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.
Our apologies for dragging our heels a bit on introducing this lovely lady (her profile page has been lurking on the right side of the winger for some time), but computer and internet troubles in her native South Africa and busyness here at the winger caused some snags that have now been worked out.
Ms. Maia Jordaan’s profile reads like a list of individuals you would need to put together an entire production - except she can do everything herself… “director/choreographer, producer, performer, set/costume designer, stage manager, company manager, marketing manager, teacher and researcher…” Quite an impressive list of talents! She is studying at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where she’s working towards a practice-based Masters in Contemporary Performance.
Maia is currently working on her thesis dissertation in which she “explores Lepecki’s proposals on the characteristics of contemporary dance/performance to three South African works: Robin Orlin’s daddy, i’ve seen this piece six times before and i still don’t know why they’re hurting each other (2000), and The First Physical Theatre Company’s 16 Kinds of Emptiness (2006).
This is part of what Tony Schultz thought would make her both a fantastic contributor to The Winger as well as a great addition to the Reading Group, in which Tony and Maia will be discussing and dissecting Andre Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance. Check out the Reading Group page to get a copy of the book, see what they have written and discussed so far, and throw in your own thoughts!
This week Maia Jordaan, a choreographer and graduate student from South Africa, found our reading group and injected a healthy dose of enthusiasm, intellect, and curiosity into the conversation. Yet another amazing person I have met through the internet. She seemed to have found us through Swan Lake Samba Girl.
Thanks Tonya and greetings Maia!
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.
The difficulty, or best part (depending on how you look at it), is that grappling with this scholarship forces you to do research in all the related scholarship. So as we might get lost in following the links of a web page we can also get lost in Lepecki’s references and footnotes.
Luckily we have a smart team and collectively have the intellectual resources to tackle this project. I found another rabbit hole that some might find helpful. The reading list for Lepecki’s course on Movement Theory can be downloaded here. You many of these texts referenced throughout Exhausting Dance. I read Randy Martin’s Critical Moves and Mark Franko’s The Work of Dance in order to get a better handle on what Lepecki is communicating.
It will be exciting to carve out this conversation and we should feel lucky to have found our friend Maia. I would love if Maia could join The Winger and we could collaborate in framing this discourse.
So please Kristin, pretty please, can we keep her?
Maia suggested collecting online video links to works by the artists discussed in Exhausting Dance. This is a great idea and am looking forward to see what folks dig up.
Maia has also added a number of comments that relate to identifying some important questions and ideas. Lets add them to our laundry list of useful ideas.
1. dance=movement (John Martin)
2. modernity=movement (Sloterdijk)
kinetic excess of modern industrial capitalism
kinetic excess of modern political mobilization
3. dance=politics (Randy Martin)
dance is inherently political in its mobilization of bodies
4. the book title
what is ‘performance’?
what is ‘dance’?
how does the term ‘exhaustion’ play?
what is ‘the politics of movement’
how do all of these link?
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.
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.
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.
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!
Posted by Maia Jordaan | The Winger Reading Group
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