[notes from a body in motion]
There have been many attempts to define contemporaneity when it comes to artistic practices. Speaking within the context of the western world, contemporary dance comes with a clear history. More specifically, the birth of what we call contemporary dance is located in the late 1960’s, when a wave of dance practitioners began to question the then established notions of what dance is and what kind of body can be considered a dancer’s body. Yvonne Reiner’s No Manifesto (first published in 1965 in the Tulane Drama Review ), has come to represent that fundamental shift in the prevailing understanding of dance: a rejection/questioning of spectacular, virtuosic, narrative, and expressive choreographic approaches, and a cultivation of the understanding that everything can be seen as dance. Expanding even further on these notions, choreographers such as Marten Spangberg, Jerome Bell and Jonathan Burrows took contemporary dance into the Post-Dance era. What is Dance after Dance? For a moment there, contemporary dance had come to mean not dancing. But, beyond the socio-political importance of challenging predisposed ideas of what a dance should be and who is allowed to do it, and dismantling the patriarchal, imperialist and colonial characteristics of what was until then considered the foundation of all dance (Ballet), dancers desire to dance. Bodies, desire to move and to do so in poetry. So we have come full circle to techniques such as Gaga that require and cultivate a lot of virtuosity and even draw movement vocabulary from ballet. Does this mean that what comes after dance is more dance?
Having presented a chronological review of contemporary dance history and the various names within it, I would like to entertain the idea that contemporary dance is far from being a style, for or philosophy. What if we look at contemporary dance as exactly what it says it is: the dance of the time. Or, more like, dancing with the time. Or, maybe, dancing with the bodies of the time.
In her essay “always more than one”, philosopher and movement practitioner Erin Manning calls “body” a “misnomer” as, in her words, “nothing so stable and so sure of itself can ever survive the complexity of worlding” (Manning 2013: 14). In other words, the abundant complexity of the world itself that is continually being revealed to our perception is proof that we too (as part of the world) cannot live up to to a self-image of separation and individualism but rather are fundamentally entangled. So much so, Manning speculates, that there simply cannot really be such thing of separation as a “body”. Movement doesn’t have a body, it bodies. (Manning 2013: 14) To perceive the body as a verb rather than a noun offers a fundamental shift of the perception of one’s self. We become leaky and permeable. The separation between the “me” and “the world” simply ceases to exist. Therefore there is nothing more contemporary than the bodies of a time. Bodies being a derivative of the verb “to body”.
I body
You body
They body
We body
or, rather
I am bodied
You are bodied
They are bodied
We are bodied
Mannings’s offering invites for a soft flip to our perception of self. What if everything is movement; what if a body, any-body is a collection of moment of meetings of matter; all matter. What changes when we stop thinking of the world through separate bodies but rather see it as an incredibly complex dance of intra-actions? And what does this mean for dance and, more specifically, contemporary dance?
If everything is movement, if body is a verb, what then does it mean to dance?
“When movement dances in the dancing, what we experience is a lived extraction from the plane of immanence that is total movement, leaving us in the vibration of what is beyond the predetermined body, in the realm of movement-thinking.” (Manning 2013: 17). In other words, to dance is to align our perception with what here is called “total movement”, so that we are able to access and distil a quality, to think through movement as opposed to thinking from outside of it and, finally, to write poetry.
Manning talks about “movement-moving”, a movement not of a body, cutting across, always active (even though not always percievable), movement as a state of being of the everything, trans-parent, trans-ient, tarns-disciplinary, trans-mattering, trans-temporal, trans-spacial, trans-everything.
What is most confusing regarding this notion of movement-moving and, in extension, movement dancing, is my own experience of the dance. In Manning’s descriptions, there is no “I” that is dancing, no-body, the dance dancing, movement-moving, dance-moving, movement-dncing. Yet, I am there in the middle of it, experiencing, relating, emoting, chanelling, decision-making, moving, dancing.
Can it be then a momentary meeting? My witnessing of a bodying?
People have been dancing for millennia; we danced for rain, we danced for Gods and Demens, we danced to free ourselves from sin, to celebrate, to seduce, to concur. In an era self-identifying as the Anthropocene, an amalgamation of hyperobjects such as climate change and geopolitics, and an overwhelming sense of disconnection, what do we dance for? Or, more precisely, what does a contemporary way of dancing have to offer?
— big logical jump?—
My proposal is that we dance for access to the awareness of interconnectedness and for holding space for the grief that so desperately needs acknowledging, holding and ultimately, loving. To better understand what such a process could be and what would be needed of us in order to go through it, I am facilitating a series of meetings, moving sessions with contemporary bodies. In these meetings, I am looking for a process/practice that supports these bodies in their being bodied.
How does one properly analyse the experience of moving? Especially when the moving in question is improvised, fluid, fundamentally indecisive and deeply personal. What is actually the difference between the contemporary dance I am attempting to describe and simply “noodling around aimlessly”? Can there/should there be a method to the madness?
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