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LECTURES OF LEARNING FROM THE
TRESTLES OF DANCING
By Luce Yfaire
Whenever there's a lot of choice I
feel at home: I can spend eternities in large supermarkets although I only
bring a little trinket to the cashier. There's a motley dance market pulsing on
the "Art-for-Art-Workshop-Arsenal" at ImPulsTanz, I thought when I came there,
and I felt elated. I cannot understand people who don't like markets or,
equally shocking, avoid museums. Moreover, museum goods are well-nigh
unsaleable. I like that. For there's nothing I like better than appropriating
the unsaleable and unownable.
Dancing is unsaleable, too. I saw
that again and again while watching classes in which the most different human
beings learned how one can dance. The tutors willingly shared their knowledge,
and it was bought by the many participants. There was a market like in a
museum, but it had developed a step further: for the knowledge about its
possibilities stored in a body is no commodity that can be pushed over the
counter to become a buyer's property who then does what he wants with it. And
the tuition is not an application acquired in a convalescent home.
The dance knowledge clientele has to
work hard in order to win something which subsequently finds its way into their
bodies. Naturally, this something never is just anything, but a partial
information structure which joins up with other partial structures in the
bodies of the learning. And two traps are lying in ambush here: if different
partial structures gainsay each other, learning gets into conflict with itself;
if they are too similar, the body receives unilateral information resulting in
a specialisation which is nothing but that (and therefore has to disappear in
itself).
Bread and books of reason
In the Workshop area, willing
clients become inquisitive scouts. The body enquires a bit different from naked
reason – which, however, indubitably is a part of the body and could not
function at all without corporeal organisation and emotional motivation. My
mind doesn't understand itself by itself, it needs daily grooming and
nutrition, bread and books, cigarettes and newspapers, films, alcohol,
performances, conversations, walking, lying and sex. And first of all it has to
dance! The mind is my body, by which again it is only partially used. I see how
the students fight for dance. As if it were for their reason – thus they
allocate their bodies something which has to do with an extended understanding
of reason.
Reason does not understand as long
as the body makes head against (putative) insight. This existential problem is
directly connected with dancing. Dancers dance because their bodies drive them
to do so. They could also satisfy their yearning for motor activity by
sprinting or swimming the crawl. But no, they aren't even satisfied with
football or boxing. They want to dance because it is just that activity which
gives them something that transforms their bodies into other places than those
which are sitting, working, or sporting.
If bodies are places then they are
places which recognise themselves and their environment, and react to this
interplay. They are topoi (in Greek originally "places" but later
"idioms") of reason: other than houses or places – and more mobile, too. The
oldest phantasm of philosophy comes from metaphysics, which either invites the
mind to set out, or has it rotate within itself. The body itself constitutes
the antithesis become flesh of a metaphysics which on the whole is one of its
collective communicative germinations. However, this germination enshrouds it
like a world-explaining gelatinous sack, because reason still has a hard time
establishing itself in the ametaphysical construction of the body.
Games of the political
Dancing is playing with this body in
the sack. The original meaning of the term which comes from the Old High German
word "spil" is "dance", "dance movement". Here one should mainly think of
Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Sprachspiele" (language games), of speaking language as
an activity and way of life, or as a synonym for those thought experiments by
which Jean-François Lyotard in reading Jon McKenzie directly arrives at the
term performativity: no power games without language games. Well now, the dance
game as we know it today is borne by language games which again are based on
blurs and bodies of rules. So the game is far from harmless. In game theory, if
one chooses to follow Johan Huizinga, dance is considered the ultimate game of
games.
An this can be seen clearly in the
workshops at the Arsenal. Here, bodies play with their performatives – a highly
political activity. The complex communications between different levels of
transfer, feedback circuits, representation patterns and physical system
activations are breathtaking. Hierarchical conditions, anticipations of
functions in the art system, networking policy and achievement discourses buzz
to and fro between the individual dance classes which look so harmless and yet
never are "innocent". The dancers' behavioural patterns are accordingly
expressive, and the strategies employed in the game aim directly at the
psychosocial conditions of the individual or at the construction of temporary
communities in the workshops and research projects.
I'm beginning to read the various
paedagogical units like performances, as construction procedures like they are
integrated into every production system. Here calculations are executed,
formulas tested, tactics taught and learned. It is quite hard to describe these
processes with language itself. But between the inwardly orientated body play
and the extroverted representation aim, language games develop which seem to
"examine" each other and settle down far away from "dancing" in the social
space.
The gelatines of divinity
That's what practised theory looks
like on a level of meta-language, I'm thinking, and the two meanings of the
term "theoros" which I as an observer dress up in, become clearer to me. From
the view of divinity (that is, the gelatinous) to the view of cognisance (that
is, language) it goes off again from the sack race of metaphysics into the
indeceivable profanity of the body in William Gibson's "meatspace".
I'm unabashed by the numerous
esoteric approaches in the workshop programme – neither by Keith Hennessy's
shamanism nor by the voodoo spheres of Koffi Kôkô or Karine LaBel, not even by
the partly flabbergasting mysticisms gathering around dancing in other courses.
For the friendly profanist in me regards the gelatinous sack race as a play
with body history and the culturally specific archaisms which recur onto the
influence of sociopsychic processes onto the ununderstandable body material.
The game is one of theories with which traditional cultures have enshrouded the
body, and whose influence on the art of doing in dance are still relevant
today. As Giorgio Agamben writes: "That which was disassociated through a
[author's note: religious] rite, can be returned by a rite to the profane
sphere."
Most of the courses I see can be
examined quite profanely with regard to their body-ethic content. In 2004 in
Helsinki a conference took place about ethics in dance education, and
interesting issues can also be found at www.ethicsdance.co.uk. But that's not the level I mean. I rather believe that
dancing itself already contains ethical discourses, and that in contemporary
dance these are in the foreground already with regard to the body definitions
of our societies. Alas, the term "ethics" in western political art debates
tastes a bit unsophisticated and pettifogging. In dance, a certain form of
ethic is still sexy, especially if it antagonises the body against its
gelatinous sack.
The profane child
Ultimately this can happen because
dance always is profane, always provokes a "what to do"?, especially in the
quasi-religious segregation from the body's general use and its return into
application modes of representational performatives in the publication of
dance. Here, dance is critique of the instrumentalisation or sacking (as in
bagging) of the body – if the dancers in return don't submit to the maxims of
the entertainment industry. If they evade the power positives which like to
utilise dance as decoration for their stagings.
I'm observing a little boy who
watches the students learning to dance and by and by begins himself to move, to
imitate. He's obviously enjoying his fidgeting, hopping, still almost toddling
movements. His joy is purpose-bound and intrinsically ametaphysical. His body
wants to find out something which lies between the urge to be active and
communication behaviour. He counts on attention and an increase of his skill.
His mirror neurons are highly active. I relish watching how they're driving
him. And how the grownups are driven in their ensackment. Both the child and
the grownups are playing their games, but the gorwnups' miens mostly remain
serious because they have to put in so much effort in their gelatines. I know
this kind of effort. It comes from all the work we have, being played by that
which surrounds us.
Here, finally, the last tranquility
in dancing breaks up. The child is grown according to its genetic building
programme, the grownup is played by interconnected biological, social and
cultural systems. Dancing and being danced, so much becomes clear in the
classes, merge. A prerequisite of absorbing information is the possibility of
direction, so that a certain bundling of manipulations meets a sensitive
readiness. In this readiness, manipulation itself can be manipulated, and
there's even training units for that. Along with them respectively fitting
basic philosophical patterns are provided, and it's a matter of the
course-scouts' combination work to build a workshop out of those which allows
them to carpenter structures enabling them to express themselves artistically
in a way that concerns us all.
So I'm finding that which I love so
much in big markets: Materials for excessive, scoutish reading. Here I'm
reading bodies as they are working in their Heidegger frames (“Gestelle”), on discovering
the body itself via methods of dance techné. The excessive, and by that I mean
the exhaustive reading of the versions stored in this techné and of the work at
appropriating them is intoxicating in a special way. The "tight skin sack of
existence" which the critic Cornelia Niedermeier locates in Falk Richter's
interpretation of Tchechov's "Seagull" is forced into the gelatinous sack of
metaphysics by this reading, and the two palls of theatre and dance begin to
blister. The gelatine between them froths up in the rituals of profanement.
This chemical reaction contains the "texts" which are writing the body as it
appears when we consult it in the packaging of art.
(August 24, 2008)
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