The Winger » The Reading Group: A Primer for Exhausting Dance

The Reading Group: A Primer for Exhausting Dance | Reading Group Post II

April 10, 2007 at 5:35 pm · Filed under TONY, writing, education, community, reading group, andre lepecki

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

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 towards playing with socio-cultural-political and psychic concerns etc.

As Professor Harvey’s comment indicates, it takes a mouthful and a mindful to even talk about this book’s introduction. Lets chew on little bits at a time and try to figure out exactly what is being said before we generate a full critique.

A good place start is with a few simple questions and some helpful links.

What do all these words mean?

discursive epiphenomena epistemology hegemonic illocution imbricates interpellation isomorphic kinesthetic methexis metonym mimesis mnemonic modernism modernity modern-dance ontological paroxysm performative perlocution post-colonial post-modernity post-modern-dance presence reification solipsism subjectivity topography

Who are these folks?

Jérôme Bel, Juan Dominguez, Trisha Brown, La Ribot, Xavier Le Roy, Vera Mantero, Bruce Nauman, William Pope.L

and these folks?

Elizabeth Grosz, Felix Guattari, Franz Fanon, Fredric Jameson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaston Bachelard, Gilles Deleuze, Homi Bhabha, Jaques Derrida, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Mark Franko, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk, Randy Martin, Roland Barthes, Spinoza

I know Wikipedia is not the well-spring of all knowledge but it is a good place to start structuring and understanding a tightly woven matrix of ideas and scholarship.

Perhaps we should start with picking out some of the key ideas that Lepecki is manipulating, whether (or not) he (or we) “believe” them.

Here are a few:

1. dance = movement

2. modernity = movement

3. what the heck is postmodern dance?

Lets expand these basic ideas/questions/equations and add on to create a whole laundry list of useful or interesting concepts. We will see where this gets us and try get more of a handle on the text.

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Greg said,

April 11, 2007 @ 5:05 pm

Hi Tony …. so, though I have the book now, I’ve been swamped with work this week .. I don’t know when I’ll be able to comment, but it will be soon. I can definitely say that I’m not partial to his “modernity,” however. I’ve gotten through to the point where he defines his use of both that term and subjectivity, but not much beyond yet.

Greg said,

April 23, 2007 @ 9:38 pm

Alright Tony, I was able to get a bit out of my swamp of work (including 2 presentations), so I read the Introduction this weekend. He puts forth some interesting things as set up for the book. I still don’t know how I feel about his use of “subjectivity” and “modernity”, though I am very glad that he defined how he is using them. It appears that he is using “modernity” not just to describe movement, but movement as the essence of dance, the “ontology” of dance, using his terminology. So, I guess I have to modify your “modernity = movement” to be “modernity = dance whose essence, its inherent reason for existing, is movement”. It is something not uncommon in modern dance, where dances are made, and then fit to music, instead of the other way around, or just left to stand on their own in silence. “Subjectivity” is interesting, too, since he is classifying dancers to be subjective to choreography, to the prescribed rules set to them. I can definitely see his point. One makes a dance with specific choreography, and the dancers of that particular dance are subservient to the particular movement used for that particular dance. What do you think of these interpretations? I’m going to take a closer look at your “laundry list”, too, but what else from this Intro do you want to focus on?

tony said,

April 24, 2007 @ 3:04 am

Greg, this is good. Thanks for engaging in the midst of your entanglements with dark matter and other astrophysicalities. Lepecki’s use of the term “subjectivity” follows Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” as the way in which the individual subject is formed by ideology. The classic example the action of a police officer yelling “Hey you” and the subsequent turning around of the “guilty” party. In this way the subject is produced by a certain configuration of power and ideas (the idea of the state, the idea of the law, the idea of the policeman’s authority, the idea of guilt).

So there is another item for the laundry list.
What does interpellation and subjectivity have to do with dance?

The introduction, like any good writing, is definitely worth re-reading. You will find that Lepecki does not equate dance with movement or say that movement is the truth or essence of dance. Lepecki observes this statement being made by others, like dance critic John Martin, Ann Kisselgoff and disgruntled viewer Raymond Whitehead (humorous telling pg 2). It is Lepecki’s project to critique the equality dance=movement.

The laundry list is not really a guide but rather a repository for unresolved, interesting or useful ideas that we would all like to engage in through the text. Lets grow the laundry list to include the ideas that Lepecki touches on and see where it brings us.

Where are you Ashley and Hadar? I know you have read this and have lots to contribute.

Any other additions to the laundry list?