Corporealities
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Corporealities

Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power

Susan Foster, Susan Foster

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eBook - ePub

Corporealities

Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power

Susan Foster, Susan Foster

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About This Book

A ground-breaking collection of essays that bring dance into the cultural studies mainstream, exploring the many ways we use our bodies as substantial, vital constituents of cultural reality.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2004
ISBN
9781134808328

Fragments for a story of tango bodies (on Choreocritics and the memory of power)


MARTA E.SAVIGLIANO


LIBRETTO

Part I

Prelude
naeem
The Operetta begins with a musical prelude performed by a tango sextet. Near the end of the prelude, the Choreocritic (narrator) provides an introduction to the operetta in the form of three parallel proposals and a refrain. She moves from one proposal to the next performing a transformist act: first, she enacts a poetic, apologizing persona; second, an aggressive, avant-garde scholar; and finally, an exotic, intellectual tanguera. Unsatisfied with the results of her different approaches, she continues with her introductory recitations into Scene One.
While reciting her first proposal, the Choreocritic’s hands, alternately, hide and reveal her face from/to the audience, in slow cascading gestures. She is loosely wrapped in a light-blue, gauze scarf and wears a blonde, curly wig.
Choreocritic’s spoken text:
Poetic Proposal: I cannot think. I cannot think of a time. I cannot think of a time when things happened without me, without me being there. To tell you the story, I must rely on my imagination.
I can only do stories, not histories, no matter how much I research. And no matter how many fragments I collect, I can neither leave them alone nor bring them back dead. I can only imagine them alive, moving, breathing between my sweaty hands.
I can only imagine peopled things, not necessarily “inhabited” but certainly, somehow animated. Things, whether subjects or objects, with intentions although not necessarily clear ones. I fear fears without memory, sadness without wounds, ideas like lost souls without bodies and finally, for the time being, I fear bodies colonized by words especially when conjured, dancing, from the past—since they cannot move/talk back.
Choreocritics is, for me, an invitation to imagine stories about people who move for and against each other, articulating webs of power. No rigid hierarchies or boundaries between facts and fictions, the weight of the storyteller’s presence and of her present is acknowledged—although we frequently forget to tell that part of the story since we are more fascinated by the past we are enticed to imagine.
While forgetting, I imagine I remember these Fragments For A Story Of Tango Bodies.
In reciting her second programmatic proposal, the Choreocritic removes the scarf and the wig revealing a designer robe-manteau and dark hair, neatly coiffed and fastened up at the back. She draws her prescription glasses out from a pocket as she changes positions. She performs clear-cut movements with her feet that follow the displacements in theoretical perspective. She travels from center-stage left to right, up-stage, down-stage, and so on.
Scholarly Proposal: Choreocritics, the approach I am proposing to pursue here, comprises: a critical take on choreography; a choreographic reading of theories and their writing; a critical stance towards theorizing choreographical undertakings; and a choreographic theorization of criticism.
Choreocritics can advance only through specificity and, thus, the dance form will be the main ingredient or organizing tool in any such analysis. The dance itself and the sociohistorical conditions it expresses and produces through a complex cultural performance situate both the analysis and the analyst.
The Choreocritic removes her designer dress revealing a black, tangoesque evening gown. She discards her glasses and lets down her hair, clips on monumental earrings and struggles to attach a big red rose to the lower back of her tango dress. Performing timid tango steps she recites:
These Fragments For A Story Of Tango Bodies are an attempt to practice choreocriticism, reading tango’s fragmented history through the memory of power it evokes in its very movements. The memory of power, in turn, is read in those fragments of tango actually or fictively danced by bodies who left traces of their movements/displacements, which are the movements/displacements of power itself. Tangos read power and power reads tangos, shaping each other in the choreocritic’s writings, as they are set to perform choreocriticism. The choreocritic’s subject positions and those of the audience generate different tango-power connections in each reading/staging, bringing the libretto into the politics of interpretation.
Choreocritic’s Refrain:
A tango story begins in the middle because its origins inhabit the total margins of memory, pushed aside and away by the powers that delineate legitimate space and time, geographies and chronologies.

Scene One: tangoland, tanguage and tangomanners

Duet of an androgynous, declassé, dark solo dancer and his shadow.
Bare stage. Dancers anticipate the movement instructions and descriptions recited by the Choreocritic, who stands down-stage (center). Two dancers are located center-stage, one on the left, the other (a shadow) on the right There is a triangular illumination effect from down-stage to up-stage.
Choreocritic’s spoken text:
South of the South of the world, always just about to fall off it, there is a flat, flat land so evenly spread out that its people inadvertently live in a latent state of horizontal vertigo.1 This strange malaise only manifests itself in the presence of someone else, provoking an irresistible drive to firmly grab and stare at the other without a smile, and step on his or her foot. These manners should not be confused with a greeting although it is a practice of recognition, of acknowledging of existence. A profound sense of vacuum takes hold of the left foot: too much air, not enough ground despite the immensity. Legs grow longer and stronger attempting to control gravity if not history. It is a game of minds or, to be more precise, of bodies pushing mind boundaries; a somewhat repressed desire that began circulating before the turn of the last century, where the pampas meet the wide brown river.
Once you feel that the horizon should be empty and open, at your total disposition, that nothing or no one should get in your way—not because you wish this but rather because this is the way things are—that no matter what, you are always in the wrong place doing the wrong thing because you cannot remember what you were supposed to do or where, and there is no sign erected against the flatness to remind you, you have fallen into horizontal vertigo. Too much air, not enough ground despite the immensity, because of the flatness. Lying down is not an option; you cannot afford to let anything drop. Your ears start buzzing and the whizzing in your hairs stretches your spine, tail heavily held down to the ground, weak knees but a strong pulling, curving your neck at the top, lifting your shoulders in upheaval. If this is the case, and you clearly feel that unless your feet start moving you have lost your balance, you are ready for it. Arrogant and defiant, burdened and ready to tango. Step after step, the outer edge of the ball of each foot sliding as close as possible to the ground, leaving clouds of dust behind you; knee against knee as in making fire; a slight torsion at the waist turning shoulders and hips into opposite alignments and a casual but definite grave thrust. Always that restless drive to grab, to stare shamelessly and stumbling to step on someone. Effortless. Embracing yourself does not help. The encounter has to be dealt with. It is right in the middle.
Dancer and “shadow” face each other without moving towards each other.
Choreocritic sings (falsetto, in lunfardo2) the following text, while the dancers perform a frantic, fast-paced tango-milonga:
Qué saben los pitucos, lamidos y shushetas;
qué saben lo que es tango, qué saben de compås.
Aquí estå la elegancia. iQué pinta! iQué silueta!
iQuĂ© porte, quĂ© arrogancia, quĂ© clase pa’bailar!
Así se corta el césped mientras dibujo el ocho,
para estas filigranas yo soy como un pintor.
Ahora una corrida, una vuelta, una sentada;
así se baila el tango
iun tango de mi flor!
What do those classy, pretentious, high-brows
know;
what do they know about tango, what do they know about rhythm.
Here is elegance. What a look! What a figure!
What posture, what arrogance, what classy
dancing!
This is how the grass is cut while drawing the figure eight, to make these filigrees, I am like a painter.
Now a run, a turn, a “sitting down” figure This is how one dances tango
a tango worthy of me!
AsĂ­ Se Baila el Tango (This is How One Dances Tango) tango-milonga, 1942.
Lyrics by Elizardo MartĂ­nez Vilas.
Music by ElĂ­as Randal.
Choreocritic’s spoken text continues as the dancers anticipate the recited movements. They improvise on “sad thoughts” and “absentmindedness”:
Since its inception, tango has always played on rivalry in search of identification —a specific rivalry, arrogantly antagonizing the usurper. Out of this solid tension that pretends casualness a monster is created: no head, one torso, four legs. It moves rhythmically, with no hint of the grotesque, following the uneven times of fate. Nothing can describe it better than the tanguage that says: “Tango is a sad thought that can be danced.”3 And itshouldbe performed absentmindedly.

Black-out
Chorus canon (all characters who have appeared so far).
Chorus stands on stage, in the dark. Text sung (a capella) as in murmuring, spreading rumors, and finally gossiping:
Power is thick, dense, heavy; its nature is viscous
it’s sticky. It hides from itself as if it would always be somewhere else and in someone else’s hands, arrested, ready to be overtaken. It lures, it fascinates because of its absent presence. Permanently fretted, rubbed by/against it, unable to take it, a grasp.
Choreocritic’s refrain:
To be repeated and continued.

Scene Two: tango embrace

Multiple confrontational duets.
Cast: Choreocritic; Dancers: Mulattos, Soldaderas and Criollo Soldiers, Compadrito and Milonguita, Immigrants, Elite Men.
Choreocritic and Dancers’ refrain: Tango started as a dance, a tense dance.
The dancers repeat the refrain while the Choreocritic recites the text. The Choreocritic is located center-stage left. Each group of dancers initiates its steps as the Choreocritic makes reference to that group’s intervention in the making of tango. They interrupt their movements each time the Choreocritic asks a question about the nature of the tango “embrace.” As the recitation unfolds, the dancing couples move towards center-stage, closer to each other, interfering with each other’s trajectories and exchanging partners, displaying confrontation. As the dancers accumulate center-stage, there are always more men than women. The men must compete to dance the tango.
Choreocritic’s spoken text:
Tango started as a dance, a tense dance, in which a male/female embrace tried to heal the racial and class displacement provoked by urbanization and war.4 But the seductive, sensual healing was never to be complete, and the tensions resurfaced and reproduced. Tango encounters were a catalyst for further racial and class tensions augmented by the avalanche of the European immigrants. Tango helped to provoke these encounters and, at the same time, expressed their occurrence.
Black men and women probably initiated the first tango steps in the RĂ­o de la Plata: flirtatious ombligadas and culeadas,5 bodies alternately coming close to each other and moving apart. Their displays of eroticism scandalized and created distance/difference, racial and class difference with their masters and exploiters,6 but they did not embrace. They did not need to hold tight; their color held them together.
The tango embrace was created, perhaps, in the midst of the internal wars that persisted for more than forty years following the independence from Spain: The tight and failed embraces of prostitutes (soldaderas and cuarteleras7) following the armies of poor mestizos and pardos.8
After the unification of...

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