Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement

Abstract

Andre Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York and London: Routledge, 2006) This is a challenging book both for the rigour and breadth of its erudition and for the nature of its broader argument concerning the politics of the (ontological) 'bind between dance and movement'. The book comprises five chapters - not including an introduction and conclusion - in which Lepecki discusses in detail a number of performance works which deploy choreographic 'strategies where dance's relation to movement is being exhausted' (1). The works, some very recent, others dating from the 1960s, are by European and American artists Bruce Naumann, Juan Dominguez, Xavier Le Roy, Jerome Bel, Trisha Brown, La Ribot, William Pope.L and Vera Mantero. In his introduction, Lepecki argues that modernity and modern subjectivisation have been invested in the kinetic and that dance supports this investment. A dance's refusal of kinetics acts as a productive lever, in the sense that it can reveal what is at stake in the requirement that 'the modem body' display itself in/as kinetic spectacle or as 'being-toward-movement' (43). Dance, Lepecki argues, entered modernity as 'choreography', that is, through an 'alloying' of dancing and writing. The concept of choKo-graphy, which dates from Thoinot Arbeau's 1589 dance manual Orchesographie, is coincident with modernity; and it is through choreography, and in modernity, that subjects become 'kinetically-disciplined'. Thus, to question dance's being bound to movement is at the same time to question the stabilising of modern subjectivity around an injunction that the body should obey or perform choreographic commands: in Althusserian terms, it is to question the subject's choreographic 'interpellation'. Lepecki argues that each of the artists discussed tests, complicates and politicises the grounds of choreography as they foreground questions of subjectivisation, representation, memory, presence and/or race and colonialism. It might be argued that the project of dance modernism, the defining of an autonomous art in which dancers develop and investigate 'movement' in its sensuouskinaesthetic-forceful dimensions in an anti-representational aesthetics, has remained an incomplete project. Lepecki, however, argues eruditely and forcefully that it is time to recognise a body of work which has moved beyond this modernist preoccupation with 'movement itself in order to reconnect with arts of representation, but doing so now in politically and theoretically informed ways. Thus he describes Trisha Brown's //'5 a Draw/Live Feed (2003) as a work/event in which 'no act (dancing, drawing) or artistic genre (dancing/drawing) is privileged in relation to the other. Instead there is a dizzying simultaneity of genres and acts' (74). The work 'probes and complicates how it comes into presence, and where it establishes its ground of being' (5). At the same time, while the works discussed, such as visual artist Bruce Naumann's Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Round the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68), might be 'choreographic', they are not necessarily 'dance'. It is part of Lepecki's argument that dance studies must consider perspectives and works that challenge narrowly defined or defended borders. Lepecki also explicitly frames his analyses of the performances discussed here as a partnership between dance, dance studies and philosophy. For example, his discussion and deployment of the concept of the 'melancholic' in dance - a melancholic that can be heard in the common plaint that dance only exists in the instant of 'now' and thus is constitutively 'lost' or 'vanishing' - proceeds from Freud and from Bergson and Deleuze where, for the two latter, 'the present is no longer equivalent to the now' but spreads out in 'activity, affects and effects, outside the moment of the now' (129). Lepecki thus takes issue both with presumptions about dance's identity as movement and its supposed ephemerality. …