Exhausting Dance

Performance and the Politics of Movement

Andre Lepecki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134230891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Danza

The only scholarly book in English dedicated to recent European contemporary dance, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement examines the work of key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990s in Europe and the US.

Through their vivid and explicit dialogue with performance art, visual arts and critical theory from the past thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenge our understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement. Their work demands to be read as performed extensions of the radical politics implied in performance art, in post-structuralist and critical theory, in post-colonial theory, and in critical race studies.

In this far-ranging and exceptional study, Andre Lepecki brilliantly analyzes the work of the choreographers:

* Jerome Bel (France)
* Juan Dominguez (Spain)
* Trisha Brown (US)
* La Ribot (Spain)
* Xavier Le Roy (France-Germany)
* Vera Mantero (Portugal)

and visual and performance artists:

* Bruce Nauman (US)
* William Pope.L (US).

This book offers a significant and radical revision of the way we think about dance, arguing for the necessity of a renewed engagement between dance studies and experimental artistic and philosophical practices.

1
Introduction

The political ontology of movement

One must introduce in the diagnostic of our times, a kinetic and kinesthetic dimension because, without such a dimension, all discourse about modernity will completely bypass that which in modernity is most real.

(Sloterdijk 2000b:27)

On 31 December 2000, the New York Times published an article by Senior Dance Editor Anna Kisselgoff titled “Partial to Balanchine, and a Lot of Built-In Down Time,” a review of the New York dance scene for the year that had just ended. At a certain point in her text Kisselgoff writes: “Stop and Go. Call it a trend or a tic, the increasing frequency of hiccupping sequences in choreography is impossible to ignore. Viewers interested in flow or a continuum of movement have been finding slim pickings in many premieres.” After listing some “hiccupping” choreographers, which ranged from New York-based David Dorfman to (then) Frankfurt-based William Forsythe, Kisselgoff concludes: “It is all very ‘today.’ What about tomorrow?” (Kisselgoff 2000:6).

Perception of a hiccupping in choreographed movement produces critical anxiety; it is dance’s very future that appears menaced by the eruption of kinesthetic stuttering. Before a purposeful choreographic interruption of “flow or a continuum of movement,” the critic offers two possible readings: either those strategies can be dismissed as a “trend”—thus cast as a limited epiphenomenon, an annoying “tic” that does not deserve a too serious critical consideration; or they can be denounced, more seriously, as a threat—a threat to dance’s “tomorrow,” to dance’s capacity to smoothly reproduce itself into the future within its familiar parameters. This last perception—that the intrusion of stilling hiccups in contemporary choreography threatens dance’s own futurity—is of relevance to a discussion of some recent choreographic strategies where dance’s relation to movement is being exhausted. I suggest the perception of the stilling of movement as a threat to dance’s tomorrow indicates that any disrupting of dance’s flow—any choreographic questioning 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. No wonder some perceive such an ontological convulsion as a betrayal: the betrayal of dance’s very essence and nature, of its signature, of its privileged domain. That is: the betrayal of the bind between dance and movement.

Any accusation of betrayal necessarily implies the reification and reaffirmation of certainties in regard to what constitutes the rules of the game, the right path, the correct posture, or the appropriate form of action. That is, any accusation of betrayal implies an ontological certainty charged with choreographic characteristics. In the case of contemporary dance’s putative betrayal, the accusation describes, reifies, and reproduces a whole ontology of dance that can be summarized as follows: dance ontologically imbricates itself with, is isomorphic to, movement. Only after accepting such grounding of dance on movement can one accuse certain contemporary choreographic practices of betraying dance.

It should be noted that such accusations of betrayal (and their implicit ontological reifications) are not confined to the realm of North American dance reviews. They emerge also in European courtrooms. On 7 July 2004 the Circuit Court of Dublin heard a civil case against the International Dance Festival of Ireland (IDF). The Festival was being accused of display of nudity and alleged performance of lewd acts in a dance piece titled Jérôme Bel (1995) by contemporary French choreographer Jérôme Bel.¹ The piece had been presented by IDF in its 2002 edition. Due to technicalities, the presiding judge eventually dismissed the case. Apparently, the complaining party, Mr. Raymond Whitehead, had based his suit on a faulty mix of obscenity laws and false-advertisement laws seeking “damages for breach of contract and negligence” (Falvey 2004:5). What is interesting in this case is that Mr. Whitehead supported his obscenity and false-advertisement case by claiming that Jérôme Bel could not be properly classified as a dance performance. In a statement to the Irish Times of 8 July 2004, Mr. Whitehead articulated a clear ontology of dance that was not at all dissimilar to Kisselgoff’s. According to the Irish Times: “There was nothing in the performance [he] would describe as dance, which he defined as ‘people moving rhythmically, jumping up and down, usually to music but not always’ and conveying some emotion. He was refused a refund” (Holland 2004:4).

Set side by side, these two discursive moments demand consideration. They reflect the fact that in the past decade some contemporary North American and European choreography has indeed engaged in dismantling a certain notion of dance—the notion that ontologically associates dance with “flow and a continuum of movement” and with “people jumping up and down” (with or without music…). But they also reflect a widespread inability, or even unwillingness, to critically account for recent choreographic practices as valid artistic experiments. Thus, the deflation of movement in recent experimental choreography is depicted only as a symptom of a general “down-time” in dance. But perhaps it is the depiction itself that should be seen as symptomatic of a “down-time” in dance’s critical discourse, indicating a deep disjuncture between current choreographic practices and a mode of writing still very much attached to ideals of dancing as constant agitation and continuous mobility. It should be remembered that the operation of inextricably aligning dance’s being with movement—as commonsensical as such an operation may sound today—is a fairly recent historical development. Dance historian Mark Franko showed how, in the Renaissance, choreography defined itself only secondarily in relationship to movement:

the dancing body as such is barely a subject of treatises. As the dance scholar Rodocanachi put it, ‘…quant aux mouvements, c’est la danse en elle-même dont la connaissance semble avoir été la moindre des occupations du danseur’ […as for the movements, it is the dance itself that seems to have been the least of the dancer’s concern].

(Franko 1986:9)

Ann Kisselgoff’s predecessor, New York Times’s first full-time dance critic John Martin, would have agreed with Franko. In 1933, he affirmed: “When we first find dancing assuming something of a theatrical form—that is, after the antique days—we find it concerned little if at all with the movement of the body” (Martin 1972:13). Why, then, this obsessive concern with the display of moving bodies, this demand that dance be in a constant state of agitation? And why see in choreographic practices that refuse that display and agitation a threat to dance’s being? These questions reflect how the development of dance as an autonomous art form in the West, from the Renaissance on, increasingly aligns itself with an ideal of ongoing motility. Dance’s drive towards a spectacular display of movement becomes its modernity, in the sense Peter Sloterdijk in the epigraph to this chapter defines it: as an epoch and a mode of being where the kinetic corresponds to “that which in modernity is most real” (2000b:27, emphasis added). As the kinetic project of modernity becomes modernity’s ontology (its inescapable reality, its foundational truth), so the project of Western dance becomes more and more aligned with the production and display of a body and a subjectivity fit to perform this unstoppable motility.

Thus, by the time when the Romantic ballet d’action is fully in place, we find dance clearly performing itself as a spectacle of flowing mobility. As dance scholars Susan Foster (1996), Lynn Garafola (1997), and Deborah Jowitt (1988) have argued, the premise of Romantic ballet was to present dance as continuous motion, a motion preferably aiming upwards, animating a body thriving lightly in the air. Such an ideology shaped styles, prescribed techniques, and configured bodies—just as much as it shaped critical standards for evaluating a dance’s esthetic value. Even though the first Romantic ballet is considered to be Filippo Taglioni’s 1832 production of La Sylphide, premiered at the Paris Opera, it is in an 1810 text that we can find one of the earliest and certainly most densely articulated theorizations of dance as clearly linked to a performance of uninterrupted flow of movement. Heinrich von Kleist’s classic parable “Über das Marionettentheater” praises the superiority of the puppet over the human dancer because the puppet need not stop its motions in order to regain momentum:

Puppets, like elves, need the ground only so that they can touch it lightly and renew the momentum of their limbs through this momentary delay. We [humans] need it to rest on, to recover from the exertions of dance, a moment which is clearly not part of the dance.²

(in Copeland and Cohen 1983:179)

However, it is only in the 1930s that the strict ontological identification between uninterrupted movement and dance’s being was clearly articulated as an inescapable demand for any choreographic project. John Martin, in his famous lectures at the New School in New York City in 1933, proposed that only with the advent of modern dance did dance finally find its true, ontologically grounded, beginning: “this beginning was the discovery of the actual substance of the dance, which it found to be movement” (Martin 1972:6). For Martin, the choreographic explorations of Romantic and Classic ballet, and even the antiballetic freeing of the body’s expressivity spearheaded by Isadora Duncan, had all missed dance’s true being. None had understood that dance was to be founded on movement alone. For Martin, ballet was dramaturgically too tied up with narrative and choreographically too invested in the striking pose, while Duncan’s dance was too subservient to music. According to Martin, it was not until Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey in the USA, and Mary Wigman and Rudolph von Laban in Europe, that modern dance discovered movement as its essence, and “became for the first time an independent art” (1972:6).

The strict alignment of dance with movement that John Martin announced and celebrated is but the logical outcome of his modernist ideology, of his desire to theoretically secure for dance an autonomy that would make it an equal to other high art forms. Martin’s modernism is a construct, a project that, as dance historian Mark Franko has shown, took place not only in his writings and reviews, but also in the contested space between the choreographic and the theoretical, the corporeal and the ideological, the kinetic and the political (Franko 1995). Dance scholar Randy Martin notes 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). This struggle for critical and theoretical authority defines the discursive dynamics informing the production, circulation, and critical reception of dance; it defines how in journalistic dance reviews, in programming decisions, and in legal suits some dances are considered proper while others are dismissed as acts of ontological betrayal. To acknowledge that dance happens in this contested space clarifies how recent accusations of betrayal ventriloquize an ideological program of defining, fixing, and reproducing what should be valued as dance and what should be excluded from its realm as futureless, insignificant, or obscene.

Meanwhile, dance’s ontological question remains open.

It is this open question, in its esthetic, political, economic, theoretical, kinetic, and performative implications that Exhausting Dance addresses. I dedicate each chapter of this book to a close reading of a few selected pieces by European and North American contemporary choreographers, visual artists, and performance artists whose work (regardless of whether that work properly falls into the category of theatrical dance) proposes, with particular intensity, a critique of some constitutive elements of Western theatrical dance. The critical elements that I highlight are, in order of appearance: solipsism, stillness, the linguistic materiality of the body, the toppling of the vertical plane of representation, the stumble on the racist terrain, the proposition of a politics of the ground, and the critique of the melancholic drive at the heart of choreography. The artists whose work sets in motion these critical elements are (also in order of appearance): Bruce Nauman, Juan Dominguez, Xavier Le Roy, Jérôme Bel, Trisha Brown, La Ribot, William Pope.L, and Vera Mantero.

The fact that two of these artists are not “properly” dancers, and do not describe themselves as choreographers, but have nevertheless explicitly experimented with choreographic exercises (Bruce Nauman) or explicitly addressed the politics of motility in contemporaneity (William Pope.L) is methodologically important for my argument. Their work allows for reframing choreography outside artificially self-contained disciplinary boundaries, and for identifying the political ontology of modernity’s investment on its odd hyperkinetic being. To address the choreographic outside the proper limits of dance proposes for dance studies the expansion of its privileged object of analysis; it asks dance studies to step into other artistic fields and to create new possibilities for thinking relationships between bodies, subjectivities, politics, and movement.

One of the relationships this book privileges is that between dance, dance studies, and philosophy. This theoretical dialogue departs from the observation that the recent difficulties of critically assessing dances that refuse to be confined to a constant “flow or continuum of movement” indicate a reconfiguration of dance’s relationship to its coming into presence. Now “presence” is not only a term referring to the dancer’s negotiation between technical and artistic proficiency in the performance of choreography. It is also a fundamental philosophical concept, one of the main objects of Heidegger’s destruktion of metaphysics and of Derrida’s deconstruction.³ Thus, any dance that probes and complicates how it comes into presence, and where it establishes its ground of being, suggests for critical dance studies the need to establish a renewed dialogue with contemporary philosophy. I am thinking in particular of those authors that follow Nietzsche’s destruction of traditional philosophy through the proposition of a critique of the will to power—a project that informs the philosophical and political work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; works and authors I invoke frequently throughout this book. For theirs is not only a philosophy of the body but a philosophy that creates concepts that allow for a political reframing of the body. Theirs is a philosophy that understands the body not as a 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 becomings.⁴ As feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz explains, after

Nietzsche […] the body is the site for the emanation of the will to power (or several wills), an intensely energetic locus for all cultural production, a concept I believe may be more useful in rethinking the subject in terms of the body.

(Grosz 1994:147)

Rethinking the subject in terms of the body is precisely the task of choreography, a task that may not be always subservient to the imperative of the kinetic, a task that is always already in dialogue with critical theory and philosophy. Fredric Jameson, in a recent book, sees the return to philosophy in recent critical studies as a dangerous return to modernist and conservative ideals and ideologies (Jameson 2002:1–5). I don’t think one immediately follows the other. I see Jameson’s position as a perfect example of Homi Bhabha’s powerful opening words in his essay “The Commitment to Theory”: “There is a damaging and self-defeating assumption that theory is necessarily the elite language of the socially and culturally privileged” (Bhabha 1994:19). Bhabha reminds us that there is “a distinction to be made between the institutional history of critical theory and its conce...