective and nonintentional elements participate in activating a passage towards change. So while yoga practice is mediated by a plethora of conventions and could be a form of selfmastery, bodily responsiveness precedes and exceeds the structural limitations and the desires of a person practising yoga. If bodily practices participate in processes of selfformation, like that of Iyengar yoga simply remain in the service of the self, then this practice offers little opportunity to open toward specific others. Michel Foucault proposes that to instigate bodily practices as ‘self-cultivation’ or an ‘ethics of care’ potentially breaks with regulatory processes. Bodily possibilities that arise in practice can offer a way to ‘feel’ differently about living. This alteration in how a person feels potentially creates an impetus to live bodies in ways previously unimagined or seemingly unavailable. While this view cannot adequately account for relations with particular others, Foucault’s writing about self-crafting through bodily practices responds to the question of how a person is to act ethically. The risks associated with fashioning the self through a bodily practice are that it might become another disciplinary practice. This risk could be worth taking when for some people, to become aware of their bodies through social set of impositions means that living life itself is at stake.

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Iyengar yoga practice can negotiate and resist potentially immobilising social forces, bodily. It offers the opportunity to alter our bodily capacities, our habitual ways of being, how we feel and therefore how we think. It can also provide another way to approach bodily awareness as an attention to body that passes over the hold of the ‘I’ in practice and explores openness to specific and irreducible others. This points towards an account of bodily ethics that configures other ways to act and live ‘our’ bodies that cannot be known prior to acting and practising them in another way. This could be to offer, in Irigaray’s words, a ‘chance for life’ not yet lived or, to paraphrase Foucault, ‘to build up and imagine what could be’. It is in these ways that a person’s Iyengar yoga practice has ethical possibilities and can enact political opportunities. Liz Dean is teaching in the Sociology Program in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

PG. 8

Rosalie Koonuth-Monk’s response to attempts to social construct her as a social problem. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=vCYhO6yRWgU (Accessed August 25 2014)

Authors referenced in this article: Michel Foucault, Lucy Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, Emmanuel Kant and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Visit the Dancehouse Diary website to access the full list of reading material.

IT ’S ALL HA PPE NING

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The Ethics of Criticism Fleur Kilpatrick

Listen. This is the hardest part: we, the artists, spend weeks, months or years creating something, crafting it as carefully as we know how. We offer it to the audience and we are proud. Then a critic comes in. They spend an hour with our work and become the authority. This never stops being difficult but it is also incredibly beautiful. To me, this transfer of power, this ultimate act of vulnerability and generosity, is what live performance is all about. It says that we are willing to start a conversation rather than end it. It says that we do not make art for ourselves but for those who step into our space for one night only. In that moment, as we offer up our art to strangers, the work becomes live. The ethics of criticism are complicated by the notoriously fraught relationship between artists and critics. I believe this stems from the mortality of our work. Live art is defined by its demise yet artists continually seek tangible proof of the impact of their work. A visual artist can return to their collection a year after their reviewers and, with time, perspective and a sleep cycle that has returned to normal, be able to form their own objective assessment of both their work and the dialogue that surrounded it. When all that remains is a critic’s condemnation, it can be difficult to hold onto your own understanding of your art. Making art makes us vulnerable and that is fine, we have the right to feel wronged. But do we have the right to demand silence? Do we have the right to request that a critic respond in a particular way? The ethics of criticism is a two-way exchange between artists and critics that must take into account the rights of the audience to know what they are paying for. What we expect from our critics depends very much on what we believe the role of the critic to be. If we believe it to be ‘pull quotes in exchange for free tickets’, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment and truncating a potentially valuable cultural exchange.

If instead we look to a critic to continue a conversation that the artist began – to provide historical documentation of the work; to meet our art with the same intellectual rigour with which we created it; to provide a point of communication between artists and audience – we will be empowered to engage in a critical dialogue. We will also hold our critics up to a higher standard. Personally, I want a lack of bias and writing that does not come from a place of anger. I want them to avoid cruelty. I want them to be in touch with the artistic landscape and I want them to love art, specifically the genre they are reviewing. I expect them to think hard and intellectually examine their emotive response at every turn. I do not want them to apologise for their opinions and I do want them to hold me to as high a standard as I hold them. I want us both to acknowledge that no single voice can declare a work a ‘success’ or ‘failure’, for to attempt to categorise performance in such a way undermines the fundamental purpose of art; as a nuanced, emotive response to and provocation for the world it issues from. Yet, writing such a list of requirements makes me feel like the Banks children in Mary Poppins singing what they want in a nanny with all the earnestness and naivety of youth. I write this knowing that I will, throughout my career, have my work critiqued by many, many people who will not live up to these expectations. I have been reviewed by people who consider themselves gatekeepers, surveyors of quality or purveyor of witty, sniping jokes at the artist’s expense. I have also been reviewed by a real estate writer, who notoriously (but accurately), wrote of one of my plays “the actor relies on her face and voice to express emotion.” (The Advertiser, 2013). Of course, this is frustrating, but I accept these reviews as part of the cultural noise surrounding art. Frequently, such reviews can provide a starting point for further dialogue with my audience and the more conversations I can have, the better. So, if the ethical responsibility of the critic is to meet the artwork with all the nuance and self-interrogation that their ability and word count allows, what is the responsibility of the artist? Well, to let it happen, to encourage it and engage with it. And this can be hard.

In January, the artistic director of Opera Australia, Lyndon Terracini, culled dissenting critics from the company’s invite list. This is not a new strategy. Many critics have told me of writing a negative review of a company and then “not being invited back until the leadership changed”. What is newsworthy is not Terracini’s actions but his position as a cultural leader, for as head of the most subsidised performing arts company in the country, he surely bears that title. What does it say about the state of our culture if the message coming down from such a leader is that questioning his artistic decisions is not allowed? I do not believe that we have the right to silence our critics but, more importantly, I do not know why we would want to have such a right. ‘Culture’ is not art; it is an artistically engaged community and arts writing, dissent and argument are crucial components in this. A critic is a part of your audience and attempting to silence them is symptomatic of disengagement with and disinterest in your audience’s voice. I fear the longterm impact that such disengagement would have on Australia’s cultural landscape. Fleur Kilpatrick is an award-winning playwright, director and arts commentator. Recent works include ‘The City They Burned’, ‘Yours The Face’ and ‘Insomnia Cat Came To Stay’. She is AD of Quiet Little Fox and Senior Reader for MKA. Her writing can be found at schoolforbirds. wordpress.com. She co-hosts the Audio Stage podcast with Jana Perkovic.

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Anti-Obscurantism: Alice Heyward

“Sticks and stones will break my bones. But words will never harm me.” This somewhat irksome, Christianderived children’s rhyme acts to persuade a victim of name-calling to ignore the taunt, refrain from physical retaliation, and remain calm and good-natured. It aims to encourage us not to seek revenge on a non-violent attack, yet discounts the hopelessness of preventing offence that can be inflicted in ways that are not physically wounding. The diktat, similar to many religious dogmas, is a commandment to obey as though its verity originates from a superior underpinning to one’s own experience of life, its affects and accumulative discovery. At the same time, the rhyme implicitly accepts and invokes the human and political right of freedom of expression, “recognised as any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used”. While not suggesting we adhere to erroneous mandates like the ‘sticks and stones’ jingle, or indeed to those of any popular religion, by which we risk foregoing individual empowerment and choice, we could take two of its, maybe unintentional, affects into account: of the strength to take independent decision against

destructive retribution of our aggressors, and of our freedom of expression. As the late Wolinski, of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, said (before his murder for creating belligerent cartoons of the prophet Mohammed), “The comedian (or artist) fights against the production of myths that seek to explain inexplicable mysteries”. Verbal, written, drawn, painted, printed, performed or sculpted expression can have momentous effect, possessing the stark power to stir unpleasant, painful emotions in its witnesses. French author Marie Darrieussecq, upon the brutal murders of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, wrote of her upbringing in the presence of the publication which taught her “the right to make fun of everything with wit” and that she lived “in the insolent country of Voltaire”, who himself proclaimed, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”. What is particular about dance as an art form is that it is physical from the outset. Dancing is the faculty to express and affect using the material body, in all its degrees of tone and quality, cutting right to the core of the human condition. No form is so directly such a poetic “concentration of life”, with product and process so inextricably entwined. Foucault lays bare that “dance’s difference and power lies in its non-reproducibility”. Bertram Müller, in an interview by John Ashford inscribed on the wall of Tanzhaus NRW in Dusseldorf, says “dance shows us quite directly… the complicated and often still callow ideas and conflicts of our time through a moving body…(and) can impart the substance of various cultural identities across borders, needing no translation”. The power of performance in reflecting or potentially stirring political upheaval, deliberately or by subjective interpretation, was clear to me during the week of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January, when I was in Montpellier, France, performing a model-version of Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s work-inprogress 7 Pleasures (as pedagogy of her recent work 69 Positions): a piece performed naked, which attempted to problamatise the normativity of sexual practice as a symptom of our internalized mechanisms of control, proposing counter practices for producing pleasure.

To examine such notions, particularly in being naked, during reverberations of the attacks in Paris, generated an awareness, as performer, of a latent construal of the work as counter-Islamic – never the work’s motivation – due to the political moment in time, and certainly the place (country), of its performance. Dance is explicit, owing to its realisation through the human body, yet simultaneously convoluted in its subjectivity, functioning very differently to cartoons, which strip their subject matter down to the bare essentials needed to convey the message. As American cartoonist Art Spiegelman explains, drawing cartoons “is like working with a 200 word language. One must deploy this language carefully in order to be understood. Cartoons lack the obvious spectrum of English language, but get into your brain before you have the chance to stop them”. There is no space to subjectively interpret the ‘meaning’ of a cartoon – it’s spoken to you as soon as seen, its message crystal clear. Such instantaneous and objective understanding (as opposed to dance), while this medium’s unique charisma and power, renders it evermore liable to fast opposition. For Spiegelman, “Disaster is my muse”. When questioned in an interview on his oeuvre Maus (1991), “Don’t you think a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?”, Spiegelman responded, “No, I thought that Auschwitz was in bad taste.” Artists have always embodied political and social views in their work, manifesting and recreating evident realities. How, and why, could, and would we avoid dealing with disagreeable or contentious actualities in which we exist, in our work, when they are entrenched in all that we are, and all that we do? Choreography and performance carry the potential to imagine new relationships and ways of being human. Material, ideas and sites, the elements of a work, are merely the sum of its parts. The ‘work’ (as noun and verb), is that unnamable effect it has on us, with potential to morally and ethically challenge. We register its influence by the way in which something is – whatever, wherever the thing – as denoted in the title of Lawrence Weschler’s book Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.

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As opposed to governance or military force, art has the power to become its own instrument, carrying a political or cultural cause with innovation, departing from recognisable origins into new, provocative territory. Great art transcends its matter into the experiential core of the occasion, therefore it is able to touch us deeper with its particular essence. Highlighted in the manifestations throughout France following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, emblazoned on posters and banners, was the message “ARTISTES COURAGE, POLITIQUE CARNAGE” (“COURAGE ARTISTS, CARNAGE POLITICS”). We must embrace our ability to create powerful work, which fulfills the influence it may have on those who behold it, especially through times of political tension and menace. Tilda Swinton “believe(s) that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. (She) believe(s) that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves”. Bertram Müller reiterates: “it is the most primary subject of dance art to research over and over again the intimate relation of space and time, of bodies, shape and dynamics and thus enables us to comprehend the rapidly changing multi-local and multi-temporal world in which we live with dignity”. As long as we live simultaneously, life is a social, cultural and political process, and hence the work we do, and art we create, is borne in these conditions. Our work is not only inevitably affected by such circumstances, but is often a gesture toward, or in reaction to, and may carry specific, inflammatory attitudes. Nina Simone declared, “I’m a real rebel with a cause”, with the bulk of her music fuelled by the Civil Rights Movement in the States, propelled by her activist motivations. Art is fuelled by the moment, historically and personally, during which it is made, and it is crucial that we remain true to our power to generate stimulating work, despite the risk to affront. At the 2015 Australian Theatre Forum, Belgian festival director and curator Frie Leysen challenged Australian artists “to be bold, and to challenge an increasingly ossified status quo”. She said,

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“Art should not please. On the contrary, art has to show where it hurts in our societies, in our world. We urgently need the courage back to pick up this role of disturbers again”. London-based artists, writers

and curators, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, reflecting on contemporary art’s current absence of claim to radical politics, write “…much current production is content with a fairly innocuous decorative function sprinkled with only the slightest of rationalisations, what Boris Groys terms art’s conceptual bikini”. Spiegelman asserts the importance of inflammatory work in society: “I don’t argue that the cartoons (in Charlie Hebdo) aren’t toxic. I do argue that that toxin is a necessary part of an ecosystem”.

Nazi Germany, the GDR epoch, China under Mao’s reign, Stalinism or Kevin Rudd’s position on the ‘(Bill) Henson Affair’ in 2008 are just a few examples which illustrate art produced in societies to either serve a government’s purpose as propaganda, or be expurgated. In 2012, there was high demand to ban Israeli dance company Batsheva from performing at the Edinburgh festival, due to Israel’s political situation, a claim viewed by many as pure bigotry. If art is a way of life, censorship represents life’s malfunctioning. We depend on expression, creation and discourse in order to co-exist through the constant motion of time’s passage. We do not just mutually exist within independent fractions of a shared world, but as part of the same universal sphere of time and space, which extends as far as our imaginations will allow. The outer construct of society, made up of borders, politics, governments, law, and religion must not overthrow the genuine keystones of our identities and collectivity, indivisible from who and how we are, what and how we make and create. Alice Heyward is a Dancer, Choreographer and Writer, originally from Melbourne.

Full footnotes on our Diary website

FRIE LEYSEN’s full keynote speech EMBRACING THE ELUSIVE at the National Dance Forum -http://www. australiantheatreforum.com.au/atf-2015/documentation/ transcripts/

h ave a lit t le wonde r

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PG. 12

C hitty S huff

h ave a lit t le wonde r

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PG. 13

les at Night

Margaret Meran Trail

Outside at night: a bare globe throws pale yellow light down a brick wall across the deck of a suburban house, and between the light and the camera shuffles. There’s no music, and backlit, s/he is a silhouette that moves, straying in front of the globe occasionally, barely there at all. S/he is night passing captured and contained in the lines of a boy, a girl. Outside at night: a bare globe throws pale yellow light down a brick wall across the deck of a suburban house, and between the light and the camera shuffles chitty. There’s no music, and backlit s/he is a silhouette that moves, straying in front of the globe occasionally, barely there at all. S/he is night passing captured and contained in the lines of a boy, a girl. There are video clips like this all over the internet; lone dancers shuffling. The videos are very short - one, two minutes - set in bedrooms, corridors, driveways, kitchens, backyards, on the street. Sometimes it is daylight, sometimes that sickly light that washes public space after dark: think car parks, train platforms. In this dance, the upper body is pretty much still, head still. Dance happening in the feet and legs; arms used as punctuation now and then, snapped into angular hieroglyphs for emphasis, but otherwise loose by the sides. Bodies are clothed: dark colours, baggy pants, long sleeves, hooded tops or caps, not much skin visible, faces in shadow, sometimes the dancer’s head is not even in the shot. Lines of arms and legs black like Texta strokes. If it were handwriting, it would be illegible. Usually the dancers are alone, at least alone of humans. The scene is present. They are elements of it, atmospheres. They are affects and effectors inside nets of space and things. There is no message, no call for participation: ‘dance too! Express yourself! Get fit, lose weight and make friends!’ they are not promoting a better world or an arts festival. They are performances but they are not for sitting down and attending. They have no story, message or program of edification, no aspiration to get bums on seats, or promote somewhere-something as a cultural precinct or cutting edge incubator of what’s hot. They are for coming-upon, corner of the eye, and for recognising if you’re lucky. If one recognises you ¾ jumps out of the screen at you and your muscles twitch, toes curl or eyes grow hard watching ¾ you might just transform into their style. You might share this clip, embed it, post or text it, move it on and move on yourself, set up a camera in your own bedroom, garage, driveway or bus stop, upload, become part of the crowd appearing and disappearing across the web through which it has come to you. You might do this fast, a bit high, obsessed, and then forget about it.

These dances and our receiving them are between-states rather than fixed states. They are speed and motion, gliding and gesturing before they mean anything, or perhaps fair to say, what they mean is what they do, and how they move with ¾ or without ¾ you. Barely ‘staged’, in them everything is masked. Against all, I believe on my dark days about rampant individualism, self-involvement, our uncritical embrace of Internet culture, its hyper-sexualisation and dumbness, here are masked dancers effacing the self, sprouting through the fog of the net like star daisies. When I watch, them I feel breeze and affect.

Dance outside at night, and the fewer or more inconsequential the place of other humans in (y)our dancing, the better, because then we are not fixed in idiotic narratives determined by others, then we are free to be affected and affect.

Chitty inhabits a literally idiotic place as air. Accepts its style and adds his/her own twists, kicks, and sticky hand shapes to its traversing. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk suggests ventilation as a figure that can address the relentless suffocation of the networked world: ‘what is needed is an ‘air-conditioning’ project that can sweep through the gentle all-absorbing hum of the totally managed and domesticated spaces of current social entities, entities which are tangled in a paradox of heightened isolation and heightened connection’.1 How to ventilate against the cold fingered digital reach of institutionalised everything-everywhere? Also its corollary, the ‘soft narcosis of the internet condition’, which is how Geert Lovink describes our indolent surrender to hopelessness in dope and games.2 We can add amateur porn too, I think, the Internet’s opioid-other of productivity.

Margaret Meran Trail has worked for many years as an independent performance/art maker exploring relations between the body, psyche, and language, in solo, ensemble, installation and electronic works. Between 1999 and 2014, she was a Lecturer in Performance Studies at Victoria University, Melbourne where she taught art history and theory, and performance composition, as well as supervising many extraordinary postgraduate projects across the fields of performance, sound/music and creative writing.

Chitty breezes: go outside, become a masked bee and each bee melt into a dark swarm barely visible. No program, organisation or funding, no prizes, reviews, measures of productivity or esteem, no festivals, voxpops or marketing. Ventilation, not attempting anything but becoming airier, faster, lighter. Becoming restless, sleepless, dancing. Of course contributions of this type may appear to be nothing at all. A dumb bee wobbling on top of a rosemary bush, a kid in a hoodie thrashing ‘round on the deck. Neither interesting nor useful. Good! Participating in what’s unmeasurable (aka nothing) becomes important, pitched against what can be measured and named important by morons. Blerk. Avoid it. Ventilate it.

There is (un)work to do. Watch videos on youtube, get ventilated, become chitty, a black bee, make your own meaning ¾ that is what it does ¾ your own corner of the eye dance/ing.

1 Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, Taylor and Frances: Hoboken, p. 235, (2008). 2 Geert Lovink, ‘Soft Narcosis of the Networked Condition’, Adbusters, #106 (2013) <https://www.adbusters.org/ magazine/106/soft-narcosis-networkedcondition.html> accessed 14 February 2015.

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Evolution(s) of Ethics Louisa Duckett

This article addresses the evolution of ethics in dance, proposing that the post modern movement and its influences heralded the birth of an emerging dialogue that catapulted dance into the intellectual domain. For without a dialogue or a framed “mise-en scene”, the ethics are hard to pinpoint. Conversely, part of the strength and weakness of dance lies in its corporeality; for a long time, it had not found a language, and yet, its ongoing presence ensured an existence of peripheral enquiry. The birth of ethics in dance lay in its success in developing a language around its corporeality, and its ongoing concerns continue be gleaned from the everevolving dialogue both personally and collectively, from current cultural and political movements. Post modernism heralded a moment that saw a considerable breakdown in traditional aesthetics. Whilst new terrains continue to inform dance, it is from this springboard that the greatest leap in ethics of the body, space and discourse emerged. The dissolution of hierarchy from classical dance’s obsession with the proscenium arch, frontal view and architectural linearity occurred with the emergence of modernism in dance. From the emotive expressionism of Graham to the intellectual sophistication of Cunningham, we had the birth of the curve, twist and the tilt. Cunningham’s collaborations with John Cage saw the emergence of sound scape, notions of chance and the introduction of improvisation in dance. These themes acted as a catalyst to establish dance within the artistic intellectual concerns of the time.1 From the 60s onwards, the birth of post modernism in dance brought the avantgarde into the studio.2 Dancers influenced by the social and political context of what was going on began to question the structures and powers that were. In many ways, the parameters in question were extending what counted as legitimate dance. What emerged with post modernism, alongside feminism, was an egalitarian ideal. The pedestrian was given a central space with the emergence of artists such as Trisha Brown. Those of you who attended Trisha Brown’s ‘Early Works’ in Melbourne International Festival (October 2014) would have been struck by the notion that one was viewing a piece of history. With one task followed by another, there was an appreciation of intellect, form, and a wittiness of pushing a new boundary, including dance, into an intellectual realm. On another level, it was momentarily boring, even tedious. It is painful to admit that sometimes the aesthetics of our ideals are boring. I have had the experience of feeling my way through a piece of choreography that felt so fluid and interesting to me, only to play it back later and see it as rather inane. Perhaps this only goes to highlight an incongruity between my aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. However, it does lead to questions around the choices we make as choreographers and dancers.

Do we have an ethical and aesthetic responsibility to our audience, and if so, where does that lie? Do we need to educate our audience in reading contemporary dance, and how should that occur? It is far easier to look from a distance, and retrospectively muse at the evolution of its ethical concerns. As a dance practitioner, one is preoccupied with negotiating the moment; the class situation, choreographic movement, or tracking the zeitgeist of the dance world. The practice of embodiment as a dancer also ensures that, since subject and object are one and the same, it is very often difficult to perceive oneself. It is rare to have a moment of perception where one sees in time and space the ethics of one’s decisions, the choices one makes as to how one moves and thinks about the moving body. In effect, as an art form concerned with both aesthetics and a kinaesthetic sense, one has more of a felt sense of engaging with philosophical concerns of ethics whilst dancing. Whereas a choreographer or audience is grappling with a more aesthetic sense of how that looks, and what is being conveyed. The notion of aesthetics and its underlying ethics are a complex melting pot of ideologies, where style, content and context become the syntax through which we come to understand our language. Obviously, aesthetics are the physical manifestations and outcome of our philosophical foundations. In essence, there are several things that seem paramount to this discussion and which revolve around the question of ethics and dance, namely: why do we dance, with what politics and ideology? How do we work with embodiment, and negotiate the space? Finally and crucially, it revolves around our modes of perception.

In my attempt to grasp the ongoing discourse around aesthetics, ethics and dance, my mind turned to our historicity. It occurred to me that, as a group of dancemakers eager to discover new dialogue, we are so ready to forget our origins of both classical and contemporary dance. In many ways, it may seem perplexing and somewhat passé to have to cast one’s mind back to ballet classes, bad leotards and daggy choreography. Perhaps now in my maturity, and having lived a certain span, I can appreciate the diversity, sophistication and body of knowledge contained within the current status and entirety of contemporary dance. It also enables us to trace, like an aesthetic map, from where we have come. Whilst the classical realm of dance does not entirely intellectually stimulate my artistic sensibility, one should not throw the baby out with the bath water. There are certain things one has learnt in the ballet studio that make a huge difference to the flow of class. The awareness of one body to another body is something those of us who began with classical, or contemporary dance take for granted. To not merely train the body in a narcissistic sense, but to have awareness of those around you and move harmoniously within that, is something I attribute to the legacy of studio ethics. Whilst not obsessed with the virtuosic potential of classical dance, I have come to appreciate the athleticism, grace and old school skill of classical dancers. I was reminded of when I was training at London Contemporary Dance School. Certain academic members of the faculty asked me with genuine interest and concern how I could subject myself to the physical, political and ethical abuse of classical ballet? How can you subject your body to such a beating? At the time, it wasn’t painful, it was just work, and I

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found their musings a bit odd, like asking a runner why he runs if it is painful. I had no perspective of the operant hierarchies or ideologies; I was athletic, coordinated and liked what I was doing. What I realise now is that this encounter was perhaps the first movement into an awareness that there were other cultures and critiques surrounding me, ones that as a teenager I was happily oblivious to. From a training perspective, it’s a question of conditioning; the young body, with a natural ability and good training can do almost anything. However, what choices are available to younger dancers engaged with the body? Are they informed, from a health perspective, intellectually, with training, what the longterm implications of misinformation are? I remember being told as young dancer training that we were “glorified athletes.“ And yet, the “glorified” seemed to be an empty rhetoric of the old ballet world. I can’t help thinking that if we really were glorified, we would have had knowledge of nutrition specifically for dancers, and what was required of our training bodies. There would have been a team of physio-therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists and body workers, even trainers, to guide dancers through their careers. It wasn’t until graduating from LCDS that I discovered a kinaesthetic awareness with teachers such as Jill Clarke, Paul Douglas, Scott Clarke, and Russell Maliphant. This was the beginning of a kinaesthetic and aesthetic sensibility, and yet, this was only one part of a multitude of ways in which the young dancer may be helped along the way. These days we can provide training alongside this enormous body of knowledge to foster

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strength, technique and talent that can be informed with real knowledge that include: kinaesthetic awareness, physiology, nutrition, philosophy, and an artist’s sensibility. In addition, we might like to address the long term goals and career of the dancer in clear and realistic terms so that they may also become adequate fund raisers, teachers, administrators or curators (to name a few), instead of stuck in a strange dichotomy of being highly trained and yet, poorly paid. I believe the evolution of a language for dance and ongoing dialogue has served to carry it from a marginalised art form, to one that places it (and contrary to my own previously held belief), on par with all current contemporary art forms. We still have a long way to go in terms of how we prepare dancers for the world and I trust that the institutions are taking note. However, we have evolved at break neck speed given that we had no discourse to reflect our milestones. The establishment of ethics in dance via emerging articulations, and its ongoing evolution from the beginnings of post modernism to the present day, are testament to the fact that dance is the most interesting and evolving social and cultural phenomenon that takes into account the multiplicities of corporeality, philosophy, review and practice.

Louisa Duckett received her early training at the Arts Educational School, UK and later went on the complete her BA Hons at the London Contemporary Dance School where she received a choreographic scholarship to Cal Arts. Post graduation, she worked as an independent dancer in London and Germany (Katja Wachter Co.) with a brief research stint in Paris (Mirian Dooge) before coming to Melbourne to complete a Graduate Diploma in choreography at the VCA. She completed her degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine eight years ago and has since been running her own practice. She continues to be engaged in questions of the body, movement, and dance and practice.

1 Michael Kirby, The New Theatre. The Tulane Drama Review Vol 10,No 2. MIT Press, (1965). 2 Sally Barnes, Terpsichore in Sneakers. Wesleyan University Press. Middletown, Connecticut, (1973).

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The Ethics of Intervention According to Felix Guattari, ethics and aesthetics go hand in hand. Why ethics? Because individually, and together, we are responsible for the future. Why aesthetics? Because everything, even tradition, has to be continually reinvented. To what extent then is the aesthetic domain affected by ethical concerns? If dance is an interactive, relational practice of innovation, then it will by its very nature be subject to ethical forces and concerns. Ethical notions of responsibility need not be posed in terms of dogmatic morality (rules and responsibilities) but may be thought corporeally, in terms of force, fluctuation, power, and affect. In short, the ethical is already implicated within the domain of dance simply because we dance. It is found in the tactile flow of information, from one body to another. It is implicated in the choice to empower one kind of dance, one domain, one body type over another. In that sense, ethics is always political. We have invited a variety of practitioners and artists to look at the notion of intervention—from body to body, through touch, for example, or between performer and audience—as it might relate to ethical questions.

MARTIN HANSEN Alterity as Recuperation The imperative for constant innovation under late capitalism is a catch-cry predicated on the notion of the individual subject. The understanding we now have of identity as fluid and unstable means we, as individualised artists, must constantly recuperate and renovate ourselves and our images in order to remain viable. This phenomenon is most keenly observed through the normalisation of ever increasing levels of education, both formal and informal, by sourcing wider or increasingly specific experiences in order to ‘add value’ to our primary commodities; ourselves and our work. The pressure to form oneself under the regime of unique individualism is rarely criticised in mainstream literature about dance and more pertinently, from my perspective, seems to be the only road to fashioning ones artist output as viable in today’s market. As Chris Kraus points out in her interview with Martin Rumsby about her unsuccessful film (cultural commodity) ‘Gravity and Grace’, late capitalism produces totalising demands for narratives of hermetic individuals to such a degree that it distracts us from wider contextual issues that condition the individual who acts within the market. In light of this statement, it may be useful to conceive of the field of contemporary dance as a fluid, moving territory that is at once itself a cultural commodity, acting under the same conditions that propel the individual artist, and also at once an active, ontological state of viewing the world. Judith Butler points out in ‘Bodies That Matter’, it is the act of appearing amongst others or rather the demand to appear before another that designates the subject a social one and from which relations, meanings and discourse can emerge. Contemporary dance is a particular kind of coded appearing, sanctioned through practices that determine which bodies can and cannot appear within its schema of aesthetic and ideological preferences. According to Kraus’s claim, such cultural fields operating under capitalism necessarily must undergo processes of self-renovation in order to continually affirm their viability as commodities. If we are working with the model of contemporary dance as a moving, unstable territory we could posit that it must incorporate new spaces into its domain in order to bolster the entirety of its territory. So, how does the territory of contemporary dance morph, move and renovate itself? I would argue that this territory, according to its economy of privileging certain kinds of appearing over others, renovates itself by incorporating bodies that lay beyond its temporary borders into its schema of facilitating appearances and via this behaviour produces new claims to legitimacy as a cultural commodity under late capitalism.

Dance, as a field, recuperates itself through the same practices that individual artists must undertake to remain a viable cultural commodity. Working from this position, certain practices that contemporary dance undertakes seem more applicable than others to discuss. One curious practice, or perhaps essential tenant to how contemporary dance understands itself, is the occasional, deliberate gesture it makes toward bodies that ‘normally’ fall short of the privilege of appearing within its schema, the incorporation of ‘other’ kinds of bodies. This produces problems; most often, this gesture simply doesn’t do what it claims it is doing, rather it reinstates a whole series of normative binaries at work within dance and that which work against this supposedly liberated gesture toward alterity. Perhaps, when this kind of dance emerges, it is always trapped in its ‘aboutness’, because it can only ever refer to pre-determined categories of bodies/subjects. Does it, when it gives space (but not necessarily ‘voice’ in Spivakian terms) to those that it otherwise excludes, perform a certain liberation, fulfill a certain desire within our community that prides itself on inclusivity and innovative thinking or does it perhaps reaffirm arbitrary distinctions between bodies whilst speaking from a historically privileged perspective?

Does contemporary dance, as a territory and as a commodity, colonise subjects under the imperative of its own constant self actualisation in order to re-affirm itself as a legitimate schema that was always-already based on assigning privileges to certain bodies? Does the inclusion of its constitutive ‘others’

change the position from which it speaks? Moreover, as long as contemporary dance is primarily concerned with producing and staging young, agile, upright and able bodies, does the inclusion of those who do not fulfill these arbitrary requirements simply not produce binary oppositions to what is usually enacted? And of these ‘appearing’ bodies, are they not producing the paradigm through which their ‘others’ are designated as such? Should we not aim for a kind of pluralism whereby all kinds of bodies can speak for themselves on their own terms? How can we divest from centralised understandings of seeing dance that favours a singular historical voice for ‘other’ bodies and therefore a predetermined notion of what a dancing body is?

Martin Hansen is an independent dancer/choreographer working between Melbourne and Berlin. He was the 2014 Dancehouse Research Housemate resident and he regularly dances, makes work, discusses and writes about dance.

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ALICE CUMMINS this interests me Since 2005, I have used intervention as a way to disrupt the trajectory of my moving body. I know how to resolve a movement in ways that are familiar to me – a lifetime of habit assures this. So finding ways to interrupt have been critical for me to maintain my engagement and interest. Interruption opens a space in me that allows a different resolution to occur. This interests me. I maintain a practice of attention and the role of intervention focuses this in a specific moment of time. I am my body moving NOW… and NOW… and NOW… An intervention is an invitation to find new ways of moving, and idiosyncratic movement often results. I experience an originality which, whilst enculturated by technique, gender, age, and race is also distinctive and specific to me. My gestures might suggest through amplification and ambiguity a variety of social and cultural behaviors and aesthetics. This interests me. Dancing becomes the lens through which ideas are manifested, suggested, projected, perceived, intuited and felt. And I love disrupting the expectations of what dance is, or might be, or is becoming at every moment. This interests me. In my teaching, I use intervention as a way to support a student realize the potential of a moment whilst dancing. I frequently select a word that will shift the dancer’s awareness instantly. It is a finely wrought moment. The right word works but needs to be swift and incisive – cutting through their habitual patterns of moving and/ or decision-making. I feel the word distil in me as I watch, wait and then speak… it is thrilling to see the response being wrestled with. Sometimes I articulate what I think the student is resisting… I trust my gut and go for it in the moment… without hesitation but a lot of discernment and aesthetic precision. I also use touch as intervention – the touch of another invites different connections and responses both from within the body and in relationship to space. Different qualities of touch stimulate, provoke, or support new realizations for the student or myself whilst dancing. The accumulation of specific touch opens new thresholds of potential that influence technique and composition. This interests me. I recognise my teaching is a philosophical form specific to me and brought into action through my engagement with my students. It is always a relational field. This interests me. It is in the entanglement of relationship that my perception is sharpened and also that of my student. And for this, we both need stamina and receptivity. How do we develop stamina to pay attention at every moment and follow what is emergent? This interests me as a performer, teacher and audience member. Alice Cummins, MA, is a dance artist and Body-Mind Centering® Practitioner. She collaborates across artforms, with work created and performed for theatres, art galleries, public spaces, and studios. Her writing has been published in the United States and Australia. www.alicecummins.com

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ELIZABETH KEEN Touching to Listen and Listening to Touch Human touch can convey a highly nuanced sense of intention. Not just conscious intentions towards the receiver of the touch such as ‘I wish you well’ or ‘I wish you harm’, but also intentions that may be unconscious, such as expectation or acceptance, dominance or service. Offerings of touch may be given with an implied request, for example, ‘please touch me in return’ or ‘hurry up and let go of that tension’. Physical contact may be initiated with the intention of ‘doing to’ the receiver from a position of assumed authority and the belief that the person applying the touch knows best what the body receiving it requires. An alternative approach to these examples of a ‘doing’ touch is a receiver focused or a ‘listening’ touch. With a listening touch, the practitioner uses the point of contact with the receiver as way to perceive what is required in that moment. This immediately changes the quality of touch and therefore the physical response in the receiver. In the East Asian practices of shiatsu and aikido, there is the notion of all movement emanating from the hara, the region of the lower abdomen below the navel. The hara is considered the physical, spiritual and energetic centre of the body. When the mind is focused on the hara, then action can arise by responding to the situation rather than reacting to a thought or belief. This physically generates a listening instead of a doing touch. In both shiatsu and aikido, the point of contact with the receiver via the hands is kept gentle and the action is applied by moving the hara to generate force. Pulling and gripping can be felt by the receiver and resisted whereas a gentle, non-expectant touch can be received and techniques of applying pressure or moving your partner can then be achieved. The ethical implications of using either a listening touch or a doing touch are seen in the agency of the receiver. A listening touch positions the receiver as a partner in the exchange and the authority of their own body. It builds trust and facilitates a smooth and dynamic interaction, where the boundaries of giving and receiving become blurred and the potential for outcomes previously unimagined become possible. Conversely, a doing touch often requires or implies a power differential. Even if the receiver has willingly placed him or herself in a subordinate position, they have assumed a passive role and are not actively participating in their own selfactualisation. If the practitioner does all the work, the implications are a lack of faith in the ability of the receiver to navigate their own responsive pathways of release, expansion, surrender, expression or control. When touch follows the lead of the receiver then the receiver experiences a sense of being completely accepted and the practitioner is not drained by the one directional movement of energy. Then the exchange becomes a duet, a delightful conversation where no one is shouting to be heard. Elizabeth Keen is a registered practitioner of shiatsu, acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. She came to this work via a background in dance and theatre as creator, performer and stage manager. Elizabeth practices Japanese martial arts, aikido and shinkendo.

KATE BARNETT The Self at Hand Her hand is following my moving body at the same time as it is supporting the quality of the connection between my head, my spine and the rest of my body. I’m aware that I have collaborative companionship in my coordinating process. I’m aware that I am making movement decisions. I’m aware of movement itself, moving me. Walking after the lesson is over I feel so new to myself, every step is my first, so at home in myself that I feel this is how I have always been. (Reflecting on an Alexander Technique lesson with Jane Refshauge, Melbourne, 2007.) The Alexander Technique offers what Seattle-based teacher Cathy Madden describes as a process of learning to cooperate with our human design.1 It gives tools for accurate body mapping and a process for changing habitual patterns of moving and thinking that constrict us. It’s my final year of teacher training and I’m working with a young man who wants to look at standing. He says he doesn’t have ‘good posture’. I’m trying Cathy Madden’s ‘have a little wonder’ approach … what kind of body map might he have… what idea of ‘standing’… where might it be useful to bring my hands… but actually, I‘m not really wondering, I’m tightening, and I can see him tightening. I’m tightening readying to ‘do’ something, and he’s tightening readying to be ‘improved’. Suddenly I feel overwhelmed by implications. The way he’s coordinating to stand is part of his whole way of being in the world, and here’s me about to move in and change that, or at least offer a different possibility. Later I talk with the teacher. She looks at me with steady compassion. ‘Actually, I see that as part of my job. To interrupt patterns. She’s right. It’s part of my job. And I realise that if I’m going to be able to do it I need to shed the ‘improvement’ dynamic. (Reflecting on my teacher training – extract from ongoing email conversations with colleague Fiona Bryant, 2015) For me, teaching Alexander Technique is an ongoing collaborative exploration, grounded in radical respect of the embodied histories and potentials of myself and the people I work with. My starting place and reference home base, when working with my hands, is always my own whole-self coordinating process. It is from here that I can offer space and invitation for people to engage their own coordinating process, moment by moment. In similar spirit, dancer and Alexander Technique teacher Fiona Bryant describes the way she works with her hands in teaching as an improvisatory duet ‘where there are no established roles of leader and follower, and negotiations that the partnership depends on.’ The organising principle that brings teacher and student together is a shared interest in the process of cooperating with our design. I am interested in what this kind of collaboration can make possible for the ways we inhabit ourselves and engage in the world. Kate Barnett is based at the Abbotsford Convent where she teaches Alexander Technique, Yoga and InterPlay. She is currently researching ways the Alexander Technique can assist people with a history of eating disorders.

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BEN WOOD haecceities or I’m no fucking Buddhist But this is enlightenment

Writing in, through, and away from the project ‘widen, subtract, warm, cool, observe out’ (presented at the Incinerator Gallery, Moonee Ponds until 28.03.15). For around a year, I’ve been making various rings out of timber. I bend the timbers by soaking them in water and clamping them around different plywood and cardboard “forms”. The forms – as well as the rings that are bent on them – are maneuvered in movement improvisations as a kind of perceptual shade, for acts of non-seeing; partially and sensitively blocking out what is visible. The rings are used to experiment with acts of perceiving-moving. When handling them, I’ve experienced a widening of sight along an edge, towards a felt, bodily sense of openess an intensely particular orientation. For me, they have heightened an awareness of what is visible as a field of activity completely permeated, made and reworked by what is invisible. Jeanette Winterson says that she sometimes sees ‘[Barbara] Hepworth’s sculptures [as] inversions - that the object, however beautiful, is a way of seeing what surrounds it.’2 Even at its most basic, sculpture requires the production of multiple positions or views. I’m most interested in work that operates openly across larger spatial and temporal distances/sites, where sculptural objects are generative parts of expansive artistic explorations. Participating in highly mobile, open and dispersive material arrangements might allow for ways of being that can at times engender the subtraction of any one position or stance. Dynamic materials and their wild (indeterminate) circumstances become intensely mixed with social and bodily movement; movement that happens as both means and ends (touches and responses, reading and writing, feeling and doing). In this mode of working complexities are not captured, they continue to unfurl. The ways the body moves are themselves a belief system. The process of moving into and through postures is not the corporeal translation of a belief or idea; rather, that process is the belief or idea as it produces a certain stance towards the world, the self, and the relations linking the two… This belief is lived on the order of the body – as a form of consciousness.3 I take care when reading this piece of writing. In the past, I’ve noticed that it can be very easy to let actions become heavily contrived, inflected by inward anxieties (of doing “bad”). It also seems easy to let the influence of others (including nonhuman otherness) to harshly shape the

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spaces and times that we participate in making. In the project ‘widen, subtract, warm, cool, observe out’ the rings are a tiny contribution to a mixture of forces that enable and constrain what can and cannot be done or said (an ethical fabric). The rings provide just enough of a line of flight for experience, enfolding fresh information, different trajectories and forces, altering the ‘way of seeing’ (and eventually the practice) itself. I’m most excited by this project’s potential to test out a lightness of ‘touch that does not seize hold or manipulate or possess’ others.4 Even the finest intervention can act as a nerve with which various movements refresh our approaches towards figuring and questioning what matters. I arrive at the garden space with arms full of timber rings and various accoutrements. Strewing them across the scoria ground, I begin exploring the site. Marks appear: sticks, weeds, eucalyptus growth at the middle of very large trees, decomposed baby bird, shiny old chocolate wrapper, spitfire caterpillar, concrete paths, crashing sounds of the adjacent waste transfer station, the path of the sun. Shade, an intensity I had been observing for some months before, is compelling where I stand. As a

dynamic play of possible arrangements overtakes my body, the rings begin to stretch the space, redistributing distances and senses; they are cutting across anything at their edges, indiscriminately. What might be considered welcome become, to varying degrees, perforated and peppered with the potentially uninhabitable. All the qualities are lived. The imperceptible and invisible saturate encounters as forces relating and buzzing within fractions of visibility.

Bjork [Song], One Little Indian 1997

Jeanette Winterson, Hole of Life, TATE online, 2003

3 Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture, HUP 2009

Alphonso Lingis, [interview] Bobby George and Tom Sparrow, Singularum, last accessed 25 October 2012

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GARY LEVY Alexander’s Pause for Thought As performing artists, or otherwise body-focused creatures by nature and inclination, dancers commonly enough encounter the work of F.M. Alexander, either during their training, as something to tap into during their quest for ongoing improvement and refinement, or perhaps as something needed to help overcome certain obstacles, including injuries. For those dancers who have had some direct experience of the Alexander work under the manual (ie. non-invasive hands-on) guidance of a qualified teacher, the impressions (and often enough the benefits too) tend to be enduring. Paradoxically, one doesn’t need to understand much about what goes on in an Alexander lesson (either one-on-one, or group work), to still register palpable and beneficial changes. By contrast, however, one can read either a lot, or only a little about Alexander’s work and gain a clear understanding its main principles and practices, only to discover that very little of this knowledge makes a lasting or positive difference to one’s bearing, disposition, or ways of moving. The primary task in Alexander work involves learning to ‘direct’ ourselves towards optimising dynamic equilibrium, so that whatever act/ion we choose to do/ perform, is more likely to occur with minimal effort and to maximum advantage. Such an end is not the exclusive domain or goal of the Alexander work. What is distinctive, however, is the principal strategy for pursuing our ends in this way, what Alexander referred to as ‘inhibition’. Very different to the Freudian notion, the purpose of cultivating inhibition in the Alexandrian sense of the term is in order to free ourselves from habitual, often limited and limiting, largely automatic ways of responding to a given impulse. Whether the impulse is generated from within a person, or by an external stimulus, most of us rely on our conditioned habits to execute an appropriate and satisfactory response. If my phone rings, I know how to answer it without giving the action/movement pattern much (or any) thought. Similarly, if I have an urge to eat, or pee, I know how to proceed to the kitchen or bathroom without a ‘second thought’. While these practiced patterns generally and largely allow me to reach my destination and achieve my end reliably, I don’t necessarily know whether I might have been able to execute the same task any other way, nor whether any of those other ways may (or may not) have been more comfortable, efficient, pleasurable, successful, satisfying etc. By learning how to inhibit my automatic, habitual ways of responding to any given prompt or impulse I am, in effect, interrupting an entire psycho-physical pattern that may or may not have been serving my best interests to this point in time. If I learn to fully interrupt that

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pattern, then I am effectively permitting myself to enter a block of time-space that is neither conditioned by past experiences, nor lured by any anticipated outcome. Recent publications by Philipa Rothfield provide a pithy phenomenology of Alexander work from a dancemovement perspective. Inhibition, in these accounts, is rightly understood as a “stopping [that] creates a gap, between intention and action”.1 Successful inhibition can, in turn, provide “a gateway for the introduction of new kinaesthetic experiences”.2 Aldous Huxley was another long-time student of the Alexander work, who also wrote about it with great clarity and insight. In a foreword written for a book on piano playing heavily informed by Ideo-kinetics,3 Huxley came up with his own inspired term to describe the way in which this voluntary act of inhibition opens up a “lucid interval” within which “the self can be taught to use the right means of doing what it wants to do”.4 This lucid interval is akin to a creative space between impulse and action, within which a potentially infinite range of options become present and available. Inhabiting this fecund space can liberate us from both past and future influences, while presenting an array of possible responses not previously known or considered. Enhanced creative expression and/or a fine-tuning of our aesthetic sensibilities, are not uncommon fruits of this engagement. The hands-on work offered by the skilled Alexander teacher is, directly and concretely, the medium through which the pupil receives both the support and subtle suggestions for engaging creatively with/in the lucid interval of inhibition and direction. Through a form of touch combining enormous receptivity with delicate strength, the Alexander teacher is able to assist the pupil to check their habitual tendencies and preconceptions and permit some different possibilities (of thought, awareness, and movement) to emerge. It is from within the array of fresh possibilities that we become free to choose our course of action, whether more deliberately or spontaneously. Consciously registering this freedom, and making a choice as to how we proceed into movement/ action, generates more constructive control5 over our immediate destiny. Such freedom and control, generated by the initial interruption of our habitual response, is intrinsically ethical, in that we are exercising our response-ability, in the moment, and from moment to moment. With the unambiguous consent of the pupil, and an openness to receiving the tactile input from the teacher, a dynamic of trust works to encourage the release of unnecessary impediments to natural, easy and integrated actions or movements. At the heart of this dynamic and trusting contact is an attitude of care and tenderness that “does not resign from its respect for the ethical”.6 The ethical is, therefore, more implicit and given than spelt out, or superimposed.

Nevertheless, once the form of touch is properly received, it can be experienced and (mutually) understood as one that, “allows [a] turning back to oneself, in the dwelling of an intimate light. But which also goes to encounter the other, illuminated-illuminating, overflowing one’s own world in order to taste another brightness”.7 This encounter may well be the point at which ethics and aesthetics also coalesce or reunite. Cultivating and enacting this (inherently ethical) way of proceeding has, at its core, a commitment to selfcare and integrity that permeates, equally (and with equanimity) both our interiors, and our external relations. This kind of integrity flows directly out of effective inhibition. And the flow of direction is something we learn more about during a course of Alexander lessons. Suffice to say, our direction pertains to no less than the natural conditions of our use and functioning; the quality of attention given to our whole selves; and the degree to which we successfully allow the vital force (or call it what you will) to move, and move through us.e Dr Gary Levy has been a student of the Alexander work since 1985 and a qualified and practicing teacher since 1992. He consults privately, as well as conducting group classes at the CAE (Centre for Adult Education). Gary also works as a research fellow in the School of Education at Deakin University, Melbourne.

Philipa Rothfield, Beyond habit, the cultivation of corporeal difference. Parrhesia (2013)

2 Philipa Rothfield, Playing the Subject Card. Strategies of the Subjective. In M. Bleeker, J.F. Sherman and E. Nedelkopoulou (Eds). Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations. London: Routledge (2015) 3 Luigi Bonpensiere, New Pathways to Piano Technique. A Study of the Relations Between Mind and Body wit Special Reference to Piano Playing. New York: Philosophical Library (1953) 4

Op Cit. p. xi

F.Matthias Alexander,Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual. London: Methuen (1923) 5

6 Luce Irigaray, The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity section IV, B, ‘The Phenomenology of Eros’. Richard A. Cohen (Ed). Face to Face with Levinas. New York: State University of New York Press (1986)

Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, translated by Heidi Bostic and Stephan Pluhacek, London: Continuum (2002)

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An Ethics of Touch Jana Perkovic

I am writing from a Europe still distressed by the attack on the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo, French satirical magazine, by two self-fashioned Islamists. The attack resulted in twelve deaths, and a momentary, but astronomical, increase in sales for the magazine, which rose from the usual circulation of about 60 000 to seven million. The ‘Survivors Issue’ was published in six languages and distributed in twenty-five countries. The debate has raged about whether Charlie Hebdo was an expression of ‘our’ treasured freedom of speech, or a small group of white men making cheap shots at one of Europe’s most disadvantaged religious minorities. By now, it is a question exhausted of all but emotional power, and it has exhausted us all; but tension still reverberates across the continent. Even my landlady believes we are at war. This is a war in which ‘we’, the West, are supposedly hurling pens at the armed enemy, even though Corey Oakley correctly pointed out (http://redflag.org.au/ article/charlie-hebdo-and-hypocrisy-pencils ) that it was not pens delivered from the West in recent years that left hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza. I am writing from this ‘West’, in which only a

Charlie Hebdo massacre was marches, spontaneous and less spontaneous protests, fuelled by new satirical cartoons. National and European institutions across Europe held a minute of silence – yet another kind of collective performance, bodies huddled together in quiet resistance. Khalid Amine noted that a similar shifting of the territory of combat took place in the Middle East in 2011: the image of the immolated street vendor first multiplied online, published through Facebook groups and websites, and yet: “if all Arabs sat by their keyboards there would have been no Arab Spring.” few years ago audiences coming out of Queer Festival in Zagreb had to be protected by the police. In the same France that rallied around the cry #jesuischarlie, only in 2011 various far-right groups tried to block the entry to Théâtre de la Ville to prevent access to performances of Romeo Castellucci’s ‘On the concept of Face, regarding the Son of God’, because they deemed it blasphemous. I am writing from the ‘West’ in which the common understanding of our treasured public sphere as a place of passionate political confrontation: coffee houses of London, May ‘68, et cetera. Has the tradition been significantly altered when political opponents no longer exchange punches in a cafe, but occupy theatre stages, or shoot? ‘Why hasn’t the French royal family condemned the terror?’, rhetorically asked British artist Momus (http://mrstsk.tumblr.com/post/107583346328 ), reminding us that the motif of the downtrodden citizen, rising up in arms, has its place in French history. Public sphere as understood by the ‘West’ indispensably includes art, with its perceived power to mobilise bodies in waves of confrontation. What followed the

What is the ethical clout of art in these extreme situations?

Standard art criticism is not very helpful in elucidating this interaction between paper and place, between representation and presence, between a single work of art and a roaring mass of bodies, because it is beholden to literature – in particular, a nineteenth-century concept of literature as a solitary, individual activity. Matthew Arnold could understand the ethical role of art only as an imprint of the whispering author’s voice on the soul of the sole reader, instilling empathetic identification with characters in a story. Apart from the most classical nineteenth-century forms, this approach does not elucidate either the political or the ethical aspects of performance. Theatre is the most public of art forms because theatre is first and foremost

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a space, and the empathetic connection between the work and the audience is primarily physical, borne out of co-presence. Performance and dance, like a rally, mobilise bodies. It is only when confronted with dance, long divorced from the requirements of representation and storytelling, that we can truly contemplate how negligible the distance is between the ‘West’ and our supposed enemies. The Western tradition of art ethics has little to say about dance that is not profoundly immersed in Christian asceticism: lascivious pleasure of touch between strangers, eliciting lustful thoughts, a mechanism of wooing and sex stimuli, ad nauseam. Even Cicero: “No man who is sober dances, unless he is out of his mind, either when alone or in any decent society, for dancing is the companion of wanton conviviality, dissoluteness, and luxury.” Our thought has not developed much further since the Inquisition. Even if we do not go to the lengths of the Saudi morality police, imprisoning wedding parties for dancing, the ‘West’ is yet to develop a positive ethics of dance. From dance movement therapy to Ohad Naharin’s gaga, therapeutic properties of dance tend to be explained with the borrowed vocabulary of yoga and meditation. In April 2012, a neo-Christian organisation ‘In the Name of the Family’ tried to ban the closing party of Queer Festival Zagreb, citing its promotional material as hateful (the poster and title satirised the organisation, and its recent campaign to ban gay marriage). It is interesting here that the perceived offense of the printed page was used to attack not the performance festival itself, but its official party - as if, perhaps, this sociable mobilisation of bodies on the dance floor presented a far greater threat than the mobilisation of bodies in the somewhat inaccessible queer art in the program. ‘In the Name of the Family’ thus joined the loosely organised alliance for the censorship of queer bodies in Croatia, which had, in the past, attacked pride parades, post-parade parties, queer couples on the street, the gay marriage, and yet only occasionally an art performance. The blasphemy (because the argument was always for traditional Christian values) was not perceived in art, but it was perceived in the everyday, non-representational display of queer bodies – or, rather, bodies displaying their erotic and emotional queerness in public space, as if they were leaving sticky, contagious traces behind. The argument used was logo-centric (hate speech on posters), but the actual target were real bodies in real space. Perhaps the neo-Christians felt sufficiently infected with sex stimuli, without even coming to dance.

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My students note (correctly) that it is usually less dangerous to stage an outrageously offensive drag performance, than to walk home afterwards in the same clothes, and this points to the simple truth about the political effectiveness of performance: as soon as we frame an event as art, it loses some of its destabilising power. None of this is to say that representation is unimportant – both to the gay kid in Zagreb seeing an image of herself on stage, and to the attackers of the Charlie Hebdo offices. However, if we neglect the physical, embodied dimension of the encounter with the representation, we are missing out on the most important aesthetic dimension of live performance. The LGBT activists kissing in front of the pope, a million people lighting candles in Paris, a dance floor full of gays in a country seeped in homophobia, Charlie Hebdo cartoons in twenty-five countries instead of one, or a single man self-immolating on a square in Tunisia – these are not simply images, but events in which the bystander is infected, implicated, not left untouched by the currents of energy, and perhaps empathy. Susan Sontag notes, in ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, that photography, through reproduction and everincreasing distance from source, decontextualises and disembodies, renders life abstract, and by doing so renders us ever more numb in front of knowledge of other people’s suffering. Abstraction, a sin shared by all mass media, is a sin unavailable to performance: by definition, live performance is always only bringing us closer to other people. In a world saturated with mediatised image, a world in which suffering can be switched off with a button, there is, I honestly believe, something immensely healing about live performance, with its stubborn resistance on real bodies in real proximity to real bodies. When Jerome Bel has disabled performers talk about the fears of their parents that they are being objectified on stage, this is no longer a purely intellectual question. When Bryonny Kimmings brings her niece on stage to talk about the sexualisation of children, her grief and anger affect us physically.

Instead of insisting on the masculine, disembodied notion of ‘public sphere’ as a political space in which we cultivate rationality as the highest expression of our ‘Western’ value, perhaps we should embrace the concept of ‘affective public sphere’, a space of emotional exchange in which we ought to make room for grief, anger, sadness, love.

I studiously avoided all rituals of collective defiance in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo – protests, gatherings, minutes of silence – as they seemed to flatten the emotional complexity of the moment into an untrue, post-rationalised simplification that would lead to scapegoating, divisiveness, and further violence. Nataša Govedić notes that, if being silent about feelings is the norm, talking about feelings has to be, by definition, queer. In the emotionally repressed, somewhat macho Australia of 2014, the most revolutionary work I saw was Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen’s Overworld, a freeform, participatory fantasia that immerses the audience in a lush cocktail of physical sensations, guided dance, imposed dress-ups and tenderness. It is a girly, playful, emotionally rich work, and it does more than simply put these values on display – it breaks our protective walls to immerse us in sensory exploration, affection, lightness, a feeling of safety. It is of no surprise that Aiken and Jensen’s Overworld draws inspiration from a variety of sources totally foreign to the tradition of Western enlightenment, and routinely trivialised: kundalini yoga, witchery workshops, pagan rituals. In the ‘West’, we do not value deregulated states of affective exploration, curiosity and connection with others, not more than the Saudi police. And this may be precisely the state to remember to cultivate when we are called on to be righteous, to be angry and to retaliate. What the ‘West’ needs is an ethics of touch. Jana Perković is a performance and dance writer, dramaturg and urbanist. Her work focuses on the intersection between urban policy and arts, immersive design and performance practice, and geographical theories. She is a sessional lecturer in Performance Studies at Victorian College of the Arts, and teaches at Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. Her writing on performance has appeared, among others, in The Guardian, RealTime, Exeunt Magazine, Dancehouse Diary, Crikey.

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Dancing in the Dark, Spinoza’s Ethics of the Body Philipa Rothfield Where you are when you don’t know where you are is one of the most precious spots offered by improvisation. It is a place from which more directions are possible than anywhere else. I call this place the Gap. The more I improvise, the more I’m convinced that it is through the medium of these gaps— this momentary suspension of reference point—that comes the unexpected and much sought after “original” material. It’s “original” because its origin is the current moment and because it comes from outside our usual frame of reference. –Nancy Stark Smith

Nancy Stark Smith speaks of a gap that opens up in the practice of improvisation. The gap is a means towards the production of new material. It provides an opening onto creativity. The gap represents a suspension of the dancer’s point of reference. It signals a movement away from familiarity, towards unknown territory. The gap is a mechanism or symptom of displacement, of the dancer who knows what to do, who is already trained, poised to show what she already understands. The gap undermines this kind of knowing, making room for the body to take the lead. So, the gap is only a gap from the dancer’s point of view. It is a gap in the dancer’s understanding, one which allows the body (or bodies) to produce new material without the benefit of conscious decision making or control. The idea that the dancer’s subjectivity is no longer central and that the body holds the key is not new. Nietzsche is renowned for preferring the body to consciousness; the body was his ‘guiding light’. But it’s Spinoza who takes these elements into an explicitly ethical domain, for it is one thing to say the body can lead us into new territory, another to call this good. For Spinoza, goodness involves change in the body, a change for the better, which is felt in the body’s own activity. A body that becomes better, which exercises a greater agency, changes for the good. This in turn produces joy in the heart of the subject. Adapting Spinoza somewhat, we might say that joy is the mark of the dance well done, of a body that surpasses itself in action. This is something that dancers intuitively understand, for dance is their art and the body their wherewithal. The joy inherent in the dance well done resonates with Spinoza’s conception of the good. Not only does dance affirm movement per se, dancers are more willing than most to tolerate not-knowing in the name of their art. They are willing to do what it takes to allow the body to excel. They are experienced in allowing the body to come to the fore by way of ‘backgrounding’ their own knowing subjectivity. There are many ways of expressing this, through resorting to imagery or other somatic strategies or, more explicitly, in performative terms. Anneke Hansen speaks of ‘vacating yourself’ when performing, Kim WishartSergeant of how to make room for the new. Likewise, for Sara Rudner, “When it came right down to it, and you were there to do the dance, the best thing that happened was the body took over and the dance happened”. Rudner brings to the fore these two elements: the dancer’s not-knowing and a body that leads. Following Spinoza, we might say that the subject’s ethical task is to embrace not-knowing so as to make way for the body to become better.

Spinoza focuses on the body’s achievements, on what a body does. His ethics is action-based. This resonates with dance to the extent that a body aims to make something of itself, to become something more in movement. Despite the desire to improve, however, there is no established pathway to the good. This is because ‘we don’t know what a body is capable of,’ even our own. In this respect, the body is the teacher. Dancers allow for that. They look to the body as the medium of their art. While Spinoza’s ethics offers no formula for success, I want to suggest that Spinoza might nonetheless acknowledge the dancer’s endeavours as a mode of ethical improvisation. Spinoza puts his faith in what a body does. His ethics is centred upon the relation between the uniqueness of a body (its essence) and its activity. The more a body expresses this uniqueness in action the better. This is what Spinoza means by the good. The good, for Spinoza, is the practice-based expression of greater facility on the part of the body. Because of his monism (rejection of Descartes’ mind/body dualism), development on the part of the body produces a shift on the part of the mind – we learn through the body’s greater competence. The good thus inheres in the body’s increasing power. At first glance, the enhancement of power appears an unlikely mark of the ethical, for what exactly is good about becoming more powerful? Much depends upon how we understand power. In Spinoza’s case, power inheres in the body’s activities, in what a body does. The more agency a body expresses, the greater is its power. Ethics is thus about empowerment rather than domination over others. The challenge of this way of thinking lies in its refusal to fix any particular content to the notion of the good (e.g rules). Rather, the good arises as a difference in this body, through its becoming active. This isn’t just about this body though. Bodies change through their encounters with other bodies. The foot pushes off the floor, the Alexander teacher offers direction to the body of another, a teacher touches, provides feedback, shows another way. There are many bodies, big and small, simple and complex (ie, bodies need not be human). When a body encounters another, two possibilities arise. A body may become more or less powerful as a result of the encounter. The good arises from the singularity of this body, in its encounter with another. It emerges because of the body’s particular qualities, which enable it to become more capable, more powerful and because that particular body has managed to express more of those qualities in action. Of course, the encounter may go the other way, producing a decrease in power as a lessening of capacity. Any increase in power leads to joy, and conversely, any decrease leads to sadness. Power grows through the body’s increasing ability to act. This is not because some external value is satisfied. Rather, it has to do with what a particular body

DAN CE THINK ING becomes as a manifestation of its own singular essence. This is its joy, the joy of expressing a greater sense of agency in the world. The idea of a dynamic increase or decrease of power thus poses the good (and bad) in relation to change. The ethical moment in Spinoza’s thought arises as a distinction between kinds of becoming. When a body encounters another, it can be affected in one of two ways: either actively or passively. Actions are a matter of bodily agency, whereas passions are external in origin. Passions act upon us, they produce passive affections. The distinction between active and passive corporeal qualities turns on the different role that a body may play in the encounter. Active and passive affections are relational and event-based. To discern a body’s activity or passivity, we must seek the corporeal encounter. Something happens in the exchange between bodies, whereby each participating body expresses or undergoes a dynamic corporeal change. This is where the qualitative difference between active and passive affections arises, depending upon whether a body acts or is acted upon (suffers action). To actively participate in an encounter— to exhibit greater bodily agency—is to increase one’s power inasmuch as a ‘new’ activity has been performed by this body. Conversely, an encounter that is wholly caused by another body is also an event but one which is not due to my body’s activity. To that extent, it represents a diminishing power of activity on my part.

Either a body acts for itself or it is acted upon. It may not necessarily be clear whether a body acts for itself or is acted upon. Is a soldier who obeys a command engaging in active or passive affections? If a massage releases tension enabling greater movement is this activity or passivity? It all depends upon the changing agency of the body. Ramsay Burt refers to an event that occurred within a Steve Paxton piece entitled Magnesium (1972). One performer (Curt Siddall) dropped another (Nancy Stark Smith). According to Burt, instead of trying to take responsibility for a ‘mistake,’ Siddall allowed the body of the other to deal with the encounter, to find a safe way to roll onto and over the ground. This happened quickly. Burt argues that the performer’s getting out of the way enabled the bodies involved to respond in the moment and to take the lead. In other words, Siddall did not try to consciously ‘fix’ the situation. Rather, he allowed Stark Smith to negotiate her own body’s dynamic response. Burt speaks of the body’s “relatively autonomous motor actions” as something beyond conscious control. He draws on the distinction between the dancer’s subjectivity (as conscious control) and the body’s skilful expression, arguing that the latter came into play through this encounter. We might say that, for Burt, the body which rolls out of the fall becomes more capable in virtue of the encounter. If the first moment involves a passive affection—being dropped—the second moment consists of a creative corporeal act—an arm extends the curve of the back as its rolls across the floor. Counter-balancing is another instance of dynamic corporeal activity. In the counter-balance, two or more bodies combine to create movement which neither body alone could achieve. The challenge of this work is

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to deal with the subtle shifts of weight that inevitably arise. Let us conjecture the momentary shift as a passive affection, as the work of an external body. The challenge for each participating body then is to actively manage this shift and not destroy the counter-balance. In the course of the counter-balance, bodies have to find new means of activity (micro-adjustments) to manage shifting relationships. A particularly challenging version of the counter-balance occurs when the centre of gravity (formed between two bodies) shifts. A body that creatively and actively manages the shift could be said to increase its agency. If the action fails (as it often does), then the counter-balance is lost. The body here does not increase its capacity but merely reacts to a change of circumstance. We might think of the body created within the counter-balance as a single entity composed of two constituent bodies. Thought as a unified body, the question of empowerment devolves upon whether or not this body-complex exerts an increasing agency within the course of the movement. This way of thinking produces a shift from dependence upon external causes to a mode of corporeal agency. The body that can do things is contrasted with the body that depends upon the activity of the other. This implies a certain conception of the good individual. Deleuze puts it thus: “The individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organise his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power and the composition of powers” (Practical Philosophy). This dynamic conception of the good situates ethics in the very gap of change, in the body’s becoming otherwise in combination with other bodies. The good thus pertains to the particular body. It is situated in the moment and felt through the dynamic of corporeal becoming. Although there is an emphasis on what a body does as a matter of its own agency, it is important to acknowledge that bodies can enhance one another in myriad ways. Deleuze describes the joy that a body may feel as it passively combines with another to create something more. This is encapsulated within teaching at its best—the good teacher is the one who can facilitate the enhancement of power in the body of the student. Such a body becomes more powerful because it expresses (engages in) a new form of activity. Perhaps we could look at dance training in ethical terms, such that goodness arises in the body that becomes more capable by way of its own activities. Training promises an ethical horizon of corporeal empowerment. Thought of as corporeal capacitybuilding, training could be conceived as an ethical affair, an organised encounter between bodies which aims to prepare a body to dance well. If the encounter enhances a body’s power to act, we would say, along with Spinoza, that this manifests as the good. Spinoza offers a dynamic conception of corporeal becoming in terms of the increasing or decreasing power of action, felt in the passing moment. The world changes and we change within it. A body that becomes more powerful by way of its own activity is a joy to behold. This is the lure of performance. We see a body risking itself in the moment.

P G . 23 Ethical development requires a kind of beginner’s mind. Intuitively grasped by many dancers and practised by many good teachers, it implies that we don’t know beforehand what will work in the particular instance. Spinoza’s ethics is challenging. It dethrones the sovereign subject, eschews universal principles of good and bad, focusing instead on each body as the source and site of goodness. To take up Spinoza’s challenge then is not merely to set aside our pre-conceptions of the good, it is to acknowledge that the good is a variable and momentary quality. To affirm this form of the good is to take joy in the corporeal moment. If we don’t know what a body can do, we can nonetheless embrace the experiment and follow its lead. Philipa Rothfield is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy program, La Trobe University. She is a dance reviewer for RealTime arts magazine and Momm magazine, Korea. She is co-convenor of the Choreography and Corporeality working group, International Federation of Theatre Research. She has been dancing on and off for some decades. As a philosopher, she writes on French philosophy, political philosophy, feminism and postmodernism, specialising in philosophy of the body. She is currently writing a book on dance and philosophy. She has published on dance in relation to Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead, Nietzsche, Klossowski and Ravaisson.

Ramsay Burt, 2011. Reflections on Steve Paxton’s Magnesium, given at the Scores No.3, Uneasy Going conference, Tanzquartier, Vienna, 2011. Gilles Deleuze, 1988 [Orig.1970]. Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Light Books. Sara Rudner, 1990. In Post-modern Dance: Judson Theater and the Grand Union, dir. Richard Sheridan. New York: ARC on Videodance. Nancy Stark Smith, 1987. “Dedication to the moment”. Contact Quarterly 12:3, online journal. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics. Trans. Edwin Curley. London: Penguin Books, 1994.