I went with two friends last night, both of which have seen a lot of dance, and we all agreed: This is the best performance dance work we had seen in a LONG time. I kid you not, if you have plans tonight, change them. It’s the last day of his show. It’s that good. Jeremy and his four dancers deliver ten-fold. Trust me, go.
Choreographer: Jérôme Bel Production: The show must go on (2001) Photo: Laurent Philippe
I propose livening up this Reading Group through conversation – where we all participate in defining this field. I would like to start this conversation by inviting all of you (whether you’ve read Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance or not) to share your viewpoint on this critique of representation/virtuosity through stillness and reduction…
When Jérôme Bel had one of his performers ask this question – “To be … or not to be” – in The Last Performance (1998), he set up a critique of representation. Re-Read this famous Shakespearean quote from Hamlet as:
To represent … or not to represent … that is the question in contemporary dance.
Jérôme Bel critiques representation through stillness … or reduction … as Lepecki points out in Concept and Presence (A chapter in Carter’s book Rethinking Dance History, 2004):
“The contemporary European dance scene can be qualified by one term: ‘reduction’ – of expansiveness, of the spectacular, of the unessential…”
Pirko Husemann points out “on the level of dance an evident fading-away of dance itself prevails. Contemporary European dance becomes less and less danced in the usual sense. Admittedly, this tendency within dance history is no singular occurrence – here mentioned would be only the minimalism of American 1960s postmodern dance.”
This critique of representation is certainly not new. The lineage of this rejection of virtuosity and representation includes amongst others:
Lepecki reads the work of 3 performers as a ghost story beneath the spectra of a 1589 dance manual Orchesographie in the second chapter of Exhausting Dance. The ghost of this ghost story is our solitary male dancer, in the empty dance studio, resonating with written language. This ghost haunts western choreography with a “solipsistic excess”. The relationship between this private dancing and the making of the “idiotic” modern subject (as from Greek idiotes: a private individual who declines public political engagement) is problematic for dance in the social and downright spooky.
Lepecki attempts to turn solipsism in on itself, framing its use in choreography as a generative metaphysical echo chamber. In his view it functions “to dismantle modernity’s subjectivization as a mode of the idiotic” and “intensify critically and physically the hegemonic conditions of subjectivization and to explode them.”
Solipsism is the philosophical position that all things outside our own experience, including other minds, are unknowable and non-existent. It is the subjectivity of Descartes “I think therefore I am” taken to an extreme, “what I don’t think, is not.” It is a selfish and lonely philosophy.
Lonely ghost #1.
Thoinot Arbeau, dance master, Jesuit priest and mathematician. Author of 1589 dance manual Orchesographie. The engravings are really interesting. The proximity of military choreography to court dancing is evident in the manual (which reminds me of another conversation). The notation clearly derives from music scoring, consisting of notes on a scale over a beat time series.
The manual unfolds as a dialog between the Arbeau and the young lawyer Capriol. Capriol is in search of dance instruction so that he may integrate properly into society. The challenge of transferring dance knowledge through notation, so that the pupil could teach himself alone in the absence of the teacher, initiates the project of orchesography. Its development “as practice, as a technological binding of writing and dancing, as a pedagogical bond between men” allows “socialization with those who are not quite there…whenever a dance book is read in a secluded chamber.”
Obeying the commands of an absent dance master raises an apparition. I wonder if Kristin has ever seen Balanchine’s ghost. Scary.
Lepecki reads Bruce Nauman, Juan Dominguez, and Xavier Le Roy as lonely ghosts haunting and haunted by “solipsistic masculinity.” The chapter is interesting once you get your head around it a little and understand what it means to look at “Western choreography as an early modern subjectivity-machine” from a paranormal perspective.
I would love to see what conversation arises from these ideas and readings of these artists. Are these ideas useful to you? A dance blog seems like the sensible place to talk about language and the body as a technological interface. Do we believe that our technique shapes our subjectivity? Can/does dance suffer from solipsistic excess?
These ideas are useful for me to think about my own work. Most of the videos/dances I have made consist of solitary dancers recorded in empty studios. Much of my personal dance/technology practice takes place in the same space, the small studio.
I am there right now, writing and dancing, trying my hardest to not be an idiot.
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