Naser 1 Political Derrida/IntroGrad - Prof. Gareth Williams Lucía Naser 20th December
Deconstructing Dances: conceptual dances and deconstructive events In this paper I risk some primary observations that focus in the presence of a deconstructive force within the contemporary dance field. Specifically I refer to the trend recognized as “Conceptual Dance” or no-dance, arising in Europe in the 90´s and rapidly influencing artists from Eastern Europe as well as Latin America. More than defining the characteristics of this heterogeneous movement (whose unity I accept with analytical purposes though could be undoubtedly put under discussion), I observe recurrent operations, identifying them through the description of some pieces that belong to the initial phase of Conceptual Dance. More than analyze them exhaustively, these works are mentioned as examples of these operations.. The main goal of this essay is analyzing dance formulations through the lens of deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida and other thinkers interested in this interlinguistic cooperation. The dialogue between them may reinforce the operational and performative potentialities of the radical critique that both propose. Although history crosses over all the discussions contained here, it is not a dimension treated explicitly in this work. This is worth mentioning, in view of the pluralism and metadiscursivity of contemporary dance, signalled by the coexistence of multiple paradigms emerged in different epochs and by its explicit concern with dance historic evolution, once that the (modern) discourses of dance progress …. have been replaced by the end of all narratives and teleologies. If the former guided dance transformations since the rise of dance as spectacle, nowadays is an eclectic and critical approach the one which predominates among dance artists and institutions, impacting on the languages and politics of the field. The artistic work taken into account include pieces created by artists such as Gilles Jobin (Swizerland), Jerome Bel (France), Xavier Le Roy (France), La Ribot (Spain), Juan Dominguez (Spain), Joao Fiadeiro and R.E.A.L (Portugal), Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People (USA), Tamara Cubas (Uruguay) and Lupita Pulpo
Naser 2 (Uruguay-Germany). A deep analysis of some of their pieces has already been done and exceed the possibilities of this paper. I focus then, on certain gestures as a way of observing the materiality of conceptual dance’s philosophy in its action field. With this purpose, I make use of heterogeneous strategies that involve scene description, reference to pieces´ release, artists´ discourses and critique reception1. I conclude this paper with some observations of the specificities of the conceptual dance´ echoes twenty years after its emergence, basing this reflection in four dance productions from USA and Latin America, which is historically and contemporaneously always taking references and influences from Europe and USA artistic propositions. Even when multidirectional contaminating process of influence – more than unidirectional dissemination - describe better the fluxes of information circulating worldwide nowadays, a responsibility compels me to reflect about the asymmetrical politic relations and communications existing under this apparently homogeneous globalization. Is not my aim to claim for their annulment or reduction, but on the contrary, taking into account the positive consequences of their existence analyzing their impacts during the last decades. It is also reasonable to suspect that – even when it shares a similarly radical and critical purpose - dance produced twenty years latter in an economic, social, technological and political reality substantially different from the 1990s (whether in Europe, USA or Latin America), has something new to say and differential strategies and languages to articulate (or disarticulate) its thinking. This seems particularly expectable coming from a dance whose historical (self)awareness constitute one of its most salient characteristics. 1
I changed the subject of this paper around three times. The second subject modification had to do with the unexpected discovery of a whole publication devoted to the questions I was determined to approach. I refer to Lepecki´s Exhausting Dance (from now on ED), where he explores the political ontology of movement in the production of “key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990´s in Europe and USA”, as he states in the first page of the book. Even when I take this bibliographic finding as significant input for the elaboration of this work, the fact of not having met with it before, increased my awareness of the site from I am articulating this theoretical thinking about dance. That site, has to do not only with certain accessibility to information (which inherently determines the exposure to some kind of knowledge and the limited contact with some other), but also with the fact that my experience with dance has developed in Latin America (mostly Uruguay and Brazil). Far from conceiving this as a lack, I welcomed this event to the research, incorporating the singularities that this peripheral condition may bring, as a contribution for the analysis of dance and deconstruction.
Naser 3 Dance as spectacle emerged in Luis XIV´s France and the center of its production has shifted alternatively from Europe to Russia and USA since then. Latin America has developed its own dance production, but is worth noticing that except for a few artists from Brazil and Cuba, little influence has compensated the enormous impact that these centers have had over the peripheral production. Geo-politicizing the interrogations approached here, can therefore be a vehicle for noticing that the philosophic and aesthetic encounters between deconstruction and conceptualism in dance will have singular characteristics in each of the time and places they occur. The route for this reflection is organized around three main topics: 1) the relations and (re)formulations produced by the encounter of contemporary dance and deconstructive philosophy, 2) the presentation of some dance operations that exemplify deconstructive drives, materialized in choreographic works by European and American artists, 3) a preliminary observation of Latin American (Uruguayan) and American dance productions, that feed from deconstructive philosophy in their singular reading and re-creation of this theoretical frame (within a process of transculturation whose outcome is a non pre-existent phenomena), and also from the dance production and ruptures produced by the first generation of dance artist identified with a conceptual approach. The main hypothesis of this work, is that the subaltern formulation of conceptual dance movement, departures from singular interpretations of deconstructive philosophy (observed here through Derrida propositions), that incorporate – in a self deconstructive fashion – the traces of an active incorporation of a relatively foreign aesthetical and theoretical frame. I also argue how the accumulative experience of dance field impact in the continuation (and radicalization) of conceptual dance, producing a continuous of differences within its evolution. Finally I observe how dis-author-izing procedures and a practice of the “passive decision” (taking this concept from Derrida) work as creative methodologies, engaged in a conception of the “event” that permeates the art work and the artistic working. The allusion to socio – political concrete issues by the pieces commented in the end, also opens questions about the singular ways in which dance attempt to address politics and the alternatives ways to do it, recently proposed in some creations.
Naser 4 In the following section I summarize some of the main axis around which contemporary dance “exhaust dance”. The term is coined by André Lepecki, who analyze the saturation of the relation of dance to movement, and the artistic work that approach the open ontological question that this language faces: a question which is esthetic, political, economic, theoretical, kinetic, and performative. Lepecki observes the ways in which some constitutive elements of Western theatrical dance are criticized through choreographic work, exceeding for this purpose, the limits of dance, and conceiving dance studies as an amplified space integrated by other artistic and knowledge fields, dialoguing with them to think relationships between bodies, subjectivities, politics and movement. His analysis is supported in the study of performance, making frequent reference to the philosophy of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, seeing their thought not only as a “philosophy of the body but a philosophy that creates concepts that allow for a political reframing of the body” (ED2 5). Which are these concepts and their contribution for a political reframing? Dance and philosophy: between concept, conceptualization and conception Viewed from the angle of its existential function – namely, in rupture with signification and denotation – ordinary aesthetic categorizations lose a large part of their relevance. Reference to a “free figuration”, “abstraction” or “conceptualism” hardly matters! What is important is to know if a work leads effectively to a mutant production of enunciation. (Guattari 131) This goes directly to express one of multiple potentialities of this exchange. It matters no more to trace disciplinary boundaries or territories, as long as contemporary art languages and knowledge fields have already mutated in ways that blurry their limits and continue producing mutant production of enunciation of great political impact.
2
From now on I refer to the book Exhausing Dance as “ED”, and to Lepecki´s Of the Presence of the body as “POB”. Also POF refers to Derrida´s The Politics of Friendship.
Naser 5 The indeterminacy, “indiscipline”3 and openness which seems to characterize contemporaneous art epistemologies, are not to be taken as nihilism, irrationalism or a destructive spirit. On the contrary, they are calling the attention over the apparent transparency of language (dance and natural languages) and thought, and also to the heterogeneity of strategies and reasons that may provide not certainties, but questioning tools to work towards the constant awareness of the formers. Departing from this critical viewpoint, all ventures should recourse to an eclectic arrange of strategies to unveil the assumptions that any discourse may carry within it. The word indisciplinarity, is thus thinking of an anti specialization drive (which Derrida relates to a segmentation or limiting of thinking), that is even suspicious of the inter and transdisciplinarities, that would end up branching new specialized territories. These are valuable considerations for embarking in the critique that Derrida proposes and dance has already started to choreograph: The experience (is an experience more or before being a philosophical, theoretical, methodological statement) of genealogical deconstruction is not only an operation…at stake is the deconstruction of the genealogical schema. (POF 105) An initial effort directed toward the questioning of the own language is a task taken up by both, the properly philosophical and the choreographic philosophy. As he states “Saying, thematizing, formalizing are not neuter or apolitical gestures arriving after the fact from above but they are positions staked out in a process” (POF 105). The influence of the practical philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, their recuperation of the artaudian concept of Body Without Organs with focus in experience, the chiasm, the critique of narcissistic vision raised by Merleau-Ponty in his phenomenological understanding of the subject-world (body and space in which interior and exterior are no longer identifiable), are fundamental to approximate us to the aporias in which dance engage itself. In this practical philosophy or philosophy of 3
This term is employed by Quito with the “Como dectectou Muniz Sodré em Antropológica do espelho (2002), quando a estretegia de pesquisa é da radicalidade do trans (referindo-se às famosas redes transciplinares), acaba virando “indisciplnar”. Um campo que “é propriamente um atrator ou “buraco negro” para onde se projetam as substancias originais da História” (op.cit:235 quoted in O corpo, Greiner 11)
Naser 6 the practice: “It is the constitutive paradoxicality of the body that the dancer expresses when dancing – but never as the representation of an “inner” conflict, and always as the successful mapping of the energy flows that the dances mobilizes from within the plane of consistency of desire (Lepecki 2006, 18). Beyond this practical philosophy and phenomenological sources, dance has been feeding from a critique of critical theory itself. Among these, Peter Sloterdijk develops a discussion of “mobilization”, a key but scarcely explored side of modernity whose pertinence when thinking about dance becomes obvious. He reveals a certain mechanism of modernity to push (bodies) towards “progress”; In the political, technological, and historical-philosophical doctrines of progress, the ongoing epoch declared its kinetic self-evidence. However, what it did not admit loudly was its secret inclination to take the moral motives seriously only to the extent that they serve as engines of outer movement (…). Thus, the formula of modernizing processes is as follows: progress is movement toward movement, toward increased movement, movement toward an increased mobility. (2006, 37) progress This suspicion, may be informing some choreographic strategies that have provided the identification of conceptual dance as “no dance”, precisely because the suspension, the questioning and the manipulation of movement economy, and the ongoing exploration of the limits of dance itself and modern body as well4. Departing from analysis focused in a critical and philosophical deconstruction of dance in contemporaneity I organize for analytical purposes, five tropes which are recurrently operative in dance pieces engaged in this critical venture. The “exhaustion” is then practiced in these 5 fronts: 1) representation critique, 2) the exhaustion of the relation between dance, presence and time, and between 3) dance, 4
Here it would be relevant to introduce the concept of body politics as to grasp in which political context these dance inquiries are located and in dialogue with. It would also be necessary to present the alternative ways in which philosophy and dance have thought of themselves, in relation to each other and to the definition of the knowledge they produce within their working. Specially Arthur Danto proposition of “the death of art” (1984) and Badiou´s reformulation of the links between art, philosophy and truth in his Handbook of Inaesthetics (2005). Unfortunately no space is left for this in this paper. They will remain as discussions to come.
Naser 7 writing and movement, 4) the rupture introduced between body and subject, and finally the critique of the 5) stage as theological space and the author as sovereign master. 1) Representation Critique The critique of representation is one of the main characteristics of early twentieth-century experimental performance, theatre and dance – at least since Bertold Brecht´s “urgency to understand mimesis (…) as historically mediated” (…), and Antonin Artaud´s famous manifestos for a theatre of cruelty from the early 1930s which, as Derrida noted, not only announced the “limit of representation” but proposed a “system of critiques shaking the entirety of Occidental history” (…). Theoretically, the critique of representation announces “a fracture in the epistemological regime of modernity, a regime that rested on a faith in the reality effect” of representation as it secured the stability of discourse (…) (and) reproduces discursive and performative forms of domination. (ED 45-6) Some of the elements that tight dance and theatre to representation are the links between presence and visibility, together with a great amount of conventions that conceive theatre as mimesis or as pedagogical space. Gayatri Spivak states that Derrida uses the word “Metaphysics” as shorthand for any science of presence, directing his critique to the liberation of philosophy from the burden of presence at/as the center of philosophy itself. Criticizing the confusion of “being as presence in all the senses of the word”, Derrida observes that is with Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger that presence as truth, presence as subject and presence as being are respectively decentred (Of Grammatology xxi). We can think these dance operations, performing a similar gesture, that seeks for the reinvention of theatrical space, not as a place of re-presentation, but most of all of imagination and invention of alternative ontological experiences. In this sense, Jerome Bel´s work dis-identifies choreography, presenting dance devoid from the elements which has characterized it. Lepecki summarizes them as a closed room with a flat and smooth floor; at least one body, properly disciplined; a willingness of this body to subject to commands to move; a coming into visibility
Naser 8 under the conditions of the theatrical (perspective, distance, illusion); and the belief in a stable unity between the visibility of the body, its presence, and its subjectivity” (ED 46). In the piece Jerome Bel by Jerome Bel, these metaphysics of presence are circumvented by a game of fake identities that establish a rupture between subject and name. By the subsequent entrance into stage, of different persons that are however presented as being Jerome Bel, and the repetition by each of them of an action – that is singularly executed in its reiterated instantiation – Bel points out a disjuncture between the name, the concept and the thing (Derrida POF 103), as well as in the failure of our perceptual mechanisms of identification of “the real”. Other frequent operation linked to a critique of representation within contemporary dance, is the unveiling and explicit exhibition of creative procedures and technical resources employed in the articulation of dance pieces. Abundant examples can show this recurrent gesture. Among them, All Good Spies are my age from Juan Dominguez (2002) and Franny and Zooey (2007) by Luciana Achugar, initiate their creative process with this aim. In the release text of the former Anne Passant writes: Todos los buenos espías tienen mi edad nos invita a vivir el antes, el durante y el después de la producción de una obra, y todo ello, de forma simultánea. El presente es futuro, es pasado. Propone a los espectadores que espíen los intervalos entre la emergencia de ideas para coreografías y la coreografía de estas ideas (…) Las acciones enfatizan las relaciones entre la escritura y la lectura de la propia obra (…) El dispositivo parece proponer distancia pero, finalmente, tenemos la sensación de hacer el amor con los pensamientos del artista, con nosotros mismos, con ambos a la vez. ¿Es él? ¿Eres tú? ¿Soy yo? Espiamos y somos espiados dentro de un espacio en el cual lo pequeño, lo insignificante, lo inocente y lo sencillo tiene tanto valor como lo supuestamente importante. El espectáculo se centra en el proceso de transformación de ideas. (juandominguezrojo.com)5
5
Took from the Juan Dominguez´s web page: http://juandominguezrojo.com/?m=2002&cat=4
Naser 9 Similarly Achugar´s Franny and Zooey (name devoted to the cats that inhabited the Studio where she rehearsed) explicitly announces that the piece: . . . was born out of the challenge to be as transparent as possible about the creative process. Making the work not as a representation of something but rather as the thing itself. Franny and Zooey makes the audience hyper aware of their physical presence in the theatre and their role as voyeur by bringing to the foreground the space and time gap between the process and the moment of performance. (lachugar.org 6). Miguel Gutierrez´s Freedom of Expression (2008), which I present later, approach the performance as an experience for the artist, placing the esthetic proposal in its sharing and exhibition and clearly not in representation. Interaction with the public has also been used and seen as a means of emphasizing the artificial conventions implicit in theatrical performance. Working from a certain openness in art works (and Eco´s Opera Aperta from 1962 constitutes a fundamental influence), artists practice creation not from the solipsist refugee of the inspired author in control of every semiotic effect produced by their art, but accepting the incomplete character of any work until it is read, or participate in the fruition process in which polysemy bursts in an unlimited semiotic chain. The term “Dramaturgy of the Spectator” (De Marinis and Dwyer) takes account of this since the moment of the artwork conception, integrating since the creative process the spectatorial activity which enable the event of performance to take space and time, understanding that there is a “corps a corps between the reader and a text” (qtd. in Jones 1). Through the explicit and varied ways of referring to the artificial and conventional nature of every theatrical event (be the gaze, speech or the public’s participation incitement, etc.), many pieces propose a critique of representation basis, making visible that which theatrical conventions tries to maintain suspended. 2) Dance, Presence and Time One of the critical tools in the unveiling of the metaphysics of presence, that both dance and Derrida are working for, is the observation that any signifying element
6
Took from web page: http://www.lachugar.org/pieces/franny--zooey/
Naser 10 is always already inhabited by and referring to another set of references, traces of traces of traces, in an endless play of difference. The deconstruction of appearances and the distrust in the recognition processes that irrationally relates the visible to the real are blank of critiques for philosophy as well as for dance. Both fields’ history is marked by an (ir)rational objectivism, in which the sense of sight is privileged above other senses and conceptualized as direct vehicle for the access to reality. Neo-classical dance technique (known as Ballet) and its understanding of the dancing body as “clear and distinct” 7 is a remarkable example of this. The contemporaneous critique that Contact Improvisation and Somatic Techniques offer to the hegemony of vision in Western Culture, is also part of the project of unveiling this lasting tradition permeating the practices and thought of western subjectivity. Phenomenology of perception and deconstruction have set the grounds for the awareness that: . . . is not only the object (the dance) that is in motion; the writer, the viewer, the spectator, is never, ever fixed as well” – the displacement of an object caused by the movement of its observer is determined by the fact that our framing of the two depend on our position in the present and that this position is defined in such framings. (Foster 207) Following Lepecki, this means to accept that, ontologically the moving body is always fading before our eyes. This justifies the need of undertaking a “provisional acknowledgment of the historical conditionality and fluidity of the current ontolinguistic grounding of dance’s presence as absence and of movement as sentenced to pastness”. (POB 137) A rupture or estrangement in our perception of
7
This term, coined by Johann J. Winckelmann sets the bases for the dance vocabulary of Ballet which take up the neo-classicist principles of beauty claimed in the age of its emergence (between XVI and XVII centuries). However this definition of art beauty survives and spreads a strong influence, even nowadays. Recalling Winckelmann´s words from 1763: “Art, as an imitator of nature, should always seek out what is natural for the form of beauty, and should avoid, as much as is possible, all that is violent, because event the beauty in life can become displeasing through foced gestures. Just as much knowledge displayed in a text must give way to clear and distinct instruction, art should here do the same for nature, and the former should be weighed in accordance with the latter” (Winckelmann xivi). As shocking as this statement sound, it was determinant for the artistic engagement of the body in the arts. Even when multiple ruptures has provoked its decease, this conception is still so active that its deconstruction would deserve as many efforts as necessary.
Naser 11 time is also recurred by dance artists, giving place to what Gaston Bachelard has named as “slower ontology”; “one that distrust the stability of forms, that refuses the esthetics of geometry, and instead privileges addressing phenomena as fields of forces and as systems of intensities” (ED Lepecki 17). The manipulation and experimentation with movement, presence and time, is thus, articulated towards a critique of western representational economy. Although they are inherently linked to the representation critique just mentioned, it is worth paying attention to them separately, as they produce specific tactics of destabilization. In Franny and Zooey, Achugar incorporates video recordings of her rehearsals to the performance, being doubly present in her actual bodily presentation onstage (her and her virtual videotaped presence/absence). The performance, exhibits a choreographic material conformed by two dissociated moments, that meet to integrate a disjointed but in apparent unity. The creative-process´ time and the performance event’s time, participate in one single undifferentiated event, and by this juncture, their difference is also reaffirmed. In I am here (2003) the Portuguese Joao Fiadeiro, challenges and defies the spectator’s perception of his presence. The piece unfolds a game of hidings and reappearances. Fiadeiro marks his ghostly appearances spatially, spectralizing in a dim space in which the traces of the dancer on a blank fund leave body-prints of his discontinuous movement. His body onstage makes itself visible and invisible, drawing the contour of his silhouette in different pauses of his travelling throughout the space, along the time of performance. Which and where is the present body when Fiadeiro is not visible but we can see the marks that his body has left in the stage? Which and where is his “real” body? How are these marks dissociating his present presence and his past presence, whose marks coexist, introducing a disjointing rupture within time? How a sign (in this case the drawn silhouette of his body) constitute a permanent presence, or becomes the ephemeral trace of a presence that in the moment of its writing has already become an absence? This questions are rose by I am Here, whose suggestive title anticipates the interrogations underlying the performance of the “I” (identity of the subject), “am” (its being) and “here” (location in which the subject being takes place). Who, how and where is that “I am here” actually being? These
Naser 12 provocations lead us into the next kind of dispositive, which deals with an historical knot in dance history: the conflictive relation of dance, writing and movement. 3) dance as movement as writing as dance as writing André Lepecki opens Exhausting Dance presenting an anecdote that shows in what extent dance is still nowadays tight in its ontology to movement. The event, occurred in 2004, was leaded by Mr. Raymond Whitehead, who after assisting the piece Jerome Bel accused the International Festival of Ireland - through the obscenity and false-advertisement laws - arguing that “Jerome Bel could not be properly classified as a dance performance”. In accordance the Irish Time published that there was nothing in the performance that could be described as dance, which was defined as “people moving rhythmically, jumping up and down, usually to music but not always” and conveying some emotion” (ED 2). It is interesting to observe the way in which an implicit rule that binds dance with movement, was functioning as the argument for the invalidation of an art work8. Marc Franko has demonstrated that in the Renaissance, choreography defined itself only secondarily in relation to movement (Lepecki ED 2). However since 1930s, modern dance founded an inextricable identification between continuous movement and dance’s being. Modern era aesthetics, with its autonomist project for arts, impacted on dance and promoted the search of the purity of this artistic language. This detachment from any external consideration, focused dance artists in the research of formalist principles of artistic creation and the self-delimitation (which also meant self-legitimation) of dance as art field9. The independent claim of dance and the birth of modern ideology strengthened the marriage between dance and movement in a coupling that as Peter Sloterdijk argues, worked in favour of the mobilization that Modernity proposes and activates. Dance’s drive towards a 8
I quote this case because of its publicity but I could also bring some similar attitudes that I had the opportunity to experience myself. It is also doubtful if a reproach like this is something happening frequently in other art fields, although even Duchamp’s art was and is also questioned by some conservative lovers of virtuosity. 9 Randy martin notices how the project of grounding the ontology of dance in pure movement leads to a “presumed autonomy for the aesthetic in the realm of theory, which is (…) what grounds, without needing to name or situate, the authority of the theorist or critic” (Martin 1998:186 qtd in Lepecki 4)
Naser 13 spectacular display of movement characterizes this period (and paradigm), in the sense he defines it: as an epoch and a mode of being where the kinetic corresponds to “that which in modernity is most real” (Sloterdijk 2000: 27) The potentiality of critically addressing this mobilization from the introduction of ruptures in a performance’s time, is noted by Lepecki: the perception of the stilling of movement as a threat of dance’s tomorrow indicates that any disrupting of dance’s flow – any choreographic question of dance’s identity as a being in flow – represents not just a localized disturbance of a critic’s capacity to enjoy dance, but, more relevantly, it performs a critical act of deep ontological impact. (ED 1) This betrayal was recuperated as strategy by the contemporary dance (mostly American and European) engaged in the dismantling of this isomorphism between dance and movement. The flow of movement and jumping bodies in the music rhythm, were contested as the inherent elements for dance definition, and the ideology underlying this ontological assumption was replaced for questions about dance ontology and about the need (may be political or economical more than aesthetical if any…) of conceiving dance as independent and pure language10. How this relates to the third term, writing, often invocated to seal a definition of dance as artistic language. Developing in the space and time, movement becomes dance when it imprints a certain text, score, script: choreography. But what comes first: dancing as writing, or escriture as dance? Both are absolutely co-dependent and at the same time different, but what is certain is that they impact in the other’s ontology in an ongoing duet whose rules are constituted by a permanent haunting of the other. Abundant sources can testify the interest and debates that the relation between dance and writing has raised among dance theorist and artists. From Thoinnot Arbeau 10
The same way in which contemporaneous philosophy has begun to analyze the knowledge contained in diverse cultural objects – as literature, cinema or media discourses - contemporary dance approaches these ontological questions without the teleological pressure of identifying and differencing itself, once as for all, from other artistic languages and non artistic disciplines. Perhaps, not only at the level of the subject, the “clear and distinct” body of the rationalist neoclassicism has been replaced by a “body without organs”. This new organic-zational logic seems to be deeply restructuring the epistemology of dance as knowledge field.
Naser 14 and his Orchesography (1589) , Raoul-Auger Feuillet´s Choreography ou l´art de dècrire la danse, par caractères, figures et signes dèmostratifs (1699), Rameau´s Dancing Master (1725), Jean-Georges Noverre and his Letters on Dancing and Ballets (1760), to the contemporaneous texts of Mark Franko, Susan Leigh Foster, André Lepecki, José Gil or Peter Sloterdijk. These decades of reflection show a slow but undeniable evolution of the thought thrown on this subject. Without space to present here the percourse of that mutation11, I try to synthesize in the following paragraphs the actual state of the debate in its theoretic and aesthetical developments undertakings?. A sort of mourning ties dance to writing from the moment that an unavoidable distance is recognized between them. Lepecki refers to a documentarist obsession directed to the correction or cure of dance’s flawed (because of ephemeral) materiality. In this way dance studies as photologhy, is one that envisions dance writing as an endless effort to counter dance’s self-erasure, subjecting dance to the archival structure or command (POB 130). But agreeing in the statement that “the moment the dance is arrested, fixated, written down, it is no longer dance. Yet” (POB139), Franko reverts the conceptualization of dance’s ephemerality as a lack, proposing instead a critique to the tradition in dance studies that sees dance’s materiality as something that must be worked against. Contemporaneous dance production, has reformulated dance’s self-erasure conceiving it as a powerful trope for new theoretical (as well as performative) interventions beyond the documental tradition. What is curious to notice is Franko´s statement that “dance’s change of cast has deconstruction to thank”. For Franko, dance’s (and dance studies´) debt to deconstruction lies primarily in the Derridean notion of “trace”” (POB 131). Derrida explains how “the trace” is not a concept, but more a “thought” that escapes binarism but also allows it to become operational: the trace is the erasure of the selfhood, of one’s presence, and is constituted by the threat or anguish of its irremediable disappearance, of the disappearance of its disappearance (Writing and Difference 230). . 11
An excellent review and discussion of this historical transformations in the relation between dance and writing is offered by Lepecki in the chapter “Inscribing Dance” (Of the presence of the body, 2004)
Naser 15 Dance’s ephemerality-as-dissapeareance – in all the creative approaches that his image has materialized itself – reveals the influence of Derrida´s concept of trace in the field of performance and dance studies. This also relates to Peggy Phelan´s definition of the “ontology of performance” as a “maniacally charged present” announcing itself at the very moment presence plunges into disappearance” (Unmarked… 148). The thinking of the trace displaces presence from the center of philosophy and at the same time reformulates radically its sensorial basis, allowing theories of dance (and of performance in general) “to free themselves from the visual attachment that has traditionally accompanied them. Dance studies no longer have to serve the eye alone . . .” (POB 133) Documentation and its insistence on the centrality of the presence, constitutes an effort to fixate dance, withdrawing from dance the flow of its own materiality and reducing it to a photological register. The engagement with the visible regime (as the ontology of reality) relates to dance and philosophy history. Derrida states then, that “the entire history of our (western) philosophy is a photology, the name given to a history of, or treatise on light” (Writing and Difference 27). It is worth describing here, the approximation of dance with visual arts as a sign of the active reflection that artists are sharing with philosophy about these issues. Relating to the work of various artists such as La Ribot, Xavier Le Roy, Josef Nadj and Miquel Barceló, Wagner Schwartz, Olga Mesa, Tamara Cubas, among many others. They explore multiple ways of emphasizing dance as a trace, whether making the act of writing the center of the choreographic action, or by presenting the body in static configurations that secondarizes movement and privilege the configuration of images. The use of white settings – that resembles a blank page – is a frequent decision taken among contemporary choreographers. This whiteness relocates the body as writing agent (or object), recuperating the powerfulness of its tracing but at the same time dissociating his presence of the subjective discursivity that dance has incorporated (reinforced by modern dance expressionist aesthetics). In this tendency – that Sánchez and Salazar denominate “cuerpos sobre blanco”, “los cuerpos encarnan los códigos y proponen sobre la superficie / el espacio blanco una escritura visual, necesariamente efímera y performativa” (Cuerpos sobre Blanco 13).
Naser 16 The silence and the slow ontology that these pieces often employ are not directed toward the purpose of sublimating the subject presence, but on the contrary, to subvert the dance association with movement and simultaneously with the metaphorical communication of emotions and feelings. The presence of the body is also dissociated from the presence of the Cartesian subject, in control and master domain of his decisions and movements. This hyperbolic silent presence of the body opens the way for a continuous difference contained within the monadic entity a body can represent. The stillness of the bodies, their arbitrary actions that seem to respond to designing needs more than to human desires and subject necessities, reach the hinging distinction between the dead and the living body. In some of these performances, what we see (static and objectualized bodies) and what we know (that we are looking at interpreter’s bodies who are undoubtedly executing consciously each of the movement they perform) are distanced and linked at the same time, by the operationalization of a difference. Perceptual and objectual at the same time. The movement becomes both “sign and symptom that all presence is haunted by disappearance and absence, turning movement and presence as absence. (POB 128129). In Unmarked, Phelan observes that “Writing re-marks the hole in the signifier, the inability of words to convey meaning exactly. The intimacy of the language of speech and the language of vision extends to their mutual impossibilities.”12 (6). The project Distinguished pieces of La Ribot, is a radical provocation towards the conventional relation of the terms just discussed. Through a sarcastic gesture that hyperbolizes the different possibilities that dance might contain, the Spanish artist moves the borders between dance and visual arts and at the same time between art and object of consumption, materializing in her Distinguished pieces – and its title seems to connote an allusion to art as sumptuary object of consumption - a critique to
12
For a further development of a research on dance and sexual difference it is worth to underline the way in which Phelan continues with this observation: “The failure to represent sexual difference within visual representation gives way to a certain effect of the positive/negative, the seen and the unseen, which frames the visual perception of the Woman, and leads to her conversion into, more often than not, a fetish – a phallic substitute. This fetishization of the image is the risk of representational visibility for women. It secures the gap between the real and the representational and marks her as Other” (6).
Naser 17 impoverishing disciplinary delimitations and to art market’s policies of commercialization. Under the generic title of Distinguished pieces, La Ribot started, in the early 90’s, a project which had a great impact on the performing and visual arts world. Lasting from 30 seconds to 7 minutes, the pieces were short solos, adaptations of concepts, poems in motion, or living pictures performed by the artist herself. Up for sale, the distinguished pieces, ephemeral and live art works, were purchased by distinguished proprietors like other art objects. Planning to create one hundred pieces.13 Defined by her as living tableaux, in these pieces La Ribot makes of the naked female body a recurrent element that receives a supra-aesthetic treatment. Presenting her body in static positions during long silent scenes, laying on the floor or even covered by a blanket similar to the one used to cover cadavers, trapped in a folding chair or folding her own body, surrounded by personal objects or lying nude with a rubber chicken, her pieces disestablish the spectatorial dance contract with the public, by exhibiting a piece that is apparently more alike visual than performing art, placing at the same time, unsaid questions about the limits of differentiation between objects and subjects and dead and living bodies14. 4) body/ subject Brain dance15: five interpreters are on scene. Three of them lay on the floor. Dead weight and eyes closed. Two of them enter and exit the scene, moving in each apparition one of these static bodies. They change their positions, drag them through the floor changing their location in the space, remove their clothes incompletely, gather them together, separate them. This removing of the bodies is done in a mechanical, almost neutrally way and in a steady pace marked by the entries and 13
From La Ribot´s web page: http://www.laribot.com/spip.php?article399 I La Ribot is perfectly aware of the perceptive challenge that she is positing through this extended artistic project. What she could not have predicted is the public (and market) reaction to her proposal, which by the way, is highly successful. What she still may not be able to know either is if the goal of developing it as a life time project would come true. She started it in the early 1990s´. 15 This piece created by Gilles Jobin in 1999 treats directly about the political mutilation and manipulation of bodies and their dead and decomposition. A video register of the piece can be found in: http://www.gillesjobin.com/IMG/mov/Braindance-short.mov 14
Naser 18 leavings that allow us to perceive the changes in the passive bodies. After a while the movers write down codes in the dead-like bodies and on their own and join the passive bodies on the floor. They are present but any movement absent. Their still presence is showed to us and from now on they will only move to reach a new static configuration, drawing shapes and postures in the space. The possible dramatic reading that may arise from the first scenes start being diluted by this geometrical, quite abstract, no much human disposition of the bodies in the scenery. They move, position themselves and come back to quietness. At this point, even the most stubborn spectator may have started to doubt if the subjective (psychological?) empathy with this interpreters´ bodies will be a useful way of relating with the piece.¿? Brain Dance: Gilles Jobin chose a suggestive title for the piece, that suggests thinking processes as related to our body processes, our biological capacities and organic functions. The thought produced by this brain dance is to be understood by which kind of “reason”? Is to be understood? In Self unfinished (1998)16 Xavier Le Roy appears in a white set, sit in a table also white. After some minimal actions he stands up and starts walking in a mode that resembles a machine. Around the table, he repeats a certain action script with his lengthy body until beginning to compose animated figures: he plays with his costume (which are daily clothes) as well as his nudity. Inverting his head and producing strange figures, configuring his body in non recognizable shapes, Le Roy produces new images in which the borders between the organic, human and mechanical are erased. In this dis-identification, the human body invisibles itself and offer us the vision of an “other”. The body of the choreographer does not dematerialize to become image: “even when in certain aspects of our perception, his body has become invisible and in other his body is still visible” (Lepecki 2006, 15). There is a co-presence of image (insect), the screen (body-image) and the subject (human body). In Exhausting Dance, André Lepecki proposes that rethinking the subject in terms of the body is precisely the task of choreography, a task that may not be always 16
An excerpt of this piece can be seen in: : http://www.xavierleroy.com/page.php?sp=d22f5301fc93b61aedfc31f0c3c53a88e553d8be&lg=en
Naser 19 subservient to the imperative of the kinetic, a task that is always already in dialogue with critical theory and philosophy (5). The philosophy that permeate the work of these choreographers understands the body not as self-contained and closed entity but as an open and dynamic system of exchange, constantly producing modes of subjection and control, as well as of resistance and transformation. Lepecki observes that choreography and philosophy “share that same fundamental political, ontological, physiological, and ethical question that Deleuze recuperates from Spinoza and from Nietzsche: what can a body do?” (6). This question can lead us to multiple answer strategies: from the sophisticated training of the body to acquire almost super human skills, to the possibility of the stillness, of the nothing. Both things are pole examples of what a body can do. It would be interesting then, to reformulate that question, to ask what a body can undo. This question proposes a dialogue between critical theory, deconstructive practice philosophy and all modes of performance, including dance. It is also provocative in view of the deconstruction of the Cartesian rational monadic subject that has determined the configuration of the “self” in most of the history of western philosophy and cultural experiences. Thinking with Deleuze, subjectivity is not to be confounded with this conception of a fixed subject. Rather is to be understood as a dynamic concept, indexing modes of agency (political ones, desiring ones, affective ones, choreographic ones) that reveal a process of subjectification, that is, the production of a way of existing (that) can’t be equated with a subject (1995:98) Modernity´s subjectivity traps the individual within a solipsistic experience mastered by the ego and the body as an independent entity governed by immanent laws. For modern subjectivity, the ethical, affective, and political challenges are of finding sustained modes of relationality apart, above, or from a critical standpoint in relation to modernity’s “emblem”: movement. The deconstruction of the hegemonic fantasies of modernity (linked to the imperative to constantly display mobility) (ED 11) is a concern present in the work of many artists as well as in critical philosophy. By exhausting the movement and operating over temporalization, dance may open new regimes of attention, producing alternative conditions of possibility for language production and at the same time new languages invented outside the normativity of
Naser 20 hegemonic discourse economy. The subject of these operations may not be approached from a psychological or teleological standpoint but from the understanding of subjectivity as a performative power and a mode of intensity. The hegemonic forces that permanently interpellate individuals in the name of a Unique Absolute Subject (paraphrasing Althusser 1994:135) can be countered by the reformulation of this way of subjection, and the invention of an experience of the world not leaded by the sovereign subject that modernity has proposed as means for life and social experience. Dance – in its choreographic and experiential possibilities – seems to be a potential space for the imagination of different proposals. Also for their performance. 5) Stage as theological space and the sovereign mastery of the author/director The previous considerations about the primacy of sovereign rational subject not only produces new ways of embodiment – on and offstage – but also a reformulation of the role of the author, the director, the master subject in charge of the decisions and the formulation of worldly or aesthetic realities. If we no longer consider the (dancing) subject as a singular entity and embark in a radical questioning of the stability (that representation has always secured) between the appearance of a present body on stage and the spectacle of its subjectivity (read as identity), “is not only the status of the body of the dancer on stage that requires critical revision. The assumed singularity of the author-choreographer must also be revised” (ED 51) If we are willing to engage in a deconstructive task of thinking performance and the performance of subjectivity from a different reasoning, one that undermine the basis of sovereign control over artistic creation - annulling therefore the arrival of new, unexpected and unforeseeable life experiences that can contain the force of powerful injunctions – it seems necessary to abandon certain conventions still present in performing arts. Listening to Derrida – who at the same time is listening to Artaud– the theological and teleological characters of theatrical politics come to surface The stage is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as
Naser 21 concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the “creator”. Interpretative slaves who faithfully executes the providential designs of the “master” (Writing and Difference 235) This reflection, offers an observation that is interesting to contrast with the authorial practices within dance field. The renunciation of the author’s power (over the creation and circulation of a particular piece) is shyly appearing and can be pointed as one of the differences between the 1990s generation of choreographers engaged in this conceptual trend, and the most recent production that this move is proposing. The technological and communicational possibilities and realities have changed radically from then up to now, and dance is at least permeated (if not radically influenced) by these transformations. The debates and conflicts about author’s rights in the present technological context differ from the economy of authorship of the end of XX century. However, not only these heteronymous transformations may be producing alternative authorship practices, but they could be also related to a meta discourse of the dance field that is being produced after the first generation of conceptual dance. It is noticeable, how this initial deconstructive undertaking has reproduced the logic common in all artistic fields, of the authorselfhood construction, making use more than discussing the star system logic, by which an artist’s aesthetic marks become a recognizable face and at the same time, a good facade for commercialization. This author transcendence and hierarchic status are no longer immune to the questioning obsession that any deconstructive venture – dance included – may lead to its ultimate consequences. Dis-author-izing practices and passive decision: exposing bodies to the event I will briefly explore why Derrida´s critique to sovereign reason may be useful to observe the experimentation of alternative authorship practices in contemporary dance. My observations suggest two main issues that could have constituted the main
Naser 22 topics of this paper17. First, that his critique on reason is closely related to a destabilization of authorial/theological practices, developing creative processes in which the director’s role is blurred and rearticulated as moderator or proponent more than as decision – making chief. This is also related to the roguish quotation of dance pieces that appear in many dance works that reproduce or deform metonymically (or by partial fragments) the creation of other’s artists, questioning performatively the copyright’s legislation, practice and morals. A second connection can be traced if we deepen the observation of the methodologies and rationalities employed in some creative processes, that seem to be closer from the thinking of the “event” and the practice of “passive decision” for the creation of a piece, than from the meticulous realization of pre-conceived programs. Commenting briefly four last pieces, I will try to read the focus of Cubas, Gutierrez and Lupita Pulpo in the creative processes´ methodologies, as deconstructive practices of dance ontology. Their critical approach is developed not only in the materiality of the completed piece – as we have seen in the works quoted above - but by the operations and logics occurring during their creative processes. The deconstruction of a teleological protocol and ontology, which see in the piece the ending accomplishment of a proposition, make these artists open to the emergence of unforeseen elements, inexistent and unpredicted before the creative process begins. It may be also adequate to say that the proper creative process is a dispositive that more than being conducted by goals and the development of a certain planning, constitute the gathering of elements and the test of conditions that may make an event arise, affecting and producing the performance material18.
17
In the same way that ruptures in any knowledge field make sense in relation to the past and history of that field, it would have been weird to approach this two kind of practices without a presentation to the more extended ambience (or esthetical-political ethos) in which they are being placed as provocations, but also as dialogical enunciations within a broader discursive venture. 18 In this point it would be interesting to develop more Derrida´s thoughts about auto-immunity and passive decision. In Rogues, he argues that without autoimmunity nothing will be ever arriving – is kind of a passive decision This ex-position to the incalculable event would also be the irreducible spacing of the very faith, credit or belief without which there would be no social bond, no address to the other, no honesty, no promise to be honoured, and so no honour. This opens the rational space of an hypercritical faith , one without dogma and without religion. This is the “messianicity without messianism”. This faith is another way of keeping within reason, however mad it might appear
Naser 23 This unconditionality of the creation process does not mean a pure chaos devoid of any form or logic, but singular rationality that is interesting to look though Derridean reflections about the reason. A reason worthy of its name would justify continuing pursuing an effort to create ways of thinking that more than falling into irrationalism - would take into account plural rationalities and the fact that “the rationality of the rational has never been limited to calculability, to reason as calculation, as ratio, as account” (Rogues 133). The mourning time that Derrida describes for philosophy in the present – originated in the fall of sovereign rationality – relates to the saturation of a reductionist use and practice of reason, that dance has reproduced throughout its history by subsequent (rival) paradigms. What Derrida is proposing is a deconstruction of the sovereign reason that has shaped certain cultural habits and even the definition of the human. In its desire for control and prevision, in its understanding of knowledge as power (used towards this control), reason has lost the ability of being hospitable to the “events”, those incalculable irruptions, those unforeseeable alterations that has the breaking force of transformation. This explains how whenever teleology comes to orient and order a historicity, a certain neutralization and binding of the event takes place If an event worthy of this name is to arrive or happen, it must, beyond all mastery affect a passivity. It must touch and exposed vulnerability, one with absolute immunity, without indemnity; it must touch this vulnerability in its finitude and in a nonhorizontal fashion, there where is not yet or is already no longer possible to face or face up to the unforeseeability of the other. In this regard autoimmunity is not an absolute ill or evil. It enables an exposure to the other… (Rogues 152) The fact that the pieces configured through these non teleological methodologies deal with socio-political issues (approaching concrete conflicts and topics) is a good motif to believe in heterogeneous ways of reasoning about the
(153). There also several articles about “passive decision”, a concept that seems particularly interesting to analyze the rational – cognitive – bodily acts implicated in dance improvisation, which is frequently used as means for the emergence of choreographic material. Obviously this remains as a note for further investigation.
Naser 24 “reality”, perceiving its constructed character and performing critical practices than more than denounce, invent alternatives to the existent injustices alluded. Freedom of information, from Miguel Gutierrez (USA, 2001) departures from the artist´ will of criticize actively the military action of USA in Afganistan, creating solidarity with the people in the world who are displaced by armed conflict, not having the basic right of rest after an active day, and who instead have to remain evervigilant for violence, ready to flee from their homes at any hour, and in worst case scenarios, become refugees. He proposes a 24 hours performance in which he will remain uncommunicated – blindfolded and with earplugs – and moving in his studio. Remarking the voluntary character of his decision, the artist wanted to stress the violence determining critical life conditions of many people in the world. The most striking side of Gutierrez’s proposition is that the political claim takes the form of an experience, and the experience becomes a dance piece which is performed not only by him but simultaneously by other artists from 49 states invited to participate in this “nationwide contemplative action” which would be transmitted on the web live stream19. The characteristics of this event as performance are dislocating the author/interpreter protagonism and also problematizing the material identification of “the piece” that would be spread along the whole country and instantiated in each of the volunteers´ experience taking place at the same time (which also produce a rupture of the unitary time that the concept of “performance” imply). Beyond discussing if this can be presented as dance work20, it is worth looking at the unforeseeable aesthetic form that this “piece” produces, as it was inextricable 19
“Seven years ago, on December 31, 2001, in response to the frustration that I felt about the United States' invasion of Afghanistan, I decided to do a 24-hour improvisation titled freedom of information in my home studio in Brooklyn, NY. The rules for this improvisation were simple. I was blindfolded and wore earplugs. I stayed in my empty studio, I didn't eat anything for the entire day and I attempted to move continuously through the space for 24 hours…” he also explains that the title alludes “to the American legislation, originally signed into law on July 4, 1964, that "allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States Government." In choosing this title, I was also thinking about the constant stream of thoughts, images and feelings that emerge out of a practice of sensory deprivation and continuous movement”. Miguel Gutierrez. Took from: http://freedomofinformation2008.blogspot.com/2008/10/statement-on-freedom-of-information.html 20 An unfruitful debate which may involve the evaluation of antecedent propositions such as those from Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovich or Joseph Beuys, among others.
Naser 25 dependent of the reactions, responses and behaviour of each of the artist which were exposing themselves to the situation and stimulus proposed by Gutierrez. Two Uruguayan choreographers produce pieces with similar names in 2011. Multitud, a Mexican-Uruguayan production leaded by Tamara Cubas21 and structured as a collaborative process with 20 Mexican dancers from different procedures, and a non defined multitude of collaborators that participate through the web. And Multitud Singular, created by Ayara Hernández and the German Uruguayan company Lupita Pulpo in residence in Montevideo. They do not only share their names and the international collaboration, but also a philosophical and methodological frame in their creative processes. Multitud and Una Multitud Singular employ creative methodologies that blurry the author’s figure and redefine the director’s role, trying to practice the heterogeneous diversity that the “multitude” as conceived by Virno and Toni Negri propose. Cubas´ production address explicitly Barthes´ writings about the author death, the non hierarchic differentiation within the multitude’s groupality, the knowledge production which takes place in every dance creation, and the phantom as unknown but perceived figure that compel us to action. The overcoming of the interpretative hermeneutics and the causality as generative principle, are also mentioned in her creative project. “Cuanto más hablas menos significas”: this phrase took from Godard’s film Vivre sa vie synthesize the communicative experiment that Cubas propose to this Mexican multitude. She states that “La premisa con la que surgió este proyecto, es la 21
It would be interesting to analyze other recent production of Cubas, that deals with family archives and memory of a traumatic political past and the disappearance of his uncle. Actos de Amor Perdidos (Uruguay, 2010) from Tamara Cubas, belongs to the project La Patria Personal. In a mourning performance whose structure is never closed, the artist construe a memory archive of her family experience of Uruguayan dictatorship taking into the scene her families and a combination of imprison experiences with contemporary dance pieces (quoted in an irreverent and chaotic way) with violent connotations. Working from a personal memory (different from the official history) Cubas bring the spectres of the deaths caused by the military regime reflecting about the limits of memory in front of reality and searching in the art-space the reconstruction or an unreal reality, of the lost archives of that time. As she writes in the piece release text: “.No hay nada mas invisible que un monumento”. The game of appearances, disappearances, absences and ghosts in a mourning process re-experienced through the body would justify a particular analysis of this piece in the frame of Derrida´s thinking.
Naser 26 de saber cómo trabaja un grupo de personas y cómo se organizan para tomar una decisión sin que nadie sea líder”. The piece is composed by the emergent material that this premise may generate and not only the director is ignorant of what the process may bring but also she explains that “La diferencia respecto a otros espectáculos que analizan las diversas formas colectivas de relacionarse es que, en esta ocasión, los bailarines no saben qué escena continúa después de la que ellos interpretan”. Using heterogeneous dynamics and tools (from questionnaires to web interaction, collective readings and video registration) Cubas decided to reply in the work with the dancers, the same exercises proposed by her colleague Hernandez during the creation process of Una Multitud Singular. This work presents on the one hand a heterogeneous group of individuals, on the other a performative reflection on the characteristics of a group as such (in its multitudinous and singular aspects). The reflection is meta-discursive because the multitude as such becomes the matter and the subject of the performance. The creative process is supported by multiple aesthetics and theoretical references that rarely have direct connection with the dance but are brought to the discursive terrain and re-codified in a creative dialogue, taking place personally and virtually, through an online extension of the process. The collaborative methodology is coherent with the aims of Lupita Pulpo: “to work in collaboration (…) to create links between the people and their countries by exchanging experiences and knowledge, which can lead into a creation. Thereby one of the main focuses is to put the work in a contemporary context. Questioning, listening, giving space and dialoguing are main issues in the meetings”. Una Multitud Singular can be seen as a choreographic essay on the experience of the multitude in the contemporary society. A series of situations and corporal relations are presented on stage, in which the capability of reflecting and creating a dialogue on the new dynamics and modes of socialization is highlighted. The study of the collective is approached as that “which doesn't attempt or goes against the individualization but on the contrary look for increasing its potential”. The composition of the piece discuss principles such as: interdependence, cooperation, influence, contamination, leadership, antagonism, competition, mediation, belonging, incorporation, organization, listening, dispersion... but the strategies to do that are
Naser 27 hard to pin down, to translate to words. The body speech is associated without any doubt to the bodies who pronounce it, who are integrated to the collective without abandoning their singularities. Without other sound than the breathing and the voices of the performers, the bodies are figures on a white background, what collaborates with the effect of a poetic and performative writing on scene. Close to the phenomenology of perception, this proposal searches for a space where what is said get confused with how is said, where the words vibrates in its maximum potential. The bodies’ makes philosophy through action, in that fringe where we no longer see the limits between individual and collective, between what is questioned and how is the question raised22. (Un)conclusions This dance that I have tried to describe has a profound trust on concepts and conceptualization but not in explanation, pedagogy or meaning-communication. Is a dance that is always moving towards difference and would not accept a fixation of its vocabulary, of its grammar. It would not agree in recognizing itself as a paradigm either, because doing so would resemble the operation of auto-legitimation that threaten the continuation of the permanent questioning and transformation over itself. This slippery dance, which calls into question a certain rationalism and a certain irrationalism, believes together with Derrida, that the crisis can be overcome because is about an appearance (and let’s remember here the predominance of vision over other senses in dance history as well as the multiple and increasing critiques that this hierarquization of senses has and still is rising); the apparent failure of
22
One of the texts quoted in their blog (among tens) present clearly the questions guiding this project through the words of the French choreographer Boris Charmaz: “Let us test an apparently simplistic proposition. It is a melting from the vertical posture to the heaviest flabbier. From standing to lying down, as usual, but this time without habits, and for an exceptionally long duration. The idea is to let oneself melt little by little while allowing unexpected circulations, and insisting on the most subtle flows: one must not deny the potential losses of balances, the difficulties, the fragility of he who, with his eyes closed, doesn’t know any more at what moment his knee will touch the ground”. Boris Charmaz. The melting of the individual. In: Everybody scores. Text first published in Éc/arts, nº1999. Took from: http://unamultitudsingular.blogspot.com/
Naser 28 rationalism, caused by the assumptions of what reason may signify, but most of all by the way in which reason has worked in dance as well as in philosophy. The heterogeneity of reasons at stake in dance processes, the position of non exclusion of them but on the contrary, the experimentation with their fusion, tensions and encounters, explains why so many approaches and interests are coexisting in contemporaneous dance creation. From pieces that dialogue with scientific principles and disciplines – from biology to physics - to those concerned with gender issues, or those addressing directly the history of dance, social relations, or the ones interested in movement investigation, body systems or the body of sports. We also find pieces which depart from the literary or plastic work of other artists, or from mass culture products or from a reflection of the body in the technological era and the embodiment in virtual realities. Some experiment with formal procedures, language (de)construction and alternatives structures while others purpose to deal with political conflicts. The esthetics and proposals that this variety of focuses produce, is as diverse as the artists that experiment in this line. Their formation and information, their precedence, their resources for production, the success of their work and their possibilities to show it around, their discursive styles and characteristics (within or outside the pieces), their exchanges with other artists, their view of contemporary production and of dance as a knowledge field may vary enormously. Plurality and infinite heterogeneity is thus a trace of the inorganic movement I have tried to think trough in this work. To reach a (fake) end, and far from a conclusive aim, which would attribute identity traces to this trend and its “new generations”, I think it is worth questioning about the singularities and differences within the work referred in this paper. The mutual influence of these artists and the widespread conception (owed to Bourdieu´s writings) of art as a field, whose agents position themselves – and their creation – in relation to each other, have increased dance self awareness about its historicity and about the pluralist eclecticisms that characterizes it nowadays. The technological advances, that enable the uploading of dance piece videorecordings to the web, have allowed the circulation of dance far beyond the local
Naser 29 where is produced. This is relevant in its impact of non mainstream or recognized artists as they are the most deprived of touring and exhibiting their work. They have also been the ones whose knowledge of dance produced in other countries has remained more unreachable (whether for not participating in International Festivals, living in countries where not much international dance arrives or being deprived of the economic and cultural means to experience dance from different provenances). The augment on the dance circulation flux does not guarantee the dissemination and mutual contamination, nor the fact that the “information” (conveyed in dance pieces) reach every dance artist, but at least sets the conditions for a more democratic dance production in a globalized world. More questions are opened that answered in this essay, which offers the only certainty of the continuity of the critical and deconstructive venture within dance creation. In this way, I overcome the frustration that a vague feeling import to such an open conclusion, believing that perhaps, there is no art (and contemporary dance) without deconstruction and no deconstruction without the breaking and destabilising force that the esthetic already brands. Yet. Works cited Artaud, A. 1970. The Theatre and its Double. Translated by Victor Corti. London, Calder. Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. A. Toscano. Stanford University Press, 2005 Borradori, Giovanni. Autoimmunity: Real and symbolic suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida In Borradori, Philosophy in a time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. Verso. Brooklyn, 2005. --,. The animal that therefore I am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, Trans. David Wills. Fordham UP. 2008. --, Writing and difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. --, Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 1994. --, Rogues. Two essays on reason. California: Stanford UP, 2005. --, Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1976.
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Naser 31 Ribot, María. Distinguished Project http://www.laribot.com/spip.php?article399 Sánchez, José A., Conde-Salazar, Jaime; Cuerpos Sobre Blanco. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La mancha: Comunidad de Madrid, 2003. Sloterdijk, Peter. Mobilization of the Planet from the spirit of Self-Intensification. Trans. Heidi Ziegler. TDR 50:4, Winter, 2006 (36-44). --, Thinker on the stage: Nietzsche´s Materialism, Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. --, La Mobilisation Infinie. Paris: Christian Bourgeois Editeurs, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri. Translator Preface, in: Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1976. Winckelmann, Joachim. Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art. Volumen 1. Trans. Curtis Bowman and Henry Fuseli. New York, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005. Wolfreys, Julian (ed.). The Derrida reader: writing performances. Available in http://books.google.com/books?id=EfL65164VgC&printsec=frontcover&hl=es&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v=onepage&q&f=fals e Wortham, Simon Morgan. Derrida: writing events. New York, Continuum International Publishing Group. 2008
Dance work quoted Achugar, Luciana. Franny and Zooey. New York, 2007. Website: http://www.lachugar.org/pieces/franny--zooey/ Bel, Jerome. Jerome Bel. France, 1995. Website: http://www.jeromebel.fr/eng/index.asp Cubas, Tamara. Actos de Amor Perdidos. Montevideo, 2010. Website: http://perrorabioso.com/ActosdeAmorPerdidos --, Proyecto Multitud. Uruguay – Mexico, 2011. Websites: http://perrorabioso.com/proyectoMultitud; http://www.proyectomultitud.com/ Hernández Holz, Ayara. Una multitud singular. Montevideo, 2011. Website: http://unamultitudsingular.blogspot.com/
Naser 32 Domínguez, Juan. All good spies have my age. Spain, 2002. Website: http://juandominguezrojo.com/?m=2002&cat=4 Gutierrez, Miguel. Freedom of information . New York – USA, 2001 – 2008. Website: http://www.miguelgutierrez.org; http://freedomofinformation2008.blogspot.com Jobin, Gilles. Brain Dance. Switzerland, Genève, 1999. Website: http://www.gillesjobin.com/spip.php?rubrique83 La Ribot, María. Distinguished Project. Genève, ongoing… Website: http://www.laribot.com/spip.php?article399 Le Roy, Xavier. Self unfinished. Montpellier, France, 1998. Website: http://www.xavierleroy.com/. Video extract: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3rv1TeVEPM.