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.

As you may note from my last post, (September 2009), I have been on a brief hiatus from my website.  However, I am determined to make a substantial return!  In anticipation of that approaching day, I am listing a few upcoming events that I am either attending or participating in:

Literary Theorist Cathy Caruth, “After the End: Literature in the Ashes of History,” Cornell 2/4

Conversation with Digital Artist/Cultural Researcher Mary Flanagan, Cornell 2/8

Brett de Bary, “Traveling, and Translating, the Distance:  Tawada Yôko and the Thought of World Literature,” Cornell, 2/24

60s Performance Artist Carolee Schneeman, Cornell 2/25

Wayne MacGregor/Random Dance, Entity, EMPAC 2/26

Dance and Technology Researcher Scott Delahunta, Cornell, early March

Composer and Theatre Director Heiner Goebbels Visit to Cornell, mid-March

Performance Artist Tim Miller, Cornell April

Dance Historian and Theorist Mark Franko, Cornell April

More to follow…

Despite such architectural grandeur, I must admit that exteriors don’t matter so much to me– I’m as dazzled by the dollar signs that were evidently poured into its construction, regardless of its artistic merit as a building, (which I also feel loathe to evaluate, a fact that leaves me suspicious and wary of lurking ideologies.) Berlin’s best theatre, HAU, is utterly unremarkable, but is the city’s most flexible, innovative performance space. In short, it’s what inside that matters, and given the unfortunate fate of other northern institutions, such as Mass Moca, their schedule will tell all.

And what’s inside at EMPAC? Well, of course, as befits its host institution, RPI, which is best known as an engineering school, it’s technological-based performance. Such work can be a bit trendy, but it undoubtedly exceeds the purview of most conventional theatres. Here’s a more immediate measure of quality: what is on this season, and even, this semester? Outside of experimental bands (Boredoms), and some odd experimental films, what are the main performing arts events en route?

Here’s my wish list:

1) Chunky Move, Glow: Yes, they’re on tour everywhere in the U.S. this fall, but I find their work, at least as seen on the Internet, extremely seductive. I showed this clip very briefly on the first day of my current class:

2) A performance installation by a Belgian new media group called Workspace Unlimited. I’ve never heard of them, (whatever that’s worth,) and this installation, They Watch involves Second Life, of which I’m always skeptical. (Second life is such a facile artistic/academic subject…) However, upon briefly examining their website, I was struck by the– here’s this word again– seductive quality of their immersive spaces.

3) I am intrigued by immersive spaces. It’s not the fact of immersion that interests me, but rather the idea of enclosure, which I discuss in my response to Rudi Laerman’s ” ‘Dance in General’ or Choreographing the Public, Making Assemblages.”

4) Immersive space also appears to be the principal quality in German sound artists Daniel Teige and Volkmar Klein’s upcoming installation works here. Sound art is definitely on the horizon for me…

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.

There are so many unforgettable images from her works– Heiner calls her images a “thorn in the eye.”  This concluding scquence from Nelken has always been one of my favorites.

How to pay tribute to Pina? Having neither time nor inclination for a comprehensive essay– these have already been written– (I am currently using Johannes Birringer’s “Pina Bausch Dancing Across Borders” in my fall course), I have chosen to translate an poetic essay by Heiner Müller on Pina.  It’s a fast and dirty translation, which I do not intend to defend, but which I do hope should bring some measure of pleasure through the unlikely tangency between these two titans of post-war experimental theatre.

I do not think it is an accident that Müller’s text, written in 1981, already read like posthumous appreciation.

BLOOD IS IN THE SHOE OR THE ENIGMA OF FREEDOM
Heiner Müller
For Pina Bausch

1

As children we played hide and seek.
Do you still remember our games.
Face on a tree or a wall
Hand over your eyes until the last
Found their place, and whoever was seen
Had to race with the searcher.
He who first arrives at the tree is free
When he must not remain standing in the spot
As if the knock on the tree or wall
Nailed him to the ground like a grave.
He may not move until the last
Was found. And sometimes the last
Was too well hidden and not found.
Then everyone waits, standing there petrified,
Each his own monument, right up to the last.
And sometimes it happens that one dies
And his hiding place is not found, no
Hunger drives him out from his death
That has found him out of ranks
The dead are not hungry.
Then the resurrection is canceled. The searcher
Has turned over every stone four times.
Now he can only wait, his face
On a tree or wall
His hands over his eyes until the world
has gone by. Note their pace.
Lay your hand over your eyes, brother.
The others that the searcher nailed to
The ground with his knock
On the tree or wall because they didn’t run
Fast enough from their hiding places that weren’t
Safe enough, and now they have
No hand for their eyes because they
May not move and also may
Close their eyes according to the rules.
Like stones in the graveyard they wait
With open eyes up until the last second…

(aus ZEMENT)

2
Time in the theater of Pina Bausch is the time of fairy tales. History transpires as an interruption, like gnats in the summer. Space is threatened by the occupation of one or another grammar, that of ballet or drama, but dance’s flightline holds off both occupations. The territory is virgin soil. An island that just appeared, the product of an unknown (forgotten or coming) catastrophe: perhaps it is happening even now, while the performance is under way. Something of the immediate connection to life, for which Brecht had always envied Elizabethan theater, is made. Film or television are no competition: they can be used. The whole thing is child’s play.

3
The players are survivors. (The spectator will perhaps have a different experience.) They report on the terror of childhood: Hansel and Gretel, fleeing from their stepmother, get lost in the supermarket. The only way into the clear is perhaps a department store fire: it had ultimately begun with fire… The feeling: Little Red Riding Hood meets the Big Bad Wolf at the disco, who wants to buy her love with the dead grandmother’s money. Maybe she will have to learn his language, which is the language of violence, and “with the weapon in hand” expropriate his sex… Of ballet: it appears as curdled history: the body’s order under law. Humanism’s striptease lays bear culture’s bloody root.

4
An instant of time belongs to the survivors. They celebrate on the tightrope between buildings, which are threatened by collapse. The choreography stands in the tradition of dance macarbe. Between the wars another Middle Ages. It was the Germans’ Golden Era: happiness in osmosis with collective death, equality before the hourglass an illusion of justice on Judgment Day. The demonic at the Brecht’s graveyard struggle against Hitler, which Benjamin registered with erudite horror, grows out of the (re)course to this ground, is supplied by this glowing ember.

5
The Middle Ages for Pina Bausch: consumption stands in for the black plague, the youngest rider of the Apocalypse. The law of series is the law of selection, the genocide of the Highest School of Statistics, the way to slaughter [Schlachtbank] leads through the databank, the final truth of consumption can be atomic flash. We’ve bet on the wrong horse, maybe the running has already happened. Before the clearance sale, the theatre dances inventory, performs the cash registers’ ritual collapse. Women’s murderer hope: that which in us desires and hates, loves and rapes. Crime scene investigation in the drafty Kontakthof: the zombies’ parade, advertising’s happy sacrifices. Dignity of the tango versus the free choice of one’s manner of death. Laughter frozen in stereotypes, repetition’s insistence unmasks boredom: pain is its face; beneath the threshold of consciousness, where desires and fears lodge, the hold makes laughter like crying subersive.

6
“In Italy I had a rooster. He always went in other gardens, and my mother had to kill him. On the evening when she had cooked him, she said that he was my rooster, and if I didn’t want to, I didn’t have to eat him. But I wanted to eat it all. I wanted him entirely for myself.” Pina Bausch’s Middle Ages is that of Brecht’s CHILDREN’S CRUSADE, in which the stray dog alone knows the way, since the good Lord had to lay down the mask of the categorical imperative– it burned even his skin– and lost his face before the death camps’ mountains of shoes, hair, and gold teeth. (Perhaps he still had a chance as a woman: icon in men’s magazines, or on the peep show’s alter.) The children are still on the march: the child who didn’t want to wash when the king visited, and the difficult child, whose hand grows from the grave. The young murderer from American cities and gangs of children in Third World metropolises. Mao’s Red Garden and the exterminating angel of the Verlaine reader, Pol Pot.

7
YOU SHALL NOT MAKE GRAVEN IMAGES. The metaphors of violence in BLUEBEARD are not for home use (“this is how one rapes a woman”). Hiding is the first game: the child wants to disappear. Nudity is taboo: before the marriage the groom may not see the bride, and there’s still a nasty wait until the ceremony. In Pina Bausch’s theatre, the image is a thorn in the eye, bodies write a text, which refuses publication, the prison of meaning. Liberation from ballet’s compulsions, in which the stigma of bondage is sedimented– that stigma which the certain lord of a certain creation enjoys like hunting, the other feudal hobby. The democratization of the military review is a transition, liberation of the serfs for the assembly line: in stadiums the mass becomes ornament. The congruency of ornament and trophy becomes painfully visible in the flash of a balletic parody: Bluebeard’s women as hanging decoration in Bluebeard’s castle. After theatre without text–from Zadek’s HAMLET to Stein’s ORESTIE, to name only two golden calves– before which one loses one’s hearing in moments of happiness, a new language of theatre. After Grüber’s great failed attempt with a mediocre period-piece to turn theatre in its north-south axis, in spite of its audience, which does not wish to forego the evening entertainment’s odor of sweat, another theatre of freedom. That a sphinx gazes at us, when we look freedom in the face, should not astonish us.

Heiner Müller
1981

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.

A 1931 untitled nude by Edward Weston.

I was never particularly fond of Edward Weston’s photography, lacks the sophistication of contemporaries in other disciplines.  Nevertheless, this image strongly resonates with those appearing in contemporary dance.

Raimund Hoghe's 2007 "Boléro Variations."

I am currently writing about this piece, Alain Platel's 2008 "pitié!." There is a similar moment in which his performers display their figurative "backsides"-- it looks just like the Weston photo.

It is hard not to be reminded of this canonical image...

There is even a whole book on the subject, “Am Rand der Körper,” (literally and inelegantly “At the Edge of Bodies,”) recently been written in German by Susanne Foellmer.  It is possible to read the table of contents and introduction on the publisher’s website.  (My thoughts on this when I read it.)

A related area of inquiry has been taken up by Austrian choreographer Willi Dorner, whose “bodies in urban space,” is presently been toured in Europe and the U.S..  There is something so predictable about its appeal to institution festivals.

Willi Dorner in Nottingham.

In the courtyard of Paris' Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterand. I want to be skeptical of Dorner's work, but I like this unobtrusive transformation of otherwise sterile and monumental public space.

***

Update September 2009

I discovered this on rhizome.org recently, as part of a daily tumblr conceptual project by a (presumably young) artist named David Horvitz. It's much less sophisticated, but seems nevertheless like an interesting addition to this collection.

]]> http://ryanplatt.net/2009/07/16/backs-asses-and-choreographic-anachronisms/feed/ 0 Ryan weston_nude bolero_01 platel_backs caillebotte UMS1089TSFoellmer-neu.indd dorner_backs dorner_paris5 fridgehead http://ryanplatt.net/2009/07/07/ii-psi-15-misperformance-studies-shifts-goat-island/ http://ryanplatt.net/2009/07/07/ii-psi-15-misperformance-studies-shifts-goat-island/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:23:53 +0000 Ryan Platt http://ryanplatt.net/?p=611 ]]> As an alternative to conventional keynote lectures, PSI #15 proposed “shifts,” performances that also engaged critical presentations.  The highlights of these hybrid performances were conducted by well-known ensembles, such as feminist groups Split Britches and Subrosa, or experimental theatre veterans Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment) and Matthew Goulish (Goat Island).  Due to circumstance, timing, and jet lag, I attended two performances by Goulish, which is unlikely, since I have long intended to compose a negative response to Goat Island’s final performance, “The Lastmaker.”  In short, “The Lastmaker” was one of the poorest performances I have ever seen.  I do not wish to dwell on a lengthy description of its contents, even less so in order to develop an argument dedicated to systematically “proving” its shortcomings.  In fact, I find negative criticism to be a tedious, and possibly even futile task.  I suspect that any act of criticism depends on a speculative judgment that is subjective and ultimately indefensible– it requires an analogical leap of faith that asks the reader to believe in the writer’s judgment, perhaps equivalent to the “as if” intrinsic to the function of fiction.  Suffice to say, I found “The Lastmaker” to be a hopelessly clumsy, intellectually affected failure, which sought to realize a postmodern collage of incidentally interlinking elements, but which never convinced me that it had undergone the tricky labor of unraveling and inhabiting that crucial “as if.”  Above all, its use of movement was astoundingly amateur: blocky, clumsy, and uncoordinated “dance” sequences transpired without a trace of recognition of the challenges posed by even minimal choreography.

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.

Zagreb may seem relatively remote, but it is worthwhile traveling to attend PSI, even merely to present a twenty minute presentation.  The conference is indisputably global and offers an opportunity for contact with scholarship from beyond the U.S. and Britain.  However, Performance Studies does have its own conventions, and as I describe my scattered path through its offerings, I intend to point out common themes or assumptions that bind its disparate disciplinary area.  In so doing, I am going to divide this entry into three sections: 1) a general description of conference, 2) a more detailed discussion of the privileged role that the performance group Goat Island has achieved within Performance Studies, and 3) an archived presentation of my own contribution to the performance, “Murmurs, Mispronunciations, and Malentendus: The Medium of Language in Recent Choreography by Mantero, Hay, and Forsythe.”

This trio of strategic errors in spoken language was inspired by the conference theme, “Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading.”  It might be supposed that PSI’s goal was to identify how failure functions within the intentional boundaries of performance, but such broad discussion was subordinated to study of disruptive phenomena across artistic, historical, and disciplinary contexts.  Moreover, the theme was derived from J.L. Austin’s use of the word “misfire,” which its organizers plainly state in its rationale: “Since our broad notion of performance and its possible misfires owe a great deal to Austin’s philosophy of language, rooted as it is in the paradigmatic Western metaphysical dichotomies of play vs. seriousness and success vs. failure, efficiency vs. loss, we are often forced to perceive and value cultural forms and events in terms of binary oppositions.”  The word “misfire”– like misinvocation, misapplication, or misexecution– belongs to a class of utterances that Austin calls “infelicities,” cases in which performatives do not achieve what their spoken intent and are “not indeed false but in general unhappy” (Words 14).  Misfires designate acts that are prohibited or fail, and whose effects are void or unfinished.

I have no intention here of trying to address the extensive discourse ensuing since Austin’s 1955 presentation of the performative in a series of lectures at Harvard– in fact, I have never developed a definitive reading of his seminal “How To Do Things With Words.”  However, as made evident by his foundational role in the theme of “misfires” and the frequency with which his principles were cited throughout the conference, Austin appears to function as a foundational figure in the field of Performance Studies.  Of course, Austin is an odd forefather, one whose legacy has been impacted by poststructuralism and gender studies, which have changed Austin’s ideas into a form that he would have almost certainly repudiated.  Furthermore, as is rarely acknowledged Austin’s text is elusively entangled within a constellation of competing influences.  He rejects Wittgenstein, admiringly cites Kant’s name, inserts a variety of antediluvian hegemonic prejudice, establishes a structure ready-made for Derrida’s mise-en-abyme analysis, but nevertheless approaches several crucial areas of scholarship still in evolution: doing/practice, social circumstance/context, and language– not to mention the way in which performatives do not correspond to the criteria of true and false.  In short, Austin is an enigmatic foundational figure, one whose legacy I would feel loathe to cite without considerable qualification.

Regardless of such ambiguities, Austin was invoked in many panels at PSI.  He made a particularly central appearance in Jon McKenzie’s talk, “Counter-Performatives: Economic Meltdowns, Techno-Snafus, and Beyond,” part of a panel focusing on research, organization, and technology.  McKenzie is well-known in Performance Studies circles for “Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance,” (and now that I am reflecting on my own titles for book-length studies, I am baffled that he used the word “performance” twice), which belongs to a class of books once part of my M.A. exam list, but which faded into a state of indefinite limbo as it failed to speak to my own work.  After PSI, I am less likely to ever read “Perform or Else.”  This is not to malign the quality of McKenzie’s scholarship– on the contrary, his presentation was as exactingly systematic as its subject, a reading of the concept of “counterperformatives” developed by sociologist of economics Donald McKenzie’s “An Engine, Not a Camera.” Ultimately, Jon McKenzie wished to direct this economic model of performativity upon the social contexts that originally inspired Judith Butler, namely, the controversy and activism surrounding queer culture in the United States.  Of course, unlike Butler, he seemed unconcerned with the singular, personal experience of social exclusion, and instead emulated an almost structuralist model that sought “to perform theories of performativity.”  In this light, the abdication of aesthetic praxis– be it social or artistic– for the logical laws of theory seemed much less compelling than they perhaps did ten years ago, and his clinical detachment immediately solicited skeptical responses.  As one audience member suggested, he did seem to be returning to a kind of “pre-Derridean” Austin, by eliding the fallacies of subjectivity– and desire– within analytical systems.

Justly or not, McKenzie’s talk thus dominated discussion.  This potentially exaggerated emphasis was also due to the absence of evident overlaps with the panel’s other papers: a talk by a junior professor from Trinity University on the locomotive as a symbol for theatrical realism’s inability to maintain its formal coherency, and thereby, “the repressed,”; a British doctoral student’s examination of Darwin’s theatricalized photographic studies in the 1860s/70s, very much written under the sign of Jonathan Crary; and a strange, rambling monologue against a generalized concept of consumerism by a kindly Portuguese grandfather, who was I believe, an archaeologist.  (It was amusing and somehow fitting when I saw him the next day strolling into Zagreb Airport’s duty-free shop…)  The mismatched diversity of these presentations also characterized a panel I had seen the preceding day, entitled “Mislocated Scripts,” in which two graduate students from Portugal and Japan, struggling to describe poorly documented stagings of Brecht and Shakespeare in remote cultural conditions, labored beneath the shadow of more eminent name, Stanford’s Carl Weber.  As one might guess, Weber was speaking about Heiner Müller, and in particular, Müller’s intentionally skewed encounters with Shakespeare.  Unfortunately, Weber’s paper amounted to little more than a book report recounting Müller’s history with Shakespeare.

Such absence of argument in the work of a senior scholar was discouraging, especially in a conference with no keynote speakers.  In the absence of such main academic events, the conference had arranged panels of distinguished speakers and developed “shifts,” hybrid lecture-performances.  Having heard the name of one of the “distinguished” speakers, I attended one panel featuring three British scholars: Nicholas Ridout, Joe Kelleher, and Sophie Neld.  This panel, “Was That What I Thought It Was…”, organized itself around “mis-spectatorship” as its theme, in particular, “visual and aural hallucinations in the theatre.”  Kelleher discussed the recently much-lauded Latvian director Alvis Hermanis’ 2005 performance “Ice,” Neld discussed the problems of representing death, giving special attention to the painstaking presentation of the Hussein brothers’ ravaged corpses in Iraq and her own personal reaction to the Bodyworks exhibition, and Ridout analyzed the narrator’s juvenile encounters with the star actress Berma in Proust’s “Recherche.”  This was by far the most well-coordinated, polished, and animating panel that I attended; its papers were sumptuously written, charismatically presented, and thought-provoking, and yet… they also demonstrated a few telling characteristics of the conference and the discipline, at least as inflected by its dominant British strand.

For one, these papers were decidedly “performative”–  that is, their tone and language were rhetorically elevated, and their argumentative mode proudly proceeded through lyrically wrought personal reflection.  This was immediately evident in Kelleher’s paper, which discussed his own “hallucinations” in the theatre, comically subordinating Hermanis’ work to the self-deprecatory inadequacy of Kelleher’s French as he tried to grasp the transpiring events at a theatre in Belgium.  This emphasis upon subjective experience as a material of analysis was actually relevant to the panel’s content, and it likewise characterized Neld’s personal reaction to Bodyworks and even Ridout’s more conventional, but slyly empathetic identification with Proust’s image of naively star-addled projection.  In fact, their personalized model of high literary expression seemed consistent with Proust’s overly erudite irony and provided the common ground for their diverse inquiries, from Kelleher’s initial recollections of 19th century French theories of synaesthesia to Proust’s complex relation to late Romanticism.  As such, these papers reaffirmed a model of literary expression, in which the the reflux of negated narrative potential returns as an uncanny excess, a hallucinatory petina that reminds the individual of their negative connection to representational totality.  Death is the limit– and the unifying link– of this structure.

However, I think Hermanis’ work has become popular because it suggests a different aesthetic direction.  In his discussion, Kelleher mentioned that Hermanis distributed several photos during the performance, including one that depicted the actors in clothes and places presumably referred to in the spoken text.  Rather than hallucinatory, I think that these photos, as is consistent with the two Hermanis works I saw in Berlin, which are “documentary” performances– actors retelling their memories of their fathers, for instance– produce an effect akin to Barthes’ description of amateur photos in “Camera Lucida”: the “ça-a-été,” or “that-has-been.”  Stated otherwise, the photo introduces an awareness of an event or life that is incontrovertibly elsewhere, beyond the synthetic capacities of sense.

The panel concluded with a comment referencing Ann Pelligrini’s critical efforts to identify underlying foundations of the sacred in the field of Performance Studies– a project that strikes me as important and consistent with the secular shift from act to acting/doing.  It also prompted me to consider the role of religion in my own research, which I think has a mystical inflection, even directly touching upon the spiritual across all of its subjects (Rainer, Akerman, Cha, and Forsythe).  I think this is a difficult cusp of change.  On the one hand, religious longing can evidently be a reactionary mode; on the other, mystical modes of expression may not be irrelevant to the critical transformation of representational practice .  Admittedly, these concluding reflections are cursory, but the sacred was certainly germane in context of “Was That What I Thought It Was…”  Its mention provoked Nicolas Ridout to an interesting admission regarding confessional writing, which enabled the lyrical charm pervading this panel: he confirmed that confessional writing exists in order to eradicate doubt…”I was here.. I saw this…”

For example, having been, seen, and heard at Performance Studies International #15 in Zagreb, a conference devoted to the infelicitious foundation of a discipline that may not even exist…

I can begin this post by saying something positive about Facebook in an academic context– namely, that after discovering a few days ago that The Forsythe Company has a fan group on Facebook, which delighted me in a dull-witted way, I received a message informing me that William Forsythe is to hold an online symposium at 3:00 PM EST as part of the launch of his new interactive project hosted by Ohio State, “Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced.”

Since the readers of this post may not be as informed about The Forsythe Company as I am—I must admit that they are one of the principal subjects of my dissertation “After Aura: Media, Movement, and the Performance of Withdrawal,” and I have been studying their work during my research residency in Germany—it would be best to provide a brief introduction.  Despite the fatuous superfluity of this statement, I would broadly say that William Forsythe is probably the world’s most important living choreographer.  He is American, but has been in Germany since the inception of his career—part of an ongoing leaching of American performing talents by Europe due to the atrocious conditions of arts funding—and currently works in Frankfurt and Dresden.  Forsythe is one of the few choreographers that a theatrically uninitiated public is most likely to know.  As befits the two decades he devoted to developing a self-exhausting, hypercomplex form of ballet, most people associate his work with ravishing cerebral intricacy rendered into a virtuosic display of physical performance.  By the way, a notable development in his ballet was his eventually necessary recourse to custom-designed computer programs in order to keep up with the complexity of the possibilities compacted into his choreographic systems, which has been partially released in a CD-ROM as “Improvisation Technologies.”  Since 2004, when conservative forces in the Frankfurt city government succeeded in pulling the plug on funding for Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt, his work has undergone a decisive shift, moving, in his words, from ballet to “dance,” and ultimately integrating a variety of other elements, notably insidiously distopian, technically sophisticated uses of language and electronic sound.  I provide a detailed analysis of these developments in “Forsythe’s Box: On the Afterlife of Choreography,” in the current issue of PAJ.  There is also a brief discussion of his 2006 work, “Heterotopia,” (which is enticingly named after Foucault’s influential essay, which is also available gratis on the web) on this site.

Enough with the introduction.  Aside from the collision of Facebook, a live streaming conference occurring today, and an ambiguous, obligatory reference to electronic sound, or his enterprising collaborations with computer scientists, neuroscience, and supposedly, his planned collaboration with Brian Massumi, whose name is virtually synonymous with Deleuze and the virtual  what does this choreographer have to do with the subject that animates HASTAC’s audience, technology?

As I begin to explore in my essay, Forsythe’s choreography stands at the forefront of emerging efforts to articulate a concept of theatricality that understands itself in relation to media rather than in opposition to technology.  I prefer the term “media” to “technology” because media—although not “the media”—suggests the history of material mediation that has existed as long as there have been techniques of conserving and disseminating language.  In particular, I find that Forsythe’s choreography has begun to surpass theatre’s traditional resistance to technologies of reproduction by seeking out grounds to stage events that no longer conform to the present as predicated by dramatic unity—a heterotopian exposition, which is decidedly not utopian…

If you only can name one living choreographer, it should probably be William Forsythe…

PS

The Synchronous Objects website at OSU just went live.  I will update this post in a few days after having played with it…