- text by Bojana Kunst
- Conference Aesthetics Between Art and Culture, Slovenian Association of Aesthetics, 29 - 30. 3. 2000, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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At the festival of contemporary dance in Bytom (Poland) few years ago, I - purely by chance - saw the performance of Conrad Drzewiecki, the famous Polish choreographer and the doyen of contemporary dance in Poland. His creation Waiting for was not in the official part of the program and was almost bashfully presented by the organizers, but the performance nevertheless remained in the memory of those who saw it as a unique and extraordinary event. Drezwiecki managed to stay within the history – probably by necessity of survival – with such finality and determination that in his case we cannot talk about reconstruction or nostalgia but about a basic commitment to past bodies and their past mode of articulation. His performance ran in a manner of pure memory, revealing itself as an archive of bodies and their forgotten movement which today exists chiefly as an object of historical research, frozen on faded photographs. Drzewiecki's decision to remain at the point where contemporary dance was conceived and articulated as an autonomous artistic form was a serious one; he is still creating and shaping the images of bodies long since covered by the horizon of time. But what is interesting in his work - which is also what provoked this essay – is not only the relic value of his creations but also the incredible distance of his bodies. Drzewiecki thus reminded me of the question about the original autonomy of the body, of the basic aesthetic utopia connected with the beginnings of contemporary dance, the time of beginner's enthusiasm and physical self-sufficiency, when the dancing body became the exclusive metaphor in the philosophical thought. What was the position of the concept of the autonomous body within which philosophy favored dance in the later development of contemporary dance? Can we still perceive its glittering from under its linear history?
1. Aesthetics of autonomy
First I would like to talk about one of the basic aesthetic utopias and concepts of the body, which are not only a part of the history of contemporary dance but also represent the starting point of contemporary dance as an autonomous artistic form, at the same time effecting the image and the representation of the body in the stage arts of the 20th century. We can call it 'point zero' that dancers, philosophers and poets talk about and is most transparently evident in contemporary dance. I do not intent to spend much time on some of the body connected concepts from the beginning of the 20th century which shaped and influenced that utopia. I would only like to mention some of the most enthusiastic thoughts that enlighten the concept of the body in the same manner that was embraced by the contemporary dance. Firstly, there is the overall tendency to return to the body, clearly evident from Isadora Duncan's statement in The Dancer Of The Future: "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." This return to the body was generally represented as the return to the natural body, but not in the sense of the neo-romantic ideal of harmonious relation between the inside and the outside. The new practices introduced those corporeal forms in which the body becomes the exclusive bearer of aesthetic strategies, values and signs. Isadora Duncan's personal discovery of movement should therefore be understood on the broader scale; American writer Mark Franko claims that her discovery can be read as the essential story of contemporary dance, as a myth about the origin that is written within the dance. John Martin, the establisher of American contemporary dance critique, also places a lot of emphasis on the movement; in 1933 he wrote The Contemporary Dance, in which he reveals some of the most important characteristics of the developing artistic field. In his opinion, contemporary dance begins with discovering of the current substance of dance, which is of course movement. Discovering that, says Martin, places dance among autonomous art forms for the first time. The movement is not accidental, it is defined by the body establishing it as an equivalent to all other elements, what is more, the body becomes the autonomous bearer of aesthetic strategies and can be understood as a pure aesthetic sign. Martin therefore describes the movement of a dancing body with a term metakinesthesis, where the physical and the mental are just two aspects of the same reality: the body as an aesthetic form. The movement is then the exclusive aesthetic practice that ensures its autonomy and specific aesthetic power; the body is capable of functioning as the bearer of representation, as well as of autonomously establishing the web of signs. But discovering the movement and popular propagating of the natural body is not the only impulse for the autonomy of the body. At the break of the century, philosophers and poets also talk about a dancing body, revealing the existential side of the body autonomy, where a dancing body is the one that is connected with the essence and is therefore entitled to nothing less then ontological primacy.
Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on the concept of the autonomy of the body was enormous – in his philosophy he connects it to the state before intellect emerged, where dancing in the sense of a light from the world before Gods always had its place. Dance is thus given the privilege to describe thought and thought has the privilege of being like dance. A thought that is like dance does not know the spirit of weight, says Nietzsche, therefore it is crucial to relax the benumbed body by means of dance . In Nietzsche's words, dance can be thus defined as a self-rotating wheel, or we can say, as Alain Badiou puts it in his interpretation of Nietzsche's thoughts on dance, dance is like a circumference in space but a circumference which represents its own principle, a circumference not drawn from the outside, a circumference that is drawing itself. The body of dance is that original body which is cleared of intellect, separated from discourses. It is a body in a constant first movement and it is never a consequence but always the origin of movement. It is a metaphor for existing in a Dionysian world, and a field of direct experience. With its rotations and movement it depicts original existence itself. It is autonomous yet evasive, never fixed, non-repetitive, never entirely beheld.
Nietzsche's purification of the body, in which dance has a privileged function, is also reflected in Mallarme's and Valery's poetic statements adding their specific character to the concept of autonomy. For Mallarme, the body of dance can never be a body of somebody but always an empty emblem, never a somebody. A dancing body therefore does not depict some other body or person, and is not conditioned by anything outside it. This is how we can understand his famous statement on the female dancer (which, of course, has also many other connotations but let us read it just as a statement on autonomy): "The dancer is not a woman who dances for the juxtaposed reasons that she is not a woman but a metaphor." The body is a form, a metaphor for movement that is capable of creating representative webs. Valery's opinion, described in his essay Philosophie de la danse, is similar to Mallarme's. He is also fascinated by the female dancer. Valery compares the state of dancing to the state of sleeping, thus re-establishing the finite form of the body. The dancing body is preoccupied with itself, nothing exists outside the system formed by dancer's actions. A female dancer has no exterior, says Valery, and such state is very similar to sleeping; the state, where everything moves but there is no reason for or intention to supplement anything, there is no exterior reference. Dancing is thus a specific manner if inner life that gives this psychological term a new meaning within which physiology is dominant. In dancing, there is nothing but the body and this body is with its inner web and epidermal surface self-sufficient and absolutely autonomous.
In the language of philosophy, which establishes its ontological/existential level, the autonomy of the body is therefore conditioned by self-sufficiency, by rotation towards itself, and deletion of referentiality and of the phenomena of imaginability and imitation. The aesthetics of autonomy thus represents the original illusion - the enthusiasm of the beginning - where the body is simultaneously the object and the subject of an artistic creation, the bearer of the image, and the image itself. This is no longer a mimetic body, nor it is an expressive body; it is a body that ceaselessly autonomously determines its own image and weaves the web of its signs. Such aesthetics of autonomy seems almost exclusive in the words of a poet or a philosopher since it gives an impression of a dancing body having some sort of ontological primacy, thus escaping the realm of art: dancing is not an art but a sign of a possible art written within the body (Nietzsche). But the enthusiastic zeal that as the point-zero of contemporary dance introduces and favors the autonomy of the body, must be understood on another level as well – not only as a utopian demand for a purified, almost ritual body, but also as a desire for establishing of new representative strategies, of those modes of physical representation, then, that are no longer hierarchically organized, that are no longer bound to anything or fixed anywhere. The autonomous body thus playfully points at the field just a step ahead: the field where the body wants to be free of denomination but demands denomination at the same time. With its evasiveness, the movement establishes the autonomy of the body, which can also be a possibility of dismantling of hierarchical relations written in the body, a possibility of separating from the discourses and the freedom of instability of the subject-object relation. The aesthetics of autonomy is reflected where the body in movement (equal to all other elements of the performance) is represented in a way that is essentially anti-foundational: where fixed relations are no longer fixed, where the body continuously disappears into gaps and where the event weaving it is originally unstable and evasive. But at the same time, this autonomy – paradoxically granting the evasiveness and disappearing of the body itself – is a reflection of contemporary views upon the physical appearing at the beginning of the century: the physical as a dynamic and energetic field where relations towards space and time are multiplied and relative; and consequent understanding of representative modes that are no longer guided by the traditional understanding of reality and the place of the subject within it. Contemporary dance is a typical 20th century artistic form, where abstraction, evasiveness, disappearing of the object (and later of the subject as well) and deconstruction of form and modes of representation are not exclusive when compared to other artistic forms.
2. Different history
The concept of the autonomy of the body can be understood as a philosophical metaphor that at the ontological/existential level reveals the unstable relation between the object and the subject, and where it seems that within this relation body re-acquires its original (forgotten) power. Same originality is typical of the aesthetic utopia of different stage-concepts that emerged at the beginning of the century, and found its to-this-day unfinished mandate in contemporary dance. A dancing body thus not only serves as a metaphor to philosophers and poets just because first, original contact with the essence would glitter through it, but because within its autonomous streak it reveals a different history, covered with hierarchical systems of the rational, of the language, of the accepted representative webs. This different history that is in fact the history of discontinuity and dispersion is also the one French philosopher Jacques Derrida has in mind when quoting Emma Goldmann, the castaway feminist from the second half of the 19th century: "If I cannot dance, I will not take part in your revolution." This sentence reminds us of the original democratic impulse hidden within the autonomous body of dance, which unlike the established and recognizable history of the body (as shown by the figurative-rhetorical context of ballet) introduces a "history of paradoxical laws and non-dialectical discontinuities, a history of absolutely heterogeneous pockets, irreducible particularities, of unheard of and incalculable sexual differences…" This is the history of evasiveness and instability, where freedom hiding in stitches and cracks makes language inefficient, where body is allowed to glitter without form and freely performs the playful tension between presence and disappearing. This is the history of exhibiting (presenting), which can be filled completely by the body alone, and is probably best described by French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy in his famous essay Corpus: "Being exposed, exposing, it is the skin, all the various types of skin, here and there open and turned into membranes, poured out inside of itself, a 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." Such philosophical playing with language with an intention to indicate all the evasiveness and paradoxicality of exhibiting and naming of the body, is about the very autonomy we are dealing with in this essay: not the autonomy in the sense of a new form of the body but the autonomy as a mode of existence and a manner of representation of the body, where the more we are witnessing the autonomous body the more we are witnessing its disappearing. The original concept, which among other things also effects the development of contemporary dance, does not place the body anywhere else but upon itself; in this context, the body is also the bearer of aesthetic strategies. The different history revealed by the autonomous body is a history of discontinuity because it is always the history of the present: a body is always bound to the present, to the moment, to its own evasive presence. In other words: the autonomous body constantly articulates itself as present, creating its own space and history. The present body interferes with established modes of representation by not being bound to anything, always dwelling at the brink of fixation of its own image, liable to disappear at any time. It has the freedom to remain fragmented or even un-shown, it has the freedom to be an emblem (Mallarme), a self-rotating wheel (Nietzsche), a thing that evades but still continuously demands to be named. Only by being present, the history of the forgotten, of the overlooked and of the forbidden bodies can glitter through it.
Throughout the history of contemporary dance, we can follow different articulations of autonomy. From returning to the movement and the autonomous expressive flow, Modernist transformations of hierarchical relations in the body and minimalist dispersion of structures, to Postmodern flirting with the narrative (autobiography, fiction, politic document) and other artistic forms, the body of contemporary dance more or less successfully managed to dance and remain a part of revolution - in the sense that it revealed the unbearable weight of denomination and history of discontinuity which denies any final denomination. Because it always played its altering game between the meaning and the comprehension, between reality and appearance, between presence and disappearing, between subject and object, never allowing to be embraced by one act, system or word only.
Nevertheless, the democratic impulse revealing itself within the concept of the autonomous body is not as natural as it may seem. The utopian desire from the beginning of the century does establish the forgotten history of bodies but on the other hand it can quickly become trapped within its own enthusiasm which basically regards the autonomous body as a transparent, predictable and exclusive body of a certain political group or ideology. At the beginning of the century we are thus witnessing an interweaving of concepts of the natural body, of movement, of eugenics, of eurhythmics with Fascist concepts of a perfect, pure and artificial body, where the original democratic impulse can quickly turn into its opposite. Similarly, different concepts of physical articulation that persisted on the line East-West for long years, starting with a difficult communication only recently, show how fragile the concept of physical autonomy really is if we are not ready for a painful searching of what always seems to be evasive, therefore forcing us to be prepared for a continuous chase.
To describe the situation in the East we can slightly paraphrase Emma Goldmann's sentence: if you dance, you will not be part of our revolution – the revolution, of course, that only admits one, collective body, eliminating everything that is different. Where the original democratic impulse has been silenced at its very beginning, where there was no possibility to discover another, hidden history, where every body was subjected to carrying the weight of the official history, contemporary dance could not develop, or – as in Drzewiecki's case – it remained within the history by the necessity of survival.
The problem is, of course, a lot more general, connected to the existential status of the autonomous body as well as to the modes of representation and aesthetic articulation that are legitimate and allowed within a certain space. The autonomous body that philosophers and poets describe by means of the metaphor of dancing is not only the formal criterion of an aesthetic field but it is also legitimate on the existential level – a legitimacy within which the body is living and experienced, a body-subject (Merleau-Ponty). The metaphor of a dancing body being a self-rotating wheel (Nietzsche) therefore bears witness to an original existential legitimacy that can be placed within a body and its existence, which was in the former socialist societies always blurred and substituted by the legitimacy of the system. Similarly, it was not possible or allowed to introduce articulations other than those established or prescribed for decades; any different history, any attempt of autonomy, any different manner of representation were made marginal in advance and considered political. The punishment for not conforming to the one mode of speech was in the best case marginating (if not something even worse) of such artistic practices in the former socialist countries. Therefore contemporary dance in Slovenia developed no sooner than in the eighties, in a country that denied any form of movement except ballet and bodies of communist rituals. Few attempts to present bodies differently were hopelessly stashed under amateurism and it was not until the eighties that we could talk about the beginnings of its professionalism. The circle of dancers and choreographers educated abroad who gathered around Ksenija Hribar and the Plesni teater Ljubljana theatre (Dance Theatre Ljubljana, established in 1985), appeared at the same time as some other artistic movements that spoke the language of contemporary art in an original manner (by a retrograde return to the original Slovene and foreign avant-garde). In a decade and a half, the present very powerful generation of dancers of contemporary dance was formed as a consequence of a very creative dialogue with different independent theatrical practices, which effected both the physical image of the theatre as well as the theatrical image of dance.
On the outside, the difference between the two manners of articulation of an autonomous body is seen primarily in the status contemporary dance has in the West and in the East. On one hand, it has been acknowledged by institutions and history for quite a few decades, thus developing its own institutional, pedagogical and production network; it is becoming a part of urban art, it develops parallel to the rest of contemporary art, its theory and critique. On the other hand, though, it has been marginal for decades, condemned to non-existence or fighting for survival, without a basic structure that would assure its development, outside the dialogue with institutions, critique, only in the last decade more or less on the rise and fighting for basic infrastructure and survival production-wise. But if we wish to discuss the difference in the field of aesthetic articulation of bodies in general now that the dialogue has been going on for the entire decade, the answer is much more complex and connected with the basic evasiveness of the autonomous body.
To answer this question we first have to discover how symptomatic the views of the West are as regarding the East. The views are fragile, often showing a picture that does not in fact exist, or an image that we cannot see. On one hand we are dealing with an almost institutionalized autonomous body of contemporary dance, which managed to bring the beginner's enthusiasm over its own autonomy of movement almost to perfection. By means of pedagogical and other more or less developed infrastructural production networks, the Western body is trained to the maximum, with a number of techniques at its disposal and an almost representative relation to the present. Sometimes it seems as if the history of discontinuity got trapped within the loop of continuity. The dancing body of the East, however, seems to be having problems with articulation. That body somehow embarrasses us and we need a specific horizon within which we can watch it. Let me just enumerate some of the horizons that the most successful Slovene groups take abroad with them. The point of entrance for Iztok Kovac and his En knap troupe is Trbovlje, Kovac's hometown and a center of mining industry where traces of devastating socialist industry are still evident. Trbovlje does present part of the artist's personal mythology but at the same time it presents a communication network by means of which his hyperactive athletic bodies talk to the public. For Kovač, Trbovlje represents a network that only seemingly facilitates the view, since it is highly misleading: the autonomy of his body is in fact bound to a certain image but an attentive observer could detect another (for example Kovač's almost metaphysical obsession with the structure of movement, etc.). Similar goes for the other two authors, Matjaž Pograjc (the Betontanc company) and Branko Potočan (Fourklor), who take war and various Balkan associations abroad with them. In this case, the view of the West is that which breaks in advance, seeing only what it wants to see. But this is characteristic for any gaze regarding what in advance has been determined different (same goes for the performances from the even further East – Japan, for example, which we always consider within a specific horizon of technology).
Thus we again find ourselves at the spot where we can try to answer the question with the original concept of the body autonomy poets and philosophers at the beginning of the century so keenly reflected on. The right to different history is the one that is revealed by the autonomous body. The autonomous body participates in it and evasively establishes it. The development of the Western contemporary dance has turned the autonomy of the body into a specific privilege while its external appearance is defined by technical perfection and multiplicity of techniques. Due to the ruthless dictation from the present, the position of which is almost monumental in contemporary dance, we feel uncomfortable whenever we are faced with something different, with the past, and we are incapable of finding a language to describe that which is different. Western gaze is therefore still hesitant when it comes to attributing autonomy of the body to the Eastern practices. In other words, the autonomy of the body is always bound to the image the West has about it. But the original concept of the autonomy of the physical - in the sense poets and philosophers mentioned at the beginning of this essay had about it – has no desire to binding it to anything, just as it does not present any image of it apart from metaphorical poetic allegories. Autonomy is primarily a field of different history, a field of letting the body constantly disappear thus showing us a dispersed image, a field within which the hunt for its original image never ends.
Conclusion
Despite everything, we can in fact detect a difference between the beginner's enthusiasm and the established status of the autonomous body in the art of the theatre today. After the body had appeared in front of us literally decomposed, fragmented and subjected to processes of deconstruction in the name of its autonomy, after the beginner's enthusiasm about discovering the Dionysian autonomous body had long faded away and had turned into an Apolinic repetitiveness of techniques, the necessity to once again reconsider their disharmonious and non-linear history and face it with new fields seems unavoidable. In the conclusion, I would like to emphasize the two problems that still condition our contact with the field of autonomy of the body to be extremely problematic due to endless possibilities (or impossibilities) of its aesthetic articulation. A different history shimmering through the autonomous body has still not revealed all of its stories, all of its marginal identities and traumatic searching for articulation of the autonomous body. The project of setting as under the heterogeneous pockets and differences is far from being completed, what is more, in the time when bodies are more and more becoming uniform, such project proves to be a basic need. Furthermore, we must not forget the fact that the beginner's enthusiasm has long been replaced by doubting the bodies per se, especially when encountering the bodies of the "disturbingly alive" (Harraway) cyborgs, reproductions, clones, invalid bodies of the present (Virilio), etc. The vision of an autonomous dancing body, to which poets and philosophers at the beginning of the century admitted an enviable primacy due to its evasiveness and simultaneous uniformity, today seems somewhat superfluous, lacking a real, convincing relation towards the ecstatic present. A reason more for philosophy to once again embrace the dancing body and by means of this unique metaphor examine whether it is still possible to appoint it with the exclusiveness of a self-rotating wheel (Nietzsche) or whether this exclusiveness is slowly being stolen by some other reality.