Writing in motion
The weak walls of our ROOM,
Of everyday or
Linear time
will not save us....
Important events stand behind the doors;
it is enough to open them…
Tadeusz Kantor
zero; or unrest
They have just stopped moving; the lights are
fading out applause will soon follow. And then they’ll leave, taking the dance
with them, taking it behind the four walls of the stage, taking the dance under
their skins. Until the next time. And as we, the
audience, leave the theater -- still energized by the
dance that is now no longer present, that is already cooling in our bodies - a fresh new sediment of experience spreads out in our
memory, claiming its space as a new past. Until there’s remembering. For some
of us in the audience this remembering means: until there’s writing, as the
moment arrives of writing on the dance that just was, of revisiting dance’s
mnemonic space, of locating and probing its precarious site. This moment of
revisiting and restaging the dance in the scene of writing and in the scene of
memory is what will interest me in this essay. An archaeological endeavour
whose success is guaranteed only by the means of mimesis, when the writer
accepts that the translation of what no longer moves into the movement of
writing depends on play between eye, hand, and the theater
of memory.
In this sense, writing is putting in motion
- an odd mimesis of the dance, its repetition, its
restaging. Only this time the dancing bodies are purely imaginary. But were
they ever not imaginary, those moving bodies of dancers now resting in some
hotel room (if the company’s budget allows such scenario, that is)? My question
is: is it possible to affirm unconditionally that their presence on the stage
was purely physical? And if we decide to answer no to this question, what implications
must we draw regarding representation
-- both in dance and in the writing of dance? American performance theorist Peggy
Phelan, in her remarkable essay Thirteen
ways of looking at choreographing writing “cogently outlines the
theoretical set-up in play here. She argues that “all forms of representations
of the body – from portrait photograph to historic dance reconstructions -- the
body in question seems to make an appearance, then it
definitely disappears, and is then re-presented. History and writing are constituted
from and by that disappearance. Moreover, this disappearance suspends the
proprietary relation between body and being. In its journey from disappearance
to representation, the body does not ‘belong’ to the subject who wears it, who
dances in and through it…” (1: 204)
I will follow Phelan’s steps and argue that the
tension resulting from this continuous oscillation -- between the dissociation
and overlapping of the physical and imaginary bodies - not only informs
historical reconstructions, but also constitutes the necessary condition for
any dance to come successfully into being (i.e., to be a “good” dance piece) as
well as for any writing to successfully address a dance piece (i.e., to be a
“good” review). For this tension and this oscillation have a rhythm, it is
already choreographic, as I will discuss later on.
I concede that the humming of a spinning hard drive
as soundtrack and the lighting of flickering electrons crashing against the
surface of the screen sets up writing in an altogether different theater than that of dance. But I am arguing here that the
moment when those sedimented images
of dancing bodies metamorphosize into writing is one
already informed by a choreographic motion. This motion is not at all simply
that of fingers running nervously on the keyboard, following the dancer’s steps
by the means of scribbled notes, loose recollections, sensations
lining up as if we could believe for a moment that indeed the dance could be
realigned again in the shape of words. Rather, this motion is highly supplemented
by the means of memory, mimesis, and projection, all contributing to compose an
imaginary room for the dance to move again; and in this mimetic/mnemonic theater of writing, in the tension of materiality and
imaginary, the dance is put into motion again, surfacing as a labyrinth of
desire and repression, a specter of the image we
think it was probably there on the stage once - just now, last night, a year
ago.
Thus the theater of writing
and the scene of dancing are not altogether as different as we thought they
were. The writer trusts that she can recapture what she thinks she saw being
danced on stage, just as the choreographer trusts she can recapture and
organize in her piece that precarious, precise improvised gesture she thinks
she saw in a rehearsal. I am interested in this unstable oscillation between writing
and dance; for this oscillation, this uncertain pendular
motion between the recollection of movements that are no more and words that
are yet to be already gestures towards choreography. The
choreographic flow in the realm of signification.
first proposition
1. If we
start by moving, by thinking through moving, and by living through moving, we’ll
arrive to that disturbing vision: that the predicament of dance is to be an art
of erasure. Dance always vanishes in front of our eyes in order to create a new
past. The dance exists ultimately as a mnemonic ghost of what had just lived
there.
Dance as an art of erasure; as opposed to dance as
an art of presence and inscription. To think of dance as that
which vanishes as opposed to that which is present. I am aware of the
boring hues of this discussion. I intend to reconsider the ethical implications
of these positions once we acknowledge that the dance is profoundly informed,
constituted, built upon mo(ve)ments that exceed the economy of the “purely physical” -
(e)motions disturbing the law of common-sensically
dulled eyes and common-sensically dulled feelings. I
am theorizing here that both dance and writing are already implicated in
the organic system of historically inscribed sensorial practices. Which means
that as writers, as dancers, and as writers on dances there is something to be
gained politically in investigating the possibilities for a
writing and a choreographic project that re-articulates the intricate
relationships between nervous systems, sensorial organs, and the linguistic/epistemic
apparati as constitutive of the political, aesthetic,
physical, and theoretical cultures.
As this understanding of the dance as erasure becomes
more and more widespread, and as it helps informing an ideological organization
of the eye, it relaunches the old project of dance
criticism as a form of archival duty. “If dance vanishes as it is danced, as
post-structural theories of the dance now tell me,” says the happy descriptive
critic, “then my moral duty as a critic is to prevent this dying by the means
of my indelible writing.” In this version of dance writing, the critic is a
kind of optimistic semiotician spinning wild in
teleological delusion. His “ethical” drive is an hygienic
one.
The problem with the belief that writing can be a
way of capturing and freezing dance (and dance’s signification) in “the linear
flow of everyday time” (as Kantor puts it in the
epigraph of this text) is that the word is an entity as fluid as the dancing image
it dreams to capture. It is in acknowledging this instability of the dance and
this instability of the word that we would have to reconsider the possibilities
of writing on dance as another art of erasure. This rethinking can be
proposed as a form of anatomical problem: what are the relationships between
the writer’s eye, mind, hand (whether the writer is a critic, a reviewer, or a
scholar), and the self-effacing dancing body? For this we must leave the room of
the theater, our cozy
havens of meaning, our eye’s lazy habits, the security of our skins, and, as Kantor proposes, open up some doors outside our everyday
and linear time and see what moves back there.
Some ideas cannot be properly disciplined. Some ideas
seem always to dance around, always ready to rupture the logic of order and
containment in uncontrollable steps, transgressing the formal border of arts
and sciences and fields of knowledge. The idea of trace has been such dancing
being. It embodied in choreographic practices as it was still being written by
Jacques Derrida In the early sixties. Anna Halprin,
who was a teacher of Trisha Drown, Yvonne Rainer, and Simone Ford, reformulated
her approach to choreography by comprehending and theorizing the implications
of dance’s predicament as an art of erasure, as an art of traces. Halprin stated: “I remember thinking that dance was in
disadvantage in relation to sculpture in that the spectator could spend as much
as he required to examine a sculpture, walk around it,
and so forth -- but a dance movement -- because it happened in time - vanished
as soon as it was executed.” (2: 117)
I will come back to Halprin
in a later section, for her insight had obvious impact on the course of
contemporary dance (her insight virtually made history). But first I must take
a detour to address the lurking question that haunts Halprin’s
perception of dance as trace - if the dance vanishes, where does it go to?
second-position
2. If the
body is a landscape, it is also a theater of
images, a site for history to rest. Dance hpens in
this fractured time, in this site for loss and desire that is memory – that
primal stage tainted by the bodies whom we sheltered.
Can we recite them?
The questions, as of now: where are the sites for dance
to rest once it is over? Where does the dance go to? And how is it set in
motion again, in the mimetic remembering of writing? The question of destiny,
of destination, of the purpose of the dance, of its path and of its faith, is
one and the same question with that of the economy of the gaze, that blindness
of the eye that beholds the dance as “purely physical.” This question takes us
further back into memory, at least some 30 years before Anna Halprin and Derridas theorization
of the trace in the 1960s. I am risking something here, but it is perhaps
worthwhile. For to invoke that which is always already eluding the eye and
eluding the word is to desire too much and to define a path that is not the
most straightforward one. This path is the path of history, the path of the
past, of sedimented memories,
it is the choreographic path of remembrance, but also of the mimetic trust of
eye and hand in the dance of the word. So, back to the past, to 1937, to Martha
Graham not dancing in her studio in
Graham’s sentence is extraordinary in every sense
of the word. I re-read it over and over again before moving on to the next
section. Maybe you could do the same...
stains, as in destiny
3. There is
her skin and there is time-stretched canvases of inscription.
And living leaves but traces, those most valuable stains
whispering sense, carving the shape of motion.
Where does the dance come from and where does the
dance go to? This is the question that haunts signification and the project of
writing dance, of writing on dance. For this travelling implicates sites of
departure and of arrival that are not evident and, moreover, try not to leave
evidences (of their location, of their particular movements). Which space does
dance fill in this journey of uncertain origins and ends? This space that hosts
the vanished dance, and that produces the yet to be danced is (I would claim)
the theatrical space par excellence. It is a place, but it is
uncharted -- a space not belonging to the realm of representation, but that allows
representation. A room. Moreover, a dark room (as theater should be), a camera obscura
-, that black box which allowed the enlightened eye to put the world into
perspective, that room upon which the eye withheld the possibility of
representation but that is always outside representation proper. This
space between departure and destination is that which allows dance to become,
that which gives dance understandability. Such space
that is uneventful in order for the event to be staged,
can never be contained for this dark room is not only full of moving
inhabitants but is in itself moving, always in tension. Such is the room of theater, as Tadeuz Kantor describes it: “the room cannot be real, i.e., exist in our time: this room is in our memory, in our recollection
of the past. This is the room we keep constructing again and again and that
keeps dying again and again.” (4: 143) Such a room, that makes representation
possible without being in itself represented, is thus an unstable one in the
realm of discourse and in the law of signification. It is always in motion,
always dying, but always being reconstituted, worked through, oscillating
between presence and memory, physicality and trace - as matter, as the dance
should be. This appearance and disappearance constitutes the problematic kernel
of dance criticism (and of choreographing); for it constitutes the element that
hold the possibility of stating: I am dancing, I am seeing dance, I can see
dance, I am writing about dance.
But now one must ask: why is it that Kantor has to say that the room he always builds only to
see it die again, does not exist in our time but exist in our memory? If
the room does not exist in our time because it is in our memory what is the
time of memory then? Does memory entails the same temporality as that of
presence (of our presence as spectators, as critics, as dancers in
performance)? Kantor concludes the previous citation
by suggesting that this temporality is informed by a rhythm, which is to say, it
moves: “This pulsating rhythm must be maintained because it delineates the real
structure of our memory” (4:143)
Memory is a material non-presence, a theatrical
space that dances according to the rhythms of vanishing and becoming, of physicality
and imaginary. This should be the fundamental premise for an ethical dance criticism.
repetition repetition repetition
4. The skin dries out, the body stops, history falls short. As
long as we move and are moved there will always be disquieting accumulations of
bodies inside the limits of our own bodies and inside the patterns of our daily
choreographies: bodies of knowledge, bodies of feelings, bodies of lovers,
bodies of sorrows. Sometimes these bodies surface. Their
loss constitutes our ultimate repetition.
Catherine Clément writes
a beautiful book on that strange, liminal bodily
state that is the state of syncope. Syncope is that temporal gap in life filled
by the absence of the self, when the subject leaves its presence and vanishes
from his body without dying. Clément describes the
state: “Suddenly, time falters. First the head spins, overcome with a slight
vertigo. It is nothing; but then the spinning goes wild, the ears start to
ring, the earth gives way and disappears, one sinks back, goes away ... Where
does one go?’ (5:1) .Thus the question erupts once again. The same question,
decades later, in a different context. Where does one go when the self is
absent? Where does the dance go when the dance is no longer being danced? They
are the one and the same question.
In order to control what she perceived as the
vanishing nature of dance, the dying of dance, Anna Halprin
introduced repetition in her work. Trisha Brown, her student, turned this
pedagogical moment into masterpieces: Glacial Decoy (1979) and Set
and Reset (1983). Henry Sayre appropriately comments on these two works: “If
in Glacial Decoy […] the dancers continually vanish away into the wings,
such is the condition of our own perceptual relation to even those movements we
can see, or rather have just already seen. The moment one of Brown’s dancers
disappears from view, we are forced to recognize that the dance itself - what
was until a moment ago present before our eyes - has also disappeared. Dance is defined as a vanishing act” (2: 140-141). But this
disappearance in Trisha Brown’s work is more complex than Sayre makes it. Its
paradox is that the repetition that informs it constitutes the same act which
guarantees the vanishing dance to be always available for re-presentation and for
its reproduction. Bui isn’t it this paradox precisely the bulk of the hard work
of being a dancer, of being a choreographer: constant repetition,
that is to say, in French répétition, a
continuous rehearsing? This endless search for recapturing an ever lost
imaginary perfect moment, a perfect pose, spin, intention, that we believe it can
be brought up again from its own disappearance? Such work is the work Kantor refers to when he talks about the theatrical space
he keeps “reconstructing again and again / and that keeps dying again and
again.”
But in this reproduction and rehearsal, this répétition , the question is still powerfully effective for the dancer
as well as for the choreographer, the audience, and the critic: where is the
dance coming from, and where is it going to? Dance historian Mark Franko writes “Dance performs still nonexistent social
spaces constructed from the memory of what is not, and never was” (6: 212). Intriguing these memories of spaces that never were. They
never were for they are gong to be gone in a different realm. To
this realm the project of writing dancing must gesture.
life in between
5. To sit, to listen, to be, to observe, to breath - the most
urgent choreography. To inhabit the stain, to embrace history.
The skin dries out, history falls short. Organically mechanical, life happens
in between.
What happens in between steps, in between touches, in
between half-motions of undefined intentions? What is the nature of that which
happens between two sets of gestures, two ideas, two
paragraphs? These questions are temporal questions, and this is already a lead.
A clue, gesturing towards an ethics of representation.
This space in between is that of the theater and that of the syncope, the one where the flow of
choreography oscillates, the space the dance moves into escaping from the
linear time of everyday life to the rhythmic time of memory. Martha Graham
answered her own question of dance’s origins and of dance’s end by gesturing
precisely towards this movement between memories and in between memories: ‘To
understand dance for what it is, it is necessary we know from whence it comes
and where it goes. It comes from depths of man’s inner nature, the unconscious,
where memory dwells. As such it inhabits the dancer. It goes into the
experience of man, the spectator, awakening similar memories.” (83-84)
But... is this all? Is this all there is to it at
the end; in the end? This return to the Freudian postulate of
an unconscious to unconscious communication? The answer, of course, is yes.
But only in one level. A yes with a yet - with the
caution of any project that gestures towards ethics, towards re-considering the
laws that regulate the always tense pas de deux
between eye and hand. In order to track down what invades the unstable, vagrant,
nomadic space of choreography-in-writing, of choreography and writing, one must
pay careful notice to (must pay homage to, must dignify, invoke, problematize, dance and write on) those suspended, in
between moments, where gestures, sounds, landscapes are not (yet) dance but
point to the choreographic tension between physicality and imagination. For
those moments open up doors, slash the boundaries of the eye, cut the vulgarity
of interpretation and description, expand self into the non-timely realm of the
syncope, the room of dancing memories - so that our spectating
bodies, and our spectating minds can pulsate in the
rhythm of theater, the oscillating rhythm of
degeneration and reproduction, where we can repeat with the dancers their own
rehearsal to transcend the body and to participate in a dance of intelligence.
References
1 Phe1an, Peggy, “
2 Sayre, Henry M., The
Object of Performance, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1989): 308.
3 Graham, Martha, Martha Graham (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
4 Kantor, Tadeusz, “The Room. Maybe a New Phase 1980,” in A Journey
Through Other Spaces , ed. Michal Kobialka, trans. Michal Kobialka, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1993): 142-144.
5 Clément,
Catherine, Syncope. The Philosophy of Rapture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994): 302.
6 Franko,
Mark, “Mimique,” in Bodies of the Text. Dance as Theory, Literatute
as Dance, ed. Ellen