"...Through the ethical acceptance of our failure to be rendered within the terms of the visible, we may find another way to understand the basis of our link to the other within and without our selves."
(Peggy Phelan)
The field
In the late spring of 1993, I was a guest "Theory" teacher at the European Dance Development Center (EDDC) in Arnhem, Holland.
"Theory" being too broad a concept to serve as a guideline, I decided to organize the three weeks of the workshop as a shared exploration with the students of several perspectives on how we could approach dance that is being made today. My concern was to give the EDDC dance students some basic concepts from the fields of cultural anthropology, semiotics and psychoanalysis and to try to use those models to help us talk, write, and understand the aesthetics and politics of contemporary dance (1)
One of my unstated objectives throughout the course was to try to avoid what seems to me a strange paradox pervading dance theory. For some reason, and with some rare and noble exceptions,(2) there is a strange discomfort amongst academia in dealing with dance outside the frame of historical perspective and a reluctance to look for a more complex interpretive frame that can illuminate contemporary choreography. Whether this predominance of History in dance research comes from an attempt to dignify an art form by acknowledging its aging (always a respectable predicament, the one of being old) or from the enormous theoretical difficulties that semiotics and other disciplines have in dealing with non-textual art forms, the result is nevertheless a strange paradox ---an art that needs living bodies to exist is projected, as a research object, to an intangible past. It is as if we needed the veil of death in order to face the essence of dance. (Or is this veil a symptom that something unbearable may lie at the core of dance?)
With all this in mind, the students and I dealt basically with two major thematic areas: firstly, an introduction to general concepts and methods coming from the Anthropology of the Symbolic and their possible applications to a decoding of choreographic construction; and secondly, a broad discussion on the politics surrounding the issues of dance creation and the circulation of dance in the market. Here a special focus was put on the role of journalistic dance criticism as an essential part of that market.
I wanted the students to understand that if we are to see dance as a cultural object not only do we have to acknowledge and study the work of choreographers, dancers, composers, designers and all the artistic staff that put their creativity together to make a choreographic object, but also and necessarily we must include in our analysis those indispensable counterparts of the creative process in a capitalistic system of production, the entire web that lives for and because of Dance: critics, journalists, curators and producers. My point was to bring some awareness to how this broad community functions in a dynamic way continuously shaping and reshaping (consciously and/or unconsciously) the definitions of what dance is or should be. This constant reshaping of aesthetic values plays an essential part in the construction of desire, frustration and validation that keep the dance market running.
A salad of references
What I wanted to bring to the EDDC workshop was a political and critical approach to two issues and paradoxes surrounding the making, producing and writing of dance--- particularly, and this is important, of journalistic writing of dance. I wanted to transmit to the students the critical tradition typical of my field of knowledge--Cultural Anthropology.
The main reference I brought te the workshop was the iconoclastic precepts of a discipline known broadly as "Critica1 Theory." Dwight Conquergood, from The Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, although acknowledging the lack of a unitary concept fox the field of Critical Theory, defines it as being "...committed to unveiling the political stakes that anchor cultural practices---research and scholarly practices no less than the everyday" and concludes "Yes, critical theory politicizes science and knowledge."(3) My inclusion of aesthetics and criticism in this process of politicization is only a logical extension of Conquergood's definition: "Critical theorists...are committed to the excavation of the political underpinnings of all modes of representation, including the scientific.'' (4)
Into this excavation and politicization, I tossed an intertextual salad of three critics of criticism in the three disciplines of Performance Studies, Ethnography, and DancenTheory: Dwight Conquergood, anthropologist James Clifford (5) and scholar Noël Carroll.(6)
Each of these authors proposes either a transformation of writing for the purpose of a better way of describing and analyzing either "ethnographic" or "aesthetic" objects or, in the case of Conquergood, a non-textual, performative approach to analysis.
To Conquergood, non-writing is seen as an alternative for academic papers as a method of analysis. In his article "Rethinking Ethnography..." he proposes that rethinking the "world as performance" opens up several possibilities for ethnographic analysis, namely fox Performance and interpretation: "What kinds of knowledge are privileged or displaced when performed experience becomes a way of knowing, a method of critical inquiry, a mode of understanding? ...What are the range and varieties of performance modes and styles that can enable interpretation and understanding?" and for Performance and Scholarly Representation: "What are the rhetorical problematics of performance as a complementary or alternative form of 'publishing' research?". Truth and textuality are not necessarily synonyms. This cannot be overemphasized.
James Clifford gave us a very useful model of historical changes of the idea of beauty in western art and art theory. His archeological study en the validation of western ("primitive") objects by European artists and critics in the early decades of this century, shows how the evaluation of this art as "exotic" is an ideological construct aimed at a specific site in the marker: the critical discourse. (This issue is very much present in European dance festivals nowadays that seem to always require the presence of that exotic.) His essays also show how both "content" and "form" are ideological constructs.(7)
Noël Carroll's "situational criticism," based in philosopher Karl Popper's model of a logic of the situation, claims that “... dance is also a human activity; and to make someone understand a dance or a choreographic style one needs to make clear the logic of the situation in which the dance was created or the choreography developed."
With all these references in mind, I proposed to the students a framework.(8) The following were the points we started from in trying to create alternative forms of criticism:
* Te say that a work of art has a content is an animistic projection--or reification. Things don't have "contents." Meaning exists because humans exist. When we are interpreting a work of art, what we are really doing is interpreting an intersection of cultural and individual definitions (the artist's and the critic's) of what art is. Criticism should be a discourse in these intersections. This is seldom recognized by journalistic dance criticism.
* The first premise has as direct consequence the inclusion of a multiplicity of levels of analysis in any interpretation of a work of art. Any discourse or interpretive model is partial. Al1 we have are different discourses that can help us shed light on different aspects of the piece. In this sense a Marxist, or a psychoanalytical, or a semiotic interpretation partially illuminates but never encompasses the wholeness of the work. In this sense a dance also never is. This has been the common sense of semiotics for at least thirty years but somehow the verb to be is still a tyrant in dance criticism. (Someone's dance is this or is that.)
* The first two premises lead to the importance of acknowledging that there is a Self behind the lines of the review. I would argue that part of the logic of the situation in dance criticism is to make that Self explicit to the reader. The acknowledging of this presence adds performativity (presence and the acknowledging of presence) to the text and dissolves the figure of authority in the abstraction of the words. (During the workshop we talked about these issues illustrating them with James Clifford's articles on the politics of ethnographic texts.)
* Following the ideas of performativity we explored Dwight Conquergood's proposition of performance as an alternative to ethnographic field notes and kept in mind that maybe text is net always an adequate medium to express precisely a certain idea. Other levels of textuality were explored.
* We kept in mind how Gregory Bateson showed that description is fundamental but always short of the object described.(9)
* We followed Noël Carroll's proposition that the role of the critic would be to clarify the logic of the dance for the reader by pointing to and explaining the choreographer's choices in view of her or his intentions. My attraction to Carroll's model derives mainly from the weight all the elements of a dance assume under this perspective and the degree of awareness it requires to include choreographic details that transcend movement--from lighting and costumes to the casting of dancers.
* The choreographic analysis that the students and I did throughout the course tried to identify and interpret these choices, seeing them as potentially meaningful. My only discomfort with Carroll's theory lies in its intellectual spring: the rationalistic body of knowledge of Popper which seems to abhor any suggestion of an unconscious life.(10) A life that we intently looked for in the interpretation of choreographies.
* We kept in mind that at a certain level the choreographer expresses unconscious or symbolic material. We looked for these materials as structuring choreographies and tried to add them into the analysis.
* We kept in mind that there is a capitalistic market behind the dance reviewed. The erotic is part of that market. The critic should make that relation explicit.
Some politics
A polemics in the U.S. still seems to revolve around the issues of "descriptive" versus "interpretive" criticism.(11) During the workshop, students and I agreed that there is no point in developing serious criticism if one is not grounded in the observed material; but also, through the analysis of several American dance critics' writings, we agreed that pure description is always short of the object and tiring to the reader; on the other hand, delirious interpretation does nt even get to the object and manages to be quite irritating for the reader.
My opinion is that at this moment a revision of criticism needs to leave these common-sensical discussions and regain some political momentum: journalistic critics don't seem to be worrying very much about the question of criticism in a capitalistic market of art and its role of self- empowerment. If there was a reason for experimenting with critique in the workshop at EDDC, it was political. Dance criticism is still judgmental in a very bourgeois way. As Spanish playwright and critic Antonio Lera would say, often the critic likes to play a role more fit for the Pope.
But the point is that the making of judgments is a necessary motor in the politics of frustration and desire- making, both essential for the production and circulation of choreographies. And it is here that the inclusion of performativity in writing can be a crucial way of reshaping the critic's use of words.
Doubt as gift
I believe that one of the political consequences of performative writing and criticism as performance (and of the workshop at the EDDC) is the inclusion of uncertainty through acknowledging in the writing the existence of the ephemeral in both the dance and in the writing on the dance.The double presence of Self and of doubt seems to me particularly relevant and politically important. Performativity in writing diminishes the authoritarian voice of the text, as Dwight Conquergood would say, "The performance paradigm is an alternative to the atemporal, decontextualized, flattening approach of text- positivism."
But this inclusion of doubt in reviews can be quite problematic; for newspapers want "news" that is "true" (whatever that means ideologically). So we also have to leave out of criticism the information on anthropological constructs, fantasmatic (12) contents, social and political issues or constraints embedded in the piece reviewed. This exclusion perpetuates the ideology of physical virtuosity, the uncritical definition of beauty, and phraseologies such as "gorgeous bodies," "witty composition" and so on, totally removed from social and intellectual constructs.
The discomfort experienced by my own editors -- always willing, I have to say, to allow for quite a wide range of writing approaches---was very clear when, for the first time in four years of journalism (from literary criticism, to scientific journalism, to dance reviewing), I had some texts on dance refused. For me, this not only locates the role of art journalism in the system of aesthetic and capital value production but made me think for the first time who I was really writing to when writing about dance. It made me see that I was, first, writing for the journalistic community in the run for factuality and "truth;" and then, to producers and choreographers eager to accumulate voluminous press-packages about their products for the sake of sale and circulation. And it made me see that, through the textual making and destruction of objects of desire, criticism embodies in its writing the complex relations between artist, producer, critic and capital in establishing the aesthetic (and therefore commercial) value of the work of art.
A trip to the field
As a corollary of the workshop I wanted the students to experience the dreads of professional journalistic dance criticism. Fortunately, the Springdance Festival in Utrecht [Holland], the epitome of the European dance festival, was happening at the time.(13) :So we went on a field trip: four performances in a seven hour marathon and after that, three days to show up with a result. The assignment was that the students would have to create a critical discourse--that is, a reflective insight on what they saw. The form of that discourse would have to be harmonious with their own mental processes, in a language they would feel at case with (verbal, pictorial, non-verbal, etc.). A final rule was that "impressionistic" texts would be considered a failure in the task. Again, I was experimenting in interpretation (or to use the jargon, in "hermeneutics') not in impressionism. A few of the results are on the following pages. Some of the students decided to stay inside the boundaries of written discourse. Among these, some would complement the typical essay form with a more open, poetic form. None of the students responded with movement which I considered a wise decision. Again, all impressionism was out of the question and to respond critically the performance through another performance would imply to create a whole new choreography (a valid option of analysis according to Conquergood's models), something they wouldn't have the time to do.
So what?
There is a Portuguese saying that claims that hell is full of good intentions. I do feel that at this point the complexity of the questions raised by performative writing and by performative criticism are but touched on in the students' and my own attempts to bring a different shape to the rationalistic hierarchy of Truth=Word/Untruth=Body. But if criticism is ideology, then to provoke in the students a responsible response to that predicament is already to happily deserve my own share of hell.
Actually, in this hierarchy, truthfulness (which is hot the same as "truth") does not necessarily have to relate to the means of discourse (body or words) but to the semantics of that discourse. Not to words per se but to a certain way of using words. To conclude, I would like to make clear that the issue shouldn't be to "fight" words or to "distrust" words, but to be aware of both the limits of language and of the political weight given to textual discourse in academia and in criticism. A weight that, when tyrannic, makes the world of expression and intellection smaller. What I do distrust are mental cages where words' magical weight are used in order to perpetuate an ideology of art production and its aesthetic, political and economic premises. In the case of European dance, a sometimes absurd system of production and circulation is literally embedded in linguistic irresponsibility, usually in the texts that festival programmers and curators write to justify their aesthetic and market choices of what to present and to exclude.
The heavenly part of all this is that one week after the EDDC course my letter of resignation was at my editor's desk. Now I feel free to write (or to non-write) about dance.
NOTES
(1)My experience in the dance world is basically a European one, significantly different from the American scene.
(2)On of the exceptions is Cynthia Novack's insightful book on the culture of contact improvisation, Sharing the Dance.
(3)The quotes and references to Dwight Conqurgood's ideas are taken from his article "Rethinking Ethnography: towards a critical cultural politics," in Communication Monographs, volume 58, June 1991.
(4) Ibid.
(5)James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Harvard Univ. Press, 1988.
(6)The quotes and ideas of Noël Carroll are taken from his article, "Trois Propositions pour une critique de la danse contemporaine," in La Danse Au Défi, Michel Febvre editor, Parachute, Montreal, 1987. Translation and emphasis mine.
(7) See James Clifford, op.cit., especially chapters 4, 9, and 10.
(8) I use framework quite in the same sense Erving Goffman defines it in his book, Frame Analysis, An essay on the organization of experience, York, Perm. NUP, 1986: “..a primary framework is one that is seen as rendering what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful."
(9) See Bateson's Mind and Nature. I re-staged the class that Bateson describes in the first chapter of the book, where he asks his students to write a description of a geometric figure drawn on the blackboard, and came up with the same partial results.
(10) Freud and later Lévi-Strauss proposed models of aesthetic interpretation where the artist's choices were seen as always causal, as unconscious meaningful decisions. Their models are more appealing to me in general as epistemologic bases but as far as I know they were never used to decode choreographies.
(11)In a recent article in the Dance Theater Journal, Roger Copeland brings the issue back again (DTJ, Spring Summer 93).
(12) A fantasm or fantasy is a psychoanalytic terra that refers to unconscious desires or images directed to the fulfillment of a repressed wish.
(13)Springdance is a good example of the pathologies of the current dance circuit in Europe. This year's phenomenon was to announce in the Festival's program that Dennis O'Connor's premiere would take place on the second night of his performance. Since "premiere" is French for "first," I asked the organisation if there was a typo in the program. I was kindly informed that that was not the case but since there was another performance opening in the same night as Dennis's, they decided to call Dennis's second night a premiere so that the press would come. As Lewis Carroll would say, and less nice people politicized extensively in the 1930s: "What I tell you three times is true.”
I would like to thank Aat Hougee and Mary Fulkerson, the directors of EDDC, for their invitation and trust, Leah Garland for her comments and critiques on this text, and the students at EDDC for their support and intelligent contributions to the course.
To contact the author: André Lepecki, 177 Hudson St. #3, NY, NY 10013.