sarma

0.
The immediate future of contemporary dance has already started yesterday. Its coming identity is readable in today's productions - in the ways they are made and take care of the body (or in other words: m how they are choreographed). Not that we are of the opinion that the human  body  is  the primary  medium, let alone the  ontological pedestal of contemporary dance. No essentialism implied - but for the sake of convenience we do concentrate hereafter on 'the bodily reality' of contemporary dance. After all, most choreographers, dancers and dance lovers still regard the potential of the human body, that which it is capable of (and by implication: that which it cannot do), as a defining feature of this artistic genre. The characterization may in itself be highly debatable, yet it remains constitutive for the production as well as the reception of contemporary dance - and, as far as we can see, also for the one of tomorrow. What comes after tomorrow is not precisely our competence or interest. We refuse the role of the prophet, and we detest statements that say that contemporary dance must become this or that. There circulate already enough moral profundities, often disguised as political slogans, in today's art worlds. For that matter, Utopia belongs to a past that has definitively consumed itself. 

1.
Contemporary dance is made in common and again and again creates a common, even if there is a directing choreographer or final author. It is a cooperative practice with varying degrees of (un)equality among those who are involved in a project; and it generates a common that has primarily the form of a momentarily shared vocabulary (of movements, images, ideas, words ...). Sometimes this vocabulary becomes the base of an entire oeuvre, but that's rather extraordinary. The dominant practice is to start anew with every new project and to look for a vocabulary that fits its particularity. Contemporary dance is research is producing a common in every new configuration of singularities.
With 'the communal regime' of contemporary dance corresponds a striking degree of conviviality. There is not much shouting or envy; appreciation is predominantly based on an interest in what others are doing, and not so much on one's personal taste. A performance is therefore an invitation to think with the premises that it handles. The assumptions made are hardly ever completely rejected, the eventual criticism is focused on the concrete elaboration - on how, within the chosen framework, artistic possibilities are utilized (or not) and generate a particular common. Within the world of contemporary dance, there is a strong consciousness of the particularity of a work or a work process, and a reservation to think or speak in terms of tendencies or poetics.
Contemporary dancers and choreographers are highly aware of the specifity of their own work. They are curious about the performance that the spectator has seen, and that has not necessarily to be their perception: They often lack words to clarify the stake of their work, but they are genuinely interested in possible clarifications: they like to have conversations about their work, the aesthetic of the wordless is not theirs. It is not possible to formulate an aesthetical theory of contemporary dance, which is precisely one of the reasons why it imposes an ethics of symmetrical speech. The dancer or choreographer and the spectator or critic never understands all by herself what she has made or seen. 

2.
Economically, relative poverty and insecurity are the keywords. How many dancers that don't belong to a big company - and that is the overall majority - have a year contract or its equivalent in terms of income? As a contemporary dancer, you can even hardly build up a career. In the roughly fifteen or twenty years that a dancer is active, only very rare cases can outline an artistic path that is also financially beneficial. Experience is difficult to cash in, since there is simply not much money available for contemporary dance; also, the movement spectrum is far too broad: as said, every aesthetic common is particular. Unlike ballet dancers, contemporary dancers can't accumulate body capital and reinvest it in a strategic way. What someone learns from X, is of no use with Y or Z.
The economy of the contemporary dance world helps to explain Two things. First, dancers value above all the possibility of new experiences in their trajectories. Their careers are not primarily financially but artistically motivated. Second, a dancer who wants to develop his/her own body capital has to take up the position of the choreographer, alone or together with others. This may be an important engine behind the striking fragmentation of contemporary dance. In any case, it is an intriguing paradox: as a consequence of the existing artistic variability, to build up and manage a standardised artistic capital is not possible, unless on your own account - and thus, diversity further increases.
In reality, the situation is probably a little more complex. In the context of a company or a project, dancers learn to develop new movement material (or a virtual common) but a lot of it remains unused. It is not further investigated because the company language or the production does not ask for it. The dancer's body carries that unexploited virtuality with it, and it is therefore evident to either search for a new working context or to create one yourself in which that artistic potential may be actualized. How many external contexts does a dancer have to go through before she/he considers the position of the choreographer as the only possible way out to value of her or his own body as a generator of art? 

3.
Choreographers and dancers fought for their autonomy during the entire 20th century, and also for the recognition of dance as an artistic discipline. This twofold struggle is wrongly described as one single history of modern and post-modern dance. The choreographers and dancers fought a different battle, even if their paths crossed each other from time to time. From Isadora Duncan you can draw a line towards Judson Church - but not over Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham. And several histories start with Judson Church, but none of them ends in Trisha Brown's late work or Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's early pieces. 'Writing dance' or, what is more correct, 'composing dance' there is also 'designing dance', but that is totally uninteresting - versus 'dancing' (or just 'moving'): these are two different points of departure. And what is indeed a complete history of itself, are the many attempts to renew ballet. Just the expression itself: to renew ballet ... That was probably "the Forsythe moment": no renewal, but a deconstruction of the ballet tradition - a highly personal move within, with and against a ghost-like past.
The attempts to make dancing into an art continue. The recent wave of so-called conceptual dance (a quite bizarre expression) can be interpreted that way. But as an aesthetic genre, dance remains highly marginal in the global art scene as well as in the art discourse. Dance simply doesn't count when the subject is modern art, its history and - the current phase - its post-history. This marginality also helps to explain the conviviality in the contemporary dance world, which is relatively small compared to the world of the fine arts, and the notable indifference of many young dancers and choreographers towards  the  distinction between art and not-art. They are not precisely making conceptual dance but explore the autonomy of the medium called dance and its possible 'remediations'.
The emancipation from the art discourse gives a great freedom, for instance to cooperate in a transversal way and to produce overstepping commons. To a great extent, the contemporaneity of dance has to do with the making of new middle zones, of heterogeneous assemblages of always particular couplings between for instance music, image and movement that produce completely different operative and perceptual frameworks than what we know from interdisciplinary or multi-medial work. Sometimes it seems as if contemporary dance is currently looking for a new synaesthetical total medium. But it may be just as well possible that the current phase of 'struggling with and between' kinds of perceptions ends in a different movement language. 

4.
During the 1980's, choreography was given a new breath by the broadening of the dance vocabulary. Falling and floor work, everyday gestures, sitting and staying quiet ... changed in no time into ingredients one could expect in a contemporary dance performance. Choreography also became more a question of dramaturgy. The language of dance broadened out, and at the same time there was much more attention to the way in which successive movements could create clouds of meanings or obtained an expressive power. Narrativity was not done in the light of the then domination of the post-modern doxa of fragmentation, But a choreography could stammer and stutter, tell a jerky story about, for instance, masculinity and feminity. Post-modern dance was postmodern choreography was post-structuralistic literary theory. Dance was text, but in the sense that Roland Barthes gave to the word: a chain of shifting signifiers in which meanings only insist and don't condense into an unequivocal message.
From the early 1990's onwards, many contemporary dance makers became fascinated by the possibility as well as the difficulty to represent repressed 'truths of the body'. Once again, we very quickly got used to the many allusions - the tough reality staying out of sight - to illness, incapacity, ugliness ... (or with a word that was very much vogue in those days: 'otherness'). But showing was and is also not-showing: the representation of the body on a stage necessarily involves its ‘depresentation’.  In the visual relationship with the spectator, the movements and the dancers' bodies indeed dissolve into Visual bodies'. On stage, whether that stage is spatially or merely symbolically marked, a body is never itself but represents itself. That may be a crucial issue of contemporary dance today, where there above all seems to exist doubt   about the "truths of the body".
Contemporary dance does not relate primarily to the body as such, but to its representations, to the fragmented cultural text that articulates our bodies: medical science, publicity, fashion, television, film, sports, pornography ... Therefore, it does not find its effectiveness through an autonomous dramaturgy of just the performance. Contemporary dancemakers are more concerned about 'the becoming (a) representation' of bodies within an uncontrollable intertext, within the echo of the uncountable other (body) representations in the spectator's mind. When this resonance succeeds, with or without video images, the imaginary frame also starts trembling: that stupid collection of big and especially small phantasms that structures the looking at other bodies. Contemporary dance today is contemporary media theory is applied cognitive science.   

5.
Much contemporary art focuses on the mechanisms that structure perception. Contemporary dance wants to "abnormalise" perception, perturb it and have it doubt about itself for a moment. But as ghostly as they may look, in a dance performance the perceived body images remain always connected with the undoubtability of the material existence of their causes. That is the specific hyperreality of much contemporary dance. Its liveness offers a pedestal of credibility to an immaterial mood or atmosphere that in fact only exists in the neuron paths and the head of the spectator. Sometimes even David Lynch is not up to that - good live cinema is simply stronger than cinema.
Contemporary dance opts for the medium of body re/'de-presentation. That medium really is a 'middle' or 'between': it is the relationship between the stage and the audience, between moving bodies and their perception. Of that 'being' no ontology is possible, because it is too close to what metaphysics as well as lay thinking damn as 'appearance'. In the strange, even bewitching middle zone that separates the stage from the audience, light and sound change the bodies into intensive body percepts: movements become sounds and gestures start singing, video images confuse the short term memory of imagination ... Nothing is what it seems to be because everything only exists as perceptual drama, as theatre of the senses. As re/de-presentation.
The option for the uncertain dialogue between what is happening on the stage and in the perception and memory of the individual spectator irrevocably commits contemporary dance to commercial culture, the types and stereotypes of audio-visual mass culture. As those are brought by the spectators with them to the show, they are the frame of the watching and listening. We recognise images of melancholy or happiness thanks to Hollywood or advertising, and also thanks to the tune usually not the words - of the songs of overtly dramatic pop bands or crooners. Contemporary dance '(re)mediates' body representations, medial spurs of affective bodies - and therefore it sometimes wants to deconstruct its primary medium, to try out the possibility of an unoccupied relationship with the spectator. Yet, much more often it opts for tactically undermining of, or a joyful playing with the omnipresent world of commercial culture or 'the society of the spectacle'. Contemporary dance is also so diverse because it speaks the new lingua franca: it explores the communality of 'we, mass people'. 

6.
The new language is in fact a Babylon of styles, niches, trends, tastes, sub-cultures ... The only thing that still holds together this heterogeneity, is the meaningless reference to a medial substrate, to a supposed corporality that is represented in an ever changing way. That is what contemporary dance bets on. In the varied forms of commercial culture, it searches for the generic (wo)man - for body representations, or fragments of it, capable of hitting every body. This is motivated by the striving to dislocate, to take elsewhere and make strange, that what is evoked. In a contemporary dance production, well-known body representations may therefore suddenly become distressing, biting or simply meaningless. Or they become, on the contrary, very meaningful, as if an image of loneliness that one has already seen a thousand times suddenly becomes lonely itself and therefore convincing again. Just like the best fine art, film or photography, contemporary dance saves singular representations from the world of commercial culture through an always singular resonance with that very same world.
Also important is the ingenuity that is mobilised by the crosswise, often innovative use of video cameras, mixing desks and all those other technical artefacts that now speak the language of bits and bytes. Commercial culture is not only the mass of stereotype representations of the mass media but also the diverse forms of cheap new media equipment. Just like an important part of contemporary art, contemporary dance plays out the latter against the former. With some exaggeration, be it is not a strong one: the cheap new production tools of global production capitalism are critically used against the spectacle of worldwide consummer capitalism.
Contemporary dance shows 'the becoming (a) representaion' body in an environment where the body has always already been represented a million times and using the possibilities of new media. But it all happens before, no thanks to your own eyes, in the relationship between the stage and the spectator. That is the autonomy of contemporary dance, and at the same time it is magic. In the medium of body re/de-presentation, it regularly lets the archaic character of the material body implode in a flow where images, sounds light and dark … form one undisentangable looping. Every successful moment in a contemporary dance performance undeliberately reminds of the final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT.