I have been fortunate enough to spend several weeks in Vienna at the world’s leading dance festival, Impulstanz. The festival is a vast, sprawling entity consisting of workshops, residencies, courses for professionals— and likewise, performances. Lots of performances. Multiple performances each evening, some of which never repeat and last late into unruly hours of the night.

As it was impossible to attend all of these numerous performances, I focused my attention on solos, especially by emerging artists working at the borders between dance and “performance” more broadly construed. Since there were more such performances than I can describe in deep detail, I propose in this post to give my “impressions,” beginning with a few general observations.

1) The Identity Crisis.

First, a little background.

Contemporary dance is in the midst of an identity crisis. This crisis is the natural result of a succeeding series of stylistic developments that started with Pina Bausch, whose use of theatrical conventions increasingly seems to define dance. As is well-known, Bausch’s Tanztheater inspired a second generation of choreographers (Vandekeybus, Stuart, de Keersmaeker, Fabre) during the nineties in a movement whose epicenter was in Belgium. Twenty years later, many of these choreographers are still on the main stages at Impulstanz. Even though their early work remains relevant and important— by all accounts, Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker’s restaging of Elena’s Aria from 1985 was a festival highlight— they have long since ceased to represent the forefront of artistic innovation. Quite to the contrary, these choreographers have regressed into relatively conservative aesthetic frameworks, as exemplified by Wim Vandekeybus’ recent return to the quintessential dramatic narrative, Oedipus Rex.

It is also a well-established fact that this second wave of Tanztheater-inspired choreography gave way during the last decade to solo artists based in France, whose admirers have dubbed it “conceptual” dance. It is not my intention to describe this movement here. I only want to note that this movement too has peaked and begun to pass, as is evident when looking at the primacy of French dance at Impulstanz several years ago.

With the passing of conceptual dance, choreographers are left with a banal question: what’s next? Judging from this year’s performances, I would say that a solid period of self-reckoning is in order— rather than thinking forward towards the next new thing, dance may be approaching a period of historical reflection and reorganization. I, for one, think that this work is long overdue in numerous artistic fields, which often rely on unexamined precepts inherited from previous artistic periods. Most contemporary theatre and dance returns to problems and ideas initially encountered in post-war performance.

This influence of postwar experimental performance was at least implicitly acknowledged at Impulstanz. Several artists staged artistic encounters with luminaries of performance from the sixties: Eszter Salamon invoked John Cage; Trajal Harrell examined the legacy of Judson Dance; an Austrian-based trio produced a “vegan” version of Viennese Actionism ; and former Forsythe dancer Tony Rizzi cast himself as the “new” Jack Smith. At worst, they are suffering from a concept popularized by Harold Bloom, the anxiety of influence. As I will describe below, this is certainly the case for Tony Rizzi. At best, these performances have the potential to begin a substantial undertaking: examining the influence, limitations and unresolved problems stemming from postwar experimental performance in order to consciously reconstruct the aesthetic foundations for choreographic practice— one which may detach dance from its recent dependence on theatrical and narrative form.

(I have begun elsewhere to discuss aspects of this transition. My previous post alludes to a forthcoming piece on the autobiographical impulse in William Forsythe and Ralph Lemon’s choreography.)

Based on my impressions below, it will be perfectly clear where I feel that certain have artists fallen. But before proceeding, I would like to offer one more observation.

2) The (relative) decline of European dance

As described above, European choreographers have dominated dance for three decades. There are invariably exceptions to this statement, but I have long believed that European work has defined the field. Nevertheless, the 2011 Impulstanz Festival seemed to indicate a shift away from the unrivaled predominance of European dance. Much to my surprise, American choreographers assumed increasing prominence in the festival. In fact, among the admittedly incomplete selection of performances that I saw, the best were by American choreographers: Marie Chouinard and Trajal Harrell.

However, it would be premature— or better yet, inaccurate— to declare the preeminence of American performance. On the contrary, I believe that its resurgence suggests that the transatlantic division between Europe and North America is ceasing to define dance culture. (I would love to call this “global,” but there was an exclusive emphasis on Western dance traditions at the festival.)

Does this matter? Well, yes and no. It could certainly have implications for practitioners. The rise of an autonomous dance scene in the U.S. and Canada with connections to Europe could have a significant impact on the future of emerging choreographers. But what about in theoretical terms? Ultimately, what matters most at this point is the archeological act: like other artistic fields, performance is in a period of transition that will only be solved through active self-examination leading to the informed reconstruction of its fundamental premises and conventions.

In the early seventies, Julia Kristeva wrote a short, but beautifully insightful essay  in which she claimed that experimental theatre and dance had become the testing ground for the development of a “new subject” that would no longer defined as a particular and exclusive locus for individual consciousness— a subject criss-crossed by multiplicity, “a multitude of stories (histories) and spaces where totalitarianism cannot extend its grasp.”  But while waiting for this space of multiplicity, (which Kristeva refers to as “language,” by the way) to arrive, she reminds her reader that theatre merely offers temporary solution by staving off ideological domination. In order to achieve this new form of subjectivity, theatre must itself undergo a fundamental transformation. In other words, theatre must cease to be theatre. It must also cease to be the framework for dance, which means re-examining the legacy of Bausch’s Tanztheater in terms of earlier questions raised in post-war performance.

If not Kristeva’s “new subject,” I hope to have seen tentative traces of this project at Impulstanz this summer.

Part II: Impressions of Impulstanz7

(Listed according to the order in which I saw them.)

Eszter Salamon, dance for nothing

As described on her website (linked above), in this solo she recited John Cage’s 1949 “Lecture on Nothing” while performing a series of repetitious idiosyncratic gestures devoid of dramatic effect. Despite their intentionally uninteresting appearance, these gestures had an elusively appealing stylistic consistency that could be considered in further detail. In short, I liked it. Quite a bit. The absence of dramatic expression and its understated eccentricity reminded me of Rainer’s Trio A, more so than any recent piece I have seen. Like Trio A, dance for nothing was designed to achieve nothing, to go nowhere, and achieve no visible effect. Rainer also had a conflicted relationship with Cage, and Salamon’s recitation could be seen as invoking the ambivalence of their relationship, if not the ambivalence of Cage’s subtle but decisive influence on post-war dance. However, dance for nothing could equally be a demonstration of Salamon’s ambivalence towards this historical lineage— or even her emotional and intellectual detachment from Cage’s influence and innovations. In this regard, it was significant that she treated  ”Lecture on Nothing” as an indifferent textual material that constituted a continuously droning background to her choreography. Like Trio A, dance for nothing deliberately avoided virtuosic movement, but it also was likely difficult to perform, especially while delivering the entirety of Cage’s text. The task (a very Judson word) of maintaining this state of split attention— which produced an appearance of distraction— seemed to be one of the principal purposes of the piece. I am tempted to call it a “peripheral relationship” with the audience. At the same time, the act of reciting Cage’s text could also be interpreted as a mindless repetition, which does not necessarily correlate to an internalized state of understanding. (Indeed, English was not Salamon’s first language, and one could only speculate about the possible slippages of meaning between languages and cultural contexts.) Such mindless repetition would be merely mechanical and thus contrary to the premises of performance, which is conventionally held to be “live.” Whether intended or not, the question and challenge to the presumption of liveness in dance for nothing was perhaps its most intriguing aspect for me (and yes, very relevant to my research), a fact that was underscored by Cage’s own words as mediated through Salamon’s performance: “The phonograph is a thing, not a musical instrument.”

Wim Vandekeybus, Oedipus Rex/Bête Noire

Wim Vandekeybus belongs to the vanguard of second-wave Flemish Tanztheater. Oedipus Rex was an excellent example of how some these second-wave artists have regressed into artistic mediocrity. There is not much to say about Oedipus Rex. It featured a live fusion rock band (European art rock at its worst), an overwrought installation on which performers could climb, and a narrative— in fact, the Ur-narrative, the story of Oedipus. Amid these conventional elements of a middling theatrical mise-en-scene, the crude physical boldness of Vandkeybus’ early choreography was an afterthought, an odd anachronism from twenty years hence that had ceased to develop.

Marie Chouinard, Les Trous du Ciel and Henri Michaux: Mouvements

In the twenty years that separated these two pieces, Marie Chouinard has emerged from Montréal to become one of the luminaries of contemporary choreography. She was a festival headliner, and with good reason: her work is bold, brilliant, visually dynamic, and scintillatingly virtuosic. There’s nevertheless a strongly essentialist streak in her work, which has been manifest in her striking, but flawed foray into prosthetically-supplemented ballets. The source of this essentialism was evident in Les Trous du Ciel and Mouvements, which drew on two related avant-garde movements, primitivism and surrealism. Les Trous du Ciel was based on Inuit mythology, and Mouvements was a choreographic adaptation of a book (with the same title, Mouvements) of ink drawings and poetry by Henri Michaux.

As an illustration of a text, Mouvements could have easily lent itself to broad and easy audience appeal. At first, it seemed like a mere exercise in fanciful adaptation. Figures flashed on the screen, which a solo dancer sought to recreate in choreographic positions. But set to the background of blaring electronic music by Louis Dufort, the dance quickly evolved into an overlapping series of successive, accelerating patterning by convoluted groups until it reached a catastrophic conclusion, in which the company took turns dancing, nearly nude, in a single spotlight on stage. It was downright Dionysian. And the thematic continuity with Les Trous du Ciel— which was literally about tribes— was impossible to overlook.

There are many interesting observations and connections to be made about the two works, as well as the general direction of Chouinard’s work. She is self-consciously continuing the language of the French avant-garde in way that is faithful to its original aims, intensity, and Dionysian character. (This was a refreshing reminder not to forget the violence inherent in Michaux’s seemingly ephemeral and ludic paintings.) Furthermore, the intensity realized in Chouinard’s work has permitted it to extend the language of avant-garde aesthetics into interrelated areas of inquiry that I believe of currently of great importance— namely, media, movement, and sound.

However, her work does not recognize or challenge any of the problematic tendencies in avant-garde aesthetics, which makes it politically unpalatable for communities excluded from traditional representation, such as women or ethnic minorities, including Native Americans. The pronounced primitivism of Les Trous du Ciel was abandoned in her recent prosthetically- ballets, her breakthrough use of prosthetics has troubling implications for people with disabilities.   (One astute student of mine called it “simply offensive.”) Although these prosthetics had (thankfully) vanished in Mouvements, I nevertheless believe that this line of criticism could still be applied to the piece— which was enthralling, by the way.

Trajal Harrell, Three Versions of Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at Judson Church: (M)imosa, (S), and (XS)

Before proceeding, I need to make a disclaimer: in November, Trajal will be teaching at my university, Colorado College! Fortunately, I have exceedingly positive impressions of Trajal’s work, but I am loathe to dish out my informal opinions in a public forum that is accessible to students. So it must suffice to share a few basic observations.

1) Trajal’s work is strongly influenced by French conceptual dance.

2) Given the pressure placed on physical movement and genre by conceptual dance, his evocation of Judson is a natural next step.

3) It is very personal and emotionally moving. This was a pleasant surprise. As a result of this, I felt a greater affinity for the smalller, more deliberately intimate pieces than the more boisterously and eclectic queer cabaret in (M)imosa.

4) I am curious to see how the project continues to evolve.

5) There will be a lot to discuss in November.

Chris Haring/Liquid Loft, The Perfect Garden

As a Vienna-based choreographer, Chris Haring attracted large audiences at the festival, even though The Perfect Garden was a weak piece. In its favor, its weaknesses were formally self-consistent and clearly established by its set, which consisted of a number of cheaply handmade devices for producing an effusion of bubbly soap suds. This endless sea of suds was the site for Haring’s ostensibly playful choreography. The choreography and set alike were predicated on a superficial artistic inquiry, which had halted its process at an early stage of development prior to the emergence of an established structure. As such, it remained in a state of pre-structural limbo that precluded the articulation of clear differences. Similar to the womb, this pre-structural state transformed all content into an undifferentiated mass— literally, a mass of child-like soap suds, or the vicious liquid vinyl that was poured onstage at the conclusion of the performance.

Although this image seems to have been a staged photo shoot (rather than a scene from the performance), it provides an image of the bubble-making machines that dominated its decor and concept.

There was a lot of work left undone here. A quick look at the other piece he performed at the festival— in which online faces are warped into grotesque, fluid masses— suggests that this is not an isolated incidence in his work, but an unexamined and flawed formal premise.

David Zambrano & Zeena Parkins, Zeta

For someone with Zambrano’s apparent success (see link above), this was an astonishingly inept piece. Instead of an improvisation, it simply seemed unprepared and relied on hackneyed dramatic expression to evoke a vague emotional atmosphere.

I would conclude my observations here, but there is one unfortunate note to add: I was dismayed to see that he will be performing at the Walker Art Center in 2012.

Christine Gaigg, Seven Cuts

Among the unrestrained stylistic diversity on display at ImpulsTanz, it was surprising to see Christine Gaigg’s surprising conventional choreography in Seven Cuts. In Seven Cuts, two dancers performed a series a seven solos that were staged in successive segments along a thin straight line. It was no surprise that their pattern— (in contrast to say, Salamon’s circuitous repetitions or Chouinard’s demonic drive towards catastrophe)— moved in the same pattern as reading, from left to right. Seven Cuts relied on the most fundamental and conservative framework for choreography, a text.

This text was both verbal and musical. After each “cut,” Gaigg came on stage to read from her journal, in which she recounted her artistic motivations (“to make contemporary dance personal”), physical ailments, and philosophical reflections (a great quotation on ticks from Giorgio Agamben’s The Open). These were the most interesting parts of the performance and related to an increasing interest in autobiographical expression in contemporary dance. However, I was never entirely moved or surprised by these declarations, even though I assumed that they were probably true. In Barthes terms, they lacked a punctum, that moment in which it is possible to perceive the potent proximity of personal experience, its “ça-a-été” or fact of having once been.

But the openness of such personal expression was precluded by the presence of a limiting textual framework, music. The piece was a collaboration with an Austrian composer, Bernhard Gander, and the Klangforum Wien. Although it did not seem that each step had been attached to a particular preexisting note, the music arguably operated as the proverbial voice of dance, a form of expression whose enunciation and notation compensated for dance’s transitory and insubstantial nature.

Which reminds me— there was also choreography. It was clean, precise, swift, and clear. Accomplished and uninteresting, much like the quality of the contemporary musical compositional and the conceptual foundations of Seven Cuts itself.

Cie. Tony Rizzi, An Attempt to Fail at Groundbreaking Theatre with Pina Arcade Smith

Isn’t this title reminiscent of another piece of overly self-conscious and derivative (see this nice little piece from the Times Magazine on David Foster Wallace) fiction, Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius? Whether or not you agree with that comparison, there’s no question that Rizzi had entirely failed to use his self-referential and self-questioning style to create a coherent piece of theatre.

This style was itself borrowed from William Forsythe’s 2002 performance, Kammer/Kammer, in which Rizzi starred as the former lover of an unnamed rock star (presumably Michael Stipe). As a result of his romantic rejection, Rizzi’s character collapsed into depression and self-doubt, which were expressed through an unusual means: a stylized whine with which he petulantly upbraided his audience. In Kammer/Kammer, this voice was part of a complicated thematic thread that he would subsequently develop in his acclaimed dance, Decreation. However, ten years later in Rizzi’s hands, this stylized depiction of craven, thwarted desire was disconnected from this— or seemingly any— line of inquiry.

I would like to see Rizzi succeed. But the apparent popularity of this performance and its inclusion in the festival, is evidently the product of his affiliation with Forsythe. Rather than Pina Bausch, Penny Arcade, or Jack Smith, it may well be Forsythe’s shadow that colors An Attempt to Fail.

Introduction to Schwarz auf Weiss, Cornell University, February 23, 2010

As an artist, Heiner Goebbels is the quintessential Grenzgänger, an exceptional individual who inhabits the worlds of both contemporary theatre and music.  Although Goebbels has occasionally expressed concerns about the critical reception of his hybrid artistic identity, he moves among both disciplines’ most elite, international circles.  For instance, he worked with the iconic German playwright Heiner Müller in the late eighties– incidentally, Goebbels credits these collaborations with Müller as his defining breakthrough– French choreographer Mathilde Monnier, and is a habitual headliner at festivals and theatres across the globe.  He is also a professor and managing director of The Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus-Liebig-Universität in Giessen, where he has taught courses on Brecht, the aesthetics of the city, sound art, and a current seminar on French novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Despite that fact that Goebbels considers himself to be “not in the center… of contemporary music… somebody who’s between the chairs”– he cites interests in heavy metal, Hans Eisler, and the Beach Boys as evidence of this outsider status–  his musical resume is equally impressive.  Since the early nineties, his work has been recorded in ECM’s venerable New Music Series.  He has collaborated with renowned musical groups, including the Ensemble Modern and The Hilliard Ensemble, and has become a regular guest at the Berlin Philharmonic, whose conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, describes him in rhapsodic terms as an irreproducible “one-off.”

Goebbels’ ability to negotiate the realms of theatre and music is more than a virtuosic feat– it has been integral to the development of his singular artistic idiom.  However, his fluency in these two disciplines was not an innate ability.  He struggled with his first position as the resident composer for a relatively traditional theatre in Frankfurt, where it was necessary to subordinate music to visual mise-en-scene.  Dissatisfied with theatre, he preferred his purely musical pursuits in experimental bands, such as the So-Called Leftist Revolutionary Wind Orchestra and his art rock trio Cassiber.  Of course, the excess of these raucous sonic displays bore little resemblance to the mysterious, muted melancholy that characterizes his musical theatre.

It is worth noting that even for an experienced spectator of contemporary performance, Goebbels’ work is remarkably odd.  In part, its quietly quizzical character can be attributed to fundamental differences with traditional theatre: a Goebbels performance generally lacks spoken dialogue, character development, and plot.  As in Black on White, little seems to happen.  The stage is apparently uninhabited– and perhaps abandoned– by proper actors.  Rather than actors, its occupants are the members of the Ensemble Modern.  Having been driven from their seats, they aimlessly roam, unattended and idly entertaining themselves with the only language they know, music.

Even if their apparent lack of purpose seems strange, these musicians at least provide a familiar human presence.  In other works, Goebbels aspires to a theatre devoid of human performers.  For instance, his 2007 work, Stifter’s Things, replaces actors with mechanical substitutes: a robotic voice reads recorded text and an awkwardly constructed contraption of fragmented pianos serves as an eerily self-aware musical instrument and uncanny puppet assemblage.

Despite the exceptionally odd character of such devices, it would be erroneous not to consider Goebbels’ work as part of a broader context of contemporary performance.  Indeed, its opposition to dialogue, character, and plot are established conventions of experimental theatre.  In such experimental theatre, instead of presenting coherent characters, performers embody nameless formal forces.  In the absence of character-driven events, theatre’s formal framework becomes extrinsic content.  In Black on White, a symmetrical grid of empty benches– which reflects the audience’s immobile position and perspective– depicts the stark structural limits of theatre’s literal and narrative space.  Goebbels’ stage resembles the ruins of narrative itself, a proverbial prison-house of meaning through which his ensemble wanders.  However, whereas most theatre emphasizes the unassailable nature of this structure– and its catastrophic force– Black on White accepts these limits with enigmatic equanimity.  Its inhabitants seem unpreoccupied, and even idle, as if indefinitely waiting for something definitive or meaningful to occur.

Given this uneventful quality, it may seem that Goebbels consciously avoids narrative.  Nevertheless, Goebbels always embeds a story– literally a literary text– into his theatre.  He is a passionate reader with consummate taste for high modernist authors, be it T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, or Franz Kafka.  Black on White stages texts by two such exemplary modernists, Edgar Allen Poe and Maurice Blanchot.  However, Goebbels presents their writing in a way that fundamentally differs from the traditional dramatic exposition of a narrative and subsequent attempts to resist author and text.  Although both stories are present in the first moments of the performance– the scribbling hand you will see is transcribing Blanchot’s 1962 novella Awaiting Oblivion– neither is ever manifest.  On the contrary, the richly fantastic events they relate remain irretrievably occluded and foreclosed.

Not only are its events foreclosed, but narrative encloses the voice that enunciates them.  This irremediable distance from the speaker is actually the subject of the Poe short story, “Shadow: A Parable.”  Its first line addresses the reader from across the grave: “Ye who read are still among the living: but I who write will shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows.”  In Black on White, this reference to the narrator’s death is literal: the speaking voice is a recording of Goebbel’s pivotal artistic partner, playwright Heiner Müller, who had recently succumbed to cancer.

Composed in 1996, a year after his death, Black on White was intended as a tribute– and farewell– to Müller.  However, despite this very real loss, its tone is not necessarily mournful.  Faithful to Müller’s own irrepressible humor, Black on White is surprisingly playful, perhaps because for Goebbels, the mortal division imposed by narrative form is not absolute.  Albeit mysterious, Goebbels’ works are not mysteries, which like Poe’s detective stories, are meant to be deciphered and reconstructed.  It is possible to appreciate his theatre’s humor and sonorous diversity for its own sake, without recourse to expertise, interpretation, or an introduction.   Please enjoy.

In Rankine's Bus: The Provenance of Beauty

I am developing a new course to be taught next semester that examines the oppositions and intersections of poetry in modern, and espeically 20th century drama– and as I have already explained several times, no, we are definitively not reading a survey of tedious closet dramas.

For some time now, I have also been working on particular, peculiar female artists. One of them, poet Claudia Rankine, has developed a new theatre piece in collaboration with the New York-based company Foundry Theatre. Taking its author’s childhood in the South Bronx as a point of departure, it assumes an unusual form: a bus tour with a prerecorded voice and one live actor. This form, the precorded tour, seems to be in vogue. I last experienced something similar in sound/performance artist duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Ghost Machine , which I suspect is more technically sophisticated, but aesthetically less innovative than the possibilities offered by Rankine’s poetic idiom.

An image from Ghost Machine, in which spectators toured Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer Theater in pursuit of a recorded narrative. Technically extremely accomplished.

I was particularly interested by a comment that she made in a recent interview regarding the challenges of making her poetic approach meet the demands of a director, whose language is founded in dramatic action:

“I think that the form came to meet me. Initially the expectation from Melanie was a very performative text and I have always lived in a very contemplative text. And so the idea of going from a field of contemplation into an active space was frightening to me. And not something that I naturally know how to do. So, what had to happen was we had to both kind of move towards each other. My notion of character became the character of the play but I don’t think it would have ever initially been Melanie’s idea of character. But I think in the end it is the right choice. I think that the reason she asked me to do this is because there was, I have to believe, I guess, that this is the way that perhaps she actually wanted to go. I think that we both initially were working from where we knew. And so a lot of the process has been coming closer to each other. She has to stand in the meditative moment and I had to move forward in the performative moment.”

This might be one for which to break quarantine in Ithaca…

A video trailer of the tour is available here:

THE PROVENANCE OF BEAUTY. from Sunder Ganglani on Vimeo.

Moreover, this digital forum permits me to add a few comments regarding the context of its composition.  For better or worse, I had locked myself into concisely describing performances by three different choreographers, and the bulk of my efforts were necessarily dedicated to developing an adequate framework of descriptive criticism.  As a result, I treated its various areas of conceptual interest with equal– that is, indifferent– emphasis.  Its principle terms, especially “the break,” would have likely benefitted from further levels of differentiation, but unfortunately there was insufficiently time to do more than hint at its theoretical inspirations and ambitions.

For instance, “the break” is derived from Samuel Weber’s “Theatricality as a Medium.”  It is a generalized term for the material inclusion of negated content within representation– the fractious borders of fiction.  At the end of its first chapter, Weber connects the immemorial institution of theatre with the “commerical break,” to which contemporary masses have been conditioned:

“This new situation [global mass media and the commercial break] is determined by a tension betwen anticipation and reflection, storytelling and interruption, that has a long history, reaching back to the emergence of theatre itself.  In the follwing chapter we will discuss a few of these earliest articulations in order to explore how the medium of theatre has, from its inception, responded to the enduring desire to survive the break” (Theatricality 53).

What does the “medium” of theatre mean?  Why does Weber just not write “theatre,” which would be equally effective in the above passage?  In short, Weber’s titular term indicates his desire to do more than merely “to survive the break,” but rather to integrate it into representation in such a way that representation no longer “works”– or for that matter, is an autonomous “work.”

This shifts the discussion into murky, esoteric territory.  Accordingly, Weber turns to Heidegger, perhaps 20th century philosophy’s most enduringly ambivalent figure, as he begins to transform his definition of “the break.”  Considered as a loose translation of Heidegger’s “Riß,” Weber states that the break ” is a tear that does not simply pull apart but in separating joins” (63-4).  Such language appears throughout Weber’s recent writing, most notably in connection with the notion of “imparting,” a translation of Benjamin’s– (this may seem like one to many proper names, but Weber is ultimately a reader and student of Benjamin, so it is inevitable)– “Mitteilung,” which features prominently in his early essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.”  This is the subject of a chapter in Weber’s new book, “Benjamin’s -abilities,” which I picked up shortly before leaving for Zagreb.  To my delight, the title of the chapter was “Impart-ability: Language as Medium.”  Evidently, language and medium are conceptually intertwined, but how exactly?  What is the medium? And what does this have to do with dance?

Given the descriptive labor concerning Mantero, Hay, and Forsythe that I had imposed upon myself, any explication of the medium seemed beyond question.  As regards its relation to dance– I have long since intended to consider Forsythe’s work in relation to such “impart-ability,” and I was surprised and pleased when attending Forsythe’s newest work on June 28, 2009 in Dresden, “The Returns,” to find that its word-play principally involved “art, part, and apart.”

Needless to say, such intersections fell beyond the scope of my talk, as well as other major themes, including translation, concepts of non-unified representation, and a turn in theatrical aesthetics from predominantly visual to aural expression– a way of getting “in touch” with the medium.  Moderator Paul Rae having mentioned translation as possible transition between my talk and the following presentation of a performance-in-progress by Aberystwyth University’s Gareth Evans and Esther Pilkington, “Would You Like to Learn My Language?”, I know that I at least successfully hinted at a few of these themes, and later Rae suggested reading Alphonso Lingis’ writings on corporeal-environmental “feedback loops.”  (This also begins to tread into the terrain of the digital, but that’s a subject best left for later…)

Ultimately, I ended with more questions than I was even able to begin to ask.  Above all, perhaps, is the looming, unfathomable subject of language.  I was a bit nervous about embarking, poorly prepared, upon this path, and indeed I did draw one contentious, albeit possibly reductive question from a Croatian student who felt that Vera Mantero’s work was “pure Derrida.”  But can one face language, an impertuably massive subject, with complete preparation?  Especially when approached through the materials of my discipline, it’s not a task I intend to realize all at once, even though I am intuitively certain that language is the right place to be, as per a quotation from Kristeva I have kept in mind for the last three years, since the advent of my linguistic and gender turn:

For if modern theater does not take (a) place, it is only as of late, as a new subject
and a new society, here and especially in France, are running up against too many
archaic constructs (economic and ideological). This obliges playwrights and actors
either to play complacently with the verisimilitude of an antiquating society’s anti-
quating fantasies (a narcissistic and debilitating accommodatior,), or, in the best
situations, to develop a technical arsenal of “alienation” (the “Ontological Hysteric
Theater” of Richard Foreman), of Brechtian distance, thus keeping the audience’s
lucidity removed from a criticizable discourse or ideology, all the while waiting for the
coming of a “place”: the remaking of language.

Certainly, language is emerging, in dance, as a medium, and the question that remains is not how, but why?

***

“Murmurs, Mispronunciations, and Malentendus: The Medium of Language in Recent Choreography by Mantero, Hay, and Forsythe”

As you can see from my title, I am addressing the emergence of language in dance.  In order to demonstrate that this is not merely an incidental, isolated event, but rather a collective phenomenon– the incipient articulation of some emergent form– I am going to cover three different examples from no later than 2006, and I’m going to have to move quickly.

Just in case you don’t happen to recognize these three proper names– this is a panel on performance and language, after all– it is important to have at least a little context:

At around 40, the Portuguese choreographer Vera Mantero is the youngest of the three.  Since her breakout solos in the nineties, in which she interpreted culturally marginal feminine celebrities, such as Josephine Baker and Manet’s Olympia, she’s used little conventional dance technique, but consistently experimented with language.  As a result, she’s been critically associated with European “conceptual” choreographers.

Deborah Hay was one of the principal members of Judson Dance Theater, whose work during the sixties in New York is an indispensably canonical moment in contemporary dance history.  Hay subsequently retreated into isolation in Texas and the ethereal abstraction of opaquely optimistic Buddhist espousals.  Since 2004 she has consistently returned to New York, where she won a Bessie [(for what that’s worth)] and has received renewed international attention.  [aside: and I saw the piece I’ll discuss in Berlin]

Finally, William Forsythe is one of the widely celebrated practicing choreographers.  He came to prominence in the 80s and 90s for his cerebral, hyper-complex ballets, which use computer technology to push the limits of physically possible form.  It’s important to note that since the city of Frankfurt dissolved his state-financed company in 2004, his idiom has vastly shifted, a fact which has fully reached the U.S. since he resides and primarily works in Frankfurt and Dresden.

Introductions aside, before proceeding into detail, I think it’s necessary to establish a few premises regarding my research and the state of contemporary choreography.

First of all, I contend that this emergence of language does not constitute a generalization of dance.  It is not simply the product of dance belatedly entering the territory of conventional theatre– so-called dancetheatre– and its language is not naturalistic, ordinary, or even autonomous.  On the contrary, this language remains grounded in the history of choreography’s materials and techniques.

Like other disciplines before it, choreography has reached a historical impasse: dance finds itself increasingly unable to maintain a stable representational continuum.  Whether this is the result of external pressures– a response to general cultural acceleration or influences from other artistic practices– or the logical evolution of its own internal form, this instability manifests itself as an immobilizing disjunction.

For instance, Vera Mantero’s choreography, from her earliest solos until her present group work, admirably illustrates this critical condition.

As I mentioned, her work is often considered “conceptual” insomuch as it uses little movement and thematizes immobility.  This was immediately conveyed by the mise-en-scene of her 2006 work, Until the moment when God is destroyed by the extreme exercise of beauty.  The performers are seated almost the entire performance, restricted to a small strip of the stage, and furthermore– that is a meteor behind them, an enormous, ironically redundant reminder of immobility.  It’s also worth noting that the meteor is a densely compressed substance, which is literally outlandish, much like its garishly attired performers.

Their stylized seating reflects the audience’s stasis and draws attention to the performer-spectator gap– an ineluctably constitutive limit of theatrical relation.  Confronting this limit is uncomfortable, and Mantero’s guests– that’s how they are billed, “Vera Mantero and Guests”– never seem at home on the stage.  Their nervously eager, absent-minded conduct betrays this discomfort, which is somehow comic and sweetly sympathetic– it is all too easy to recognize their anxiety from the innumerable instances of everyday life in which one is put on trial, tested, or otherwise asked to perform.  These scenarios and their corresponding anxiety are reactions to an underlying aesthetic condition, which one might refer to as the real, but which I prefer to call the break– the fundamental discontinuity to which choreography is presently bound.  Faced by the break, they literally begin to chatter– that is, both to tremble and to profusely and pointlessly talk, even though they cannot seem to recall why or to what end.  This obliviousness pervades their speech, whose syntax proceeds through evasions, ellipses, qualifications, questioning repetitions, irrelevant exclamations, dazed diversion, etc. etc.  In short, they rely on a repertoire of rhetorical detritus, common to ordinary speech, but antithetical to philosophical seriousness and superfluous to meaning.

In case you didn’t catch it, en route to thank you, they passed through “say taste strain straighten stay tray and state.”  Compounded by the performers’ competing confusion, collective uncertainty, and multiple mispronunciations, this scene exemplifies the morphing mutability of overlapping words, which move throughout the performance between pure sonorous value– the hissing “s’s”– and conventional referential function organized around subject statements– I, you, and in this case, “we.”  This roundabout process of expression permits a glimpse into an expanded range of possible articulation, even if merely consisting of quaintly insignificant variations.  It’s a virtuosic feat to make this muddle clear and chaotic at once.  In this regard, their ensemble coordination resembles a dance– in the traditional sense of maintaining an event’s impossible point of ideal unity– and its wobbling, fumbling, bumbling movement back and forth is– in an admittedly superficial way– a kind of weaving dance.  However, this swaying, almost drunken movement– note their party-like costumes and the reference to dionysus– actually reflects the rupture captured by Mantero’s visual contradiction, her meteor, an unmistakably ironic image of immobility.  Since the tension between [immobility and dance] can never be resolved, Mantero’s guests must stay in constant verbal motion.  They cannot stop because their speech compensates for the structural inadequacy that they literally face, but cannot see– that is, the break.  And because they can neither explain nor mend this gap, they endlessly excuse themselves and over-sollicitously thank their audience.

Language also assures structural continuity in Deborah Hay’s 2008 If I Sing To You.  The two pieces share other key characteristics, including constant, instable motion, an evident ethos of distraction, and a bittersweetly comic consolation that harbors desire for an unbroken communal place.  Even more than Mantero’s guests, who are certainly steeped in camp, Hay’s all-female cast situates this desire in queer, specifically lesbian terms.

There are neither men, a set, nor an apparent conflict (as was grounded in Mantero’s visual structure).  Rather than emphasizing visibility,

Hay’s strangely corresponding costumes strive to be no more nor less noticed than members of traditional genders or sexual orientations– to be, in a sense, visible, but indistinguishably blending into the context of ordinary life.  [Judson ordinary?]  Instead of conflict, If I Sing to You radiates an elusive harmony, which as will shortly be seen, corresponds to its titular reference to song– the only recognizable words in the performance.  [future ref to H.G.]  Its predominant language is a diffused– vs. the density of Mantero’s meteor– chorus of murmurs, weird whispers, and incomprehensible muttering.

(video: comes in at “climatic” singing, please ignore shutter sounds, pay attention to language at start)

Quite to the contrary of Mantero, who plays between given meanings and sound, this is evidently a private language, perhaps even a fantasy language, which has no externally determined referential function.  Since she is willing to sacrifice intelligibility for continuity across its visual, aural, and even choreographic elements, Hay’s use of language constitutes a more radical challenge. [elaborate?]  Unfortunately, I don‘t have much footage of her richly intricate choreography, which combines a myriad of minute inflections, partial phrases, and small shifts in balance.  [maybe video: here’s what i’ve got-- it’s a bit blurry] Moreover, the dance consistently produces a soft background of shuffling and squeaking.

[picture: note sneakers-- squeaking intentional]

Other choreographers — notably such as William Forsythe– have also experimented with incidental noise in order to convey the body’s irreducibly resistant materiality.  But unlike such attempts, which emphasize the friction between the body and the stage, Hay’s choreographic noise connects to and compliments its strange spoken language.  As such, regardless of whether or not Hay’s quietly revolutionary avenue of inquiry is a sufficient answer to the break, it establishes a fundamental connection between movement and language.

Despite If I Sing to You having premiered at The Forsythe Company’s home in Dresden, this connection between movement and language may be the sole trait common to Hay and Forsythe.  Nevertheless, Forsythe’s language does not evidently complement his choreography.  Since his celebrated, complex ballets, Forsythe’s choreography has tested the limits of technically possible form, and its increasingly elaborate combinations have resulted in a painfully fragmented appearance.

Likewise, his use of stage space has become fragmented, making it impossible to see the entirety of events onstage.  Granted, this technique is not his invention: many artists have sought to overwhelm theatre’s visual field in order to induce a euphoric experience of overabundance, as if representation were being burst open– producing the rapture of rupture, if you will.  However, Forsythe’s stagings do not cause such rapture– or rupture– but are perplexing obstacles that intentionally occlude a privileged perspective of the theatrical event– that is, its unity.  [photos. mention Heterotopia, use of two spaces.]  Forsythe has undertaken a contradictory task– he is trying to surpass the structural limitations of the body and theatre, but he remains nevertheless committed to theatre’s spatial particularity– and the embodied discipline of dance.  This contradictory imperative characterizes the title of his 2008 performance, Yes We Can’t.  This title is derived from one of its several language-based solo improvisations, which resemble child-like– but exceedingly sinister– word-games.  Like Mantero, the sound of overlapping, repetitious phrases catalyzes unexpected syntactic shifts, but instead of weaving and wobbling, their tensely wrought, frantically forced tone conveys panic and menacing mania.  For instance, in the title sequence, a male dancer stands before a microphone, repeating variations of:

open the box
yes you can
yes you can’t
the box is open

This sequence occurs as a rapid, unstable succession in which opposing terms collide and nullify one another, leaving only the quixotic resonance of overarticulated consants: “box” and “can’t.”  He is literally thrown back by the force of his words, only to be caught by two performers and hurled back to the microphone. This spastic process of self-negation suggests that “the box” is not open– and that despite his various shifts in tone– threatening, cajoling, pleading– all efforts of self-expression reinforce its mysterious power of containment.  In Yes We Can’t, language is a trap, which contains its speaker and cannot be broken.  Under such conditions, akin to an exhausting interrogation, one would presumably not speak unless necessary– and in fact, following the examples of Mantero and Hay, spoken language is necessary, for it provides compensatory structural continuity.  But unlike Mantero and Hay, Forsythe is not trying to elude or elide its limitations and restricts the continuity supplied by language to a tautly tautological force in order to realize non-unified or fragmentary forms– forms that exceed the limits of the possible.  Such fragments– reminiscent of Mantero’s meteor, but not symbolic– are thus irremediably broken off from intelligibility.  In turn, these fragments– and the tautological utterances to which they give rise– intimate the unintelligible, that which cannot be expressed within the box, or the boundaries of sensible representation.

So, in review, in all of these examples, language provides structural continuity, but only once its choreographic complexity exceeds dance’s formal unity.  Unable to suppress the structural disjunction that has haunted dance, these choreographers must incorporate its discontinuities into a diffused field of constant, insignificant syntactic shifts (Mantero and Hay) or incomprehensibly discrete objects (Forsythe).  As such, the potential which is negated by the break, and which has a priori, no place in representation, is introduced into language.  Indeed, language ceases to be a measure of intentional intelligence, but instead deflates and deflects meaning into inattentive (Mantero and Hay) and ill-intentioned (Forsythe) modes of expression.  For artists and spectators alike, the task of attending to this ambiguous non-sense is neither looking nor understanding, but, perhaps like a translator, listening in near stillness to what is not taking place on stage, what remains behind, obscurely delayed, but also acoustically relayed by choreographically conditioned language.

Nevertheless, Goat Island– and its two principal agents, Matthew Goulish and Lyn Hixson– are critically beloved.  They both teach at The Art Institute of Chicago, (which admittedly has been assessed as “overly theoretical” by acquaintances), have been lauded by respected academics (Peggy Phelan, Stephen J. Bottoms, Adrian Heathfield), and developed much of “The Lastmaker” in residency at Zagreb’s Center for Dramatic Art, which evidently led up to their central role in PSI #15 at the University of Zagreb.  I saw “The Lastmaker” in Berlin, where it was invited by NYU’s Andre Lepecki to the inTransit Festival at the House of World Cultures.

The Lastmaker

I might be alone in my distaste for Goat Island, or at least “The Lastmaker.”  In a recent review from Theatre Journal, Stanford grad student Rachel Anderson (Stanford is another of their notable critical proponents; part of Goulish’s shift at PSI was organized by Stanford professor Branislav Jakovljevic) analyzes the performance in glowing terms, never mentioning movement:

“Pieces of the Hagia Sophia model, representative of the many transformative properties of space, shifted and blended with the bodies of the performers to remake a different structure out of the old. The components of the Hagia Sophia, the performance of The Lastmaker, the performance group Goat Island: none of these ceased to exist in that final moment of balance; instead, the group constructed a self-reflexive image that transfigured “lastness” into performance that never exactly ends and disappears, but always engages in the process of making and remaking, forever creating newness and possibility” (Anderson).

I feel compelled to insist that the Hagia Sophia model was clumsily forced, the culmination of a long-sought after release from the performance’s tedium and to question the ways “The Lastmaker” might possibly affirm some sort of inexhaustible fabric of spiritual-artistic activity– (this sounds like a critical crap-out, anyway)– but I don’t think can, or perhaps care to, prove this point.  You’ll have to take my word for it.  Despite the fact that other, more eminent voices have also affirmed Goat Island’s artistic acumen.  Take, for example, Peggy Phelan, whose writing I have long followed and admired:

“They achieve an incredible leveling of discourse and sentiment–to use that word again–and of physical gesture. So, Virilio’s words are not any more or less authoritative than the performers’ gestures, emotions, bodies. To the degree that the language fits the gesturing body, it carries a certain dramatic affect at the level of plot. To the degree that it does not fit, it serves as a kind of dramatic punctuation. Goat Island is highly sophisticated; their performances sometimes seem to me elaborate montages of these fits and misfits, the joins and disjoins between the gesturing body and thinking, between flesh and words” (Phelan).

I don’t get it.

The Lastmaker

So, having noticed the prominence of Goulish and Hixson at the Zagreb conference, I decided to faithfully attend their two performances in order to resolve the discrepancy between their critical acclaim and the hapless blundering that was “The Lastmaker.”  Much to my relief, in their defense, I gained an insight into what they do well– speech, writing, and theory.  When trimmed to its minimal elements, their technique as performers and individual personalities have a force absent from Goat Island’s ensemble performances.  Unfortunately, their group direction remained affected and clunky, incapable of transmitting their best qualities into theatrical space.  In particular, I was again struck by the odd awkwardness of their movement language, which I had always assumed reflected their works’ forced, seemingly psuedo-intellectual structures ( such a model of the “Hagia Sophia” as some supposedly penetrating symbol, or at PSI, a piece dedicated to a retelling of Dusan Makavejev’s Bergman experiment and a scene from “Sweet Movie.)  During Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never, at PSI, it occurred to me that their physical direction actually functions in the absence of transitions.  Lacking a central structural logic, their movement becomes nervously bulky and must rely on rash extremes: stasis and sudden exaggerated gestures.

(After writing this entry, I just found a video clip from this performance on the website of their new group, Every House Has a Door. I entreat readers to follow this link, which leads to a scene in which the actors are mimicking orgiastic rituals from Makavejev’s “Sweet Movie.”  Goulish is on the far right in a black winter hat.  Most importantly, it demonstrates the qualities of motion described above.  Note the cramped stillness, which abruptly becomes an exaggerated gesture, reflecting pointless excess of the orgy we cannot and would rather not see– an example of reliance upon extremes.  Later in the video, they a dance sequence that is consistent with “The Lastmaker”‘s blunt floundering.)

However, this stasis becomes a strength in the context of their controlled vocal delivery.  There were two opportunities to witness this craft and composure: Lyn Hixson’s introductory presentation at the first shift, “Abandoned Practices,” and Matthew Goulish’s staged reading, analyzing a bad joke as part of the Institute of Failure, a project conducted with Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells.  (Another sign of externally validated success– I have seen two performance by Etchells and liked both of them.)  Indeed, as Phelan suggests, in person they proved to be highly sophisticated, both in terms of intellectual range, writing ability, and the technical control of their body’s gestural and vocal cadences.  In particular, Goulish’s squirming gestures and slowly stilted speech pattern revealed a format that he adapts for his performers on stage.  It was wildly successful in this series of over-explicated jokes, but for some reason, it seems inadequate on stage.  Is it because this quiet, comically agonized voice depends on immobility– the immobility of text and the seated posture of reading– for its effect?  Whatever the reason, this comically cramped style seems to provide a model for a physical vocabulary that loses its loquacious charm, appearing instead to be ill-advised and thoughtlessly conceived.

Nevertheless, the Institute of Failure had virtuosic moments.  In particular, another Stanford graduate student’s (Sebastian Calderon Bentin) academic discourse on farting– for better or worse, Performance Studies’ definitive encounter with Eddie Murphy’s “The Nutty Professor”– distinguished itself.  However, given the insufficiency of theoretical sophistication to buoy Goat Island’s work, it seems fitting that Goulish cited a Sophist near the end of his psuedo-critical monologue.  For me, especially at the end of an exhausting, four-day conference, such comic sophistry provoked a certain anxiety: at what point does critical discourse serve to obscure the actual experience of thinking?  That is, something beyond language, which has lodged itself in the sphere of representation as it travels in fleeting pulses of affect, hinted at in inflections and gestures between words.  In encountering something that, whether intentionally or not, encumbers the already neglected field of thought, I am reminded of that decisive Platonic decree, whereby theatre was exiled from the Republic, setting the stage for the stage’s long history.  Certainly, in our present moment, in which tradition is dissolving so rapidly, the difference between the Sophist and philosopher has been rendered uncertain, and indeed, sophistry may actually be indivisible from thinking.  But there are other solutions emerging, which do not necessitate adding to the twaddle of professors (Nietzsche) nor to the proliferation of performance?  In my own contribution to PSI, I hope I began to suggest such an alternative: the audible silence of language.

Near the conclusion of Sasha Waltz's 1996 comically ill-fitting family, Allee der Kosmonauten

In addition to new performances, the prominent, Berlin-based choreographer Sasha Waltz has been showing her earliest works from 1993 forward.    This model, which allows companies to consistently show more work than a choreographer’s most recent production, may be a growing trend among independent groups– at the very least, The Forsythe Company has adopted a similar strategy, keeping all of Forsythe’s creations since 2002 in repertoire.  Being able to see such a broad span of work has been indispensable in my own reception of Forsythe; likewise, it has completely changed my opinion and understanding of Waltz, whose idiom has surprisingly transformed over this period of time, so it’s extremely informative to see her rehearsed re-stagings of her own oeuvre.

Allee der Kosmonauten– simply AdK in the mouth of the people, (or so says Wikipedia.de)– is a street in Marzahn, well into former East Berlin.  Accordingly, AdK by Sasha Waltz broadly thematizes communal living among six performers who share the same building, or perhaps, even living space.  The piece was Waltz’s breakout piece in 1996, and it appeared in the same space where I saw it last night (January 20, 2009), the Sophiensaele, one of the most prominent and successfully spaces enduring amid increasing closures of alternative theatres and art spaces in the Eastern part of the city.  AdK was invited to the prestigious Berlin Theatertreffen that year, and well, the rest is history… that is, Waltz goes on to be Berlin’s most prominent choreographer and international export.

AdK is an imperfect piece.  It hardly strikes me as a classic of second generation Tanztheater in the vein of say, Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker’s “Achterland,” or Wim Vandekeybus’ “Roseland.”  However, what it does have, and which distinguishes itself from the clinical pathos of the aforementioned “Belgian boom,” is humor, humanity, and tenderness.  Waltz’s early idiom is one of comic clockwork and expresses the ceaseless failure of everyday communication to form coherent communities.  The failure of this community’s constitutive choreography becomes an eminently forgivable, “human” element, and the ensuing dramatic plethora of failures, mishaps, and cumulative imperfections is her sentimental ersatz.

But rather than addressing the possibilities of this comic choreographic timing– which she had, by the way, developed into a decidedly original dance vocabulary– AdK already seems underway to abandoning her early stylistic discoveries.  She incorporates a motley mix of influences, especially at times using a brand of physically daring magic realism resembling the British dance company DV8, including an unfortunate scene of domestic violence and codependent sexuality between a “punk” and his girl– DV8 par excellence, rather naturalistic, and quite at odds with the silly tenderness and movement precision of the piece’s dominant idiom.  Accordingly, the movement language introduced by this scene is itself distinctly different, resembling a dramatized, pathos-filled version of contact improv, one which draws upon the physical conventions of that form to stage battles of will, especially between genders.

Another trite trope of ’90s theatrical experiments consisted in its superfluous use of video, which flanked the stage on three sides, endlessly streaming oneiric, faraway images of ordinary apartments and lives, perhaps those actually lived on the Allee der Kosmonauten in 1996.  Video here is mere wallpaper, and moreover, it stands in direct contradiction with Waltz’s aesthetics of communal poverty and the delicately coordinated economy that constitute the fleeting, fairy-tale present time of the work.

Afternote on research:

There are two reviews of AdK in English, (which is somewhat rare), one of which is written both Loren Kruger.  Both are in the review section of Theatre Journal, review a variety of pieces at once, and so are by no means comprehensive, so I cannot recommend them as such.  Interested, but forewarned parties can find them in issues 50:2 and 53:3.

A glimpse at German language critical reception is forthcoming here.

Régine Chopinot is one of the major names in the state-supported French dance scene– director of the national dance center at La Rochelle (which does not appear to have a website)– since the mid-eighties, and one of a number of prominent French choreographers whom I hadn’t had the opportunity to see.  Fortunately, I was in Paris during the city’s premier of her latest work, “Cornucopiae,” at the Centre Pompidou.  Without knowledge of her work more broadly, it’s difficult to come to terms with Cornucopiae, which was deliberately odd, tedious, and detail-oriented– it’s choreographic inquiry limited itself to methodically labored walking, a few spastic, cartoon-like explosions, and slow, abstract motion vaguely reminiscent of “dance.”  Although I’m hardly a defender of the lyrical wonder of dance, Chopinot’s particular reformulation of the choreographic field never really seemed to equal its graphic presentation by the new media artist Jean-Michel Bruyère.

Bruyère’s set evoked a quasi-scifi, minimal, and evidently surrealist-inspired post-apocaplyptic wasteland, through which Chopinot’s bumbling chorus crept, rolled, tumbled, and wailed beneath the weight of a presumably alien environment.  By far, the most striking element of the work were its “oven-mitt-esque” costumes, in which the performers were completely insulated and removed from their environment, their faces shielded throughout by grey shovels.

This choice has a clear resonance with the art historian Christine  Ross’ recent book-length study on depression as an aesthetic paradigm, The Aesthetics of Disengagement:

“Art has become a producer of depressive screens that ‘conserve the living under its inanimate form’” (The internal quotation is from Pierre Fédida, “Des bienfaits de la depréssion.”)

This resonance certainly doesn’t entail that Chopinot, nor Ross’ analyzed artists, are representing depression; quite to the contrary, disengagement is posed as a mode of retreat that threatens the validity of representation itself.  Moreover, Chopinot’s accompanying text is characterized by Artaudian excess: “La bouche au cul/Qui souffle à merdre…Par cul lâché me suis cachée/Par trou léché me suis trouvée/Bon nez cochon qui sent la truffe.”  (A rough, fast translation: “Mouth to ass/that breathes shit… By loose ass I’m hidden/By licked hole I’m found/Good pig nose that smells truffle”)

Chopinot’s exploration of dance, language, and withdrawal parallels some of my own most currently vivid research, but I have a low threshold of tolerance for this kind of seemingly outdated heroic-anal rhetoric.  Likewise, although Bruyère’s work is visually brilliant, I’ve had large reservations about its theoretical premises since first encountering his work, “Si Poteris Narrare, Lictet” (2002).  (Here’s an interview with Bruyère at Festival d’Avignon that I haven’t yet had a chance to read.)

If Bruyère’s erotic affirmation of the negative is thus also preserved within his insulated costumes in Cornucopiae, Chopinot’s challenge would be to develop a choreographic language that faced the same structural challenge, i.e., what becomes of dance when its expressive complexity is subjected to a logic of self-containment.  The apparent failure of Cornucopiae was that, in discarding the traditional vocabulary of dance, it merely retreated to a provocatively infantile choreographic language, rather than producing forms derived from an internalized aesthetic process render distant to the spectator.  In other words, Chopinot’s work maintained a simplistic means of mimetic production between “outside/inside” or “subject/object,” even as its ostensible inquiry was aesthetic disengagement.

Jean-Michel Bruyère's "Si Poteris Narrare," (2002). Postcolonial phantasmorgia in the dome of Jeffrey Shaw's "Eve Cinema."

A final note of interest during the performance– it’s been a long time since I’ve been to see a work that provoked such a pronounced negative reaction in its audience.  Although not quite a “Rite of Spring” riot, a number of audience members loudly left during the performance, boos and clapping competed at its conclusion when the dancers revealed their faces to take a bow, and a scuffle was nearly started by an older woman who threw her program at the stage and visibly cursed the performers.  Evidently, even at the Centre Pompidou, the goal to “épater le bourgeois” hasn’t entirely lost its force… In an era when the experimental has become itself a cliche, why would this occur?  Is it possible that the proponents of mainstream artistic values have a particular interest in maintaining the integrity of dance, even as they suffer the increasing abstraction in the graphic arts that one inevitably experiences in any visit to the Pompidou Center?

Update June 2009: While preparing for a forthcoming presentation at Performance Studies International on the emergence of language in contemporary choreography– my examples are Vera Mantero, Deborah Hay, and William Forsythe– I was struck that this performance could also apply.  Nevertheless, I would not alter the above analysis, which understands Cornucopiae, and its spoken language, as grounded in a decidedly residual, “avant-garde” framework.  Yet its muddled speech and evident self-enclosure decidedly relate to my current work… as a result of which, I have stumbled upon a short documentary clip about Cornucopiae at France 3′s site for media-rich cultural reportage, culturebox

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Thanks to the support of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, I recently traveled to Montpellier to see The Forsythe Company’s 2006 work, Heterotopia, which proved to be consistent with the aesthetic direction and incomparable artistry of Forsythe’s recent work. The title is derived from Michel Foucault’s essay, “Des Espaces Autres,” which may be accessed digitally in both English and French. Most immediately, this reference to Foucault manifests itself in the performance’s highly unusual mise-en-scene, in which the audience is permitted to move at will between two visually exclusive playing spaces– a small, traditional proscenium space and a grid of tables whose margins accommodate its spectators.

The unusual technical demands of Heterotopia may likely restrict its circulation. However, if the equally unusual elation of the Montpellier Festival organizer staff is any indication, there may perhaps be an emerging institutional interest in works that challenge the traditional dimensions of theatrical space.

There is further, much more conceptually specific discussion of Heterotopia in my piece, “Forsythe’s Box: On the Afterlife of Choreography.”

To view the video again, please refresh the page.  Or visit its original source at one of Europe’s leading venues for Dance, Tanzquartier Wien, which also has a large flash video library of performances.

This is the only piece I have seen to date by Vera Mantero, who to my mind is a thoroughly established figure working on the boundaries of performance art and choreography. I particularly associate her work with NYU Performance Studies professor, Andre Lepecki. Lepecki was, not incidentally, the curator responsible for this admirable and enigmatic performance’s inclusion in his the inTransit 08 Festival at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in June.

As is often the case with choreographers championed by Lepecki in his book, Exhausting Dance, there was virtually no movement in the piece, and the performers were restricted to their chairs and the thin strip of stage space before it.

The signature element of the performance was its use of language. Speaking as an uncoordinated chorus in English– which was evidently a second language for the entire group– in a wobbly syntax that erred between alliteratively related registers, they recounted nothing in particular, save perhaps their reiterated love of machines…