13 minute read
The dance of detritus:
Dance Artist Rumen Rachev (Auckland, New Zealand) and “friends” in residence with Gull Cry Dance (Victoria, B.C.)
by Kristen Lewis
Marcel Mauss’ 1934 article Les Techniques du Corps did ground-breaking work on the relationship between gesture and social conditioning. As is often the case with work that reaches beyond the strictures of the present zeitgeist, the implications of Mauss’ insights were not realized fully in his time. Taking up Mauss’ work nearly a century later, dance scholar Carrie Noland elaborates on how Mauss’ conception of gesture might help us theorize the ways in which social conditioning marks bodies. She suggests that dance art that acknowledges the strictures of conditioning (while also stretching beyond it) might act as a liberating force in an era where mass normalization threatens to restrict gestural range in ways that have disturbing consequences for social freedom. Noland (2009) summarizes Mauss’ contribution and its implication for current dance praxis and research as such:
This invitation for ‘future research’ into the ways in which the felt experience of moving might inflect gestural routines speaks to the possibility that dance, as a form of research, could reveal: 1) new ways of experiencing movement; and 2) new modes of movement itself, born out of the potential liberated by moving otherwise than according to the dictates of social conditioning.
This is not a novel statement. The most sensitive, skilled, socially responsible dance artists I know, in this city and elsewhere, tend to frame their work along these lines—e.g., as interested in exposing kinesthetic experience that reaches beyond the (often deeply oppressive) norms of current culture and of actually creating new movement pathways, ones that offer the possibility of moving against the grain of the social order. Still, the way Noland carries Mauss’ important work on gesture forward in time to point to dance art as a site of possible liberation from social conditioning is useful in this moment, given the extreme restraints so many dance artists have experienced in the “covid” and “post-covid” era.
Indeed, the manifold constraints this era has imposed has asked many of us to revisit the whole idea of dance-making—to question, first, how to survive as dance artists and, relatedly, why we might want to in a world where so many crises call for a sort of attention that dance art might seem ill-equipped to give. The work of New Zealand-based dance artist Rumen Rachev speaks with rare power to the question of how dance might use the
New folk dances for new spaces, co-created and danced with joy © Damarise Ste Marie very medium of our extreme conditions of constraint (conditions grown much worse in the post-covid era) to offer avenues for freedom, however provisional, from the massively powerful forces of normalization that condition our social, economic, and ecological life in the present moment—and hence also the movements of our bodies.
I became familiar with Mr. Rachev’s work when covid conditions found us occupying the same Zoom rooms on a variety of virtual collaborations through Performance Studies international (PSi). We later joined forces to create a cross-distance ‘residency,’ in which my BC-based dance company, Gull Cry Dance Theatre, invited Mr. Rachev to present some of his recent work on 希望学 kibōgaku (hopeology) via Zoom to a hybrid-audience of in-person and virtual attendees gathered in my apartment in Victoria, B.C.
Rumen Rachev “performing” lonely audio-vibrator stool with Java Bentley’s inflatable work in the background and Adam BenDror’s frugal instrument in the foreground. (October 16, 2022, Zero Waste Network, Glen Innes, Auckland)
© Chris Berthelsen
Brief Notes After Rumen Rachev’s Presentation on Hopeology (希望学)
Mr. Rachev’s work on hope-ology activates a choreographic space in which audiences are inspired to reflect on their own relations to that fraught, complex term “hope.” At his December 1, 2022, showing, audience members were invited to share reflections on hope. Rather than describe Mr. Rachev’s piece, I want to offer, instead, the echoes of audience members’ experiences—often, how dance lives on in audience members says more about its kinaesthetic resonance than straight description (or even recording) of a work. Here is what audiences had to say:
In elaborating this question of “hope as a method,” Mr Rachev participated, along with several collaborators (Mongoose Chen, Chris Berthelsen, Adam Ben-Dror, Sena Park, Jason Mathieson, Angela Hu, Xin Cheng, Java Bentley, and Giulio Laura), in an innovative residency titled The Auckland Community Recycling Centre Art Residency (ACRCAR), taking place at the Zero Waste Network, in the neighbourhood of Glen Innes from July 2022 to November 2022. The residency saw him engaging in choreographic actions centred around various objects figured as “waste,” by virtue of them being brought to the recycling centre. Showing that “waste” is not always that, he and his collaborators repurposed these discarded objects to performative ends—indicating that things (and indeed people) have a value, a purpose, a meaning even when the values of late industrial capitalism render them as “no longer useful.”
Several choreographic actions resulted, a few of which I will elaborate here. As part of his developing collaboration with Gull Cry Dance, Mr. Rachev routinely sent me pictures of these choreographic actions over the course of the fall of 2022. Reflecting on these refracted through my own practice, I created kinesthetic resonance over the distance.
Experienced Counsellor (a co-production piece by Chris Berthelsen and Rumen Rachev)
Rumen Rachev and Chris Berthelsen in “Experienced Counsellor” (Oct 16, 2022, Zero Waste Network, Glen Innes, Auckland)
© Rumen Rachev
In the first photo, the supine figure of the dancer (in this case Chris Berthelsen, at other times Mr. Rachev) is barely visible underneath a giant, weighted pillow marked with the words “Experienced Counsellor” (a sign repurposed from a series of wellbeing events in the city and then thrown in the trash). A collaborator/audience member plays a makeshift synthesizer cobbled together by Adam Ben-Dror while a crowd of Auckland art-goers look on. In the performance, the dancer remains motionless underneath the weighted pillow for much longer than anyone watching was likely to think wise. This choreographic intervention gestured comedically, but also with a note of deep tragedy, towards what I wish to call the “therapy-industrial complex” that arose during covid—the sudden emergence of all manner of online “mental health” services, sold through sneaky marketing appeals to the pain we all came to carry, in one form or another, through the combination of economic precarity, mass uncertainty, precarious health outcomes, and social isolation ostensibly brought on by covid, but well in place long before covid. By literally placing their bodies on the line, they expose the neoliberal equation at the heart of therapy-as-big-business (“if there is something wrong with you, it is your fault, not the fault of the social, and it is on you to do something about it—and if you cannot, you must learn to ‘be more resilient.”)
Rumen and Chris’ intervention in Experienced Counsellor welcomes meditations on how, in an era where “mental health” is the new buzzword, our bodies are choreographed by the social equation to move according to the logic of “if you feel depressed or anxious, it’s about you, it’s your responsibility to fix, for instance by seeing a counsellor you must pay more for what you can really afford ” (This is not to disparage the many wonderful mental health professionals who provide deeply necessary services to people in deep need, often working for far less than they deserve—their work is golden, and I love them. I am referring to a wider social trend that pathologizes every reaction to uncertain circumstances as "mental health ")
In placing their bodies under the weight of this absurd rendition of “experienced counsellor,” they spoke to the reality that, for many of us dance artists, our bodies are choreographed a priori by a social milieu in which our understandable distress at a social world where survival is more difficult for artists than ever is routinely pathologized. If a dance artist is in distress mentally (even if instigated by the egregious lack of public funds devoted to dance art, for instance), then it is her responsibility to fix it. Those around her can look on, yes, but there is no expectation that they will help—for instance, in their performances no audience member intervened. In each iteration of the performance, the dancer lay there motionless, the figure of a dance artist disappeared under the weight of stress induced by dire economic circumstances but rendered as his “personal responsibility.”
Rumen and Chris’ choreographic action, though severe, served a liberatory function: in performing the dance artist’s paralysis in the face of the mental-health industrial complex and its noxious assumptions about personal responsibility for “mental health” Mr. Rachev and Mr. Berthelsen performed a choreography in negative relief—they performed the absence of community care and in so doing, placed in the imagination of audience members the possibility of enacting choreographics of care that move against the grain of this social conditioning.
Discarded Seat Massager
Dance Artist Rumen Rachev in “Discarded Seat Massager” (October 10, 2022, Zero Waste Network, Glen Innes, Auckland)
© Rumen Rachev
Mr Rachev and his collaborators' other choreographic interventions launched in the context of the Recycling Centre residency invited, similarly, reflections on how it might be possible to move otherwise than according to the (often invisible because so ubiquitous) conventions that govern our social choreographies. For instance, in Discarded Seat Massager, the dancer bricolages and then sits on, yes, a discarded seat massager (brought back to life by Adam Ben-Dror), onto which he has mounted an old wooden stool, wrapped in what looks like a used wad of packing foam (an inconvenient type of reupholstery by Chris Berthelsen). Clad in a reflective vest suggestive of every warehouse employee everywhere, his dance consists of simply allowing, without adding to the action, the seat massager to cause his vertebrae and pelvic region to “dance” passively. In the video of the performance, his back vibrates side to side, completely at the mercy of the make-shift machine he has created out of “waste ” This choreographic intervention invites us to query into the ways our bodies, too, have been rendered passive by the ubiquitous technological interventions that move us here and there without agency, turning our surrender, our passivity into the medium through which a Machine, a Social Machine, larger than ourselves dictates how, when, and if our bodies can move at all. In refusing to add “dance-like” movements to this piece, Mr. Rachev shows a brave willingness to expose the social machine for what it is, an instrument that too often renders bodies unfruitfully passive. Again, he enacts a choreography in negative relief, begging through his utter willingness to perform the passive subject with unadorned faithfulness, the question: how might we resist?
Conclusion
The pandemic years—and these odd “afteryears” in which many of us seem to walk around as if in a never-ending twilight zone— have profoundly altered the dance milieu and, in many cases, have brought an end to dance careers or else stopped who knows how many potential dance careers from even starting. The word “precarity” does not even begin to describe an artistic sector in which, even before the pandemic, many dancers lived at the edge of poverty, seeking out the possibility of dance from amid the ruins of late industrial capitalism. What makes Rachev’s work so crucial—so capable of going to the crux—of dance art today, is that it makes the ruins in which we live the very subject of his oeuvre.
These ruins are places where hope can feel impossible for an artist wondering when the next cheque is going to come through, inside a wider context in which the fate of the human experiment on the whole is always in question. In this, he echoes and extends a tradition of dance that does not turn its back on the social conditioning that marks bodies inexorably, including the bodies of dancers even when we try to pretend otherwise by masking the truth of our bondage to oppression with good training. Mr. Rachev belongs, with Marcel Mauss, with Tatsumi Hijikata, and with countless others (in Vancouver, the dedicated life-work of Lee SuFeh and of Justine A. Chambers comes to mind as exemplary interventions on the implicit choreographies of the social, and of space itself as transformative agent) who reject the idea that dance should pretend, for instance through excessive displays of a narrow vision of “virtuosity,” that dance can ever be extricable from wider social, economic, and ecological struggles. He makes dances on the margins, out of the rubble, in conditions that acknowledge that we are never not living on the edge—because that is where all of life lives now. To pretend otherwise is to betray the reality of the conditions all bodies find themselves in, though some are far more marked by the burden than others. Mr. Rachev will not pretend that business as usual is normal or fine or good. If you want to see him work you have to go to where he is—in a waste management site, on the edge of town, amid other discarded objects. A crucial site, indeed, for truly contemporary dance art.
Kristen Lewis , JD, LLM is a dance/ performance artist, movement educator, and legal advocate. In all of these overlapping and intersecting roles, she is interested in how embodied approaches to storytelling, in both dance/performance and in the public sphere, can open up information-saturated Human Persons to more nuanced, beautiful, peace-generating alternatives to the divisive narratives that govern our status quo. She is the artistic director of Gull Cry Dance, and the executive director of the Canadian Centre for Men and Families (Vancouver).
