| | Posted by Tony Schultz

Last week Sara Rudner invited me to sit-in on a rehearsal for Dancing-on-View: Preview/Hindsight. Rehearsal is such a rich environment. Watching everyone focused and communicating, physically and verbally, in a well lit studio is different than watching a performance. It involves problem solving and systematic thinking in much the same way that a scientist works in the laboratory. Rehearsal is a research and development practice. This makes perfect sense as dance, I believe, is a form of science.

I watched the rehearsal to with Sara’s son, Eli. He is a computer scientist, physicist, martial artist and just about to graduate from college. For the first half of the rehearsal Eli and I spoke about programming languages, computer vision, and augmented reality, mostly techie stuff. Then our conversation began to drift, as if directed by the moving bodies in front of us.

The topic turned to from electronic to more abstract technologies, namely techniques for imposing discipline over the body and how they relate to dance. I invoked the name of Michel Foucault. In his book Discipline and Punish, he systematically describes the modern emergence of these technologies of power over the body. His treatment includes a historical and critical presentation of what I will call choreographies of power. This includes: military choreography (marching and weapon manipulation), pedagogical choreography (unison seating of students on command etc), incarceral choreography (strict control of prisoner in time and space by strict schedule and segmentation in cells) and productive choreography (examination and encouragement of physical efficiency in productive labor).

Though Foucault never refers to dance explicitly, or choreography, it seems that his philosophy of power and the body is intimately connected to ideas about dance. Dance is a discipline and choreography requires a technique of power over the body. Indeed technique is what gives the dancer power over their own body. In this way the dancer is always simultaneously bound and set free by their technique. Is this a fundamental contradiction?

Watching the rehearsal from this particular theoretical perspective made Eli and I giggle since it brought, by analogy, comparison between Sara and the associated power personas of the drill sergeant, school master, prison warden and factory manager. I always have this vision of the old-school ballet mistresses who would walk around with a cane and use it to illicit disciplined limb work. Though she did shush Eli and I at one point in our conversation, Sara is definitely not one of the above mentioned whip-cracking dance masters. She is, in fact, one of the most kind and generous people I have had the pleasure of knowing. She is also very interested in critiques of power and ways of disrupting its formations. Sara knows that dance is about power.

This line of thinking clearly needs more development. In my next post I will try to describe the work I observed at the rehearsal and relate it to ideas from physical theory. I have started seeing many similarities between dance and physics, the two pure forms of physical science.