frenesick: a teathReal fiction contribution for Swedish Dance History by lucia naser the migration of humans to other planets, the control of thought by machines, hybrid
bodies that fuse the human with the robotic, robots under the dominance of women and man and viceversa, vegetable species which develops intelligence, authoritarian
governments that ban books, knowledge, time measures… bodies enhanced by cognitive paraphernalia, technology which enable to manage and modify time and space
parameters, telepathic communication, telemetric programation, automatic activation,
programmatic prevention, synchronized perversion… all this integrate the repertoire of
science fiction, evoking an imaginary that – even when departs from it – interrupts reality to present fictional alternatives and its potential consequences about human, earthly and intergalactic life.
Isaac Asimov used to say that there are 3 kinds of speculative fiction: “what would happen if…?, “if only…”, and “as this continues this way…”. departing from the imaginary alteration of daily and social life provoked by changes in science and knowledge, and the potential transformations that those would bring, science fiction presents sometimes futuristic
narratives, other times some which perturbate (or subvert) the horizon of the possible,
requiring from the reader or spectator what the philosopher and poet Coleridge called in 1817 “suspension of disbelief”.
but beyond (or before) fiction, in the contemporaneity, the changes brought by the quick technological development and the incorporation (and in-CORPOration) of the virtual
dimension in our life, introduce an irreversible dislocation in the concept of “the real”,
modifying this way the tempo-spatial axis/coordinates in radical ways. operatively and
philosophically, the theoretical practices and practical theories of the real are destabilized and fragmented, problematizing concepts as presence, absence, distance, time, history,
identity, reality, truth, true, false, fictional, etc. a co-existence of multiple realities or the perforation and rizomatization of reality occurs. reflecting on the body from a
phenomenological perspective, these transformations are groundbreaking, as they reformulate the entire basis for our perceptions.
in The Phenomenology of Perception Merleau Ponty sais; “perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from
which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them… the cogito must reveal me in situation,
and it is on this condition alone that transcendental subjectivity can, as Husserl puts it, be an intersubjectivity” (1945, xi, xiv). which is the inter-subjectivity and the worlds that become possible in this out-of-joint
time and space? in these virtual realities? in this fictional truth that reshape permanently
our daily lives and beings? which are the potentialities that arise from a thought of the non real?
dance fiction: between speculative fantasy, surrealism and science fiction if modern science has obsessed itself for the knowledge and control of “the real” – and even its production, reproduction and representation –, science fiction develops an imaginary of what the world can, might, may, will, could be. these inventions are
productive and lead to the emergence of alternative and infinite worlds, to the poetization of an space and time whose existence, even when intermittent or ephemeral, posses the political potential of all creative imagination. speculative fantasy – using J.G. Ballard concept – allows the detaching from the hegemonic modes of presentation and
representation based in mimesis and in the concept of beauty as the ground for truth (and viceversa). it thus opens ways for the exploration of the outsides…. it causes the explosion of the circular and totalitarian reason, making evident that thinking of “…culture as a hermeneutic circle is a mere ideological prejudice” (A. Moreiras in The Exhaustion of
Difference, 2001, 15). science fiction lets go all the verisimilitude principles and sees itself as the nonholder of the nontruth of the real (idem, 25).
this outer space is also delimited as the outside of that which we are able to identify,
appearing when we focus on it, an augmented or alternative reality beyond our more familiar perceptions or sensibilities. this non-familiarity defies the categories and
procedures of western cogito, which reduces the reason to an instrumental and productive tool. as Ballard realized thinking about speculative fantasy, there is a redemptive and
therapeutic power in the fusion between the outer world and the inner word of psyche.
with this i don’t want to re-produce the cartesian division of the in-and-out of the body, but to make a phenomenological remark about the indiscernible fusion of both in
experience. as a dreamlike experience “the speculative fantasy is an especially potent
method of using one’s imagination to construct a paradoxical universe where dream and reality become fused together”, in Ballard’s words.
the fiction contained in surreality is not mere arbitrariety but is about not taking the world just as it is (because on the other hand: what is it?) but to re-make it, transform it with the
tools of the imagination; “… the madman does that… the psychopath does that… but the real job it to re-make the world in a way that is meaningful, you see…and that’s what surrealism
does” (Ballard At Home, 10). surreality is overall an attempt to overcome the reductionist
duality of the subject-object through the fusion of unconscious unlimited visions and daily life experiences. to discuss and shake the fixed dualistic notions about the real (and no real), the body (real and imagined) and perception (objective or subjective), seems an
interesting way to explore through dance and semiotic reflection… and i am – as always – already imagining dances and bodies… “….by considering the body in movement, we can
better see how it inhabits space (and, moreover, time) because movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time it actively assumes them, it takes them up in their basic significance which is obscured in the commonplaceness of established situations” (The Phenomenology… 117).
how would it be to make a dance fiction piece? which are the possibilities of the encounter and juxtaposition between dance, graphic novels, the comics? how can a “real” body
convey, compose and performance a science fiction choreography? how is the narrative of
a comic translated into the tempo-spatiality of dance? i want to go on with these questions and after an intersemiotic promiscuous intercourse, invent new temporalizations and
spatializations, fictional bodies that might touch or re-make reality through unexpected, violent and brief electrical shocks. traffic among languages and fields, be the rogues of reason and the burglars of all prisons.
/ un viaje al espacio en tren a carbón / un drag-superhéroe de una indígena aymará / una novela sobre una sola imagen / un mapa de una canción / una sinfonía sobre el silencio / una pintura rupestre de un submarino nuclear /
dance fiction. irreal teathReal bodies, the illusion as a bodily work, an embodied
caricature, the becoming past of the future, the becoming present of the past, the synchronicity of an impossible choreo-graphy.
how would take place the materialization of an i-reality? of an e-reality? which is the
fiction that every-body contains? how is the corporunreality of such a dance? can dance imagine other bodies, that when become present bring with them the presence and
absence of infinite others? can dance be a mechanism of fiction construction? can dance be a mechanism of fiction de-construction? is fiction a reality or is reality in itself a stubborn fiction?
*endnote: I thank the thoughts of Maurice Merleau Ponty, J.G.Ballard, Isaac Asimov, Alberto Moreiras and Ramiro Sanchiz for dialoguing with me in the formulation of these questions. The references for Ballard can be found in: Gasiorek, Andrzej. JG Ballard. Manchester University Press. Oxford Road, Manchester, UK. 2005; Bresson, J.G. Ballard at Home; J. Goddard and D.Pringle, An interview with J.G.Ballard� in Goddard and Pringle (eds), J.G. Ballard: The first twenty Year, pp.8-35, p.30. For further readings see: http://www.jgballard.ca/. The blog of Ramiro Sanchiz can be acceded in: http://ballardrasante.blogspot.com/