Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance: Unbecoming Rhythms

By Jonas Rutgeerts

Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance develops a new framework to understand how temporality is performed in contemporary dance. It combines an in-depth analysis of the choreographic practices of Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Ivana Müller, Mette Edvardsen and Mårten Spångberg with a close study of the philosophical work of Bergson, Deleuze and Bachelard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Feb 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781789387056

Book preview

Performing Temporality in

Contemporary European Dance

Performing Temporality

in Contemporary

European Dance

Unbecoming

Rhythms

Jonas Rutgeerts

First published in the UK in 2023 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2023 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2023 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

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Cover image: Ewout Decraene

Frontispiece image: Performance of No Title at Teaterhuset Avant Garden, Trondheim (Norway) Director Mette Edvardsen. Photo by Mette Edvardsen, courtesy of the artist.

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Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Only concepts? Dance and the conceptual

Only live? Dance and the ephemeral

Shaping time from within: Rhythm and dance

Going against the flow: Rhythm in contemporary dance

Dance–philosophy: An infinite conversation

Articulation of the chapters

1. Rhythm is Life: Rhythm in German Ausdruckstanz

The ‘doctrine of energy’ and the rise of fatigue

The birth of Körperkultur: Jaques-Dalcroze's eurhythmics

Rhythm in the beginning of the twentieth century: Rudolf Bode and Rudolf Laban

Intermezzo: The evolution of the concept rhythm in Bergson's oeuvre

Ausdruckstanz and Körperkultur: Mary Wigman's ecstatic rhythms

Intermezzo: German Ausdruckstanz and the body politics during the Nazi era

Conclusion: Becoming rhythm, becoming life

2. Dancing in the Meantime: Syncopation in the Work of Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion

On the fence: Rhythm and milieu in Deleuze and Guattari's ‘Of the refrain’

Playing apart: Rhythm and syncopation

Intermezzo: Transatlantic and the resistance of roots

Following the rhythm: The relation between rhythms and patterns

Conclusion: Syncopation's trouble

3. Still Dance: Hesitation in Ivana Müller's While We Were Holding It Together

Intermezzo: Dance and movement, a modernist love affair

Still-act: The tableau vivant

Time as hesitation: Bergson and the suspension of time

Intermezzo: The still, or the cinematographic experience of modern times

The space of elsewhere: Bachelard's poetic imagination

Intermezzo: Imagination, intuition and the task of the artist

Conclusion: What about tomorrow

4. Stumbling Through Time: Repetition in the Work of Mette Edvardsen

The logic of the phrase: Repetition in Accumulation and Dance

Stumbling through language: Repetition in Black and No Title

Running out of time: Performing the eternal return

Intermezzo: The triple murder of the eternal return, or Deleuze thinks death

Conclusion: The amnesiac witness

5. Dark Utopia, or Sleeping through Marten Spångberg's Natten

Dancing with myself

Spending the Natten together

Conclusion: Sushi or sashimi

6. Stealing Time: Rhythmic Operations in a Society of Control

Notes

References

Index

Figures

Acknowledgements

Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance: Unbecoming Rhythms could not have come into existence without the gifts of time, inquiry and dialogue from so many people, among them Stéphane Symons, Rudi Laermans, Anneleen Masschelein and my parents.

The greatest gift of all is that of trust, tenderness and companionship. I want to send my love to Lena, without whom I could not have done this, and to my newest love Omar. Words cannot begin to describe how important you both are to me.

Introduction

Imagine, it is 2006 and you are sitting in the auditorium of a theatre. The booklet on your lap states ‘While We are Holding it Together – Ivana Müller’ in big bold letters. You lean back and relax, while the auditorium lights go out. On stage, the lights fade in, slowly revealing five performers standing in a particular position. They are looking at you, their eyes scanning the room, but otherwise they are not moving. After a minute of stillness, the stage lights fade out again. Meanwhile, you have migrated to the edge of your seat, somewhat surprised and puzzled. Is this a dance piece? But, no worries, the stage lights go back on. Surely, the performance will start now. As the lights come up, however, nothing has changed. The performers are still standing in the same position. Slowly you let go of the expectation of movement. The performers will stay frozen. There will be no choreographic movement, or, at least, not in the way you expect it.

The choreographic works discussed in this book all conjure up a similar experience of surprise, unsettling our preconceived ideas about dance and choreography. In Jonathan Burrows's and Matteo Fargion's Both Sitting Duet (2007), we encounter two unathletic middle-aged men who are sitting on chairs throughout the performance, only making simple gestures with their hands and arms. In Mette Edvardsen's diptych Black (2011) and No Title (2014), a woman calmly walks up and down the stage while depicting imagined objects with her hands, repeating the name of each object eight times, or moves about carefully and hesitantly with her eyes closed while enumerating a seemingly endless list of sentences that all start with ‘no’ or end with ‘gone’. In Mårten Spångberg's seven-hour-long performance Natten (2016), a group of dancers hang around on stage, sometimes dancing, but most often doing nothing more than sitting or lying down, staring at the audience, talking to each other or checking their phones. In all these pieces, there are no complex gestures skillfully executed, no athletic bodies seemingly capable of defying gravity, and, most of all, no continuous flow fusing different actions into an overarching movement. Instead, we are confronted with performers enacting unremarkable activities, often in a clumsy way, and unbecoming choreographic structures marked by discontinuity and interruption rather than grace, flow and cohesion.

In their resistance against the ‘typical’ characteristics of dance, the pieces of Burrows and Fargion, Müller, Edvardsen and Spångberg do not stand alone. Rather, they are part of a wider trend that emerged in the 1990s within European contemporary dance and includes choreographers like Xavier Le Roy, Jérôme Bel, Eszter Salamon, Boris Charmatz, Mette Ingvartsen, duefert&plischke, Didi Dorvillier, Lilia Mestre, Philippe Quesne, Juan Dominguez and Vera Mantero. What binds these choreographers is not similar aesthetics or common thematics, as much as a shared resistance against the modernist approach to dance. Since the rise of modern dance in the beginning of the twentieth century, the project of dance has been driven by a quest for ‘pure dance’. Here, dance is framed as ongoing bodily movement and stripped from anything not connected to this movement.¹ The choreographic experiments that emerged in the 1990s resist this reduction of dance to its supposedly essential characteristics. Shifting the focus from dance to choreography, which they define generically as the organization of (non)human bodies in space and time, they expand the scope of the choreographic, adding on elements that are not considered essential for dance, like text of film. At the same time, they actively seek to subvert dance's so-called primary features. As Rudi Laermans argues, the choreographic work of the 1990s ‘radically de-essentializes dance by deliberately subtracting elements that are usually regarded as being constitutive for dance’ (2015: 50). One of the most obvious (and radical) forms of subtraction is the erasure of ‘the still prevalent idea of dance-as-bodily-movement’ (Laermans 2015: 50).² Performance scholar André Lepecki was one of the first to describe this trend. In Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (2006), he observes how ‘in the past decade some contemporary North American and European choreography has indeed engaged in dismantling a certain notion of dance – the notion that ontologically associates dance with flow and continuum of movement’ (1–2, emphasis added).

In this book, I will analyze the temporality that is produced by the choreographic experiments of the 1990s. With the questioning of dance's identity ‘as a being-in-flow’ (Lepecki 2006: 1), choreographers are not only rethinking their relation to movement but also their connection to time. Through the development of flowing movements, dance generates continuity between past, present and future. Moments melt into each other seamlessly, creating a sense of a spontaneous renewal where the present automatically replaces the past, only to be replaced by the future. By questioning the flow of movement, the new forms of choreography also question this temporal flow, destabilizing the continuity of past, present and future. The temporality developed in and through these performances unsettles the idea of time as a process of continuous becoming, creating a temporal framework in which the present no longer appears as a continuation of what has happened, or an anticipation of what is to come, but a site of temporal experimentation that breaks with the past and cracks open the future. Within dance studies, this ‘unbecoming’ temporal quality has been subject to very little theoretical or historical reflection.³ The reason for this relative neglect seems to be two-fold. First, the framing of these works as ‘conceptual dance’ has led to an overemphasis on the structural aspects, underscoring them at the expense of their experiential and durational qualities. The label ‘conceptual dance’ reduces choreographic practices to a critical statement, a non-dance merely gesturing towards the actual art form in order to deconstruct it. Second, this neglect can be connected to dance's alignment with ephemerality. This connection, which has gained currency within dance and performance studies since the 1960s, highlights the instantaneous nature of dance. Like other performing arts, dance is conceptualized as a form that only takes place in the now and, as such, is not capable of constructing a specific temporal duration. In the next two parts, we will elaborate on both elements.

Only concepts? Dance and the conceptual

The label ‘conceptual dance’ emerged in the late 1990s to denote a large and multifaceted group of artists experimenting with dance's mediality and choreography as a tool to organize this mediality. By defining these artists as conceptual, the label draws a link between the evolutions in dance of the 1990s and the rise of conceptualism in the visual arts in the late 1960s. Building on the work of the earlier avant-garde artists, most notably Marcel Duchamp, conceptualists like Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth and Bruce Nauman advanced forms of art that forcefully resisted the traditional canon.⁴ Instead of focusing on aesthetically interesting objects, they concentrated on concepts, trading the figure of the virtuosic artist for the artist as a researcher or even trickster.⁵ At the same time, they explicitly framed art as a self-reflexive medium, a practice that critically examines and addresses its foundational concepts as well as the context in which it takes place. According to the conceptualists, artworks should not only be presented in museums or galleries but they should also actively reflect on the discursive and institutional frameworks constituted by these spaces.

Despite conceptualism's relatively short lifespan (roughly 1965–75), it had a tremendous impact on the artworld. This influence was less connected to specific works than to the way it redefined art in general. As Laermans argues, conceptual art mainly lived on ‘in the generic sense’ as ‘the double-sided artistic practice to start from researched ideas and to take self-reflexivity into account’ (2015: 201, original emphasis). It is also in this more generic sense that we should understand the alignment of choreographies that emerged in the 1990s with conceptual art. Like the conceptualists, the choreographers listed above developed performances around concepts or ideas, and critically examined the constitutive characteristics of their medium. In her book Choreographing Problems, Bojana Cvejić describes this tendency as follows: ‘choreographies unfold a practice of thought rooted in the problematization of specific concerns of contemporary dance’ (2015: 1). Discussing the work of six choreographers catalogued under conceptual dance (Le Roy, Burrows, Jan Ritsema, Charmatz, Ingvartsen and Salamon), Cvejić convincingly advocates that the ‘forte’ of these choreographers resides not in their revolutionary style, but the fact they are ‘introducing a method of creation by way of problem-posing’ (2015: 2).⁶ Rather than aesthetic concerns, their working processes are fuelled by specific problems related to the medium of dance. In the duets of Burrows and Fargion, for example, the performers probe the traditional relation between dance and music and between the performance and the score. Müller's While We Were Holding It Together questions the relation between dance and movement, as she creates a piece in the form of a still image, or tableau vivant. Edvardsen's choreographies with words explore the traditional antagonism between dance and language. In Natten, finally, Spångberg explores the interaction between the public and the dancers that lies at the heart of every dance performance.

Despite the clear points of convergence between conceptual art in the generic sense and the choreographies that emerged in the 1990s, the term ‘conceptual dance’ is controversial. It has been rejected by choreographers categorized under this label and dance theorists who study them. The label, these choreographers and theorists argue, does not adequately capture the specificity of the works it is applied to. Although the choreographers mentioned above would all agree with the fundamental attitude towards art proposed by the conceptualists, they are not the only ones to do so. As Xavier Le Roy, one of the forerunners of this new form of choreography, states: ‘I don't know of one choreographer who works in dance without using a concept’ (2004: 10). Ever since the dancers from the Judson Dance Theater developed their dance experiments in the 1960s, it has become common for choreographers to adopt idea-oriented approaches and critically examine their medium, posing the question ‘What can be considered dance?’.⁷ While their oeuvre is markedly different from choreographers catalogued as conceptual, artists like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker or Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, for example, also develop their works via concepts and ideas.⁸

The fact that ‘conceptual dance’ is not sufficiently specific is not the only or even the main reason for the resistance against the label. It has also been rebuked for its tendency to dismiss the performative and experiential qualities of the works it includes. As Ramsay Burt mentions, contemporary choreographers are correct to resist the term as it ‘suggests something that is primarily located in the mind’ (2009: 205). Cvejić similarly argues that the term is misplaced because it fails to acknowledge the creative potential of the choreographies it assembles. According to her, the label is mainly adopted by critics of these new forms of choreography, who use it to reduce the actual choreography to an idea, thereby casting it aside as non-dance, an intellectual practice devoid of the performative and emotional qualities inherent in ‘real’ dance (2005: 55). From the start, critics have used the term to imply that this work either ‘suffocates from the effect of its self-questioning’ (Birringer 2005: 15) or has reached ‘such a high grade of auto-reflexivity that it finally has become unattractive to a wider audience’ because it ‘trades all emotions and pleasure for dry intellectualism’ (T'jonck 2005: 49).⁹ Starting from the observation that these choreographies do not produce the experience one traditionally associates with dance – the ‘sense we have of feeling alive in our bodies’ (Birringer 2005: 15) – these critics conclude that there is no performative experience at all. Conceptual dance is thus not ‘real’ dance. It merely advances a ‘clever cynicism’ that parasitizes dance while deconstructing its main features (Birringer 2005: 15). In short, it is a dance that ‘would be more suitably developed in an academic treatise than in a scenic adaptation’ (T'jonck 2005: 49).

This approach fails to acknowledge the experiential qualities that are present in every work of art. Even a conceptual artwork cannot be reduced to its ideas. Anybody who has ever encountered one of Lewitt's murals, or an installative work of Kosuth, knows that aesthetics play an important role in conceptual art. The ideas always need to be translated into specific textures and compositions, and these material elements define to a large extent how the work is experienced. Similarly, conceptual dance cannot be reduced to ideas. The simplest concept can be the start of an interesting and complex performance. Vice versa, the most brilliant idea can turn into a dull performance if the choreographer fails to transform it into performative ‘material’ that keeps the audience engaged for the duration of the piece. In other words, even if a choreography is idea-centred, its actual performance cannot be reduced to this idea. As Laermans argues, ‘dance ideas’ are never presented as such, but ‘distributed over countless events and immanent to a great variety of percepts and affects’ (2015: 220).¹⁰ To make the ideas ‘work’, to make them perform, the choreographers have to find ways to convert these ideas into a durational event. They have to translate the concept into a consistent series of perceptual and affective states and find dramaturgical strategies to combine these states into a composition that unfolds in and through time.

Choreographers thus experience the term ‘conceptual dance’ as too broad, because it applies to almost all contemporary choreographies, and too limiting, because it is used by critics to dismiss the experiential and durational qualities of the dance. Understood in its most generic sense, all choreographers can be defined as conceptual, because they all deal with concepts: keeping notes, generating interpretations and developing ideas. In its reductive sense, on the contrary, conceptual dance can be understood as something that never truly existed. Dance is never merely an idea, but also the development of that idea into an aesthetic artefact. Specific for dance is that choreographers have to find ways to unfold the idea in time. As Cvejić argues, ‘none of the problems [around which the pieces are centred] could be divested of the duration which their operation constitutes’ (2015: 195).

Only live? Dance and the ephemeral

Traditionally, dance has always had an intimate relationship with time. As with any other time-based medium, the performance of choreography can only take place in and through time. This is not the whole story however. Dance not only unfolds in time but it also folds the time in which it unfolds itself. It entails the organization of time, the development of a time proper to the piece. Every piece needs to transform consecutive gestures into a temporal unity shared by audience and performer. As Paul Valéry argues in Philosophie de la danse: ‘dance after all is merely a form of time, the creation of a kind of time, or of a very distinct and singular species of time’ (2011: 87). In a similar fashion, Laermans defines dance as ‘the art of the orderly temporalizing of time within time, or marking time with time’ (2015: 122, original emphasis). In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the conceptualization of dance's durational character – its capacity/need to create a shared time – gave way to its framing as ephemeral. Since the 1960s, dance has been increasingly characterized in terms of absolute presence, an art form that can only take place in the unmediated confrontation between the audience and the work. As a consequence of this alignment with the ephemeral, dance has no existence outside of the now, no life outside of the live. It is not only marked by pure presence but also by absence and disappearance. Dance is intractably bound to the present; its existence is always momentary, the movements disappearing with the time in which they emerged. In the words of dance theorist and critic Marcia B. Siegel: ‘dance always exists at a perpetual vanishing point […] It is an event that disappears in the very act of materializing’ (1968: 1).¹¹

In Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011), performance theorist Rebecca Schneider argues that the ‘history of ephemerality’ starts with theatre director and performance theorist Richard Schechner (2011: 94–96). In his work, Schechner describes theatre as an ‘event characterized by ephemerality and immediacy’ (1974: 118). As one of the founders of New York University's Performance Studies department, Schechner influenced both colleagues and successors, including Siegel (who joined the faculty in the 1980s), Herbert Blau, Barbara Kischenblatt-Gimblett and Peggy Phelan. From this list, Phelan is probably the theorist most associated with the idea of ephemerality. In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1996), she tries to establish an ‘ontology of performance’ through a division between the performance and the documentation of that performance. Whereas a document is a record, the essence of performance resides in the fact that it can only exist in the ‘maniacally charged present’ (Phelan 1996: 148). ‘Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance’ (Phelan 1996: 146). As a consequence, performance is marked by transience and irretrievable loss. It ‘only becomes itself through disappearance’ (Phelan 1996: 146). However, this ephemeral character should not be understood as a problem, but as that which distinguishes performance from other art disciplines. Unlike other art forms, performances can withdraw from capitalist production's operational logic, which is based on ‘the balanced circulations of finance’ (Phelan 1996: 148). In performance, there are no ‘left-overs’, nothing to sell, circulate or speculate on.

Due in part to the work of Phelan, ephemerality became performance theory's rallying cry. By the end of the twentieth century, the understanding of performance as something that only takes place in the now, as an art form where appearance and disappearance are part of the same movement, was commonplace.¹² Although the framing of performance as ephemeral marks an important step in understanding its specificity, showing that certain elements cannot be captured outside the interaction between performer and audience, it fails to account for the durational complexity of performance's time. As Schneider argues, the live moment of performance cannot be reduced to ‘a matter of temporal immediacy, happening only in an uncomplicated now, a transitory present, an immediate moment’ (2011: 92). It does not adhere to the linearity of real time, where different ‘maniacally charged presents’ replace each other, but to the flexibility of living time, a murky terrain in which the past works through and charges the present. Similarly, Adrian Heathfield and Lepecki criticize Phelan's conceptualization of performance as ephemeral, and the accompanying alignment of the present with the instantaneous now. In Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (2009), Heathfield trades the dominant model of performance as an ephemeral art form ‘allied with disappearance’ for an approach that focusses on the ‘vital lasting’ of time: the fact the past works through the present and prepares the future (2009: 13). In the last chapter of Exhausting Dance, Lepecki defines Phelan's conceptualization of time as ‘melancholic’, because it frames dance in terms of loss and mourning (2006: 124), rendering the art form mute. Being intrinsically linked with the instantaneous now, dance not only loses its past but also its future and the potential to act upon that future. Much like Schneider's idea of living time, Lepecki stresses the fact that the past always works through the present. The performance is never taking place in the pure present or at a perpetual vanishing point, because there are always elements from the past that work through the present. As such, ‘theatre can never be live. Or, never only live’ (Schneider 2011: 92).

Shaping time from within: Rhythm and dance

There are two reasons why the temporal qualities of choreographies emerging in the 1990s have been side-lined: the labelling of these pieces as ‘conceptual’ (which has led to a reading where dance is reduced to an a-temporal structure), and dance's alignment with ephemerality (which has resulted in an overemphasis on the ‘real time’ of dance at the expense of its ‘lived time’). This research aims to redress this negligence by stressing the temporal qualities of contemporary choreographies. In doing so, however, the book does not want to inscribe itself in the growing corpus of works on the relation between dance and history (Lepecki 2010; Franko 2018). Fuelled by the rise of memory studies as a disciplinary field and the growing interest in re-enactments in the fields of dance and performance, researchers increasingly question how dance ‘survives’ over time (Pouillaude 2017: xiv); how it relates to, persists in and/or transforms through history. Resisting the framing of dance as ephemeral, these researchers often focus on dance's many afterlives, pointing to elements that ‘remain’ after the performance has taken place (Schneider 2011). Although this book also resists the reduction of dance and performance to the ‘maniacally charged present’, it is not my intention to frame