Choreographing Problems

Expressive Concepts in Contemporary Dance and Performance

Bojana Cvejic

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137437396
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Performing Arts

This book illuminates the relationship between philosophy and experimental choreographic practice today in the works of leading European choreographers. A discussion of key issues in contemporary performance from the viewpoint of Deleuze, Spinoza and Bergson is accompanied by intricate analyses of seven groundbreaking dance performances.

1

Problems and Expressive Concepts

This inquiry begins with one characteristic that sets a group of seven works apart within the field of contemporary dance: each work analyzed here poses or formulates a “problem,” and the thorough interpretation of each work requires a distinctive kind of conceptual practice to which that problem gives rise. My claim is based on the study of three varieties of sources: firstly, I draw on the documentation of all seven works’ creation process, on the scores, notes, and essays written by the choreographers during their making of these works. The second source is a series of public interviews with the choreographers that I conducted during a research residency project (Six Months One Location) at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier Languédoc-Roussillon from July to December 2008, as well as additional recorded conversations and written interviews with the makers about all seven works. The public interviews with Xavier Le Roy, Eszter Salamon, and Mette Ingvartsen involved examining Self Unfinished (SU), Untitled (U), Nvsbl, 50/50, and It’s In The Air (IITA) on the basis of published documents, unpublished notes, and frame-by-frame analysis of video recordings of the works while these were projected before an audience. The third kind of insight is provided by my having been witness to the making of Weak Dance Strong Questions (WDSQ), 50/50, and IITA, which I accompanied either as observer (WDSQ) or in the role of dramaturgical assistant (50/50 and IITA). We will set out by briefly outlining the arguments of the main claim which will unfold in this chapter.

The creation of all seven performances begins by critically revealing the conditions which structure the field of dance as problematic: the synthesis of the body and movement and the entanglement of performing with attending performance in theater. At the outset of the creation process, the choreographers explicitly state their intention to examine the regime of representation in contemporary (theater) dance through the following aspects: the genesis and perception of bodily movement, the identification of the human body, and the represented subject matter or (thematic/conceptual) “aboutness” established through the reception of the audience. Thanks to various procedures of their own development, designed to disjoin the body and movement, disrupt co-presence and communication in theater or render perception difficult, these works explore the limits of sensibility by inhibiting recognition. The procedures arise from experimentally setting up the constraints in which a new field of experience is conceived, one that can’t be subsumed under knowledge, but should instead be regarded as a problematic encounter. With the notion of “encounter,” we draw on Deleuze’s critique of representation in Difference and Repetition as the most appropriate framework to interpret the critical departure of these works. According to Deleuze, the encounter with a sensation that is a limit-object of sensibility engenders a sort of violence on recognition, a “discordant play” of perception, memory, imagination, understanding, judgment (DR: 139–40). The encounter with that which can only be sensed and not recognized from the point of view of common sense–– understood as the harmony of all the faculties of the thinking subject that agree upon the form of the same object (DR: 133)––gives rise to a problem and an “act of thinking in thought itself,” or in Deleuze’s own words:

Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think [. . .]. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. (DR: 139, emphasis added)

The problems posed by these works entail a critique of representation, which can be demonstrated both in the registers of theater dance and also in relation to thought. Thus their creation can be appropriately accounted for by what Deleuze describes as “the destruction of an image of thought,” which is the very same condition “of a true critique and a true creation” (ibid.). As we will elaborate in detail in the following sections, the genetic account of thought posits thought as a result of forces that act upon it from the outside, hence not resulting from a natural, a priori disposition to think under the model of recognition, but from the impossibility of recognition, which the seven works here explore.

If these performances succeed in undermining representation, as I will argue and demonstrate—in problems that “force” thinking as an exercise of the limits of sensibility beyond recognition—then they cannot be accounted for by representational notions of thought. Conversely, it can be argued that these problems involve another logic of creation, one of “expression,” as developed by Deleuze in his reading of Spinoza’s philosophy. Our task will be to conceive of the creation of performances as a logic of expression by way of problems in the sense that Deleuze broaches in Difference and Repetition. Thus we will explicate problems under concepts that don’t interpret these performances by drawing a correspondence between certain forms of movement or bodies and a meaning: in short, by representational thought. As the objects of these concepts are problems, the concepts refer to performancerelated things (i.e., inventions of the body, movement, time, relations between performing and attending, etc.) only indirectly, via problems that share certain properties with these inventions as a result of thinking and doing at the same time. The existence of an indirect link is evidenced in the names of these concepts, which due to the assembling of two terms often take the form of portmanteau words: “part-bodies,” “part-machines,” “head-box,” “stutterances,” “power-motion,” “crisismotion,” and so forth. The relation between a concept, the problem it refers to, and something of the performance that it includes is an agreement based not on representation, but on adequation—the principle Deleuze develops from Spinoza in his own theory of Spinozist expression (EP) which will be explicated later. In a brief example to explain and illustrate the philosophical term invoked above, adequation supposes the equivalence and parallelism of two dissimilar things, for instance, as in WDSQ, bodily movement and the thought of a movement without origin or destination (“movement neither from nor to”). Thus, the movement in which Burrows and Ritsema dance isn’t similar, representative, or exemplary of cognitive interrogation. It is parallel, adequate, and therefore expressive of the idea of a movement that doesn’t originate or aim for anything via the problem of questioning movement by movement itself that this dance tries to solve. The approach to art that the logic of expression in Deleuze implies, which will also be my main methodological reference here, can be succinctly explained through a shift of the question posed to the work of art from interpretation (“What does it mean?”) to experimentation (“How does it work?”). In sum, the “expressive” concepts that we propose here explain the power of problems to produce thought in experimentation, which then creates these choreographic performances.

In this chapter’s first section, we will consider Deleuze’s critique of representation in Difference and Repetition as a condition that paves the way for an expression of problems. The second section will focus on Deleuze’s “expressionist” philosophy, mostly derived from Spinoza’s conception of thought and adequation. The third section first expounds Deleuze’s theory of problems and Ideas as developed in Difference and Repetition and then briefly presents how the seven works pose problems in this theoretical frame. Taking into account how Deleuze’s attitude toward “concept” evolves from Difference and Repetition, a capital study of metaphysics in which he substitutes ideas for concepts, to later books in which he affirms philosophical concepts about art or cinema (as in Cinema I: Movement-Image and Cinema II: The Time-Image), we will try to carefully elaborate how “expressive” concepts whose objects are problems stand in relation to Deleuze’s Ideas/problems and his later cinematographic concepts. The last section of the chapter discusses how these problems cause a differentiation of three constitutive dimensions, or, as we will propose here, “modes” of performance—making, performing, and attending—to which the concepts pertain.

Thought beyond recognition

The seven choreographic works discussed here belong to the Western tradition of theater dance and are conceived to be re-presented in theater in two respects: first, they are reinstantiated more than once, and second, this must involve a set of specific functions of representation proper to the apparatus of theater. The latter is our concern here. The following various functions of theatrical representation are undermined by these works: the recognition of the staged object of perception (SU, Nvsbl, U, WDSQ, 50/50); the stability of the position of the spectator, whose faculties allow her to see and identify the object of perception (U) or mirror herself as a subjective correlate of the staged object through identification and empathy (50/50); address and response (U) and the evidence of the co-presence and community of audience (héâtre-élévision (h-é)); and the name of the author, who provides the ground for the judgment of the work (U). All these elements appear subsumed under the model of recognition that Deleuze associates with theater, which explains, as Laura Cull remarks, why theater and performance are excluded from Deleuze’s wide interests in the arts in favor of cinema. Cull’s edited volume of essays, Deleuze and Performance (2009), forwards the claim that although Deleuze (and Guattari) “seem to have had a complex, even troubled, relation to performance,” they “adopted the language of performance,” as is also evident in the conceptual significance of Antonin Artaud (Cull 2009: 1). Deleuze’s only text explicitly and programmatically dedicated to theater, “One Less Manifesto” (Deleuze 1997b: 239–58), is on the art of the Italian theatermaker Carmelo Bene and, as Cull notes, presents “the potential importance of all of Deleuze’s philosophy for Performance Studies” (Cull 2009: 3). Hence, the alliance between Deleuzians and performance studies scholars could be built on shared concerns, negotiated with the notions of process, relations, movement, affect, event, and liveness, as essays by Maaike Bleeker, Cull, Edward Scheer, Anna Hickey-Moodey, and others testify (Cull 2009). Cull concludes that the implications of Deleuze’s ontology of difference, process, or becoming is worth being pursued by performance scholars. In order for performance studies’ engagement with Deleuze to go beyond the recognition of shared concerns, the encounter with Deleuze requires of performance studies that it radically examine its disciplinary objectives and techniques, such as interpretation by means of case studies, culturalist quests for identity, and representational thinking in general. Perhaps at this stage we can content ourselves with a selective identification of those practices that not only merit but also necessitate a specifically Deleuzian discussion because of their tendency to “misperform” in the more standard, poststructuralist and culturalist methods of performance studies.

A closer look into the matter of Deleuze’s aversion to theater and his preference for cinema will acquaint us with the “camera consciousness,” which allows inhuman and unnatural perceptions, while the stage is marred by a representational frame that makes theater human (C2: 162, 178, 202). What makes cinema a definitive critical alternative to theater for Deleuze is that it allows a rupture with the phenomenological concept of perception that rests on human consciousness. Post-World War II modern cinema, “cinéma du voyant,” “a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent” (C2: 2) offers an interior subjectless vision (“voyance”) that, according to Deleuze, is adequate to the condition of man’s delinking from the contemporary world. Rescuing Henri Bergson’s metaphysics from phenomenology, Deleuze attempts to further Bergson’s ontological equivalence between image, movement, matter, and light (from Matter and Memory) when he posits that modern cinema unravels the pure optical situation in which the object and the subject coincide in pure quality, abstracted from spatio-temporal coordinates, or in “pure impersonal expression that is highly singular” (Alliez 2000: n.p.). As Eric Alliez has pointed out, modern cinema in Deleuze gives the “most contemporary image of modern thought,” a thought in movement that creates by construction and expression at the same time, dissociated from the thinking subject. Herein lies Deleuze’s adamant opposition to theater—associated as it is with representation and phenomenological notions of real presence, natural perception, and human consciousness—in favor of cinema.

In the fourth chapter of Difference and Repetition, “Ideas and Synthesis of Difference,” Deleuze makes his critique of the theater of representation explicit when he calls for a new non-Aristotelian kind of “theater of problems,” or

a theatre of multiplicities opposed in every respect of the theatre of representation, which leaves intact neither the identity of the thing represented, nor author, nor spectator, nor character, nor representation which, through the vicissitudes of the play, can become the object of a production of knowledge or final recognition. Instead, a theatre of problems and always open questions which draws spectator, setting and characters into the real movement of an apprenticeship of the entire unconscious, the final elements of which remain the problems themselves. (DR: 192)

How the works investigated here critically tackle the elements Deleuze invokes above is the subject of the following chapters. For now, it can be stated that they point to a critique of representation with which the problems they formulate are intimately linked. This critique particularly targets that which Deleuze defines as the “model of recognition” (DR: 133–4)—the harmonious exercise of faculties on an object (here performance) that is identical for each of these faculties, in theater constituting a “sensus communis” of the audience manifested in communication and consensus. As Deleuze’s critical undermining of recognition is rooted in his critique of Kant’s theory of knowledge, we must first unpack Deleuze’s exegesis of the model of recognition in Western philosophy. The following discussion will prove to be the indispensable ground for understanding how the choreographers of the works studied here conceive of their intention to part with recognition of the dancing body, or with reception as a unified judgment of cognitive faculties.

Deleuze defines recognition as one of the postulates of what he calls the “image of thought,” which, according to him, dominates both the pre-philosophical form of common popular reason, or doxa, and Western philosophy in its major authors—Plato, Descartes, and Kant—who are his primary addressees in his critique here. The “Image of thought” is a subjective, widely shared implicit presupposition about thought as in a formula Deleuze proposes here: “everybody knows what it means to think.” This doxa is “universalized by being elevated to the rational level” (DR: 134) in Descartes’ Cogito as the unconditioned identity of the thinking subject as a principle that defies all the objective presuppositions in the forming of clear and distinct ideas about things. As a moral and humanist model of thinking, the image of thought further comprises two postulates from which recognition follows. According to the first, thinking is regarded as a natural exercise of a faculty, a universally held capacity whose nature is good, characterized by an innate affinity for truth and the good will of a thinker to think (DR: 132). Deleuze here implicitly refers to the very beginning of Descartes’ Discourse on Method:

Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false – which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’ – is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things. For it is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to apply it well. (Descartes 1985: 111)

The second postulate posits the ideal of common sense, the harmonious collaboration of faculties toward an object, first conceptualized as Descartes’ Cogito and then further developed by Kant. Thus “good sense” and “common sense” constitute the two “halves of doxa” (Deleuze) and the two sides of the philosophical image of thought: the subjective identity of the self and its faculties, and the objective identity of the thing (and world) to which these faculties refer (DR: 133). The two are then joined in the model of recognition, which isn’t a particular empirical faculty, but rather the unity of consciousness that provides the foundation for sensibility, imagination, memory, understanding, and reason as a principle of their harmonious accord:

An object is recognised, however, when one faculty locates it as identical to that of another, or rather when all the faculties together relate their given and relate themselves to a form of identity in the object. Recognition thus relies upon a subjective principle of collaboration of the faculties for ‘everybody’ – in other words, common sense as a concordia facultatum; while simultaneously, for the philosopher, the form of identity in objects relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject, of which all the other faculties must be modalities. (DR: 133)

For Deleuze, the unifying ground of the thinking subject refers to the principle of the synthetic unity of apperception in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The “I think” in Kant is the self-consciousness which accompanies and unifies all cognition. “I think” is a transcendental principle, that is, an a priori condition which makes knowledge possible. Kant introduces it in the first book of Critique of Pure Reason (Analytic of Conceptions):

The I think must accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought; in other words, the representation would either be impossible, or at least be, in relation to me, nothing. [. . .] but this representation, I think, is an act of spontaneity; that is to say, it cannot be regarded as belonging to mere sensibility. I call it pure apperception, in order to distinguish it from empirical, or primitive apperception, because it is a self-consciousness which, while it gives birth to the representation I think, must necessarily be capable of accompanying all our representations. (CPR: 76)

Kant defines cognition as an “objective perception,” distinguished from “sensation” as a modification of the state of the subject. It belongs to the category of conscious representations, where Kant understands representations (Vorstellung) as “internal determinations of our mind in this or that relation of time” (CPR: 132). Cognitions are divided into intuitions and concepts; the former are immediately related to objects and hence are “singular and individual,” while the latter’s relation to objects is mediated “by means of a characteristic mark which may be common to several things” (CPR: 201). From the latter can be deduced the function of ...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Problems and Expressive Concepts
• 2 Disjunctive Captures of the Body and Movement
• 3 Theatrical Apparatuses of Disjunction
• 4 Exhausting Improvisation: Stutterances
• 5 A Critical Departure from Emotionalism: Sensations and Affects in the Mode of Performing
• 6 During and After Performance: Processes, Caesuras, and Resonances
• A Post Hoc Conclusion: An Expanse of Choreography
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index