sarma

In recent years, the project to restart a radicalized dance (i.e. a politically or socially aware choreography) has become increasingly visible and somehow already in demand in the forever new mainstreams of the dance market. Letting aside the dreads regarding the convoluted cynicisms of fashion and marketing, one can be but happy to presently find numerous choreographers successfully engaging in the process of reclaiming dance's specific potential to access, reflect and hopefully reconstruct the nervousness of our century's last decade.

Performance as Political Resistance

In a time when 'the body' so explicitly re-enters the political discourse of Western states - justifying nationalistic upheavals and the performance of hate through exclusionary policies and policing (from immigration policies to the return of the option of killing as a legitimate tool for the state's self-preser- vation) - in a time that represents itself in a realm of growing identity anxieties, cultural nervousness and warrior values: in this time that is our time, resistance through performance is more than welcomed.

Despite the diversity of techniques, aesthetics, beliefs and agendas forming and reforming dance's reformulation as a vehicle for political and social critique, choreographers appear to be commonly finding that an art that embraces the body as its privileged medium of expression, an art that claims the body's centrality as vehicle, maker and destructor of ideas cannot possibly live (not even survive!) alienated from the fact that political repression nurtures on bodily states that escape language's embrace: pain, trauma, shock, disease, decay, brutality. Such extreme bodily conditions are silent stations in the Iogic of political repression and ideological reproduction - from Wogeo to the White House, from the streets of Dresden to Ruanda.

Alongside with choreographers, dance criticism and dramaturgy also needs to focus on the problems raised by an engaged contemporary dance. What I find significant in the common denominator informing the works of such different creators as W. Forsythe, Reza Abdoh, Meg Stuart, Dennis O'Connor, Vera Mantero or Saburo Teshigawara (to mention but a few) and the writing addressing such works, is the project to explore and problematize dance's unique potential for ideological iconoclasms through resistant bodies.

The problem, though is that, as the Portuguese popular saying goes, 'Hell is full of good intentions'. And this inferno of good intentions when Iocated in performance raises a few urgent questions: How can performance in general, and dance in particular, provoke the political without falling in the indigencies, and ultimately in the idiocies, of propaganda and allegory? How to rethink physical training, performing techniques and dramaturgic and staging approaches to enable the contemporary choreographer to reform dance as an engaged art of the present? How can we (that is, critics, audiences, dancers, choreographers and producers that believe that dance can be something more than a self-indulging entertaining erotic sport) engage in a dialogue aimed at building a different choreographic paradigm, one where social awareness and the will to provoke and emote do not put in peril the ontology of dance?

A Rhetoric for the Stage

AII these questions ending up in the question for the moment.., and the question for this essay: How can political awareness and social engagement be conveyed without falling back info the rhetoric of ecumenical allegories already programmed by the same political realm one is trying to critique/destroy?

Such sets of questions and interrrogations are not merely rhetorical. The problematization of an aesthetics for a socially aware dance is again informing the aesthetic debate on dance criticism and dance dramaturgy, at least in Europe, in a way maybe not seen since the 1930's. Eva-Elisabeth Fischer's essay 'The Transparency of Evil' in tanzaktuell's August/September issue can be referred to as a good example of the problems raised by ideologising the dance at this historical moment that perceives the social state as a state-of-shock. After claiming that in some cases "Violence on stage had obviously changed into a particularly stimulating l'art pour l'art exercise" Fischer proposes an aesthetics of violence (on stage) that can resonate in the viewer's perception. After stating that Reza Abdoh's 'The Law of No Remains' "produces yawning boredom", the critic goes on to propose an aesthetics argung that "the real shock is caused by sensitizing the perceptions, especially with very quiet tones; the real shock is caused by those who don't work with a hammer and cudgel but with a fine drill."

Such is the kind of problem that the question of my list of questions inevitably raises: what constitutes this 'real shock' - i.e. a meaningful, intelligent one- and how to achieve a valid sensitization of perception? I disagree with Fischer in two points: personal- ly, I cannot imagine any of Reza Abdoh's pieces pro- ducing boring effects, but toost importantly, it seems to me that David Byrne is absolutely right when he says that "there are a million ways to get things done". So, I would like to build my argument for this essay by stating that the drill or the hammer can wake you up or put you to sleep, sensitize or anaesthetize your perception and your intelligence depending on the way you use them. For, in performance, both are subordinate toa finer and all-embracing construction: the rhetoric strategy chosen by the choreographerldirector through which each 'tool' acquires significance.

Kresnik parrots the Rhetoric of bis Opponents.

I would like to claim that political intervention in choreography or theatre, today, must problematize and reflect predominantly on the choice of such structural strategies of playing with meaning and meaning making. To make things less abstract, I would like to ground my arguments on a concrete example, an important choreographic event I had the chance to attend this summer in Vienna: the final showing of a two-week-long summer 'tanztheater workshop' directed by Austrian choreographer and director Johann Kresnik.

I find this student showing particularly important for mainly two reasons (beyond the obvious one of being directed by Kresnk): firstly, it was a pedagogical experiment; secondly, it explicitly aimed at a political, or at least socially aware choreographic and theatrical aesthetics of today. The workshop's manifest intentions couldn't be more pertinent, even urgent, for a contemporary, engaged dance theatre, In Kresnik's words, the ... "seminar will be introduced as a discussion about tanztheater itself: history, forms, aesthetics and the very personal approach of each participant. On the basis of this discussion, individual subjects will be developed that will be worked on in the seminar. Subjects focussing on society or family but also political projects are possible ... even the German tabloid 'Bild-Zeitung' may be translated into dance. [...] After a few days, the results will be discussed in the group as regards the basic idea, realization and also understandability of the individual scenes - dance theater must be 'readable' for the spectator. The seminar will be concluded with a public presentation of the work and a final discussion."

Kresnik's proposal for the seminar mingled a historical component on the specificity of tanztheater in the performing arts with a strong encouragement for individual creativity (asking the dancer to be more than just a skillful body, but with a skillful and critical intellect - a predicament not so much fostered by yet that many choreographers), and a calling for a awareness regarding social events as inspirational sources for the creative process. Before going on, I would like to ask the reader to retain in his/her mind the importance given by Kresnik to "unterstandability and readability" of tanztheater. For it is Kresnik's rhetorical choice, or dramaturgic strategy, to achieve this readability in the showing, that my writing will address.

Since as far as I could tell, no final discussion folIowed the presentation, it is as an active participant of the imperative of readability avowed by Kresnik as one of the predicaments of both tanztheater and the workshop that I feel compelled to open up my feelings and readings around and about the showing. The sad part is, and this is what I would like to explicate throughout this article, for it is the source of my will to respond to the showing through this writing, the showing's challenge emerged only because of its absolute failure.

So, it is a Sunday afternoon in early August this year, and a crowd has gathered in the Volkstheater in Vienna to see one of the highlights of the magnificently ambitious program of the ninth Internationale Tanzwochen Wien, the 2 hour Iong final presentation of the workshop taught by Johann Kresnik in "Choreographic Theater" as part of the ProSeries 94.

In general terms, the showing was structured as a series of sketches performed by usually three to six students out of the fifteen or so. As far as I could grasp, each section was the work of an individual student (although quite probably in strong collaborative mode with each participant). Despite the sketchy out- line, a very coherent thread of concerns and a very homogenized aesthetics linked the various sections into a cohesive whole, a fact also emphasized by the appropriate use of the set where, a few hours later, Ismael Ivo would present bis latest collaborative work with Kresnik on Francis Bacon.

Word-for-Word Readability as a Choreographical Paradigm

It is thus in the highly harmonic dramatic structure crossing the whole performance that one can Iocate the imprimatur of the director/teacher. And this is where Kresnik's final presentation becomes a creepy moment of ideological and theatrical collapse. What I would like to argue is that this collapse is due toa very clear rhetorical choice springing from the programmatic "understandability and readability" in Kresnik's tanztheater: the over-privileging of literality as a performative paradigm, particularly as a performative paradigm for translating social mechanisms of empowerment and oppression into a readable choreography.

What I would like to show is that in absolutely all issues dealt in the performance - mainly, sexual and gender relations, racial relations, self-inflicted violence (masochism) and violence inflicted to the other (war/rape/sadism) - what was presented was a replication of the ideology of repression and not its deconstruction, its destruction, nor even its denouncing by representation. Since it is known that empowerment and the occlusion of power by law lives through the constant self-denial of its own metaphoric nature, that law and censorship privilege the literal, one sees already the dangers of gluing uncritically to the rhetoric of power itself in order to deconstruct the political biases that encage us.

Literality led Kresnik and his students to fall into a series of fallacies that I find painfully problematic. These fallacies are: the exposure of the oppressed body is enough to dignify it (and redeem the oppressor); the reproduction of trauma is enough to overcome the cruelty of the traumatizer; the expression of one's rage is enough to destroy the agents and mechanisms of repression.

The Logic of Violence reproduced instead of broken

Rape and extreme male sadism were the main ideas and actions going on throughout the entire presentation, thus constituting the thread that united the several sketches or sections. From the beginning, women are constantly being raped by men, in ways that refer more or less explicitly to the logic of (political) torture. Conceptually, the idea of sado-masochism as a pervading aspect in gender relations, whether private and exclusively sexual or public and sublimated into the realms of war, religion, identity roles and social behaviour is a powerful insight. But after seeing it happening endlessly in front of your eyes without any dramatic, ironic, oniric, humorous, caustic or any other comment on the actions or characters or contexts, you start wondering what kind of kick is being (re)produced. The inability in the performance to overcome the traumatic experience or fantasy of sexual sadism only reproduces the Iogic of the rapist, without marking him.

It should be obvious by 1994 (when visibility of horrors and of explored bodies is used even to publicize fashion) that showing the oppressed (whether the figures of socially repressed bodies - the Black, the Turk, the Gay, the Lesbian, the Diseased - or the symbols for the psychically repressed) does not at all give the oppressed either liberty or dignity. The fallacy of literalism gets really out of control when halfway through the showing, after a series of raped women, the two only black men of the group start a dance to the sound of African bongos, and how in a twist of guilt, the black-man-as-love-object (by the white woman) appears as the only male that does not rape. It is wonderful to see the Iogic of ideology working in the display of literality: for how could le bon, not to say "beau", sauvage always lurking behind the European sexual scene be something more than an archetype in the literality of performed fantasies? If all (white) males are rapists of women in the two hours of the showing what is this showing of the black as always already a lustful inocent African body actually saying? Afer some explicit attacks on the Bosnian war, embodied in the white performer, it seems quite simplistic to unproblematize those black bodies in the context of the seminar and erase the truly complex problems raised by the Somalian and more recently Rwandan crisis, where sadism, gender, race, and the performance of State terror -and European guilt - are so much intermingled.

If the black is the desired good body, dancing to the sound of bongos, the Brazilian is a transgressing womb that sambas the exposure of female lesbian desire. Which is quite probably true and reasonable as a structural-dynamic interpretation of the unconscious of Brazilian culture but again only reinstates Eurocentric imaginaries that so much helped to forge and justify European domination and genocide in the Americas: namely the symbolic assimilation of America as Woman that historically justified the assimilation of America as the place of inarticulateness, of the collapse of language, thus recycling ideas of femaleness as hysteric (and here the reference of the womb-as-flag is particularly interesting), as the uncontrolled body that is under language.

The examples are endless but the dramaturgy consistently unique, and suddenly if there is a shock, the showing is shocking for Daddy. The problem with such a target being that in the unconscious of capitalist patriarchal terror, Daddy Ioves this kind of shock (especially by explicit sexual advances from his little women, or his lustful and passive black males) ... It feeds him back to his power place.

If we are going to be political, if we are going to be provocative and moreover, if we are going to engage in creating a social event that lives in and by the contact of presences, of a conviviality of living bodies of ideas - i.e., if we are going to create a performance - then let's be responsible and particularly let's be critical. For the law of terror has been around for a Iong time, and the law is not dumb.

As Jacques Derrida would say in his essay "The Force of Law": "Politicization, for example, is interminable even if it cannot and should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism or a triviality, we must recognize in it the following consequence: each advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret the very foundations of law such as they had previously been calculated and delimited." But there is no re-interpretation, no re-presentation in this showing: only blunt acting out - the desired readability collapses for there is nothing being read out of reality, only photocopied.

The Stage as Metaphor, not as Television Set

What becomes painful for me to see is how the director/teacher's will to uncover, to unmask, gets destroyed by its inability to escape the Iogic of the law it aims to undermine. Free flown expression (on or off the stage) does not directly imply freedom. As Walter Benjamin very well pointed out, this ultimate freedom of expressing one's anger is the main performative attraction and condition of fascism. In this sense, the acting out of rape scenes and Eurocentric fantasms on the stage of the Volkstheater in Vienna could only make sense if a mark of theatricality, the sign of the stage as metaphor, and not as TV set for infantile symptomatic acting out to shock Daddy, were present somewhere sometime.

It is in this sense that Kresnik's strategies as a director and as a promoter of this pedagogic project - the one of proposing strategies of directing and performing - have to be debated. If we are to survive in the realm of purely acting out of anger, we enter directly in the Iogic of ideological obscenity. Here, I have to be very cautious not to let myself be identified with the character of the catholic priest that in a sketch at the end of the showing wants to fuck (of course, a woman) -and again, is this all there is to say about Catholicism political and body terrorism; is it that simplistic?

These are dangerous grounds over here, for when one calls forth such strongly connated words one is likely to end up stuck in them (and connoted with the words' denotations), so, if I bring forth concepts such as obscenity and literality it is only to underline how both go hand in hand with free narcissistic/sadistic psychic drives. Obscenity is an interesting phenomenon because it is linked to the sado- narcissistic phase of early childhood and is semantically exclusively .... literal.

Frappier-Mazur says: "The obscene word,like the insult, harks back to the time when the child does not distinguish very well between the representation of words and the representation of things and tends to treat words as things. [...] Unlike other words, the obscene word not only represents, but is the thing itself [...]". The French psychoanalyst Sylvain Floch states that in obscenity "the object resists extradition and insists on coinciding with itself, with its appearance and, with an absolute lack of tact, installs itself in the literal with great contempt regarding the metaphoric. In re-enforcing its spectacular status, the object puts in danger the realm of the specular, of abstraction."

And here I would argue that the obscenity of realism, literality and obscenity, as defined above, constitutes the rhetoric device for State control and terrorism and that Kresnik's student presetation, in this sense, participates in this ideology of obscenity, not because it shows dicks and cunts, raping and peeing, coprophilia and sadomasochism (again the tools are unimportant) but it is obscene precisely because it adheres to a rhetorical device that replicates without reflection the terror of the system it tries to unsuccessfully destroy. This is not only bad politics; it is not socially aware theatre.

When choreographing, or building a performance or a student's final presentation, what is important to keep in mind is not only what one wants to say or deconstruct or destroy or kill or even overcome, but how one can do it, without falling back into the Iogic of bis/her own oppressors. It is this how that will resonate and stimulate the audience's intellection and emotion, asking them to reformulate their own performance of the political, their own living of the social, promoting a radical claiming to control the making of significance and value. For this purpose, noise, silence, shit, violence, pomography, hammers and drills are all equally welcome: as Iong as they are used beyond the ideoIogic that encages our desire.