Singularities

Dance in the Age of Performance

Andre Lepecki

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317441090
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Art
• Thema: Art général

How does the production of performance engage with the fundamental issues of our advanced neo-capitalist age?

André Lepecki surveys a decade of experimental choreography to uncover the dual meaning of 'performance' in the twenty-first century: not just an aesthetic category, but a mode of political power. He demonstrates the enduring ability of performance to critique and subvert this power, examining this relationship through five 'singularities' in contemporary dance: thingness, animality, persistence, darkness, and solidity.

Exploring the works of Mette Ingvartsen, Yvonne Rainer, Ralph Lemon, Jérôme Bel and others, Lepecki uses his concept of 'singularity'—the resistance of categorization and aesthetic identification—to examine the function of dance and performance in political and artistic debate.

1 Moving as some thing (or, some things want to run)

DOI: 10.4324/9781315694948-2

A memory

June 2009. Berlin. A hot and unexpectedly humid Thursday in an otherwise bland and chilly spring. Clouds are gathering slowly, lazily piling up, while a gentle breeze licks the treetops at the Tiergarten. In a few hours, this year's edition of the performing arts festival IN TRANSIT is set to begin at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures, or HKW).¹ In 2007, thanks to Johannes Odenthal, who led the performing arts department at HKW for many years and founded the festival in 2002, I received an invitation from HKW's principal director, Bernd Scheerer, to curate two consecutive editions of the festival: IN TRANSIT 08 and IN TRANSIT 09. On the early evening of that Thursday, June 11, the second and last festival I curated would open its doors to the public.

The 2009 festival had been thematically organized around a short phrase written by the poet and performance and critical theorist Fred Moten—one that appears in the title of both the first and last chapters of Moten's groundbreaking book In the break: the aesthetics of the black radical tradition (2003): “Resistance of the Object.” I had seen how this phrase had become increasingly relevant for understanding developments in experimental dance and performance from the mid- to late 2000s, and so it became, with Moten's blessing and permission, the festival's subtitle, as well as its curatorial frame. In a short text for the program, I described the festival's concept in the following terms:

“Resistance of the Object” is the theme for IN TRANSIT 09. This phrase emphasizes the recent and increasingly visible phenomenon in the performing arts of exploring the fine line between objecthood and subjectivity. Thus, much of the theater, body art, dance, performance, video, installation and lectures presented during the 10 days of the festival directly address the current centrality of objects in performance. Sometimes playfully, sometimes cruelly, artists from five continents will explore how subjects become objects, objects become subjects, and how neither can escape the call to act.

“Resistance of the Object” is a phrase drawn directly from the work of US performance and critical theorist Fred Moten—a guest throughout IN TRANSIT 09 who will open the lecture series. Moten's work reminds us how colonialism and capitalism in its past and current racisms and modes of subjectivation are predicated on systematic, pervasive, and institutional reduction of entire human populations to the condition of objects. Yet, even when reduced to objecthood, resistance has happened and continues to happen—particularly through performances that can only be called: radical.

I wanted to convey the importance of the notion “resistance of the object” in relation not only to what Moten calls “the black radical tradition” in performance—but to all kinds of minoritarian performances. The artists presented in the festival included Adrian Piper, El Periférico de Objectos, Yingmey Duan, Julie Tolentino and Ron Athey, Mapa Teatro, Nevin Aladag, and Trajal Harrell, to mention just a few names.

Another of those names was that of Colombian visual and performance artist Maria José Arjona. I had invited Arjona because I wanted to include a work that would explicitly draw the link between Moten's political-aesthetic concept of resistance with a performance of bodily endurance. I wanted to present a piece that would directly express how the notion of agential objecthood could precipitate a making of time that altered our understanding of performance's relation to temporality thanks to the singularity of acts of resistance as acts of persistence. Thus, I asked Arjona to perform three works that are part of her longer White Series (2004–09): Untitled (2004), remember to remember (2006), and Karaoke (2006). These would be performed consecutively over the ten days of the festival in a single space built exclusively for them: first Untitled, for five days, then remember to remember, for four days, and finally Karaoke, which would unfold throughout the entirety of the festival's final day.

The technical preparations were delicate. Usually, the White Series takes over an entire art gallery's space and is performed for a period that lasts between ten days and two weeks. In the context of the festival in Berlin, the temporal frame was fine—the series would run for its entire ten days. However, space was a problem. HKW's building was designed in the 1950s to be a Congress Hall and therefore constructed with many large windows and wide spaces of circulation—particularly its huge foyer. It does not really have galleries, properly speaking. But, even though the institution had to contend with several restrictions resulting from the building's status as a national monument, together with Arjona and the HKW's technical team we came up with a solution for the presentation of the three works from the White Series. In the huge, cavernous central foyer of HKW, we would create a long corridor, about fourteen meters long, four meters wide, and three meters high, constructed from wood panels painted white. The corridor would be open on top, roofless. This would become the space where Arjona performed for the duration of the festival, for six to eight hours a day, every day.

Yet one small detail kept posing problems. The first part of the series, the piece Untitled, is structured as follows: from six to eight hours a day, for five consecutive days, Arjona slowly paces along the perimeter of the gallery. Dressed in a white T-shirt and white pants, barefooted, holding a small container from which she uses a piece of wire with a looped tip to draw liquid soap, Arjona continuously, stubbornly, meditatively, never pausing and constantly pacing, blows soap bubbles into the air. Hours and hours of pacing and blowing bubbles, blowing bubbles and pacing. But what at first seems to be an innocent, childlike, and gratuitous gesture, after a while starts to gain an uncanny resonance, coalescing into an image charged with tension, if not violence. As the delicate bubbles float around the space and eventually hit the walls or fall to the floor, they explode into vivid red stains: the liquid soap is laced with vermillion pigment. As the hours pass and days go by, and as Arjona continues to simply and methodically pace the floor while blowing bubbles into the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, her clothes, her hands and feet, increasingly begin to resemble battered flesh and raw meat. In deep silence, the kind of silence that only a methodically repeated, persistently performed action can create, the entire space seems to be the site of a terrible butchery. The accumulating blots and splashes of red paint synesthetically render visible the bubbles’ inaudible cries. Untitled reveals a disavowed and repressed phonographic potential, a sonic-affective life rustling beneath the surface of matter.

But what was the small problem that this apparently simple performance kept posing? Only this: that in the institutional context of HKW, the bubbles’ trajectories needed to be controlled, managed, and precisely tracked. These quasi-objects, these almost things, had to be carefully choreographed in advance, since HKW's building is a national monument, and the color schemes of its walls and ceilings must be protected and preserved. Which meant that even the tiniest bubble hitting the building's ceiling or walls would require a complete repainting. Especially problematic was the ascending flow of bubbles, since repainting the impressive foyer ceiling would mean incurring an enormous expense.

Thus, a task force was set up. HKW and IN TRANSIT technicians tested different combinations of water and soap, different kinds of pigment, mapped draft patterns in the foyer at various times of day and night, and tested different combinations of which doors would be opened or closed to street access. Eventually a solution was found: the right balance of soap, pigment, and water created a bubble that was slightly heavier than usual, with a tendency to be dragged downwards—but not too much, since otherwise the performance would not work—or at least not to float up to the ceiling right away; and a pigment was found that could be washed if a bubble happened to drift away from the assigned performance space, exit the long white corridor through one of the two large entrances, and burst upon hitting the foyer's floor. (For some reason, the floor posed no problems for conservation.)

Yet the ceiling remained a big problem. Despite the effort to manipulate the liquid soap's density, and the mapping of draft flows in the foyer, some bubbles would still insist on floating up, and risk staining the ceiling. Thus, to be extra-safe, and with approval of Arjona, a light net was placed atop the white corridor. Air and light would still come in, but any deviant ascending bubble would burst against it. And thus, with a tight white mesh on top, a carefully prepared soap-water-pigment formula, and a more or less precise mapping of the draft currents in the foyer, Untitled was finally given a “go.” The imponderable motions of things had been managed, contained, and forecast to a satisfactory level. But, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write, “Some people want to run things, other things want to run” (Harney and Moten 2013: 51). Let's keep their sentence in mind since it offers a definition of thing that is absolutely related to the choreographic impulse to govern, the choreographic drive to “run things,” and the nature of thing's kinetic resistance to their choreographic government. Their sentence, as simple as it is profound, will inform my discussion throughout this chapter, defining a “thing” as whatever escapes instrumental reason, whatever exists outside logics of manipulation, whatever is unconditioned, whatever actively wants to run away, escape, from being reduced to graspability and comprehension, whatever reminds us that “uncertainty surrounds the holding of things” (91, emphasis added).² And again, because it matters, and because it matters the thingness of matter, as much as materializes forms of controlling matters: “uncertainty surrounds the holding of things.”

It is, as I said, a Thursday in June. Opening day. And it is, now, about two hours before the official opening. Spring almost over, clouds piling up, humidity rising. The idea had been that all of the installations, video works, and durational performances presented at the festival—including a sculpture by Adrian Piper, an interactive object-theater piece by Allen S. Weiss and Michel Nedjar, an installation by Julie Tolentino, the set, sound and videos of El Periférico de Objectos, videos by Nevin Aladag, and Arjona's Untitled—would be open to the public that day a bit before 7:00 PM, giving the audience about an hour to visit them before attending the performance by the Japanese butoh dance group Sankai Juku. Yet Maria José Arjona had made a request. In order for her to be properly performing Untitled when HKW's doors would open to the public, she had asked to begin blowing the bubbles earlier in the day. Which she did, stepping into the long white corridor and getting to work around 4:00 PM that afternoon.

It is now a bit before 5:30 PM. The lazy clouds have formed storm clusters castigating the city here and there, while the morning breeze had turned into gusts of hot air, occasionally bringing brief showers of rain. I am walking to HKW; I wanted to arrive there early to be sure that everything was on track for the opening, and anyway the rain was falling in other parts of the city. I am not too far from the building, just a couple more minutes to get there, when my cellphone rings. On the other end of the line, I hear the voice of then HKW's technical director, Herman Volkery, who sounds really alarmed (which, let me assure you, does not happen often at all). “We have a huge problem!” he says, “We have to cancel the opening!” I freeze in my steps, and try to stay cool:

“Herman, what's going on?”

“The bubbles! They are everywhere! The bubbles are everywhere!”

The bubbles are everywhere!! How could it be? After all the testing, and the decision to place the security net on top of the corridor, and the mapping of drafts, the calibrated soap …. I dash to HKW, enter through the backdoor, and rush to the foyer. The scene is incredible. The bubbles are everywhere. And, right behind them, more or less all over the foyer, house technicians armed with butterfly nets are frantically chasing after the bubbles (where and how did they get those butterfly nets so fast?!, I never asked, and I still don't know …), trying to catch them before they hit the walls, or worse, before they start ascending towards the very high ceiling. In the middle of it all is the long white corridor where Arjona, hands dripping with red paint that makes it look like she is bleeding, continues to pace methodically, apparently oblivious to the chaos around her, blowing her bubbles. All of a sudden, a durational performance, a politically inflected action painting, has become a kind of Tania Bruguera piece, a work of art interpellating the security system controlling the institutional behaviors and protocols that museums, galleries, and other art venues exercise over their objects and subjects. But this is not a Tania Bruguera piece. It is an Arjona piece. It was supposed to be about time and endurance and the violence embedded in the most innocuous of things. And yet … the bubbles are everywhere!! How could it be, after so much planning!

Today I know that “Some people want to run things, other things want to run.” But back then Harney and Moten had not yet written their book. I knew only about objects and their resistance, I did not know anything about the uncertainty surrounding the holding of things, nothing about things and their constitutive fugitivity. And yet once I stepped into the stained corridor of The White Series, trying to convey to Arjona the chaos outside, I remembered something else, something that Moten had written to me in an email in response to my invitation to give the opening talk at the festival: “André, I am less interested now in the resistance of the object than in the persistence of things.” I had no idea back then what he meant. I was about to start to understand. I enter the stained white corridor, and it seems huge from within: it must be the bubbles adding dimension to it, expanding space with their wild, uncontrollable floating movements. I approach Arjona. She has been blowing bubbles for over an hour now, and is in a total daze, as happens to anyone who has been exhaling continuously for an extended period of time. The effects of hypocapnea, or “overbreathing,” apparently. The simple, repetitive action had already created another body, and with it another state of mind, altogether out of this world, drifting away, in sheer persistence. “Maria,” I say. Nothing. “Maria!” She barely notices me, but then something like recognition emerges from the far regions of her being. I take this opening from her own bubble of action and blurt out: “Maria, the bubbles are everywhere, technicians are chasing them with butterfly nets, is this ok with you?” From the far away land of another time and life she slowly offers an answer: “It is ok André, it is ok …” she whispers in between blows. I rush out, relieved, tell the technicians it is fine to chase the bubbles. The opening...