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The kinesthetic citizen: Dance and critical art practices

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The kinesthetic citizen: Dance and critical art practices

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Content THE KINESTHETIC CITIZEN:
DANCE AND CRITICAL ART PRACTICES
FOR MASTER
OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
by
Megan Marissa Steinman

_________________________________________________
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
May 2011

Copyright 2011 Megan Marissa Steinman
DEDICATION
For my grandmother, Marilyn Edith Heit Leibovitz
(1923 - 2007)
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to my committee members, Gloria Sutton and Janet O’Shea, for making sure
that all of my analysis came out of the artworks. Thank you to Bennett Simpson for
sending me in search of “biopower.”
A very special thanks to Helen Molesworth, for all of your original insights and for
introducing me to a number of the artists in this study. Your continued mentorship over
the past year has truly been a highlight of my academic journey.
Thank you to my editors, Chloë Flores and Jonny Coleman, for your friendship, your
unconditional generosity, and your superb command of the English language.
To my wonderful friends, on both sides of the Atlantic, who remain a constant
inspiration. Thank you and Vielen Dank. I am fairly certain the genesis of my
manuscript began on a dance floor with you.
To Arnie, Susan and Jennifer Steinman. Thank you for your love and endless support,
which transform all of my machinations into reality.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii
Figure: Marilyn Leibovitz, Ellenville, New York, 1974 ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Dance Narratives 15
Rhythmanalysts 19
Language of the Body 26
Chapter 2: Dance Spaces 32
Chapter 3: Dance Transmissions 47
Conclusion 58
Bibliography 61
ABSTRACT
When we watch a dance performance, we become aware not only of the dancer’s
movements, but of our own corporeal capacity for movement. Thus, dance in exhibition
spaces posits spectatorship as a physical act. It also provides an embodied understanding
of our relationship to social spaces. How might this kinesthetic awareness be mobilized
as a political gesture? My thesis examines the work of six contemporary artists - Jérôme
Bel, Trisha Brown, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joachim Koester, Ralph Lemon, and Rashaad
Newsome - whose multi-disciplinary practices utilize two central tenets of the
postmodern dance genre: the incorporation of everyday movement within choreography
and a rejection of the archetypal dancer. I examine the kinesthetic experience of their
dance events through the lens of political and spatial theories proposed by Ernesto
Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Doreen Massey in order to locate political empathy in
everyday movement, social encounters and lived experiences.
v
INTRODUCTION
Historical times slow down or speed up, advance or regress, look forward or backward. According to what
criteria? According to representations and political decisions, but also according to the historian who puts
them into perspective. Objectively, for there to be change, a social group, a class or a caste must intervene
by imprinting a rhythm on an era, be it through force or in an insinuating manner.
- Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis
1
Dance cannot exist without dance design: choreography. But dance is the dancer.
- Susan Sontag, Dancer and the Dance
2
Over the past several years there has been an increased interest in dance and
performance works by major art institutions worldwide. The Getty Museum’s 2007
exhibition, Evidence of Movement, focused on the ephemera of performance. London’s
Southbank Centre recently ran Choreographing You: Art & Dance, about the
participatory nature of dance works, and the ICA Philadelphia’s Dance With Camera
continues its tour across the country. The Dutch-based traveling exhibition, If I Can’t
Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, examines the relationship between
performance and political strategies. 2011 will mark the 4th iteration of RoseLee
Goldberg’s Perfoma biennial, now more expansive than ever. Dancers have become the
subjects of solo exhibitions, including the Walker Art Center’s 2008 tribute to Trisha
Brown, So That The Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing, and the
Whitney Museum of American Art’s Off The Wall: Seven Works by Trisha Brown in 2010.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has recently appointed a curator of
1
1
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore
(London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 14.
2
Susan Sontag, “Dancer and the Dance,” in Reading Dance, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon
Books, 2008), 335.
performance. In addition, dance has become a central component in many museum’s
public programming initiatives. By no means an exhaustive list, the preceding examples
point to a consideration of dance as a vital component of a contemporary art viewing
experience. When we watch a dance performance, we become aware not only of the
dancer’s movements, but of our own corporeal capacity for movement. Thus, dance in
exhibition spaces posits spectatorship as a physical act. It also provides an embodied
understanding of our relationship to social spaces.
This awareness is often credited to kinesthesia, a prevalent concept in theories of
movement and phenomenological psychology since the late 19th century. The term links
bodily movement with its experienced environment, actively unifying mental capabilities
with the body, and presenting a corporeal perspective of space and time. Kinesthesia
was first established to describe the sensation activated by proprioceptors, the sensory
organs that make humans aware of the internal construction and interconnections of our
bodies. Although originally explored to manage the body’s health, by the 1960s,
kinesthesia had become a tool for mapping the body’s physical relationship to a variety of
external stimuli. Although kinesthesia linked the mind and body, as a science it also
provided ways to understand one’s self as if from the outside looking in.
3
It is used in
psychoanalysis to recollect memories surrounding traumatic experiences and general
heightened awareness of the body in relation to place. In dance theory, kinesthesia
undergirds what dancers commonly refer to as ‘muscle memory.’ Muscle memory is a
2
3
My description of kinesthesia relies heavily on an extensive study of the term by performance historian,
Susan Leigh Foster. See Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance
(London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 73-125.
technique wherein the body stores knowledge about choreography, music and rhythm for
future expression at various moments and in different locations. A kinesthetic awareness
of the body allows us to understand the body not only as an spatialized object, but as a
social subject that is simultaneously motivated by internal physiological conditions and
externally enforced behavior codes.
The conceptual strategies of the dance-based art works outlined in this paper are all
located at the intersection between a kinesthetic awareness and the specific societal
constructions articulated by political theorists, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, as
“antagonisms.” Antagonisms, according to Laclau and Mouffe, are the liminal thresholds
of a subject’s position within society. Deploying a post-structuralist philosophy of
identity construction, they envision social spheres whose constituents exist conditionally
with their perception of their subjective Other. Subjects are created through an infinite
process of positionality and discursive dispersal. The lack of an originary foundation for
these subject’s positions and their endless potential for dispersal is what levels the
playing field, so to speak, without the need for a universalizing consensus which results
in the exclusion of particular groups. Within social realms, where subjects interact, “this
experience of the limit of all objectivity does have a form of precise discursive presence,
and this is its antagonism.”
4

Both concepts of kinesthesia and “antagonisms” are concerned with an awareness
of ourselves in relation to others. Since dance generates a kinesthetic awareness for both
3
4
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics, Second Edition (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 122.
performer and audience, might it therefore bring not only a visual but also an experiential
understanding of Laclau and Mouffe’s social theories? Following Mouffe’s definition of
critical art practices as those that make “visible what the dominant consensus tends to
obscure and obliterate,”
5
postmodern dance offers an artistic strategy that corporeally
emblematizes both the construction and critique of social hegemonies. If dance can
solicit a kinesthetic response in viewers, could the postmodern dancing body produce
legible paradigms of the transmission of historical narratives and activist practices?
Two central tenets of the postmodern dance genre are the incorporation of
everyday movement within choreography and a rejection of the archetypal dancer. These
characteristics position the genre as an embodied mirror of its audience’s lived
experiences. The postmodern dancer need not present themselves according to the
stylized athleticism prized in other dance genres. Postmodern dance choreographers are
not beholden to a finite collection of stories. Their movement vernaculars are culled from
the world around them, and therefore have the ability to communicate with their
audiences in a shared visual language based on factual occurrences more so than fictional
tales.
The works that I discuss in the first chapter illustrate dancing bodies that subvert
dominant narratives of race (as explored in Ralph Lemon’s semi-auto biographical
performance installations over the last 15 years), queer identity (as celebrated in Rashaad
Newsome’s entry for the 2010 Whitney Biennal) and societal hierarchies (as displayed in
4
5
Chantal Mouffe, “Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space,” Open Cahier on
Art and the Public Domain, Volume 7 (2008): 12.
Jérôme Bel’s 2004 performance and video, Veronique Doisneau). Bel, Lemon and
Newsome all choreograph physical confrontations with seemingly fixed cultural
archetypes. On display are corporeal demonstrations of recombinant identities that
simultaneously expose the evolution of the social environments from which these
archetypes originated and suggest revised articulations contingent on their current
cultural milieus
These milieus are the focus of chapter two, wherein I examine the spaces that
choreographers and artists create in conjunction with their dances. The three works
discussed represent a journey from the internal private sphere of one’s self (as explored in
Joachim Koester’s 2007 video installation, Tarantism), across the relational threshold
wherein we become empathetically cognizant of our constitutive environment
(demonstrated in the participatory nature of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ installation, Untitled
(Arena), first produced in 1993) and into the public realm where perception and
communication are intercepted by a myriad of constructed obstacles (read through two
photographs of Trisha Brown’s dance, Roof Piece, from the 1970s and my own viewing
of its most recent iteration at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in January, 2011).
I would like to posit these spaces as tightly woven networks of perception, with a
topography most accurately described along coordinates of relational articulations
between bodies and space. The works can then be read as dances that create corporeal
interventions in public spaces delineated as stages. The interventions challenge the
existence of binary oppositions used to classify our inhabited social spheres: public/
5
private, intellectual/visceral and psychological/physiological. The dancing body’s
position within various performance spaces allows us to visualize how each social realm
is defined by its external counterpoint. This interdependence is what Laclau and Mouffe,
deploying Jacques Derrida’s theory of the “constitutive outside.”
6
The constitutive model
prevents a closed system of sociopolitical relationships, positioning every individual and
social group in relation to its perceived Other. It is an awareness of this Other that allows
one to conceive of their Self. The constitutive outside model requires social groups to
maintain an empathetic relationship with each other based on shared difference. The
choreographic strategies of the selected artworks offer methods for both dancers and
dance spectators to practice empathy in their everyday movements.
I am interested in the idea of choreography, as Andrew Hewitt writes, “not as
aesthetics nor as politics but rather as articulation - not as one term in a relation, but as a
discourse, and performance, of that relation.”
7
What Hewitt (along with Laclau and
Mouffe) points towards is the temporal and situational aspect of politics. His theories
suggest that sociopolitical structures are constantly in flux, never fixed, a radical notion
that makes no hegemonic power absolute. The works collected for this essay
demonstrate through performance that historical narratives and social spaces are also
6
6
Derrida’s ‘constitutive outside’ is key to Mouffe’s concept of radical democracy based on antagonistic
social structures. According Mouffe, “the ‘constitutive outside’ cannot be reduced to a dialectical negation.
In order to be a true outside, the outside has to be incommensurable with the inside, and at the same time,
the condition of emergence of the latter. This is only possible if what is ‘outside’ is not simply the outside
of a concrete content but something which puts into question ‘concreteness’ as such.” The constitutive
outside refutes binary opposition and makes a hegemony by way of consensus impossible as there is no
‘concrete’ base from which to claim absolute power. Chantal Mouffe. The Democratic Paradox (London
and New York: Verso, 2005), 12.
7
Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 15.
always in flux. The dance works selected position critical art as an embodied practice.
Using dance to explicate larger sociopolitical systems we can begin to envision the
physical reality of the discursive platform put forth by Hewitt, Laclau and Mouffe. The
pluralisms that Laclau and Mouffe articulate do multiply endlessly. But they also contain
specific nodal points - the human body, the dances performed, and the audiences’
encounter with the dance event - which allow us to examine each artist’s choreographic
strategy along a broader sociopolitical continuum.
Hewitt’s study attempts to map choreography onto everyday movements such as
walking and socializing, thereby redefining modernism as an aesthetic program. His
“aesthetic continuum” is positioned between two poles: “one tracing the ways in which
everyday experience might be aestheticized” and “another tracing the ways in which ‘the
aesthetic’ is, in fact, sectioned off and delineated as a distinct realm of experience.”
8
This
continuum becomes infinitely more complex when applied to the postmodern dance
genre which collapses these two poles by bringing already aestheticized everyday
movement into a reconstructed dance experience that rejected forms of theatricality and
virtuosity, namely ‘the aesthetic.’ Therefore, I shall take up where Hewitt left off,
analyzing contemporary artworks and stretching his continuum into the present day so as
to position the dance event as an encounter between artist and audience wherein an
established kinesthetic awareness might generate an empathetic transmission that reveals
7
8
Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 19.
thru shared difference of subjectivity the inherent instability of hegemonic social
ideologies.
The criteria for measuring such encounters must thus be done against both dance
and public sphere theories. I would like to suggest that dancing bodies which obtain their
choreography from the everyday can be used as exemplary articulations of political
praxis and biopower, defined by Michel Foucault as “what brought life and its
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent
and transformation of human life.”
9
Following a large number of dance projects and
theorists since the 1990s, I will position movement as a form of agency, as well as a way
to construct the rhythm of an individual’s lived experience.
10

My exploration begins in 1960s New York City, with Trisha Brown and the
Judson Dance Theatre. Brown, along with Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton and Simone
Forti (to name a few) came together from various career trajectories and dance companies
in the modern dance world. The Judson dancers rejected the theatrics of narrative
performance in favor of movements that fused everyday actions with an expanded
definition of where, and when, the dancer’s stage could exist. The performances at
8
9
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990),
143.
10
Movement as a form of agency and agency of the body are both vast sub-categories of dance theory.
They are often a way to link dance with other sociocultural and identity-based studies, such as feminism,
queer theory and nationalism. A short list of sources includes Susan Leigh Foster, Dances that Describe
Themselves (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Mark Franko, “Mimique,” in Bodies of the
Text, ed. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1995), 205-216; Jens Richard Giersdorf, “Border Crossings and Intra-National Trespasses: East German
Bodies in Sasha Waltz’s and Jo Fabian’s Choreographies,” Theatre Journal V ol. 95 No. 3, Dance (October,
2003): 413-432. Though not based in dance theory, I also refer to Irit Rogoff’s writing on artist, Ana
Mendieta, for a thorough discussion on the agency of the body. Irit Rogoff, “Borders,” in Terra Infirma:
Geography’ s Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
Judson Dance Theatre, which loosely date between 1962-1967, were initiated as a
workshop to expound on philosophical and physical ideas about the possibilities of what
dance could produce beyond its artistic boundaries. Their works included collaborations
with many artists and musicians not normally associated with dance.
11
Choreographer
and dancer, Robert Dunn, brought constructional concepts to Judson from his work in
John Cage’s music composition classes at the New School for Social Research. In a 1968
essay, Yvonne Rainer mapped the movements contained in one of her most famous
dances, Trio A, against the Minimalist objects being created at the same time by Donald
Judd and Carl Andre (among others).
12
This cross-medium sourcing for both inspiration
and execution is a key choreographic technique of postmodern dance that I will highlight
in the recent works of Jérôme Bel, Joachim Koester and Rashaad Newsome. It is also
important to note the specific dance forms developed by Judson’s founders (e.g. Paxton’s
Contact Improvisation and Rainer’s rejection of theatrical artifice) that are used in Felix
Gonzalez-Torres’ and Ralph Lemon’s works to restructure the dancer-spectator
relationship.
9
11
Multi-genre collaborations are not singular to postmodern dance and have occurred throughout the
history of both traditional and modern dance performances. As examples, the Ballet Russes company had
their sets and costumes designed by Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and more. Merce
Cunningham worked extensively with Robert Rauschenberg in the creation of his sets and lighting design
and maintained a collaborative practice with John Cage for over fifty years. My reason for highlighting
these consortiums is to establish a historical progression of hybrid dance performance practices that lead to
the more recent works discussed in the following chapters which feature singular artists and choreographers
utilizing multiple formats to express their movement concepts.
12
Yvonne Rainer, “A quasi survey of some “Minimalist” tendencies in the quantitatively minimal dance
activity midst the plethora, or an analysis of Trio A,” in Dance With Camera, ed. Janelle Porter (Institute of
Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2009), 124-129.
The Judson dancers continued their relationship with artists outside of the dance
world long after their group disbanded into its numerous side and solo projects. Brown,
for her part, worked closely with artist, Robert Rauschenberg, and photographer/
filmmaker, Babette Mangolte, (among others) throughout the 1970s and 80s to produce a
wide-ranging series of performance installations, photographs and films that presented
the dancing body as an extension of whatever environment it happened to occupy. It is
this positioning of the body as the connective tissue (both literally and figuratively)
between various artistic mediums and spatial planes to create a phenomenological social
experience that is central to my argument about the kinesthetic possibilities of critical art
practices.
Responding to a broader sociopolitical landscape, performance artists of the
1960s and 1970s explored the possibilities of corporeal dissent in their work. Yvonne
Rainer’s public dance piece, Street Action (1970), was created in protest of the United
States’ invasion of Cambodia. Street Action featured three rows of performers all
wearing black armbands, linked by hands and shoulders. The conglomerate
synchronically rocked back and forth as they moved through the streets of New York’s
Soho district, their heads bowed in meditation, demanding to be noticed but not
acknowledging any presence outside of their current task. Rainer derived her
choreography from the workers’ movements in Fritz Lang’s 1927, Metropolis.
13
Like the
workers in Lang’s movie, Rainer’s performers presented the power of a unified proletariat
10
13
Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2006), 343.
force. The power of Street Action lies in its unwavering demand for the body to be
recognized as a political instrument able to be harnessed by both sides of social conflicts.
I consider there to be important parallels in the political landscape of the 1960s
and 1970s that shaped concerns about dance and body-based performances and that are
cyclically reoccurring today. The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement in the
United States brought to bear, in violent and immediate ways, the prerogative of the
body’s existence that had been too long ignored, along with the limits that the State
would, and could, apply to its citizens’ prosperity. Bodies marched arm in arm, sat
stoically at lunch counters and congregated in the millions to protest government
regulations and discriminatory laws that controlled an individual’s lived experience based
upon their class, gender and racial attributes. The lesson from these sociopolitical events
is, as Foucault suggests in the History of Sexuality, that “the power to expose a whole
population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued
existence.”
14

The last quarter of the 20th century, and first decade of the 21st, have been
marked by multi-national wars and the rapid expansion of technology that, in different
ways, both completely disregard the integrity of the human body. Young men and
women are sent around the world to face unforeseeable death in the name of cross-
government strife. Women’s reproductive rights are still being considered in courts of
law, rather than facilitated according to our own bodies. On the Internet our physical
11
14
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990),
137.
selves are represented by recombinant constructions of binary code, firewall passwords
and social network mythologies. As Diana Taylor writes in her study, The Archive and the
Repertoire, we are “now on the brink of a digital revolution that both utilizes and
threatens to displace writing, the body again seems poised to disappear in a virtual space
that eludes embodiment.”
15
Virtual space alters our comprehension and construction of
tangible place. There are places on the Internet - Facebook, chat rooms, online discussion
boards, etcetera - called ‘sites’, where subjects congregate. But these subjects are without
object bodies and fixed identities that necessarily reflect or respond to their corporeal
reality. Instead, the subjects are names and descriptions that exist only as onscreen
imagery. Like their predecessors, the contemporary dance works and installations
presented in the following chapters utilize the strength and suppleness of our corporeal
realities as a counter to the continuous disembodiment campaigns listed above.
The purpose of the temporal jump that I make between Brown’s work in the early
1970s and the dance works of the past few years, is not to disregard the radical
performance tactics of the 1980s and 1990s, but to reformulate the very notion of what a
political gesture might entail.
16
While the artists and choreographers of the recent works
might not make overt statements about their work’s political nature, that does not deny
12
15
Diana Taylor. The Archive and The Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 16.
16
The works discussed in this essay all benefit from the substantial inroads created by the feminist,
identity- and activist-based art practices of the 1980s and 1990s. These include, but are not limited to the
members of ACT UP, Eleanor Antin, Carolee Schneeman (among many others) which demanded that we
consider the body as a locus of political activity and revealed that gaze was both informed by a host of
internal and external forces, including gender and sexuality. I do not cover these practices in my thesis, but
refer to RoseLee Goldberg’s seminal study, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, which
describes at length the foundations laid by these earlier generations of dancers and performers. RoseLee
Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001).
them a political standing. Contrary to earlier avant-garde projects who considered
revolutionary reconstructions of society the goal of artistic practice (evidenced by the
Situationist International in France, the manifestos of the Italian Futurists, and those of
André Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky while based in Mexico to name a few),
17

the dance works selected here exemplify what Mouffe maintains is crucial for today’s
critical art practices, namely relinquishing “the idea that to be political means to offer
such a radical critique.”
18
The political strength of these works is derived from their
pragmatic presentation of alternative corporeal positions. Rather than attempting to
replace dominant power structures with their own system of ethics, they exist alongside
the sociopolitical and performance frameworks that they contest, highlighting the
inherent instability of hegemonic practices. Their aim is to maintain a relational, and
therefore additionally self-critical, perspective on the larger social implications of each
dance work’s subject matter. The movements enacted suggest an understanding that these
dancing bodies are no longer defined as a marginal other to normative social structures.
Their identities are intrinsically interwoven into the fabric of a larger society. As
exemplified by the Lefebvre quote above, what these works accomplish is an introduction
of new societal rhythms. They consist of “insinuating manners” that the body can inhabit
13
17
The three examples listed are only a small representation of avant-garde art movements that have merged
their practices with the sociopolitical realm. An extensive collection of writing from the various authors
and members of the Situationist International is available in the Situationist International Anthology, edited
by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2002); a collection of manifestos by the Italian
Futurists is available at http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/, last accessed 2/15/11; for Breton, Rivera and
Trotsky I allude to the trio’s 1938 manifesto, “Towards a Free and Revolutionary Art.” Andre Breton and
Diego Rivera, “Towards a Free and Revolutionary Art,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of
Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 532-535.
18
Chantal Mouffe, “Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space,” Open Cahier
on Art and the Public Domain, Volume 7 (2008): 13.
in a place, be that place the art institution (Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joachim Koester,
Rashaad Newsome), the theatre stage (Jérôme Bel, Ralph Lemon) or the urban rooftops
over our heads (Trisha Brown). Postmodern dance incorporates everyday tasks into its
movement vernacular to test the liminality of the genre. Couldn’t then, dance rhythms
that test the liminality of our historical narratives and citizenry be brought into the
everyday?
14
CHAPTER 1: DANCE NARRATIVES
In the opening video of Ralph Lemon’s 2010 multi-format performance, How Can
You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, Lemon’s muse, Walter Carter, an
103-year-old ex-sharecropper from Yazoo City, Mississippi sits in what is most likely a
recently plowed cotton field. Carter wears a homemade, silver spacesuit, complete with
helmet, the design of which recalls the 1951 science fiction movie, “The Day The Earth
Stood Still.” His legs jut out in front of him, body on the verge of tipping over. Carter’s
posture the result of his aged frame positioned in a pitted field, apparently top heavy due
to the weight of his helmet. The uncanny abounds in this image: a spatialized vision of
the American South’s racist past (the field) is confronted with a black body from the
future. Carter’s portrayal of a free-roaming space traveler repudiates the earthly shackles
of America’s sharecropping system. Linear time is rendered useless. The image has no
determinable epoch because its constituents - a cotton field, a space traveler at rest, his
attire - do not correspond with one another.
The scene is one of several that Lemon and Carter created together between
2002-2010. During that time, Lemon would travel to Mississippi several times a year to
work with Carter and Carter’s wife, Edna. Lemon considered Walter Carter’s body a
container of all of the history that Carter had experienced and wanted to explore “the way
he held it all.” To do so, Lemon would choreograph a series of activities that utilized
Carter’s natural movement patterns. Lemon called these activities his “lessons,” and
15
referred to Carter as his teacher.
19
The activities ranged from everyday tasks such as
getting dressed or working in the yard, to more emotionally driven pieces during which
Carter would lie atop his bed with Edna seated in a chair next to him, both silent and
watching one another in shared meditation for extended periods of time. Lemon and
Carter also worked in the fantastical realm. Lemon would have Carter reenact scenes
from movies, such as Andre Tarkovskiy’s 1972 science-fiction classic, Solaris. He cast
Carter as the scientist, ‘Kris Kelvin,’ and Edna as Kelvin’s ghost wife, ‘Hari’ - two lovers
fatefully separated by tragedy and reunited through romantic delusions. Carter and Edna
would dance and perform other movie moments throughout of rooms of their Mississippi
home that had been transformed into ‘DIY’ versions of Kelvin’s ship. Lemon developed
a number of roles for Carter to embody. Each was accompanied by costumes and
sculptural elements that reinforced the visual narrative Lemon was after.
At another point in the opening video of How Can You Stay in the House All Day
and Not Go Anywhere? Lemon is dressed in a rabbit suit and is being punched repeatedly
in the stomach by Carter. Lemon explains that the rabbit represents “Brer Rabbit, the
unreliable storyteller… a threat to Walter’s legitimacy… because the truth cannot really
be mentioned and [sic] so the hare creates exquisite lies in order to share something
mentionable with the unsuspecting world.”
20
For Lemon, Carter’s “legitimacy” is held
within his body. The statement suggests that the “exquisite lies” developed to connect
16
19
Ralph Lemon, “Sunshine Room.” (lecture presented as part of Lemon’s performance, How Can You Stay
in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theatre, Los Angeles,
California, November 14, 2010).
20
Ibid.
individuals within larger historical narratives undermine the reality of our lived
experiences. Lemon uses choreographic strategies to present an embodied perspective of
Carter’s personal narrative. The image of Carter physically defeating the rabbit becomes
a corporeal example of Foucaultian biopower taking on abstract sociopolitical structures.
Lemon’s work with Carter is the result of the choreographer’s fifteen-year
investigation of the cultural, spiritual and physical definitions of Lemon’s own body and
lived experience as a set of relationships with various landscapes. In 1995, Lemon made
a concerted break with the ‘downtown New York art scene’ of which he was a member
for nearly twenty years. He disbanded the Ralph Lemon Dance Company and began
what he described at the time as an “exploration of foreign physical and language
sensibilities, how they collide and intersect within my conceptual formal concerns.”
21

The exploration resulted in the Geography trilogy, three separate articulations of
embodied knowledge obtained and expressed through the frames of race, enlightenment
and memory. The space traveler is a version of Carter, choreographed by reshuffling both
men’s’ memories relating to place, time and identity that subsequently interrupt the stasis
of Carter’s lived environment. This reconstruction does not deny its subject’s past, but it
does deny the concept of history as a fixed condition within the present moment. Lemon
has reconfigured Carter’s physical reality within its own environment, and in doing so
dismantled preconceived conventions of what exactly constitutes a 103-year-old ex-
sharecropper from Yazoo City, Mississippi.
17
21
Ralph Lemon, Geography: Art/Race/Exile (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 46.
Lemon, Jérôme Bel, and Rashaad Newsome (who are also discussed in this
chapter), are all concerned with the construction of a movement vernacular that could be
used to communicate embodied identity. Dance plays one part in their works, as does
photography, video, drawing and lectures. Their respective movement vernaculars are
developed through a collaborative process with the dancers who perform the works,
thereby synthesizing multiple identity paradigms and challenging cultural archetypes.
For Lemon, the activities that he creates with Walter Carter come out of an
autobiographical exploration of what it means to inhabit the body. Lemon casts Carter,
Edna and his dancers in roles that represent people, emotions and experiences from
Lemon’s own life. Conversely, Lemon creates choreography based on these players, each
character occupying one another’s identity through movement.
22
Jérôme Bel stages the
biographies of dancers in place of his own movement vernacular to complicate the
concept of the choreographer’s artistic signature. Newsome uses video editing and
movement-tracking software to isolate and reconfigure the specific gestures of vogueing
so as to translate and help legitimize the dance form’s performance strategies. Each
artist presents identity as a socially constructed work-in-progress expressed through
bodily rhythms that are intrinsically linked to the rhythms of their surrounding
environments.

18
22
In the first act of How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere? (2010), Lemon states,
“Okwui and I are a reduction of Edna and Walter, Edna and Walter as Hari the ghost wife and Kris Kelvin
the Solaris scientist, Kris Kelvin and Hari a reduction of unseen Asako and I, and also Okwui… as the
enlightened lying hare, and everybody else… all of you.” Ralph Lemon, “Sunshine Room.” (lecture
presented as part of Lemon’s performance, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go
Anywhere?, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theatre, Los Angeles, California, November 14, 2010).
Rhythmanalysts
Rhythms, according to Henri Lefebvre, occur “everywhere there is an interaction
between a place, time and an expenditure of energy.”
23
Lefebvre proposed that the body
is conceived by the rhythms of its lived temporality and further that a rhythmanalyst is
someone who does not separate their body between object and subject. The artists in this
chapter read as rhythmanalysts, present biographical articulations as the results of
specific interactions which have not broken with historical trajectories, and which can
only be interrogated within their own spatiotemporal moment.
Lemon, as the rhythmanalyst, explores the ways in which his own body intersects
with its lived environment and with its history. His dance practice is distinguished for its
research and development of a movement vernacular able to express these multiple
constituents. His methodology for working with Carter was to first demonstrate the
activities, and then have Carter repeat them while being filmed. The resulting
movements were uniquely Carter’s, who would execute each task according to his own
comprehension and coordination. The video documentation became a record of the
lessons. Lemon was able to study Carter’s movements and tease out theories on the
specific energy and emotional expenditures necessary to express an idea, which he later
incorporated into his dances.
19
23
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore
(London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 15.
Come Home Charley Patton (2004) and How Can You Stay in the House... (2010)
both contain long sections of ritualized pandemonium utilizing the postmodern dance
technique, contact improvisation. Pioneered by Judson Dance Theatre co-founder, Steve
Paxton, contact improvisation deploys physical contact amongst dancers to construct
dynamic amalgamations of movement during which, as dance scholar, Helen Thomas,
writes, “the surfaces of individual bodies seem to disappear in the flux.”
24
Key to the
external component of contact improvisation is a dancer’s inner focus on their physical
reaction to the impact of another body. Thomas postulates:
the body was perceived to have its ‘own intelligence’ or ‘truth,’ which had been damaged by
culture and civilization and which could be born again, as it were, by listening internally to
the body through the exploration of weight and touch.
25

Thomas is calling attention to the kinesthetic awareness required to perform contact
improvisation. Her statement about the body having its own intelligence alludes to other
types of knowledge that we might harness in order to better understand our experience of
the dance event, specifically, and our lived environments, more generally. That the body
could appear damaged by culture suggests the constructed nature of this experience.
For the contact improvisation section of Come Home Charley Patton, titled,
“Mississippi/Duluth,” Lemon wanted the dancers to construct their movements based
upon historical accounts from the Civil Rights Movement. The section begins with
Lemon on stage, attempting to dance while being sprayed with a fire hose. From there
we follow the dancers onto their open expanse of a stage, the white surface below them
20
24
Helen Thomas, The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 106.
25
Helen Thomas, The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 103.
recalling a blank canvas as metaphor for histories yet untold. Their bodies strike out at
one another in convulsions, intersecting one another’s personal, violent meditations. It is
hard to tell whether their dances are a reenacting of past - or anticipation of future -
political discrimination and physical oppression.
Lemon also attempts to connect his audience with the performance using the
strategies of contact improvisation listed above. He activates a kinesthetic awareness for
everyone in the theatre by bringing the internal rhythms of the dancers onto the stage.
The second act of How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?
contains a section during which one of Lemon’s principle dancers, Okwui Okpokwasili,
spends a solid 10 minutes or more hidden off-stage in the wings producing ear-splitting
sobs, while the usual space of performance remains empty. The audience, in their seats,
remain powerless to either source or console the woman’s emotions. Okpokwasili then
rambles out of the wings, still howling, her body near limp with emotional exhaustion.
She stands with her back towards to the audience, continuing to deny our ability to end
the increasingly uncomfortable situation. Okpokwasili’s onstage positioning is
reminiscent of a work by Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg, titled If You Couldn’t
See Me (1994). During the entirety of this dance Brown moves with her back facing the
audience. By methodically removing elements of her body from the performance, Brown
activates her audience’s awareness of their own spectatorship. Her viewer’s must rely on
stock footage from their own historical narrative to complete the corporeal image of
Brown’s presence. This imagery is singular then to every individual, and alludes to the
21
process by which we translate external prompts using a set of internalized, learned codes.
In Lemon’s work, Okpokwasili’s position takes this concept one step further.
Okpokwasili and the audience both face the same void of the blank stage. The imagery
each audience member must now construct include intangible, emotional cues that
seemingly exist beyond the space of the performance. Is her back turned to us, or
empathetically positioned as ‘one of us’? We are left to question who, in fact, is being
choreographed?
In many ways, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? is
a review of Lemon’s own historical narrative through the lens of his lessons with Carter.
The work ends with a pas de deux between Lemon and Okpokwasili positioned as an
extension of a previous duet the performed together. Both versions utilize contact
improvisation techniques. During the first duet, they expelled every ounce of emotional
force against one another, their bodies seemingly bent on simultaneous union with, and
destruction of, their external Other. During the reprisal, Lemon and Okpokwasili dance
in separate, yet adjacent, spheres. Lemon, for his part, barely moves. By the end of the
second iteration Lemon is seated alone onstage, his legs jut out in front of him like the
space traveler in the field. Just before curtain he cries out, “Yes!” with all the guttural
relief of an “ah-ha!” moment, suggesting that his body, like Carter’s, contained
everything he needed to know about movement.
22
Jérôme Bel, as the rhythmanalyst, uses sampling techniques normally found in
music and literature to create dances that attempt to complicate ‘the choreographer’ as an
identity defined by movement. Bel’s biographical works feature a single dancer on a
blank stage delivering a lecture-performance that intermingle seemingly disparate
selections of movement and memories from both their offstage, personal life and their
public-professional personas. The series began in 2000 with Xavier Le Roy, and Bel’s
most recent iteration is Cedric Andrieux (2009). The second, and perhaps most well
known work of the series, is Veronique Doisneau (2004). The works reconstruct
historical narratives of their subjects, without directly referencing Bel or Bel’s
choreography.
26
And yet they present a formulation of social identities (i.e. the subjects,
Xavier Le Roy, Veronique Doisneau, Cedric Andrieux, etc.) so inter-connected amongst
Bel’s dancer-choreographer-author-audience schema that they become singular objects
described as a Jérôme Bel artwork.
Veronique Doisneau premiered in 2004 at the Paris National Opera, Palais
Garnier. Its subject, Veronique Doisneau, was then a sujet of the Ballet de l’Opéra de
Paris (Paris Opera Ballet), a professional distinction that meant she danced in both the
corps de ballet as well as in solo roles. At the time of the performance, she had been
dancing with the company for over twenty years, and was set to retire at the age of 42.
This performance was to be her last. Through words, movements, and music, Doisneau
23
26
The exception to this is Bel’s work, Pichet Klunchun and myself (2005), which Bel created with the Thai
Kohn dancer, Pichet Klunchun. The lecture performance was a conversation between the two dancers on
the origins their choreography. “Pichet Klunchun and myself, 2005 by Jérôme Bel, interview by Jan
Ritsema,” Jérôme Bel, Catalogue raisonné, 1994-2005, accessed February 9, 2011, http://
www.catalogueraisonne-jeromebel.com/player.php?ep=9.
recreates some of the most pivotal moments in her professional career: the
choreographers she has met and admired, the dances she has loved to perform and the
ones that make her “want to scream, leave the stage.”
27
Her testimonies constantly
traverse the ‘ballet world’ and the ‘real world,’ co-mingling private desires with public
personae until neither are positioned in opposition. Bel obfuscates the distinction
between dance as a talent and profession,
28
presenting the social choreography inherent in
Doisneau’s dual identities of mythical performer and skilled laborer.
Doisneau completes her demonstration with an illustration of the most punishing
role in her repertoire: the pas de deux in Swan Lake. For this scene, Doisneau and her
fellow corps de ballet dancers must become organic set pieces. Positioned along the
sides of the stage while the swan and her prince perform at center, the corps de ballet
hold lengthy poses, their lithe arms either held above their heads or outstretched in front
while Tchaikovsky’s epic score fills the theatre. Watching this corporeal endurance test,
the audience becomes kinesthetically aware of the mental and physical strength required
to execute the dance. Normally the stage would be filled with upwards of 50 or more
dancers, sets, feathers, and tutus, but on this night Doisneau is alone. Her movements,
stripped of artifice and theatrics, reveal the truth of Doisneau’s experienced identity.
24
27
“Veronique Doisneau” Accessed November 26, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIuWY5PInFs
28
In a filmed conversation with Jérôme Bel about Bel’s work, Veronique Doisneau (2004), Christopher
Wavelet describes the ‘society’ of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris as being so entrenched in its own illusory
code of ethics that the dancer profession is considered a gift, not a job for which one trains and potentially
improves. Wavelet states, “this society, this world to which this dancer belongs, implies that one should
accept this category of “talent,” an almost magical power that is not the result of work or a form of
rationality, but that is granted to us as a kind of grace - by a miracle, you might say.” “Veronique Doisneau,
2004, Reworked transcription of the filmed conversation between Jérôme Bel and Christopher Wavelet”
Jérôme Bel, Catalogue raisonné, 1994-2005, accessed November 26, 2010, http://www.catalogueraisonne-
jeromebel.com/player.php?ep=8&lang=en
Like the section of Lemon’s How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go
Anywhere? wherein the dancer’s sobs are created by and address an unknown assailant,
Bel’s audience must empathetically connect with Doisneau’s onstage corporeality in
order to gain full comprehension of the visual imagery presented. However, unlike
Okpokwasili’s performance, which attempts to evacuate the dancer’s body of all restraint,
Doisneau must contain her discontent in accordance with the demure identity of an
archetypal ballerina in the Paris Opera Ballet. Included in both performances are
cultural signifiers that are reproduced by each dancer and their audiences in order to
shape the dance.
The thread throughout Bel’s biography series is an inquiry of what it means to
perform a work by Jérôme Bel. Bel uses the lens of postmodernism to fracture his own
identity within the portraits of his dancers. Staging himself as a phantasmic subject
simultaneously external of, and intrinsic to, the work. Thus the performances appear to
derive from two seemingly unconnected sources: Bel as author and the dancer as
producer. It is not that Bel wants to evacuate himself completely from the construction
of these works. He has produced a rigorous Catalogue Raisonné (available online) that
contains taped interviews and texts that explicate his choreographic decisions. The
insinuation here is that Bel’s theoretical framework exists as a form of choreography that
structures each performance. However, if as Bel seems to suggest in these pieces, that a
dancer’s identity is created through a collection of movement narratives, by removing all
25
traces of his own movements from the works is he ultimately relinquishing his own
identity as a dancer?
29

Language of the Body
Like Bel, Rashaad Newsome also uses sampling techniques to construct his
performance-based works. Newsome, as the rhythmanalyst, isolates and classifies the
specific movement structures of marginal social groups. Newsome then reconfigures
and replays these movement structures across a variety of artistic and institutional
platforms reorganizing the hierarchal dynamic between performer and audience.
Newsome’s three works, Untitled (2008), Untitled (New Way) (2009), and Five
(2010), feature vogue dancers from New York’s ballroom community, a Lesbian-Gay-
Bisexual-Transgender coterie that specializes in putting fashion haute couture idealism in
drag and competing via stage presence and dance for status hierarchies based on the
ballroom communities’ own identity, genre and gender classification system. Newsome
selected vogueing “due to its under representation as a dance form… despite the strong
parallels it draws to ballet and modern dance, and due to its use of body language and
gestures as a means of communication.”
30
The embodied identities of the vogue dancers
are both fabrications of, and the impetus for, their hyper-theatrical, kinetic gender
expressions. Newsome first isolates the symbolic characteristics of vogueing, then creates
26
29
“Xavier Le Roy, 2000 by Jérôme Bel, interview by Xavier Leroy, 49’29,” Jérôme Bel, Catalogue
raisonné, 1994-2005, accessed November 26, 2010, http://www.catalogueraisonne-jeromebel.com/
player.php?ep=5
30
Rashaad Newsome, “Artist Statement” (Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Chelsea Gallery, New
York, NY , 2011)
new repertoires that while not ‘naturally’ found in vogueing, remain authentic to the
pastiche nature of the ballroom community’s identity.
In Newsome’s first video, Untitled (2008), vogue dancer, Shayne Oliver, performs
silently in a bare, white studio. Only the floor and one wall behind him are visible.
Oliver appears to move according to a series of internal crescendos and cues which tell
his body where to be, and when. The repetitive nature of particular back bends, arm and
leg lifts suggest a choreographic code that must be adhered to, but within which Oliver is
free to fully express his individuality. Newsome created the video in three stages. First,
Oliver was filmed performing his own movements from multiple angles. Newsome then
edited that recording to choreograph a fictitious vogue sequence devoid of Oliver’s
original cues. Oliver then watched and reinterpreted Newsome’s version to create a
vogue vernacular singular to the video.
In the second iteration, Untitled (New Way) (2009), the choreographic process was
the same. The work’s parenthetical title refers to a particular sub-genre of vogueing
exemplified by dancer, Darrin Prada. ‘New Way’ is labeled as such for its generational
break from previous vogue styles, and indicates the dance form’s established history.
31

For Untitled (New Way), Newsome significantly altered the dancer’s environment. The
new studio is a small box. Its three walls, and at times the ceiling, are all visible. The
compressed space adds to the sculptural element of the dancer’s movement. Prada bends
27
31
Newsome writes in a recent artist statement that voguers use the terms “Old Way” and “New Way” to
“refer to the evolutionary changes of the dance that are observable almost every ten years.” Rashaad
Newsome, “Artist Statement” (Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Chelsea Gallery, New York, NY ,
2011)
his arms, legs and torso into nearly every available arrangement that the studio allows.
His repertoire is reminiscent of postmodern dancers, Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer,
and artist, Bruce Nauman, who each explored their body’s ability to occupy the geometric
shapes of Minimalism. Prada’s eyes remain fixed on the camera for long periods of
time, activating the presence of both Newsome and the viewer. Intrinsic to vogueing is
the self-cognizant subject who presents through his dance a relational exchange between
author and audience.
The culmination of Newsome’s meditations on the vogueing body come together
in Five (2010), his multi-platform performance work which premiered at the 2010
Whitney Biennial. Five featured eight dancers, a ballroom MC, an opera singer,
drummer, guitarist, flutist, violinist, and a saxophonist. Newsome remained just offstage,
commanding both the rhythmic beat that kept time for the multiple performers, as well as
a motion sensor that tracked and translated each dancer’s movements into abstract line
drawings. Five presented samples of isolated gestures found within the larger vogue
movement vernacular: “Hands”, “Cat Walk”, “Floor Work”, “Dip Spins” and “Duck
Walking”.
32
These gestures are what Newsome calls a “language of the body,”
33
which
the dancers use to communicate their individual personalities. Dancers who compete in
the ballroom circuit perform and perfect these gestures to establish their specific position
within their community’s sociopolitical system. Each sample was accompanied by its
28
32
Rashaad Newsome, “Artist Statement” (Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Chelsea Gallery, New
York, NY , 2011)
33
Martha Schwendener, “Project Spaces at Location One and White Columns.” The Village Voice, July 9,
2008, accessed November 26, 2010, http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-07-09/art/the-secret-annex/
own instrumentation that served to sonically distinguish the dancers’ movements from
one another. The finale brought all five sections together in a joyous fusion of sound,
dance and vogue identity that was completely singular to its present moment.
Writing about the communicative techniques practiced by black performers in
America and Africa, Thomas F. DeFrantz suggests that a “hallmark of social dance
practice in the African diaspora is the communal valuation of the dancers’ ability to speak
in the imperative through dance movement.” DeFrantz continues that it is this language
of dance that is inevitably tied to the construction of identity by both dancer and
spectator.
34
As if picking up on DeFrantz’ hypothesis, Muhammed Ultra-Omni, a vogue
dancer from New York, boasts, “vogueing is truly an evolution of ancient African dance
forms rehearsed and refined into a form of first-world party artistry.”
35
While Ultra-
Omni’s statement thoughtfully reconnects black culture in America with its African
ancestry, it also sustains a perceived distinction between America as ‘first-world’ and
Africa as its third world ‘Other.’ ‘Ancient’ Africa is frozen in historical stasis while
contemporary American culture can constantly generate anew. Such cultural hierarchies
are exactly what Lemon and Newsome challenge through the construction of their
respective movement vernaculars. Lemon and his collaborators created their
choreographic language by layering and interweaving cultural and historical narratives
amongst one another until none were immediately recognizable nor held hierarchy over
29
34
Thomas F. DeFrantz, “The Black Beat Made Visible” in Of The Presence of the Body: essays on Dance
and Performance Theory, ed. André Lepecki (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 2004), 69-70.
35
Guy Trebay, “Still Striking a Pose,” The New York Times, May 22, 2005, accessed November 26, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/fashion/sundaystyles/22VOGUE.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
the other. Lemon refers to such an egalitarianism of movement as formlessness, a way
for the body to access more transcendental emotions like love and spirituality by
releasing it from the confines of socially constructed behavior codes and choreography.
Conversely, Newsome uses video, drawing and installation techniques to hyper-codify a
set of vogue movements that simultaneously depict and scrutinize the social systems it
derives from on its own terms. Untitled, Untitled (New Way), and Five represent the
recontextualizing of vogueing as an art form so that it can participate in a larger cultural
dialogue.
Such transmissions also depend on the spatial relationship of the performance to
its site, which provides constant context to both the production and reception of
movement. Part of the legitimizing force that Newsome is after occurs via staged
interventions with his works’ sites of display. During Five, the Whitney Museum was
transformed into a version of the ballroom stage. Simultaneously, the vogue dancers’
movements were transformed into drawings. This formal exchange reconfigured the
relationship between the ballroom community and the art institution, challenging the
notions of what constitutes a marginalized culture and an institution’s hierarchal power.
Geographer, Doreen Massey, suggests imagining space “as a simultaneity of
stories-so-far.”
36
Her concept posits descriptions of space, like cultural identities, as
socially constructed. The term “simultaneity” conflates time and space as a single
moment wherein an encounter of varying publics and ideologies occurs. This encounter
30
36
Doreen Massey, For Space (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, and Washington DC: Sage
Publications LTD, 2005), 9.
destabilizes the closed systems of hegemonic grand narratives, and recurs endlessly. The
dances explored in the following chapter provide visual examples of spaces as
simultaneous encounters. Each artist articulates the relational links between their
specific practice, the space of display and their audience. Their choreographic decisions
consequently expand previously held conceptions of both the mediums in, and stages
upon, which dance can occur. The dances become exemplary arguments against
sociopolitical essentialism based on a description of natural and social spaces as having
coeval and constant evolutions.
31
CHAPTER 2: DANCE SPACES
What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and
links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
37
Joachim Koester’s 16-mm film installation, Tarantism (2007), is based on the
tarantate culture that originated in the Salentine peninsula of Southern Italy. Tarantate
are those thought to be afflicted by the poisonous bite of the tarantula spider, which
caused prolonged states of hysteria and psycho-physiological instability. The tarantella
dance was created as a cure, sending the victim into trance-like convulsions meant to
isolate and expel the spider’s poison from the body. Although tarantate culture no longer
exists in its original ritual form, the tarantella has become a central figure of the region’s
entertainment, political and tourist operations. In this way, the tarantella dance has come
to define the Salentine peninsula as a place.
38

Upon entering a gallery it is likely that viewers will hear Tarantism before they
see it. The loud clack of its projector creates a hypnotic rhythm that sets the pace for the
work’s onscreen movement. The screen is positioned slightly above the floor, its
dimensions oversized so that the dancers are just beyond human scale. The space in
which the dancers perform is devoid of any architectural perimeters, save for a partially
revealed floor marked by their spastic movements. There are no walls, no corners, and
32
37
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, Oxford and Victoria:
Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 44.
38
Karen Lüdtke, Dances with Spiders: crisis, celebrity and celebration in Southern Italy (New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), 4-11.
no curves. The black expanse behind the dancers appears to dovetail endlessly into
another dimension. This environment at times subsumes their trance-like gestures,
thereby destabilizing the relationship between foreground and background within
Koester’s pictorial plane. This plane then bleeds into the exhibition space. The film’s
projected surface becomes a portal that connects the geographical and corporeal origins
of the tarantella dance with the viewing space occupied by its audience.
The tarantella is performed in spaces traditionally defined as ‘public’: town
squares, churches, and promenades. In addition, today’s tarantella performers take over
abandoned fields and farmhouses to tout the once-illicit nature of the dance. As social
anthropologist, Karen Lüdtke describes, “with generators fueling light bulbs and loud
speakers and traffic signs attracting and directing crowds, deserted and silent places
become temporarily infused with life.”
39
Koester uses similar tactics to activate the
galleries in which Tarantism is shown. The light and sound of the projector create a total
environment, transporting viewers from the exhibition space into that of the performance.
Koester’s photographic and film projects aim to link the material and the physical reality
of a place with something unseen.
40

The tarantella requires both audience and accompanying musicians for its
execution. The dancer, usually a woman wearing a loose-fitting nightgown, begins by
laying down on a white sheet at the feet of her spectators, their bird’s-eye view best
33
39
Karen Lüdtke, Dances with Spiders: crisis, celebrity and celebration in Southern Italy (New York and
Oxford: Berghan Books, 2009), 165.
40
Catherine David and Joachim Koester, “A Blind Spot: a prologue to an exhibition,” (lecture, Haus der
Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, June 4, 2010), accessed January 25, 2011, http://hkw.eu/en/
programm/2010/berlin_documentary_forum/tv/a_blind_spot/201006041630.php
described as of a body against a blank canvas. As the musicians begin their song, the
dancer matches their rhythms, writhing and slashing about across the ground, on her
back, hands and knees, feet and back to the ground again.
Tarantism is performed by professional dancers, whom Koester had instructed to
move according to their own personal understanding of the tarantella. The six minute,
thirty second film loop contains a series of choreographed configurations: some frames
are of a single dancer, while others feature the entire group in staged formations that
mimic Broadway dance numbers or televised variety shows. In one shot, we peer
through the stationary legs of the group who surround a soloist writhing on the floor. The
voyeuristic perspective of this arrangement is closest to an authentic tarantella
performance and intimates at the dance’s inherent taboo nature. The camera’s movement
is constantly shifting our gaze, adding to the frenetic quality of the tarantella itself. Taken
together, these scenes create a single holistic dance compelled by the rhythmic clack of
the film’s projection.
Koester is clear that the dancing performed in Tarantism is not the result of an
authentic trance. He refers to the work as a “conceptual game,” using the phenomena of
the tarante as a framework to explore the expressive possibilities within different
identities. Koester describes the tarantella as originating from an oppressive peasant
society, the frantic dancing then creating a “free space” wherein individuals found relief
from externally enforced hardships.
41
The tarantella can be seen as a kinesthetic cure for
34
41
ibid.
disorders brought on by an individual’s relationship with larger society. The spider’s
poison as a metaphor for deviations in normative social behavior. The dance represents
an expelling of the tarantula’s poison as an outward expression of internalized social
codes.
42
That the tarantella dance implicates the body as the location of psychological
imbalance indicates a phenomenological understanding of one’s lived experience.
It should be noted here that Koester’s film, like Rashaad Newsome’s video and
performance works discussed in the previous chapter, is not attempting an exact
ethnographic recreation, nor explanation, of the specific counter-cultures that their dances
refer to. Each artist has removed the contextual signifiers that normally correspond with
the dances they construct (e.g. the village squares of Southern Italy or the ‘ballrooms’ of
upper Manhattan). Both have made the formal decision to replace cultural milieu as
backdrop with blank walls in closer accordance with their own artistic practices. Further,
each have constructed a performance strategy (Koester through verbal instruction,
Newsome through video editing), which produce dances tethered to the artist, not
tradition, and which make the works applicable to their exhibition space. Using dance,
Koester and Newsome create spaces within art institutions that allow their audiences to
kinesthetically respond to inquiries about individual positionality within larger
sociopolitical planes.
35
42
In the 2004 documentary, Un ritmo per l’anima: Tarantismo and terapie naturali (Tarantism: A Rhythm
for your Soul), directed by Giuliano Capani, Antonio Fassina of the New Therapy Center in Milan posits
that the tarantula is “a creature which is considered to be poisonous, so its bite is a way of liberating the
poisons the person has within. Poisons which are part of the mind’s content.” I take this reasoning a step
further to suggest that the ‘poisons’ result from a break in codified social behaviors which have been
internalized and position the afflicted as a pariah. The tarantella dance is executed as an attempt to return
to society as an able-bodied citizen using recombinant choreography of those same social codes.
Tarantism represents Koester’s anthropological investigation of an enigmatic
corporeal space that he refers to as “terra-incognito of our bodies.”
43
The projection
surface becomes a liminal interface between the interior space of our bodies and exterior
social spheres. The material surface of Tarantism connects the specific historical
narrative of the tarante with a larger inquiry into the psychological potential of human
movement strategies.
In many ways, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work operates on the same liminal
interface that Tarantism exposes. Gonzalez-Torres uses multiple mediums and display
strategies to build an awareness of both the material conditions and the spaces that our
bodies inhabit. His practice is predicated on an understanding of the body as a form,
what else might represent this form, what the form can contain, and the form’s
relationship to its surrounding architecture. Gonzalez-Torres’ installations reference
formal art-historical vernaculars, particularly the serial and geometrical forms of
Minimalism and the proposals of Conceptualism. His works are choreographed
collaborations between the artist and a varying cast of interlocutors: the institution, the
collector and the audience. Through his art, Gonzalez-Torres demonstrates the
continuous loss and regeneration of the human body, a cycle facilitated by mediated
encounters. In an interview with Guggenheim deputy director and chief curator, Nancy
Spector, he explained that without the spectator, his works are nothing, stating, “I need
36
43
Joachim Koester, “Tarantism, 2007,” accessed February 9, 2011, http://www.nicolaiwallner.com/artists/
joachim/tarantismtext.html
the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to
become part of my work, to join in.”
44

Movement is an inherent thread throughout Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ oeuvre, and is
used as a way to build a kinesthetic awareness of the spatialized corporeal forms space
described above. This movement occurs across cities, as viewers traverse the streets
below and between his photographic and text-based billboards. Movement happens via
the art material itself, as the printed sheets of paper that form his “stacks,” or while the
brightly-wrapped candies, methodically ‘spilled’ across gallery floors, are collected and
carried away by viewers. Nowhere is a viewer’s movement more central than in
Gonzalez-Torres’ installation, Untitled (Arena). This piece is part of his “light strings”
series, which are characterized by an extension cord of a fixed length with evenly spaced,
white porcelain light-bulb sockets and detailed instructions of how the extension cord
should be hung. In keeping with his collaborative tactics, the instructions include a
provision that their exact display is ultimately the decision of the collector and/or curator
in charge of their presentation. The casual strings of lights recall festive, familial
gatherings, while at the same time, their solitary lines and illumination of gallery spaces
evoke Dan Flavin’s florescent tubes.
Viewers step into the space of the ‘Arena’ delineated by light strings, and perform
a waltz with their dance partner. Unlike Koester’s Tarantism, in which viewers watch
other dancers, Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Arena) creates a participatory frame that
37
44
Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2007), 57.
kinesthetically collapses the public space of the gallery with the private realm of memory.
Within this completely new form of relational space, the physical reality of a participant/
viewer’s phenomenological experience becomes tangible as each new sense is engaged.
We touch another body, we hear a waltz through the headphones, we are watching our
partner, and likely, our feet. All the while we feel ourselves being watched. It is within
this framing of corporeal perspective that Gonzalez-Torres offers viewers an experience
of what philosophy scholar, Jaana Parviainen, refers to as ‘bodily knowledge.’ According
to Parviainen, bodily knowledge describes the living body’s movement ability
distinguished from the actual movement itself. Bodily knowledge is a combination of
“awareness, kinesthesis and perception,”
45
and has as much to do with self-reflexivity as
with technical skill. Two years prior to completing Untitled (Arena), Gonzalez-Torres
had lost his lover, Ross, to AIDS and was himself dying from the disease. At stake in the
work is an urgency of exposing through a kinesthetic experience of movement the
precarious nature of our corporeal form. Ultimately, the dancers inside the ‘arena’ are
surrogates - stand-ins - for Gonzalez-Torres and Ross. The participants’ dance, which
continues as long as the work continues to be displayed, is how their corporeal memories
live on.
In his study, Social Choreography, Andrew Hewitt discusses at length the impact
of the waltz on Western society at the turn of the century. Compared to the large-scale
group dances practiced in the royal courts as demonstrations of idealized social order, the
38
45
Jaana Parviainen, “Bodily Knowledge: Epistemological Reflections on Dance,” Dance Research Journal,
Summer (2002), 19.
waltz was an intimate performance between two individuals, which on the surface
focused on the pleasure of dancing itself.
46
The waltz is, of course, completely infused
with social codes. Gender power structures and normative sexuality is enforced through
partner selection and the decision of who should ‘lead.’ Hewitt posits that, “the display
of erotic attraction in the waltz projects the so-called representative public sphere into the
realm of bourgeois intimacy.”
47
Rather than look to external examples of appropriate
social behavior, during the waltz individuals demonstrate their own command of these
behaviors. Within his ‘arena,’ Gonzalez-Torres creates a new space that inverts this
schema: the installation, isolated within the art institution as a viewed object, returns the
waltz to an external entity like the court dances. By opening the performance to all
viewer-participants, regardless of culturally determined identity and dance skill, and by
specifying that the construction of Untitled (Arena) is left to its exhibitor, the social
choreography on display is demonstrated through the sovereign of a dispersed public, not
a centralized, abstract site of power. The endless diversity of dancers, dance partners and
performance spaces made available through the work prevents a reading of the waltz
based on socially based class, gender or heterosexist hegemonies.
It is not necessary to have a previous understanding of the waltz in order to
participate in Gonzalez-Torres’ Arena. The work’s intention is to provide a space that
builds awareness of our interconnectivity with our constitutive outside. The architecture
39
46
Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 31-34.
47
ibid.
of the piece facilitates our encounter with the work’s themes and with our fellow viewers.
Conversely, dancers can affect the architecture of a space by changing the contours of
their body in relation to their stage. Janaa Parviainen, quoting Susan Leigh Foster,
contends that dancers use their bodily knowledge, to “learn curves or angles that the body
can form, and place these in a particular shape at a given time.”
48
Space itself becomes
the dancer’s constitutive outside, which simultaneously determines the parameters of
their moving body. This process can be seen as analogous with an individual’s dynamic
relation to their sociopolitical environment, a key component of Trisha Brown’s Roof
Piece.
Roof Piece premiered in 1971, during Brown’s time with the Judson Dance
Theatre. Brown and her Judson contemporaries sought to eliminate the totalizing effects
of metaphor, virtuosity and theatre within the postmodern dance genre in “an effort to
bring dance closer to everyday life.”
49
Brown has created her own dance vernacular,
which she uses to explore the body’s relationship to space, gravity and endurance. There
is a scientific quality to Brown’s choreography. She presents a problem field and then
uses the body to find an answer. According to photographer, Babette Mangolte, Roof
Piece tested the “erosion of movement by transmission,” but was also about “revealing
the majesty and privacy of downtown roofs and the sculptural effect of its water
40
48
Jaana Parviainen, “Bodily Knowledge: Epistemological Reflections on Dance,” Dance Research Journal,
Summer (2002), 20.
49
Philip Bither, “From Falling and Its Opposite, and All The In-Betweens.” So That The Audience Does
Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing, ed. Peter Eleey. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2008), 9.
towers.”
50
For the purposes of this essay, my description of the work relies on three
sources: two photographs (one dated 1971, which is featured on Brown’s website without
a photographer credit, and one dated 1973, by Mangolte); and my viewing of the work’s
most recent presentations at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City on
January 15 and 16, 2011.
Roof Piece was originally performed by 12 dancers spread across the rooftops of
New York’s downtown skyline. Each dancer was dressed from head to toe in red,
corporeal beacons set against the industrious, soot-stained grey of the city. Both the color
photograph from 1971 and Mangolte’s black and white image from 1973 depict a sky
hazy and thick, in the former, Brown’s hair blows against what seems like an oncoming
storm. One of the most immediately striking elements of both images is the contrast
between human bodies and the urban backdrops that surround them. The built
environment stretches beyond all four edges of both photographs, endlessly. Far from
being dwarfed, the dancers become extensions of the buildings on which they move,
natural outcroppings of the cityscape.
To further explicate her thesis on bodily knowledge, Parviainen deploys
philosophy and social science scholar Michael Polanyi’s work on tacit knowledge, and
posits that this extension is how we become aware and take heed of the space around us.
Parviainen uses Polanyi’s term indwelling, explaining that when “we make a tool
function… we incorporate it into our body - or extend our body to include it -so that we
41
50
Babette Mangolte, “About Roof Piece. a dance by Trisha Brown and a photograph by Babette Mangolte,
2007,” accessed January 25, 2011, http://www.babettemangolte.com/maps.html
come to dwell in it.”
51
The city space is Brown’s tool, which she both dwells in and
deploys to define the contours of the dancers body and the thresholds of human
communication.
Roof Piece lasts for approximately 30 minutes, during which time the dancers
watch one another, relaying a series of improvised movements that originate from the
first dancer in their line.
52
The communication transmission is akin to the children’s
game, Telephone, and like that game, the movements of each dancer are never exact
replicas of one another’s, but interpretations. Each dancer’s movements are produced
using a bodily knowledge of both their own movements and the dancer they are
attempting to mimic: they must first comprehend the gesture then mnemonically process
how to configure their own body as such. While this is happening they are also
conscious that their movements are being transmitted and received by another dancer.
Each dancer must also be conscious of their own rooftop, which delineates the space they
have available to move within. No two rooftops are alike, and by extension, no two
dancers’ movements are alike.
42
51
Jaana Parviainen, “Bodily Knowledge: Epistemological Reflections on Dance,” Dance Research Journal,
Summer (2002), 18.
52
For the 1971 and 1973 iterations of Roof Piece, the dancer improvising the originary movements of the
group was Brown. During the 2011 performance at MoMA, one of the most interesting developments was
that it was unclear who was “leading” the succession of movements. This is due to several differences in
the dances iterations. First and foremost being that in the 2011 presentations, Brown no longer performs
the work. Without the choreographer/artist as central figure, the audience must formulate new conceptions
of the dance’s ‘leader.‘ Second, was due to the vertical configuration of the dancers positioned from the
ground floor to the sixth floor around the circumference of the museum’s central atrium, as opposed to the
dance’s original horizontal layout. The final factor was the audience’s ability to see the direction of each
dancer’s gaze, which led to confusion rather than clarification of the dance’s starting point. The dancers did
not follow each other one after the other, but rather constructed a complex web of communication that
traveled from wall-to-wall and floor-to-floor. An apt metaphor for this confusion would be the constant
reconfiguration of power around a central figure, which the true democracy constantly puts in crisis.
While Roof Piece works formally within its own parameters, when analyzed
against the sociopolitical framework engaged throughout this essay, what it reveals are
the difficulties in disseminating information across large crowds of people and/or public
spaces. Intercepted by both time and environmental factors, there is no way for Brown’s
choreography to remain intact. The time that it takes for the movement to travel between
one dancer’s space and the next disrupts the possibility for synchronized and synchronic
movement. Therefore the twelve dancers express their own narratives, completely
informed by their present actuality. Similar to the varying waltzes performed in
Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Arena), the resulting dances of Roof Piece originate from a
fractured dispersal of authorship, rather than the centralized figure of a choreographer.
The breakdown of Brown’s movement vernacular symbolizes her authority (as
author of the work) in crisis. Following French political philosopher, Claude Lefort,
Rosalyn Deutsche writes that public space is the “social space where, in the absence of a
foundation, the meaning and unity of the social is negotiated - at once constituted and put
at risk.”
53
The political provocation in Roof Piece cannot be reduced to Brown’s move
from a traditional stage to the cityscape. It is Brown’s choreography of communication
as it occurs in public space, and the multiple translations that result, that are mnemonic of
democracy and the sociopolitical public sphere. Such a place is created by what
Deutsche terms “the spatializing operations that produce the space of politics.”
54
What
43
53
Rosalyn Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” in Evictions: art and spacial politics (Graham Foundation/MIT Press,
1996), 273.
54
ibid.
Roof Piece demonstrates through a combination of scenography and choreography is an
example of the spatialized public sphere actualized through kinesthesia and bodily
knowledge. The dancers are not only bodies in space, they are dancing a democratic
praxis.
Public space is not automatically a site of politics. Deutsche writes,
… the assertion that public space is the site of democratic political activity can repeat the very
evasion of politics that such an assertion seeks to challenge. For, like the urban critic’s
defense of traditional city space as a terrain in which political discourse takes place, this
assertion does not require us to recognize, indeed it can prevent us from recognizing that the
political public sphere is not only a site of discourse, it is also a discursively constructed
site.
55

In order to best understand how a space is constructed it is valuable to consider the work
of geographer, Doreen Massey, who argues for a defense of space on its own terms. Such
spaces would exist free of the grand narratives that society adheres to them, offering a
focused perspective of the politics at work above ground.
56
Examining the processes by
which spaces geographically evolve, Massey suggests is necessary for the
“reconceptualisation [sic] of places in a way that might challenge exclusionist localisms
based on claims of some eternal authenticity.”
57
Thus, Massey cautions against the
potential for land-based exclusionary practices supported by Deutsche’s discursively
44
55
Rosalyn Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” in Evictions: art and spacial politics (Graham Foundation/MIT Press,
1996), 289.
56
The separation of natural space and social space is not the realm of geographers alone. Henri Lefebvre,
too, notes that natural space evolves coeval with social space, natural space distinguished by its lack of
economic production: “until nature became localized in underdevelopment, each place showed its age and,
like a tree trunk, bore the mark of the years it had taken to grow. Time thus inscribed in space, and natural
space was merely the lyrical and tragic script of natural time.” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space,
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 95.
57
Doreen Massey, For Space (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, and Washington DC: Sage
Publications LTD, 2005), 20.
constructed sites. Massey does not deny that exclusionist narratives are a reality, nor that
we are absolved of creating them. But if we can recognize types of spaces that exist
separate from the practice of ‘discursivity,’ then we can also recognize the ultimate
instability of both the discursive operation and the meanings that it produces. Massey
considers this key to dismantling hegemonic social structures.
58

This chapter has attempted to highlight the many types of spaces that exist. As
evidenced by Koester’s Tarantism, space can also include the ‘terra-incognito of our
bodies’. Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Arena) presents space as the liminal threshold
between our private desires and public relations. Brown’s space is recognized by its
communicative potential. These definitions of space are all social constructions that exist
coeval with non-human, a priori space. Both exist as spatial facts, and both are also
always in flux.
The positioning of our bodies in space, is a function of perception. Places, as
Massey describes them, “implicate us, perforce, in the lives of human others, and in our
relations with non-humans...They require that, in one way or another we confront the
challenge of the negotiation of multiplicity.”
59
The spatialized interface that Koester,
Gonzalez-Torres, and Brown perform upon is fabricated not only by the location where
our bodies meet a surface, but also by the encounter of individual experiences with the
45
58
This concept is also where Massey’s notions of radical geography coincides with the Laclau’s and
Mouffe’s political discourse. What all three scholars describe is the impossibility of a single-minded
society due to the constantly evolving social and natural environments that we navigate in our everyday
existence. Laclau’s and Mouffe’s antagonisms exist spatially in the same way that Massey’s geography
exists temporally: neither can ever constitute a closed system.
59
Doreen Massey, For Space (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, and Washington DC: Sage
Publications LTD, 2005), 141.
narratives that have been used to describe spaces and culture thus far. Their dances thus
reveal the various ways that we define ourselves in relationship to others and the way our
bodies inhabit space.
Having examined the dance event through its participants and the spaces in which
they occur, the following chapter will focus on the encounter itself between artist, dancer
and audience. How are these points of transmission choreographed, and what are the
types of information relayed? What artistic strategies are deployed to position the human
body as a specific nodal point within broad sociopolitical contexts? And how might these
encounters be reproduced?
46
CHAPTER 3: DANCE TRANSMISSIONS
Jérôme Bel uses a combination of costume, communication and staging cues to
position his subject, Veronique Doisneau, within a sociopolitical structure that extends
beyond the borders of the performance space. This positioning provides audiences with
multiple entry points into Doisneau’s performed biography specifically, and Bel’s
theoretical framework in general. Bels’ choreographic decisions highlight the many ways
that dance events are experienced, and present the body as the natural point of
transmission between performer and audience.
In Veronique Doisneau (2004), Doisneau appears onstage wearing a purple leotard
under a pink nylon stocking camisole, pink tights and black cotton pants, dressed it would
seem for a dance class or rehearsal, rather than a performance. Her lecture thus invites
the audience to explore behind the scenes of the Paris Opera Ballet. This transmission is
furthered by the stage, which is devoid of sets and flooded by the house lights, as if the
audience was let into the theatre on one of its ‘dark days.’
Doisneau’s address to the audience is of a confessional nature. She reveals her
past experiences and future desires, looking either directly into the audience or the
camera lens. Writing on the importance of the visual in ballet, Helen Thomas explains
that dancers’ bodies are constantly monitored and modified according to the direction of
ballet companies and choreographers. She is apt to point out that ballet dancers also
47
“scrutinise [sic] themselves by watching their performed movements in the ever-present
mirror, rather like a knowing spectator.”
60
In Bel’s Veronique Doisneau, the mirror and
the spectator become one, and are positioned facing the dancer as the mirror would in a
classroom or rehearsal space. Bel has choreographed a dance event that allows for
Doisneau to present her historical narrative, and for the audience to empathetically relate
to her story - as if we were the reflection she saw in a mirror whilst lecturing to herself.
There are a few points of the performance when Doisneau attempts to align
herself with the audience. The first pieces of information that Doisneau reveals are her
name, her age, that she is married and also a mother. These details from her personal
life, distinguished from both her performance attributes as a dancer and her employment
attributes as a sujet of the Paris Opera Ballet, together form the whole of Doisneau’s
onstage presence. Doisneau, it turns out, is comprised of the same personal and
sociopolitical constructs as her audience. About halfway through her lecture, Doisneau
describes how she adores to watch Céline Talon (also a sujet of the Paris Opera Ballet)
dance in Swedish choreographer, Mats Ek’s, “Giselle.” Doisneau then sits down at the
foot of the stage with her back facing the audience. The house lights dim and all of us,
including Doisneau, watch as Talon appears onstage to perform. Her dance ends with a
large round of applause from the newly restructured audience.
Ralph Lemon also attempts to complicate the performer/spectator relationship.
The first section of his latest work, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go
48
60
Helen Thomas, The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 98.
Anywhere?, is a lecture conducted by Lemon sitting on stage in plain clothes and boots
next to a video screen. Lemon narrates the video that traces the historical trajectory of
the performance his audience is about to watch which is largely based on Lemon’s
autobiographical experiences. And it is later during this same performance that dancer,
Okwui Okpokwasili, stands with her back to the audience staring onto the stage, just as
Doisneau does while watching Céline Talon. This constant traversing of the spectator/
performer position allows the choreographers to generate an empathetic transmission
amongst every person in the exhibition space or theatre without collapsing these roles or
requiring a participatory element in their work. Lemon, Bel, Doisneau, and Okpokwasili
focus on the communicative potential of their encounter with audiences. The physicality
of these encounters allows for multiple types of knowledge to be mobilized and relayed.
I take my definition of empathy from German philosopher, Edith Stein, who
classifies empathetic expression as “acts in which foreign experience is comprehended”
61

Stein further explains that empathy does not mean a loss of self, rather it allows a deeper
comprehension of one’s self through first, the acknowledgement of an entity foreign to
our self and thus outside ourselves, and second, the awareness that these external
experiences simultaneously have affect on our internal phenomenological compositions.
This separation between one’s self and a foreign entity is key. Empathy, according to
Stein, does not mean that two subjects observing one another become one. Fusion would
complicate empathetic emotion as the observers would not be able to sense a ‘self’ in
49
61
Edith Stein, On the problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein, PhD (Washington DC: ICS Publications,
1989), 6.
relation to an ‘Other.’ As Susan Leigh Foster states, expanding Stein’s theories,
“empathy was the bodily experience of feeling connected to the other, while at the same
time knowing that one was not experiencing directly the other’s movements or
feelings.”
62

Foster’s study, Choreographing Empathy, provides many helpful insights to
understanding the construction of kinesthesia and empathy as both being socially
constructed scientific terminology used to explain human relationships with external
points in the world. She explains that the desire to find “common ground…developed
along with the growing awareness of cultural difference brought on by colonial
expansion.”
63
By tracing the historical trajectories of both terms and their specific uses,
Foster shows how kinesthesia and empathy have been used for both over-universalizing
and exclusionary purposes by hegemonic sociopolitical groups. Disputes surrounding
government-regulated civil rights, such as abortion, same-sex marriage and affirmative
action, isolate segments of the population using empathetic appeals based on
discriminating factors of class, race, gender and sexuality. These campaigns are evidence
of empathy mobilized as a closed system, rather than a position that allows for infinite
diversity.
Foster also highlights the fascinating new studies on mirror neurons that began in
the 1990s. Mirror neurons are responsible for the brain activity that allows us to share
50
62
Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London and New York:
Routledge, 2011), 164.
63
Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London and New York:
Routledge, 2011), 138.
experiences with others. These neurons are singular to social animals, as the basis of all
socially constructed culture comes from imitation. Mirror neurons translate the activities
we see others doing, so that so we can do similar things.
64
Drawing upon the concept of
the mirror helps push against the potentially universalizing tendencies of the terms
empathy and kinesthesia. For mirrors do not create replicas. Like artworks, mirrors
produce representations of things, they never are that thing.
Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s conception of radical democracy is also
instrumental in understanding how empathy might still be deployed as a positive political
force. For Laclau and Mouffe, the impossibility of a single-minded society lies in the
endlessly produced pluralisms stemming from each individual’s lived experience.
Empathy in this model would not universalize, rather as Stein and Foster suggest, it
would allow democracy to flourish through an awareness of assured difference amongst
all inhabitants of shared social spheres. The differences would occlude binary
oppositions such as us/them used to support consensus amongst particular groups.
Rather, as Mouffe deploying Jacques Derrida’s concept of the ‘constitutive outside’
suggests, the empathetic awareness of ourselves in relation to a foreign other is “what
makes any ‘us’ impossible.”
65
51
64
“Mirror Neurons,” NOVA, television program. Public Broadcasting Station, January 25, 2005, accessed
February 2, 2011, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/mirror-neurons.html
65
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 12.
The paradox of empathy, as Emilyn Claid explains, is that it requires a
separateness while entering another’s world “as a movement of bodily inclusion.”
66
When
an audience-participant dances the waltz within Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Arena),
empathy is generated through an understanding that our movements, while they might
symbolically represent those of the artist and his lover, remain solely our own. The
connection between artist and audience through a shared, yet individual, experience is
what empathy makes possible in the work.
All of the works selected are examples of multi-medium expressions of dance.
Their multiple points of entry allow for a more thorough comprehension of the dance
event, which as Susan Leigh Foster explains, “affirm the possibility of conceptual
resonances among disciplines.”
67
Both Trisha Brown and Rashaad Newsome use video
and drawing techniques to expand their dance vernaculars. Brown positions her body
atop paper the same way she would dance on a stage. The marks are generated by
movement studies and the possibility of her body in space. Newsome uses sensor-
technology to transform vogue poses into a kinetic line drawing for archiving the dance.
Joachim Koester figures the sounds of a film projector as music and positions his
projected image as a physical link to historical dance traditions. Rather than fetishizing a
‘pure’ performance, the interconnection of mediums and time within these works mirror
the social patterns of our lived experiences. The dancing body becomes more than just an
52
66
Emilyn Claid, “Still Curious,” in The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, ed. Alexandra Carter and Janet
O’Shea (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 141.
67
Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance
(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986), 221.
art material. Everyday experiences are folded into the construction of the dance,
providing an external nodal point on which artists and audiences can test visual and
political theories. These theories are then transformed through dance into viable praxes
that can be transferred back into our everyday. Due to the myriad of technologies, virtual
and spatial, with which we interface everyday, societies rarely exist in a single dimension.
Like a company’s catalog of dances, or an artist’s multi-faceted output, these dimensions
and social spheres combine to make up our personal repertoires.
In her book, The Archive and The Repertoire, performance scholar Diana Taylor
provides a very convincing argument for the equal validity of the performance repertoire,
with that of the written archive, long privileged by cultural and academic institutions as a
sole source of knowledge. According to Taylor, ‘the repertoire’ consists of articulations -
separate, equal and relatively supporting of historical narratives, and ‘the archive’ is seen
as documentation and written texts. Taylor makes a case for an embodied knowledge that
might supersede the written text, suggesting that instead of “focusing on patterns of
cultural expression in terms of texts and narratives, we might think about them as
scenarios that do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description.”
68

While I rely heavily on many of the arguments Taylor makes in favor of an embodied
knowledge, the key shift from her theories I would like to suggest is in the rigidity of her
terms that separate the archive and the repertoire, thereby effectively limiting what either
could contain. Taylor is astute to point out that written knowledge has been primarily the
53
68
Diana Taylor. The Archive and The Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 16.
domain of dominating classes, and further, that conquering cultures quickly rewrite
histories to expel those they have conquered. But if Taylor sees the unpacking of the
written word as key to her conception of performance tactics that empower the cultural
contributions of Latin American societies, why not expand the etymological possibility of
her terms? Why must the archive only contain written texts, documentation and artifacts
so that ultimately and always only those who understand a particular language put forth
can participate in the knowledge they produce? Language, like performance, is
completely dependent on its spatiotemporal context for meaning. Language - both
spoken and written text - evolves similarly to any other natural or man-made object. The
meanings of words transform through a process of repetition, transmission and
abandonment. If, as Taylor suggests, we are to set limits on the potentiality of the written
word, then it seems we are allowing the written word - specifically the word, ‘archive’ -
to limit us in its historically held meaning, an action counterproductive to a discussion
about the perceptions of performance and critical art practices, specifically with regard to
communication and the transmission of knowledge. Such a position keeps dance and
performance (and all of the events, or ‘scenarios,’ to use Taylor’s term) not captured by
documentation permanently outside of a collecting hierarchy practiced by cultural and
learning institutions. By rejecting the limits of the terminology already in place, it allows
for the actions once relegated to performance repertoires to be included within a larger
art-historical narrative and presentation. I do not submit that either spoken language or
the written word are devoid of meaning to begin with. I only suggest that both contain
54
movement and substantial shifts that we have witnessed over time, moves that we are
also empowered to affect.
Underlying Taylor’s argument seems to be a call for other types of knowledge
besides the written word, which can often result in hegemonic scholarly, ‘moral’ and
sociopolitical majorities. Jaana Parviainen’s definitions of ‘bodily knowledge,’
explained through a kinesthetic sense utilized by dancers and choreographers to create,
reconstruct and perform dances, might be one to consider. In addition to dance and
performance, there are many critical art practices that seek to create a more holistic
transmission between artwork, viewer and our lived environments, in order to
communicate in more expansive ways than language alone. An example of such is the
Mexican muralist tradition, which when originated was utilized to unite the country’s
largely illiterate population. The artists most famous for this tradition - Diego Rivera,
David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco - combined fresco techniques garnered
from their individual studies in Europe and Mexico, along with the painted-narrative
traditions of Mayan and Aztec cultures, to spread their proletariat-based agenda to the
widest possible audience across all of post-revolution Mexico and the Americas. The
murals are an important artistic tool responsible for a shift away from written language as
the primary conveyor of knowledge and sociopolitical agendas. The muralist tradition
does not diminish the intellectual rigor put forth by the content of its images. Far from it.
The translation of imagery into political action transforms the world into a network of
signs, not just spectacle, forcing an heightened awareness of ones positionality in space,
55
the relational nature of such a position and its potential political impact. Embodied art
practices blend language with a host of physical features manifested in the artist, the
viewer and the display environment. The corporeal coding that we read on the dancing
body, for example, is interwoven with the message put forth to create a more
phenomenologically complete experience of that body in space, along with the body of
the interpreting viewer.
The kinesthetic awareness of the self as both subject and spectator enables our
organization of the multiple constituents that make up our lived environments. These
constituents, once collected and classified, could be considered our personal archive.
When, how and why we pull from this archive would be what constituted our personal,
historical narratives (as outlined in the first chapter). Mobilizing this awareness allows us
to act as historians of our own ‘everyday’ - reshuffling information based on revised
functions of perception and additional data obtained.
The keepers of these archives, kinesthetic citizens, have the power to transmit
social and political ideologies via movement practices and interpersonal encounters in the
public realm. This concept does not negate the need for a repository of ideas that hold
our various ideologies and narratives. A place that could be used to draw information and
knowledge that pertain to the present goals of the bodies involved in micro and macro
sociopolitical relationships. An institution, or an archive, per se. This archive is not
housed in a museum or other art institution. This archive has no grand narrative. It is
constantly evolving, metamorphosing based on the types of artworks that it displays.
56
Both the content of the archive and its location are one and the same: our bodies. Bodies
viewed on the sociopolitical plane as being works of public art.
Whether through language, images or movement, history is never revisited, it is
replayed. It is not just dance that disappears the moment it is performed, our natural lives
disappear from one moment to the next. This is a temporal fact. How might we transfer
or communicate knowledge about ourselves, from one data collection point to the next?
If our personal archives - like historical narratives and socially constructed spaces - are
generated by subjective information, then it would seem the ideal conveyor for the
archive is a medium of equal subjective possibility: the body in motion.
57
CONCLUSION
In the preceding pages, I have outlined what I consider our greatest political
strength: empathy. Empathy creates interconnectedness amongst social groups, while
allowing differences between individuals to flourish. Empathy should not be equated with
a desire for political consensus. I have utilized the political and spatial theories of
Rosalyn Deutsche, Ernesto Laclau, Doreen Massey, and Chantal Mouffe to highlight the
instability and impossibility of consensus within a true democracy. The practice of
ideological articulation, as Laclau and Mouffe suggest, must consist “in the construction
of nodal points which partially fix meaning” and therefore include a potential for new
information to construct new meanings, endlessly. They continue, “the partial character
of this fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the
constant overflowing of discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity.”
69

Empathy, must become one of the many starting points from which we communicate our
varying ideologies.
The kinesthetic experience of witnessing a dance event, in its many forms, can
trigger an empathetic response that both individuates and enables an awareness of our
always occurring constitutive outside. Through kinesthesia and empathy, the political
citizen comprehends both the internal and external constructions of their personal social
58
69
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics, Second Edition (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 113.
condition. Thus, as Andrew Hewitt suggests, “we might think of choreography in terms
of ‘rehearsal’; that is, working out and working through of utopian, but nevertheless
‘real,’ social relations.”
70

Does applying a political lens on the works contained in this study serve to
heighten, or distract from, their respective activities? Does calling attention to
choreographed breaks in cultural protocol diminish the impact of works that, whether
intentionally or not, are providing alternative visions to hegemonic political structures
and socially constructed historical narratives? None of the dance-based artworks selected
for this project would be considered overtly political acts. Rather, it has been my
intention to reveal their innate political gestures so that they might become exemplary
acts of our empowered ‘everyday.’ Together, these works create an awareness of our
positionality in the public realm. The works represent an activation of bodies that
circumvent the socially sanctioned behaviors of cultural institutions so as to engender a
biopower of the multitudes, wherever they may be. Dance presents the potential of a
constitutive outside completely informed by internal rhythms. If we are to establish a
malleable movement vernacular with the power to reconfigure those social rhythms that
surround us, why not begin using the rhythms of dance?
Ryan Heffington is a Los Angeles-based choreographer who has gone from
counter-culture dance maven to holding residencies at museums and other art institutions
nationwide. Since 2008 he has been teaching an all-levels dance class called Sweaty
59
70
Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 17.
Sundays. The class is billed as bridging the gap between “the dance club, the gym and
church.”
71
While clearly intended as a slick reference to the day and time that the classes
take place, what each of these locations also infer are those places our individual selves
are made aware of their external presence. At the dance club, the gym and in church one
works to perfect their individual constitutions so that they might be received positively in
society at large. This is the way we develop our personal narratives, something
Heffington celebrates and does not intend to stifle. For Heffington, there is simply no
ideal dancer. The emphasis is not on technique, but rather, like Brown’s Roof Piece, the
transference of a dance vernacular based in individual awareness of positionality within a
group dynamic. Heffington’s dancers learn how to comprehend synchronic movement
independent of formal dance ideologies. What Heffington teaches us is bodily
knowledge: an awareness of our sensuous bodies in space. He utilizes the medium of
dance to turn bodies into joyous subjects. What is created every Sunday morning is a
community of individuals from all walks of life whose lived experiences overlap as
rhythms for two hours. No dancing body is alike, no movement expression is the same.
Yet, together they produce an empathetic social unit forged through kinesthesia. This
bond is recognized in the cheers, handclaps and endless smiles that are offered amongst
strangers before, during and at the end of every dance sequence. It would be a
theoretical stretch to claim that Heffington’s intention is to actualize a utopian public
sphere, but he is certainly dancing in the right direction.
60
71
“Ryan Heffington’s Sweaty Sundays,” The Sweat Spot, accessed January 25, 2011, http://
www.thesweatspotla.com/sweaty-sundays.html
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Asset Metadata

Creator Steinman, Megan Marissa (author)

Core Title The kinesthetic citizen: Dance and critical art practices

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 04/12/2011

Defense Date 04/12/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag contemporary art,Dance,Empathy,kinesthesia,OAI-PMH Harvest,Performance,Political science,public sphere,spectator

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Sutton, Gloria (committee chair), Decter, Joshua (committee member), O'Shea, Janet (committee member)

Creator Email meganmsteinman@mac.com,mmsteinm@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3735

Unique identifier UC1274855

Identifier etd-Steinman-4531 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-441607 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3735 (legacy record id)

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Rights Steinman, Megan Marissa

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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