- text by Bojana Kunst
- Symposium about the theory and critique of the contemporary dance, International conference on contemporary, Bytom, Poland, June 1998
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About unsteadiness of the dance event
This early morning lecture will be generaly devoted to one of the most important metaphors which goes alone with the contemporary dance event and which strongly influenced the structure and theoretical problems of dance criticism and writing on dance. It will be devoted to a significant feature of the dance event, so broadly accepted that it already works like a metaphor - therefore it defined not only the structure of language talking about dance but also the structure of representation in general. So let's discover the metaphor which is so common that it seems as if it needs no consideration at all: we will talk about the "proverbial" (generally accepted) persuasion that dance event (or dance in general) is ellusive, slippy, unsteady, especcialy if we want to translate it into another medium (language, by example). Dance event as ellusive and unsteady field became in the contemporary philosophy (from Nietzche to Derrida and postmodern philosophy) the important metaphor of unsteadiness and slipperiness of the subject and its structure began to correspond with philosophical thought which uncovers the illusions of the rational, fixed subject/object relationship and finnaly the illusions of the fixed systems inside which we could define and describe cognition and language. Dance as a field of expression as well as an artistic act is somehow understand as event which is intristically antifoudational; so there is no surprise that so many contemporary theories on language and communication, which are uncovering the illusoriness of the fixed subject of speech and it's fragility, used metaphor of dance to describe their ideas.
It is true that a number of post-Enlightenment philosophers turned to expressive arts to resolve problems of knowledge, perception and cognition, this is particularly the case with music (and later extended to dance). Because (as Hanslick point out) in these arts it is harder to distinguish between time and space, because it is very difficult to define the relationship between the expressive and interpretative, those art fields represent good groundwork for researching some crucial problems of cognition in general. But I want to considerate the metaphor of elusiveness from the different perspective: I don't want to go deeply into the gnoseological problems of cognition, I would rather stay among some aesthetic values which defined contemporary dance as an autonomous artistic field. How does it come that dance is so elusive; elusive not only for language but as well for theory and philosophy, when it's solid and firm point of expression is the body, in contemporary dance in many cases completely self - sufficient body with it's own expressive and kinetic autonomy? How does it come that expressive and kinetic autonomy of the body which is as well the essential element of aesthetic autonomy of contemporary dance has an epiderma which seems so elusive, so hard to chase? It seems that from the start of contemporary dance in the beginning of 20th century, there is a constant paradox at work when we are discussing about the dancing body: (we could describe this paradox shortly) whenever (or better as much as) the body is represented as an autonomous body, so much we are witnessing the body disappearing. My intention is of course not to solve the given paradox but to explain what is happening with the body in dance and how it's specific aesthetic autonomy has produced the elusiveness of dance event. Even more; I think this paradox is somehow implemented in the dance event andinside it's specific aesthetic strategies and expression (I will talk about those problems a bit little later).
French poet Paul Valery was writing in his famous text Philosophie de la danse exactly on the problems of dancing body (basicaly he is almost unavoidable source when we want to theorize about the body problems in general). Although we could notice in his text that he as a poet (of course), was very much fascinated with the women dancer and therefore we could find some good old-fashioned romantic inside his text, we could as well find some statements, which are still very consistent and important today. Valery compaires the state of dancing to the sleeping state: dancing body is occupied with itself, nothing exist outside the system which was formed by actions of the dancer. Women dancer has no exterior, said . This condition is, as Valery pointed out, very similar to the condition of sleeping: where everything is moving in itself and there is no reason, no intention to accomplish something, so there is no outside reference. Valery's poetic words are disclosing to us more as it maybe seems on the first sight; especially in his statement that a dancer has no exterior. Dancing is (on Valery's words) a specific kind of inner life, allowing that psychological term a new meaning in which physiology is dominant. In dance, we could conclude - there is nothing more than a body and the body itself with its inner network and epidermal surface is self-sufficient and totally autonomous. Autonomy of the body in contemporary dance is somehow conditioned with the self-sufficiency: there is no relation outside the body anymore, nor to rhetorical network of figures (ballet), nor to the expressive mimesis of the object (as in theater where the role is at work), or mimesis of the interior (mimetic expression, which was still characteristic for the beginnings of contemporary dance and for a few innovations of the ballet in the beginning of the century). Therefore French philosopher Michel Bernard marked the dancing body as figural and not as figurative: the body is in the same time object and subject of artistic piece: the carrier of the image and image itself. Figural body is not a mimetic body anymore, as well as illustrative body or mimetic body which express something; it is the body, which produced it's own image and form, it is always existing on the border of fixing it's own image.
(There could be of course an objection that in last two decades - in so called post-modern dance we could find again a lot of narativity at work - choreographers that emerged in the 1980s had an insatiable appetite for narratives of all kinds: autobiography, biography, fiction, political document, interwiev, the use of sign language and other emblematic gesture systems; so we came a long way from the dance per se. About this problems wrote Sally Banes in Happily ever after... But as Sandra Kemp reminds us, we are still confronted with an autonomous body which is playing it's game between meaning and cognition, appearance and reality and of things as physical symbols and things as objects: body is still having its playful and controverse identity which is aesthetically self-sufficient; Sally Banes suggests that "postmodern dance can have its cake and eat in a way that the non-performing arts can never do, by combining the plymorphous pleasure of the body with the adult pleasure of the analysis of the text. Body is playing with the narativity, not the narativity is defining it's epidermal network. Playing with narativity (or including narativity into the dance event) is not only the consequence of formal dismemberment of the body where there is no hierarchy in the body anymore (body as a structure of independent and autonomous signs as in modernist dance) but as well the consequence of the identity dispersion where there is no clearness about the self and the body which defines the self anymore. In the time where virtual bodies are very close to us (and more and more similar to us) , where the automates and machines (as Donna Harraway said) became disturbingly alive, autonomy of the body suddenly opens the question of it's identity: where to place the identity in such a dismembered form (we know well that modernist approach went wright to the end of epidermal displacement of the body: parts of bodies as pure signs, where completely unstructured network is at work), how to define my own body etc. We know nowadays that there is almost no whole body anymore, but we will see a little later that this was illusion on the beginning of the century, too).
On the corporeal autonomy of the body wrote also Friderich Nietzsche, who strictly speaking began with the metaphor of elusiveness (slipperiness) of the dance and connect it with the pre-rationalistic state, where the dance had always it's domicile. Nietzsche claims that dance should always describe thought, or vice versa that thought should be like dance. Thought which is like dance knows no "spirit of heaviness", (stiffed body should be set free with the help of dance, said Nietzsche in his famous work The birth of the tragedy form the spirit of music), dance is a light from the world before the gods. With Nietzsche's words we could define dance as the wheel rotating from itself, or as Alain Badiou in his interpretation of Nietzsche's text said: dance is like circular line in space, but such a circular line which is not drawn from outside, no, it is the circular line which is drown by itself. The body in dance we could metaphorically say, is always in the first motion: "each dancing gesture or movement should be disclosed not as consequence but as the very origin of moving." (Alain Badiou) With Nietzsche dance became the sign and the metaphor for the opposite dionisian word (which was directly transmitted into Duncan's aesthetic, too), where the body with its rotations and movements presents the very essence of being and there is no fixed point for reason to catch this very essence.
Mallarmé, too, pointed out the autonomous body of dance; which can not be someone's body. The body is always an empty emblem, never someone; dancing body is not shaping some other body or person. With this statement we could also help us to define the relation of b contemporary body autonomy in connection with ballet or theater: dancing body is not submitted to some outside form, network or system (as the role of an actor in theater or a type), it could even not be submitted to a discourse of rhetorical forms (typical for ballet) or to any predefined system which is formed outside the body). From this point of view we could as well understand famous Mallarmé's statement on the woman dancer: "The dancer is not a woman who dances for the juxtaposed reasons that she is not a woman but a metaphor." (Mallarme: 1887). (This declaration was literally realized by modernist approach, where sexual difference was practically not important; and was later rejected in recent European dance, especially by Pina Bausch. But: it was rejected with an experience of non-difference: Bausch woman is completely different form Duncan's emancipatory project - where there was strong point on liberation and disclosure of the woman's body.)
But we all know of course - that it is almost impossible to capture the very essence of being (except for real believers), so how is it possible that dance alone (especially in philosophy) has such an ontological primacy? Is the corporeal autonomy of the body one of the causes for, let's say, ontological exclusiveness? Is the corporeal autonomy of the body opening new modes, new structures of representation? If this is true, how is this possible?
Although there is a certain conviction about its specific structure which formed its ontological primacy, myself and probably majority of choreographers and artists would not completely agree with the statement of German philosopher, which said: "dance is not an art but a sign of possible art which is written in the body." If the representation as such is questionable, then we are very soon in the blind alley and we are not talking about art form anymore but of an very exclusive and isolated experience, which we could compare with haiku poetry (where is very hard to define the decisive line between art form and the way of articulating being) or religious experience as well. Let's quote Roland Barthes for help: "neither describing, nor defining, the haiku diminishes to the point of pure and sole designation...permanently alienated definition...The haiku, articulated around a metaphysics without the subject and without God, is apprehension of the thing as event and not as substance."
It is true, that dance or more specifically the dancing body is (in philosophy very often) understood as the metaphor of the innocent, speechless and uncorrupted field, which is not infected with the rationality and with it's very consequence - which is language (or word). That's what it is playing with us and demand to chase him always one step before: before the representation, presentation, interpretation, the field of pure movement flew, the flew of innocent thought and pure existing which is always resuming itself. "I'm only asking you what is dance, each of you respectively appears to know, but to know is quite separately! The one tells me that it is what it is and can be reduced to what our eyes see here; and the other holds very strongly that it represents something, and is therefore not entirely in itself, but principally in us. As for me, my friends, my uncertainty is intact" (Valery: Dance and Soul). The slip between the representation and being in the body is always present and defines the very structure of representation in contemporary dance as autonomous art form. It is somehow before the nomination but at the same time it definitely demands a nomination, too, and that's why there is sometimes very hard job for the writer to do.
Though dance could be a very creative metaphor of thought on philosophic field and it's pre-rationalistic primacy in philosophy as well influenced a certain number of beginners of contemporary dance, contemporary dance is primary an autonomous art form, typical art form of the 20th century where is no specialty that the abstraction, slipperiness and deconstruction are on work. The corporeal autonomy of the body is on one side really the cause of ontological exclusiveness, because it opens different history, maybe forbidden or hidden behind the systems and strict hierarchy of the rational and language: (as Sandra Kemp said a history of paradoxical laws and non-dialectical discontinuities, a history of absolutely heterogeneous pockets, irreducible particularities, and also of unheard, incalculable sexual difference. That's why Derrida quoted Emma Goldmann - a maverick feminist form the 19. century who once said of the feminist movement: If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part of your revolution"). It is a field where the holes are seams of the structure and splitting construct the elusive network, where there are no intristic rules except the autonomy of the body. But on the other side it opens new modes, new structures of representation, typical for contemporary dance and art in general. On the beginning of the century the demand for bodily (or corporeal) autonomy was exclusive for start a new artistic form and produce new aesthetic strategies.
Some of the statements from this period of obsession with bodily freedom and liberation are still very interesting today, when "korperkultur" finally became a market value with selling illusions that we would only get back our natural body with more and more artificial techniques (although we could find artificiality in demands for natural body, too). A statement of Isadora Duncan tells us a lot about the return to the body on the beginning of the century which defined artistic language and structure of contemporary dance: 1900: "For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded between my breasts, covering the solar plexus...I was seeking and finally discovered the central spring of all movement." I quote this from the book of American writer Mark Franko, who insisted that Duncan's personal discovery of movement can be read as a foundation narrative of modern dance, or better to say, it's myth of origin. Going back to the natural was not (as it seems on the first sight) a neoromantic search for ideal relationship between inside and outside (interior and exterior) of the body, but something more: it expose the new corporeal forms, so that the body itself with its actions and movements became exclusive creator and carrier of aesthetic strategies, values and signs.
John Martin, a founder of contemporary American dance criticism (he was one of the first writers who reviewed modern dance as a serious independent art form), wrote in year 1933 very interesting tekst with the title The Modern dance, exposing in it some important characteristics of (as he said) the developing artistic field. The beginning from where contemporary dance started, was by Martin's words, the discovery of the actual substance of the dance, which it found to be in movement. With this discovery, insist Martin, dance became for the first time an independent art - an absolute art: this movement is not only accidental (hidden in exterior forms as by ballet) but defined the body of the dance in its presence and aestethic strategies. Therefore Martin used a term metakinesis, where physical and psychical are merely two aspects of reality (this reminds us on Valery word about inner life where physiology is dominant): metakinesis formed the body as an artistic form which could produce aestethic signs and values and also communicate with other subjects.
The autonomy of the body is somehow based in the discovery of the movement as completely self-sufficient aesthetic strategy. The status of movement as an exclusive artistic practice gives the autonomous body the specific aesthetic power, enthusiasm that the body itself is capable to be the carrier of the representation, that is capable to construct it's own network (is not important if the parts are connected) of signs or non-signs and its finally the cause for the specific paradox which goes along with the autonomy of the body and which the body of dance in constantly inhabiting.
Bodily movement intervene and destructurate the very structure of representation, which is not so coherent field as it still looked in the beginning of the century. Movement, similar to the process of deconstruction, disperse the representation of the body and the structure of the event, instead of the closed event it is showing the seams, traces, with its own autonomy, became more and more dismembered. There is no autonomy in the body per se, but there is autonomy (or freedom) of its slipperiness. Dynamic body more and more became a shadow, a trace, just a tiny part or unsistematized structure. The body has finally freedom to disappear completely. That's why French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy claims that only the body alone fulfills the very concept of the word exposition, or being exposed: "being exposed, exposing: it is the skin, all the various types of skin, here and there open and turned into membranes, mucous, poured out inside of itself, or rather whiteout an inside or outside, absolutely, continually passing from one to other, always coming back to itself whiteout either a locus or a place where it can establish a self, and so always coming back to the world, to other bodies which is exposed, in the same gesture that exposes them to itself."
Pure form of movement became an artistic object. Autonomous expressivity became the code of contemporary dance; it is a specific autonomy for which the clearness of the sign is not the first care anymore. (From this point of view is contemporary dance a typical form of 20th century art). One of the consequences of the new corporeal autonomy is primacy of the energy, dynamism, epidermal surface (which is in the same time innerness of the body) over the sense, which resulted as well in rendering more difficult the communication.
And exactly this unsteadiness and elusiveness of the body gives to the contemporary dance specific artistic and aesthetic autonomy. The status of the body in contemporary dance, as we said, produce a constant paradox: more autonomy, more disappearing. The body has an exclusive place in contemporary dance and cause the specific structure of communication. The very point of this communication is lack of the exterior. That means not of course that there is no communication at all, that there are just subjective views and no objective criteria. This conviction generally influenced the debates on dance criticism, but it's wrong in its start and completely unproductive. Instead of that generally accepted conviction the lack of exterior produced the specific communication, where the problem of translatability is somehow implemented in the structure of communication and the slipperiness of the event is one of the important groundwork to produce dance signs and discover them. Even if the body dancing is moving and we the seating body are watching, we are in constant movement to search and chase signs, parts, traces: it seems as if the dance is in a constant movement of deconstruction. French philosopher Michel Bernard insisted, that we should name the art of dance "l'art de la dépense" (the art of waste"), where the elusiveness of the body produced the network of waste on the field of viewer perception. Chasing the traces or even the shadows of traces became the important principle of watching, understanding and interpreting the dance event. Dance as l'art de la depense is strongly connected with the characteristic of corporeal autonomy, where the body alone is the mediator of aestethic strategies.
Movement is understood as an attempt of body deliverance; deliverance which insist on corporeal self-sufficiency and corporeal separation from discourses which were written inside its epidermal and submitted the body to the exterior (language, rhetorical figures, role, music, text, viewer reception). This attempt of deliverance is not characteristic only for contemporary dance, but it is only a part in requesting the artistic forms, disclosing the structure of artistic work, which happened in contemporary art of 20th century, especially in modernism. The liberation is not ideological (it not only redefined the relationship between exterior and interior) but structural and formal: the liberated body is autopoetic and builds it's own principles of representation, it is not the body destined with the exterior image, but the body which is self-representing. So on the end we could use the statement from John Martin, who too, altough an expert, was fighitng his own heavy battle with disappearing words when he was trying to write about Graham's performance Dark Meadow for morning delivery of New York Times. The modern dance is not a system it's a point of view. And to read the point of view, you have to be prepared to follow constant paradoxes, jump into the holes and silences and produce language, which should be always carefully exposed between subjective views and objective aesthetic criterias.