The Winger » Performance and Pedagogy 2.0: The Reading Group

Performance and Pedagogy 2.0: The Reading Group | Reading Group Post I

March 26, 2007 at 1:10 am · Filed under books, invite, TONY, dancing, education, politics, performance, community, project, reading group, andre lepecki, pedagogy

TONY SCHULTZ
Dance + Technology Expert
Bronxville, NY USA
BIO | POSTS

The full collection of posts for this reading group can be found at the link here.

Last week I wrote (and danced in) a post entitled Performance and Pedagogy, presenting the work of two radical scholars, Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. In it I discussed the relationship between performance and education and how each could raise critical consciousness by promoting active dialogue. The Winger (and this whole corner of the blogosphere for that matter) is an ideal space for performing this type of dialogical dance. In a recent conversation with Tonya Plank regarding dance and politics, we had the idea of forming a reading group to add more depth to our discourse.

I would like to officially invite all of you to participate in an experiment, the formation of an online reading group relating to dance and dance studies.

Tonya and I thought of starting with Exhausting Dance: Performance and the politics of movement by Andre Lepecki. Like Freire and Boal, Lepecki is another radical scholar whose ideas have fundamentally transformed the way I think about dance and education. (He is also coincidentally Brazilian-born.) Lepecki currently teaches dance studies, performance studies, critical theory and philosophy at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Exhausting Dance is a wonderful book as it is both difficult and stimulating. Since it is such a short but challenging book it is ideal as the first text in this reading group. You can order the soft cover version of Exhausting Dance from Amazon right here. It is well worth the purchase. Perhaps we could have our first group analysis in a couple of weeks where we could pick apart the first chapter.

Write a comment if you would like to participate. This feels like the start of something big!

Permalink

Dea said,

March 26, 2007 @ 2:10 am

This is such a great idea! I was indeed in search of a good book to read, and it will be very estimulating to be able to participate in a discussion like that.
While I’m familiar with Paulo Freire (with an “u”, not an “o” and Boal, I had never before heard of Andre Lepecki, shame on me!! I read his biography and noticed that most of his education and work was done outside Brazil, but still…I guess it shows how undervalued this art form - and hence its thinkers - is in our country. oh, well…

(PS: I was very honored by the email, thanks!)
(PPS: how cute the little bears in the picture!!!

tonya said,

March 26, 2007 @ 2:22 am

I’m currently waiting for my book to arrive — hopefully soon!

SanderO said,

March 26, 2007 @ 1:45 pm

Tony this is a good idea.. I got your email and both links were broken however. I’ll order the book and see what he has to say.

susan said,

March 26, 2007 @ 5:17 pm

Awesome idea!
Can’t wait for my book to get here.

Mark Harvey said,

March 26, 2007 @ 11:06 pm

Greetings from New Zealand/Aotearoa,

Thanks for putting out the invite to chat about lepecki’s new book - this platform is exciting to me - I will share it with our Dance Technology students here at the University of Auckland.

I have to confess my bias, I am quite a fan of lepecki’s writing in general.

I find the introduction in this book particularly interesting because of his articulation of motility and movement in relation to modernist fixations. While I have often in my own practice attempted a sense of stillness in physicality with the goal of holding off my fetish to ‘move for the sake of it’, I have a question about whether stillness as Lepecki argues is really constructive way to go beyond fixations of motility in dance. After all, from a Derridian framework, stillness always contains movement and vice versa. Perhaps a way to approach dance beyond modernist fixations for movement could be to consider the play of movement and stillness instead? That is, to not try to make ’stillness for the sake of it’, because to do so is to fixate on form in a modernist manner, but to allow for the play in dance practice between stillness and movement as a means toowards playing with socio-cultural-political and psychic concerns etc.

Does anyone have any thoughts/responses ? Andre, if you read this, what do you reckon?

Thanks,

- Mark Harvey

Alexandra said,

March 27, 2007 @ 12:35 pm

ME! I want to do this! I shall buy my book this evening. When do we start?

Chimene said,

March 27, 2007 @ 12:39 pm

Sorry,

I’ll have to pass on this since I am actually studying for a board exam in May. I will follow the discuss that follows though. Best of luck with this new project.

Greg said,

March 27, 2007 @ 6:01 pm

Hi Tony, I think I might be able to do this …. I think it would be really cool to discuss this sort of thing in this sort of way. I still haven’t gotten around to reading the motion capture thesis, though the Chaos paper was really interesting.

Alexandra said,

April 10, 2007 @ 1:28 am

My book finally came! I’m gonna get started in a day or so, once I finish up my current book. Let us Wingers know if we’re all, ahem, on the same page.

thewinger.com » TITAS gala said,

April 10, 2007 @ 3:37 pm

[…] Exhausting Dance - André Lepecki […]

thewinger.com » The Reading Group: A Primer for Exhausting Dance said,

April 10, 2007 @ 10:38 pm

[…] Okay. Lots of people have their books. I have been reading, re-reading and trying to figure out how to open this conversation. The introduction is pretty dense. Mark Harvey of the University of Auckland posted the following comment […]

Martirio said,

April 15, 2007 @ 11:43 pm

I am new to thewinger, and interested in the conversation about Lepecki’s book. Will try to catch up quickly. Curious to know if he has been invited. I’m studying to become an Alexander Technique teacher and have wanted to go back to Freire, Boal, and others (Dewey certainly) in terms of looking at the educational framework, as well as the idea of freedom and creativity across disciplines and times.
Is this invitation open to those not previously participating in the site?
I hope it is. I haven’t done this before.

Tony said,

April 20, 2007 @ 6:27 pm

Martirio

Dont worry…everyone has been reading the text at a nice slow pace. I am sure things will pickup after the semester is over. Lepecki has not been contacted yet since I think we should read the text and understand it before we start asking him questions. The reading group posts can all be found here.
http://thewinger.com/words/category/andre-lepecki/
The last post is a good primer for tackling the introduction.

Please participate!

Hope to hear from you soon.

Tony

Maia said,

May 1, 2007 @ 10:19 pm

greetings from South Africa!

I am so excited about this reading group - what a fantastic idea this is exactly what I need right now… (am literally jumping with joy - no need for stillness here )

I am doing an MA thesis on Lepecki’s notion of ‘reduction’ and how it manifests in contemporary South African dance. In two other texts (find references below), Lepecki argues that “the contemporary European dance scene can be qualified by one term: ‘reduction’ - of expansiveness, of the spectacular, of the unessential” (Lepecki, 1999:130) and that the contemporary (European) dance scene can be characterized by a “radical recasting of dance from a theatrical paradigm to a performance paradigm (Lepecki, 2004:172). He goes on to say that the following elements are characteristic of contemporary dance:
a suspicion of virtuosity;
a radical questioning of the possibilities of the body and presence;
a contention with movement and space;
a distilling of the fundamentals of performance through an investment in small perceptions;
a deep dialogue with the visual and performance arts;
a politics informed by a critique of visuality; and
a radical change in the relationship to the audience (Lepecki, 2004).

It might be useful to look at these two articles with regards “Exhausting Dance…” which is the culmination of this research on the politics of movement, but then again I suppose everyone has enough to read for now )

I am quite a fan of Lepecki’s work and it is brilliant to find some likeminded people

Interestingly enough I found “Exhausting Dance…” before I found this reading group. Coincidence or what? I haven’t done an in-depth read yet, but will do so pronto. I am however familiar with quite a variety of Lepecki’s other texts. For those who are interested you can find a range of his articles on the SARMA database. It is a great database & its free. Here is the link for one of the articles http://www.sarma.be/text.asp?id=869
called: “Undoing the fantasy of the (dancing) subject: ‘Still acts’ in Jérôme Bel’s The Last Performance”
Use the links to find some other useful articles on dance.

Does anyone know how I can get hold of video footage of work by Jérôme Bel, Vera Mantero, Borris Charmatz, Jonathan Burrows and Xavier Le Roy? I know watching video footage is far from the real experience (even more so in this case where the relationship to this audience is of paramount importance), but SA is a far way to go and watch these performances ‘live’ - oops, I think I’ve opened another can of worms

Happy reading to you all…
Will be back soon

The Lepecki References:
Lepecki, A. (1999). Skin, Body, and Presence in Contemporary European Choreography. “The Drama Review.” 43(4), 129-140. Go to: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/105420499760263598?cookieSet=1&journalCode=dram

Lepecki, A. (2004). Concept and Presence. In Carter, A (ed.) “Rethinking Dance History: A Reader (pp.170-181). London: Routledge.

tonya said,

May 3, 2007 @ 1:09 am

Maia, I’m so glad you joined! You are so smart and you have such a huge range of knowledge! (I feel so happy and proud that someone was led to the Winger through my blog :) ) I am definitely going to read up this weekend!

Maia said,

May 3, 2007 @ 10:51 pm

Tonya but it is you who are so brilliant…
you have no idea how i’ve searched to find something like this reading group as well as your blog
i was obviously looking in all the wrong places

am i smart? i’m struggling with that introduction - its gonna take a couple of re-reads
having read his other articles definitely helps though
but then again i always tend to get lost in terminology
(thanx for the links Tony - this sure helps)

Perhaps we should start at the beginning
The title ~ the title is an introduction into the text and in a way the goldent thread throughout the text.
Obviously the title links very specifically to the introduction…
So we have:
the notions of ‘performance’ and ‘dance’
and
‘the politics of movement’
what is ‘performance’?
what is ‘dance’?
what is ‘the politics of movement’
And how do all of these link?
Lepecki clearly outlines these in his introduction - perhaps it will focus our own introduction to the text?

I will post some responses with regards the above over the weekend…

ps - the only problem with this reading group is it is far more fun than re-writing my thesis proposal which is due in a week - well, i’ll just have to balance it all out

thewinger.com » The Reading Group: Exchange said,

May 4, 2007 @ 2:22 pm

[…] Maia is studying in the department of Contemporary Performance at Rhodes University. Her master’s thesis uses elements of Lepecki’s theoretical framework to analyze contemporary South African dance. Read what she has to say. Her comment on the original reading group post is provides great ideas and resources. The SARMA database is a great online resource for dance studies and criticism. Since Exhausting Dance deals with so many ideas Lepecki has developed in other writings it can be helpful to read some of his related work on the SARMA database. Maia points us toward http://www.sarma.be/text.asp?id=869 called: “Undoing the fantasy of the (dancing) subject: ‘Still acts’ in Jérôme Bel’s The Last Performance” and encourages us to follow the links. […]

SanderO said,

May 5, 2007 @ 10:49 am

I struggled through one Lepeki’s essay and it made me think about how the ideas he discusses reach some people on a conscious level, others on a subconsciuos one… perhaps some on both and for others nothng penetrates their being… they look but do not see… they listen but do not hear.

With our brains.mind we can and have stood up a way of examining the world around us… and we are, as well, part of that world… we can create events.. and things. Dance is a creation of the human mind as well a painting or a play or even an idea. One the mind exists.. it devours the universe.

We map the world inside our minds with our own software - language… our own inputs… the five senses. It’s all very self referential and recall a book I read many years ago.

Godel, Escher and Bach… the Eternal Golden Braid, By Douglas Hofstader (sp).

One of the central dogmas is the notion of bootstrapping. We as humans, are an example of the remarkable phenomena of creating something from nothing. We are not alone in this… Life itself, is an example of increasing complexity over time… of bootstrapping itself up from nothing (Although this is an anathema to the creationists).

Once consciousness appeared (and that is a whole other discussion) we used it to probe the world we live in and to try to find casaulity in all things and then apply “meaning” to the world. Our mind/brains refuse to accept that the elements of the world have no meaning so we look for it in everthing. I think Dawkins would argue that our mind was only a survival strategy. But this presupposes that living thing have some sort of inherent need to survive… His radical idea of course is that WE are the spaceship survival strategies for our genes… they are what we actually pass along though the ages.

Yet we now have memes.. which are a meta creation which are passed along and have hardly a need for a physical body… ideas can be carried through the ages in any number of ways and are indestructable as things that have no physical existence are.

And so we have those such a Lepeki looking for meaning in dance, movement and even stillness. But this quest is all inevitable and only an artifact of our minds and the need to structure the world around us.. if we can’t do that.. we are adrift in a terrifyling universe with no anchors… where there is no solid reality… no firm ground to take a step forward into the future… it is confusing world where we can make sense of anything.

Most of us, most of the time operate on a much higher level of langauage where meaning resides in languages which we can “process”. We don’t look deeper down, or in fact, need to.. because it is the upper level of meaning and mapping which allows us to make it from cradle to grave. I don’t need to know how my pancreas makes insulin… I couldn’t make it even if I knew what it is… but having a functioning pancreas is allowing me to sit here and write this nonsense.

If you examine something like language (an I am no linguist or scientist here)…you can see that it is used to convey, find and store meaning and ideas… ultimately to make things happen (progress???). Meaning is found in a sentence, or phrase, which is a string of words in some rigorous syntax/structure. Each word has some meaning which it shares with the others in context and a new more complex idea emerges from the juxtaposition. Mix up those words and in them new ideas are to be found.

Yet the words of the language are composed of letters… which are strung together again with rigid rules… but here the rationale is much more abstract… and often has to do with ideas like prononciaton. So in English we can’t have words like xxjskkuu. And then drill down a bit more and look at the letters themselves… they too are formed by and within a system of constraints. Our alphabet uses straight lines and curves to create 26 letters which make up the words in the English language. The Italian language… I believe has fewer letters … no J or W if I am correct. The Italian language has managed to express all the ideas (I think) with fewer letters. Interesting ha? And there is no one to one correspondence between languages.. it’s not just a code where one symbol in language A is the same as another symbol in Language B.. like deciphering a code.

I am getting far afield of the discussion of dance here… but what I am reading is that some thinkers are drilling deep down into the meaning of dance, or movement, it’s context, what it does to those who dance, those who watch and why that might be. All very interesting…. but…

I use a computer and I have no idea of how it works.. On my screen are things I can understand and manupulate, but I have no understanding of the software which lets this happen, the underlying code and machine language and so on. I am not sure I need to understand DOS and lower level languages when what I need is “windows” and the so called graphical user interface. But I damn glad that there are geniuses who do and so I get to use a PC… dumb old me.

I love dance because, for me, it links so much of the human experience in a referential, albeit, distilled and elegant manner. It borrows from art, architecture, scuplture, atheletics, culture and much more and of course “narritives”. it is a language which speaks to me… but language I never studied and can’t speak.. and it shows me things about the human form which I rare see on the street so to speak. It’s a totally thrilling experience of both meaning and absence of meaning.. if that makes sense… a thrilling experience…. absent meaning. It’s abstraction if such a thing really exists… in that everything is an abstraction…(rene magritte’s The Treachery of Images)

Thanks for making me think a bit, Tony…

SanderO said,

May 5, 2007 @ 11:01 am

Please excuse the many typos… above… I hope you can understand my ideas despite the errors in language…

Maia said,

May 13, 2007 @ 8:54 pm

Why is Lepecki regarded as such an authoritative voice in contemporary dance writing?

I hope someone can help here… I need it for my thesis proposal & would love some input from another fresh perspective

tony said,

May 14, 2007 @ 1:55 pm

Maia, good question and I am not quite sure. I think of him less as an authoritative voice and more as a fresh voice. Dance studies, as distinct from dance history or criticism, is a relatively new project whose purpose and methods are still being worked out. I think Lepecki’s youth and familiarity with contemporary theory help him with his branding as a fresh new thinker. He is also prolific which always helps establish author-ity.