Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo 0367698889, 9780367698881

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“Across his novels, essays, and place‑based writings, Georges Perec radically expanded our understanding of how we inhabit and interact with everyday spaces. His work foregrounds questions of embodiment, in both historical and relational terms, and proposes experimental forms of engagement with the world in which we dwell. Perec’s influence is increasingly evident across multiple disciplines and fields of creative practice. In this welcome explora‑ tion of the intersections of Perec’s writing with dance, Leslie Satin urges us to consider his oeuvre in new ways while exploring its implications for embod‑ ied performance more broadly.” Charles Forsdick, Drapers Professor of French, University of Cambridge, UK “Leslie Satin, dancer and dance scholar, deftly claims Georges Perec for the dance world. She invites him into her own family history as she imagines her‑ self ‘dancing with Perec.’ Her recollections of Perec’s significant presence in her own path through a dancing life ranges from aspirational flights of fancy to embodied experiences with Perec’s ideas writ large, all through the lens of postmodern dance. Satin’s scholarship and analysis of Perec is deeply rooted in an interdisciplinary framework, while her prose metaphorically dances across time and the pages of this timely text.” Douglas Rosenberg, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Art, University of Wisconsin‑Madison “Dancing With Georges Perec is an examination of the work of an experi‑ mental French writer and his choreographic contemporaries in New York City. Leslie Satin has created an imaginative and personal work that brings them together, though neither culture had probably ever heard of the other. A fascinating enterprise.” Yvonne Rainer, co‑founder of the Judson Dance Theater; author of Work: 1961–1973; co‑editor of Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019

Georges Perec. Source: Photo by Louis Monier. Used by permission from Getty Images.

Dancing with Georges Perec

This book explores the relationship of the life and work of the remarkable Parisian‑Jewish writer Georges Perec (1936–1983) to dance. Dancing with Georges Perec addresses art‑making parallels and their personal and sociocultural contexts, including Perec’s childhood loss of his parents in the Holocaust and its repercussions in the significance of the body, everydayness, space, and attention permeating his work. This book, emerging from author Leslie Satin’s perspective as a dancer and scholar, links Perec’s concerns with those of dance and demonstrates that Perec’s work has implications for dance and how we think about it. Moreover, it is framed as a performative autobiographical enactment of the author’s relationship to Perec, periodically linking their written, danced, and imagined lives. This exploration will be of great interest to dancers, dance scholars, and dance students interested in contemporary experimental dance and contemporary dance. Leslie Satin is a member of the Gallatin Arts Faculty at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and a choreographer and dancer. Her performance texts and scholarly writing on dance’s intersections with other fields have been published in many journals and edited collections.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This series is our home for cutting‑edge, upper‑level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant‑garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innova‑ tive studies on emerging topics. The Art of Entertainment Popular Performance in Modern British Art, 1880 to 1940 Jason Price The Routledge Companion to Performance‑Related Concepts in Non‑European Languages Erika Fischer‑Lichte, Torsten Jost, Astrid Schenka The Legacy of Stylistic Theatre in the Creation of a Modern Sinhala Drama in Sri Lanka Lakshmi D. Bulathsinghala Passion and Elegance How Flamenco and Classical Ballet Met at the Ballets Russes Barbara Marangon The Canon in Contemporary Theatre Plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Brecht in Contemporary Directors’ Theatre Lars Harald Maagerø Dancing with Georges Perec Embodying Oulipo Leslie Satin For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge‑Advances‑ in‑Theatre‑‑Performance‑Studies/book‑series/RATPS

Dancing with Georges Perec Embodying Oulipo

Leslie Satin

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Leslie Satin The right of Leslie Satin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing‑in‑Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780367698881 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367698898 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003143741 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003143741 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To my family, with love

Contents

Acknowledgments Foreword

xi xv

PAT CATTERSON

1 Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction 2 George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography

1 30

3 Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra‑Ordinary55

Entracte: The Body Catalogue

4 Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space

80 93

5 Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition

120

6 What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment

144

7 Dancing into the Twenty‑First Century with Georges Perec

172

Index

195

Acknowledgments

Soon after encountering the work of Georges Perec, I was struck by a sense of his writing as somehow connected to dance, my primary field of practice and scholarship. Figuring out what constituted that “somehow” became the long, engrossing research process which led to this book. Much of the research came in the form of conversations, interviews, discussions, and other interac‑ tions, intentional and incidental, with people in the overlapping communities of my life. I would like to thank them here. Thank you, first, to the literary scholars whose work contributed so much to my own. I am especially grateful to David Bellos and Warren F. Motte, both of whom have invested so much time and thought in contemplating and investigating the work of Georges Perec and Oulipo, and who agreed to meet with me. Our interviews were extremely useful; both interlocutors were generous and supportive. I am also indebted, of course, to their published research and that of others. Thank you to the dancers whose ideas, observations, and descriptions have been so valuable. I interviewed some of them and had many, many less formal conversations with those same people and with others, some of whom are longtime friends, some of whom read and responded to chapters in process, all of whom have contributed invaluably to develop‑ ing my ideas. Recent interviewees Richard Colton, Ishmael Houston‑Jones, Barbara Mahler, Yvonne Rainer, and Vicky Shick were very generous with their time way beyond our “official” conversations. Other dancers whose nu‑ merous conversations and/or earlier interviews have been productive in my thinking about dance include David Botana, Pat Catterson, Janet Charleston, Douglas Dunn, Elise Gent, Jennifer Goggans, the late David Gordon and Valda Setterfield, Deborah Hay, Ted Johnson, Susan Klein, Meredith Monk, Jeremy Nelson, Wendy Perron, Daniel Squire, and Carol Teitelbaum. Thank you to Vicky Hunter for our scholarly and choreographic partnership and our rich friendship, which began with our love of Georges Perec! Thank you to Claudia Brazzale for many timezone‑crossing conversations about space, scores, and dance. In memory: Thank you forever to Marjorie Gamso, Sally Gross, Aileen Passloff, David Vaughan, and James Waring.

xii  Acknowledgments Thank you to friends and colleagues in other fields, especially visual arts, theater, and music, whose conversations and collaborations over the years have been enriching, and whose support has been unwavering. These include Connie Beckley, Marty Donach, Robert Flynt, Nicholas Gamso, Andrew Gurian, Béatrice Matriona Johnson, Jeff McMahon, Nicole Plett, Karen Robbins, and Gabriela Vainsencher. Mady Schutzman, special thanks for your support, thoughtful readings, and reassurances about the developing process. Thank you to Jerri Hurlbutt for your research assistance and your eagle eye. Thank you to Anita Malnig for careful reading of the chapters. Thank you to June Abbott, who has enthusiastically attended multiple Perec conferences across the UK with me and has avidly read and responded to every chapter. Thank you to Ogden Goelet, who has regularly supplied me with ever‑better French dictionaries and off‑topic French literature. Thank you to my French class, surtout Béatrice Puja (professeur extraordinaire), Mary Lynn Bergman‑Rallis, and Deborah Cooper. Thank you to the organizers and participants of conferences which intro‑ duced me to scholars offering new perspectives on my interests and afforded me the opportunity to offer presentations based on research‑in‑process which would develop into essays, chapters, and this book. These conferences in‑ cluded Species of Spaces: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Georges Perec, UK, 2014; Performance, Place, Possibility: Performance in Contemporary Urban Contexts, UK, 2014; Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies, UK, 2015; Georges Perec’s Geographies/ Perecquian Geographies, UK, 2016; Staking a Claim for Dance Studies, UK, 2017; Con‑ tra: Dance and Conflict, Dance Studies Association, Malta, 2018; and sev‑ eral symposia at the University of Chichester, UK. Conferences focusing on Jewishness and the arts include Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World, US, 2018, and Conney Conferences on Jewish Arts, US, 2019 and 2022. Those I have met and learned from at these are too numerous to name, but special thanks to Heike Salzer, the Endotics (see Chapter 3), Gustavo Fijalko, the late Lauren Berlant, Douglas Rosenberg and the heterogeneous gathering of Jewish artists his Conney Conferences attract, and the unusually active and supportive Dancing Jewish listserve. I am very grateful to New York University’s Gallatin School of Individu‑ alized Study for its support and for the relationships with friends and col‑ leagues, especially the members of the Arts Faculty and others who have expressed interest in this project. Very special thanks to Julie Malnig, who has been so supportive, intellectually and personally, throughout the book’s development, for many probing conversations about concert and social dance history, and for her detailed responses to my writing. Thank you to literary scholar Eugene Vydrin for reading several chapters and respond‑ ing with both extreme specificity and inimitable exuberance. Thank you to Michael Dinwiddie, Lise Friedman, Stacy Pies, and the late Rahul Hamid for their enthusiasm and interest in the project. Thank you to former Dean

Acknowledgments xiii Susanne Wofford, who was consistently supportive of this work. Thank you to Dean Victoria Rosner, who has also expressed interest in the book, and to Associate Dean Alejandro Velasco, who has acknowledged the project’s value. Many thanks to Gallatin for financial support during this period of work, including multiple Jewish Studies grants, Professional Development Fund grants, and a Gallatin Enhanced Faculty Research Fund grant. Thank you to all my students who have read Perec’s essays and found pleasure in his writing and his ideas about space, cities, and seeing. These stu‑ dents, in interdisciplinary courses linking studio work in experimental chore‑ ography to scholarship in dance and other disciplines, laughed and wrote and argued, then made terrific score‑based performances with bodies, objects, space, and language. Thank you to Movement Research, especially Executive Director Barbara Bryan, Programs and Event Associate Yuexing (Star) Sun, and Media and Communications Manager Marielys Burgos Meléndez, for their assistance with my research. Thank you to MR for keeping the contemporary dance community alive during the stages of the pandemic. In the same category: Thank you to Danspace Project for its ongoing support of the dance com‑ munity and its connections to scholarly investigations, especially in the form of thematic Platforms. Many thanks to the Merce Cunningham Trust for keeping classes going, online and eventually in person, throughout the pandemic. Special thanks to Jennifer Goggans, Program Coordinator of the Cunningham Trust, for her central role in producing these classes and for her active interest in my work. Thank you to everyone who taught Cunningham classes during this period, especially Janet Charleston for her Saturday Zooms. Special thanks, of course, to Routledge Theatre and Performance Editor Laura Hussey for her enthusiasm and support for the project from the start. Thank you to Senior Editorial Assistant Swati Hindwan for guiding me through the process. Thank you, too, to Daniel Gundlach for thoughtful indexing of the material.

* Thank you, of course, to my family. I am grateful to my mother, Phyllis Satin, to my late father, Jerry Satin, and to my sisters Bascha and Sally for their continuing love and interest in my work. I thank above all my husband, Dean Rainey, and our next generation, Simone, Lucas, and Leila. They have been living with this project for a long time and as far as I can tell remain enthused about it; this means more than I can say. Dean’s support, in particular, has been rock‑solid and consistent; he has read and discussed the chapters, saved the day on numerous occasions of computer misfire, and in all ways, prac‑ tical and psychological, supported the development of this project. I can’t imagine having completed this work without him.

Foreword Pat Catterson*

Artists on different continents, in the same era, but who never met, were yet similarly compelled to teach and entreat us to see differently, be it through words or performance. They celebrated the ordinary, the everyday, the un‑ coded, the inconsequential: their value was made evident by the rigor of their artistic placement via structures of careful selection, combining, and repeti‑ tion. The resulting works were simultaneously too much, just enough, per‑ sonal, impersonal, serious, playful, expressive and not, difficult and familiar. In her enlightening book Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo, Leslie Satin exhaustively analyzes and compares these two artistic movements from the tumultuous 1960s: Judson Dance Theater and early postmodern dance and the writing of Georges Perec and his colleagues. One I knew well, the other not at all. I came to New York City to begin my dancing and choreographic career in 1968, at the very end of the Judson experiments, the dance scene still seething from its disruptions. It was not yet iconic, not yet included in syllabi across disciplines in the university. I wanted to make my own stamp as a choreogra‑ pher, but with that influence among many others; 116 dances later I continue to try. Leslie came to the New York dance scene several years later than I did but, through Bob Dunn and Sally Gross, as well as James Waring, who had planted the seeds in her pre‑NYC years, she was introduced to Judson’s intel‑ lectual and artistic projects and methods. Years later, she became fascinated and charmed by Perec’s writing, seeking out opportunities to share experi‑ ences and ideas with others equally enchanted by his work. Both fed her own artistic investigations. Leslie and I have been dance colleagues for decades, taking the same classes, attending shows, seeing and appreciating one another’s work, talking endlessly about dance, and comparing notes on the enterprise of teaching. We also share an admiration for Yvonne Rainer, a pivotal figure in her book. I first performed with Yvonne Rainer, one of the seminal members of Judson Dance Theater, in 1969 and since 1999 have served as her dancer, choreo‑ graphic/rehearsal assistant, and principal transmitter and caretaker of her early dances. As Leslie mentions in her book, I taught her Yvonne Rainer’s

xvi  Pat Catterson Trio A in a workshop for Movement Research and smidgens of it in guest stints in her classes at New York University. As this book attests, the work of the 1960s across art forms is still being parsed and discussed and still inspires many. It is evident that these artists continue to impact Leslie Satin’s own choreography and teaching and think‑ ing about art and its meaning‑making. In fact, it is through her work and this book that these two movements meet and “dance” together. As she says in one of her chapters, “I came to this party late and have never left.” Whether you’re familiar with one or the other or neither of these artists or episodes in art history, you will be fascinated by the results of Satin’s research and analysis, a further contribution to the accounting of this period, one that is both scholarly and personal. Note * Pat Catterson is a New York‑ and Boston‑based choreographer, educator, and writer who has choreographed 116 works. She first performed with Yvonne Rainer in 1969 and continues to this day as her assistant and transmitter of her early works.

1 Dancing with Georges Perec An Introduction

Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo is an interdisciplinary join‑ ing of legacies, art forms, perspectives, histories, and voices.1 I look here at the work of Georges Perec—the literary wizard whose genre‑crossing writ‑ ing brought together extremes of compositional agility, style, and tone with far‑ranging investigations of personal, political, and cultural concerns—and reconsider it in light of other arts: of its own time, of now, of a few points between. Specifically, I explore the connections of Perec’s work to dance, es‑ pecially experimental Western concert dance, from my viewpoint as a dance practitioner and scholar, and as an act of autobiographical imagination. On March 28, 2014, I attended what was not only my first conference exploring the work of Georges Perec, but nearly everyone’s first, an interna‑ tional gathering charged with excitement and anticipation.2 Called “Species of Spaces: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Georges Perec,” it was sponsored by the Modern Humanities Research Association and held at the Institute of Design, Culture and the Arts at Teesside University, in a post‑industrial town in northeast England’s County Durham. There is much to say about this conference, and I will return to it later in this book. For now, though, I want simply to note the exhilaration of spending three days surrounded by fellow Perec enthusiasts from across the globe, all of whom had been struck by the work of this twentieth‑century experimental writer and by its connection to their art practices, their academic disciplines, and their ideas about space and language and literature and loss, and all of whom were delighted to encounter each other. At that time, I had begun what I did not yet know would become the project which grew into this book, Dancing with Georges Perec: Embody‑ ing Oulipo. The project really started in 2012, when I read Perec’s work for the first time—Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, and then Life A User’s Manual—and became utterly enamored of it. Species of Spaces (SOS from here on)3  lured me into its conception of a life seen in terms of space and spaces: primarily organized along a single plan or design, from the smallest spaces of Perec’s life (the page) to the largest (the world, and space itself); the writing an array of literary forms and styles; the content a mix of visual and material detail, personal reflections, political perspectives, and a com‑ pelling sense of the person producing this life on paper. The dictionary‑size DOI: 10.4324/9781003143741-1

2  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction Life A User’s Manual was more purposefully and dramatically a wilder ride, plunging me into an enormous and enormously seductive word‑world of in‑ tertwined puzzles, embedded and floating arcana, and a narrative at once composed of seemingly endless parts, pieces, and periods. I was thrilled by this writing that was so aesthetically rich, so intellectually lively, so weirdly funny at the same time as it was permeated with pathos. I was drawn as well to Perec’s compositional choices, including both the out‑front and behind‑the‑scenes scores and strategies,4 the mélange of literary styles, and the games and generally ludic approaches to devising and present‑ ing material. Most simply, I loved his lists, his offerings of material somehow categorized though often un‑narrativized or un‑matrixed. As a dancer and choreographer who came of age not long after the bolt of lightning that was early postmodern dance in 1960s New York City, who has continued to feel inspired by what still functions for many dancers as its aesthetic and com‑ positional lineage, and who for years has written about and taught studio and academic courses emerging from that choreographic perspective, I found in Perec’s writing an ideal, if unlikely, challenge and partnership—a dance partnership. And so: Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo (from here on, Dancing with Georges Perec or, simply, Dancing). The book in your hands or on your screen considers the work of this iconoclastic Parisian Jewish writer (1936–1982), widely known and admired for his literary experimentation and, in particular, for his contributions to Oulipo, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), the organization of wickedly clever writers and mathematicians, founded in 1960 to incite literary experi‑ mentation, as it connects to dance. It recognizes and, I hope, communicates the delight and expansiveness I have experienced in exploring some of the aesthetic and compositional overlaps across literature, especially Perec’s, and choreography. In Dancing, writing as a dancer and an interdisciplinary arts, dance, and performance scholar, I link Perec’s work to its implications both for dance and for our thinking about it. Georges Perec, who was both brilliant and prolific, figures prominently in the world of twentieth‑century Western literature. Deeply experimental in his structural and stylistic approaches to composition, he is widely known for the radical choices he made both before and during his long association with Oulipo, the organization founded to devise what its members called con‑ traintes, or constraints: strategic limitations designed to radically re‑imagine and extend existing compositional approaches. Perec’s writing is known for its investigations of everyday life, its complexly playful experiments with language: letters, words, sentences, and beyond. Elements of autobiography and memory, actual and altered, thread insistently through his creations. Ar‑ dently devoted to writing across literary forms, Perec amassed a huge volume of material exemplifying a particularly far‑reaching range of genres, includ‑ ing but not limited to novels, essays, poetry, plays, films, puzzles, games, lists, and palindromes.

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  3 Perec is not known, though, solely for his incursions into literary genres and structures. From the first, his writing addressed an unusually extensive range of subject areas, private experiences, and public circumstances, and brought them into contact with each other. He wrote inquiringly, playfully, passionately about ways he saw the world operate, from the narrowest of focuses—his desktop, his coffee‑stirring spoon—to the broadest: history, hu‑ man suffering, power dynamics. Those large‑scale phenomena were more than intellectual concerns. They were the political and familial frames of his childhood and the terrible losses he suffered then, which reverberated throughout his life and, by extension, his work. Perec was born to a Polish Jewish family in Paris in 1936, just four years before the start of the German Occupation of France. By the time he was seven years old, he had lost both parents to the Holocaust: his father was killed in battle, his mother “disappeared” at Auschwitz. Perec, known then as Jojo, was taken in and raised by the loving and generous (and complicated) family of his aunt and uncle and given the opportunity for a “normal” life from early on. Nonetheless, themes of pain, loss, isolation, absence, and abandonment pervade his writing, side by side with the levity and the intellectual and stylistic dexterousness characterizing so much of it; these themes underlie both those pieces which seem clearly to be autobiographical and those which do not. Perec was not a big‑name author during his lifetime; he did, though, re‑ ceive two major literary prizes: the 1965 Prix Renaudot for his early novel, Les Choses (Things), and the 1978 Prix Médicis for the novel widely seen as his masterwork, La Vie Mode d’Emploi (Life A User’s Manual). He lived a life embedded in literary, political, and artistic circles,5 and had a range of familial, social, and intimate relationships. Sadly, he died of cancer in 1982: quite young, just before his forty‑sixth birthday. I offer this brief general account to introduce readers to Dancing with Georges Perec: to Perec himself, his writing, and the unusual premise prompt‑ ing the book’s existence. Perec’s many works of fiction and non‑fiction indeed considered or explored a vast span of subject areas, and his adventures in content and style have had repercussions since his first literary endeavors in the early 1960s. These repercussions have been largely, and logically, situ‑ ated in the worlds of literature and writing, including their intertwining with the worlds of the Holocaust, Jewishness, and autobiography. These are the worlds in which a considerable amount of Perec scholarship has been located. One world that Perec barely wrote about, though, is dance. That omis‑ sion, that lacuna, is at the heart of this project, which explores the relation‑ ships of Perec’s work to dance. Introduction to the Project: Perec, Dancing, Writing While I use the word “project” primarily in regard to this book, in fact, the project covers a broader territory. It extends to the collection of dances, es‑ says, and scholarly and performative presentations which I have created over

4  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction the last several years, some of which I address in Dancing, all of which have been instrumental to the development of my perspective on Perec.6 These pages exploring Perec and his work not only represent the ideas that I have derived from his writing and from the writing of other scholars and admirers probing it; they represent, too, my experiences of his work: the embodied experiences integral to my dance practice; the ways I understand and animate those ideas in choreographic, physical, or somatic as well as textual form. Dancing with Georges Perec is a vehicle for bringing together Perec’s work with dance via the critical, analytical, experiential, corporeal, emotional, and mnemonic strands of my ongoing engagement with both areas. It is neither a manual nor a demonstration of direct correspondences of two unlike areas. Instead, it is a reflection on Perec’s work as it has touched me, through its beauty, through its revelations about human lives, and through its interplay with my experiences in dance and with many of my ideas and beliefs about embodied knowledge and about space. What I offer here, then, is my dancerly experience of reading Perec. That is, having read his work, open to how it affects me in terms of ideas, im‑ agination, and embodiment, I have engaged in an imaginary dance with his ideas. I have also had many rich and unanticipated experiences of dancing, choreographing, and consciously moving through everyday life, more fully understanding the ways that words and bodies act on each other, through my work with Perec. My Dance Histories: Selections These experiences join my histories in dance and dance writing as they con‑ tribute to the breadth of this project, including my own position(s) within it. Dance is an extensive, variegated, and complex field, composed of at least as many parts and perspectives as there are originating cultures, historical contexts, and individual practitioners. Within that, my definition of the form is infinitely open, joining an endlessly contingent and continuous relationship of cultures, bodies, space, and time; of being and becoming; of the braiding of creating, enacting, and responding. Dancing with Georges Perec emerges from my personal perspective as an interdisciplinary arts and performance scholar, writer, and teacher, and as a New York dancer, white and female, trained for many years in dance techniques primarily associated with Western concert dance as well as with cultural conventions of movement, space, and aesthetics stretching beyond the studio. These techniques include a range of modern and postmodern dance, im‑ provisation, somatic and other exploratory movement practices, as well as ballet, and, more recently, West African and Haitian dances. Each of these has been critical in shaping my dancing and my understanding of the forms; each has contributed to shaping my actual body and my sense of how to move, how to be still. I have brought my passions for hiking and walking as well as my long involvement with meditation into my dance

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  5 practice and my dances. My choreographic work—initially prompted by early eye‑opening and arts‑crossing studies with proto‑postmodernist and eccen‑ tric balletomane choreographer James Waring7—has variously integrated formalism with a range of compositional and aesthetic options and inter‑ ests: scores and structures; images; and ever‑shifting beliefs about intuition, impulse, expression, and autobiography. My explorations of all these areas were expanded enormously by my long friendship with Sally Gross, an origi‑ nal participant in the concerts of the Judson Dance Theater which put post‑ modern dance on the map, who continued her work as a trends‑be‑damned minimalist choreographer par excellence for decades after. It is largely because of my youthful studies with Waring as well as my re‑ lationship with Gross that I came early on to see dance, especially the phase of postmodern dance to which they introduced me, and the questions and re‑ search it engendered, as fundamentally engaged with similar prompts across other art forms. Certainly, these mentors made clear by example that it was imperative to know what else was going on in the arts, to figure out relation‑ ships among them, and to both prize embodied experience and complicate as well as articulate it in language. And so, my involvement with dance has always been of a piece with my predisposition toward the visual arts, and with work in performance art, theater, music, and writing that zigzags across these titles and territories, that exults in the overlaps and exchanges: Interdis‑ ciplinarity is at the core of my research and experiences as an artist as well as an academic. It is no surprise, then, that my Perec project both joins dance and literature and is aesthetically grounded in postmodern dance. I use the term “postmod‑ ern dance” broadly, primarily linking it to its historical beginnings in the 1950s/60s and to its lineage, including evolutions and deviations, stemming from these early days. This history, largely framed by US‑based writers, in‑ cludes its more‑or‑less official beginnings, before my dancing/viewing time, in early 1960s New York City; and its roots, extending back through the 1950s and into the work of some of my eventual teachers and mentors. Postmodern dance also includes the current experimental work that remains, in many ways and through multiple perspectives, in dialogue with its earlier forms. That dialogue, much of it conducted by younger artists not as encumbered by expectations of what postmodern and other experimental dance should be or do, is bringing both dance and its discourse into new and necessary realms of worldliness, connecting movement and Movements, practice and concept. My longest‑term dance studies, and the consequential imprinting on my body of a corporeal dance model or framework, are in the technique de‑ veloped by twentieth‑century American choreographer Merce Cunningham. His invigorating experimental work had legs, as it were, in both modern‑ ism and postmodernism—a factor germane to the dance taking place during Perec’s writing life.8 It has also been critical to me and to other adherents of the technique who have jointly embodied Cunningham’s ideas and been pow‑ erfully affected by his dances while following choreographic paths grounded

6  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction in postmodern aesthetic inquiry. Nonetheless, I experience Cunningham’s movement as well as the ideas about bodies, space, time, and composition it animates as my dancing body’s home base. Like most homes, this one is not without its cobwebs, its concerns and questions; and like any cultural practice, it reflects the broader concerns and questions pervading the culture. That is to say, however neutral, even “natural” this way of experiencing my body feels to me, it is neither. The issue of what constitutes nature and the natural is an important throughline in dance and dance history, linked to cultural ideas about bodies, move‑ ment, space, and social as well as aesthetic or to‑be‑watched choreography. Over the years, my own experiences of dance‑making, viewing, studying, and teaching have increasingly incorporated elements of somatic practices and beliefs about movement into all my work, even my continued engagement with Cunningham technique. (It, too, has changed; for instance, its teaching more and more reflects instructors’ embodied knowledge of the physical and physiological implications of somatic practices to this work.) Experimental Arts of the 1960s: Judson Dance Theater and Oulipo Dancing brings Perec’s writing into contact with dance in several ways. For one, it proposes a significant historical relationship, that of the experimen‑ tal literature of this mid‑twentieth-century writer and the postmodern dance that emerged in early 1960s New York City. I look here at Perec’s work and at the Oulipian practices of 1960s Paris in which Perec participated and con‑ sider how they compare and otherwise resonate with another nexus of arts experimentation of roughly that time: the Judson Dance Theater, whose cen‑ tral work, ranging from 1962 to 1964, during which they performed fifteen iconic concerts, explored fundamental questions of what constituted dance. I look at, and link, their ideas about what art (considered broadly), especially dance, is, how it is conceived and created, and how the compositional pro‑ cess is connected to the art act or object it produces. As the word “roughly” (above) and preceding paragraphs suggest, rather than arguing for an ex‑ act parallel, I am acknowledging the overlaps and influences of these artists’ not‑quite simultaneous work. The Judson Dance Theater, which evolved from a series of choreographic workshops led by musician Robert Dunn, was made up of a group of dancers approaching dance and dance‑making with the kind of questions and inven‑ tive spirit enlivening the often‑overlapping practices of the visual, theatrical, and literary arts: What is dance? How can we rethink its definitions and revise its boundaries? How can we remake its known and assumed move‑ ment vocabularies? How can we reconsider the compositional perspectives, tools, and strategies to generate its materials? How do these questions and the processes of responding to them change the meaning‑making properties of the form? Additionally, the Judson concerned itself with issues of produc‑ tion which addressed both the real‑time real‑space practicalities of making

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  7 and presenting these dances with the work’s altered conceptual frameworks: the kinds of spaces which might be understood as rehearsal and performance venues for dance, the avenues of financial as well as aesthetic support, the opportunities to participate in making, performing, and viewing dance. The Judson’s activities were actually initiated prior to the group’s gener‑ ally agreed‑upon beginnings in 1962 and were inspired and supported by dance experimentalists working in the late 1950s. Even though the group’s “official” workshops and concerts ended in 1964, many of the participants continued to work individually and collaboratively, not only through the 1960s but for many years—in some instances, into the present day. One par‑ ticularly significant follow‑up was the Grand Union, the thrillingly disorderly improvisational group of Judson dancers (Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Da‑ vid Gordon, Trisha Brown) and colleagues which performed irregularly from 1970 to 1976 (Perron 2020). Another example is Contact Improvisation, the fundamentally interactive and now transnational movement form initiated in 1972 by Paxton, who had danced with Cunningham as well as Judson and Grand Union (Contact Quarterly 1975‑present; Novack 1990).9 Certainly, many of Judson’s choreographic ideas and practices endure—changed and recontextualized, of course, over the fifty‑plus years since their inception—in contemporary dance in the US and Europe. At the same time, even those newer and often younger choreographers whose work has been informed by ideas and practices stemming from Judson have turned their sights toward more explicitly political elements, such as the broad area of identity politics, and their emotional repercussions. Oulipo was founded in 1960 in Paris, and though it has no end date—its memberships continue, officially, in perpetuity, and there is still a functioning organization of experimental literary participants—a particularly rich and significant period beginning with its inception went on through the 1970s. The group was initiated by poet, novelist, and critic Raymond Queneau and mathematician, chemical engineer, and writer François Le Lionnais. Its membership, primarily writers and mathematicians, would come to include Dadaist philosopher/artist Marcel Duchamp and writers Marcel Bénabou, Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino, Jacques Roubaud, and Daniel Levin Becker, among others. In most ways, they have been a wonderfully diverse array of spirited writers committed to opening up the compositional practices of literature. At the same time, they were nearly all male, mostly French (and some Americans), and—as was also the case with early postmodern dance— included few members of color. Oulipo was, in literary/cultural studies scholar James R. Kincaid’s words, “a group of deliriously brilliant mathematicians, theorists, and writers, [which] devoted itself to extraordinary linguistic experiments, designed to test the limits of received esthetics and to drive traditional critics and read‑ ers to drink” (1995: 3). This sensibility is echoed in the evocative words of Oulipo and Perec scholar Warren F. Motte, Jr., who wrote, “On the Ameri‑ can front, solid beachheads were established by the Oulipo through events

8  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction staged by the group in New York and Seattle…. Jacques Jouet took [Boulder] by storm […and others] invaded the Bay Area” (1998: ix). The Oulipian commitment to (as Kincaid wrote) “extraordinary” experi‑ mentation was at times focused on the specificity of a writer’s compositional terms rather than what was produced from it. That is, not everyone who invented a compositional approach to writing necessarily created a piece of writing emerging from that approach. Certainly, though, many Oulipians took that plunge, and among them was Georges Perec. He joined Oulipo in 1967; from that time on, his own work continued to evolve, advancing the literary ideas and practices he had initiated during the preceding decade and developing them in tandem with the group’s efforts—in the process, making a distinct contribution to raising the group’s profile. Everyday Bodies, Particular Bodies, Perec’s Bodies Another element of the relationship of Georges Perec and dance which I am positing here is much broader. This is the body, or more accurately the bod‑ ies, which populate, quite differently from each other, both dance and Perec’s writing. These multiple bodies are charged with immediacy: the live actuality of bones, muscles, tendons, cartilage that activate the trained dancer’s most delicate and voluptuous movements and participate in the more broadly if less formally trained everydayness of our gestures, postures, and movements. These bodies are deeply personal, repositories and representatives of our in‑ dividual lives, memories, dreams, and imaginations. And they are embedded in cultural, geographic, and historical schema, their individual strengths and vulnerabilities inextricably linked to systems of power, from dance studios to governments. Perec’s work is notably and variably filled with references to bodies and ob‑ servations about bodies, including his own and those of his literary stand‑ins. His writing, though, does not generally describe at length the bodies and the general appearances of his characters, fictional and actual. We are not typi‑ cally offered detailed physical profiles of his characters; instead, we develop a sense of their physical lives within the particularity of their surroundings, their worlds, and their observations. Moreover, Perec’s writing seems both to emanate from his body and to assume the criticality of an embodied perspective. His bodies are written rather than flesh and blood, but they vividly derive from and are charged with his own corporeal experience. This experience weaves through his ideas and feelings about the present and absent bodies of his history, his life, his moment of writing, as well as the bodies he mourns and longs for and invents and enjoys. Much of Dancing with Georges Perec is essentially a focused study of bod‑ ies in space and time, in action and reflection, in rehearsal and performance venues, and at the writing table. That focus matters: this is not a sweeping overview of dance history and literature, but a look at one person’s work as

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  9 it merges epochal enormousness and the most intimate sensations and as it matters to me. Considering Perec’s work this way has made it necessary for me to investigate my own experiences and beliefs about bodies and about the contexts in which these experiences and beliefs exist. Embodiment: Bodily Knowing, Alone and Entwined Contemplating the work of Perec and dance has prompted me to examine my ideas of embodiment, a concept and a term often used rather casually to designate physical sensation or experience. Loosely defined, the word indeed includes those elements, but it goes beyond them, acknowledging the interac‑ tive and reciprocal relationships of each person’s deep knowledge of one’s own movement and stillness, of bodily being, to those of others. As dancer and phenomenologist Susan Kozel has said, “We are embodied by other bod‑ ies” (2009). Embodiment, essentially, is the sense of the body and the awareness of the body derived from and sustained by culture, personal and collective history, spatial and temporal circumstance, and systems of representation as well as by immediate feeling, including the feeling of moving and the feeling of stillness. It is a way of knowing derived from experience: corporeal, of course, but also aesthetic, cognitive, psychological, interpersonal, gendered, spatial, spiritual, and religious. It reflects a person’s geographic locale and the cultural circumstances of the person’s life there, including sex, race, ethnicity, class, and social status. It reflects both the present moment and memory. Many scholars in dance and other fields define and explore embodiment, in particular, as it is enmeshed with ideas and experiences of space. Dancers, whether or not they enter into discussions about it, are always engaged in embodiment as central to their practice. The specifics of this engagement are complex and personal and often exist outside our conscious attention. At the level of everyday experience, people don’t generally analyze in real time their most basic autonomic, ongoing functions, such as breathing, nor do we monitor every action of the muscular or skeletal system: we just “put one foot after the other,” a phrase simultaneously stating in physical terms the abled person’s act of walking and, metaphorically, the sense of getting through the day or getting on with one’s life without too much analysis en route. Accomplished practitioners of walking meditation and certain so‑ matic forms re‑pattern their ways of moving, so that the consciousness of walking is relocated through the body. But even dancers, athletes, and other skilled workers, whose actions require significant in‑the‑moment knowl‑ edge of their bodies and whose training has set them up to join knowledge and action, internalize most of this material within spheres of attention, of “need‑to‑know‑ness.” These spheres shift according to circumstance. In the class or studio, a dancer might focus on her body in terms of what it needs to do, how it/she can do it, and what that doing feels like. This is likely to include not only

10  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction relationships among body parts but shape, speed, quality, rhythm, impulse, and phrasing: a wealth of material and information, often particular to the genre and its choreographic, pedagogical, and discursive conventions, known and stored in the dancer’s body and that body’s mind. This embodied knowl‑ edge supports the dancer paying attention to learning and integrating new material. In our everyday lives, we generally don’t consciously monitor our move‑ ment choices at the levels of anatomical specificity. My attention to personal interaction among other social choreography participants is often attuned merely to avoiding danger or discomfort—swinging my arm into someone else’s “zone” or crashing into someone walking on the “wrong” side of the street. However, all of us moving through the streets, in New York City or Accra or Katmandu, are, to borrow Kozel’s words, each other’s “other bod‑ ies,” endlessly engaging in individual and communal embodiment. And as becomes increasingly clear, these engagements and interactions are not lim‑ ited to other human bodies but extend to the creatures and plants and geo‑ graphic phenomena with which we share space. Our bodies, clearly, are trained, defined, and understood by class, lo‑ cale, gender, race, religion, abled‑ness, and a host of other cultural markers. Throughout Dancing, I consider ways we understand and experience our acculturated and historical bodies, drawing connections to Perec’s alternately celebratory and disturbing images and recollections of bodies far from the studio. That is, I bring idealized dancing bodies into contact with Perec’s eve‑ ryday bodies, and with his broken or dead bodies, Jewish bodies, and invis‑ ible bodies, and with his complex acknowledgement of embodied experience. Autobiography: A Perspective, A Structure I never knew Georges Perec; I never met him. And when I encountered him through his writing, it was through his compositional playfulness and its carryover into the work itself. As a choreographer who loves lists and games and instructions as paths into making a dance, I was drawn to his way with a score, or a constraint, as a way of working—especially to the way his go‑ ing as far as possible with such seemingly exterior guidelines produced work so utterly personal, visceral, and intimate, while retaining a core, a secret space, of what would or could never be articulated in language. I’ve been occupied for years with questions about formalism and non‑formalism and have shifted my positions many times; it has been liberating to read Perec’s roller‑coaster rides across these categories. Dancing with Georges Perec, then, began with my delight in Perec’s work and emerges from my dance practice as well as my interdisciplinary research. But that wasn’t the whole story. Over years of immersion in Perec’s writing and what felt to me like a growing sense of closeness with the writer him‑ self, I came to recognize that our imaginary relationship—which is to say my imaginary relationship to him—was personal. Poring through his writing

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  11 and the responses to and reflections on it, I realized that I was not only intellectually and artistically drawn to his work; I was personally drawn to him. I increasingly thought of him not only as a fascinating subject of study but as a person I might know, a person I wish I had known—even as some‑ one to whom I might be related. (Or, I could have been one of the friends in his circle of young intellectual Parisians, though there weren’t all that many women in this largely masculine milieu.) Eventually I realized that I had somehow linked Perec in my imagination with my father, Jerome Satin, who was slowly dying of Parkinson’s disease and finally succumbed during the time I began delving into Perec’s work. My father, who was born in 1925, would have been eleven years older than Perec; they would have shared a War, so to speak, but their experiences of it would have been extremely different. My father spent almost all his life in New York City, where he, his brother, and both his parents were born. Nei‑ ther he nor they were religiously observant, though the previous generation had been devout. It was a given, though, that in our extended family and in our circles of friends and acquaintances, Jewish identity was central, and incontrovertible—and quite disconnected from religious beliefs or practice. Even while my father was alive, I had begun to think more about my sense of secular Jewish identity, not whether I had one but what it was, what comprised it. One of the ways I thought about it was in terms of dance, and bodies, particularly my own. I have asked, and continue to ask, how the dancing body is a site of memory as well as presentness, or how dance em‑ bodies autobiography. Memory as Mediated, Imagined, Collective, Archived In 2016, I gave a presentation at a symposium in London in which I re‑ flected, in dance and speech, on my parents dancing during my childhood.10 Through the experience of more‑or‑less channeling them through my own body, blurring and fortifying our separateness, I entered into conversations with both family photographs and a range of films which seemed to both replay existing memories and to produce them. That is, I found myself in a complex interaction with what new media scholar José Van Dijck calls “me‑ diated memory”: the trove of actual objects—photographs, say, in boxes and scrapbooks—and the extended field of endlessly alterable screen sounds and images comprising our identities‑in‑process (2007). Moreover, I saw these memories as somehow linked to a past preceding my own. Such memories are not only personal; they are collective. Others who have examined memory, including embodied memory, as cultural rather than strictly individual include sociologist Rafael Narváez, whose theory of Em‑ bodied Collective Memory (ECM) assumes “the mnemonic importance of the body.” These “gestures, corporeal and phonetic rhythmic, common affective idioms and emotional styles” are learned, adjusted, and passed along within the social world, joining past and present (2013: 1–3). Other perspectives,

12  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction such as that of Bessel Van Der Kolk, approach memory from the view of neuroscience, focusing on trauma’s impact on our entwined bodies and brains, and on the potential for relief and healing (2014). In Bill Bissell and Linda Caruso Haviland’s collection, The Sentient Archive, the editors and a selection of contemporary choreographers consider multiple views of move‑ ment, ideas, and experience in the archive body (2018). These views speak to our complex experiences of everyday life as movers, dancers, and viewers. In 2018, I attended a seminal conference in Tempe, Arizona on dance and Jewishness.11 In her keynote speech, German musicologist and dance historian Marion Kant spoke about an interview of Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, conducted by Italian journalist Ferdinando Camon. Levi told Camon that he did not then, nor had he ever, believed in God. “Then,” Camon asked, “in what sense are you Jewish”? Levi first answered that it was a “simple matter of culture.” But, he contin‑ ued, this “simple matter” had been inscribed, literally and otherwise, on his body: “the racial laws and the concentration camp, stamped me the way you stamp a steel plate. At this point I’m a Jew, they’ve sewn the star of David on me and not only on my clothes” (Kant 2018, 2019: 7). The conference and those stark words affected me in ways extending to and beyond the scope of this project. For instance, though so many attendees were familiar to me as friends, acquaintances, or colleagues, I realized that we had barely or never spoken in depth about these often‑unsettling experi‑ ences, or any experiences at all, of Jewishness. The recognition of experienc‑ ing one’s life, history, and identity through the body, of embodying memory, was perhaps not so surprising in a gathering of dancers, people for whom the element of bodily knowing is a given. The question of how memory is embodied, and embedded, though, was then and continues to be debated. A key element of this debate concerns whether and how these memories, including what memory studies scholar Marianne Hirsch has identified as “postmemory,” continue intergeneration‑ ally solely through behavioral, social, and familial lines, including tellings and retellings of what is recalled individually and collectively, through art as well as personal communication, or through neurological, epigenetic, or other physiological channels as well (Hirsch 2008; Youssef et al. 2018; Ferrando 2020). The dance world often associates memory with embodied individual and cultural history, acknowledging the power implicit in its bodily meta‑ phor: Modern dance pioneer Martha Graham titled her 1991 autobiography Blood Memory. Choreographer Donald McKayle called the 1976 dance he made for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, exploring “hundreds of years of African heritage,” Blood Memories, the plural form representing the collective historical experience of the African diaspora.12 And contemporary dance scholar Thomas F. DeFrantz, considering those dances of Ailey which reflected the horrors of racism and poverty in his 1930s Texas childhood, wrote of an “atmosphere of fear” present in the choreographer’s “‘blood memory’ pieces” (DeFrantz 2004: 27).

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  13 A related but more surprising perspective arose in the 2018 gathering of almost entirely Jewish dancers and dance scholars. We were a religious and cultural mix: Many, perhaps most, of us were secular, some identified them‑ selves as religious, and we represented a range of belief systems and practices. We came from across the US as well as Israel, South America, Canada, and Europe. All of us were born after World War II. Still, the widespread belief was that the sense of what made us see ourselves as Jewish was the Holocaust. My father, born and raised in Brooklyn, had been in the US Army during the war in which both of Perec’s parents perished, but he never saw battle, or Europe, for that matter, in the service. (Remaining in the US as a soldier, he found even the American South to be quite a cultural shock.) And his family, what would become our family, was in no directly Nazi‑generated physical danger then; both my parents’ families had come to this country from Eastern Europe by the late nineteenth century. But the war, and the Holocaust, had a tremendous effect on him and on us. I still hear his voice, unusually steely for this gentle and amiable man, assuring me when I claimed as a teenager to not really be Jewish since I didn’t believe in God, that Hitler would not have cared in the least that I was a non‑believer: in the terms of that horrifying and nuanceless circumstance, I was still a Jew. And so was he, even though he dismissed religious observance as “malarkey.” Performing Autobiography: Explicit, Implicit, Embodied My engagement with Perec has incorporated a kind of search through the boxes of photographs of my life and his together. At the Jewishness and Dance conference, I presented “S/He’s Not There: Perec, Place, and Perform‑ ing Autobiography.”13 This focused on Perec’s Jewishness as it was linked to his ideas about bodies—especially Jewish bodies, “stamped” (as Levi said) by history: living in the dynamic spaces of public and private life; entwined with the personae, characters, and circumstances in his writing; suggesting to me a more personal perspective on Perec and Jewishness, individual identity, and collective history. This mix of bodies and autobiography is a significant element in the work of Perec, particularly in the many writings in which he moves through mazes of language, image, and structure, exploring what he knows and what he can never know about his life, offering himself and his tellings and withdrawing from them in an endless game of hide‑and‑seek with his readers. The word “autofiction” first came into use during Perec’s writing life, but the merging of “fact” and imagination has long suffused genres such as the roman à clef and bildungsroman.14 And Perec’s work, during his own time as well as since then, has been acknowledged for its stepping into and out of categories of self‑representation or “life writing.”15 That kind of “stepping in and out” is particularly evident in considering autobiography as a phenomenon in dance, where the material itself (such as the movement and the movers, the space, the sound), its performance

14  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction contexts, and its reception are more evidently merged through the factor of time. Always, the dancer is both being and becoming. She is in a constantly shifting present tense. Her movements, and by implication she herself, con‑ tinually dissolve into the past and evolve into the future. At the same time, the acts of giving/performing and receiving/spectating are brought together in real time, as the viewer experiences the dance and the dancer, and herself, kinesthetically as well as visually and intellectually, in the moment of its and her unfolding. Literary autobiography, including speech‑based performance art, has historically been grounded in what I think of as “explicit autobiography,” which assumes the recounting, reiteration, and reconstitution, however radi‑ cal, of real‑life material. Indeed, many choreographers, too, have brought their personal and collective histories into their work: material directly de‑ rived from or referring back to their actual lives, that announces an aspect of the choreographer’s and/or the performer’s identity, as that person sees it. The work, including the movement itself as well as a particular piece or, more broadly, a choreographer’s oeuvre, is characterized by representation, and invites, or guides the viewer to connect to it within that framework. Other choreographers’ work is engaged in what I call “implicit autobiog‑ raphy,” wherein dancers and choreographers present or produce a sense of self through a broader array of elements, from the smallest of gestures to the breadth of whatever constitutes a piece’s or a body of work’s mise en scene. Indirect expressions and embodiments of the self weave through the choreog‑ rapher’s and/or the performer’s intentions and strategies, acknowledging the performativity of the self and the idea of the self, creating an autobiographi‑ cal presence via attention, accident, and accumulation. Autobiographical Framing: Dancing with Georges Perec There is considerable flexibility and mobility, and, increasingly, overlap in these perspectives and the dances they produce, grounded in a mix of cul‑ tural, political, historical, and aesthetic factors. I will return to these in later chapters. For now, I primarily want to note the importance, on several levels, of autobiography to this book. Dancing is framed as a performative autobiographical enactment of my relationship to Perec, in which our written, danced, analyzed, and imagined selves periodically converge through my periodic anecdotal and otherwise autobiographical interventions. While this explicitly autobiographical pres‑ ence emerges from my involvement with many kinds of dance, it is grounded in the non‑representational work of much historical and contemporary post‑ modernism and in a running internal dialogue about formalism and non‑ formalism. It is an experiment: My text‑based presentations nearly always include movement; here, my textual autobiographical presence stands in for me, moving, embodied.

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  15 Dancing originated in my delight in Perec’s ludic compositional ap‑ proaches, which corresponded to my own and other choreographers’ making work derived from scores. Weaving life experience into scholarship, I reflect on my embodied practice and acknowledge my complex Jewish identity, especially as performed within my secular middle‑class New York family. Recognizing that I have come to love not only Perec’s work but (my idea of) Perec himself, I create an imaginary relationship with him, as I have come to “know” him, as he has become part of my own dancing, writing life. In these pages, I am (imagining) dancing with Georges Perec. (My aunt saw a psychoanalyst regularly for many years. At her apart‑ ment, she displayed a group of framed family photographs on a small table. If you looked at the pictures carefully, you would notice that the familiar face in one of them was not actually a family member; it was Sigmund Freud.) References and Recognitions: Re‑considering Perec Many scholars have written in biographical terms about Perec, sensitively tracing historical details and linking them to the complexities of his charac‑ ter, his relationships, his professional developments, his life. I am especially indebted to David Bellos, who has frequently written about and translated Perec’s work. His biographical volume, George Perec: A Life in Words, is distinguished both for the scope of its research and the warmth and empathy it grants to its subject—whom he never met (1999).16 Bellos introduced in 1993 a special issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, focusing on Perec. The collection gathered an array of noted Perec scholars and (posthumously) Perec himself. The contributors, some of them Oulipo members, included Harry Mathews, Marcel Bénabou, Bruno Mar‑ cenac, Andrew Leak, Warren F. Motte, Paul Schwartz, Kaye Mortley, Gilbert Adair, Bernard Magné, Jacques Roubaud, Patrizia Molteni, Rob Halpern, and Philippe Lejeune, who addressed multiple aspects of Perec’s writing, in and out of Oulipo (O’Brien et al. 2009 [1993]).17 Notably, there is considerable overlap among scholars addressing both Oulipo and Perec. Motte’s contributions are especially valuable, as is the writing by Oulipians on the group’s history, theory, and practice included in his written and edited volumes (Motte 1984, 1998). Writers considering Oulipo through a critical contemporary lens include Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito (2013), Daniel Levin Becker (2012), Alison James (2009), Louis Bury (2015), Michael Leong (2015), and Anna Kemp (2021). In the Review of Contemporary Fiction collection, as elsewhere, writers considered Perec’s relationship to his Jewishness and his Jewish identity. Nu‑ merous scholars have continued to examine this directly, including Marcel Bénabou (2004), Joshua Cohen (2009), Benjamin Ivry (2010), Dan Stone

16  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction (2000), Marc Caplan (2020), and Lawrence Kritzman (2005). Others have contributed to the weave of Jewish studies, Holocaust studies, memory stud‑ ies, and other fields which contextualize Perec’s experiences and the literature they engendered. In recent years, Perec’s reputation and influence have expanded into other fields and disciplines, most notably space and geography, everyday cul‑ ture, visual art and film, sound, theater, and multidisciplinary approaches to identity and self‑representation. Recent edited collections look at Perec from specific perspectives. Georges Perec’s Geographies addresses the range of ways that Perec understood and created relationships with space(s), as viewed from the vantage points of multiple artistic and scholarly disciplines (Forsdick et al. 2019). The contributors to The Afterlives of Georges Perec consider how his work might now affect their own disciplines, practices, and ideas (Wilken and Clemens 2017). These investigations address subject areas which Perec approached directly or suggested in his own work. For instance, he both wrote about and contributed to other art forms—theater, radio plays, screenplays, films—often collaboratively. Contextualizing Dance: Critical Views Questioning how cultural and natural phenomena participate in dance seems especially significant right now: a highly charged moment in the development of experimental dance, in particular of the lineage of postmodern dance. At the time of this writing, there is tremendous general attention to the underly‑ ing cultural biases, especially those tied to race, class, gender, and other often unspoken or invisible contributions to (equally silent) structures of power, within and across the arts as well as in the broad sociopolitical circumstances within which they exist. While this crisis of invisibility and power is not Dancing’s subject, it is germane nonetheless, opening up questions about making meaning in dance and literature; larger contextual world issues; and beliefs regarding abstraction, formalism, and representation, which figure prominently (if not always consciously) in our responses to art acts and ob‑ jects and our experiences of making them. More broadly, considering dance now is intrinsically enmeshed with the shifts in our experiences of human life as it has been altered, in increasingly unignorable ways, by our beliefs and behavior regarding the planet Earth. This book is neither an analysis of dance in the Anthropocene nor a reflec‑ tion on dance and dance scholarship’s participation in the recuperative efforts of transdisciplinary fields such as New Materialism, which vibrantly rethink key dance words and concepts like “space” and “site.” However, the project emerges in part from the recognition of how we, embodied creatures, play a role in the unfolding of new ways to interact with our multiple homes: “our bodies, ourselves”—as the landmark 1970 Boston Women’s Health Collec‑ tive book had it—and the spaces we inhabit.

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  17 Several historians’ views on dance, especially the development of post‑ modern dance, have been especially valuable to me. Sally Banes was a par‑ ticularly influential American historian of the Judson Dance Theater and early postmodern dance’s links to contemporaneous developments across the arts (1987, 1993a, 1993b, 2003; Banes and Carroll 2006); Deborah Jowitt has contributed both focused historical overviews and, for many years, jour‑ nalistic installments on how the field was progressing (1967–2011; 1988). Other valuable views include on‑the‑scene writings and later reflections of Jill Johnston (1959–1981), as well as those by dancing, documenting, theo‑ rizing, and imagining participants, particularly Yvonne Rainer (1974; and, with Emily Coates and Nick Mauss, 2023). Writings by Ramsay Burt (2006) and Emilyn Claid (2006) offer other views of early postmodern dance and its legacy in the US, the UK, and Europe. Over the last several decades, dance scholarship as well as dance itself has changed. Auto‑ethnographic, phenomenological, New Materialist, and affect‑ and performance‑theory‑derived perspectives articulate dancers’ ex‑ periences and locate them within the sphere of dancerly activity—connecting one’s own moving to others with whom one shares space—and within larger sociopolitical circumstances. Recent writing informing my own addresses ways that both popular and concert dance arise from and evolve within specific times, places, and cultural circumstances. Contemporary writers rethinking dance‑historical givens, such as the primacy of Western concert dance or the relationships of specific dance cultures to political expression and activism include Thomas DeFrantz (2012), Miguel Gutierrez (2018), and Julie Malnig (2023). The dancer/writers featured in Danspace Project’s Plat‑ form series have offered evolving perspectives on current and recent dance; especially germane here is Judson Now (Hussie‑Taylor 2012). Writing that recalculates the received wisdom on the physical and expres‑ sive aspects of dance, and on matters of practitioners’ and viewers’ experi‑ ence of dance have also been valuable; authors include Steve Paxton (2018), Anna Halprin (1995), and Simone Forti (2015). These studies include schol‑ arly and artistic investigation of the theoretical and creative underpinnings of such experience, such as work on phenomenology by dancers and writ‑ ers Susan Kozel (2009), Sondra Horton Fraleigh (1996 [1987]), and Susan Rethorst, whose “choreographic mind” is attuned to the “phenomenologi‑ cal body” (2012: 29). These writings tie into scholarship on embodiment. A short list beyond those already named for work with this focus includes Fiona Bannon (2010), Gaston Bachelard (1958), Victoria Hunter (2015, 2021), Louise Steinman (1995), and Richard Sennett (1994). This work also includes anatomical and experiential guides for practitioners such as Andrea Olsen (2002) and Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay (2023 [1990]), who poetically link space and place, language and image. This book draws on contemporary and historical work on space, site, and site dance, linking and expanding our ideas of dance space from the studio

18  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction and stage to the worlds in which they and we exist, and the perspectives through which we view them; examples include the writings and edited collec‑ tions of Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik (2009), Victoria Hunter (2015, 2018, 2021), and Karen Barbour (2011). Other valuable scholarship includes work in cultural studies, especially investigations of everyday culture, such as the writings of Ben Highmore (2014, 2017); explorations of space and place emerging from humanist geography, such as that of Yi‑Fu Tuan (1977); writing on affect theory, especially that of Kathleen Stewart, which joins af‑ fect and anthropology (2007, 2011); and the auto‑ethnographic model of‑ fered by Ruth Behar (1997) of “the vulnerable observer.” Many of these authors, and the pages of Dancing, draw on early twentieth‑century work by Marcel Mauss (2006 [1935]) and Maurice Merleau‑Ponty (2012 [1945]) linking movement, embodied experience, and culture. History and dance history, in particular, are retrospective guides to how we have thought about bodies: iterative articulations and interpellations of our cultural and personal beliefs, experiences, and enforcements. Suspicions of and aggressions against bodies have recurred throughout human civiliza‑ tion. Writing now amidst a global pandemic in a country—the US—ravaged by political upheaval centered on bodies, especially regarding race, class, sex, gender, and mental/physical health, and by violence between partisans of one side or another crashing into long‑held beliefs about systems of power, it is impossible to bypass the sense of our bodies as under siege, literally and metaphorically under the microscope as the world we have known succumbs to our collective assault. The Writing of Georges Perec: Worldly, Intimate, Interactive This may seem to be a long way from the work of Georges Perec. But cer‑ tainly, all of Perec’s writing, no matter how amusing, complicated, puzzling, or seemingly hermetic, is engaged with the circumstances of his time and place and underlaid by the scars worldly life inflicted on him and the gaps in what he was able to understand about these circumstances of loss and brutality, at once enormous and intimate. Perec was no stranger to the ways that human bodies, which he recognized as integral to the comprehension of so many of our experiences of living, also bore the marks of the most ex‑ treme cruelty and brutality, and, as one iconic novel—A Void, whose French title is La Disparition, or The Disappearance—implied in its very title, could be made to “disappear.” Moreover, though he wasn’t, at least consistently, a social activist, Perec was extremely aware, both of personal and collec‑ tive inequities attributable to political regimes and systems and to systems of communication that kept these inequities and cruelties under wraps. And throughout his work, the ways he wrote—his compositional choices as well as his content—variously acknowledged, suggested, and hid in plain sight the breadth of what he knew and what he felt. By extension, he kept the reader

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  19 in an unusually active state of involvement with the text and, by extension, with (one’s idea of) him. This kind of interaction of artist and respondent has long been understood as significant to how art matters, to how it makes meaning. As Dadaist pio‑ neer and, later, Oulipian Marcel Duchamp, for example, famously claimed in a 1957 lecture, “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act” (in Sanouillet and Peterson 1975: 140). Perec repeatedly articu‑ lated his expectations of the reader to participate in the meaning‑making part‑ nership, making this active unraveling an important aspect of the exchange. One area I explore here is this partnership, including the relationship of the respondent to the compositional approach of the work and the ways and reasons an artist chooses whether (or not) and how to divulge knowl‑ edge of that approach. In dance, too, many choreographers invite viewers into the experience of active response, encouraging them not to analyze a piece during its performance but to engage with its offerings, recognize its elements, and, in some instances, consider the ways it came into being: its compositional strategies as well as its originating ideas. This aspect of active response to a work of dance, literature, or other form is especially germane to thinking about material made by artists known for making work in which the compositional form or process is acknowledged or articulated, textually or otherwise. For example, Perec is probably most widely known for the e’s left out of one book and stuffed into another—A Void/La Disparition and The Exeter Text/Les Revenentes, respectively18—and for the world’s longest palindrome and other impressive compositional feats. In dance, Cunningham, too, has often been seen reductively, the fullness of his work narrowed to its com‑ positional processes, especially chance operations, and the assumption that such work “has no meaning” beyond the seemingly mechanistic prowess of its making.19 This is particularly true regarding dances made with his primary collaborator and life partner, composer John Cage, and with other compos‑ ers exploring fundamental questions about creating and experiencing music, sound, and structure. These composers created and developed compositional scores variously like and unlike Oulipo’s constraints and sharing the desire to make work beyond personal habit, cultural convention, or a genre’s “rules.” Dance, Language, and Definitions One factor this raises is the ways our interactions with dance differ from our interactions with literature—with language. Responding to any artwork calls on our intellectual/cerebral storehouses, our aesthetics, our memories, our surroundings, our moods, and more. Some forms, though, especially dance, elicit experiences not only through our bodies but through our embodied

20  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction knowledge. We “get” dance through a vast and complex weave of sensation and what Susan Rethorst calls “the body’s mind”—“knowing, and learn‑ ing, and feeling things via physicality—thinking physically, perceiving physi‑ cally” (2012: 53–54). While I hesitate to make any all‑encompassing claims about dance, I believe that across its forms and origins, watching dance, making dance, and dancing, we potently merge the broad field of sensation with our other, sometimes more comfortably cognizant, more thought‑ and language‑based ways of knowing. This kind of engagement with dance is not, ideally, a process of transla‑ tion into those ways of knowing: of asking what the dance “means.” And for many contemporary choreographers, dancers, and viewers, it doesn’t as‑ sume the presence of a narrative throughline, or everyday logic, or comple‑ tion, or other familiar guidelines for responding to art (including some kinds of dance).20 I remember a long‑ago interview with choreographer Deborah Hay, who had been a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and a participant in the Judson Dance Theater, in which, communicating to me her experiences of processing dance in the moment of watching it, she accompanied her words about “getting it and getting it and getting it” with circling and gathering arm and hand gestures, enfolding the space around her and bringing it in to her body, taking the dance out there into her space, her body, her self here (Hay 1996). More recently, choreographer Tere O’Connor spoke about the interplay of dance’s material bodies in actual space and the abstraction suffusing choreography and its creation. “Language and the com‑ pletion of stories,” he said, are “a kind of consciousness that’s not in my work” (O’Connor 2021). These fundamental beliefs about dance and how it works—how we make it, how we get it—within overlapping spheres of cer‑ ebral and embodied logic are key to the ideas about bodies which are critical to me, and which, I believe, play out in the writing of Perec and are valuable to thinking about his work. Much of what I write here indeed applies broadly to dance. That said, defining the form and the language is an occasion of entrapment: every defi‑ nition, from the absurd to the merely evanescent, is laden with historical and cultural context, reflecting the ways that our practices and what cultural critic John Berger called our “ways of seeing” change.21 Back in 1983, for instance, Marshall Cohen and Roger Copeland gathered a span of attempts to answer their eponymous book title’s question, What is Dance? The book’s century‑crossing insights, some now dated, some still germane, remind us how definitions, practices, and beliefs necessarily change over time and differ across place and genre within any given period as well. Dancing… periodically acknowledges the specificity and usefulness of some of these definitions or calls in more recent ones which stress or note the sociopolitical frames that I have mentioned or offer new propositions. UK site‑dance scholar Victoria Hunter, for instance, writes of dance from a New Materialist perspective encompassing a broader field of participants. She de‑ fines the field as a circumstance in which

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  21 different actors, materials and entities contribute to an entangled pro‑ cess… [Its] players … consist of dancing‑moving humans, material sites, energies, atmospheres, and affects and the material components of dance movement practice such as motion, effort, tension and rhythm. (2018) This way of viewing the field deepens our ways of seeing dance … and, per‑ haps, seeps into these pages, whose heart is an exploration of historical and contemporary postmodern dance as it intersects with the work of Perec and as it resonates with me. Articulating the terms of this resonance is important: As UK cultural studies scholar Ben Highmore points out, in bringing Perec’s work into the present moment, we have to recognize its “historical specific‑ ity.” That is, we need to understand his project’s origins in a particular time and place, “as a response to a particular historic situation,” and, correspond‑ ingly, to locate those contemporary circumstances of “continuities,” of af‑ fectual parallels or likenesses across time and place (Highmore 2017: 105). A critical element of this “particular historic situation” is the intertwining of the experimental arts in the 1960s and 1970s. Art historians Richard Kostelanetz and Tania Ørum are among those who designate the era of “the 1960s” as having begun in the 1950s; this view, including Ørum’s seeing the period as stretching into the 1970s, is useful here in representing not only the development of avant‑garde work but the period in which Perec would have encountered it (Ørum 2006: 320; Kostelanetz in Jowitt 1988: 309). Also significant is Kostelanetz’s belief that “there is only one art, called Art, and thus that dance, literature, etc., are merely academic categories” (Kostelanetz 1993: ix). While some readers might see that as a stretch, it certainly acknowledges the tremendous interplay, especially of that time, among art forms, as artists working individually as well as with more or less organized groups engaged materially and conceptually with shared questions, options, compositional methods, and philosophies. Artists participating in and drawing on these ideas and practices included not only the Judson Dance Theater and Oulipo but also the performers involved in the Happenings which Allan Kaprow began in the late 1950s; the international and interarts Fluxus artists; and the more politically self‑defined Situationists.22 Interdisciplinarity and collaboration—both in the interarts and cross‑over work produced by artists and the literal collaborations of artists working together—were factors in the ways artists thought about their own and others’ work. While it is likely, then, that Georges Perec was largely, though not entirely, unaware of the avant‑garde dance activities going on in either the US or Europe during this period, it is evident—in his work, in his biographical details—that he was conversant and engaged with many of the ideas and practices they shared with literary, visual, and other performance arts. *

22  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction I have read and reread many of Georges Perec’s books and essays with enor‑ mous pleasure, not as a literary critic but as an explorer, seeing how his life, his words, his ideas, and his artistic impulses intersect with mine and, more broadly, with dance—figuring out how his work matters to me and to the field. With those same provocations in mind, I have watched films and interviews that give me more of a sense of him. I regret that my immersion in Perec’s writing and in other research is largely, though not exclusively, in English; I fully acknowledge that were my French more nuanced, my com‑ prehension of the original would be as well. Je suis désolée. But I am, in the end, deeply grateful for the experience of building an admittedly one‑sided but nonetheless rich relationship with him and his work. Structure/Chapter Breakdown Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, in terms of either Perec’s life and work or the development of contemporary dance and other experimental arts. This intro‑ ductory chapter means to give a general sense of both areas of the book’s at‑ tention, so that readers coming from either the “Perec world” or the “dance world” or elsewhere might comfortably proceed. Chapters 2 and 3 primarily focus on Perec and begin to bring dance into the discussion; the “Entracte” between Chapters 3 and 4 and Chapter 4 itself are more situated in dance. Chapter 5 focuses on Oulipo and links it to contemporaneous developments in experimental arts. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on dance, integrating it with material addressed in the preceding chapters. Certainly a reader knowledgea‑ ble about Perec, Oulipo, or early postmodern dance could skip or skim those chapters covering what may be substantial familiar material. In fact, though, these worlds and ideas encounter each other throughout. I invite you to read the book as a whole and be open to unexpected overlaps of perspective, as well as information, which exist within and among the chapters. Chapter 1: Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction This introductory chapter gives a general sense of both areas of the book’s attention—Perec and dance—and their intersections, the focus of this book. Chapter 2: Georges Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography This chapter looks at Perec’s life, especially his early life, marked by ab‑ sence and loss following the deaths of his parents in Nazi‑Occupied Paris; it looks, too, at his relationships to Jewishness and identity. It considers ways these elements figured in his work’s autobiographical presence, its whole and broken bodies, and our reading of them. It begins to address these factors as they connect to dance. Chapter 3: Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra‑Ordinary These pages link Perec’s focus on paying attention to his beliefs on the significance of the everyday: what he called the “endotic” (rather than exotic) and the “infra‑ordinary” (rather than extraordinary). It considers

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  23 his practices of paying attention, documenting, and presenting material— especially listing. Entracte: The Body Catalogue: This segment, in list form, bridges chap‑ ters on attention and space. It focuses on a common dance practice, a “body catalogue” in which the dancer focuses on her body: its parts and wholes, its interior connections, and its links to the spatial, individual, and collective elements contextualizing the event. Chapter 4: Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space This is an overview of Perec’s ideas and writing about space, their implica‑ tions for dance practitioners and scholars, their extension into everyday life and social choreography. It looks at bodies in space and bodies as space; it considers embodied knowledge and experience as both deeply personal and strongly cultural. Chapter 5: Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition This chapter considers compositional approaches of twentieth‑century ex‑ perimental artists, across art forms. It looks especially but not exclusively at the literature of Perec and Oulipo, and at dance, whose practices involved scores, constraints, and other process‑driving devices. Chapter 6: What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment This chapter is primarily an overview of the history and development of early postmodern dance. It primarily addresses the work of the Judson Dance Theater, also discussing other experimental art and performance, including that of Lawrence and Anna Halprin in California. It looks at the work of these dancers in light of Perec’s and Oulipo’s creative models. Chapter 7: Dancing into the Twenty‑first Century with Georges Perec This chapter addresses work made after the Judson period; most of it looks at contemporary work. It considers the ways that our ideas about bod‑ ies, memory, and dance have changed since early postmodern dance. Notes 1 Throughout the book, I use the spelling Oulipo rather than OuLiPo, though Perec preferred the latter. The adjective form, in French, is oulipien, which in English is written, as it is here, as Oulipian. See Bellos (1999: 352). 2 To be precise: it was the first conference of the more‑or‑less present day. There had been a residential conference in 1983, soon after Perec’s death, organized by Les Amis de Georges Perec, which would come to be known as Association Georges‑Perec and which remains devoted to compiling his materials: “a con‑ vivial and productive bas for scholarly work” (Bellos 2017: 247). 3 SOS refers specifically to Species of Spaces, which is part of Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. The “other pieces” include a range of Perec’s previously published essays. 4 There is considerable discussion of scores in later chapters; as used here, “score” refers to a blueprint or set of instructions for making an art act or object. 5 Nonetheless, Perec “was never an intellectual celebrity and avoided [some of] the fevered debates of his age” (Bellos 2009: 12).

24  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction 6 I first explored many of the ideas in this book in writings (see Satin 2015, 2017, 2019), presentations, and performances. 7 See Satin (2003). 8 Dance historian Sally Banes noted that while Cunningham made “radical depar‑ tures from classical modern dance,” his work retained elements of that form and its aesthetic perspective, while, in partnership with the ideas of composer John Cage, it “formed an important base from which many of the ideas and actions of the post‑modern choreographers sprang.” Cunningham, she wrote, “stands on the border between modern and post‑modern dance” (1987: xvi). Years later, Banes and arts scholar Noel Carroll addressed the two concurrent avant‑gardes of this period, positioning Cunningham as a modernist and Cage as a postmodernist. See Banes (1987a), Banes and Carroll (2006). 9 The journal Contact Quarterly, founded in Contact Improvisation’s early days, explores “emerging dance and improvisation forms and practices, somatic move‑ ment approaches, and creative processes.” https://contactquarterly.com 10 See Satin (2021). 11 The Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World conference, organized by Naomi Jackson, took place at Arizona State University, October 13–15, 2018. 12 See “Blood Memories.” Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater website. https:// www.alvinailey.org/performances/repertory/blood‑memories 13 “S/He’s Not There: Perec, Place, and Performing Autobiography” was presented October 14, 2018, at the Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World conference, Arizona State University, October 13‑15, 2018. 14 Anna Kemp describes autofiction as “a form of self‑representation that, acknowl‑ edging the impossibility of autobiography as traditionally conceived, explores the self via experiments in fiction.” The term was coined in 1977 by Serge Dou‑ brovsky. See Kemp (2021: 10–11). 15 Perec is not, of course, the only author to bring together autobiographical mate‑ rial and fiction in which the Holocaust plays an important role. Another writer in this category is the Parisian Patrick Modiano, who was born, significantly, in 1945—the year World War II ended. His many novels variously search for the his‑ tory which both created him and which he didn’t know. While he actually wrote something called an autobiography, he acknowledges that it is his novels—for which he won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature—which more vividly portray him. 16 While I cite any quotations or explicit points of view, any general factual and uncited material about Perec’s life is found in A Life’s pages. 17 The Spring 1993 collection, 13.1, was reprinted in Spring 2009, 29.1 with an updated Introduction by Bellos, taking into account the number of Perec’s works that had been published in the interim. 18 La Disparition (A Void) has no letter “e”; in Les Revenentes (The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex), “e” is the only vowel. 19 See Brown (1968); Noland (2020). 20 The ways that viewers respond to dance meant primarily to be watched (such as concert dance) rather than participated in (such as social dance) include a mix of sensation (e.g., visual, aural, kinesthetic) and the accumulated knowledge of a form’s “codes” and conventions of viewership. 21 In his insightful and influential 1972 analysis of visual culture, Ways of Seeing, cultural critic, essayist, novelist, and screenwriter John Berger articulated and demonstrated the historic weave of image, identity, and economics. 22 See Banes (1993a) on the development and underlying political nature of the Judson Dance Theater, and Banes 1993b, addressing a cross‑section of Green‑ wich Village’s arts worlds from a sociological perspective; Kostelanetz 1965, a

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  25 contemporaneous overview of experimental arts; Kaprow 1993, considering re‑ definitions across the arts from the 1950s through the 1990s; Guy Debord 1956, his seminal Situationist text on the “Dérive”; and the 1993 collection, In the Spirit of Fluxus, edited by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, on Fluxus’s inter‑ disciplinarity. Works on Perec’s relationship to other arts include Ørum 2006; Highmore 2014; Satin 2017.

Works Cited Armstrong, Elizabeth, and Joan Rothfuss, eds. 1993. In the Spirit of Fluxus: Pub‑ lished on the Occasion of the Exhibition. Exhibition catalogue. Essays by Simon Anderson, Elizabeth Armstrong, et al. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994 [1958]. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Banes, Sally. 1987 [1977]. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post‑Modern Dance. Middle‑ town, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Banes, Sally. 1993a [1980]. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Banes, Sally. 1993b. Greenwich Village 1963: Avant‑Garde Performance and the Ef‑ fervescent Body. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Banes, Sally, ed., assisted by Andrea Harris. 2003. Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Banes, Sally, and Noel Carroll. 2006. “Cunningham, Balanchine, and Postmodern Dance.” Dance Chronicle 29: 49–68. Bannon, Fiona. 2010. “Articulations: Walking as Daily Practice.” Choreographic Practices 1: 97–109. Barbour, Karen. 2011. Dancing Across the Page: Narrative and Embodied Ways of Knowing. Bristol: Intellect/University of Chicago Press. Behar, Ruth. 1997. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bellos, David. 1999 [1993]. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. London: The Harvill Press. Bellos, David.  2009. “The Old and the New: An Introduction to Georges Perec.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 29.1 (Spring): 11–20. Bellos, David. 2017. “The Afterlives of a Writer.” In The Afterlives of Georges Perec, edited by Rowan Wilken and Justin Clemens. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 245–256. Bénabou, Marcel. 2004. “From Jewishness to the Aesthetics of Lack.” Yale French Studies 105. Pereckonings: Reading Georges Perec Issue: 20–35. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. Bissell, Bill and Linda Caruso Haviland, eds. 2018. The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory. Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. https://www.pewcenterarts.org/sentient‑archive‑bodies‑ performance‑and‑memory Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, a.k.a. Our Bodies, Ourselves Collective. 1970. Our Bodies, Ourselves. (First published as Women and Their Bodies). Bos‑ ton: New England Free Press; subsequent editions New York: Simon & Schuster. Brown, Carolyn. 1968. “On Chance.” Ballet Review 2.2: 7–25.

26  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces. London and New York: Routledge. Bury, Louis. 2015. Exercises in Criticism: The Theory and Practice of Literary Con‑ straint. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Caplan, Marc. 2020. “Double or Nothing: Jewish Speech and Silence in Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance.” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (June). https://ingeveb.org/articles/double‑or‑nothing‑jewish‑speech‑and‑silence‑in‑georges ‑perecs‑w‑ou‑le‑souvenir‑denfance Claid, Emilyn. 2006. Yes? No! Maybe…: Seductive Ambiguity in Dance. London and New York: Routledge. Cohen, Joshua. 2009. “Word Play: What the French Novelist Georges Perec Owed to the Kabbalistic Tradition.” Tablet: October 29. https://www.tabletmag.com/ sections/arts‑letters/articles/word‑play Cohen, Marshall and Roger Copeland.  1983. What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Contact Quarterly Dance & Improvisation Journal. 1975  –  present. Periodical. Northampton, MA. https://contactquarterly.com Debord, Guy. 1958 [1956]. “Theory of the Dérive.” Translated by Ken Knabb. Situ‑ ationist International Online. Originally printed in Les Lèvres Nues # 9 (Novem‑ ber 1956); reprinted in Internationale Situationniste # 2 (December 1958). https:// www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html DeFrantz, Thomas F. 2004. Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of Afri‑ can American Culture. London: Oxford University Press. DeFrantz, Thomas F. 2012. “The Complex Path to 21st Century Black Live Art.” In Parallels: Danspace Project Platforms 2012. New York: Danspace Project. Elkin, Lauren and Scott Esposito. 2013. The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement. Winchester, UK and Washington, DC: Zero Books. Ferrando, Francesca.  2020. Philosophical Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Forsdick, Charles, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips, eds. 2019. Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces. London: UCL Press. Forti, Simone. 2015. Thinking with the Body. Edited by Sabine Breitwieser. Munich: Hirmer Publishers. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. 1996 [1987]. Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Graham, Martha. 1991. Blood Memory: An Autobiography. New York: Washington Square Press. Gutierrez, Miguel. 2018. “Does Abstraction Belong to White People?” Bomb Maga‑ zine: November 7. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/miguel‑gutierrez‑1/ Halprin, Anna. 1995. Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance. Edited by Rachel Kaplan. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press/Univer‑ sity Press of New England. Hay, Deborah. 1996. Personal interview. August 4. Highmore, Ben. 2015 [2014]. “I Make Love to the Days: Accounting for On Ka‑ wara.” In On Kawara: Silence, edited by Jeffrey S. Weiss and Anne Wheeler. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications: 205–209. Highmore, Ben. 2017. “Georges Perec and the Significance of the Insignificant.” In The Afterlives of Georges Perec, edited by Rowan Wilken and Justin Clemens. Ed‑ inburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 105–119.

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  27 Hirsch, Marianne. 2008. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today: Inter‑ national Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication 29.1: 103–128. Hunter, Victoria, ed.  2015. Moving Sites: Investigating Site‑Specific Dance Perfor‑ mance. London: Routledge. Hunter, Victoria. 2018. “Dance.” In New Materialism: How Matter Comes to Mat‑ ter: Almanac. https://newmaterialism.eu Hunter, Victoria. 2021. Site, Dance and Body: Movement, Materials and Corporeal Engagement. London: Palgrave. Hussie‑Taylor, Judy, Jenn Joy, and Lydia Bell, eds.  2012. JUDSONOW: Danspace Project Platforms 2012. New York: Danspace Project. Ivry, Benjamin. 2010. “A Renaissance for Belleville’s Georges Perec, Master of the Lipo‑ gram.” Forward: May 12 and 21. https://forward.com/culture/127939/a‑renaissan ce‑for‑belleville‑s‑georges‑perec‑mas/ James, Alison. 2009. Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Johnston, Jill. 1959–1981. Village Voice. Newspaper. Dance Reviews, Historical and Critical Writing. New York City. Jowitt, Deborah. 1988. Time and the Dancing Image. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. Jowitt, Deborah. 1967–2011. The Village Voice. Newspaper. Dance Reviews, Histori‑ cal and Critical Writing. New York City. Kant, Marion. 2018. “Then in What Sense are You Jewish? Portrait of the Artist as a Jew.” Keynote speech at Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World Conference, October 15, Arizona State University. Kant, Marion. 2019. “Then in What Sense are You Jewish?” Dance Today 36 (Sep‑ tember): 7–10. Kaprow, Allan. 1993. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Kemp, Anna. 2021. Life as Creative Constraint: Autobiography and the Oulipo. Liv‑ erpool: Liverpool University Press. Kincaid, James R. 1995. “Read My Lipograms.” New York Times Section 7: 3 (March 12). https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/12/books/read‑my‑lipograms.html Kloetzel, Melanie and Carolyn Pavlik, eds. 2009. Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Performative Spaces. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Kostelanetz, Richard. 1993. Dictionary of the Avant‑Gardes. Chicago, IL and Pen‑ nington, NJ: Chicago Review Press, Inc./a cappella books. Kozel, Susan. 2009. Video. “Susan Kozel: Across Bodies and Systems, New York.” YouTube: August 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8FsjeDUcnQ Kritzman, Lawrence. 2005. “Remembrance of Things Past: Trauma and Mourning in Perec’s W, ou le souvenir d’enfance.” Journal of European Studies 35.2 (June): 187–200. Leong, Michael. 2015. “Rats Build Their Labyrinth: Oulipo in the 21st Century.” Hy‑ perallergic: May 17. https://hyperallergic.com/206802/rats‑build‑their‑labyrinth‑ oulipo‑in‑the‑21st‑century/ Levin Becker, Daniel. 2012. Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Malnig, Julie. 2023. Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock ‘n’ Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press.

28  Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction Mauss, Marcel. 2006. “Techniques of the Body.” In Techniques, Technology and Civi‑ lisation: Marcel Mauss. Edited and introduced by Nathan Schlanger. New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books. Essay originally published in 1935: 77–95. Merleau‑Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Originally pub‑ lished in 1945. Motte, Warren F. 1984. The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges Perec. Lexington, KY: French Forum, Publishers. Motte, Warren F., ed. 1998 [1986]. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Nor‑ mal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, Illinois State University (1998); Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (1986). Narváez, Rafael. 2013. Embodied Collective Memory: The Making and Unmaking of Human Nature. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Noland, Carrie. 2020. Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary. Chicago, IL: Univer‑ sity of Chicago Press. Novack, Cynthia J. [Also known as Cynthia Jean Cohen‑Bull]. 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison: University of Wis‑ consin Press. O’Brien, John, Martin Riker, Irving Malin, and Jeremy M. Davies, eds. 2009 [1993]. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 29.1: Spring 2009 and 13.1: Spring 1993. Georges Perec Issue. Funks Grove, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. O’Connor, Tere. 2021. “Tere O’Connor in Conversation with Rashaun Mitchell.” Interview. Danspace Project, New York City: June 28. www.danspaceproject.org Olsen, Andrea. 2002. Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Ørum, Tania. 2006. “Georges Perec and the Avant‑Garde in the Visual Arts.” Textual Practice 20.2: 319–332. Parfitt, Clare, ed. 2021. Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remem‑ ber, Dancing to Forget. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Paxton, Steve. 2018. Gravity. Brussels: Contredanse Editions. Perec, Georges. 1987. Life A User’s Manual (La Vie mode d’emploi). Translated by Da‑ vid Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Publisher. Originally published in 1978. Perec, Georges. 1995. A Void (La Disparition). Translated by Gilbert Adair. London: The Harvill Press. Originally published in 1969. Perec, Georges. 1999a [1974]. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and trans‑ lated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Penguin Books. Perec, Georges. 1999b [1974]. Species of Spaces (Espèces d’espaces). In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Penguin Books: 1–96. Perec, Georges. 2004a. The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex. (Les Revenentes). In Three By Perec, translated by Ian Monk, introductions by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine, Publisher. The Exeter Text was first published in 1972: 55–120. Perec, Georges. 2004b. Three by Perec: Which Moped with Chrome‑Plated Handle‑ bars at the Back of the Yard? The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex; A Gallery Por‑ trait. Translated by Ian Monk. Introductions by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine, Publisher. Perron, Wendy. 2020. The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction  29 Rainer, Yvonne. 1974. Work 1961–1973. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia Col‑ lege of Art and Design. New York: New York University Press. Rainer, Yvonne, Emily Coates, and Nick Mauss. 2023. Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019. Performa, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and Lenz Press. Rethorst, Susan. 2012. A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings. Hel‑ sinki: Theatre Academy Helsinki, Department of Dance, Kinesis 2. Sanouillet, Michel and Elmer Peterson, eds. 1975. The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp. London, Thames and Hudson: 138–140. Satin, Leslie. 2003. “James Waring and the Judson Dance Theater: Influences, Inter‑ sections, and Divergences.” In Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible, edited by Sally Banes, assisted by Andrea Harris. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press: 51–80. Satin, Leslie. 2015. “Dancing in Place: Exhaustion, Embodiment, and Perec.” Dance Research Journal 47.3 (December): 85–104. Satin, Leslie. 2017. “Georges Perec and On Kawara: Endotic Extravagance in Litera‑ ture, Art, and Dance.” Literary Geographies 3.1: 50–68. Satin, Leslie. 2019. “Embodiment and Everyday Space: Dancing with Georges Perec.” In Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces, ed‑ ited by Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips. London, UCL Press: 154–169. Satin, Leslie. 2021. “Mother Tongue: Dance and Memory, an Autobiographical Ex‑ cavation.” In Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remember, Danc‑ ing to Forget, edited by Clare Parfitt. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan: 243–258. Sennett, Richard. 1994. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civiliza‑ tion. London: Faber and Faber. Steinman, Louise. 1995 [1986]. The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Con‑ temporary Performance. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC and London: Duke Univer‑ sity Press. Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 445–453. Stone, Dan. 2000. “Grasping What Isn’t Shown: Georges Perec, Ellis Island, and ­Jewishness.” The Jewish Quarterly 47.2 (Summer): 37–40. Tuan, Yi‑Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tufnell, Miranda and Chris Crickmay. 2023 [1990, 2014]. Body Space Image: Notes towards Improvisation and Performance. Dorset: Triarchy Press (Previously pub‑ lished by Dance Books Ltd. in Hampshire, UK). Van Der Kolk, Bessel. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books. Van Dijck, José. 2007. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wilken, Rowan and Justin Clemens, eds. 2017. The Afterlives of Georges Perec. ­Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Youssef, Nagy A., Laura Lockwood, Shaoyong Su, Guang Hao, and Bart P.F. Rutten. (2018). “The Effects of Trauma, with or without PTSD, on the Transgenerational DNA Methylation Alterations in Human Offsprings.” Brain Sciences 8.5 (May 8). https://www.mdpi.com/2076‑3425/8/5/83

2 George Perec’s Radical Fractures Engaging Autobiography

The disturbing words in this chapter’s title, “radical fractures,” are borrowed from Georges Perec. He used the term, unsurprisingly, in reflecting on his ex‑ periences of visiting Ellis Island: the reception center through which millions of emigrants and refugees poured into New York City from their various sites and circumstances of origin, disruption, and displacement, from 1892 to 1954. Perec’s visits, first in 1978, then in 1979, were prompted by his co‑creation with French filmmaker Robert Bober of a film, Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir / Ellis Island Revisited: Tales of Va‑ grancy and Hope (Perec and Bober 1980), and a book, Ellis Island, about this site (Perec with Bober 1995). Perec described the site and his experiences in a brief 1979 essay, “Ellis Island: Description of a Project” (which over‑ laps with material in the book) as “nothing other than a factory for making Americans, for turning emigrants into immigrants, an American‑style fac‑ tory, as quick and efficient as a Chicago pork‑butcher’s” (Perec 1999a: 135). Perec’s use of this last phrase, of course, is charged, given its naming of the food most potently at odds with kashrut—Jewish dietary practices—as well as its evocation of brusque death‑dealing, to people as to pigs. Perec went further with his critique: He asserted that the “reception center” switched gears, and eventually kept those emblematic freedom‑seekers, “the ‘wretched refuse’ and ‘huddled masses’” immortalized in the words of poet Emma La‑ zarus and set into the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, “from entering the United States.” And finally, when hopeful arrivals presented faulty documen‑ tation or were seen as potentially dangerous to America and its values, Ellis Island became, he wrote, “a detention center” and “a prison” (134–135). Charged Sites, Charged Bodies: Loss, Jewishness, and Writing Identity In “Ellis Island,” Perec uses the site itself and its contentious history as a starting point from which to articulate the breadth of his feelings and ques‑ tions about his own personal and family history, and about his own iden‑ tity, especially his Jewish identity. Having the physical experience of being in the place most intensely charged with the ruptures and upheavals of others also cast from their lives might, he thought, shift the terms of his search for DOI: 10.4324/9781003143741-2

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  31 meaning in his origins, especially regarding the instability of his Frenchness and Jewishness, as they intersected with the literal and metaphoric behemoth of Ellis Island itself. What he sought there, he writes, was the actual image of this point of no return, the consciousness of this radical fracture. What I wanted to interrogate, to throw into question, to test, were my own roots in this non‑place, this absence, this fissure, on which any such quest for the trace, the word, the Other is based. (137) Perec’s roots, however complex and unfathomable, irrevocably refer to his childhood tragedy. He was orphaned as a small child: Both of his Polish‑born Jewish parents, living in France, were killed by the German onslaught of the war and the Holocaust. Until he died, Perec was enmeshed in the act of griev‑ ing, of continuously working through these losses and upheavals. His life was framed by his Jewishness in the most brutal ways, even, as here, in spatial terms, in the relegation of Ellis Island to being “the place of the absence of place” (136), a corridor of in‑betweenness framed at entrance and exit by despair and denial. Yet this Jewishness was a pervasive mystery to him: I don’t know exactly what being a Jew means…. It’s not a sign of be‑ longing, not linked to a belief, a religion, a praxis, a culture, a folklore, a history, a destiny, a language. It is an absence, rather, a question … designated as a Jew, and therefore as a victim, and of owing my life simply to chance and to exile. (136) Not only was being Jewish a matter of not knowing, it was defined by what it was not. What it was, was a gap, or a weighted name. Philippe Zard speaks of the “Jewish ghosts” populating Perec’s writing (in Ivry 2010). Perec pointedly uses the term “radical fracture” to represent the singular division of himself from his own history. My use here of the plural is a way of opening up that division both to its myriad effects on Perec’s life, work, and consciousness, and to the implications for our thinking, decades later, about how his explorations of history, memory, bodies, writing, identity, and expe‑ rience matter to us. Perec created an archive of variously actual and fictional self‑portraits: flirtations with definitions and enactments of autobiography, and not‑quite‑autobiographies and beyond‑autobiographies, in the forms of novels, memoirs, essays, films, and more. While these are mostly composed in language, there are recurrent evocations of painted self‑portraits and mys‑ terious visual images, through and into which he invented and inserted him‑ self. And there are many silences and secrets embedded within and between words: games, scores, and pictures evincing and evading the twinned and entwined elements of absence and loss.

32  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography “Radical fractures” evokes intensity, even violence, the disruption of something once assumed to be irrevocably whole. It suggests the undoing, the terrible loss, of essential phenomena: in particular, of bodily integrity and personal identity. Critically, it reflects Perec’s sense of himself as grounded in the absence which haunts so much of his work. Perec, writes his biographer and translator David Bellos, “made gap or absence the constitutive device of all his writing”; moreover, he writes, Perec’s writing “is explicitly built on nothing, on the absence that lies at the heart of language, and which is the truest expression of the self” (Bellos 2009: 18). Given the prominence of autobiographical presence, however literal or mysterious, in Perec’s work, this distance from “the truest expression” weaves through his words with the same insistence with which it imprints his clues. This perspective is resonant just in the extremeness of what Perec lost. But it is significant, too, in considering the unspeakable: what cannot or may not be said, what is not translatable or reduceable through the codes and systems of language. This is also, of course, a phenomenon integral to many defini‑ tions and experiences of dance, even given abundant contemporary choreo‑ graphic pairings of movement with speech and language. And it is significant in dance’s embodiment of wordless expression, joining past and present in the moment of performance. Absence and loss, as both theme and structure, prevail across Perec’s oeuvre. His 1969 novel La Disparition (A Void)—its French title simultane‑ ously signifying disappearance and death, its English one signaling empti‑ ness, evasion, and of course, avoidance—is an enactment of absence and a potent example of Perec’s language‑play. Its missing “e” makes it a lipo‑ gram, in this instance omitting the most‑used letter of both the book’s origi‑ nal French and this English translation. On one level, the book is a clever, entertaining read, a meta‑narrative about missing person Anton Vowl, whose surname announces the loaded, albeit absent, letter.1 But as many scholars have noted, the “disappearance” of the “e” stood in both for Perec’s own losses and for the enormous circumstance of loss in which they figured, the “disappearance” of Europe’s Jews. No “e”—the letter in French pronounced like the word “eux,” meaning “them”—meant no mère (mother), no père (father), no je (I), no famille (family). It meant, even, no Georges Perec: an acknowledgment of his name, and thus he, not being truly French, not truly representable except as a sign of his absence from his own autobiography. In‑ deed, A Void reminds readers throughout of its autobiographical status, not only through Perec’s textual virtuosity but also through the travails of Vowl, which echo those of his creator, his absence, his disappearance recalling that creator’s central “void.”2 A Void and its radical absences vividly embody Perec’s received and en‑ forced identities; the book also exemplifies his radical formal experiments. In 1967, Perec joined the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle/Workshop for Po‑ tential Literature (from here on, Oulipo), the group of writers and mathema‑ ticians founded in Paris in 1960 and devoted to conceiving and creating new,

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  33 or “potential,” literature. Much of their work, including Perec’s, was driven by formal “constraints” (such as the lipogram), Oulipo’s term for strategies specifying and narrowing a writer’s options, and, thus, opening the possibili‑ ties for composition. It is possible to read A Void without noting the significance of the missing letter beyond its compositional role, or, for that matter, without recogniz‑ ing the compositional throughline itself. But as Perec/Oulipo scholar Warren Motte has observed, Perec’s assiduously omitted “e” is “the literal enfigure‑ ment of [Perec’s] parents” (emphasis in the original). Its absence, he writes, “is the one essential and inescapable reality” of the book, as his parents’ absence is the “essential and inescapable reality” of Perec’s life. Noting, like Bellos, the vital element of what is omitted, he writes, “The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence” (Motte 2004: 66–67). Perec’s Autobiographies: Recalling, Recasting, Resisting Perec’s personal and literary histories weave through each other. His life (by any definition radically fractured) underlies his writing, which is suffused with autobiography as exploration, as framing and reframing, as repeatedly picking at old wounds and opening new ones, as simultaneously and sequen‑ tially offering himself to readers and retreating from them. Perec considered autobiography to be one of his work’s four major areas, as he acknowledged in his 1978 “Statement of Intent” (in Perec 2009). But his autobiographical representations were regularly invented, sculpted, revised, and revived: mod‑ els of resistance to the genre. Perec’s resistance was not a matter of refusing to identify the names or events populating his life; in fact, he prolifically embedded them in his writ‑ ing. However, he insistently held back from a “straight” telling, even in those pieces which seemed to do just that. This is particularly clear in W or the Memory of Childhood (W, from here on), Perec’s shattering 1975 double novel.3 One of its two interwoven parts is an autobiographical (if complexly unreliable) telling of his early life; the other is an increasingly horrific tale, first devised by Perec at age thirteen, of a competitive sports center gradually revealed to be a concentration camp. Perec draws readers into an insistently mobile telling of his own life stories, in which details are refuted within a text or differ from piece to piece, camouflage and revelation blur, and the author maintains a fluid directorial presence.4 His acts of resistance to traditional autobiography produce an autobiography defined by resistance. Moreover, as Motte argues, Perec’s multiple retellings and omissions con‑ stitute his repeated and reshaped mourning of his parents. That is, rather than simply express his sadness and loss, he recasts it through his “work of mourning”: both the act of writing and its product (2004). Perec constructs increasingly dense patterns, telling tales from different points of view, thread‑ ing through them invitations and challenges to read actively, connecting the dots both within individual pieces and across them.

34  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography An introduction to even an abbreviated version of Perec’s biography is in‑ herently an introduction to the central position of loss in his writing and his life. Following the stability of his early childhood, his experiences of losing his mother and father, above all, amid the context of the Holocaust are, for many of us, unimaginable. Harry Mathews, Perec’s close friend and Ameri‑ can Oulipian colleague, extends this sense of loss, which “is what is now most vivid about him,” to the experience of the reader seeking, in vain, to locate him in his words: “You will not find him,” he cautions, “but you will find what it is that struck him out of night, and you with him” (Mathews 2009: 9). Admittedly as just such a wishful reader, I look here at these losses and consider some of the ways they are reflected in his work. That they are reflected there is acknowledged by Perec fairly early in W. In a single passage, he demonstrates both the elusiveness of his own whole‑ ness and the pervasiveness of the sense of loss which defined him to which Mathews refers. Indeed, he duplicates Mathews’s warning to readers that they will not “find” Perec: neither will Perec find, nor will he revive, his mother and father, however extensively he invents and engages in the pro‑ cesses of (re)producing them in language. Because of the vividness of Perec’s perspective, its intensity of emotion and eloquence of language, I quote from and engage with this passage here. Following pages of biographical facts and personal memories of his parents, originally written fifteen years before and here amended and revised, Perec states: I possess other pieces of information about my parents; I know they will not help me to say what I would like to say about them. … [W]hether I added true or false details of greater precision,… whether I gave free rein to my fantasies or elaborated more fictions, whether … I have made any advances in the practice of writing, … I would manage nothing more than a reiteration of the same story, lead‑ ing nowhere. (41) Nowhere, that is, but to the impossibility of saying what insists on remain‑ ing unsaid, of fully representing his past or his parents, as they were, as they occupy him, however he uses his literary skills to manipulate the “details” of what he knows to create portraits and self‑portraits. His challenge is not just lodged in locating the right language; it is in the inherent merging of writing and remembering (42). This inadequacy of language to express what was central to him, instead endlessly mining his own compositional and expressive options and recreat‑ ing his own narrative loop, raises darker resonances. His addressing of his own life echoes his personal history and the collective history of mass murder with which it was enmeshed:

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  35 I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing; I do not know if what I might have to say is unsaid because it is unsayable (the unsayable is not buried inside writing, it is what prompted it in the first place); I know that what I say is blank, is neu‑ tral, is a sign, once and for all, of a once‑and‑for‑all annihilation. (42) Finally, Perec writes of the conjoined limits and powers of his narrative ef‑ forts. However much he writes, however he repeats, rewords, reconfigures his memories and longings, he will not bring his memories, his parents, or his world as it could have been to life; he will not undo their absence. But he will make something, the work itself, described here as having its own live presence: at once the markings and the markers of his hand, the innumerable bits of ink on paper expressing what cannot be said but must be said. Writing is what he did, who he was, his perpetuation of the life he had briefly known when he lived with these parents, his body and theirs in the little apartment: [A]ll I shall ever find in my very reiteration is the final refraction of a voice that is absent from writing, the scandal of their silence and of mine. I am not writing in order to say that I shall say nothing, I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say.… I write because we lived to‑ gether, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shad‑ ows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life. (42) Perec and Cage: Encounters with “Nothing”

When I read those words of Perec, I feel as if I’ve been punched in the chest. But I am also struck by both their similarity to and distance from other words, written and spoken by composer John Cage, whose serene young face looks out over my computer from a small, framed photograph. “I have noth‑ ing to say, and I am saying it and that is poetry,” he said in his “Lecture on Nothing” in 1950, when he was avidly rethinking music and sound: as aural experience, compositional practice, and articulation of the score itself (Cage 1950: 109). The “silence” that is the title of the book in which “Lecture on Nothing” appears is the critical center of Cage’s questioning, most famously illustrated in his 1952 4’33”: the silence heard round the musical world as the audience heard “only” the myriad sounds of the environment while the pianist sat, still, not touching the keys, during the three movements scored, for silence, for the eponymous period of time. There was, for Cage, no such thing as silence—the title of music scholar/composer Kyle Gann’s 2010 re‑ flection on Cage’s work—but its ideal, nonetheless, was a sacred opportunity

36  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography to hear sounds, and noise, unhindered, unframed by aesthetic or structural expectation. His words about having nothing to say and his experience of that state as free, or untethered, and buoyed, perhaps, by his sense of having been “gifted with a sunny disposition” (Cage 1963: x) together suggest Cage’s Zen Buddhist perspective and a quiet joy, full of presentness and promise. I don’t want to overstate the juncture of these perspectives. Cage had a less obviously traumatic life than did Perec, and their aesthetic beliefs were at a distance. Nonetheless, I see an overlap in their encounters with “nothing”; for both, this engagement meant action: writing as a way into and through experience. Perec was only fourteen years old when Cage wrote his statement on having nothing to say, and highly unlikely to have encountered it then. It is certainly possible, though, that he came to know about the composer and his work as an adult—and vice versa. Both artists were prolifically articu‑ late about their ideas and processes and attuned to the complexities of their inner lives. Perec, clearly, did not experience himself as “sunny,” though there are certainly elements of lightness or silliness in many of his characterizations of himself or his literary stand‑ins. Still, Bellos characterizes him as “a des‑ perately unhappy child” (1999: 68) who would later guiltily repeat, “Je suis un mauvais fils”: “I am a bad son” (151).5 Perec was often depicted as awk‑ ward, or a misfit, however brilliant and clever. He was social, though, and didn’t shy away from parties and card games, buoyed by booze and social interaction. Cage’s expression of “having nothing to say” was located in the present and looked to the future. He referred to both the text of his lecture and the experience of the music he would discover in the act of composing it. Perec’s “not saying anything” was laden with grief and emptiness and the unresolv‑ able need to engage with his insistently present past. A Short (Annotated) Life of Georges Perec What follows is primarily about Perec’s early life and the political and family circumstances that so profoundly affected it. Variously loving and traumatic, these formative years set up Perec’s ways of being in the world for the rest of his days. I urge readers to go to David Bellos’s exhaustive and compassionate Georges Perec: A Life in Words for a more substantial recounting of Perec’s life (1999).6 Georges Perec was born on March 7, 1936 in Paris. That his sense of identity, especially Jewish identity, was inextricably bound up with the world into which he was born is stated early in W: “For years I thought that Hitler had marched into Poland on 7 March, 1936.” His revision, or enhancement of this “story [that] had already begun…for me and for all my people” follows: a long list culled from that day’s Le Temps of its main announcements, mostly of international upheaval but including sports, cars, cosmetics, and movies: “German troops enter the Rhineland DMZ. …

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  37 Kosher slaughtering banned in Poland… Advertised to open on Friday 13 March: Modern Times, by Charlie Chaplin” (Perec 1988 [1975]: 19–21). Perec spent his early years, until 1942, in the apartments of his parents and grandparents on Rue Vilin (24 and 1), in the largely Jewish and Eastern European immigrant neighborhood of Belleville, in the 20th Arrondissement. Bellos describes it as resembling Jewish ghettos in Poland, with its “Yiddish newspapers, bearded men in top hats and black coats … .a shtetl‑sur‑Seine” (1999: 30). It was poor and crowded, its residents squeezed into tiny apart‑ ments on streets which would be lost after the War to what came to be called “urban planning,” or the joint displacement of residents and phasing out of a district’s historical markers. * Beginning in 1969, Perec would closely document this gradual demolition of his street in Lieux [Places], an intricately structured project he worked on un‑ til 1975 but never completed, in which he regularly visited and wrote about twelve Paris sites, his texts joining description and memory.7 His efforts to characterize Rue Vilin, in a neighborhood long dismissed as an ilot insalubre, or “unhealthy block,” were prompted by knowledge of its impending de‑ struction [Whitney 2011]. Lieux is an example of Perec’s attachment to the streets and houses of his early life and to his seeing and writing about his life in spatial terms. Many years after Lieux and under‑informed about Belleville’s more re‑ cent changes, I searched in vain for Perec’s childhood homes on Rue Vilin. I had come to Paris to dance in front of the house where Perec had spent his early years, a posthumous homage. My beloved friend, choreographer Sally Gross, had coached me, reminding me to dance the piece softly, from the heart, because it was a gift. And so it was. But the house had disappeared, so I couldn’t perform my dance in situ. And Sally died soon after, her words a gift to me. * Georges’s young Polish Jewish parents had fled Poland and come to France with their families. Not much is known about his mother’s, Cyrla Szulewicz’s, early life or her family, only that they came to Paris before the Peretz family, who would become the Perecs, and that Cyrla, her parents, and siblings lived at 1 Rue Vilin. Cyrla, known in Yiddish as Tzirela, was born in 1913; she was known in France as Cécile. There is scant information about her mother, Laja; we know about Cyrla’s father, Aaron, only that he was identified in one docu‑ ment as a traveling street vendor, probably of produce. Cyrla’s sister, Fanny, was only ten years old when Georges was born; she became his nanny and companion, traveling with him regularly between Belleville and Passy, where his wealthier aunt Esther (Perec’s father’s older sister) and her family lived. That we know so little of the Szulewicz family is not unusual, in that so many victims of forced emigration and genocide are separated from or

38  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography never had access to official documentation, or that the documentation was destroyed. But the lack of information is especially potent here regarding Perec’s construction of his history. In a genealogical project begun in 1967 and periodically updated, Perec created a textual and graphic family tree, in which only the Peretz branch is represented. Bellos points out that Perec could have found certain information easily but did not do so. For whatever reasons, he never pursued existing members of the Szulevicz family: “He simply did not want to know” (Bellos 1999: 364–368). Considerably more is known about the Perec/Peretz side of the family. David and Rose Peretz (born Sura Rojza Walersztejn) and their children Léon (born Lejzor), Esther (born Chaja Esther), and Icek, who would become Georges’ father, left Poland and its anti‑Jewish aggressions between 1918 and 1929. Icek Judko Perec was born in 1909; he came to France, where he was known variously as Issek and Isie Perec, and sometimes as André, prob‑ ably in late 1927. The family first went from Lubartów, nearly all of whose Jewish residents would be exterminated, to Palawy. Icek was born here and was raised largely by his thirteen‑years‑older sister, Esther. From there, the family went to Lub‑ lin, where Icek attended school until 1925, from which Lejzor found his way to Palestine, and where Esther met and married David Bienenfeld, a medical student, an Austrian Army medical auxiliary and Galician/Polish Jew. Georges’s grandfather David Peretz was devout, a possibly Hasidic‑ influenced Jew and grand‑nephew of the great Polish‑Yiddish writer, Isaak Leib Peretz. In a kind of prelude to Georges’ later conflicts about his Jewish identity, David Peretz’s religious inclinations were banned early on from his own home by Rose, his young and industrious wife, who became the family wage‑earner. David Bienenfeld further complicated the family picture of Jew‑ ishness: he didn’t even speak Yiddish. Even so, as he was Jewish and Polish, he was banned from practicing medicine in Poland. Instead, he, Esther, and baby Bianca headed to Paris, where he had a pearl‑trader job waiting for him, and where Esther abandoned her Jewish life, claiming that she “forgot” how to speak Polish. Years later, she would tell her nephew Georges that the experience had been arduous, “that one lifetime was not enough to travel ‘from the ghetto to the light’” (Bellos 1999: 16–17). All the members of their families had come to Paris before 1930. We know that both Icek and Cyrla Perec learned to speak excellent French, and that she was trained as a hairdresser; she opened a shop at 24 Rue Vilin, the same building where after their marriage on August 30, 1934 they shared an apartment with Icek’s parents. Bellos writes that she “was not a strik‑ ing young woman …in looks or in character” (1999: 32). About Icek, we have descriptions such as “handsome” and “happy‑go‑lucky,” and a “poet” (whether that was meant literally is unclear); he left school early—there was no choice, given his Jewishness—and went on to become a worker, officially a “caster.” He never applied for naturalization.

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  39 He did, though, five months after Georges was born, take the steps to have his son registered as French. He went to the local justice of the peace “to de‑ clare before witnesses that his son, having been born in France, was of French nationality”; that is, as his papers would forever state, Georges Perec was “Français par déclaration, fils d’étrangers”: French by declaration, son of foreigners (Bellos 1999: 34). This official distinction from being French in the sense of being born in France to French parents was generally not significant in Perec’s life; it would, though, later commit him to serving in the French military. And as passages from “Ellis Island” and W quoted earlier indicate, every nuance of externally imposed difference and isolation in Perec’s life contributed to the fragility of his identity. Another aspect of this fragility resides, as it does for many immigrants, in his family name. “Perec” has been the subject of considerable attention. Briefly, the original spelling was Peretz, and according to Bellos, the name was not intentionally ruined, just “changed, automatically [from its] Polish spelling into French” (1999: 4). Nonetheless, the name is neither fully French nor fully not French, and its shaky national status was one of the many fac‑ tors that would come to complicate Georges Perec’s sense of identity, both as he experienced it and as it was viewed by others.8 In “Ellis Island,” Perec links his not‑quite‑Frenchness directly to his Jewish identity, finding at this place where refugees confronted chaos and desperation “something…at the limits of the sayable…which for me is very intimately and confusedly linked to the actual fact of being a Jew” (1999b: 136). “At the limits of the sayable” is another reminder of dance’s location at the border of language, where the dancer’s embodied self and self‑representation merge, where the dancer’s body recalls or imagines. * In the Queens neighborhood where I grew up, there were several synagogues and two Catholic churches. The Catholic kids went to parochial school. There were very few Protestants, who seemed quite exotic to me; I still remember the names of my Protestant elementary school classmates, including the sin‑ gle Black student. (Ironically, this neighborhood is now duly celebrated for its diversity.) I also remember the names that sounded gentile, nestled among the Cohens and the Rosenfelds—Smith, Sanders, Powell, Blaine—which “we” all understood to be Jewish. (My own father’s family name, which I use, was changed from Sattel to Satin, probably at Ellis Island; its unlikely long‑“a” pronunciation was my father’s and uncle’s doing, not an official act.) And I remember the teacher who left school one Friday afternoon as, say, Mr. Rabinowitz, and returned Monday morning as Mr. Robbins. * Little Georges—Jojo—spent his earliest years in what appears to have been a warm and nurturing environment. The German Occupation would be

40  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography coming soon, but the toddler was surrounded in his little world by doting and adoring parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Jojo’s life was one in which a sense of Jewishness, though not necessarily Judaism, was pervasive. Members of the family learned to speak French on a scale from adequate to fluent, and some of them continued to speak Polish, but the predominant language was Yiddish. Jojo may have learned to speak it; he certainly understood it, knew its sounds and rhythms and cadences. When he first learned to read, possibly at three or four years old, he began— possibly—with Hebrew letters. In W, he recalls a memory hinging on these letters, in which he was three, sitting within his “family circle warm, protective, loving,” with Yiddish newspapers around him. “Everyone is in raptures” because he has identified and named a Hebrew character. On W’s page is a drawing of this letter, which like other renderings of Hebrew letters in his work and the “memory” itself, is imperfect. Perec says as much, acknowledging his inventions and revisions (Perec 1988: 13–14). The warmth of the family home and neighborhood was dramatically al‑ tered, and Jojo’s life as he had known it was inexorably shattered, by the gradual takeover of Eastern Europe by the Nazis, moving into Poland in 1939, and, in response, France’s and England’s declaration of war on Germany. Icek, a Polish national, could not join the French army, but he en‑ listed, apparently with family support for his decision, in the army’s foreign legion when the War began. His foreign and volunteer regiment, it appears, was poorly assisted by French “comrades.” On June 15, 1940, he was shot in battle and brought to a field hospital. Insufficiently cared for, he died there the next day, not yet thirty‑one years old. It was only days before the Armi‑ stice, signed June 22 by France, Germany, and Italy following the German capture of Paris on June 21. Georges was only four years old. It is impossible to know how this small child felt, what he thought in response to his father’s death; certainly, his mix of emotions would have been inarticulable. However unremarkable Cyrla might have appeared, she did what she could for as long as possible to keep her child safe. When it became clear that she could no longer do that, she brought her little son to the Gare de Lyon in the fall of 1941 and put him on a train: a convoy organized by the CRF, the French Red Cross, which carried war orphans and other children out of the occupied zone.9 Perec wrote about this experience several times, most directly and dramatically in W. Again, we don’t know how he felt. But certainly, the experience of being sent away, even to family he loved, by his only remaining parent, must have at least in part been terrifying, whether or not he had any awareness that he might never see his mother again. Jojo was met on the other side in Grenoble, in the French Alps, by his aunt and uncle, the Bienenfelds: Icek’s sister Esther and her husband David. They had escaped with one of their daughters from Paris to Villard‑de‑Lans, near Grenoble, in fall 1941, and would now take Jojo into their family, officially adopting him in 1945. He went first to a nursery school, then to a Catholic

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  41 boarding school, Collège Turenne. It was made clear to him that he needed to “forget” that he was Jewish, to forget everything about his life that made him Jewish; we know that he spent the rest of his life burrowing into this mix of memory and its repression. Georges spent three years of his adolescence at a boarding school in Et‑ ampes, a town south of Paris. For the most part, though, “home” for many years would be chez Bienenfeld, whether in the Alps or, later, in Paris, and Georges grew up with his cousins and other relatives and friends. Cyrla, who tried unsuccessfully to escape Paris in 1942, was arrested on January 23, 1943, along with her father, Aaron, and her sister Fanny. Her father‑in‑law, David Peretz, was arrested as well. For unknown reasons, his wife, Rose, was not taken away; she would rejoin her grandson Georges and the rest of the surviving family in Villard‑de‑Lans in spring or summer of 1943. Cyrla was first taken to Drancy, a holding camp, where she re‑ mained for several weeks. On February 11, she was taken on a cattle‑truck and then to Auschwitz. There, she “disappeared” from the records, leaving open the question of exactly where and when she died, though it was presum‑ ably in February 1943. David Peretz, Aaron Szulevicz, and Fanny Szulevicz would also die. * That Georges Perec was brilliant was, it seems, evident from early on; that he was rather an odd duck academically as well as socially was apparent as well. His scholarly history was spotty; he eventually attended the Sor‑ bonne, where he studied sociology, but he never completed a degree, either there or anywhere else. Nonetheless, he formed long‑lasting attachments to his fellow students and to professors, especially his philosophy teacher, Jean Duvignaud. He also was engaged with a broad span of European and North African writers, artists, and political activists, with whom he created several literary and political journals and, more generally, a community of friends and like‑minded thinkers. Perec would live nearly all his life in Paris. He did, though, spend stretches away. For one, he spent considerable time at writers’ retreats; foremost among these was Moulin d’Andé, in Normandy, where he wrote several of his major works during a five‑year period. He also visited other rural spots to focus on his projects, as well as to develop his relationships with other artist residents. Another period away, an unusual departure from the arc of his life, was Perec’s service as a parachutist in the French army for just short of two years, 1958–1959. He was assigned to a regiment of the Chasseurs Parachutistes, having, importantly, been excused from fighting in Algeria because his father had died in battle for France. Perec, daredevilry‑averse, was not a fine physi‑ cal specimen, and the activities he was expected to participate in were a phys‑ ical and psychological struggle. He was, reasonably enough, terrified. He managed to transcend his fear, even finding “ineffable joy” in jumping, and

42  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography he became more fit and muscular (Bellos 1999: 187). He used his available time to read across a broad swath of literature, to listen to Thelonious Monk, Bach, and Vivaldi, and, importantly and prolifically, to write. Perec spent almost twenty years (1961–1978), back in Paris, as a scientific archivist, or un documentaliste, at the Centre National de la Recherche Sci‑ entifique (Laboratoire de Physiologie). It paid poorly and took up a signifi‑ cant amount of his time, but it was in some ways a valuable circumstance: a place where Perec could develop his formidable skills at and inclinations toward organizing and categorizing, which were central features of his work. An atypical employee, to say the least, Perec regularly embedded his play‑ ful approach to language and structure into the documents he prepared for unsuspecting scientists. He left the job only when the Prix Médicis he won in 1978 brought him both acclaim and financial reward. What was clear to Perec from early on was that he was, or would be, a writer. The terms of this identity and what it produced evolved, of course, over the years. He was devoted to his practice, and from very early on, he developed and revised many drafts, many though not quite all of them pub‑ lished. From early on, he wrote for several literary publications, including Les Lettres Nouvelles and Nouvelle Revue française. Beginning in 1959, he was part of a small group formed to produce a journal—La Ligne général (The General Line), or Lg—focused on a Marxist critique of art and litera‑ ture and named after a 1929 Sergei Eisenstein film, revolutionary in both politics and cinematic techniques. The group’s ideas and activities continued well after the review folded in 1960. Throughout, Perec wrote across multiple literary forms, beyond the novels, essays, and poems for which he is best known and celebrated; he wrote radio plays, and for years wrote weekly crossword‑puzzles for Le Point. Long pe‑ riods of financial and personal insecurity were relieved by significant literary awards: the Prix Rénaudot for Things and the Prix Médicis for Life A User’s Manual (Perec 1987). He wrote screenplays; his filmmaking included Récits d’Ellis Island, and Un Homme qui dort, based on his novel of that name and directed by Bernard Queysanne, which won the 1974 Prix Jean Vigo.10 Perec had an active social life, and he liked to drink, to smoke, to party, to play games (such as Go). He had a group of friends and colleagues, some of them for decades, who were intellectually engaged and politically aware, and participated in literary efforts joining critical writing, the arts, and activism. He had lovers; and he had two primary intimate relationships. He met Paulette Petras, a working‑class leftist Sorbonne student, in late 1959; they moved in together soon after meeting, and were married in Octo‑ ber 1960, as an official condition of spending a year in Sfax, Tunisia, where she had a teaching residency. The plan was that he would write; and while that aspect of his time there was less than stellar, the Sfax year certainly contributed to the creation of his celebrated 1965 novel, Things. The couple separated in mid‑1969, formally divorcing in 1980 and remaining close all the while.

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  43 In 1975, Perec met Catherine Binet, a filmmaker. They began a relation‑ ship which lasted until the end of his life.11 A detail of Perec’s last moments speaks of Binet’s love for her companion, her knowing what would mean the most to him. She brought to his hospital room items she had taken from his box of fétiches, cherished objects: color slides of 24 Rue Vilin and a lead “W.”12 Georges Perec died, of lung cancer, not quite 46 years old, on March 3, 1982. * In 1928, three‑year‑old Jerry Satin lived with his mother, father, and brother Irwin in Eastern Parkway, a largely immigrant neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City. Many of the local residents were Orthodox Jewish and Black, the two groups tensely sharing the space. Jerry’s and Irwin’s parents, Sadie and Philip, had both been born in NYC, one on either side of the century’s divide. Also living in the apartment were Sadie’s parents—Abe, a scholarly housepainter, and Jeanette, or Jenny, who refused to speak English after the boys laughed at her attempts—and her mysterious brother, Uncle Louie. Years later, Jerry and his wife Phyllis moved into a middle‑class hous‑ ing development in Jackson Heights, a largely white neighborhood in the borough of Queens. They were among the first Jews allowed to live there. The neighborhood remained religiously divided and ethnically and racially defined for all the years of my growing up. I often went to see my grandparents, who still lived in the old neighbor‑ hood. On one visit, when I was about seven, I cut the toes out of my expen‑ sive patent‑leather party shoes, like the other girls there did. I thought that this shoe adjustment was a fashion statement, not realizing that the girls’ families couldn’t afford new shoes. * Explicit and Implicit Autobiography: Offerings and Ellipses, Books and Bodies The word “autobiography” is typically linked to literature, to language; but self‑representation exists across the arts, including dance. For some time, I have explored ways that dances—generally with neither story, character, nor explanatory text—and dancers “perform autobiography” through the “embodiment of autobiographical perspectives.”13 Some of the elements of performance and self‑representation apply, too, to written autobiography, including Perec’s. Two categories germane to dance and literature are what I think of as “explicit autobiography” and “implicit autobiography.” The first refers to events and experiences said or implied to have actually happened in the art‑ ist’s life. Often, these depictions are constructed along linear narrative lines, both revealing what took place and indicating its progression. This kind of structure is foundational to much literary autobiography, spoken as well as

44  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography written. It is also a factor for some choreographers who emphasize their personal and cultural histories and identities, including the reiteration and reconstitution of real‑life material, in their dances. “Implicit” autobiography comprises the broad swath of everything else that creates a sense of who a person or persona is. In writing, this happens in language, moored within codes of production and reception as well as perspectives of time and place. In dance, it is articulated through different structures: movement as it interacts with formal elements, such as space and time, and with all the mise en scene in staging a self. Implicit autobiography is a lens through which to look at dancers and choreographers whose dances continually articulate autobiography’s pri‑ mary tropes in the moment—more accurately, across the moments—of per‑ formance. It is concerned with, and composed of, indirect expressions and embodiments of the self that weave through the choreographer’s intentions and strategies and underlie the dances’ performative presence. The choreographers and dancers whose work engages me and suggests Perec’s ideas and practices embody not only a movement vocabulary but an idea of the self, or selves, accumulating through and across individual pieces. These dances may or may not include elements of explicit autobiography, variously embedded in the broader field of the implicit. We have seen how Perec manipulates material, offering and retracting, making and un‑making his self‑portrait. What we (think we) know of him emerges not just from the “facts” of his life but from his textual construction of an autobiographical presence, even in pieces not seemingly autobiographical. These multiple Georges Perecs hopscotch through personal and collective history, memory, experience, and desire. They function, too, as a reminder to readers that they are part of Perec’s “game.” UK literary scholar Anna Kemp persuasively presents Perec’s autobiography, and indeed, Oulipian autobi‑ ography, as play, “explor[ing] the relationship between playing and living” (2021: 2).14 Perec’s sense of writing as a practice, an ongoing act of working through his own history, resonates as a corollary to dance, in which the experience of any moment is always at once appearing and disappearing, vivid and gone, for both doer and viewer. Perec reconfigured this structure of appearance and disappearance, echoing the absences and losses of his life. One way was to produce a tremendous amount of “explicit” material, then hint elsewhere that the material was invented or impossible or create a version wiping out the original. Another was to continually reproduce his absences and losses, keeping them in the reader’s (and his) mind. Perhaps the most extreme and potent example occurs in the pages of W, between the first and second sec‑ tions of the book: a nearly blank page (61), its only marks an ellipsis, its three tiny dots signifying what no language can accommodate, what no writer can fully say. (And what no reader—certainly not this one—can stand to imagine.)

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  45 The irony and pathos of that wordless marking is that no one could wield a pen—or a typewriter—quite like Perec. Reading his words, even “reading” those empty spaces and mysterious figures that go where words cannot, we are powerfully drawn into his expectations that we would expend the efforts of interaction to understand and participate in the making of the material. Bellos writes of the “flags or clues to the kind of work [Perec] expects his readers to do” (1999: 58); this seems especially evident in his writing about childhood. The mobility of his factual/fictional details, the hints that their structural and narrative underpinnings might lie within another source, keep the reader in an unusually active state. For instance, in his preface to W, Perec identifies one of the two texts as an autobiography, a “fragmentary” one “lacking in exploits and memo‑ ries” and composed of “scattered oddments, gaps, lapses, doubts.” It is the reader’s job to connect it with the other text, which Perec claims evolved from his long‑ago “fantasy” and which changes direction in medias res, and to recognize in this rerouting “the point of departure for the whole of this book,” the balancing acts of his words and his childhood (1975: unpaged). Moreover, the book’s dedication, pointing back to A Void, is “For E”—or “Pour Eux.”15 Another example is Perec’s descriptions of his experience on the convoy to Grenoble. Details differ: He writes in W that his arm, which was not broken, was in a sling (26), which was apparently untrue. Two chapters later, he in‑ sists that the sling was necessary because the Red Cross would only transport the wounded, then admits that his aunt had told him that he had no sling, then claims that he’d had a truss to support a rupture. He even hints that the sling will reappear “later on” (54–56). He writes that he had a Charlie Chap‑ lin comic book to read on the train. That was impossible, though; Chaplin’s work was banned then, for its ridiculing of Hitler. More likely, Perec had a Mickey Mouse comic (Bellos 1999: 58–59). Such clue‑planting figures in a subset of autobiography, what Warren F. Motte, Jr. calls “autoreference.” In this salient feature of reading multiple ex‑ amples of Perec’s work, elements recur, altered or resituated, prompting but not explaining memories and allusions for the reader. Motte applies his term both to Perec’s pointing to himself, as the text’s author, and pointing to his material’s intertextuality, gathering diverse writings “into an oeuvre.” This leads to what I see as Perec’s being not only the author but also a narrational character and autobiographical presence, apart from any single narrative of “what happened”: what Motte identifies as a “textual entity, almost a fic‑ tional being” (1984: 38–39). Years later, Motte reflects that when reading Perec, we are “bound up in a kind of mourning for him….[and] for both the written and the unwritten” (2004: 71). This kind of reading, for me, evokes figuring out and following a score for a dance: a duet, for which, as a performer, I’ve been given oblique or “po‑ etic” but demanding instructions on developing material—or, as a viewer, an

46  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography avenue into “getting” the dance. As a performer, I need to figure out what to do; as a viewer, I want to know something about the piece, within the piece, that maybe even repeated viewings won’t reveal. Reading Perec is not only a wild literary ride but, like dancing, it takes place in time, the unfolding ex‑ perience of understanding and even playing the game. Watching dance, par‑ ticularly of a choreographer whose work is familiar, one gets a sense of how the movement vocabulary, spatial choices, structural decisions, and general affect are like and unlike the artist’s other pieces, how they build on them or tamper with previous readings. Perec’s insistences and seductions and inter‑ ruptions into the sometimes‑habitual go‑with‑the‑flow act of reading itself emphasize that element of time of the reader’s experience. Still, Perec will remain out of reach. The Autobiographical Pact Reading Perec’s autobiographical writing or reading his work as autobiog‑ raphy is an inherently slippery exercise. The question of what is “true” is basic to many encounters with autobiography, at least within the terms of the genre as it is traditionally understood. In 1975, literary scholar Philippe Lejeune (with whose writing Perec may have been conversant, and who wrote about Perec’s autobiographical strategies after Perec’s death)16 developed what came to be seen then as a scholarly linchpin in contemporary autobi‑ ography. He articulated the terms of what he called the “autobiographical pact,” a contract which the self‑representational writer makes with readers that “the author, the narrator, and the protagonist” are “identical” (Lejeune 1989a: 5) and joined by “identity of name” (12; emphasis in the original). And he defined autobiography, narrowly, as a “Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality” (4). Lejeune later made some adjustments to his definitions: opening up the terrain, partly in response to theoretical misgivings and the constitutes of the genre itself.17 That said, his pact can be usefully, if broadly, understood as describing rather than prescribing the genre’s conventions, acknowledging the expectations and desires of both its writers and readers for models, iden‑ tification, gossip, and the pleasures of imagining getting into someone else’s skin. He distinguished autobiography from similar genres, such as journals, diaries, and memoirs (4), which he also explored.18 At the same time, he acknowledged the ways these categories had some fluidity, variously empha‑ sizing perspective or context or form. He set forth the ways that the writing itself figured in guiding the reader’s experience. This applies, for example, to the possibilities inherent in the voices of the first, second, or third person, and to the distinctions suggested (or not) between the “grammatical person” and the “identity of the individuals to whom the aspects of the grammatical person refer” (6). And overall, clearly, he was addressing autobiography as a purely literary project.

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  47 Since the days of Lejeune’s pact(s), the terms of autobiography have opened up. Across visual and performing as well as literary arts, practitioners have incorporated elements of their individual lives and identities, as well as their collective and cultural circumstances, into work which may not primarily reg‑ ister as autobiographical. They have interacted, too, with the terms of their field’s material and formalist elements as well as their historical, political, and critical engagements with self‑representation. And certainly, Lejeune’s seemingly baseline assertion of identicalness has been countered by numer‑ ous writers as well as by autobiographical practitioners in other, non‑literary forms. The term “autofiction” first came into use during Perec’s last few years, about the same time as Lejeune’s “pact.”19 Many more‑or‑less con‑ temporary writers of fiction braided with self‑representation, such as Proust, Duras, Joyce, Colette, and Modiano, had drawn readers into questions of truth and “identicalness,” even in the realm of the novel, which simultane‑ ously enacts and avoids the confessional or conspiratorial conventions tra‑ ditionally associated with autobiography. And over the years, considerable attention has gone to autobiography outside these boundaries, emphasizing the presentation rather than the information.20 A Man Asleep: The Eye and the Fragmented Body

Notably, one example Lejeune provides of what seems to be a life story with‑ out using the first person is Perec’s 1967 Un Homme qui dort (A Man Asleep), a compact and disturbing early novel, which was later made into a film by Perec and Bernard Queysanne. Both the book and the film are composed entirely in the second person (Perec 1990, Perec and Queysanne 1974). Perec bluntly, even brutally, tells the tale of its protagonist—a 25‑year‑old college student divorced from the studies that perhaps once engaged him—and his stultifying depression and disengagement, indifference and isolation. We read his recounting of the grim days he endures in a bleak attic and the city streets he haunts at night, brimming with details of late‑hour Parisian life; he writes from outside these observations, untouched by the socks soaking in a pink plastic bowl, the clock always at five‑fifteen, the sounds of cars and cafés and rainfall comprising his indoor world and his outdoor world. Many of these objects, sights, memories, and actions (some his own) are presented one after another in the lists which Perec employs, to various effects, in much of his writing: “In front of you, at eye‑level, on a white‑ wood shelf, there is a half‑empty, rather grubby bowl of Nescafé, an almost empty bag of sugar, a cigarette burning down in a whitish mock opaline ashtray bearing an advertiser’s logo” (137); “You hear the sounds of run‑ ning water, doors closing, steps hurrying down the stairs. … the screeching of tyres, the crunching of gears, toots on the horn” (138). The barrage of lists produces for the reader a developing sense of the teller’s physical environments and the simultaneous distance from and immersion in his material surroundings.

48  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography All of this is shaped, and complicated, by the second‑person address as it clashes with the expectations of autobiography. Perec insisted that the novel, which in so many ways seems to articulate the kind of trauma with which he was laden, was not his story, was not any single person’s.21 In making both the French and English versions of the film, he made this point forcefully by having the script, heard in voiceover as the character goes through the mo‑ tions or circumstances the words describe, spoken by a woman. (In French, this is especially complex because of the genderedness of the language as well as the feminine sound of the speaker’s voice.) This address complicates the writer/reader or character/viewer structure in terms of reading or spectatorship and autobiography. Most of the writing that has gone in directions such as Lejeune identified, in which an author avoids the first‑person position, simply adopts the third‑person stance and often only minimally blurs the work’s subjectivity. The relentless “you” of A Man Asleep, the refusal of the “I,” implicates the reader, blocking the pos‑ sibility of release or relief, even the quiet sleep which is the narrator’s primary psychic domain. It both insists on and resists Lejeune’s pact. At the same time, what is chillingly evident is the focus on the protago‑ nist’s body, and, in particular, its distortion. The very first words of the novel are about the narrator’s eyes: “As soon as you close your eyes, the adventure of sleep begins” (133). The rest of the chapter, a little over three pages long, is a single paragraph which traces the act of seeing: the viewer’s creation of the environment by the complex, unstable, granular process of vision. A few elements are material, the actual objects in the bedroom comprising the nar‑ rator’s visual field: a window, a bed, a book. Some of the episodes describe the gradual construction of a sight, from memory (“the paths your eyes have followed a thousand times”) and the tiny shifts of translation of a thing (“a board of indefinite extension”) as it exists in relation to the seer’s eyes: first, its passive position, “set at a very shallow angle to the plane of your eyes”; then in response to the seer’s action, “depending on how tightly, or loosely, you screw up your eyes” (133). This long passage about seeing as an act of attention travels into the eyes and beyond the eyes, as the narrator realizes, throughout the hours and pages, that his/“your” body is shrinking, disintegrating, disappearing. “You have lost your body,” the narrator says, “or no…it is rather that you can see it … but you will never be able to get back to it. / You are now nothing more than an eye. A huge staring eye which sees everything” (193–194). This terrible image is emblematic of the broken or fragmented body—the trau‑ matic sight which Jacques Lacan called the corps morcelé—and of existential dread, of disembodiment translated into endlessly seeing oneself. And at the same time, it is an inside‑out take on the traditional hall‑of‑mirrors concept of autobiography. This is, perhaps, a guide to understanding a puzzling element of Perec’s writing. (I use that adjective both in its literal sense and in tribute to his pro‑ clivity for puzzles, both perfect and flawed.) The body of A Man Asleep is

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  49 one of sensation, cognition and recognition, imagination, recollection, and isolation. It is insistently spatial, in terms of the character’s description of his room, the building and the streets beyond it, and most significantly his body as it is part of and apart from these frames, as it falls slowly into noth‑ ingness. But we, readers, falling with him—even knowing that there is no “him,” no “I,” only the disquieting repetitions of “you”—don’t have the opportunity to look at him, to feel the potential empathy of physical likeness linking human beings. Knowing Through the Body: Actions and Objects

Perec created a range of whole and broken bodies, loci of pleasure, wisdom, and unspeakable disturbance. Not every piece focusing on embodied expe‑ rience is as distressing as A Man Asleep. But all of them link this way of knowing through the body to the images and experiences of the bodies of dance. This is not unlike, as described above, a choreographer’s creating a performative persona over years of work, as demonstrated by the artist, by other performers, and by other performative elements. And critically, Perec’s repeated references to and descriptions of bodies, especially his own, dynami‑ cally engaged with spaces, objects, vision, and perspective keep the issue of embodiment salient in the experience of reading. One lively example is his 1976 “Reading: A Socio‑physiological Outline.” Its title borrows from anthropologist/sociologist Marcel Mauss’s 1935 Tech‑ niques of the Body, which was instrumental in clarifying the ways people’s bodies are minutely trained to carry out the movements and behaviors of eve‑ ryday public and private life, according to each culture’s beliefs and practices. Mauss’s observations, Perec writes, address “the history of our bodies, the culture that has shaped our ways of moving and holding ourselves, [and] the education which has moulded our motor” (2009b: 87–88). Perec then applies this mode of observing everyday behavior to reading but looking at the “act” itself (88). He describes how our eyes process the signs on the page and look for “signifying elements … meaning‑crumbs”; how they “sweep the page … in an aleatory, muddled, and repetitive ­fashion … like a pigeon pecking at the ground as it hunts for breadcrumbs” (90).22 He notes the unconscious activity of our vocal production muscles, compli‑ cates the hands’ page‑turning responsibilities, lists and annotates primary full‑body reading positions (92–95). He considers reading‑focused spaces in which people whose main action is solo reading among others, and alter‑ nately focused spaces (cafés, beaches) into which reading is inserted (95–97). He notes the sounds and sensations of the environment, lists overlaps of reading with bodily needs and functions, asks how these disruptions and ir‑ regularities caused by our bodies and the clatter of the everyday affect our relationship to the text itself (2009b: 97–102). Another essay detailing an everyday element, Perec’s 1976 “Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk,” is a kind of auto‑ethnography

50  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography joining the writer and his work‑table. Perec names and describes the objects (some work‑related, some feeding daily habits, some mysteriously but ongoingly present) atop its surface, fits them into categories and con‑ texts, moves them to accommodate the shifts in his practice and life. This is a space Perec made, and its curated contents stand in for him; I sense his hands trying out this spot and that for pens and ashtrays, his body hunched over the mess and his labors. “Sometimes I would like [my desk] to be as clear of objects as possible,” he writes, evoking the joint meticulousness and volume of his writing. “But usually I like it to be cluttered, almost to excess” (Perec 2009c: 11). He has in mind to write a history of this desk, this endlessly changing home to tools for work and memory‑production. It would be another attempt at defining my place, a somewhat oblique approach to daily life as I live it in practice, a way of talking about my work, my own history and my preoccupations, an effort to pinpoint something which is a part of my experience of the world … at the point where it actually breaks surface. (2009c: 16) Notes 1 In the original French, the name is Voyl, as in voyelle, meaning vowel. 2 David Bellos (1999: 398–403), Warren F. Motte (2004), Marcel Bénabou (2004), Dan Stone (2000), and Anna Kemp (2021) are among those who have addressed both the autobiographical elements of Perec’s writing and the ways that his ­Jewishness figured in that writing as well as in his life. 3 Bellos reminds readers of his translation that the W of the original French ti‑ tle is to be understood and spoken as a double V: W, in French, is pronounced double‑vé. Here, signifying the doubleness of the book’s structure, vé becomes vee, like vie, French for “life” (Perec 1988 [1975], no page number). Marc Caplan adds that the French pronunciation of vé is the homonym of the Yiddish vey, or “woe” (2020). 4 Historian Dan Stone notes “the dissimulatory lengths to which Perec went in W to ensure that fundamental truths of his childhood were expressed despite almost every individual statement being factually false” (2000: 39). 5 A strange dance parallel: In May 2016, choreographer Juliette Mapp performed Luxury Rentals, a compelling dance and spoken‑word exploration of space and life in New York City, at Danspace Project. I recall Mapp’s loud incantatory ­repetitions of “I am a bad son,” the mournful words of a troubled stranger. 6 Any quotations or biographical information in this section not specifically or ­otherwise cited are drawn from Bellos 1999. 7 Lieux was conceived as a twelve‑year piece—documenting and recalling twelve spots in Paris on a monthly schedule (two per month), sealing his writings in ­envelopes, beginning again each year (Bellos 1999: 417–418, 420–421, 578). 8 See Bellos (1999: 3–7), Perec (1999b: 134–138), Perec ([1975] 1988: 35–36). 9 It is not known on just what day Perec rode that train, but it would have to have been before October 28, 1941, when the convoys were shut down by the Germans (Bellos 1999: 55–56).

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  51 10 Georges Perec and Bernard Quesanne made the film Un Homme Qui Dort (A Man Asleep) in 1974; Perec was the screenwriter; he and Quesanne directed. Perec made the film Ellis Island Revisited: Tales of Vagrancy and Hope with Robert Bober in 1980. Perec wrote the screenplay, and Bober directed. 11 In 1990, Binet made a two‑part documentary about Perec: Te souviens‑tu de ­Gaspard Winckler? And Vous souvenez‑vous de Gaspard Winckler? 12 The image of the wooden box and its memory‑laden contents recalls the “cas‑ kets” of Gaston Bachelard (1958) and the “shoeboxes” of José van Dijck (2007): memories encapsulated in objects. 13 See Leslie Satin with Judith Jerome, the “Introduction” to Jerome and Satin (1999). 14 Kemp draws from psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s “understanding of creative play as the foundation of a person’s sense of self” in discussing the autobiographi‑ cal aspects of Perec’s work (27). 15 See Bellos (1999: 561–562). 16 See Lejeune (1991). 17 Julia Watson writes that Lejeune “wryly references the structuralist and postmod‑ ernist suspicion” of the 1980s about—in his words—both “’tell[ing] the truth’” and having an “autonomous existence’” (Watson 2018: 9–10; Lejeune 1989b: 131–133). 18 Literary scholar James Olney notes that Lejeune allowed for some flexibility re‑ garding genre, suggesting that one should instead “think in terms of an organic system of genres within which transformations and interpenetrations are forever occurring” (Olney 1980: 18). 19 The term “autofiction” refers broadly to work which is not only self‑­ representational but brings a critical perspective to the construction of the self and to its written formation. Kemp notes its “acknowledging the impossibility of autobiography as traditionally conceived [and its exploring] the self via experi‑ ments in fiction” (2021: 10–11). 20 See Kemp (2021: 26), on Bernard Magné’s description of Perec’s work as “auto‑ biotextes” joining autobiographical material and compositional constraints. 21 Bellos points out, though, that the experience central to A Man Asleep “is one which Perec says he went through himself around the age of twenty” (1990: 10). 22 See Chapter 3 regarding Kate Briggs’s work in this area. Note: The cover of the Species of Spaces edition created for the 2014 Perec conference (see Chapter 1) is a photograph of such a pecking pigeon.

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1994. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bellos, David. 1990. “Introduction.” In Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep, translated by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Publisher: 7–12. Bellos, David. 1999 [1993]. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. London: The Harvill Press. Bellos, David.  2009. “The Old and the New: An Introduction to Georges Perec.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 29.1 (Spring): 11–20. Bénabou, Marcel. 2004. “From Jewishness to the Aesthetics of Lack.” Translated by Brian J. Reilly. Yale French Studies 105/Pereckonings: Reading Georges Perec. Yale University Press: 20‑35.

52  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography Binet, Catherine. 1990. Te souviens‑tu de Gaspard Winckler? and Vous souvenez‑vous de Gaspard Winckler? Two‑part documentary film shown on television as Film sur Georges Perec. Cage, John. 1950. “Lecture on Nothing.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings 1973 [1961]. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press: 109–126. Cage, John. 1973 [1961]. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Cage, John. 1963. A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Caplan, Marc. 2020. “Double or Nothing: Jewish Speech and Silence in Georges Perec’s W ou le Souvenir d’enfance.” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (June): 1–9. https:// ingeveb.org/articles/double‑or‑nothing‑jewish‑speech‑and‑silence‑in‑georges‑ perecs‑w‑ou‑le‑souvenir‑denfance Eakin, Paul John, ed. 1989. On Autobiography. Translated by Katherine Leary. Min‑ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gann, Kyle. 2010. No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ivry, Benjamin. 2010. “A Renaissance for Belleville’s Georges Perec, Master of the Lipo‑ gram.” Forward: May 12 and 21. https://forward.com/culture/127939/a‑renaissance‑ for‑belleville‑s‑georges‑perec‑mas/ Jerome, Judith, and Leslie Satin, eds. 1999. Issue of Performing Autobiography. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 10.1–2: 19–20. Kemp, Anna. 2021. Life as Creative Constraint: Autobiography and the Oulipo. Liv‑ erpool: Liverpool University Press. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989a [1975]. “The Autobiographical Pact.” In On Autobiogra‑ phy, edited and with a foreword by Paul John Eakin. Translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 3–30. “Le pacte autobiographique” was published in Poétique 14 (1973): 137–162. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989b [1975]. “The Autobiographical Pact (bis).” In On Autobi‑ ography, edited and with a foreword by Paul John Eakin. Translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 119–137. Lejeune, Philippe. 1991. La Mémoire et l”oblique: Georges Perec autobiographe. Paris: P.O.L. Mathews, Harry. 2009. “Back to Basics.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 29.1 (Spring): 9–10. Mauss, Marcel. 2006. “Techniques of the Body.” In Techniques, Technology and Civilisation. Edited and introduced by Nathan Schlanger. New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books: 77‑95. Originally published in 1935. Motte, Warren F. Jr.  1984. The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges Perec. Lexington, KY: French Forum. Motte, Warren. 2004. “The Work of Mourning.” Yale French Studies 105. Pereckon‑ ings: Reading Georges Perec: 56–71. Olney, James. 1980. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Perec, Georges. 1987. Life A User’s Manual. Translated by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Publisher. Originally published in 1978. Perec, Georges. 1988 [1975]. W or the Memory of Childhood. Translated by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Publisher.

George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography  53 Perec, Georges. 1990a. Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep. Translated by David Bellos and Andrew Leak. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Publisher. Perec, Georges. 1990b. Things: A Story of the Sixties. Translated by David Bellos. In Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep, translated by David Bellos and Andrew Leak, introduced by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Pub‑ lisher. Things was originally published in 1965. Perec, Georges. 1990c. A Man Asleep. Translated by Andrew Leak. In Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep, translated and introduced by David Bel‑ los, Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Publisher. A Man Asleep was first published in 1967. Perec, Georges. 1995 [1969]. A Void (La Disparition). Translated by Gilbert Adair. London: The Harvill Press. Perec, Georges. 1999a [1974]. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and trans‑ lated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Penguin Books. Perec, Georges. 1999b [1974]. “Ellis Island: Description of a Project.” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1999, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Penguin Books: 134–138. First published in Catalogue pour des Juifs de maintenant by Recherches, 1979. Perec, Georges. 2009a. Thoughts of Sorts. Translation by David Bellos. Boston: Verba Mundi Book/ David R. Godine, Publisher. Perec, Georges. 2009b. “Reading: A Socio‑physiological Sketch.” In Thoughts of Sorts, Georges Perec, 2009, translation by David Bellos. Boston: Verba Mundi Book/ David R. Godine, Publisher: 87–102. Also, as “Reading: A Socio‑physiological Outline,” in Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1999 [1974], edited and translated by John Sturrock, London and New York: Penguin Books: 174–185. Originally published in Esprit 453, January 1976. Perec, Georges. 2009c. “Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk.” In Thoughts of Sorts, Georges Perec, 2009, translation by David Bellos, Boston: Verba Mundi Book/ David R. Godine, Publisher: 11–16. Also, as “Notes Concerning the Objects that are on my Work‑table,” in Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1999 [1974], edited and translated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Pen‑ guin Books: 144–147. Originally published in Les Nouvelles littéraires, February 1976. Perec, Georges. 2009d. “Statement of Intent.” In Thoughts of Sorts, Georges Perec, 2009, translation by David Bellos, Boston: Verba Mundi Book/ David R. Godine, Publisher: 3–5. Also, as “Notes on What I’m Looking For,” in Georges Perec, Spe‑ cies of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1999 [1974], edited and translated by John Stur‑ rock, London and New York: Penguin Books: 141–143. Originally published in Figaro in December 1978. Perec, Georges. 2010 [1975]. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Translated by Marc Lowenthal. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press. Perec, Georges and Bernard Quesanne. 1974. Un Homme Qui Dort / A Man Asleep. Film. Produced by Pierre Neurisse and Dovidis. Perec, Georges and Robert Bober. 1980. Ellis Island Revisited: Tales of Vagrancy and Hope. (Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir). Film. Directed by Robert Bober. Screenplay by Georges Perec. Distributed by TF1. Perec, Georges with Robert Bober. 1995 [1980]. Ellis Island. Translated by Harry Mathews; “Remembrances” translated by Jessica Blatt. New York: The New Press.

54  George Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography Satin, Leslie with Judith Jerome. 1999. “Introduction.” In Judith Jerome and Leslie Satin, eds., 1999, journal Issue, Performing Autobiography. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 10.1–2 #19–20: 9–19. Stone, Dan. 2000. “Grasping What Isn’t Shown: Georges Perec, Ellis Island and ­Jewishness.” The Jewish Quarterly 47.2 (summer): 37–40. Van Dijck, José. 2007. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Watson, Julia. 2018. “The Exquisite Ironies of Philippe Lejeune: Nine Auto‑­ Anti‑Theses.” European Journal of Life Writing VII7: 9–18. Whitney, Karl. 2011. “This is Not the Place: Perec, the Situationists and Belleville.” The White Review. https:www.thewhitereview.org/feature/this‑is‑not‑the‑place‑ perec‑the‑situationists‑and‑belleville/

3 Looking, Listening, Listing Attention and the Infra‑Ordinary

In June 2015, I attended the Conference on Emotional Geographies, held on the campus of the University of Edinburgh.1 It was a particularly engaging conference, representing a vast number of fields, disciplines, and perspectives and an unusually diverse array of presenters. My colleague, UK site‑dance scholar Victoria Hunter, and I were set to present work emerging from ideas about Perecquian space. We soon joined up with the group of multi‑ and inter‑disciplinary scholars who had been at the Perec Conference at Teesside University, where most of them taught, the previous year. Calling themselves The Endotics,2 they identified their work with Perec’s term for the non‑exotic, the everyday, and the invisible systemic, acknowledging their collective en‑ thusiasm for his attention to the often overlooked or suppressed phenomena of the daily. In Edinburgh, they, too, were bringing Perec into the picture, at the conference and, less officially, at my first daylight‑at‑midnight pub crawl (featuring a mildly inebriated discussion on the ease of growing rhubarb, “a weed” in the UK, unlike my own garden’s sulky stalks). The Endotics presented a panel on Perec, focusing on “Emotionless Ge‑ ographies? ‘Affect,’ Stillness, and the Endotic Space.” Participants’ views of Perecquian space emphasized the linking of the spatial and the personal: seeing the endotic in terms of both observation from a position of stillness and of time, place, and reflection: as a process and as a (spatial) practice. Later, Endotics member Heike Salzer and colleague Ana Baer, screen dance choreographers/scholars, showed dance films demonstrating interactions of bodies, space, and mediated imagery. At another session, in a performa‑ tive presentation, Hunter and I overlapped dance segments created through movement‑ and spatially‑focused scores—representations of processes and plans for action occurring over time—with spoken texts by and about Perec. At the same time, Salzer sat at a computer typing a running commentary of what she was seeing, her words visible to viewers on a large screen and vari‑ ously at odds with the action—animating, as I will show, one of the critical elements of Perec’s looking and listing. The entwined phenomena of the “endotic” and the “infra‑ordinary,” Perec’s term for what was not extraordinary, comprise a large field. These words encompass my reluctant rhubarb, the un‑noticed minutiae of our daily walks, and the convoluted and mediated mazes through which we are slotted DOI: 10.4324/9781003143741-3

56  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary unawares into sociopolitical holding patterns. They are joined, too, as Perec urges, to our experiences of attention. Perec’s emphasis on paying attention is linked to the physical, spatial, sensorial, affectual, and emotional experiences of his everyday life. His in‑ sistence emerged from his personal history and is embedded in his writing and in the compositional practices that produced it: specifically, in the fol‑ lowing pages, his lists, a literary strategy figuring prominently in his work. Sometimes these strategies and the writing they produced were clearly ludic; always they functioned as a way not to simply organize material but to dem‑ onstrate a way to understand that material, to pay attention to it. I connect here what I see as Perec’s “attention to paying attention” to ways we think about, experience, understand, and know ourselves and our worlds through our bodies, ranging from everyday bodies to the exalted “Apollo’s Angels” of ballet (Homans 2010). Endotic, Infra‑Ordinary, and Paying Attention: Everyday Life and the Present Moment The first time that Georges Perec used the word “endotic” was in his short, sharp, and plaintive 1973 essay, “Approaches to What?” (Perec 1999d). He jumps in with both feet, broadly accusing a generalized “us” of falling prey to the attraction of “the extra‑ordinary: the front‑page splash” rather than looking at the small print or the unwritten back‑story, rather than taking the time and attention to recognize the systems of communication that orches‑ trate our understanding of these serial scandals. It’s “as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if…what is significant…is always abnor‑ mal,” whether the disasters are natural or political or social. Moreover, we entirely miss the seemingly endless and overlapping spheres of misery within which these salient moments occur: “What is scandalous isn’t the pit explo‑ sion,” he writes, “it’s working in coalmines” (209). Perec is venting his frustrations, even his desperation, not only at our col‑ lective dullness but at how we have been driven to narrowly perceive the world. He is pointing his pen at the primary medium of his time, the news‑ paper. Of course, this material carrier of “the news” now seems quaint by comparison to the internet and its then‑unimaginable scope and malleability, which make the content itself, rewritten minute by minute, regularly (sub) merged with commentary and presented as a state of perpetual catastrophe, at once incomprehensible, dismissible, and normalized: Another crisis will come soon enough. The scale and ubiquity of the media systems within which we live haven’t simply changed but exponentially magnified the conditions of Perec’s viewpoints. His observations were not simply complaints about, say, the editorial position of a given periodical; they were realizations about the ways that newspapers eclipsed and flattened the experience of everyday life. They “talk of everything,” he wrote, “except the daily” (209).

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  57 The center of the essay is Perec’s asking what real human life experience is and his acknowledging the poverty of moving through life in a state of “anesthesia”: What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra‑ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? (210) What is critical, Perec urges, is to question, to activate awareness of the ma‑ terial and sensory phenomena of our lives, to bring our focus to the endotic and the infra‑ordinary. This is where he locates those objects, environments, and political/social circumstances we routinely overlook, disregard, predeter‑ mine to be unimportant. Throughout his work, Perec reflected these “insignificant” elements as they demonstrated his embrace of the endotic and its relationship to paying attention. He communicated his engagement with everyday life, suggesting the urgency of recognizing and questioning the ordinary, reveling in the gen‑ erally overlooked detail and drama of street life and domestic as well as pub‑ lic circumstance, and acknowledging the often‑hidden cultural systems and circumstances controlling what citizens know and notice. In 1974, he wrote Species of Spaces (SOS from here on), the remarkable book in which he ex‑ plored the multiple ways he saw and experienced his life through a range of spatial phenomena, primarily actual rather than metaphorical.3 The Street The overlap of affect, attention, and endotics with spatial experience and spatial circumstance come into play especially powerfully in the SOS chapter “The Street.” This piece joins some of Perec’s key ideas about space and place to the specifically spatial attributes of experiencing street life and aspects of the street itself and to his ideas and practices of paying attention. It also illustrates some of his compositional choices, bringing together unlike strate‑ gies, forms, and modes of address and implicitly suggesting how these might inspire similar possibilities for artists in other fields. Perec’s “The Street” is divided into five sections, diverse in style and per‑ spective. His Section 1 is essentially definitional, architectural, administra‑ tive: a guide for someone, however familiar such a person might be with walking down streets as a lifelong daily activity, unfamiliar with “street” as a concept. “The buildings stand one beside the other,” it begins, “They are ex‑ pected to form a line, and it’s a serious defect in them when they don’t do so” (1999c: 46). Perec explains how these lines, facing each other, constitute a

58  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary street, and he lays out the ways streets are organized and identified regarding their breakdown into addresses and their fitting into the larger urban struc‑ ture; in his city, Paris, that refers to their relationship to the Seine. Perec writes about the streets’ zones and times of ownership, participation, pe‑ destrian, and automotive traffic; about plants and lights, warning systems and codes of conduct, and surveillance (1999c: 46–49). That is, he begins to articulate the many parts of the whole which we encounter—blindly, as it were, certainly thoughtlessly—day after day after day. Cities, of course, differ from each other not only in the details but in the more general outlines of urban design as mandated by political and cultural perspectives. But Perec isn’t being prescriptive here about street‑ness as much as he is noticing and remarking on a structural framework which is at once ubiquitous and invisible—and suggesting (indirectly, in this section) that we actually look at it, and actually see it. And as particular as the writing is, there is something of the city‑as‑stand‑in here: While not everyone lives in a city, everyone who lives somewhere lives in a place whose particular defi‑ nitional, physical, and official structures act upon their lives whether or not they have noticed or acknowledged them. Section 2 is short and intimate. Here, Perec shifts from his coolly defini‑ tional, impersonal/authoritative urban studies stance to a still‑descriptive but more empathetic and narrowly focused recollection of a past moment. No longer literally in the street, he remembers a moment when he had been on Rue Linné. He homes in on his memory of two blind pedestrians, one guid‑ ing the other, arm in arm. He doesn’t tell us much about their appearance except to point out that they are a fifty‑ish‑year‑old woman and a very young man, but he recounts what they do: They walk with their “long, exceed‑ ingly flexible sticks,” the woman guiding the young man, sightlessly observ‑ ing and knowingly avoiding the “obstacles” populating their pathway: “a street light, a bus stop, a telephone kiosk…[and] a road sign” she couldn’t read (1999c: 49). (I wonder whether they speak to each other; Perec doesn’t say.) The walkers’ knowledge of many of the material details Perec discussed in Section 1 is necessary for their ambulation; the woman’s passing along her keen sensory knowledge is a circumstance both tender and essential. (I am reminded of a description by dancer and choreographer Steve Pax‑ ton, whose deep knowledge of attention, embodiment, and movement in space has roots in his involvement in the Judson Dance Theater, in Contact Improvisation—the movement practice he founded, in which partners create movement through intense attention to their own and each other’s bodily ac‑ tions and experiences—and in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He describes seeing a blind woman washing dishes and catching mid‑air a soapy plate that had slipped from her fingers. We have many more than the prover‑ bial five senses, Paxton writes. We experience the world through this plethora of connections within, among, and beyond our bodies, from proprioception to—according to some philosophies—the mind.4)

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  59 Section 3 is perhaps the central piece of Perec’s chapter, certainly its most direct in not only addressing the reader but in encouraging the reader’s literal participation. Like the first sections, it moves between a wide and a narrow focus. It has a title, Practical exercises, and indeed, it is a series of instructions on how to pay attention: Perec’s précis of presentness. Addressed to an imag‑ ined reader, it begins calmly, almost obliquely, like a meditation guide. It is a score, an open score which acknowledges what needs to be done—to look, to focus, maybe to note what is regular or expected—but leaves to chance what is likely to occur or to be encountered: Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps. Apply yourself. Take your time. (1999c: 50) In the passages that follow, Perec notes where he was (“the terrace of a café near the junction of the Rue du Bac and the Boulevard Saint‑Germain”)— perhaps when he conceived or wrote these words, maybe when he had a particularly rich experience with the exercise. He provides a few details of time, date, and weather (a nice evening, May 15, 1973). And then he focuses on what this project initially calls for you, the reader, to do, and what your efforts are likely to reveal about you as well as your surroundings. You need to document your findings, bring together the acts of looking and seeing and writing, and confront your shortcomings as a researcher: Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. (1999c: 50) This, he says, is what you need to do next: You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless. (1999c: 50) This is the page to which my favorite copy of SOS flips open, so often have I returned to these instructions, read them aloud to my students, wished that Perec were present to discuss the details. And these are the lines, with their soothing prescription for slowness punctured by the shock of “stupidly,” that I imagine chanted silently by fellow Perec readers, freed or forced to recognize the details of their physical lives which have become clouded or obliterated by their worries, desires, needs, confusions.

60  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary These lines lead into several pages of possibilities: noticing the details of the shops and cafés and cars, the passersby, the signs; seeing the micro‑steps (thirteen of them, plus four alternatives, vertically aligned) of parking the car, so apparently simple an action that it registers, if at all, as merely transi‑ tional; asking questions and inventing stories and contexts about what you see and what you can’t see. So much happening, but “Nothing is happen‑ ing, in fact” (1999c: 52). So, you just dig into the experience, until “the scene becomes improbable,” when everything has been made unfamiliar, and “the whole place becomes strange”)5 and you have used your imagination to make it stranger, to “smash everything” and “replace the people by cows” (1999c: 53). Section 4 switches its approach dramatically, signaling its shift in the sub‑ title, “Or else: Rough draft of a letter” (1999c: 54–55). The segment leaves behind the sociologically conceived, externally directed, ocular‑centric task of looking out and taking inventory of the place where Perec has stationed himself. Here, in another brief and intimate perspective, he turns the lens to himself. Sitting in a café, Perec writes to “you”—clearly a particular ad‑ dressee, unlike the more generally conceived reader of “The Street”—with longing. He looks carefully at his surroundings (“a piece of ironwork, a blind”), describes his actions (“I arrange my packet of cigarettes”) and his unsettled state (“I pretend to be preoccupied….I pretend to be writing a let‑ ter”), lists what he sees. He opens the section, “I think of you often,” and begins its last fragment, “I am thinking of you,” followed by a short list of memories or imaginings: “you’ve turned up your foxfur collar, you’re smil‑ ing, and remote” (55). He inserts and then closes with a parenthesized el‑ lipsis, less gut‑stabbing than the one on a blank page in W, but nonetheless speaking of absence, solitude, attention to desire, and private experience in a public space. Section 5, Places, describes a piece Perec had begun in 1969. Places, or Lieux, was to be a twelve‑year‑long series of descriptions of twelve places significant in his life. Each place to be described was determined by an algo‑ rithm: “orthogonal Latin bi‑square, this time of 0rder 12” (1999c: 56).6 What Perec makes evident is not only the significance of what is seen, but the challenging and complex act of seeing itself. “Force yourself to see more flatly,” he writes (1999c: 51), to notice what is new to you, the reader/viewer, not only as a way to see beneath and beyond what you’ve already noticed but to contribute to what, in “Approaches to What?” he called “our own anthropology” (1999d: 210), in which active seeing and questioning of the status quo would be enmeshed. Exhausting Seeing, Inviting Exhaustion Perec’s writing about seeing, then, is an exhortation to be fully present, and to truly have one’s eyes open: to see more than what you expected to encoun‑ ter or had predetermined to matter. It is also a reminder to look into what

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  61 may not be evident, to recognize what lies beneath and within the systems and structures within which our lives are embedded. And, I am certain, the passion of Perec’s writing about being fully in a place and a time extends his perspective to the most personal realms of sensory and emotional experience. That is, it has also to be about seeking and creating the comfort and continu‑ ity in the material world, the enmeshment with shared human experiences that had been stolen from him. The roots of Perec’s impulse to look, notice, and pay attention merge with the most personal and intimate terms of his life. The breadth of his loss is reiterated in piece after piece, his words sometimes naming wrenching memories and feelings, time after time keeping them in view but at a remove or hidden or denied, luring or beckoning the reader into an ever‑expanding pas de deux with the text. Paying attention, his writing urges, is an act of insistent subjectivity and necessary agency: more plainly, for him, of squeezing everything from a moment or a life when you know that the possibility of its being snatched away is more than a nightmare. In 1966, Judson choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer, among the most consequential foundational philosophers of early postmodern dance, wrote that “Dance is hard to see” (Rainer 1974b: 68, in 1974a). For some choreographers and dancers, the challenge was to address this difficulty through movement and every other possible element of the form’s mise en scene. Rainer cites her own 1966 dance Trio A, which rather than using repetition strategically to make seeing simpler instead “dealt with the ‘see‑ ing’ difficulty by dint of its continual and unremitting revelation of gestural detail that did not repeat itself, thereby focusing on the fact that the material could not easily be encompassed” (68; emphasis in the original). Moreover, the movements are executed one after another in a kind of list, calling atten‑ tion to the choreographically, anatomically, and spatially functional logic of their line‑up. Another 1966 example of dance confronting questions of seeing was Rise, Judson choreographer Deborah Hay’s “duet” with a gray flat,7 manipulated by two people; Hay, dressed in gray, pointedly blends with the moving flat, “her dance [becoming] harder to distinguish from the ‘dance’ of the décor” (Banes 1987: 116).8 While these issues of visibility were considered and taken on in early post‑ modern dance, they were not, of course, only germane in that field. As Perec recognized, everything is hard to see. And so, he investigated, exploring both the potential for richness that really looking and really seeing offer us as well as the barriers that complicate or obfuscate the process. Critically, Perec urges us to exhaust our observations, to not endlessly skip over what we’ve routinely overlooked. In October 1974, he embarked on a project documented in An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Tenta‑ tive d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien), in which he spent three days at several cafés in the Place Saint‑Sulpice, looking at and recording, in writing, the sights, sounds, and rhythms of dailiness: whatever he noticed, whatever took place. In a brief introduction, he notes that many things in that locale have been acknowledged: “described, inventoried, photographed, talked about, or

62  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary registered.” His aim for the project “was to describe the rest instead…what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds” (2010: 3). The book, a slim, dense volume, is organized by numbered café sittings, each identifying the circumstances of these episodes (place, time, weather) and then listing his observations, divided into a range of overlapping catego‑ ries. For example, in his first episode, Perec registers “some strictly visible things,” such as the numbers appearing on buses to represent their line, or on the square, representing the arrondissement (5). In the second, those bus lines recur more as markers of time, as Perec sits and writes: “A 63 passes by. A 96 passes by…..An 86 passes by….A 70 passes by” (11). He appears to be atten‑ tive to all of the sensory invitations of his post: “a fairly young man draw[ing] a sort of ‘V’ on the sidewalk with chalk” (12) and an “apple‑green 2CV” (13), a cool car, a Citroën, one of several he spots throughout his exercise. Notably, though, as the three days go by, Perec’s descriptions stray; he refers back to himself and his own experience of viewing. He does not, how‑ ever, comment on his own physical and geographic position, including his more‑or‑less stillness and his single vantage point in regard to the area he is surveying. These physical factors of his viewership seem significant in terms of Perec’s experience as well as acknowledgment of the site’s boundaries, but apparently, whether or not they were consciously self‑imposed, they do not appear to have figured as constraints in his score. In other ways, though, the categories of viewing merge with the experience of noticing, the saturation of visibility. Perec is not so much setting about see‑ ing “almost stupidly” as recognizing his own presence in the project, paired with the blurred quality of his sightings. The specific objects of his observa‑ tion meld into the generalized plural: the 63 bus is one of many 63 buses, one of many other buses, yet another vehicle in the ongoing Parisian street traffic. By extension, the experience of looking at each thing becomes less of vivid particularity and more of a momentary flash within an overview. Here, too, as in “The Street” and its exhortations to learn how to see, vision is given pride of place over other senses—most noticeably its typical “partner,” hearing. In fact, other written works of Perec integrate sound into their worlds. As literature and history scholar Alasdair Pettinger notes, while speech and other elements of sound figure periodically into Perec’s writing, they are more apparent and more important in his film, radio, and television projects. In all these forms, Pettinger notes, the sounds Perec introduces are those of everyday life, the “background noise,” the endotic (2019: 131). In one of my attempts to channel Perec, I spent hours in the Place SaintSulpice under Paris’s unusually blazing sun, sitting in the cafés where he had sat and chronicled, or attempted to, everything that happened as he watched. I drank glass after glass of water at Le Café de la Mairie, look‑ ing as open‑mindedly as I could, alternating between a wide focus and a narrow one, writing down as much of what I saw and heard as possible, and becoming increasingly aware that I could neither see, hear, nor write

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  63 everything—especially given my imperfect French. (I, too, largely stayed in a single chair, occasionally shifting my position or facing and thus slightly ad‑ justing the terms of my viewing.) I became uncomfortably aware of my own presence as I stayed too long, ordering just enough food and drink to not get kicked out; staring at “my subjects” in a probably too‑direct, intrusive, un‑Parisian way; straying into narrative speculation about their relationships, professions, activities. I began blurring the details of my documentation: so many blue shirts, so many buses, for hours. Of course, Perec knew this, too. That particularity which he urged was, clearly, impossible. The elements of observation, documentation, and reflec‑ tion cancel each other out: As you write and draw, however quickly, you miss the other details of the passing moment, the one over there when your attention is here, the fifth woman leaving the café with the newspaper under her arm and the fourth breed of dog walking on a leash and the tenth person carrying a baguette and a bunch of flowers. * This circumstance was illustrated at the performative presentation I referred to a few pages back, in which Heike Salzer, sitting at a computer table, re‑ corded in real time as many of Victoria Hunter’s and my simultaneously occurring spoken words, movements, and spatial shifts taking place as she could see and document. Of course, despite Salzer’s vigilant viewership and fast fingers, her words, appearing to audience members in real time on a large screen, left much undocumented. In a 2014 dance, What Happens Now?, I worked with a similar challenge. As one dancer improvised in place, moving rapidly and changing directions and levels in vertical space, a second performer, standing still, narrated in real time what she saw the dancer doing. A third performer, positioned so that she was unable to see the other mover, executed the movement as she heard it described. There was some correspondence linking the two segments, even occasional wisps of simultaneity, but what was most vivid was the amount of movement that went unseen and/or unspoken. Three Perspectives on Exhaustion There are, at the least, three ways to look at this impossibility of exhausting the sensory offerings of an environment; all are germane to understanding Perec and to finding paths between his projects and those of contemporary Perecquistes. One is the most familiarly and pleasurably Perecquian: the rich‑ ness of the observational experience. You may or may not succeed in the quest to pay attention to every one of those many objects and actions, all those chairs and bricks and head‑scratches typically flying under your radar: to notice every detail of the world in which you find yourself, as it were. Nonetheless, you are in an inspired and intensified state of engagement with your environment and the people with whom you share it.

64  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary This potentially joyful positioning is tied directly to a second, more sober way to see the inherent impossibility of Perec’s Attempt, its flip side: what really matters is the impossibility itself. In a 2017 essay, everyday culture scholar Ben Highmore addresses this as it features in what he sees as Perec’s essential, if particular, “realism.” This term, as he uses it, takes in Perec’s demonstration across literary styles and genres of cutting through the omni‑ present obfuscations of what matters—the insignificant—and acknowledging the apparatus invisibly imposing false and seemingly inarguable views of the world. Perec’s realism, for Highmore, “might mean revealing the significance of the insignificant” (2017: 105). He notes, too, the potential danger or lack of accountability inherent in merely logging the details, however fully, with‑ out acknowledging one’s observational or critical perspective on the details or exhaustiveness or exhaustion. Without that criticality, he warns, citing Hungarian Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács, the writer might simply pro‑ duce “arbitrary naturalism” (107). Such a (potential) accusation is unlikely to stick, given Perec’s thorough‑ going approach to the plethora and mobility of his writing’s details: the names resembling and repeating from one text to another, the compositional tactics artfully redeployed, the parts and wholes of his work addressing each other across years and genres. As David Bellos sees it, Perec’s realism would be based in “an individual experience of the world.” The writer’s job, then, would necessarily be “to know and to understand the self, to relate the self to the world, and to give form to the real” (Bellos 1999: 276). In any case, as Highmore acknowledges, it’s unusual to see Perec as less than fully welcoming to all sensory input and more occupied with politi‑ cal theory than with the ludic compositional approaches which became so important to his work (109)—and, I would add, to many readers’ preferred version of who he was. While Perec may not have been “an intellectual celeb‑ rity and avoided the fevered [theoretical] debates of his age” (Bellos 2009b: 12), he certainly was intellectually involved with the politically aware literary activists who were his friends and colleagues. And, Highmore argues, “the relationship between the particular and the general … was foundational in his work,” its documentation of “insignificant” elements serving to suggest the potential social implications of everydayness (109, 110). A third perspective is biological, and underlies the complexity of noticing, however one approaches the task. The human eye and the human brain, working together, are simply not cut out to see everything. In 1999, playwright Deb Margolin considered the physiology of the eye in terms of the utter particularity it imbues on our seeing. In “Count the I’s, or, the Autobiographical Nature of Everything,” Margolin contemplates our fundamentally autobiographical perspective as she meditates on the word “duh.” She describes the structure of the eye, noting the existence of a blank spot. We neither experience the spot nor the brain’s overriding of it; however, what we see is distinct, reflecting our fundamentally individual and unique perspective, merging vision and autobiography….“duh” (23-25).

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  65 Literary scholar and translator Kate Briggs, whom I first encountered at the 2014 Perec Conference, also addresses the physiology of seeing, linking it to the seer’s experience. Briggs considers the ways the eyes work—what they do, how they move—in the act of reading. She focuses, in particular, on read‑ ing Henry James’s “The Story in It,” itself about such an experience. Briggs cites the research of nineteenth‑century scientist Emile Javal, who, according to Nicholas Dames, first recognized that the eyes’ passage “across text is not continuous”; it is divided into sections, bits of text “seen during rhythmically recurring rest periods,” and the movement between them taking place in “rapid leap[s]” during which the reader’s “vision does not happen” (Dames 2007 in Briggs 2016). Briggs’s project involved her teamwork with scientist and experimental psychologist Sam Hutton, another investigator of eye movement. First view‑ ing a “scanpath” of a then‑unidentified image (actually a woodcut, derived from a photograph of a very early representation, on paper, of such move‑ ment), Hutton recognized known reading patterns, noting guiding likeli‑ hoods of culture (e.g., reading left to right), illumination (flashing lights), and familiarity (few returns to earlier spots in the text). Upon analyzing Briggs’s eye movement as she perused the James story, Hutton tells her, in fact, that reading is “the visual activity…where the eye’s movements are most guided, most directed, most choreographed, by what’s being looked at.” This infor‑ mation led to Briggs’s sense of the inherent motility, including choice‑making and the particularity of both the text itself and the reading event’s contexts, as well as the reader’s tendency to “submit to” a page’s “suggested path” (Briggs 2016).9 That is, the experience of reading, as seeing, is both some‑ what predictable and insistently singular. And because it is contingent on every element of the reading event, from the edition’s textual/spatial layout to the angle of the reading lamp, possibilities of the experiences of reading are inexhaustible. Charged Everydayness As it happens, reading is one of the everyday experiences which Perec wrote about from an embodied perspective. For example, as described in the previ‑ ous chapter, in his “Reading: A Socio‑Physiological Sketch” he addressed the experience of reading in terms of the reader’s physical engagement—not only with the eyes, but with the body as a whole—in and with the environment (2009b). He did not, in this instance, consider aspects of comprehension or engagements with the content of the reading material.10 Paying attention to the everyday is rarely just a matter of stopping to smell the proverbial roses. At the time of this writing, a period of multiple simultaneous and staggered political, military, cultural, climatic, and medical crises, the concept of everydayness is vexed, to say the least. The everyday‑ ness of much of the earth’s human population today is horrific, the dailiness fused with the catastrophic. As we become increasingly aware of the dangers

66  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary to the non‑human inhabitants of the earth and to the earth itself, and of the defiant maintenance of this status quo in ruins by those in positions of ludi‑ crous wealth and power, our engagement with the details of our environment is always braided with countless larger circumstances. Perec’s own larger framing circumstances, beyond those of his child‑ hood, included, for instance, France’s “colonial questions,” extending to the yearslong (1954–1962) Algerian War. This, Bellos concludes, “was the experience that defined Georges Perec’s generation” (1999: 145). Indeed, Perec shared his strongly held leftist perspective and anti‑colonialist stance with his friends and colleagues, an intellectual pairing of literature and poli‑ tics long known in French history. Nonetheless, he accepted his period of military service, which began in early 1958, knowing that he would be ex‑ empted from serving in Algeria because his father had been killed “in the service of France.” Perec, we know, pointed out that what is omitted from the daily papers is the revelation of these huge and systemic circumstances underlying the en‑ dotic, the infra‑ordinary. Certainly, he was aware of what was missing from his own everydayness, as it had never been, as it might have been. His hours and pages of exhaustive observations of everyday life offer soothing, neces‑ sarily repeated and never fully operative antidotes to his un‑erasable memo‑ ries. His everydayness “implicitly” refers back to—is “set against”—that of World War II, writes Pettinger, its “regular rhythms…signifying as they do a world free of the terrors of Nazi Occupation” (2019: 131). Capturing the Everyday: Attentive Practices, Compositional Strategies The charged awareness of the everyday has played an important role in the lives and practices of artists across forms as well as scholars across disciplines. One of the pathways through which it gained traction in the mid‑twentieth century, especially in the US, is the spread of meditation and mindfulness practices, particularly through the Asian philosophies and spiritual perspec‑ tives which became more widely known during the 1960s and 1970s. The study and practice of Buddhism, yoga, and other spiritual offerings played a significant role across the arts. The development of Beat poetry; composer John Cage’s involvement with the principles of Zen; the Beatles’ devotion to Transcendental Meditation; the many visual and performing art‑ ists whose works conceptually and materially engaged Eastern ideas of time, space, and the boundaries of formalist components; and the range of popu‑ lar and performative dance forms, from rock and roll to the Judson Dance Theater, which invited practitioners and viewers to fully experience their bodies, individually and with others, flourished in this period.11 “Be Here Now,” as Baba Ram Dass (a.k.a. Richard Alpert), psychologist and spir‑ itual teacher, famously titled his best‑known set of teachings in 1971, boils down to the property of present‑tense consciousness. More recently, in his

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  67 2022 The Zen of Therapy, psychiatrist and Buddhist teacher Mark Epstein connects his own two disciplines via the commitment to paying attention, both to one’s own mind and to the minds of others. Not only those practitioners who followed particular spiritual beliefs were affected by their beliefs and ideals, which permeated the broader coun‑ terculture. Dance and performance historian Sally Banes links these ways of seeing the world to the ways of creating the artwork, noting that “the Zen notion of at‑oneness with the world through the technique of conscious awareness … provid[ed] strategies for artmaking as well as the fine honing of consciousness.” She identified this way of understanding the world, whether through spiritual practices or to “mind‑expanding drugs,” to an altered and expanded view of the body which “channeled intelligence directly through the skin, muscles, nerves, and organs” (Banes 1993b: 236). This view, which resisted the dualism inherent in Cartesian philosophy, entered broader discourse at the time through the writing of phenomenolo‑ gist Maurice Merleau‑Ponty as well as through more spiritual channels. It is central to the concepts of embodiment and body‑mind integration critical to the practices of many experimental performing and visual artists of 1960s New York (and, of course, continuing into the present). In the dance world, these ideas had begun to take hold earlier on the West Coast, especially with the work of choreographer Anna Halprin, who also taught Judson partici‑ pants and other east coast dancers who traveled to northern California to study with her. But as Banes points out, the pull to spirituality among these practitioners was complex, tinged with discomfort regarding any sense of particular or idealized truth and expressing “a distinct ambivalence toward the absolute” (1993b: 244). This resulted, among other things, in a range of compositional approaches that variously, and sometimes simultaneously, embraced chaos, kinetics, and collage, inviting or challenging viewers or listeners to have ex‑ periences of “too much,” or at least more than could be easily followed or absorbed. It also produced strategies such as extreme repetition, prolonged singleness (of a sound, a color, an action), chance operation‑derived music and dance, and improvisation in dance, music, theater, and Happenings. Clearly, Georges Perec was aware of these strategies and the beliefs and questions underlying them: that is, in the work, the concerns, and the aesthet‑ ics of experimental artists practicing in Europe and the US during his own most productive years. In addition to his involvement (actual collaboration as well as awareness) with the work of other writers, he was demonstra‑ bly knowledgeable regarding the developments in the work of avant‑garde visual artists, including the performative ventures, such as Happenings, which emerged from the visual arts to engage with the dimension of time. These artists had themselves been guided by the fundamentally game‑­ changing ideas and approaches to composition animated by John Cage, in particular, as well as by other musical and other arts‑based experimentalists. Even the title of the 1962 concert, Kleines Sommerfest: Après John Cage

68  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary (Little Summer Festival: After John Cage), in Wuppertal, West Germany articulates the structural position Cage occupied in those years.12 As literary critic Tania Ørum points out in an essay on Perec and the visual arts avant‑garde, these artists’ shared investigations, which were widely known in France during this period, included the commitment “to capture the every‑ day” (2006: 325), in part through addressing and embodying the centralness of paying attention. It is possible that Perec was aware of those explorers of at‑ tention who focused on expanded consciousness, especially as it connected to the practices of those whose aesthetics he shared. He certainly devoted himself to paying attention, not only in his repeated acts of observation and documen‑ tation but also in his involvement with the psychoanalytic dialogue. Ørum argues that the “avant‑garde of the 60s is generally indifferent or even hostile to psychoanalysis, since these artists react against the modernist cult of the artist and the whole interiorization of art,” and instead turn to more “exterior, social” practices (326). In that same vein, art historian Ina Blom considers the work of Fluxus artists who approach subjects “less as psy‑ chological themes than as programs or operational modes” (2010). And Cage (who in several instances wrote off psychoanalysis as, at the least, not useful to him) saw countless opportunities for developing “exterior” compositional scores in a vast range of everyday sources. Blom sees him, significantly, not as someone driven solely by elements of the liberation of sounds as “beings” or by the apolitical perspective with which he was often associated but as “an artist intensely sensitized to the regular grids of modern power” (2010). This connects to Perec in several ways, including the recognition of eve‑ ryday life and artistic response as acknowledging the invisible and powerful systems determining so much of our lives. Moreover, it suggests Perec’s history of being both deeply involved with psychology, especially psychoanalysis, but engaging with it personally and artistically on his own terms. He saw several psychologists and other analysts for extended periods of his life, and he tied a number of his works to these periods and the episodes—the encounters with the analyst—themselves. He did not fully submit to the psychoanalytic dogma, nor did he ignore or escape it. He transformed it in the terms of his writing. A sober discussion of Perec’s experience with psychoanalysis is his 1977 essay, “Backtracking.” Here, he inquires into his own long and often reluc‑ tant, resistant, even “panicked” experience with one analyst, linking the ritu‑ als of the process, the critical weave of speech and writing, and the four years it took for his “story to come together…like a memory restored to its own space, like a gesture or tenderness resurrected” (2009d: 52–53). Perec’s Dream‑Life Autobiography Another, especially intriguing, example of Perec’s “restoration” of memory is his 1973 dream diary, La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams (2012), the “noc‑ turnal autobiography” which he recorded, beginning in 1968 and continuing

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  69 into 1972 while under the care of a psychiatrist. We generally think of our dreams as personal and private, perhaps recounted to one’s partner or pre‑ sented for analysis to a psychotherapist. The entries in this book, though, presented in list form, numbered and dated (month and year), are offered for our delectation (and perhaps analysis: Freudian, literary, or other) and are as fully loaded with puzzles, mysteries, secrets, and games as Perec’s writing typically was. The material itself is even more potentially resistant to literary or autobio‑ graphical analysis than usual, since its origins in the author’s sub/un/conscious mind are presumably mixed, revised, recast. They are, though, as Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker writes in an Afterword, notable for being somewhat more raw, less characterized by Perec’s usual “armor,” perhaps more reveal‑ ing of “who he really was” (260). Perec, though, teases the notion of what is “real” from the start, on the book’s dedication page,13 fancifully attributed to Oulipian poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud and twelfth‑century Japanese poet Saigyō Hōshi: Since I think that the real is in no way real how am I to believe that dreams are dreams Perec right off gives readers a clue to experiencing and understanding the dream‑tales, noting the twist of their creation: that the writing of the dreams prompted the dreams themselves: I thought I was recording the dreams I was having; I have realized that it was not long before I began having dreams only in order to write them… [W]hat could I then expect of them, if not to make them into texts… (2012 [1973]: 1)14 Part of the pleasure of reading these dream‑tales is recognizing this drive to produce writing and to ensure its seductive complexity. Some of it is depend‑ ent on knowledge of French language (for instance, puns) as well as culture and current events; most of it deftly joins, at least in the space of a page, ele‑ ments of Perec’s actual life (waking, sleeping), his imagination, his memories, and his interplay with language. Several themes repeat: A number are about puzzles, some specifically involving crosswords, which were one of Perec’s long‑time projects. Some are about reversals, returns, surprises, memories; food, beards, books. Some of them return, sometimes with anxiety, to his work, such as the thousands of “e”s that somehow found their way into A Void (Dream 95, October 1971: 76–77).

70  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary Three of the dreams, to my delight, are engaged with dance … rare Perec‑ quian words indeed: One is simply metaphoric: No. 71, May 1971’s The bus is largely a re‑ counting of a trip in which a bus becomes a car and two other cars collide: “The two drivers of the crashed vehicles are circling each other in a slow ballet” (120). One is a performance fantasy nestled into a longer story: No. 122, July 1972’s The wedding has many segments, some picking up from Perec’s actual life, probably not including the six American dancers populating the dream: “The ballet begins, a marriage pantomime. Gags…. It’s very funny.” More and more dancers join in, but the original ones have disappeared (232–233). One, very short, is a description of a moving woman. It has an unexpected, unexplained—and, in Perec’s personal world, loaded—follow‑up: No. 92, October 1971’s The actress, 2: “An actress begins to dance and slowly takes her clothes off. She has very small breasts. / I think of my mother” (172). The last dream of the book is in harsher territory. No. 124, August 1972’s The denunciation is a return to the plagues of Perec’s imagination, taking place in 1941 and incorporating Nazis, trains, stranded Jews, mutilated children, a camp, and his father, ignored as he “dips his left boot” into a freezing‑cold pond, hoping to be, then, “declared unfit for service.” (In life, of course, he had died in battle.) The final paragraph begins, “I am a little child” (238–239). Perec ends this long list, then, with a dream whose imagery recalls what had actually happened in his life, including a memory to which he returns on writing about the dream, and how he continued to experience himself in this narrative as the little child, alone. He had irrevocably lost what and who was most dear to him, most necessary to his finding a place in the world, to knowing himself—now, sans eux. This is not articulated directly either in these dream narratives or in his documentations of café‑table sightings. It lurks, though, as I see it, as I read him, under the pillow, behind the kiosks and sports cars, the autobiographical underscore of his writing. Lists: From Knowing to Telling The playfulness of Perec’s work was one of the elements that first drew me in: not only the actual humorous writing but the dexterousness with which Perec manipulated language and structure, with which he urged the reader (me, anyway) to speak aloud sections of the material, to hear and feel their sounds. I happen to love lists, and the lists appearing throughout Perec’s writ‑ ing, including those offered above, are among the compositional elements that intrigued me. As a choreographer, too, and an arts enthusiast, I find great pleasure in essentially ludic devices such as lists and games, including the implicit invitation to interact with these devices, perhaps recognizing how they might rub up against or produce meaning‑making possibilities in an individual piece or an artist’s life’s work.

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  71 The word “list” can be understood in multiple ways, most of them char‑ acterized by resisting or limiting discursive connectivity. That is, rather than explaining how one entry fits together with the preceding or following ones, lists assume the reader’s (or dancer’s or other collaborator’s) ability to un‑ derstand, through familiarity with the form and the context, possibilities of how to interact with both the material and its structure. This might include, for instance, an entry’s or a score’s invitations to comprehension, to engage‑ ment with ideas and sensory information, to recognition of formative and performative possibilities, to development of something entirely new. Historian Hayden White addressed this structural device’s relationship to meaning‑making and communication. Taking off from the idea that “narra‑ tive might well be considered a solution to … the problem of how to translate knowing into telling” (in Mitchell 1980: 1), he homed in on historiography’s trio of modes of representing history, each tied to a level of narrativity. The annals form, he writes, is simply a list of events in chronological order; the chronicle reaches toward narrativity but fails to achieve it; only the “history proper” might “attain full narrativity of the events of which they treat” (5). Beyond these models of historical representation, many lists are simply individual words or phrases. Among these are the grocery lists which land‑ scape architect and urban planner Lawrence Halprin identified as a kind of (everyday) score, a term he defined initially as “symbolizations of processes which extend over time” and which “[make] process visible” (1969: 1). However they adhere to the demands of a specific field or circumstance, an academic discipline or a trip to the supermarket, lists generally do not fully, or at all, clarify narrative logic or cohesion. That said, as Rowan Wilken and Anthony McCosker suggested, Perec’s lists “serve as testimony to his ability to transform the trivial into the poetic—list‑making as ‘invent‑ory’” (2012). This view articulates the lists’ generative power, their beauty (for instance, their visual design and aural applications), and their functionality as scores, whether it sends you to the vegetable market or generates a poem or a dance. Lists: Invitations to Attention Perec’s lists exemplify a range of definitions, or functions, including White’s narrative trifecta and Halprin’s scores. An example of his historical presenta‑ tions is his 1979 “I Remember Malet & Isaac” (Perec 2009f). This consists of multiple vertical and horizontal arrangements of words, typographically distinct, in what Perec calls “a game with cut‑and‑paste, a listing of chapter headings, captions, highlighted keywords and so on” which demonstrate the “phantom history” he’d been taught at school (55–56). Significant historical facts and figures fall into line(s) of a conveniently arranged, which is to say reductive and ideologically insistent, puzzle, as well as a serious critique of the French educational system of the time. Another list, both kind of amusing and a bit wistful, is the alphabetically ordered anaphora‑adjacent 1981 “On the Difficulty of Imagining the Good Life.” This begins with “I’d not like to live

72  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary with Andress (Ursula), but sometimes I would,” and proceeds, maintaining the same I’d‑not‑like‑but (or reverse) structure, through “I’d not like us all to live in Zanzibar, but sometimes I would” (2009g: 103–104). Listing, as a compositional choice, was a way for Perec to demonstrate a range of attitudes to paying attention: what to pay attention to, how to merge the act of paying attention into text. Some lists, for instance, indicate thematic links between and among entries; others draw the reader’s attention not only to their content but to their sound, rhythm, and imagery. They are often vivid, too, in what they suggest about their maker. For example, they acknowledge the role of Perec’s spatial or temporal or physical relationship to a list’s elements; and critically, in some instances, they create an autobio‑ graphical presence and essentially stand in for Perec himself. Some of the lists are organizing devices, similar to, though typically more pronounced than (and so starker or funnier or odder than) those of most expository writings’ chapters and subtitles. Other lists are the organized matter itself. Some of them are simply structuring devices which announce (often via their presen‑ tation rather than an articulation) that there is a subject being explored, by category; here the list itself may be short, or only implied, but it forms the scaffolding for the otherwise untethered parts. An instance of an implied list holding together the thematic promise of its title is a short essay, the 1977 “Three Bedrooms Remembered.” Each of its three stand‑alone sections is titled with a number and place name, followed by a short description of the room and the things in it, which Perec recalls from his time spent there in adolescence (2009e: 17–20). This is an instance, too, of autobiographical fragments: three searches for solace in Perec’s dif‑ ficult teenage years. And, as is often the case with Perec, there is a back story to the writing, a nod to Proust’s legendary pages about falling asleep (Bellos 2009a: IX). The 1976 “Twelve Sidelong Glances” is quite different: its sections, each numbered and titled, pertain to observed examples of fashion or to Perec’s analytical and political thinking about what may or may not be a “gentle tyranny” (2009c: 33) or “crude and vulgar institution” (37). Some sections are in essay form of various lengths. Two sections, more obviously lists them‑ selves, ground the whole, naming outfits, their components, their costs. In the section called The Pillow Book (which he claims to have adapted from The Pillow Book of Sei Shônagon), Perec names “Outerwear,” “Fan Handles,” “Women’s Robes,” and more, adding to each “I like” or “I don’t like” some element (40–41). The opening section, Off the Peg, is largely a long list of ob‑ served outfits and their costs, including “Printed muslin dress, silk collar and cuffs, pleated skirt (400 F)… Pleated jersey wool cloak with matching skirt and pleated front panel (420 F). Children’s collection: printed satin country pinafore. Four‑year‑olds: 90 F” (31–32). But the list twists sharply from its unmannered itemizing in a long sentence‑as‑paragraph, concluding that fash‑ ion advertising’s manipulation of children “was one of the most repugnant manifestations of the world in which we live” (32).

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  73 These structures echo the kind of categorizing that occupied Perec as the center of his work life for a remarkable period of time: nearly twenty years. He worked as a documentaliste, a scientific archivist, at the CNRS Labora‑ toire Associé 38, from 1961 to 1978. This job, however much it changed over time as the technical and technological options increased, called for Perec to demonstrate and develop his superior skills at organizing information. This was an inherently absurd and potentially hilarious situation, despite these skills, given such tasks as creating an index “for a highly technical field about which he knew exactly nothing” (Bellos 1999: 252). Gleanings from this job, actual scientific material as well as the apparently virtuosic projects of organ‑ izing information systems, would find their way into Perec’s writing. And Perec would cleverly, or hilariously, interject his own material into that of the Laboratory, adding a range of humorous and sometimes bilingual (French/ English) wordplay and commentary, as well as typewriter‑crafted visuals which had no chance of making it into a final draft, when he was meant to be simply typing the work of the actual scientists. He even composed his own apparently excellent and preposterous takeoff on a scholarly paper.15 Perec’s lists are charged by the felicitousness of his organizational prow‑ ess. They are also often charged by suggestions of autobiographical material (which might be familiar to readers as well) within and between the lines. Our sense of attention to his subjects is guided by the sheer abundance of words, by their rhythm and sound (if we actually or mentally read them aloud), and by their visual presentation, enlivening both the positive and negative space of the page. In the SOS chapter, “The Apartment,” the Moving Out segment is a vertical list, some of its entries single words, others appositives or expan‑ sions stretching across their lines: Leaving an apartment. Vacating the scene. Decamping. Clearing up. Clearing out. Making an inventory…. Breaking Burning Taking down; unfastening…. Unplugging detaching cutting pulling…. Closing Leaving (1999b: 35) The next segment, Moving In, is over a page long and written entirely in horizontal lines of word after word, at once visually engaging for the wild mix of material and the suggestive power of the imagery and both daunting and seductive in its density. An excerpt: imagining inventing investing deciding bending folding stooping sheathing fitting out stripping bare splitting turning…

74  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary sighing whistling while you work moistening becoming very keen on pulling off sticking up glueing swearing insisting (35–36) This list not only brings together vivid physical imagery, it also suggests rec‑ ollection: the sheer weight of actions he has already performed in the eve‑ ryday life process of moving house. Like many such Perecquian offerings, it could easily be understood as a dance or performance score, to be set or improvised, in which, for instance, each word, phrase, or line generates a specific movement, utterance, spatial direction, rhythmic shift, or other compositional element. And, of course, these words, temptingly arranged and urging this everyday process into art, are begging to be read aloud. As readers, we connect both to Perec’s re/productive attention to his subject and to our own attention to the merged experiences of reading, hearing, speaking his poetry. Art‑Lists, Archives, and Autobiography Perec’s lists bring to mind other art‑lists. One is the long and evocative Verb‑ list (1967) compiled by sculptor Richard Serra as possible things to do with oneself and one’s materials: “to roll, to crease, to fold…to tear, to chip, to split.” This is at once a score and countless possible scores, an open‑ended future‑focused plan for making art, for generating a process; and it is an art object, a drawing of writing. Another example is the life’s work of On Kawara (1932–2014), the Japa‑ nese Conceptual artist who created, on an enormous scale, multiple archives composed of lists and other narrative‑resistant forms. He sent thousands of postcards to and from all over the world, announcing the time he woke up or the fact that he was still alive; he compiled shelves of books filled with lists of people he encountered while taking a walk; almost daily for forty‑eight years, he created Date Paintings, meticulous representations of the date on which he was painting, spelled out in white sans serif letters on a dark background. This huge array of material at once documented and produced the minutia of his own everyday activities while revealing nothing of his “personal life,” in the process challenging definitions and conventions of archives, autobiogra‑ phy, and art (Satin 2017). As Perec showed throughout his work, and as many other artists have dem‑ onstrated since early in the twentieth century, the notions of what constitutes a personal life and its artistic expression are mutable. Autobiography seeps through the cracks of everyday alertness and its documentation. We refocus—­ through lists of foods eaten and actions taken and cars counted, through recounting of a desk crowded with objects reformulated as self‑portrait and still life, through a recitation of two lists compiled by On Kawara enu‑ merating thousands of years, past and present16—our sense of what consti‑ tutes a life and the realms of realism of its documentation. We experience, as

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  75 artists, readers, and viewers, the roles of listing and the specificity of the lists themselves as they engage our attention, organize and orchestrate the over‑ load, complicate and calm the chaos of our minds and our lives. Notes 1 The 5th  International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geogra‑ phies, 10–12 June 2015, was hosted by The University of Edinburgh. 2 More formally known as the Endotic Teeside Research Group, members included Sara O’Brian, Robert Burton, Rachel Carroll (who had organized the 2014 Perec conference), Gemma Draper, Michael Hall, Heike Salzer, Chris Thurgar Dawson, Simon Morris, and Helge Musial. See Gemma Draper (2015). https://www.gem‑ madraper.com/interdiciplinary‑project‑on‑the‑endotic/ 3 I return to Perec’s ideas about space, particularly as he articulates them in Species of Spaces (in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces), in Chapter 4 and elsewhere in this book. 4 See Paxton (2001). 5 These words suggest Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization,” in which art is associated with bringing attention and awareness to the everyday, the famil‑ iar, the seemingly already known. See Shklovsky (1965). 6 Though Lieux (also addressed in Chapter 2) was never completed, it shows up repeatedly in Perec’s writing and critical responses. Its generating algorithm was also employed in constructing Perec’s Life a User’s Manual (1987). See Bellos (1999: 417–422) and Sturrock’s notes in Perec (1999a: 40, 56). 7 The term “flat” is used in theater for a wall‑like set‑piece. 8 See Satin (1999). 9 See also Briggs (2013), a reading map of an excerpt of William James’s Psychology: Briefer Course. 10 Note that this chapter (3) addresses viewing dance in terms of literally seeing; later chapters consider other factors interacting with the visual. Dance scholar‑ ship focusing on broader issues of seeing/understanding—“reading”—Western concert dance includes Susan Leigh Foster’s 1986 Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, which joins literary theory to choreo‑ graphic representation. 11 See, for example, Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (Carole Tonkinson 1995), which focuses on literary interactions with Buddhism. Many scholarly and critical histories of the arts of that period address this intersection; a very short list includes Sally Banes’s Democracy’s Body (1993a [1980]) and Terpsichore in Sneakers (1987 [1977]) and Greenwich Village 1963 (1993b); Al‑ lan Kaprow’s Essays on the Blurring of Life and Art (1993); Cynthia Novack’s Sharing the Dance (1990). 12 Several years before that, in 1958, Cage attended and performed at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. Nam June Paik, whose brilliant multi‑media experimentation engaged film, video and television, music, and performance, was there as well; a claim he made later suggests, however tongue‑in‑cheek, Cage’s central importance to the avant‑garde: “My life began one evening in August 1958 in Darmstadt. 1957 was 1  BC (Before Cage). 1947 was the year 10  BC. Plato lived in 2500 BC and not 500 BC [Before Christ].” See Tanasoaica (2013) and Armstrong (1993). 13 The dedication itself is “for Nour,” presumably referring to his dear friend Noureddine Mechri. 14 Perec also writes of this phenomenon of dreaming in order to write in “Backtrack‑ ing”: 2009d: 51.

76  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary 15 Perec once directly incorporated material from the lab’s actual research, in his 1972 radio play, “Fonctionnemont du système nerveux dans la tête” (“The Func‑ tioning of the Nervous System in the Head”). He also appropriated the style of the work circulating in the lab in a “scientific” piece of his own, “Experimental Dem‑ onstration of the Tomatotopic Organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.),” composed in “what might seem in French scientists’ eyes to be English”—a preposterous, hilarious, and wildly detailed paper “so well aimed…that it almost transforms silliness into an art form” (Bellos 1999: 263–265). 16 One Million Years, by On Kawara, was read aloud during the artist’s posthumous 2014 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, On Kawara—Silence. See Satin (2017), Highmore (2015, 2017).

Works Cited Armstrong, Elizabeth. 1993. “Fluxus and the Museum.” In In the Spirit of Fluxus: Published on the Occasion of the Exhibition. Edited by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss. Exhibition catalogue. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center: 14–21. Armstrong, Elizabeth and Joan Rothfuss, eds. 1993. In the Spirit of Fluxus: Published on the Occasion of the Exhibition. Exhibition catalogue. Essays by Simon Ander‑ son, Elizabeth Armstrong, et al. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center. Banes, Sally. 1987 [1977]. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post‑Modern Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Banes, Sally. 1993a [1980]. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Banes, Sally. 1993b. Greenwich Village 1963: Avant‑Garde Performance and the Ef‑ fervescent Body. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Banes, Sally, ed., assisted by Andrea Harris. 2003. Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Battcock, Gregory, ed.  1968. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Bellos, David. 1999 [1993]. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. London: The Harvill Press. Bellos, David. 2009a. “Introduction.” In Georges Perec Thoughts of Sorts, translated by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine: V11–X11. Bellos, David. 2009b. “The Old and the New: An Introduction to Georges Perec.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 29.1 (Spring): 11–20. Blom, Ina. 2010. “Signal to Noise: John Cage and ‘The Anarchy of Silence.” Artforum 48.6. https://www.artforum.com/print/201002/signal‑to‑noise‑john‑cage‑and‑the‑ anarchy‑of‑silence‑24766 Briggs, Kate. 2013. On Reading as an Alternation of Flights and Perchings. Calgary: No Press. Briggs, Kate. 2016. “Story the Story in it: A Project.” In Reading the Illegible, spe‑ cial issue of Amodern Vol. 6, edited by Nick Thurston. https://amodern.net/article/ story‑the‑story‑in‑it/ Dames, Nicholas. 2007. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dass, Baba Ram. 1971. Be Here Now. San Cristobal, NM: Lama Foundation. Dils, Ann and Ann Cooper Albright, eds. 2001. Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Draper, Gemma. 2015. “Interdisciplinary Project on the Endotic.” Panel. 5th Inter‑ national and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies, 10–12 June

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  77 2015, hosted by The University of Edinburgh. https://www.gemmadraper.com/ interdiciplinary‑project‑on‑the‑endotic/ Epstein, Mark. 2022. The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life. New York: Penguin. Forsdick, Charles, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips, eds. 2019. Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces. London: UCL Press. Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Halprin, Lawrence. 1969. The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Envi‑ ronment. New York: George Braziller, Inc. Highmore, Ben. 2015 [2014]. “‘I Make Love to the Days’: Accounting for On Ka‑ wara.” In On Kawara—Silence, edited by Jeffrey Weiss and Anne Wheeler. New York: Guggenheim Museum: 205–209. Highmore, Ben. 2017. “Georges Perec and the Significance of the Insignificant.” In The Afterlives of Georges Perec, edited by Rowan Wilken and Justin Clemens. Ed‑ inburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 105–119. Homans, Jennifer. 2010. Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. New York: Random House. Kaprow, Allan. 1993. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Lemon, Lee T. and Marion J. Reis, translation and introduction. 1965. Russian For‑ malist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Margolin, Deb. 1999. “Count the I’s, or, the Autobiographical Nature of Everything.” Performing Autobiography. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 10.1–2, #19–20: 23–32. Merleau‑Ponty, Maurice. 2012. The Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Originally published in 1945. Mitchell, W.J.T., ed. 1980. On Narrative Chicago, IL and London: University of Chi‑ cago Press. Novack, Cynthia Jean (Later known as Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull). 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ørum, Tania. 2006. “Georges Perec and the Avant-Garde in the Visual Arts.” Textual Practice 20.2: 319-332. Paxton, Steve. 2001. “Improvisation is a Word for Something That Can’t Keep a Name.” In Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader,edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press: 421–426. Originally published in Contact Quarterly Dance & Improvisation Jour‑ nal 12.2 (Spring/Summer 1987): 15–19. Perec, Georges. 1987. Life A User’s Manual. Translated by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine. Originally published in 1978. Perec, Georges. 1999a [1974]. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and trans‑ lated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin. Perec, Georges. 1999b [1974]. “Species of Spaces.” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock, London: Penguin: 1–96. Perec, Georges. 1999c [1974]. “The Street.” In Species of Spaces, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin: 46–56. Perec, Georges. 1999d. [1974]. “Approaches to What?” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin: 209–211.

78  Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary (First published in February 1973 in Cause Commune, and in Perec’s L’Infra‑ ordinaire, 1989.) Perec, Georges. 2009a. Thoughts of Sorts. Translated and with an Introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine. Perec, Georges. 2009b. “Reading: A Socio‑physiological Sketch.” In Thoughts of Sorts, translated by David Bellos. Boston: Verba Mundi Book/David R. Godine: 87–102. Also, as “Reading: A Socio‑physiological Outline.” In Georges Perec, Spe‑ cies of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1999 [1974], edited and translated by John Stur‑ rock. London and New York: Penguin Books: 174–185. Originally published in Esprit 453, January 1976. Perec, Georges. 2009c. “Twelve Sidelong Glances.” In Thoughts of Sorts, translated and with an Introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine: 31–42. Also in Georges Perec, 1999 [1974], Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin: 156–164. (First published in 1976 in Traverses 3: 44–48.) Perec, Georges. 2009d. “Backtracking.” In Thoughts of Sorts, translated and with an Introduction by David Bellos, 2009, Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine: 43–53. (First published in 1977 in Cause commune no.1: 77–88.) Perec, Georges. 2009e. “Three Bedrooms Remembered.” In Thoughts of Sorts, trans‑ lated and with an introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine: 17–20. (First published in 1977 in Les Nouvelles littéraires 2612: 20.) Perec, Georges. 2009f. “I Remember Malet and Isaac.” In Thoughts of Sorts, trans‑ lated and with an introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine: 55–68. First published in March 1979 in H‑Histoire 1: 197–209. Perec, Georges. 2009g. “On the Difficulty of Imagining the Good Life.” In Thoughts of Sorts, translated and with an introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine: 103–104. First published in La Quinzaine littéraire 353, August 1, 1981: 38. Perec, Georges. 2010. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Translated by Marc Lowenthal. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press. Originally published in 1975. Perec, Georges. 2012. La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams. Translated and with an af‑ terword by Daniel Levin Becker. Brooklyn and London: Melville House. Originally published in 1973. Pettinger, Alasdair. 2019. “Perecquian Soundscapes.” In Georges Perec’s Geogra‑ phies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces, edited by Charles Forsdick, An‑ drew Leak, and Richard Phillips. London: UCL Press: 127–139. Rainer, Yvonne. 1974a. Work: 1961–73. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia Col‑ lege of Art and Design, and New York: New York University Press. Rainer, Yvonne. 1974b [1968]. “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A.” In Work: 1961–73, edited by Yvonne Rainer. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and New York: New York University Press: 63–69. Previously published in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968: 263–273. Satin, Leslie. 1999. “Autobiography in the Present Tense: Deborah Hay, Living and Dying at Once.” Performing Autobiography. Women & Performance: A Jour‑ nal of Feminist Theory 10.1–2, #19‑20, edited by Leslie Satin and Judith Jerome: 181–210.

Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary  79 Satin, Leslie. 2017. “Georges Perec and On Kawara: Endotic Extravagance in Litera‑ ture, Art, and Dance.” Literary Geographies 3.1: 50–68. Satin, Leslie and Judith Jerome, eds. 1999. Performing Autobiography. Issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 10.1–2: 19–20. Serra, Richard. 1967. Verblist. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/152793. Ac‑ cessed June 21, 2023. Originally published in Avalanche 2 Winter 1971: 20–21. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1965. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Ne‑ braska Press: 3–24. Originally published in 1917. Sturrock, John. 1999 [1974]. “Introduction.” In Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin: ix–xvii. Tanasoaica, Liviu. 2013. “Beyond Cage: Nam June Paik.” Non Finito (August 9). https://medium.com/history‑of‑art/nam‑june‑paik‑escaping‑the‑cage‑d5f6fdfdd750 Thurston, Nick, ed. 2016. Reading the Illegible, special issue of Amodern (July 6). https://amodern.net/article/reading‑the‑illegible/ Tonkinson, Carole, ed.  1995. Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation. New York: Riverhead Books. Weiss, Jeffrey, and Anne Wheeler, eds. 2015. On Kawara—Silence. New York: Guggenheim Museum. White, Hayden. 1980. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” In On Narrative, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980: 1–23. Wilken, Rowan and Justin Clemens, eds. 2017. The Afterlives of Georges Perec. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilken, Rowan, and Anthony McCosker. 2012. “The Everyday Work of Lists.” M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 15.5. Accessed February 20, 2022. https:// journal.media‑culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/554.

Entracte The Body Catalogue

Contemplating dance and dancing involves exploring the ways we join the spaces of our bodies and the sensations through which we experience them to their and our environments. These include the people with whom we share movement and stillness and the merged sense of immediacy, memory, and anticipation. Many dancers practice some version of what I call the body catalogue: an act of attention, endlessly open to change, widely known as a body scan. I focus here on some of the ways this act is engaged in and under‑ stood and as it is particular to the experience of dancers. This brief chapter, in list form like the body catalogue itself, is an entracte. It positions the catalogue as linking the preceding chapter, which focused on everydayness, attention, and listing, primarily in the work of Georges Perec, and the chapter after this, which addresses spatial elements as they figure in his writing and in dance. The word “entracte,” which translates as “intermission” (US) or “interval” (UK), generally signifies a break. Here, it is intended as an opportunity to explore the in‑betweenness of an instance of embodiment. #1

The Body Catalogue as Conundrum and Connection

The body catalogue encapsulates and enacts a central conundrum of dance. The dancer needs to be an analytical observer, at the micro‑level, of her own body: knowing the feelings and functions of each part of it, from the little toe of each foot to the comparative heft of the pelvic girdle, at rest and in motion; being familiar with the constantly changing experiences of the op‑ tions for those parts and that motion, for the movement itself and for the quality of that movement, however subtle or dramatic. And at the same time, to really dance, she needs to be able to transcend that watchful perspective. She needs to shift from minute observation and potentially judgmental per‑ spective, to expand beyond that sense of the all‑seeing eye and commit to the realm of embodied action and experience, of participatory presentness— connected, perhaps, to other dancers, perhaps to observers, certainly to the performance, the moment, the space.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003143741-4

The Body Catalogue  81 #2

The Body Catalogue as Perecquian Act of Attention and Occasion of Renewal

This circumstance is at once intimately personal and broadly supported, drawing on our individual lives and beliefs as they are merged with our “dance histories” and the sociocultural attributes of our lives as they figure in our embodied practices. Moreover, as I have come to see, and to feel, the catalogue is a list: a corporeal and implicitly Perecquian act of paying atten‑ tion. That is, it is a scene of identifying, focusing on, and experiencing each part of our bodies, and our bodies as wholes, and it is an opportunity to do so in a way specific to every iteration, every day, every time. Endlessly renew‑ able, the catalogue marks the shifting terms of our embodied experiences as sites of presentness, memory (moments ago, years ago), and imagination. #3

The Body Catalogue as Particularity, Contingency, Time(s), and Space(s)

One of the key elements of Perec’s revelations of the everyday is the locating of his plea for recovery in terms of the body, of space, and of things. He links these explicitly in his 1973 “Approaches to What,” moving inward from the broader boundaries of that essay’s protest against the misleading depic‑ tions of everyday life in the “daily” newspapers: “But where is our life?” he asks. “Where is our body? Where is our space?” (1999b: 210). You have to notice—his words suggest—your sensations, your breathing, your every‑ day movements, the particularity of your actions, the way you breathe and move somewhere in a space and place alive with its own properties. You have to look beyond what you (think you) already know: “Question your tea spoons” (1999b: 210). At the 2014 Perec conference, I began to tie together the ways I had come to understand Perec’s work as it raised ideas about dance: about bodies, space, endurance, composition, and attention. I opened my presentation, “Dancing in Place: Exhaustion, Embodiment, and Perec,” with the passage below: I stand facing the mirror that covers one of the long walls of the dance studio. It is what we call the Merce Cunningham Studio, though in fact, the “real” Cunningham Studio is gone. That beloved space, perhaps the most beautiful dance venue in New York City for forty years—a great swath of pale‑floored high‑ceilinged openness, eleven flights up, two walls lined with windows situating us within the vast and undisciplined architectural landscape of downtown Manhattan and flooding us with sunlight, one short wall mirrored to reflect dancers’ images, Merce’s barre in the corner—has been lost to a tangle of real estate, politics, and grief. We are merely (and admittedly grateful) tenants now, one among many, in this windowless studio at City Center, in the wrong

82  The Body Catalogue neighborhood, its floors too hard, its lighting harsh, its scheduling of classes subject to the landlord’s calendar. So in this space that is not really what we call it, I stand toward the back, positioned to face my reflection in the mirror, fifth panel from the left, my most slender double, the shape of my body already narrowed by my perpetual black costume and a lifetime of dance techniques de‑ signed to produce a body that not only does particular things but has the visual appearance announcing that it can. We have not yet begun to move, the pianist has not yet begun to play, the teacher has not yet arrived at his or her position, center front, signaling us to get in place, as it were, to choose a spot in the room and line up the parts of our bodies according to the ballet‑derived, vertically‑organized script: head floating atop the long neck, chin lowered a bit, chest open, energy go‑ ing up and down through the torso, weight down through the legs and feet, tailbone dropped, hips over knees over toes, arms ever‑so‑slightly rounded. We have begun the minutely detailed and endless cataloguing of our bodies’ components, in movement and stillness, in this moment of prelude, this moment that is, of course, only seemingly still. This careful reviewing of our bodies continues, consciously and otherwise, throughout the class and throughout our dancing lives.1 I quote this passage to demonstrate and interact with a particular exam‑ ple of the kind of listing I have introduced and to articulate some of the assumptions which potentially underlie it. This particular catalogue clearly goes beyond the more familiar focus on the body, engaging other, contextual, elements. Moreover, as its revival here years later suggests, what seemed so physically evident at the moment of its composition is no longer dependable. For instance, one of the primary such elements is now freighted with nos‑ talgia: We have not held classes exclusively at City Center studios for a long time. Many Cunningham technique students took, or take, class alone, at home, via the Cunningham Trust’s Instagram classes which began early in the Covid pandemic; even the notion of who “we” are is in play. Some of this chapter, by extension, describes an “as if” link to a remembered situation.2 #4

The Body Catalogue as Ritual

The body catalogue recurs day after day, a ritual—before or during class, before rehearsal, alone in the studio or on the living room floor—in the lives of dancers working across techniques, genres, and geographies. In those mo‑ ments of what is not really stillness, the dancer, maybe standing, maybe lying down, finds her breath; she locates the parts of her body as they line up with each other, as they literally “take place” somewhere, as they are supported by gravity, and as they reflect the physical, physiological, and philosophical perspectives of a technique or a practice as well as her innate proprioceptive abilities, her sensitivities to the feel of the room.

The Body Catalogue  83 #5

The Body Catalogue as Archive of Experience and Memory

The catalogue recalls the archival features of Perec’s writing, its function of both gathering and separating his multiple perspectives and histories and evoking their underlying individual, social and sociological, and phenom‑ enological properties. It articulates experientially a dancer’s knowledge of her body, acquired over time and techniques, experimentation and advancement; and of anatomical structures and bodily systems, e.g., skeletal, muscular, and visceral. It includes, consciously or not, the less formal “training” within each person’s sociocultural as well as corporeal and personal world. That training—that acquisition of a vast and detailed span of culturally specific information and guidance about how to move and how to be still, alone, and with others—is how we learn what Marcel Mauss called the “techniques of the body” (2006 [1935]). #5A

The Body Catalogue as Wholes and Parts in Time

Like much of Perec’s work, the catalogue articulates the archive/body’s own past and present, endlessly producing an emergent present and, sometimes, implying an embodied future. This gathering of archived embodied experi‑ ence and time sounds lovely, and in many ways it is. Really, it’s why I con‑ tinue to dance, even taking the Cunningham classes that still feel like my body’s base: a crazy choice in a world where for most people concert dance is irrelevant … and when my grand jeté isn’t what it used to be. In part it’s because I still believe in the body’s mind, in the body as whole, “the body as home.”3 For Perec, this was not fully an option. His “roll calls”4 are sometimes fragmented, fractured: a body in parts. As I described earlier, in his novel A Man Asleep, so thick with inertia and depression that reading it makes me feel leaden, the protagonist describes in painstaking detail a body whose parts are detached from each other or from any sense of synthesis, the objects of observation by the analyst who identifies himself as All Eye. The character, reduced to the most basic parts and functions of his body and their dispas‑ sionate description, embodies fracture and precarity (1990 [1967]). I won’t reduce Perec’s vision to this broken body, in part because so much of his work is funny, charming, silly, alive with the pleasures of playful in‑ teraction with the world, with the word—and with knowing and feeling so much that even his vast storehouses of language can’t penetrate. Perec’s ex‑ pressions of unutterable pain and loss and his repeated framing of his life in spatial and bodily terms speak to me; they tell me that we are inhabited by our histories, our memories, that we carry our grief in our bones, even the grief we feel across years or generations or miles. It is not always evident how to distinguish among memory, metaphor, and desire, what to take from the multiple scientific viewpoints, how to respond when a gesture or sensation morphs into another moment or another movement. Much has been written

84  The Body Catalogue about memory as a phenomenon extending beyond the personal to the variously defined collectives (family, nation, tribe, culture) whose individual members feel its presence in their bodies. We certainly recognize the exist‑ ence of muscle memory; many of us insist on the existence of blood memory. I know that dancing, as Cunningham said, gives us that “fleeting moment when you feel alive,” when you are everything you are (2019). “Everything you are,” of course, includes everything you were or have been, however mysteriously its components come to your consciousness, to your jumps and gestures. #6

The Body Catalogue as Structure: Bones, Breath, Gravity

Most simply, the catalogue is an opportunity for a practitioner to take stock of a moment’s components, particularly the experience of one’s body and space: most centrally the body as space and the body in space. It might be as basic and as structurally clear as lining up, or listing, and acknowledging one’s body parts, along the lines of the Black American spiritual’s “ankle bone connected to the shin bone, shin bone connected to the knee bone…,”5 or the less godly and more anatomically disordered paean from the 1960s musical Hair: “I got my feet I got my toes I got my liver Got my blood.”6 But in fact, its design and components are as varied as its makers, and the varia‑ tions reflect these origins. That element of lining up and otherwise focusing on the individual parts of the body, and in some instances on the relationships among them, as a person is experiencing them on that day in that place is what I believe most dancers would see as central to the catalogue. The phrase “I believe” doesn’t represent a guess or assumption but a reflection on practice. It follows, in addition to my own longtime solo experience of organized embodied reflec‑ tion, years of guided experiences in the class or rehearsal studio in which the teacher or choreographer urges participants to be conscious of the parts of their bodies, taking care to contextualize their experiences in terms of the breath, the relationship to gravity and the floor, and the connections of body parts to each other. This is not as simple as it might seem. For one thing, the material in a catalogue reflects the wide range of the practitioner’s or guide’s as well as the circumstance’s contexts: a range of elements large and small, interwoven and separate. These might include her dance training; knowledge of the field and its movement and language vocabularies and psychological, phenomeno‑ logical, and intellectual dispositions; geographic locale; social environment; and individual desires, needs, expectations, observations, and predilections. Moreover, and this is as true of Perec’s lists as it is of dancers’ tracings, in their mind’s eye and their sensations, their hips and fingers and feet: each instance reflects and produces shifting relationships among parts and wholes.

The Body Catalogue  85 #7

The Body Catalogue as Everyday Practice: Dance Class and Rehearsal

A body‑scanning catalogue in some instances will be understood as part of the work of a technique class or rehearsal, in others as something individual dancers do beforehand as part of their preparation for it. Some of that is per‑ sonal and particular: what each person experiences as what is necessary to do before class or rehearsal begins, even if it’s known that the event will include some kind of scan. It is and is not “warming up”: an arguable concept in any case. (Both Merce Cunningham and my early, brilliant ballet teacher, Peter Saul, said repeatedly that there was no such thing as a warm‑up: it was all dancing.) The catalogue, however configured and embodied from technique to tech‑ nique, class to class, rehearsal to rehearsal, person to person, is a practice of paying attention joined to a malleable structure of listing: what I think of as an embodied Perecquian practice.7 Each teacher’s and choreographer’s version of the catalogue is connected to supporting the understanding of the dancer’s body, as it is aligned, as it moves and is still, and as it is best prepared for the work to follow—a perspective not so much required for the work as in league with it. Certainly, there are many activities of engaging, stimulat‑ ing, relaxing, and simply noticing parts of the body common to many dance and other physical practices. But each practice is tied to a belief system and a philosophy of dance and/or movement, sometimes but not always articulated in words, borne out richly in its body catalogue. And dancers extract from their experiences in class and rehearsal what works for them for their ongo‑ ing individual practice: for specific circumstances, for what sets them up for the day, for what feels right. What follows are descriptive reflections drawn from my experiences stud‑ ying at length with Vicky Shick and Barbara Mahler, two choreographers and dancers as well as teachers who are well known in the New York City postmodern dance community.8 #8

The Body Catalogue of Vicky Shick: “The simple pleasure of ease”9

Vicky Shick’s technique classes are informed by years of performing with and teaching the dances of Trisha Brown as well as choreographing her own work. The class often begins with a short period of standing, Shick talking the dancers through a succession of small actions in place, often addressing a single body part, adding another, noticing and activating the parts and the whole. She often uses simple walks as a way to enter the space, to experience oneself in the space. “See what you’re looking at,” she urges; “activate your vision,” rather than get drawn inward. It doesn’t feel compulsively list‑like, but it gradually moves through the body, wakes and incorporates the muscles and bones and introduces a movement quality joining spatial clarity with

86  The Body Catalogue softness in the joints, unpredictable rhythms and initiations, limbs tossed and thrown and rarely held for more than a second. From standing, Shick moves into an extended, voluptuous, and largely su‑ pine catalogue. We all lie down, opening our limbs into a big X. Shick calmly intones her instructions, repeating not only actions but spoken phrases fa‑ miliar to class “regulars.” Each dancer gently enters the movement world of this time, place, and technique; allowing herself to sink slowly into the floor, continue to awaken her muscles and body parts and her consciousness of these parts; find the weight and gravity in the quiet legs opened wide on the floor while the arms stretch from the fingers10 and pull the torso into a twist reaching to the base of the spine, eventually carrying over into the hips and the legs, still extended through the toes. Sometimes the narrated voyage through the body is “logically” organized, tracing, say, a path from head to foot, or vice versa; sometimes, instead, it follows a less skeletally obvious route. The subtle waves of Shick’s incanta‑ tion are peppered with her pleasurable groaning, playful imagery (“take your leg for a ride”), exaggeratedly loud outbreaths, and repeated reminders not to do anything that doesn’t feel right. Almost always, she includes the direc‑ tion (which I, among others, have borrowed for my own teaching) to take a moment to “do absolutely nothing,” which is harder than it sounds and an endlessly appreciated opportunity to release a morning and a lifetime of tension. Shick’s instructions mix physical specificity with the need to “do what feels right” and recognize the sensations of executing the movement. At the same time, her language has become increasingly linked to physical and spatial structure: “Sense the architecture of your body,” “Find your width.” When we finally spiral up to standing, I feel the freedom of movement of my body parts as they are, and as I am, not only supported by the floor and by gravity but by a sense of myself as both parts and a whole. I also feel ready to take the rest of the class, the more obviously “dance‑y” material, some improvised, more set. The emphasis on sequential movement, elasticity in the joints, release of weight into the floor, and generally letting go (“shake the muscles off the bone”) contribute to qualities of ease, connec‑ tivity, and quiet which underlie the technically and rhythmically challenging elements of the material. #9

The Body Catalogue of Barbara Mahler: Experiencing Anatomy

Many dancers take both Shick’s and Barbara Mahler’s classes, which share certain beliefs about movement (for instance, the value of dropping into one’s weight and of softening the muscles), but their teaching and their body cata‑ logues are quite distinct. Mahler’s classes in Klein Technique, a somatic prac‑ tice which she developed with Susan Klein beginning in the 1980s, center on an explicitly anatomical view of the body—complete with a replica of a skel‑ eton, frequently used for demonstration—in which the focus is on alignment and on the bones. There is no suggestion that one moves without involving

The Body Catalogue  87 the muscles, but the primary subjects of the discourse are the proper stacking of the bones, the micro‑specifics of what you do, differently every time, and the attention you pay to your experience of being in your body.11 Dancers become consciously engaged with understanding their bodies as made up of many separate but collaborative parts. Klein described seeing “a person as a whole, not just as a body [and looking] at the body as a whole, not just the troubled parts. We are interested,” she wrote, “in analysis and integration, articulation and connection. We are working to integrate a per‑ son’s structure and movement” (Klein 2005). She is acknowledging the broad effects that this technique of repatterning—of resetting the known, familiar, and not always useful ways of moving—has on a person’s “understanding the full use of the body as an integral whole” (Klein 2005, 2021). Unlike in some other somatic techniques, the focus is not on your sensa‑ tion, on what you feel, but on what you notice about your body. (Some practitioners of somatic and other phenomenologically derived approaches to movement focus more on experiencing interiority, while maintaining con‑ sciousness of their surroundings.) Shick has spoken in similar terms about the direction of her own catalogue, but her more languid style of presentation as well as the movement itself encourage a feeling of lushness rather than “analysis.” On the other hand, Mahler’s classes, however thorough they are in developing dancers’ observational abilities regarding their own bodies, are extremely sensually pleasurable. The class can either be seen as beginning with a brief but distinctive and necessary catalogue, or as, essentially, all catalogue: an expansion of those initial moments. Dancers actually begin before class, lying on the floor, legs stretched out in line with their hip sockets or resting vertically against a wall. At a cue from Mahler, dancers spiral up to standing, close their eyes, and place their feet under their sitz bones. Mahler directs everyone to notice their bodies as they are today, rather than assuming how anything will function or feel. She guides them to move their attention beyond the muscles to the bones, to breathe into the connections between the bones. Mahler then asks dancers to open their eyes and place the fingers of both hands on their tailbones. From there, each person moves very slowly through the roll‑down central to this technique, first lowering the head until the sense of it affecting the position of the pelvis is apparent (“halfway”). She then brings one hand around to rest on the pelvis and breathes into the space between her hands. She drops her arms, lowering her head and letting its weight lead the torso forward and down until her hands come to the floor; she counterbalances by bringing the weight toward her heels, releasing the quadricep muscles at the front of the thighs, releasing any held places in the body, releasing the images, thoughts, and habits in the way of locating this alignment. The work is slow, quiet, focused. Dancers spend considerable time in this folded‑at‑the‑hips posture, often a substantial part of the class; the mainte‑ nance of the shape is divided into multiple variations and opportunities to

88  The Body Catalogue tune in to the details of particular body parts and their functions as well as to more overall individual embodied experience. As in the previous segments of attentive action and reflection, Mahler’s spoken list entries are largely but not entirely in a discernible anatomical order; other times they appear more sur‑ prisingly, their content filling in our skeletal designs, the sound of the words themselves—sacrum, scapula, trochanter—soothing. Often, we take time to lie on the floor quietly, not so much to “do absolutely nothing” but to take note of the small or substantial changes in how this muscle feels, how that area is longer or softer. And frequently, we walk around the room between “events” in no set pattern, noticing those changes in (experiencing) motion (sometimes calling them out—“I feel heavier,” “I feel lighter,” “I feel my side/ side”12—in answer to Mahler’s queries) and hugging friends we encounter, activating the social frame of this largely private experience. #10 My Body Catalogues: Alignments, Locations, Observations I came to think of the body catalogue as a kind of list when I recognized that its “entries” were not always merged into what I thought of as an organic whole. That is, I began to notice both that the elements, and my experiences of them, were as likely as not to be separate from each other. Moreover, the noticing itself was a factor, most significantly insofar as conceiving the event as primarily an experience of embodiment and sensation or an experience of outside‑looking‑in visual separation, even detachment, in this potentially most focused and intimate moments of individual consciousness. #10A My Body: Space Travel, Time Travel

The passage I quoted earlier in this Entracte is a particular type of list and a particular type of catalogue, quite different from what I would be likely to do alone in a rehearsal studio or in my living room. Instead, it is an extended prelude, a narration of the moment before “the real thing,” a map of spatial and temporal reference points originating in and situating my standing body. And, of course, it is multiply out of real time and real space. As an “event,” it lasted for two or three minutes, mostly wordlessly, and was translated into exposition, into language, after; and then it was presented, aloud, to a crowd of non‑dancers. It is not so much remembered as imagined, or maybe the other way around, like Perec’s dreams. Or as he wrote, recalling a pivotal but out‑of‑time moment: “It took place, it had taken place, it takes place, it will take place” (2009b: 45). Recalling and writing the words of that passage, I locate myself in the room. However, before I can fully be there, I travel into the space’s history, and my own. I am no longer in what at the time I still considered the stand‑in for the “real” Cunningham Studio, but back at Westbeth where the sun poured in and Merce was still alive.

The Body Catalogue  89 (Moving through the Coronavirus Pandemic, after two‑plus years of taking Cunningham classes on Instagram, I have yearned for that im‑ perfect and inconvenient uptown studio, full of sweaty companions and live music played by an actual person sitting at an actual piano. After some years, I’d come to feel quite fond of the space, however much I missed Westbeth. And now, the City Center venue is itself history, and “the studio” is a concept rather than a place.) Re‑placing myself in the recollected City Center studio, I note my favored spot for beginning class. I connect it to my admittedly neurotic, if not uncom‑ mon, anxieties about my appearance. And I connect it to my knowledge of the rhizomatic system of which this space is a part, through which dancers come to develop, understand, and recognize themselves, mostly experien‑ tially: moving and sensing themselves very particularly within cultural ideals of time, space, and identity. (Teaching, I aim to imbue in my students the abiding love for dance and movement I feel so lucky to retain, and to excite them, too, with readings, including Perec. It’s a grateful gesture: As an undergraduate, studying with James Waring, I was pointed toward the worlds of visual art, theater, literature, and integrated arts practices with which experi‑ mental dance was linked. That changed my life. I still teach chance operations and other scores to students using Jimmy’s charts.13) #10B My Body: Recalled and Recovered

Finally, I get to my body itself, the usual focus of my everyday experience, the specific, though variable, “script” which I recognize as proper alignment for what I want to do in class. It is the most obviously list‑like section of the pas‑ sage, but it also has something of the check‑check‑check quality, like the know‑ ing and naming of “those bones.” It is only the beginning of this regularly but never identically repeated catalogue that keeps my sense of living in my body dynamic, intimate, and collective: joined to the experiences of other people, in the same studio and elsewhere, dancing and tracing their anatomy according to the terms of the dance worlds in which they have come to know themselves. When I work alone, I often begin my individual catalogue lying down. The work I do in that position is primarily of breath and release, as I imagine one body part after another dropping into gravity. Eyes closed, I often begin with an image of energy, derived from Jimmy Waring’s classes, which I allow to move through my length from head to feet, always making the decision about interrupting the length by taking time with my arms or getting to them after. The image of energy—I don’t remember what Jimmy called it—moves through and warms each part, leaving it heavy on the floor. I let the image disappear, and then I come to standing.

90  The Body Catalogue Now erect and in narrow parallel position, my eyes closed again, I find my body’s order and alignment: my head floating up toward the ceiling, the sense of my skeletal anatomy drawn down from there through the compo‑ nents of my verticality. I feel the width of my collarbone. I travel down the length of my spine, noting its cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral segments. I note the stacking of my shoulders, hips, knees, and toes. My arms hang, heavy. My legs are two long lines; I feel the connections of tailbone to heels, sitz bones to heels, and the sense of my weight and energy moving down through my feet into the floor as I stretch up through my spine and head at the same time. I notice my breath; if I am unusually tense, I inhale and exhale more fully. I make very small movements, exploring balance, feeling its relationship to gravity, locating a momentary and contingent sense of spatial organization. (I like to remember that Steve Paxton, developing what came to be known as Contact Improvisation, called this maybe visibly impercep‑ tible movement the Small Dance, or the Stand, the names joining its fundamental physicality and its identity as dance. “Standing is one of our basic archetypical events,” he said in 2015 (38–39). “Letting grav‑ ity take the limbs down, you are letting the spine rise against gravity … [Y]ou start to feel the event that is holding you upright, that is keeping you from falling.”) Sometimes, I do this catalogue, especially the vertical version, not as a prel‑ ude to something else but as a long, slow meditation; sometimes, the event is quicker, more of a ritual of repetitions. Even so, what I do both emerges from and encourages a way of experiencing my body, derived in part from Cunningham’s geometries and geographies, and the likely movement vocabu‑ lary of a class. But other movement and ways of experiencing connections of body parts to each other come in as well, elements of Trisha Brown‑via‑Vicky Shick, the Klein/Mahler rolldown, whatever I need on any given day to most fully feel myself as an engaged body at that moment. #11 The Body Catalogue in the World: Extending Embodiment I have come to recognize, too, how the practice itself is more charged, more weighted, than might be immediately evident. The sense of the ideal embed‑ ded in a body catalogue is that of the dancer whose body and body experi‑ ence are joined with a particular practice: the language of that practice as well as its movement vocabulary and its concurrent physical requirements. But it is also joined to the specificities of each person, each “dance history” and personal, familial, cultural, racial, economic, national, and spiritual frame. It is joined to each body, not only the ones satisfying the requirements for this technique or that,14 but the more general life‑defining characteristics:

The Body Catalogue  91 how one is situated along the spectrums of mental and physical health, for example, and of able‑bodiedness and age. On some days, I wish that I were a person who always thought of my body, my life, in terms of earth and sky, like dancer/environmentalist Andrea Olsen, whose views of space are rooted in “a sensuous relationship of body and earth” (2002: 202). While I am deeply drawn to her way of experiencing herself in the world, my own inclination is to think of floor and ceiling. And now, during these days of revived antisemitism and global ethnic and racial an‑ tagonism, it is a great relief to lie on the floor or stand on my rug and contem‑ plate my skeleton, my sensations, my feelings, my surroundings, recognizing my focused attention as a kind of respite from worldly dread, an occasion of gratefulness. At the least, it is an opportunity for deep experience of ourselves and our bodies, in our bodies, however we and they share space this moment. Notes 1 This passage was originally published in Satin (2015): 84–104). 2 The Merce Cunningham Trust and Merce Cunningham Dance Company were lo‑ cated in Westbeth, an artists’ housing complex in NYC’s West Village, from 1971 to 2012, three years after Cunningham’s death. For nearly ten years after, Cun‑ ningham technique classes were primarily held at New York City Center, still the base of the Trust. Since then, classes have been held at a number of NYC venues. See https://www.mercecunningham.org 3 “The Body as Home” is the title of the opening chapter in Louise Steinman’s The Knowing Body (1995 [1986]). 4 Perec (1967: 192). 5 Writer and activist James Weldon Johnson, who famously wrote the Black an‑ them, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also wrote “Dry Bones,” from which these lines derive. First performed in 1928, “Dry Bones” is based on the Biblical story of Ezekiel at the Valley of Dry Bones, where he “prophesie[d] that the dead will one day rise again at the command of the Lord.” See https://makingmulticultural‑ music.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/the‑story‑behind‑the‑dry‑bones‑song/ 6 Hair’s lyrics and book were written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; the music was written by Galt MacDermot. Hair debuted off‑Broadway in 1967, moved on to Broadway and many subsequent productions. 7 Because moving through these body catalogues is so personal and specific, I use either first‑person or female pronouns here to reflect my own experience. I invite other practitioners and readers to find the language reflecting their own cata‑ logues, their own identities and personal particularities. 8 Shick 2022/2023 and Mahler 2022, 2023 represent many discussions about this work. 9 Vicky Shick, conversation September 20, 2023 10 Distal initiation of movement, also significant in Klein technique, is distinguished from the spinal initiation associated with many other techniques. 11 See https://barbaramahler.net 12 This term refers to the side‑to‑side “movement of the pelvis, as it moves from one leg (femur) to the other” as we walk (Mahler 2023). 13 See Chapter 6 and Satin (2003). 14 See Foster (1997).

92  The Body Catalogue Works Cited Banes, Sally, ed., assisted by Andrea Harris. 2003. Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Cunningham, Merce. 2019. Changes: Notes on Choreography. Edited by Frances Starr. New York: The Song Cave: Merce Cunningham Trust. Originally published by Dick Higgins, 1968, New York: Something Else Press. Desmond, Jane C., ed. 1997. Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foster, Susan. 1997. “Dancing Bodies.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by Jane C. Desmond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 235–257. Klein, Susan. 2005. “Klein Technique: History.” https://www.kleintechnique.com/kt_ history.pdf Klein, Susan. 2021. “Klein Technique: The Klein School of Movement and Dance.” https://www.kleintechnique.com/ Mahler, Barbara. 2022. Interview: December 30. Mahler, Barbara. 2023. Personal communication: June 23. Mauss, Marcel. 2006. “Techniques of the Body.” In Techniques, Technology and Civilisation: Marcel Mauss 1872–1950. Edited by Nathan Schlanger. New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books. Essay originally published in 1935. Olsen, Andrea. 2002. Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Paxton, Steve. 2015. “Why Standing? Steve Paxton Talks about How the Stand Relates to Stage Fright and Entrainment in Contact Improvisation.” Edited by Karen Nelson. Contact Quarterly Dance & Improvisation Journal 40.1 (Winter/Spring): 37–40. Perec, Georges. 1990. A Man Asleep. In Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep. Translated by Andrew Leak. Boston, MA: David R. Godine. A Man Asleep was originally published in 1967. Perec, Georges. 1999a [1974]. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and trans‑ lated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin. Perec, Georges. 1999b [1974]. “Approaches to What?” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin: 209–211. (First pub‑ lished in February 1973 in Cause Commune, and in Perec’s L’Infra‑ordinaire, 1989.) Perec, Georges. 2009a. Thoughts of Sorts. Translated and with an introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine. Perec, Georges. 2009b. “Backtracking.” In Thoughts of Sorts, translated and with an Introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine: 43–53. (First published in 1977 in Cause commune no.1: 77–88.) Satin, Leslie. 2003. “James Waring and the Judson Dance Theater: Influences, Inter‑ sections, and Divergences.” In Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was. Possible, edited by Sally Banes assisted by Andrea Harris. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press: 51–80. Satin, Leslie. 2015. “Dancing in Place: Exhaustion, Embodiment, and Perec.” Dance Research Journal 47.3 (December): 84–104. Schlanger, Nathan, ed. 2006. Techniques, Technology and Civilisation: Marcel Mauss 1872–1950. New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press. Shick, Vicky. 2022. Interview: December 15. Steinman, Louise. 1995 [1986]. The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Con‑ temporary Performance. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

4 Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space

Toward the end of his charming little book, Quiet Corners of Paris (2006), Jean‑Christophe Napias writes, Lovers of Paris trivia will thrill to discover one of the city’s smallest “streets” here, rue Georges Perec, in reality a mere staircase linking rue Jules‑Siegfried and rue Paul‑Strauss. Perec, the fanciful author of Les Choses, would doubtless be tickled by this non‑street with not a single numbered address! (158) I agree that Perec—who also had a planet named after him1—would have been “tickled” by this identification of himself and his name with a place in his home city. He would likely have appreciated, too, being linked to a place not only marked by near‑hyperbole (“one of the smallest”) but described as what it is not (it is a “non‑street”) and what it has not (“not a single num‑ bered address”) as well as what it actually is (“a mere staircase”). This vignette suggests the layers of complexity regarding spatial matters variously created, revised, and dissolved in the writing of Georges Perec. Much of Perec’s work addresses space and place, often not only noting but complicating what might seem unremarkable, sometimes simplifying what seems charged, and always engaging with the layered interactions of spatial phenomena and spatial experience. Perec’s spatially focused writing is critical in its recognition of the spaces of our lives and of space’s participation in our individual and collective ways of meaning‑making. Perec’s engagements with space appear throughout this book. Previous chapters, for example, link the dancer’s body catalogue to Perec’s textual bodies; connect Perec’s ideas of space to attention, to seeing, and to his visual organization of language; consider his childhood as a series of exiles and separations, reiterated in his work. Here, I join ideas and embodied experi‑ ences of everyday and dancing bodies to Perec’s ideas about space.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003143741-5

94  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space Entrance: New York and Paris, a Plan and a Park An ironic aspect of my involvement with the work of Perec and others drawn to it is that I have found myself, as it were, in a spatial mindscape at odds with my unreliable sense of direction and spotty knowledge of geography. As a dancer, choreographer, and researcher, though, I am drawn to space—how it functions in a dance, how individual choreographers deploy it, how we understand our own and others’ bodies in spatial terms: our bodies as space and in space, in the everyday spaces of streets, offices, and kitchens as well as the rehearsal studio or stage. And so, a primary way I connect to Perec is through his writings about space as he addressed and experienced it, as he saw it as significant in everyday life, and as I see it in mine. At home, I know in darkness or light where almost everything is and how to get to it. In much of Manhattan, supported by its numeric street grid and familiar traffic patterns, I walk without conscious calculation, supported by my embodied knowledge of the neighborhood. The West Village’s mix of named and numbered streets and interruptions of rectilinear regularity by parks, diagonals, and culs‑de‑sac calls for more active attention, but long acquaintance guides my legs. In less‑comfortable or less‑trod urban areas, I rely on recognizing the generic constitutes of city street‑ness and the gradual discovery of how these are adapted “here”: the structural and conceptual underpinnings Perec laid out in “The Street,” an especially rich section of Species of Spaces (SOS).2 Walking in non‑urban spaces, of course, opens up an enormous span of possible ways to be lost and found. Numerous contemporary writers, such as Rebecca Solnit (2005), Phil Smith (2014), and Franco La Cecla (2000) wax long and poetic about the joys of walking and getting lost. I love walking, and I love their writing, much of it emerging from Situationist Guy Debord’s seductive and strident urgings to participate in psychogeography‑driven dérives, going with the ur‑ ban flow to encourage unplanned experiential interactions with politically charged city space (1956). However, I do not love actually getting lost. This spatial anxiety extends to my difficulty reading maps. I have made the most of this problem and its unlikely companion, my love of travel, by join‑ ing it to my greater comfort with social experiences. I talk to strangers, find‑ ing out how to get to wherever I’m trying to go and maybe inquiring about whether that’s really where I should be going. At the same time, I am con‑ verting the amorphous space of anywhere/nowhere into a place, an at least minimally readable spot in which a former stranger has become a friendly, knowledgeable interlocutor whose particularities of voice, posture, gesture; gaze and proximity; clothing, hair, and other identifying markers orient me toward the specificity of where I am at that moment. An evocative example is an experience I had searching for Perec: for the house where he had lived as a small child on Rue Vilin in Paris’s Belleville neighborhood. This was an act of “finding” him through sharing his space, being where I knew he had been, and where he had been treasured. I had

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  95 brought a gift, a dance made with a compositional score derived from a passage he wrote, and I wanted to dance it in front of his house. I spent hours gripping my Plan de Paris, walking up and down the very hot streets looking for this building, and asking multiple strangers in French and English whether they knew where this building might be. No one did, but several of them, with very little prodding, avidly and empathetically signed on as my “team”; we traipsed around individually and together, an ethnic, racial, and linguistic mélange of locals and visitors, all of us finally giving up with a friendly group shrug. One lovely guy, though, a late‑comer and the last left standing, thought to ask why I was looking. I had no expectations that he would be attuned to my project. But when I told him a bit about Perec, he responded right away, along the lines of, “Ah—le roman sans ‘e’!” And, he added, of course I couldn’t find the house: that part of the street had been torn down and made into a lovely green park, Parc de Belleville— where years before, migrant Jews had once sought solace and solidity, where I had walked earlier that day to contemplate my confusion—as I would have known had my Plan de Paris not been hopelessly out of date. A Survey of Views: Bodies and Space Perec’s attention to space and place was both subject matter and literary act, drawing readers to notice the everyday details and affects we typically skip over, in the street and on the page. His writing ties in with views of multiple scholars exploring space and bodies: some presumably or identifiably known to him, others paired with him retrospectively. Perec came to know sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre, during his own tenure as a young and rather reluctant parachutist in the French Army: a more than usually direct and extreme encounter, to be sure, with the amorphousness and immediacy of open space. David Bellos suggests that Perec’s 1965 novel Les Choses (Things) might even be taken “by a theoreti‑ cal philosopher” as “a fictional recreation” of Lefebvre’s then just‑published Critique de la Vie Quotidienne (Critique of Daily Life) (Bellos 1999: 192). Things, a story of a young couple whose actual and imagined lives are de‑ fined by the objects they desire, is replete with lists of fantastically explicit descriptions of (their) potential spaces, the things filling them, and the lives they would lead among them. The novel, like Lefebvre’s examination of capitalism, philosophy, and so‑ ciology, merges space and social theory—and begins, in the pointedly con‑ ditional tense, with “Your eye, first of all, would glide over the grey fitted carpet…” (Perec 1990b: 21). This line is a spatial recasting of the isolated eye in A Man Asleep,3 nonetheless highlighting the significance and mobil‑ ity of seeing as one of the experiential interpreters of space, even as the act of vision destabilizes the objects of the gaze. Lefebvre would later write of the body’s instrumental role in experiencing space, going beyond the idea of embodied interpretation to embodied creation, asserting in The Production

96  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space of Space that “it is by means of the body that space is perceived, lived—and produced” (Lefebvre 1991: 162). Perec’s work resonates with other investigations of the spatial and social perspectives of habitus and environment. In 1935, looking at movement in everyday as well as special (e.g., ritual, ceremonial) circumstances, so‑ ciologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss unwrapped the breadth of this cultural movement training (Mauss 2006). Perec, who was introduced to Mauss’s work in 1958 by Lefebvre, was drawn to his writings on how we come to move and perceive movement as we do. Mauss studied the minutiae of how we walk, sit, swim, run, march, and otherwise carry out movements which could be assumed to be natural but are clearly learned, derived within what he called “the social nature of the ‘habitus’” (80; emphasis in the origi‑ nal). Critically, especially in seeing this perspective regarding both formally trained and everyday movement, Mauss saw this idea of habitus as includ‑ ing not only imitation but education, producing what he called “prestigious imitation” joined to factors of psychology, biology, and social authority (81). Overall, he drew attention to the culturally specific elements of the “habits” of our bodies in and as space, in the ordinary actions of life and the rests between, the full‑bodied movements and the small precise gestures. These “techniques of the body” not only differed from one person to another but were marked by the systems though which they were continually produced.4 Sociologist Howard Becker writes that “several of [Perec’s] works can profitably be read as a kind of social description, a ‘telling about society’” (2001). Indeed, Perec’s writing ties in with multiple views of social scientists exploring how we “learn the lines” of our seemingly natural behavior, and how this trained behavior is linked to spatial knowledge. In 1959, sociolo‑ gist Erving Goffman used the theatrical metaphor to underline the vast array of what he called, eponymously, “the presentation of self in everyday life.” He described what we now more commonly refer to as performance: the broadly understood and rehearsed individual and collective behaviors (e.g., proxemics and posture; spatial occupation of public places; facial and vocal expression; and other indicators) in social and private space. The readings and repetitions of those behaviors within communities (and whose misread‑ ings, intentional or not, often signify or initiate isolation from them) depend in part on this spatial framework of embodiment. In 1970, anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku looked at how dances cre‑ ated through these cultural habits are seen from outside the culture, especially the biases informing or predetermining how we view dance movement and body/spatial choices, how we see and judge the dances themselves. She notes the minimizing and dismissive categorization, as “ethnic,”5 of non‑Western forms, performers, spatial values, and movement lexicons characterized as untrained or “natural” actions. All dance, she wrote, enacts its culture’s beliefs about bodies, movement, and space. All dance, then, is ethnic—and

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  97 the problems with acknowledging that have long been wrapped up in racist, ethnicist, and classist perspectives (Kealiinohomoku 1970 in Dils and Albright 2001: 41). What we know and what we need to know to perceive a dance, including its spatial perspectives and enactments, are enmeshed with culturally in‑ formed seeing. Dance ethnographer Deidre Sklar’s 1991 “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance” was a valuable reminder to “pure” formalists of movement’s experiential and embodied meaning‑making, joining space and place to anatomy, psychology, spirituality, history, and anatomy. Using genuflection as her model, Sklar made clear that this action was more than the flexing of a joint; it represented systems of belief, commu‑ nity, and cultural knowledge about bodies and space (in Dils and Albright 2001: 30–32). Humanist geographer Yi‑Fu Tuan looks at these descriptors from cultural as well as phenomenological perspectives. The “human body,” he writes, “is the measure of direction, location, and distance” (1977: 44).6 His experience‑ derived views articulate the spatial values prominent within and across cul‑ tures and their iterations in environments and in bodies—e.g., the widely held reverence for verticality and frontality, the presumption that what is below or behind has lower status. These viewpoints are so deeply engrained and repeated (in language, architecture, personal relationships) that they seem to be natural. And significantly, while these categories of body and space inter‑ act, they are unequal: “the one not only occupies the other but commands and orders it through intention. Body is ‘lived body’ and space is humanly constructed space” (35). Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart elaborates on this cultural knowledge of behaviors as they suffuse a space; she approaches our experiences of per‑ sonal and environmental phenomena from the perspective of affect, which she beautifully describes as “things hanging in the air” (2011: 447). She captures the mutability and movement within interactions among people, things, places: “the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected by that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences” (2007: 1–2). Through close and sensitive de‑ scription, Stewart brings to life the under‑the‑radar attributes of what Perec would call the endotics of a circumstance. This is how we understand a situ‑ ation, interact with its verbal scripts and physical realms of expression and communication and vibration as they occur and emerge (through a moment or a lifetime), their agents, subjects, and observers practiced in the conven‑ tions of human relationship. This cycle of experience and repetition is a way of perfecting a world: making it more fully itself. It also opens up the idea of “worlding,” what Stewart, reflecting on Heidegger, describes as “an intimate compositional process of dwelling in spaces that bears, gestures, gestates, worlds” (2011: 445).

98  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space Doorways to Dance: Bodies and Cultural Space In dance, there is nothing random about spatial values. The particularities of space and spatial belief are inherent not only in a form’s history and culture but in every dancer’s training, however formal/distinct or casual/integrated. Dancers are instilled with the rules and conventions addressing spatial and chronological organization, specificity of movement and sound, reason for the dance to be performed, and spatial and technical expectations.7 Ballet dancers will have had years of studio instruction and practice posi‑ tioning the head, spine, legs, and feet to create the body’s turn‑out and ver‑ ticality, execute the movement lexicon, and perform its inherent hierarchies and seeming freedom from gravity. Dancers and audiences know the spatial conventions of the performance venue, typically a theater, and the stage itself, including its own hierarchies of space and positioning of performers, e.g., the setting apart of lead dancers, the charged proxemics and facings in a pas de deux. Dancers will have learned to embody the inherent “classical” per‑ formance of gender tutored by the ubiquitous presence of the mirror, urging dancers—especially female dancers, already and more broadly “trained”—to prioritize the image rather than the experience. Indigenous dances, such as a recent Corn Dance at the Santa Ana Pueblo in New Mexico, similarly assume clear spatial conventions and the expecta‑ tion that they will be understood.8 Dances, usually performed outdoors, have a clear spatial design: This dance for a large group repeatedly traced a single circle on the bare dry earth; at its center, a substantial puddle was a seren‑ dipitous reminder of yesterday’s rain. Male and female dancers are generally distinguished by costumes and body make‑up, sometimes by movements. The dancers themselves have learned the spiritual and community beliefs as well as the performative attributes of these events; many have not trained to create a particular body shape or stance, and the body types are consequen‑ tially diverse. Percussive stepping phrases ground the choreography, their weighted repetition over time entwined with the complex, hypnotic sounds and rhythms of male singers (some also dancers) and the shared immersion of land and sky, space and place. In both examples, performing and viewing participants share the cultural comprehension of the dances’ spatial and social norms. These shared entwinings of spatial and social meaning‑making are often unarticulated verbally and rarely merged with the dancer’s ongoing perfection of physical acts or the viewer’s seemingly natural knowledge of how and where to look. Nonetheless, dances and dancing are fully operative in transmitting these ideas of spatial and cultural expression, even if they are not acknowledged in these terms. As Mauss made evident, our minded bodies learn through repetition how to move in these spatialized and contextualized circumstances. Studying the fantastically complex bodily geometrics of Cunningham technique, I practice its daunting and deeply pleasurable directives: the quick shifts of facings, the simultaneous deployment of spatial actions and body parts (e.g., spine

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  99 curving and twisting, legs alternately circling and stretching, head turning), the sharply switching paths of traveling steps in a movement combination. Getting “lost” dancing with others potentially endangers both me and my colleagues. This experience of embodied spatial consciousness is similarly, if less spec‑ tacularly or wittingly, a factor of everyday life: Stopping in a busy street to respond to a ringing cell phone or “spacing out” while driving in traffic breaks the social/spatial code. We rarely analyze, let alone notice, the tech‑ nique of every step on our walk to the produce market—or, for that matter, the inhale and exhale of our breathing. This sense of our own bodies and our spatial interdependence extends to our everyday worlds, which offer—which comprise—a huge range of spatial comforts and demands. Experiencing Ourselves and Others: Bodies as Space, Bodies in Space Dance is an opportunity to focus movers’ and viewers’ attention on the spaces of the body joined to other spaces, and on the embodied systems of sensa‑ tion (and our availability to them) through which, to recall Lefebvre’s words, we perceive, live, and produce them. Some of them are environmental: any site where dancing occurs. In these spaces, sometimes we are alone, which is to say, in a circumstance of opportunity to interact with their forces and phenomena. Other times we exist and interact with other movers, remaking ourselves and each other in space and time. These spatial ways of being also suggest ideas about how we perceive dance: the qualities of the little world, on the stage or in the studio or wher‑ ever it is taking place, in which crossings and overlaps and stillness and uni‑ son and crowds and emptiness, for starters, reroute to find a temporary home in one’s own responsive and observing body, one’s intellectual and sensory touchpoints, one’s stomach, one’s tear ducts. We experience the situation of our own viewership, whether from close enough to see someone’s face echo the arcs of movement or to feel someone’s breathing or from far enough to watch patterns emerge and subside, to feel the shifting barriers (we’re part of that world, we’re apart from it). We are variously adept at responding to the phenomena demanding our sensitivity, to knowing how to read the profu‑ sion of semiotic clues: what counts in this world? Kinesthesia and Proprioception

What I have just described derives at least in part from kinesthesia, one of the primary ways we respond to and “get” dance. (I use “get,” rather than “understand,” to emphasize the physical, physiological, affective, and other interactive mechanisms for engaging with dance and other spatial circum‑ stances phenomenologically rather than “translationally.”9) “Kinesthesia,” the term typically used to identify a bodily sensation a viewer experiences while watching movement, actually covers a broader field.

100  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space It is an element of the larger field of proprioception, which movement scholar Louise Steinman points out means “how we ‘sense ourselves’”; kinesthesia itself is “the feeling of movement derived from all skeletal and muscular structures. [It] also includes the feeling of pain, our orientation in space, the passage of time, and rhythm” (1995, 11). Through these embodied attributes, we bring our bodies into a constantly shifting but knowing relationship to the spatial worlds we inhabit. The other primary elements of proprioception also are critical to our abili‑ ties to perceive our spatial experience. Visceral feedback, “which consists of the miscellaneous impressions from our internal organs,” and labyrinthine or vestibular feedback: “the feeling of our position in space…provided by the cochlea [in] the inner ear” are physiological guides to our spatial awareness of being, and of being somewhere (Steinman 1995, 11). Indeed, much of our experience of space is visual, but these proprioceptive elements are what link us to the way we feel space and spatial relationships. In everyday life and most exquisitely in dance, we negotiate open and narrow and complicated areas, and the people with whom we share them, through the sense of breathing and moving together, the proxemic shift when some‑ one steps a little closer than you had expected or darts away and either frees you to the glory of open space or seems to leave you in the dust. This same empathetic spatial interaction feeds into the experience of spectatorship, rep‑ licating in the viewer’s body the perceived sensations of the dancer’s body and of the performance space itself as dancers’ configurations (and lighting and sound and the choreographic arc of the dance) reshape it, rekindle its spatial implications. And it follows us through time, as we recreate and restore by‑ gone dance experiences in our embodied imaginations. * Perec’s work speaks to dance implicitly but convincingly through its repeated attentions to bodies. As I wrote earlier, this is not a matter of description, of letting the reader know enough of what a character looks like to be in‑ formative. For instance, in Things (Les Choses), page after page is filled with the names and qualities of objects obsessing Jérome and Sylvie: the “things” populating their shelves and their desires. Some of these “things” stand in for their bodies; in one unusually physical, exuberant detail, Perec writes that after having long “been absolutely anonymous,” the characters “leapt ecstatically into fashionable English clothes”—discoveries which he then lists at length: “silk scarves, tweed, lambswool, cashmere, vicuna … and, finally, the great staircase of footwear” (1990b: 39). We see their literal spaces and dreamspaces in detail, and some of what they do as a couple, in a group. “They could have walked, run, danced, sung all night,” we’re told, but Perec describes instead their next‑day ruefulness, their drained bodies: “dieting, feeling queasy, overindulging in black coffee and soluble aspirin … draconian resolutions: no more smoking, no more drinking…” (53).

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  101 An autobiographical twist is Perec’s own body’s appearance in his early, pre‑Things novel, Portrait of a Man (Le Condottière), not pub‑ lished until 2014, over thirty years after his death. Its central character is an art forger, one of several Perecquian characters called Gaspard Winck‑ ler. This character inserts “himself” into a portrait, including an actual scar on Perec’s upper lip which appears in the self‑portraits of Renais‑ sance painter Antonello da Messina, whose painting Il Condottierre bears the same scar.10 Generally, we locate Perec’s characters, including himself, people he ob‑ serves in the streets and cafés populating his archives of dailiness, and those who have been lost to him but continue to exist as memories and yearnings, not so much in terms of their appearance. Instead, we recognize them by what they do, what they say and think, where they are, and where they are situated in Perec’s world of words. We are encouraged to pay attention in‑ tensely, to see and engage with what might be overlooked, to develop embod‑ ied, psychic, sensual openness to enriched spatial encounters. We are urged to see these lives, and our own, in spatial terms, joining the realms of the personal, the viewed, the past, and the present through the perspective of time, space, and embodiment. Some writings even suggest ways to effectuate and develop these encounters in choreographic realms. We are guided, by extension, to encounter dance itself fully, not only visually and critically but more broadly sensually, corporeally, and—assuming the perspective of the “thinking body”—thoughtfully alert.11 (When I am watching dance, the internal verbal cacophony that some‑ times invades my consciousness gets in the way of my focusing on the two people standing right here, one looking up into a corner, both rhythmically wriggling … and the woman in blue kneeling there, her right hand creeping forward on the wood floor of this familiar venue. Viewing dance so often exceeds the immediacy of the performance space, becoming a negotiation of Monkey Mind’s distracting rumble of history, memory, and analysis, and the will to be fully present, re‑ ceive the artists’ offerings and the opportunity for focused experience of space and time: the calls to conscious spatial attention central to Perec’s writing.) Spectatorship: Gazes and Spaces Dance and space are inextricably engaged with each other, informed by as‑ pirational, accidental, developed, and historical beliefs and ideas about their relationship. Dance history in many ways is an archive of spatial conventions and experiences as bearers of broader cultural ideals. For instance, in much traditional Western concert dance, our gaze is guided toward what, and how, the choreographer wants us to see.

102  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space Bodies in Space

All the elements of the mise en scène contribute, including where performers are in the space, how they enter and exit, what they do (still or moving) and with whom and for how long and at what distance, and the movement lexi‑ con itself as it is joined to the overall spatial design, lights and décor, sound and music. Moreover, the viewer is likely to be familiar with ideas about stage space—perspective, for instance, and symbolic readings—dating back at least to the Renaissance and refined through the mid‑twentieth century.12 At that time, classical modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey wrote The Art of Making Dances. She located her theories of performers and stage space within that historical moment, identifying the positions of dancers’ bodies, arrangements of those bodies with each other, and deployment of moving bodies on the stage which she saw as most and least readably potent (Hum‑ phrey 1959).13 However doctrinaire these were in regard to the hierarchies of design of both stage and bodies, in practice, they enacted a way of seeing congruent with her broader choreographic ideas and the historically rooted social beliefs and expressive ideals they represented. Major shifts of spatially guided spectatorship were initiated, begin‑ ning in the mid‑twentieth century, in the dances of Merce Cunningham, whose open‑field organization of performance space resisted not only pre‑ determined viewing options but the meaning‑making “readings” they pro‑ duced. For instance, the onstage material might include several segments of dance at once, and neither the dancers’ pathways in the space nor the zones of action in which the segments occurred signaled designated meanings. Stillnesses and any kinds of movement might co‑exist at a given moment; the still and moving dancers both contributed to the spatial liveliness of the stage. Viewers were free to look where they chose, to maintain a general sense of the whole and/or focus on a single movement event and/or shift their visual attention. What was freeing for some viewers was, and to some degree remains, off‑putting, disorienting, and disturbing. Ironically, this spatial openness and the constant, if typically unconscious decisions about what to notice, what to see, how to make connections is most like our everyday lives, in which we take on the added option of what to do as a participant in the social choreography which maintains our culturally and spatially derived collec‑ tive experience. Moreover, some take issue with accepted definitions of spa‑ tial meaning‑making. Claudia Brazzale, for one, challenges the assumptions about bodies and space she experienced as a student at the Cunningham Stu‑ dio, seeing the spatial directives familiar to Western dancers—“pierce space, cover ground”—as representing cultural ideals as dancers occupy space des‑ ignated as neutral, passive, universal (2014). These beliefs and ideas about space are woven through the systems and experiences of cultural training that produces, sustains, and adapts them. As is evident in Perec’s writing about everyday life, these ideas and systems

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  103 extend beyond our participation in social choreography and public space to the intimacy, privacy, and isolation of our individual experiences within and beyond those larger arenas. Of course, since Perec’s time, concepts of public space and bodies themselves have changed radically. Still, in dance, as in everyday spaces, that bodies exist in space is appar‑ ent. Dancers, still or moving, are visibly in an interactive and fluctuating circumstance, creating and created by other dancers and their actions and the multiple elements of the environment: the space itself, including all the aspects of the mise‑en‑scène, such as lighting, set, sound, and costumes. Spa‑ tial liveliness is a general phenomenon across dance forms and specific to particular genres and individual choreographers’ work, as are methods of interaction and ways of “reading” the site‑in‑flux, already linked to known ways of looking and seeing. Bodies as Space

The idea of the body as space is perhaps less evident but is experientially, phenomenologically central. This sense of oneself as embodied, as experi‑ enced from anything as minute as what choreographer/dancer Deborah Hay has called “the cellular level” (Hay 2000)14 to a fuller and more literally incorporated sense of oneself, applies not only to the body catalogue and its focused attention but to the broader sense of body/mind integration. This is what phenomenologist Sondra Horton Fraleigh called “the whole person as a minded body” (Fraleigh 1996: 9) and site dance scholar Victoria Hunter summarized as the “coexistent relationship between moving and thinking” (Hunter 2017: 29). Choreographer/dancer Susan Rethorst, acknowledging that not only do “we change the nature of what we perceive as we per‑ ceive it,” recognized that we do so “through the filter of our associations with, feelings for, myths about, the body” (Rethorst 2012: 19). In spatial terms, dancers and other investigators of the mind/body relationship resist a top‑down thought‑directed perspective on our most intimate experiences and turn to more integrated engagement, sensing ourselves in ways far exceeding the presumptions of Cartesian duality. Many improvisors, dance and somatic practitioners, and dancer‑scholars have focused on the significance of a dancer’s sense of interiority, both for its own exquisite complexity and as a necessary aspect of understanding the relationship to one’s exterior circumstances. These have included Anna Halprin, the California‑based dance artist whose movement workshops and collaborations with her landscape architect husband Lawrence Halprin since the 1950s joined inner corporeal experiences to social outreach in public and private space.15 Steve Paxton, the Judson/Cunningham dancer who went on to develop Contact Improvisation and to write numerous reflec‑ tions on the practice and its implications, has been rigorous in his embod‑ ied explorations and analyses.16 Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay have contributed a deeply integrated guide to improvisation via image, language,

104  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space anatomy, and space.17 Andrea Olsen’s detailed and strongly researched writing explicitly links the body as space and the body in space, and positions itself within our climatic crises.18 Perec’s Space(s), Perecquian Space(s) Space, as we live it, never exists on its own. Even our most personal spatial experiences are enmeshed with other phenomena: historical, cultural, politi‑ cal, corporeal, temporal, and spiritual, for starters. And space is ubiquitous, figuring importantly, if sometimes quietly, in our everyday lives. As choreographers and dancers, though, we are necessarily preoccupied with space: with our bodies’ structures, with the constant interplay of exteri‑ ority and interiority, of bodily systems (e.g., skeletal, muscular, physiological, visceral), of autonomic and conscious actions and processes. We are aware of the spaces in which we move: the distances across which we visually and kin‑ esthetically transmit ideas, images, and actions; the (moving) placement of other people, the room we need to execute whatever we’re doing, the scope of our kinespheres (the spherical outline marking the limits of our extended moving arms and legs).19 We are aware of the space we “take up,” still a potent attribute of spatial expression of gender, class, and race on and off the dance floor.20 We align our body parts, map paths in the studio and on the stage, adjust movement and spatial choices to accommodate Vimeo’s digital disruption of the “real thing.” Perec’s spatial perspectives permeate his writing and expand beyond it. In ways both direct and oblique, he establishes a spatial orientation for his experiences of living in the world. In some instances, he reflects on these per‑ spectives at length, in musings on space itself; in others, he braids his view‑ points and insights into encounters with space as they figure across literary genres and subjects. In addition to the ideas and writings addressing Perec’s own spatial beliefs, perspectives, and experiences, others weave through the ideas of practitioners across forms and fields, suggesting the interdiscipli‑ nary undercurrent of his thinking about space itself and its interweaving with other ideas. In fact, in the Introduction to their recent collection Georges Perec’s Ge‑ ographies, editors Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips go so far as to claim that Perec is “one of the most inventive and original ge‑ ographical writers of the twentieth century” (2019: 1). The book’s essays contemplating the Material, Performative and Textual Spaces of the book’s subtitle trace tributaries of Perec’s attentions to actual and metaphorical space and place, and address fields as far‑ranging as film, sound, theater, radio, photography, and dance.21 The editors identify a substantial range of his spatial themes, encompassing both likely elements such as architecture and urban design and less expected or less literal ones such as “mathematical and textual spaces; imagined, utopian and dystopian spaces,” “landscapes of memory and trauma,” “material culture,” and, not surprisingly, a range of

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  105 spaces linked to the everyday. They note, too, that Perec’s spatial attentions were directed not only to a range of themes but to methodological factors: the kinds of organizational and archival operations, such as his acts of listing, which figure throughout his writing, especially the category he called “socio‑ logical” (Forsdick et al. 2019: 1). Perec’s Species of Spaces This predominance of space as it figures in Perec’s writing was announced in the title of his 1974 Species of Spaces (SOS), in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1999b, 1999a). While Perec’s spatial perspectives pervade his work, I return here to SOS because of its variously directed and diffuse ap‑ proaches to the subject and its writerly presentations, which comprise image and spatial design as well as language. SOS’s pages are themselves spatial: a revelation‑by‑accumulation of Perec’s embodied, experiential, and inves‑ tigative attention to the many spaces of his life, the multiple spatial frames through which he sees his life. Perec connects these perspectives throughout to the significance of the en‑ dotic. He does this not only by narrowing his study to domestic and personal circumstances but by considering how the more conceptually elusive spaces might be brought “down to earth,” as it were. Both the prosaic and the fan‑ tastic elements of space he addresses extend the autobiographical underpin‑ nings of his writing, especially the dramatic shifts in his early life. SOS also reflects Perec’s inherent interdisciplinarity, interacting with ideas populating the work of other artists drawn to exploring space. The book opens poetically, indirectly, engaging with its subject from multi‑ ple perspectives. First is a visual figure, then a long list of spatial categories and expressions, a Foreword, a very short and unattributed playscript, and the lyrics of a children’s song by Surrealist Paul Éluard. Then Perec moves into the book’s most substantial material: a series of chapters in which he meticulously catego‑ rizes and reflects on the spaces of his life, organizing them in terms of scale, from small to large, from the beds he slept in to the rooms where they were situated to the buildings, streets, city, country, continent, and so on—mapping out his life’s spatial grid and, by extension, finding his place in the world. At the end of the Foreword, Perec articulates in a single sentence the sig‑ nificance of his project, framing his life in spatial terms. “To live,” he writes, “is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself” (6). These words, on one level, assert the central importance of the spatial perspective he traces in these pages. At the same time, they indicate both the active and passive movement which takes place negotiating among spaces and the vulnerability of that travel—of being alive. They recall, most literally, Perec’s own personal displacements, beginning with his being cast away as a small child from his home and family in occupied Paris, his solitary train ride from Paris, variously and frequently recalled within his work, and a lifetime of bumpy encounters.

106  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space Perec’s descriptions of experiencing SOS’s many spaces are compelling in part because of the individualized terms of both the attention and engagement— literary, philosophical, affectual—with which he addresses each one. There is no single template regarding form. Instead, the text joins narratives and lists; memory and meta; history and commentary; multiple “voices” and attitudes; wisps of observation; lengthy contemplation; fact and fiction. The Foreword opens with a not‑quite definition: the book’s subject, Perec writes, “is not the void exactly” (as though the reader would expect that perspective of space as emptiness and endlessness), “but rather what there is about or inside it” (5). Pointing to the square outlined in black, “Map of the Ocean,” (“taken from Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark”), he seems, then, to focus our attention on its fine‑line boundaries. But as is often the case, Perec’s readers are urged to engage carefully with his words and ideas, check them for con‑ nections to what we know of his life, his obsessions, his desires; it turns out that this figure is not simply a reproduction, and it certainly doesn’t fulfill the fundamental definitions or functions of a map. As Andrew Leak explains, the original was a rectangle rather than a square and included various kinds of spatial information; this one is confounding: a space of “disorientation” and “reversal,” simultaneously signaling “absence” and “excess” of spatial meaning (Leak 2019: 17–19). * My longtime dance partner David Botana and I made multiple pieces exploring intimacy in choreography. We spent significant time experi‑ encing moving and stillness together, mostly not‑quite‑touching. In one dance, like binary stars anchored to each other by gravity, we orbited around the narrow space between us, torsos twisting and leaning, all the while looking into each other’s eyes. In another piece, an improvisa‑ tion, almost anything was fair game, except for one person to turn his or her head and walk or otherwise move away, leaving the other person behind, thereby shifting the basic spatial act of going somewhere to the personal act of leaving—somewhere, someone—which one of us found intolerable. * Perec makes clear in SOS that space is no one thing, but a multiplicity of cultural circumstances framing our lives. Some of them are frightening and seemingly unassailable, “interplanetary, intersidereal or intergalactic,” maybe reachable by dreams and imagination (5). Unsurprisingly, Perec is not so much focused on these huge, abstract, and anxiety‑producing spaces— “OUTER SPACE … SPACE STATION … SPACE TIME CONTINUUM”— far beyond our daily lives and small bodies, as on the spaces within which we live (3). These are “particularized” (6), distinguishable, sometimes named, sometimes directly tied to definitions or conventions governing or guiding

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  107 what we do and how we see ourselves; they are spaces in and of which we “live…. touch….dream….and imagin[e]” rather than encounter the “mut‑ ism” of the “infinite spaces” and other spaces far from everyday experience (5). That is, whatever distances Perec imagines and fantasizes, his preferred spatial worlds suggest the immediacy of himself, his life, his body. And he is intent on noticing our spatial encounters, again recognizing the infra‑ ordinary, as they contribute to creating our lives. Some of Perec’s pronouncements seem to address space less personally, but in fact he returns to individual perspectives. He writes, for instance, that there isn’t a single space, “a beautiful space… there’s a whole lot of small bits of space” (5–6), each characterized by its own specific qualities and its po‑ tential to change those qualities and, thus, become quite another space. One space, for instance, “has become Paris,” while another “has been content to remain Pontoise” (6). And, generally, “spaces have multiplied, been broken up, and have diversified. There are spaces today of every kind and every size, for every use and every function” (6). Perec’s subject here isn’t space and spaces per se, but how we think of them, how we feel (about) these named and designated and experienced places and their discursive stand‑ins: representations not only as they appear in actual maps but as they figure in the individual imaginative responses and inter‑ actions of readers with these spaces, with these words. Perec is describing space’s and spaces’ overlaps with politics, nomenclature, identity, memory, time, and experience. Narrowing the focus: He could be describing, however lightly or indirectly, the circumstances of nationalism and war which much less lightly reshaped his own country, neighborhood, apartment, life. Trisha Brown’s Skymap: Perecquian Choreocartography Imagine a dance whose choreographic score indicates constant and specific changes of direction for each dancer but leaves unarticulated the basic spatial coordinates: a potentially chaotic and/or anxiety‑producing and/or thrilling event. Imagine a dance for a soloist or multiple performers free to draw maps with their own bodies moving in the space. Imagine lying still and seeing in your mind’s eye the lines and points and arcs of an unseen map in the making. The first two scores are enticing directions for an improvisation or the initiation of a dance’s making. The third score was realized in a 1969 work by iconoclastic postmodern/Judson choreographer Trisha Brown, who challenged spatial expectations in dance throughout her career. In Skymap (Brown 1969 in Teicher 2002: 81–83), she demonstrated how traditional assumptions of dance’s space might extend to its most basic elements: that there is something to see, something that takes place, somewhere. Skymap included no actual bodily movement, no visual action; instead, it featured Brown’s recorded voice playing for a supine audience, guiding listeners in the creation of a map on the ceiling. Having attended a performance in 2010 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I recall the pleasurable oddness

108  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space of lying, with strangers, on the gallery floor—I think there was a carpet—at a museum. There was nothing to watch except each other; one might even close one’s eyes to better follow the prompts of Brown’s talking, which cre‑ ated a vivid “dance space,” however imaginary and individual. What I did not realize at the time was the Perecquian tone, structure, and perspective of Brown’s script. Her words address a subject, cartography, through a playful, indirect, digressive “map” of its own, skipping from one viewpoint, topic, or mode of address to another. Brown animates her words, some “helped by invisible gnomes,” and the elements they represent: “If you hear ‘horse,’” she says, “know that H‑O‑R‑S‑E‑S are trotting out to take their places as border, valley, and capital.” She warns listeners not to “get lost in the content” while making their maps. Then she complicates the process, merging normally separated words (of a prayer, whose meaning she revamps) into strung‑together lines so we can “hear the words working.” She tells a story; moves in and out of what seems to be autobiography; drops in multiple long lists of evocative place names, some interspersed with unmatrixed words for foods, tasks, and other strays (Brown 1969 in Teicher 2002: 81–83).22 Site‑Dance: Engaging Space and Place Brown’s layered view of spatial meaning‑making is tied, too, to Perec’s ideas about the often‑overlooked attributes of the endotic. One form in which this is potentially most fruitful is site dance, a term that generally refers to dance in a non‑theatrical setting or other atypical dance venue. Typically, it “encompasses engagements with urban, rural and virtual environments and incorporates a range of themes from the socio‑political to the romantic, historical, ecological and factual,” writes Victoria Hunter, linking site dance to “Perecquian Perspectives” (2017: 28). Often, though not always, that site is outdoors, whether in city or country; it may be familiar, in its everyday context, to viewers and/or dancers. That is, we may know how to use a space, how to engage with it practically or materially, but we may never have looked at it or otherwise given it attention on its own. We may have noticed clouds or wind, but not taken the time to dwell on their details, or our details of experience. Site‑Specific Dance: Tamar Rogoff

Dances engaging these spatial elements directly, called site‑specific, are tied to a historical, ecological, or other particularity of the venue, and could only be made or shown there. An example is Tamar Rogoff’s spatially and emo‑ tionally charged The Ivye Project (1994), staged in a forest in the Belarus‑ sian town where in 1942, twenty‑nine members of her family, who had been killed in a single day, were buried. Her cast included professional dancers and local community members: Holocaust survivors, children, and adults channeling the space’s historical importance.

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  109 One way that this event is especially germane to Perec is its autobiograph‑ ical undertone. As Perec has acknowledged, autobiography permeates his writing, even in work in which that aspect is unannounced. Ivye was gener‑ ated by Rogoff’s new awareness of a terrible event in her family’s history; however, the piece didn’t foreground that event or articulate its personal con‑ nection. Rather than framing the work as “a Holocaust piece,” Rogoff con‑ sidered it an opportunity to “come ‘home’” to an actual place reconstructed through history and imagination (Rogoff 2009: 261). The piece’s basic structure was a tour through the forest, in which viewers encountered staged, unmatrixed quotidian scenes, guided by an actor playing Rogoff’s murdered Uncle Beryl who addressed them in five languages. Per‑ formers’ everyday activities included bicycling, tree‑climbing, slowed‑down “fracture(d) pedestrian movement”: Anything dance‑y was simply merged with the general environment, not highlighted. Rogoff wanted “to make the audience see in a new way” (2009: 255). That re‑vision was also germane to the participants, who experientially located or created relationships to the space. Some, such as the dancers from Lithuania and Estonia who had never been there, would do this both by danc‑ ing in it and participating in the rehearsal and performance process which immersed them in the space’s and the performance’s narrative. The Holo‑ caust survivors, entering the forest, were literally stepping back into a horrific moment in their own personal as well as political and cultural history. Rogoff and her American entourage experienced the forest, too, as it emerged from their own still‑unintegrated family histories, from their research and carefully wrought relationships with locals. Moreover, the company encouraged the mostly non‑Jewish viewers to attend by providing transportation, dinner, free admission, and assurance that despite rumors, no one would be dancing on the graves. Audiences were urged to sense the space as an occasion of com‑ munity memory, and, as it turned out, limitedly, community future: efforts to revive Jewish culture began but fizzled out, overwhelmed by the pressures of political and economic power structures (Rogoff 2009). Site‑Adaptive Dance: Eiko and Koma

Other site dances, referred to as site‑adaptive, are linked to a geographic category rather than a particular spot. Eiko Otake, in the dances she has made and performed individually and in the works she has created with her husband, as Eiko and Koma, has made many such pieces. One example is their River, which has been performed at numerous water‑centered sites. The choreographic “action” (a term radically understating the performers’ com‑ mitment to slow and sometimes passive continuity, extending the flow and rhythms of the water itself) follows its score and concept. “[W]e become part of the river,” Eiko says. “We are born, bloom, and die in a river… [W]e come from upstream with driftwood and then float downstream with driftwood, leaving the audience with only the river” (Otake 2009: 180). Each time they

110  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space perform the piece, Eiko and Koma float together. However, the contexts, which could reflect an area’s history, climate, economy, and culture, and which they research in advance, change. This affects not only the movement but production decisions (e.g., lighting, seating) and their consequent effects on spectators’ experiences. The driving idea is to give the community mem‑ bers, who are likely to know the site as, say, swimmers or picnickers, another perspective, seeing the site’s beauty rather than its use value, acknowledging “a landscape with its own memories” (Otake 2009: 175). Just as powerful are the dances in Eiko’s A Body in Places series. These solo performances take place in public spaces (train stations, malls, streets) across the world, viewed by mainly unsuspecting passersby. Eiko is delicately built, her body often sheathed by her long hair and a slip‑dress or kimono. She typically moves extremely slowly, sinking and rising, reaching, her affect joining vulnerability and urgency, her gaze reaching out to the place and the people unexpectedly pulled from their lunches and hurries. She embodies hu‑ man pain, sorrow, and suffering, seeming to offer or insist on this temporary inconvenience as an opening of the body itself as space. This is not so much an invitation to explore the space or see it anew, as to recognize the extreme‑ ness of what and who exist there, in this venue—sometimes a “non‑place”23 between more articulated areas—designed to support commerce. Can these dances change things?24 All Dance as Site‑Dance

In some ways, broadly speaking, all dance is site‑dance in that it happens somewhere, and by extension the dancers’ and viewers’ experiences derive from an emplaced and interactive experience. Moreover, as some site‑dance scholars note, these experiences don’t only respond to spatial cues or circum‑ stances, they create the space. Hunter, for instance, sees Perec’s views of the endotic in site‑dance as encouraging dancers to be available to those elements of a place which might have escaped their attention and to acknowledge their own participatory (re)creation of that place and of themselves. She writes of “the process of engaging with the world as an unfolding event through ac‑ tion and interaction….[a] position of reciprocity between body and world” (2017: 30–31), locating our bodies as spatial entities, interacting with their environments: in space, as space. UK dancer/scholar Adesola Akinleye also argues that “all dance is site‑ specific” (2021: 18). Significantly, her point of view rests on the distinction she makes between choreography and dance‑making. “Dance‑making” is a word she applies to a process potentially less informed than that of chore‑ ography, which she sees as directly linked not only to site interaction but to the “intentional making of site/sight—intentional Place‑making” (2021: 19). (I think here, by contrast, of dances called site‑specific when they are merely re‑placed, disappointingly without regard for a venue’s potential contribu‑ tion and reimagining.)

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  111 The significance of site is germane even when the place is only in our imaginations. Whether spectators are guided in an encounter with an act of conceptual art, such as Skymap, or, as a choreographer or performer, we begin from dreaming a new dance into existence, we experience it and our‑ selves coming into being as that dance evolves from an inchoate image to corporeal and spatial specificity. (Our experience of) its site is enmeshed with (our experience of) the dance itself, bringing together the body in space and the body as space. Just as Perec repeatedly investigated and rearticulated his ideas about space, choreographers, and dancers find opportunities to remake and revise beliefs about space and place in dance. This is one of the most powerful ways we recognize particular choreographers’ work: the ways they transform a regulation studio or stage into a site that announces itself as one person’s dance‑world, sometimes immediately, sometimes over the course of a piece. Similarly, a dancer who has performed at a particular venue before will layer that memory onto the current moment, linking time to space, moving not only from Hunter’s “Being Here and There” but also to what we might call “Being Now and Then.” In addition to the recognition of time and space as inextricable, as it is so vividly in dance, we are reminded of the narrative fluidity of our experiences of dancing and viewing. (I have borrowed my mother’s variation of the Twist, which I loved watching her dance when I was a child, as material for several pieces. Most of the time, it features my facial expression, which is to say her expression—a slight smile, the tip of her tongue showing—once re‑ moved. I don’t always make that expression; sometimes I just focus on the feeling or the memory of doing it. I imagine myself into the side‑to‑side motion of my mother’s hips, the rustle of her fancy skirt. I cannot do this “simply” as movement; it is indelibly her swinging hips, her full‑skirted dress, her gaze at my father. The site of this dance is her body as I remember watching it, watching her; I am channeling her body of years ago, bringing its memories as I imagine them into a duet with my own, experiencing our bodies in space, as space.25) Circling Back: Species of Spaces, Time, and Language In SOS, following Éluard’s children’s song, a sequence of merry destruction— dark, like what some folklorists see as “Ring‑Around‑the Rosie”’s Black Plague references26—the chapters are themselves “particularized,” in terms of theme, structure, position, and voice. Many comprise unequally divided segments, or switch between quotidian actions or objects and philosophical perspectives and personal narratives. “The Apartment,” for example, begins with a little almost‑story of a former neighbor, a disabled elderly woman; a longer piece in the same entry contemplates (and rejects) the notion of an airport serving as a living space; another is a list of rooms and their

112  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space functions—which leads into a wonderful exposition on functionality itself. That leads to a little play, which Perec calls a “model” (28),27 and a gather‑ ing of neologistic fantasies reimagining architectural convention to accom‑ modate people’s needs, desires, senses: “The Mondayery could ideally be a laundry‑room” or “imitate a boat” (32). This winds into wondering about “a space without a function,” and the difficulty Perec experiences trying to think about nothing: “How to think of nothing without automatically putting something round that nothing” (the image recalling his Carroll‑derived functionless map), which turns it into something else (à la Paris and Pontoise) (33).28 He doesn’t manage that. In‑ stead, he sifts through more and more categories directly or obliquely linked to apartments and their component parts and potential use values. Such adroitness of space and language registers for me choreographically, as an opportunity to relish the malleability of space, to know that another meaning or way to do or see something that you’ve done or seen so often can be redefined, re‑experienced. This is a beguiling mix of space and time, to borrow from popular songs released a few years before SOS was published, of “We have all been here before” and “Each moment is different from any before it.”29 Tellingly, during this time, Perec was compiling his autobio‑ graphical W or the Memory of Childhood and working on his Lieux (Places) project, accumulating or “dredg[ing] up” childhood memories through these circumstances of extensive and charged revisiting of places and times satu‑ rated with personal significance.30 David Bellos describes Perec as he “sat on the train going south along the same tracks on which he had travelled north with his cousin Henri twenty‑four years before,” an experience that re‑set his plan for the structure of W (Bellos 1999: 449). For both the dance‑maker and the dancer (who might be the same person), this tale of memory and revision takes us in two directions. It reminds us of embodied experience as a way of knowing and of Perec’s emphasis on the endotic, especially on noticing what is typically overlooked, as it is germane to moving with others, to experiencing one’s own and others’ movements and the spatial/temporal map of their becoming. It is especially resonant regard‑ ing improvisation: a reminder of what can take place when a practitioner has the courage to not (always) go for the most outrageous choice but the one acknowledging “the big picture” of what has happened so far and how this moment simultaneously repeats, expands, restages what we saw when “we [were] here before.” * After considerable structural play and ping‑pong, pages on moving out and moving in and doors and staircases, Perec writes these beautiful lines, con‑ joining knowing and unknowing, past and present, subject and object, ani‑ mate and inanimate, architecture and impermanence:

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  113 I put a picture up on a wall. Then I forget there is a wall. I no longer know what there is behind this wall. I no longer know there is a wall. I no longer know this wall is a wall. I no longer know what a wall is…. (39) Perec’s expression of body/space mutability calls to mind another wall, from a dance by Sally Gross. In 1998, she made a quartet, Suddenly Then She…. Several times during the dance, Gross or another performer gesturally marked a remembered space, saying: “There was a picture. I put it on the wall. Every day I looked at the picture. Has the picture changed? Or have I changed?” I asked, then, given the Buddhist view of constant change, “[W]hat remains? What is stable? What is the image and what, or whom, is beneath it? … And what is around it?” (Satin 2000: 23). Everyday Behaviors, Everyday Bodies as Space, in Space Some SOS entries complicate the textual space of the page itself. The list of spatial categories near the start of the book is written in all upper‑case letters and centered on the page, the word SPACE centered and lined up like bricks in thirty‑eight repetitions on one page and fourteen on the next, each time except the first (which could be considered a title) preceded or followed by a modifier: DEEP and PARKING and WATCH THIS, for instance, before the word, BAR, INVADERS, RACE, NEEDLE coming after (2–3). The effect of the whole is a call to read or sing the lines aloud, to animate their rhythm, to hear the stretch and humor and idiosyncrasy of Perec’s choices, variously historical, descriptive, suggestive, idiomatic, quotidian, personal. It looks rather like a mesostic, and while it doesn’t share that form’s definition, it brings to mind the same sense of merging words’ meaning‑making qualities with their sculptural layout, their visual and spatial features. At the end is a puzzle, or a worry: WASTED SPACE. SOS’s spatialized chapters include “Europe” and “New Continent,” which each get one line; “Old Continent” gets two, and that, along with substantial in‑between blank space, comprises the whole page (76). Some use the sim‑ plest language or state the simplest views—at once the most reductive and the most essential: “I like my bed,” he assures us in “The Bed” (17); and “The world is big” (“The World,” 77). Many chapters include lists, such as his “ty‑ pology of bedrooms” (23) and “Things we ought to do systematically, from time to time,” whose first entry has several parts and one attention‑drawing word choice: “go and call on your neighbours; look at what there is on the party wall, for example; confirm, or belie, the homotopology of the accom‑ modation. See what use they have made of it” (44). “The Page,” too, approaches a spatial phenomenon from multiple per‑ spectives. Perec focuses on writing, first repeating “I write” several times, then arraying words on the page in lines at odds with their content (the word “Horizontal” is on a diagonal) and while demonstrating how a page of text

114  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space comes into being. Then he shifts gears, offering a brief analytical history of paper: its regulation sizes, its imaginary geographical equivalent if spread across land or water, its cost in forests. Returning his attention to the action of writing, he precedes a large blank space with “I inhabit my sheet of paper … I incite blanks, spaces”—and adds in tiny font, in the margin, “I write in the margin” (emphasis in the original). Soon, shifting again, he writes a short essay almost entirely composed of a very long list of “written trace[s]” of eve‑ ryday life: “an address caught in passing…a list of urgently needed supplies (…cat litter, Baudrillard book…,) … notes taken at some lecture…” Finally, he includes a meditation starting, “This is how space begins, with words only” and moving through another list, this one geographical, then skipping to “Virtual space,” not in the contemporary sense but meaning the spaces “evoked” by words. Another list, this one linked to workers and what they do. “An idealized scene,” he closes. “Space as reassurance” (9–15). Perec recreates and rethinks such scenes, idealized and otherwise, through‑ out SOS, certainly, and in his other work as well. These scenes acknowledge the behaviors we witness and participate in regularly, as people enact the gen‑ erally unspoken, nearly always unwritten, and widely internalized and thus understood conventions of physical and spatial life—as they move through everyday spaces and particular ones, such as maneuvering on a busy street or avoiding crashes on a crowded dance floor. In these and other circumstances of human activity in public space, or for that matter, in private space, the activity seems “natural.” In fact, though, these protocols of spatial values, particularly as they guide bodily behavior, are deeply known, internalized, and understood, as they have variously been taught or imitated. Certain spa‑ tial behaviors are consciously imparted to the smallest children: to maintain a particular distance from the person with whom you’re speaking, to stand in line at school, to avoid crashing into people. Some spatial behaviors, par‑ ticularly locale‑specific ones, are literally spelled out: whether to stand on the right or left side of the escalator, leave empty those bus seats reserved for the frail if you are able‑bodied, wait in line for movie tickets rather than rushing the box office. But for the most part, we learn these conventions of everyday behavior, of everyday bodies as space, in space, largely indirectly: through observation and repetition, rewards and consequences. * Weeks after the collective trauma of 9/11, New Yorkers were finally allowed to go south of Canal Street. Dancers gratefully returned to the Beach Street studio where Susan Klein and Barbara Mahler taught their somatically de‑ rived technique. Fragile and cautious, we returned to our warmly familiar space and the pleasure of all of us together there and tried to simply take class. One of those first mornings, lying on the floor and concentrating on breathing, we somehow fell out of our communal and internal rhythms and into avidly recounting the disaster we had all lived through and had barely be‑ gun to process. A loud wail cut through the crosstalk: “Please,” the distressed

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  115 dancer cried out, “take us back to the body.” My heart broke, again, even as I knew that the body and the mind do not exist apart from each other. Writ‑ ing about this incident over twenty years later, both my memories and my continuing desire for integrated harmonious embodiment are revived, and I am weeping once again. Notes 1 According to a single isolated sentence at the end of Species of Spaces, “Since 1984, small planet No 2817 1982 UJ) has borne the name of Georges Perec” (Perec 1999b: 96). See also Tom Payne (2011). 2 See Chapter 3. In two recent works, I explored experiences of walking in cities: “Walking as Site Dance: Choreography and Conflict in Tel Aviv” (Satin 2019b) and “Cell‑Out: A Long‑Distance Mobile Performance of Scores, Reflections, Confessions” (2021), the latter co‑written with Claudia Brazzale. Both join au‑ tobiography and a dynamic integration with urban flow, everyday life, and the complexity of site. 3 See Chapter 2. 4 I imagine that Perec would have been drawn not only to the substance but to the form of Mauss’s essay: the arrangement of much of its material into lists, whose entries are of various lengths, structure, complexity, interaction, and degree of personal commentary. 5 Both Kealiinohomoku and Mauss are intent on redefining such terms and atti‑ tudes as “ethnic” and “primitive.” 6 “Man is the measure,” Tuan writes (1977: 44). The line nails the central value of his perspective, though his dated pronoun usage is jarring, and, indeed, at odds with his generally more inclusive, sensitive writing. 7 See Cynthia J. Novack’s 1990 Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, an ethnographic joining of a dance form’s movement compo‑ nents and cultural, performative, and personal contexts. 8 I saw this performance July 26, 2016. I have been privileged to view several per‑ formances of Pueblo dances. I assume that such performances, made available to non‑Pueblo viewers, differ in many ways (including spatial values) from those offered only to insiders. The ballet description is not tied to an individual perfor‑ mance, but to the form’s underpinnings. 9 In 2010, choreographer Neil Greenberg titled a dance (Like a Vase), to emphasize its being something to look at and experience rather than to explain, to insist on “meaning” something. 10 Perec’s scar resulted from a blow from a fellow student, what he felt was an unfair response to an accident (Perec 1988 [1975]: 108). 11 I use the term “thinking body” here not only to refer to body/mind integration, but to note the importance of Mabel Elsworth Todd’s 1937 The Thinking Body, which was significant in introducing these ideas, linking physiology and psycho­ logy to dance and movement. 12 Marianne Goldberg’s “Ballerinas and Ball Passing,” in a 1987 issue of Women & Performance on The Body as Discourse, deftly and performatively joins the site of the body to insight on its entwinings with language. She explores the relation‑ ship of these spatial attributes not only to conventions about space and dance but to the gendered meaning‑making of the body, which “accumulates and sheds meanings through social practice: It can lie as easily as the word” (9). That last clause refers back to Martha Graham’s famous and debatable pronouncement, “the body never lies.”

116  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space 13 Humphrey’s book covers considerably more ground, and responds to the work of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, whose company nurtured her own and Martha Graham’s early work, as well as to ballet. 14 Near the end of My Body, The Buddhist, Hay offers “A Chronicle of Performance Practices,” several of which begin with “I imagine every cell in my body…” Ex‑ amples of what follow include “hears, performs, and surrenders the dance simul‑ taneously” and “invites being seen living and dying at once….” (2000: 103). Also see Anderson (2009). 15 See Lawrence Halprin (1969) and Anna Halprin (1995). 16 See Paxton 2018 and numerous essays in Contact Quarterly. 17 See Tufnell and Crickmay (2023). 18 See Olsen (2002). 19 Movement analyst Rudolf Laban used this word to refer to “the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without step‑ ping away from [one’s] place” (Laban 1966: 10). This is a momentary space, changing as we travel to a new base of support. 20 See Brazzale (2014). 21 See Satin (2019a). 22 Off the Wall: Part 2—Seven Works by Trisha Brown was an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, September 30–October 3, 2010. https://whitney.org/exhibitions/off‑the‑wall‑part2 23 See Augé (1995). 24 See Hussie‑Taylor 2016; Hussie‑Taylor and Bell 2016. 25 See Satin (2021). 26 See BBC Culture (2022). 27 Perec playfully interrupts his discussion of spatial functionality in apartments with a footnote about his use of the word “nycthemeral,” which enthusiastically advises readers, “This is the best phrase in the whole book!” (It means “Designat‑ ing or characterized by a variation that occurs in a period of twenty‑four hours, especially corresponding to the contrast between day and night”—http://www. lexico.com) 28 Certainly, Perec was familiar with existentialist writings such as Jean‑Paul Sar‑ tre’s 1943 Being and Nothingness. Perhaps he was aware, too, of musical expres‑ sions of similar philosophies of the 1960s: loud and literary rock bands such as the Fugs, whose members were poets, intellectuals, and activists. “The Fugs First Album” (1965) included “Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time” (a cross‑century col‑ laboration of poets William Blake and band member Ed Sanders) and, especially, “Nothing,” an enthusiastically depressing piece based on a Yiddish song, written by band member and composer Tuli Kupferberg, and structured—as would have pleased Perec—as a list: “Monday, Nothing; Tuesday, Nothing; Wednesday and Thursday, Nothing…” See www.thefugs.com. 29 Respectively, these songs are Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Déjà Vu,” on their 1970 album Déjà Vu (Atlantic LP), and the Incredible String Band’s “This Moment,” on their album of the same year, I Looked Up (Elektra/WEA). 30 See Chapter 2.

Works Cited Akinleye, Adesola. 2021. Dance, Architecture and Engineering: Dance in Dialogue. London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic/Bloomsbury Publishing. Anderson, Carol. 2009. “Christopher House and Deborah Hay.” Interview. Choreo‑ graphic Dialogues. https://www.dcd.ca/dialogues/houseandhay2.html

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  117 Augé, Marc. 1995. Non‑places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York and London: Verso Books. Originally published in 1992 as Non‑Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. BBC Culture. 2022. “The Dark Side of Nursery Rhymes,” BBC Culture. https://www. bbc.com/culture/article/20150610‑the‑dark‑side‑of‑nursery‑rhymes Becker, Howard. 2001. “Georges Perec’s Experiments in Social Description.” Ethnog‑ raphy 2.1 (March): 63–76. Bellos, David. 1999 [1993]. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. London: The Harvill Press. Brazzale, Claudia. 2014. “(Un)covering Ground: Dance, Space and Mobility.” Thea‑ tre, Dance and Performance Training 5.2: 107–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/1944 3927.2014.908140 Brazzale, Claudia and Leslie Satin. 2021. “Cell‑Out: A Long‑Distance Mobile Perfor‑ mance of Scores, Reflections, Confessions.” Streetnotes 27: 99–136. Brown, Trisha. 1969. “Skymap. Text of Spoken Performance.” In Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961–2001, 2002, edited by Hendel Teicher. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of Contemporary Art, Phillips Academy, distributed by the MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London: 81–83. Debord, Guy. 1958 [1956]. "Theory of the Dérive." Translated by Ken Knabb. Situ‑ ationist International Online. Originally in Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956); reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958). https://www.cddc. vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html Dils, Ann and Ann Cooper Albright, eds. 2001. Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Forsdick, Charles, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips, eds. 2019. Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces. London: UCL Press. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. 1996 [1987]. Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: ­Doubleday Anchor Books. Goldberg, Marianne. 1987. “Ballerinas and Ball Passing.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 3.2 # 6: 7–31. Halprin, Anna. 1995. Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance. Edited by Rachel Kaplan. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England. Halprin, Lawrence. 1969. The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Envi‑ ronment. New York: George Braziller. Hay, Deborah. 2000. My Body, the Buddhist. Hanover and London: Wesleyan Uni‑ versity Press; published by University Press of New England. Humphrey, Doris. 1959. The Art of Making Dances. Edited by Barbaral Pollack. New York and Toronto: Rinehart & Company, Inc. Hunter, Victoria. 2017. “Perecquian Perspectives: Dialogues with Site‑Dance (Or, ‘On being here and there’).” Literary Geographies 3.1: 27–49. https://eprints.chi.ac.uk/ id/eprint/3178/ Hussie‑Taylor, Judy and Lydia Bell, eds. 2016. A Body in Places. Catalogue. New York: Danspace Project. Hussie‑Taylor, Judy. 2016. “Eiko Takes Her Place.” In A Body in Places. Catalogue, edited by Judy Hussie‑Taylor and Lydia Bell. New York: Danspace Project: 7–10.

118  Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space Kealiinahomoku, Joann. 1970. “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Eth‑ nic Dance.” In Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, 2001, edited by Dils and Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press: 33–43. Kloetzel, Melanie and Carolyn Pavlik, eds. 2009. Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Laban, Rudolf. 1966. Choreutics. London: Macdonald and Evans. La Cecla, Franco. 2000. “Getting Lost and the Localized Mind.” In Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday, translated by Stuart Wylen and edited by Alan Read. London: Routledge: 31–46. Leak, Andrew. 2019. “The Mapping of Loss.” In Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces, Charles Forsdick, Leak Andrew, and ­Richard Phillips. London: UCL Press: 17–29. Lefebvre, Henri. 1999 [1974]. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson‑Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Mauss, Marcel. 2006. “Techniques of the Body.” In Techniques, Technology and Civ‑ ilisation: Marcel Mauss 1872–1950, edited and introduced by Nathan Schlanger. New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books: 77–95. Originally pub‑ lished in 1935. Napias, Jean‑Christophe. 2006. Quiet Corners of Paris: Unexpected Hideaways, Se‑ cret Courtyards, Hidden Gardens. Translated by David Downie. New York: The Little Bookroom. Originally published as Paris au Calme, 2006. Paris: Editions Parigramme. Novack, Cynthia J. (Later known as Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull) 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison and London: Uni‑ versity of Wisconsin Press. Olsen, Andrea. 2002. Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Otake, Eiko. 2009. “An Interview” and “Feeling Wind, Feeling Gaze.” In Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, edited by Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik. Gainesville: University Press of Florida: 179–188. Parfitt, Clare, ed. 2021. Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remem‑ ber, Dancing to Forget. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Paxton, Steve. 2018. Gravity. Brussels: Contredanse Editions. Payne, Tom. 2011. “Georges Perec: Essay.” Telegraph: May 3. https://www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/books/8480784/Georges‑Perec‑essay.html Perec, Georges. 1988 [1975]. W or the Memory of Childhood. Translated by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Publisher. Perec, Georges. 1990a. Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep. Translated by David Bellos and Andrew Leak. Introduced by David Bellos. Boston: David R. Godine. Perec, Georges. 1990b. “Things: A Story of the Sixties.” In Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep. Translated by David Bellos. Boston: David R. Godine: 13–126. First published in 1965. Perec, Georges. 1990c. “A Man Asleep.” In Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep. Translated by Andrew Leak. Boston: David R. Godine, 1990: 127–221. First published in 1967. Perec, Georges. 1999a [1974]. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and trans‑ lated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Penguin Books.

Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space  119 Perec, Georges. 1999b [1974]. Species of Spaces. In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and translated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Penguin Books. Perec, Georges. 2014. Portrait of a Man. Translated and with an introduction by David Bellos. London: Maclehose Press. First written in 1959–1960, first published in 2012. Read, Alan. ed. 2000. Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday. London: Routledge. Rethorst, Susan. 2012. A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings. Hel‑ sinki: Theatre Academy Helsinki, Department of Dance, Kinesis 2. Rogoff, Tamar. 2009. “‘An Interview’ and ‘Carriers of Consciousness: The Role of the Audience in the Ivye Project’.” In Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, edited by Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik. Gainesville: University Press of Florida: 253–267. Satin, Leslie. 2000. “Sally Gross, Suddenly.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22.1 (January): 10–25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3245907 Satin, Leslie. 2019a. “Embodiment and Everyday Space: Dancing with Georges Perec.” In Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces, edited by Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips. London: University College, UCL Press: 154–169. Satin, Leslie. 2019b. “Walking as Site Dance: Choreography and Conflict in Tel Aviv.” Choreographic Practices 10.1: 25–42. Satin, Leslie. 2021. “Mother Tongue: Dance and Memory, an Autobiographical Ex‑ cavation.” In Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remember, Danc‑ ing to Forget, edited by Clare Parfitt. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021: 243–258. Schlanger, Nathan, ed. 2006. Techniques, Technology and Civilisation: Marcel Mauss 1872–1950. New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books. Sklar, Deidre. 2001. “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance.” In Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edted by Dils and Alright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press: 30–32. First published in 1991. Smith, Phil. 2014. On Walking… and Stalking Sebald: A Guide to Going Beyond Wandering Around Looking at Stuff. Devon: Triarchy Press. Solnit, Rebecca. 2005. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Penguin Books. Steinman, Louise. 1995 [1986]. The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Con‑ temporary Performance. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 445–453. Teicher, Hendel, ed. 2002. Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961–2001. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of Contemporary Art, Phillips Academy. Distrib‑ uted by the MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London. Todd, Mabel Elsworth. 1997 [1937]. The Thinking Body: A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic Man. Pennington, NJ: Princeton Book Co. Tuan, Yi‑Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tufnell, Miranda and Chris Crickmay. 2023 [1990, 2014]. Body Space Image: Notes towards Improvisation and Performance. Dorset: Triarchy Press. (Previously pub‑ lished by Dance Books Ltd. in Hampshire.)

5 Ludic Literature Oulipo and Rethinking Composition

In 2016, I taught a class for graduate students at Hamidrasha, the art school in Tel Aviv, on making performance using compositional scores. I began by performing a solo version of a dance I had made, titled Procedural to accentu‑ ate its processual doubling: the making of the piece according to a movement score based on accumulation, interruption, substitution, and other strategies; and the piece itself as unfolding and gathering steam, like a police proce‑ dural. Before moving on to the class’s workshop phase, in which students created and performed their own score‑driven events, we had a discussion: I explained Procedural’s score; students described their experiences of watch‑ ing the dance; and we addressed questions such as whether it was useful or necessary or irrelevant to have information about how a piece comes into being. During this conversation, visiting American composer Daniel Fox, whose practice reflects his alignment with experimental composers such as Alvin Lucier and Pauline Oliveros, asked, “What’s the difference between composing music with a score and … just composing?” I was momentarily flummoxed by this question, which pointed to my own presumptions about compositional processes and their rationales. What is a score? Why do artists choose to use or refuse it? How does it differ (in practice, as philosophy) from “just composing”? I don’t recall exactly what I said then, though I’m sure it addressed the significance of intention inherent in conceiving and creating work through score‑based composition. Among those artists drawn to generating work through devised procedures are Georges Perec and the other members of the Ouvroir de Littérature Poten‑ tielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature (from here on, Oulipo), founded in 1960, whose processes are characterized by self‑imposed contraints, or constraints, a subset of scores. Ludic Inclinations: Perec, Oulipo, Caillois An array of compositional approaches and the ideas, intentions, and strategies they manifest have figured in the work of many twentieth‑ and twenty‑first‑century experimental artists. The practices of some of these art‑ ists involve devices such as scores and constraints which direct or determine DOI: 10.4324/9781003143741-6

Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  121 aspects of the working process. The focus here is largely but not entirely on “ludic literature,” especially that of Oulipo and Perec, considering these language‑based practices in the context of other, contemporaneous fields and perspectives.1 Oulipo’s formal constraints, many evolving from long‑existing (and already constrained) forms and structures, aimed to focus the writer on discovering and activating new rules, games, and challenges. Many of these constraints were, from the start, gloriously extreme in concept and in actual or imagined execution. As Oulipo and Perec scholar Warren Motte points out, even the minutes to Oulipo’s monthly meetings, 1960–1963, “testify eloquently to the ludic spirit that has consistently animated the group” (1998: 2).2 Perec, Oulipian since 1967, was an aficionado and a perpetually prolific creator of games, puzzles, structures, and scores—a lude‑ite, as it were. As we know, his work not only featured from the start a remarkable span of compo‑ sitional and structural choices, it brought our attention to the forms and deci‑ sions behind them and to the effect these decisions had on our experiences of reading. In many instances, the behind‑the‑scenes preparation for writing the manuscript itself is apparent. This is so most notably in his masterly 1978 novel Life A Users Manual, whose set‑up is recognizably exhaustive, the evidence (if not the mathematical, spatial, chronological, narratological, or other specifics of its score‑supported conception and construction) appar‑ ent in the plethora of detail on every page. Still, Perec named it as a book which might be read purely for pleasure, without necessarily engaging in textual unpacking.3 Life A User’s Manual, though, is not an isolated example. Perec was clearly drawn to work which took him for such a ride, beckoning him to acknowl‑ edge its underpinnings as he succumbed to its readerly pleasures. He was a fan of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin tales: police procedurals or romans policiers with a twist, first published in 1905.4 He was the author of several unorthodox detective stories of his own, including A Void, its radical omis‑ sion of the letter “e” underlying at once its formal constraint, its humor, and its memorial homage to those lost to the Holocaust. His unfinished 53 Days (completed in 1989 after his death by Oulipians Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud from Perec’s voluminous notes) was itself a kind of detective story, not so much unfolding as reeling through changes of direction. Perec’s work articulated and extended such compositional approaches in his constraints and the literature arising from them, as well as in his own classification of his work. As with Oulipo, Perec’s output was certainly not always amusing. The focus here, however, is the playful perspective underly‑ ing much of the work as action, as practice. Though “ludic” is often used to indicate “funny” or “anything goes,” its focus is play and games. That said, brilliant genre‑crossing writer and Oulipo co‑founder Raymond Que‑ neau has been described, amusingly, as a “practical joker” and a “humorist” (Motte 1998: xiv).

122  Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition Such distinctions are evident in sociologist Roger Caillois’s 1958 Les Jeux et les Hommes (Man, Play and Games), presumably known to original Ouli‑ pians. Caillois divides games into four “rubrics,” each dependent upon the primary role played by “competition, chance, simulation, or vertigo” (12). He distinguishes Ludus, play based on rules, from the more improvisational, looser‑structured play of Paidia. These larger categories, occupying opposite ends of a spectrum, are framed by connotative descriptors: “turbulence” and “carefree gaiety” for Paidia; the more Oulipoesque “requires an ever greater amount of effort, patience, skill, or ingenuity” and a “taste for gratuitous difficulty” for Ludus (13). Caillois’s ideas, derived from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, identify play “as essentially a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and place” (6). This is moderated somewhat by the cultural specificities Caillois links to the games and play throughout. However, this division assumes a very far‑reaching work/play or life/play split, as does the statement, “play … creates no wealth or goods, thus differing from work or art” (5). Much has changed since Man, Play and Games was written; its gen‑ dered title wouldn’t fly now, for starters. But the interaction of play and “the rest of life” is clearly significant in the making of art, pointedly so in the work of Oulipo. It seems especially germane to Perec, who was as active in constructing game‑based creations at his actual job as he was in his more clearly Oulipian efforts. For many years, he regularly produced highly irregular‑but‑official writing and hilarious takes on conventionally serious work as a documentaliste at CNRS Laboratoire Associé 38.5 And, of course, Perec was extremely attached in life and work to experiencing and exploring the everyday. That said, Caillois’s presentation of games as an opportunity to be enveloped in a circumstance designed to hold the game, its rules, and its participants speaks to the broader Oulipian as well as Perecquian projects. Scores and Cycles, Chance and Choice Score‑based composition, often linked to arts‑crossing practices, has long figured in such experimental objectives: not only regarding arts of the mid‑ twentieth ‑century and beyond, but of their predecessors, e.g., Cubists, Dadaists, Futurists, and Surrealists. (That last, we will see, would be contested by many Oulipians.) Again, we recognize the 1960s as a heyday for artistic innovation in Europe and the US, especially for formalist experimentation buoyed by ludic inclinations. This leaning stimulated not only Oulipians and other writers but practitioners across non‑literary arts. The work of groups such as the Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union, and Fluxus as well as of many individual artists which blossomed during this time was notable for its unusual amount and intensity of experimentation. It was also significant for its high degree of arts‑crossing and collaboration, with practitioners of

Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  123 different fields creating pieces cooperatively and/or merging multiple forms in individual projects. (Some of these works, incorporating chance, or “alea‑ torics,” would, as will be clear, have furiously clashed with Oulipian purists.) Lawrence and Anna Halprin: The RSVP Cycles

One influential interarts proponent of compositional scores was American landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment was based on years‑long ideas and practices created and elaborated with his wife, choreographer Anna Halprin, and identifies scores as “symbolizations of processes which extend over time” (Lawrence Halprin 1969: 1; emphasis in original). Rather than determining how to proceed, these Scores—which inhabit potentially multidirectional cycles along with Resources, Valuaction, and Performance—support the discernability and elasticity of the creative process, facilitating continual reflection and communication and allowing for individual and collective creativity. Scores, wrote Lawrence Halprin, especially as integrated into the cycles, were meant to free the creative process and to make it “visible” (1969: 3). That visibility was integral to the development of the process itself, which was inherently adaptable. This malleability was built into the cyclical structure, composed of moveable, exchangeable, and repeatable parts, and whose (unintentional) initialism, RSVP, reflected the responsive openness inherent in its invitational letters. The cycle’s Resources were everything an artist had to work with, from initial idea to participants, environment, objects, duration: whatever was germane. Scores were the instructions or plans for what to do with those resources. Valuaction merged evaluation with action: rethinking, rehearsing, and revising. Performance was the work emerging from the cycle’s other parts. These parts could be enacted, and repeated, in any order. Moreover, the cycle was conceived as double, two overlapping concentric circles representing the decisions, actions, and experiences of the individual person and the collective within which the person worked. The Halprins’ scores might be open or closed, a circumstance generally indicating a continuum rather than a division, and, instead of determining in advance what will happen, they often articulate or suggest something to do.6 Traditional Western sheet music, for instance, typically presents a relatively closed score consisting of those elements—instrumentation, notes, measures, clefs, rhythm, meter, tempo, quality or affect, and duration—ensuring that its proper enactment, however “interpretive,” would produce something identi‑ fiable as, say, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. This is quite different from, to use a legendary example, John Cage’s considerably more open‑scored 1952 4’33”.7 Here, musicians are directed not to play their instrument (or instru‑ ments: their choice) for the three movements of the piece’s eponymous dura‑ tion; the “music,” different every time, emerges from the environment rather than from the score’s directives or the artist’s action; the listener is free to

124  Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition notice what was already present. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the premiere, featuring David Tudor at the piano, provoked significant (and noisy) discord‑ ance within the audience.8 Devoted to an ecological, humanist approach to making performances and environments, the RSVP Cycles can be understood as a precursor of New Materialist‑derived creative process, assuming the integration and im‑ permanence of natural as well as cultural, or human, circumstances. (Im‑ agine: “Identify and document the human‑to‑animal, animal‑to‑plant, human‑to‑human encounters in the woods for three days,” a variation on Perec’s “attempt to exhaust” his Paris street.9) This approach is distanced aesthetically and philosophically from at least early (dare I say “classical”?) Oulipo. However, RSVP shares Oulipo’s encouragement of knowledge, ar‑ ticulateness, and discipline as well as freedom in the creative process. Chance Operations and Aleatory Literature: Cage, Oulipo, Perec

This mix of thought‑through discipline and freedom applies, too, to John Cage, whose compositional procedures as well as his music were tremen‑ dously far‑reaching. He had been so unceasingly innovative in his explora‑ tions of what constituted both music and composition, weaving theories of sound and circumstance, creation and audition, that in 1962, an interna‑ tional music festival offered work that could only have been made “after” his. But as early as 1937, Cage announced his belief in “the use of noise…to make music,” presaging his lifetime embrace of all sounds and opening his music‑making, or “organization of sound,” to technology: “electrical instru‑ ments” (1973 [1961]: 3). Cage went on to explore the possibilities of rhythmic structure, espe‑ cially, as composer/critic Kyle Gann describes, making compositions that were “mathematical … formalist, rather than expressive” (2010: 52). His 1939 percussion score, Imaginary Landscape No.1, for example, depicts “an expanding sequence” of numbers of measures across four sections (Gann 2010: 52); this is quite like the Oulipian Rhopalic verse, which is described later in this chapter. Another instance is Cage’s 1939 First Construction in Metal, its base what Cage called “macro‑microcosmic rhythmic structure,” in which each part of the piece and the piece as a whole “had the same proportions” (Gann 2010: 52). This clearly suggests a (perhaps potential) Oulipian constraint. Beginning in 1951, Cage began working with the chance operations which predominated in his composition from then on. These were highly organized and detailed, each reflecting his chosen sound and structure categories, their deployment determined by the words of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. Cage’s focus on the act of working itself is striking, demonstrating his absorption in an arduous process demanding attention, time, and much repetitious coin‑tossing. (He eventually employed the computer.) This was

Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  125 not only Cage’s art practice; it was his Zen practice as well. Moreover, it recalls both Oulipian zeal and Perec’s repeated insistence on work as what he did, what he had to do. Cage’s ideas and acts of composition were as radical as those of Oulipo, but there is no love lost in their (imaginary and imputed) disputes. Oulipians from the first have resisted chance operations and similar practices—Motte refers to “the avowed bête‑noir of the Oulipo: the aleatory” (1998: 17)— merging them with the ideals of the Surrealists, who had figured significantly, and often problematically, in many of these writers’ personal histories. Moreover, Surrealism had found a foothold in the broader literary culture, and it was not conducive to the ideals and practices of the Oulipian project. As Motte points out, the scholarly world essentially dismissed Oulipo in the group’s early years, having “begun—in France at least—its infatuation with surrealism and psychoanalysis.” And at the same time, there was conflict and misunderstanding, as well as possible overlap, regarding the theories and practices of Structuralism and Oulipian attitudes toward literary structure (1998: xiv). Perhaps, then, there is no cause for surprise that Raymond Queneau de‑ clared that Oulipians “are not concerned with … aleatory literature” (in Motte 1998: 87). He brushed off notions of “the equivalence [between] in‑ spiration, exploration of the subconscious, and liberation: between chance, automatism, and freedom,” tying aleatory practices to lazy, impulsive, unin‑ formed art‑making (in Roubaud 1998 [1986], in Motte 1998: 87). Queneau’s reading is regrettable in its mingling of Surrealist philosophy and practice with the beliefs and the work of artists seriously engaged in making work using chance operations. Notably, though, that last quotation was written long before Oulipo, in 1938, and he aimed them not at Cage or others in the composer’s creative cohort, but at Surrealism. While this attitude was com‑ mon among early Oulipians, Queneau, in particular, according to Motte, was “very, very scarred by the Surrealist experience,” in particular, by the “tyranny of [André] Breton” (2022). Chance operations and other art‑making projects supported by external means have long been trivialized. Both Oulipian and Cagean work were seen by dubious and uninformed responders then (and presumably still now) as a joke at their—the responders’—expense. In 1968, longtime Merce Cunning‑ ham dancer Carolyn Brown, then married to experimental composer Earle Brown, addressed the widespread “misunderstanding” of chance as a com‑ positional approach. This under‑informed viewpoint, she wrote, included the “criticism hurled at artists for using chance procedures [which] has been abusive at times, often ridiculous, almost always lacking in knowledge of… [its] reasons,” history, or scientific foundations (Brown 1968: 8). Addition‑ ally, Brown raised ways that chance procedures could represent perspectives which were not oppositional but entwined. Composer Lou Harrison, for in‑ stance, averred that he “would rather chance choice than choose chance,”

126  Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition while fellow composer Morton Feldman wrote, “In my music, I have always been involved with choice. I choose chance.” Both declarations, Brown sug‑ gests, were “[w]ords of wisdom” whose meanings extended beyond their clever wordplay into the complexity of how chance might be defined within particular fields and within the aesthetic perspectives of individual artists (10–11). Ironically, in light of Queneau’s accusations toward what he saw as chance‑choosing artists practicing “blind obedience to every impulse” or writing whatever “comes into his head” (in Motte 1998: 87), Cage was a highly disciplined composer who believed that “music should be free of the feelings and ideas of the composer” (in Gann 2010: 16; Goldberg 1974). He also, though, with good reason, harbored the fear of himself or his work being seen as a joke.10 Perec, too, acknowledged his own worries about his work, and he as its maker, being essentially dismissible. That Perec, his Oulipian companions, and Cage were dedicated investiga‑ tors and innovators in their fields is indisputable. Still, the issue of chance remains contentious, even the word itself. Early in her thorough and ab‑ sorbing analysis of Perec, Oulipo, and chance, Alison James notes that in English, “chance” is “simply what happens or the way things happen” or “an opportunity”—or “absence of design or assignable cause … [or] the cause or determiner of events, which appear to happen without the interven‑ tion of law, ordinary causation, or providence.” In French, chance refers to luck; un hasard points to an “accidental” or “unexpected or unexplainable set of circumstances”; and le hasard “is the fictitious (and often personified) cause of that which happens without apparent or explainable meaning”— definitions with negative connotations (James 5). Equally significant, and entwined, for the writer/artist and the reader/viewer/listener is the use of the term “chance” or le hasard as it applies to a work’s compositional process— e.g., Cage’s chance operations—and to the work itself, whatever its mode of production. In 1974, artist/scholar Allan Kaprow wrote of such entwinement in considering the “formalist‑ anti‑formalist clash” which his essay’s subtitle, “Flogging a Dead Horse,” suggests (Kaprow 1993b: 159). Addressing the work of Cage, Pollock, Mondrian, and others, he notes the ways these cat‑ egories, however distinct their theoretical ideals, overlap in the processes and responses, and in the canvases or concerts, in terms of actualities and experi‑ ences. James brings Perec into this mix, writing that Perec’s texts effectively exploit the possibilities of chance, both tapping into its creative potential and controlling its operation. In doing so, these works capture essential aspects of human life: its “considerable energy” (to adopt Perec’s expression), its boundless possibilities, but also the constraints and limitations to which it is subject. (James: 4)

Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  127 Moreover, James points out that Perec’s works are “characterized by irony, linguistic play, and narrative flair” and at the same time are “incontest‑ ably poignant, bearing the mark of the writer’s personal history.” Not only post‑War but following unbearable and inexplicable personal loss, Perec created work which “emphasizes the powerlessness of individuals faced with a future that is both unpredictable and seemingly inexorable” (18). This kind of crossover is, to me, more than a given about how art “works” for creator and respondent; it is how we continuously process the most intense and complex experiences of being human. No matter how many dice one throws or how many instructions issue from the I Ching (Cage’s favored chance operation tool) or how assiduously one constructs a leave‑no‑stone‑unturned set of spatial/temporal/textual/mathematical scores and develops it into an endlessly compelling novel, artists make work emerging from their ongoing revisions of their lives, in autobiography and fiction, in image, and in movement, stillness, and the life of the knowing, thinking body. As David Bellos said, There is a dance, if you like, between Oulipo and chance … [T]hey want to try and develop a kind of writing that denies, or excludes, the random, and yet the very machine‑like routines that they did devise produce what from the outside look like chance or random outcomes. (Bellos 2022) Performing the Quotidian: Happenings, Fluxus, and the Everyday As Caillois, Cage, and founding Oulipians were plunging into the possibili‑ ties of ludic art‑making, Allan Kaprow homed in on the necessity of “Total Art,” an intentional undoing of historically separate genres. Expanding and animating this idea, he created Happenings, a genre‑crossing, time‑based phenomenon in which people carried out a score, or scores, often without audiences. “We must become preoccupied,” he wrote in 1958, with the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or … Forty‑second Street … An odor of crushed straw‑ berries, a letter from a friend, or a billboard selling Drano … all will become materials for this new concrete art. (1993b: 7–9) Later, Kaprow noted the value of Happenings’ undergroundness, their se‑ crecy resisting cooptation or commodification, freeing artists to fully expe‑ rience them. Given that a Happening “perhaps alludes more to the form of games and sports than to the forms of art,” he listed its essential principles, variously joining and countering those of Caillois. These events derived from a ludic perspective and were characterized in many instances by play.

128  Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition At the same time, they were significant in their focus on the everyday, on the merging of dailiness and art: The line between the Happening and daily life should be kept as fluid and perhaps indistinct as possible. Themes, materials, actions, and the associations they evoke are to be gotten from anywhere except from the arts, their derivatives, and their milieu. Time, closely bound up with things and spaces, should be variable and independent of the conven‑ tion of continuity. (Kaprow 1993c: 59–63. Italics in original) Such ideas, already significant then, presaged Kaprow’s later, broader model, distinguishing between Lifelike Art and Artlike art, a concept still germane to experimental practice and its reception.11 Many of the adherents of reconceiving and redefining a range of arts prac‑ tices, often but not always by crossing over their boundaries, were associated with Fluxus. From the early 1960s, members of this international movement worked both within and across their “home” areas, including visual arts, film, literature, music, and performance. That last category was particularly important; while it did not include dance per se, it cracked open the still in‑process understanding of performance as an opportunity to focus on the body as the site of the articulation and expression of ideas. Kristine Stiles characterized Fluxus events as “‘concerts’ of the quotidian,” in which such a site‑body, “reconfigur[ing]” everyday actions, is both subject and object in an inherently interactive circumstance: both performers and viewers are urged to not only contemplate “the behavioral processes that relate thinking and doing” but to change them. This body is inherently and simultaneously social, spatial, and continually in a state of flux, of becoming and changing: “in phenomenological terms … emergent with the world” (Stiles 1993: 65). Founding Fluxus artist Dick Higgins pushed these boundaries of embodied performance regularly, bringing everyday life to new extremes. One exam‑ ple was his enactment of his 1962 score, Danger Music Number Seventeen’s “Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream!” at great length and vol‑ ume. A less alarming but equally provocative act was presenting quotidian material out of context, as performance: for instance, getting his hair cut by his wife, fellow Fluxus artist Allison Knowles, in Danger Music Number Two. In 1966, Higgins wrote “Statement on Intermedia,” in which he looked at this phenomenon as it was germane both to producing new art and to acknowledging the political circumstances compelling such a response. Con‑ sidering the impact of then‑new media (television and transistor radios) on our desires, responsibilities, and experiences of engaging with art, he writes that “our sensitivities have changed,” and our temperament and communica‑ tional expectations as well (Higgins 1966 in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1993: 172–173). Like Perec’s 1973 “Approaches to What?” (1999b), Higgins’s

Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  129 “Statement” decries the distancing effects of the media on our knowledge of the world; we are rattled by headlines, numb to the systemic despair they cover up, filled with longing in our own lives for ” …what?” Oulipo: The Workshop for Potential Literature Cultural critic Andreas Huyssen, writing in the context of Fluxus about the significance of interarts practices of the late 1950s and early 1960s, points out Fluxus’s origins amidst considerable international political complexity. He also addresses a circumstance he sees as critical in the group’s develop‑ ment: “In 1962,” he writes, “a United States avant‑garde met a European avant‑garde” (Huyssen 1993: 146). While Oulipo did not attract American members for some time, it began, in Paris, in this period of artistic upheaval and shared some of its interna‑ tional compatriots’ questions about what art, literary in this instance, did and could do. That said, it was quite a distinct enterprise. Among the specif‑ ics were its clearly articulated literary principle‑based beginnings; its ener‑ getically argued‑over and agreed‑upon rules and constraints, which were the central compositional feature of Oulipians’ intentional potential literature; and its remarkably divergent development of these structures and strictures in the work of individual practitioners. Oulipo was founded in 1960 by poet, novelist, pataphysician,12 critic, and former Surrealist Raymond Queneau and mathematician, chemical engineer, pataphysician, former Dadaist, Resistance fighter, critic, and poet François Le Lionnais, representing the two primary fields from which the group’s par‑ ticipants emerged. Oulipo’s first meeting was on November 24. While the group is primarily literary in its focus, its mathematical perspective was sig‑ nificant to how its raison d’être was understood and has been developed over time. (“Time” includes the present: Not only is Oulipo’s work understood as endlessly continuing, but as we know, individual participants retain their membership dead or alive. There are indeed currently active, as in breathing, members.) The importance of the mathematical element becomes increas‑ ingly clear upon reviewing (as we will) the unimaginably complex con‑ straints dreamed up—or retrieved from obscurity, or at least from historical archives—and put to new use by the participants. Moreover, the practice of engaging with language with the same kind of diligence and specificity called for in mathematics grounded the writers’ exploration. The group’s name itself emerged from a bit of Oulipian word‑tussling. Noël Arnaud—who pre‑Oulipo had been a Dadaist, Surrealist, Resistance fighter, and pataphysician—points to the choice of ouvroir as distinguished from the more religiously associated séminaire. The former variously re‑ ferred to an eighteenth‑century cobblers’ workshop where laborers plied their trade, rooms where “young women … work on projects appropriate to their sex” or wealthy women sewed items for those less fortunate. Ouvroir,

130  Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition then, suggests an aspirational self‑image of a laboratory encouraging care‑ ful manual group work or, as one founding Oulipo member, Albert‑Marie Schmidt, saw it, “a secluded place where people work together on a difficult task, where people strive to elaborate new techniques” (Arnaud 1998 [1986] in Motte 1998: xi–xii). Even so, the descriptive definitions of past ouvroirs represent women and their work dismissively, a factor of Oulipo’s gendered history which has been addressed in recent writings.13 Motte notes that the group’s early years were spent, intentionally, under the radar, though work was published (including Perec’s La Disparition, in 1969); things picked up in 1973 when the group published its collection, La Littérature Potentielle, demonstrating a selection of the kinds of work its writers were producing (1998: 1). Oulipo artists created an astonishing array of work through radical for‑ malist experimentation. This work was understood by its makers in terms of two primary paths of exploration: analysis and synthesis, the former refer‑ ring to the exploration of quite old formalist experiments (“anoulipism”) and the latter to the creation of new ones (“synthoulipism”). At the same time, it was understood in terms of a particular Oulipian “principle or theory,” in line with Queneau’s and Le Lionnais’s sense of the “formal quest” underly‑ ing Oulipian work (Motte 1998: 2). Moreover, there was no expectation that a writer who had arrived at a new constraint—or other writers, for that matter—would follow through and produce a text, or texts. Some Oulipians have believed that one text was sufficient as a constraint’s demonstration; some have seen only the text setting up the constraint as valuable. The group’s mission, as articulated by Queneau, who Warren Motte situ‑ ates as central to the group’s development, was simple: “the search for new forms and structures that may be used by writers in any way they see fit” (in Motte 1998: 2–3). One of these ways was the choice to come up with a form or structure—and/or to make or work on something, and/or to complete something with that form or structure. A widely known work of Queneau, written years before Oulipo (1947) but presaging its synthoulipous inclinations, is Exercices de Style (Exercises in Style). It carries out its (unstated) task with thoroughness, charm, and humor: telling a wisp of a story (a young, hatted man accuses a fellow bus rider of pushing and is later seen, with a friend, by the story’s narrator) in ninety‑nine iterations. Each is announced in its title, indicating whether the retelling will be based on literary terms (Litotes, Polyptotes, Anagrams, Aphaeresis), genre (Comedy, Ode, Free Verse, Sonnet), or senses (Olfactory, Gustatory, Tactile, Visual). A considerably more expansive Oulipian model is Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), a fantastically conceived and daunting work. Its ten sonnets are to be subjected to an enor‑ mous number of operations involving accumulation and replacement of ho‑ mologous, sonnet‑crossing lines, continually producing new texts: a massive instance of combinatorics, merging mathematics and literature. Cutting to

Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  131 the chase: Queneau acknowledges that given “the time which a close textual reading demands … it would take more than a million centuries to finish the text” (Motte 1998: 3). The piece and its multiple accruals and enlargements abundantly satisfy Oulipo’s analytic and synthetic principles. Bellos points out, though, that while its structure “refuses the random,” it “produces a randomizing machine … [A]ny one poem from [it] is a product of chance” (2022). At the same time, actually following through on the instructions of the score is, practically speaking, not doable. The piece, encompassing the original son‑ nets and the score of their fulfillment, is at once an invitation to enter into an incompletable process and an iconic instance of potential literature. This simultaneously iconic and unfulfillable model suggests another meeting point. In my early dance composition studies with James Waring, ballet‑loving vaudeville fan and pre‑Judson postmodernist, one assignment was to compose detailed scores for two events: one improbable, one im‑ possible. This task was preceded by substantial discussion: What marked the distinction between improbable and impossible? How did it depend on scientific knowledge? On personal beliefs, anxieties, assumptions, bank ac‑ counts? Granted, at this moment as during those classes, Queneau’s score is impossible to enact. It could be understood, though, as jointly situated in two worlds generally considered separate: experimental literature, imaginable in the ouvroir of quiet poets and seamstresses, and Conceptual Art.14 Much of that movement’s work was presumably vexing to most Oulipians; however, it was indeed initiated by fellow Oulipian Marcel Duchamp, whose work and ideas were instrumental in its development. Oulipian and Perecquian Constraints What follows is a sampling of the Oulipian workhorses: the constraints they invented to guide their acts of voluntary literature. An artist’s use of such limitations, Oulipian Marcel Bénabou argues, recognizes the constraints in‑ herent in nearly every genre, ancient to current. It “is rather difficult, except for proponents of ‘automatic writing,’ to imagine a poetics that does not rely on rigorous rules” he attests (40), joining a casual dig at a central Surrealist principle with a reminder of the intense antagonism between that group’s and Oulipo’s beliefs and practices.15 Queneau’s 1938 commentary on following formal rules rather than urges sets the Oulipo stage: inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in real‑ ity a sort of slavery … The poet who writes that which comes into his head … is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant. (in Bénabou 1998 [1986] in Motte 1998: 41) Oulipian practice, we know, often focused on the exploration of ancient scores and the creation of new ones. That is, they delved into the old rules

132  Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition as deeply as possible and then transformed them, devising new problems for which they devised new answers. (Queneau famously wrote that Oulipians were “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”)16 One widely known constraint, an example tied to two existing texts, is S+7, in which the writer, having chosen a starter text, replaces each major word with the seventh word following it in a given dictionary. While this ancient‑to‑contemporary textual practice demonstrably sends writers into new territory, it also emphasizes the original material and its continuing pres‑ ence: a layer of the past asserting itself like a long‑painted‑over detail emerg‑ ing through a later image, keeping the painting definition in flux. At the same time, it reiterates, even reifies, the significance of the original form. Numerous Oulipians have been drawn to the possibilities of technology, specifically to the computer, with which one might go increasingly toward the outer limits of calculating the combinatoric mathematical/linguistic and syntactic/semantic possibilities inherent in algorithms or other sets of instruc‑ tions. In a related literary act, Perec wrote a novel‑as‑flowchart in 1968, detailing a raise‑seeker’s steps as the structure for The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise (Perec 2011 [1968]). As clear as his structurally virtuosic text‑play is the empathy Perec feels, and conveys to the reader, for the hapless character trapped in the systems of corporate life and capitalism itself. The constraint for which Perec is best known is the Lipogram, in which a single letter is excluded from the text: in this instance, the “e” missing from La Disparition/A Void.17 In “History of the Lipogram,” Perec links this de‑ vice to centuries (as far back as the sixth) of texts in which particular letters were absent from writing and speech, with various consequences to the texts’ meaning. In some instances, such as the letters standing in for but not spelling out the name of God in Hebrew scripture, the absence was the most evident element of the writing (Perec 1986 in Motte 1998). This is true in a quite different literary form in the subtext of Perec’s diverting A Void, a seemingly more playful act that at the same time invisibly calls out its more significant absence. In “History of the Lipogram,” Perec’s opening references to the To‑ rah and Cabala (and Jorge Luis Borges’s reading of it) recalls his hide‑and‑seek game with Hebrew letters in Life A User’s Manual: the letters he was told he knew first as a small child, which he was to forget along with anything about being Jewish, and which he dotted through his writings, often incorrectly. * Below is a partial list of other constraining structures, all of which Perec used as compositional devices:18 Pangram: a text including all the letters of the alphabet Anaphora: a text in which a word is repeated at the start of multiple iterations (e.g., Perec’s Je me souviens … and the explanatory clauses of this list) Homophone: a text using words which sound alike but have different mean‑ ings; Perec participated in an act of collective homophonics derived from the name “Montserrat Caballé”19

Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  133 Heterogram: a text in which no letters are repeated; Perec’s heterogrammatic poetry consists of anagrammatic verses Palindrome: a text that reads the same in either direction; Perec created the then‑longest palindrome (more than 5000 letters) in 196920 Belle Absente: a text—a kind of “acrostic encoding”—in which a given name’s letters are excluded, either all at once or as accumulated in suc‑ ceeding verses Bilingual Poetry and subset Homographic Poetry: a text whose words must have meaning in both of its two languages; these meanings may not be shared21 Syllabic Palindrome: a text which reverses as a standard palindrome does, but whose units are syllables rather than letters Snowball, or Rhopalic, or Euryphallic verse: a text whose segments are each one letter longer than the one before; this process may be reversed; these operations create a narrow‑to‑wide or wide‑to‑narrow visual. Positioning Perec’s Writing As we know, Perec’s writing, before and after he joined Oulipo, covered an unusual number of genres, styles, and subject areas, approaching each in ways that developed his literary explorations and inclinations and expanded the possibilities of what writing could be, of what writing could do. Da‑ vid Bellos’s praises acknowledge both the value of Perec’s work to the liter‑ ary world and Oulipo’s embrace of the young author: “Perec’s adoption by OuLiPo in March 1967,” he writes, “was an event of great significance, not only for his own life and work but for the group itself and for the future of French writing” (1999: 364). In 2002, Warren Motte went so far as to proclaim, “Georges Perec is the finest French writer of the twentieth century” (2013). The tone of the adula‑ tion is cheeky, Motte saying that he “can already hear the howls of right‑ eous outrage from the Proustians” and other “literary partisans.” But even given their giddy tone, Motte’s words call to mind some of his other writings, their titles alluding to both Perec’s and his own darker perspectives, such as “Georges Perec and the Broken Book” and “The Work of Mourning.” Both examples address Perec’s range of writing, in and out of Oulipo, focus‑ ing not only on the autobiographical material pervading his work and the losses it endlessly re‑plays but on the ways that from “text to text, … Perec pursues the work of mourning” (Motte 2004: 59). “Broken Book” speaks to the multiple representations in Perec’s writing of the Holocaust, focusing on the weaving within and among his texts—particularly his 1975 W or the Memory of Childhood (W ou le souvenir d’enfance), from here on W—of autobiography and fiction. It also warns the reader that the weave is knotted: it “juxtaposes discourses of astonishing candor and others of the most utter duplicity. Fiction and autobiography compete…” (Motte 1994: 235 / empha‑ sis mine). In “Mourning,” Motte continues to examine Perec’s recuperative project of writing through his central loss, bringing invention into the space

134  Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition where memories should be: “I have no childhood memories,” Perec claims at the start of W’s autobiographical text (1988 [1975]: 6). Perec, for whom writing is “what he is, and more importantly still, that’s what he does … turns to his work” (Motte 2004: 60, emphasis in the original.) Earlier chapters refer to this textual and personal conflict, these repeated retellings in and beyond W—which Motte writes fight an “unequal battle of story and history” (1994: 239)—in which Perec alters details, shifts position, brings his absent parents into focus and loses or erases them again. I return to it here to underline the complexity of Perec’s writing at large and his writing about his writing, especially the overlapping of literary types, as it appears in these pages.22 Perec’s Four Fields In 1978, Perec wrote a piece for the newspaper Le Figaro, “Statement of Intent,” saying that he had always wanted to cover an unusually broad spec‑ trum of possibilities. His “ambition,” he stated, was “to write every kind of thing that it is possible for a man23 to write nowadays” (Perec 2009c: 4), followed by a list of literary genres, most of which he had already produced. This breadth is acknowledged in the essay’s opening lines: When I attempt to state what I have tried to do as a writer since I began, what occurs to me first of all is that I have never written two books of the same kind, or ever wanted to reuse a formula, or a system, or an approach already developed in some earlier work. (Perec 2009c: 3) Even the essay in which he wrote these words exemplified this viewpoint; he was asked to write about his work and given a limit of only 800 words to do so. Within this stricture, which is to say, constraint, he produced an on‑point description of what he called his “systematic versatility,” breaking his work down into four categories. He calls them, improbably enough, “fields,” com‑ plete with references to “beets [and] alfalfa,” and himself as a “farmer,” con‑ trasting these agricultural images far from his actual life to the “reputation of being some sort of computer or machine for producing texts” (3). This kind of accusation was not unfamiliar to Oulipians, whose efforts begged the question of whether real art could be produced through such methodological practices. It has also been aimed at many other artists, including, as we shall see, choreographers and dancers. While Perec does identify four fields, he acknowledges that they are not wholly separate categories. Instead, they are different ways to approach what may be the same material; each one characterizes, instead, a kind of writ‑ ten work (3). Importantly, in light of his writing’s genre‑crossing proclivities, Perec notes that this organizational baseline is “rather arbitrary [and] could be greatly refined” (4). It also suggests the interdisciplinary and more broadly

Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  135 interconnected aspects of artistic process, social forces, individual and collective history, identity, and agency. These figure in the two elements Perec pointedly calls out as nearly always present in his work: One is the autobio‑ graphical attributes, about which he refers narrowly, even reductively, to pos‑ sible “allusion to one of the day’s events in a chapter in progress” rather than to the underpinning of absence and loss pervading his writing. The other is the utilization of “Oulipian structure or constraint, even if only symbolically” (Perec 2009c: 4). Moreover, following through on Queneau’s “The only lit‑ erature is voluntary literature,” Perec demonstrates, as he does throughout his work, his attention and devotion to the practice of writing itself.24 The first field Perec identifies is what he called “sociological,” which he connects to “the ordinary and the everyday” (3). He links this category to Things, his first acclaimed novel, in which a couple’s actual and imagined lives are narrated and understood through their (actual and imagined) ob‑ jects. He also names Species of Spaces, in which he defined, described, cate‑ gorized, and riffed on a broad array of spaces as he identified and understood them, and An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, the accumulation of a three‑day episode of observation and documentation. He acknowledges here his work on Cause Commune, the collectively developed journal initiated by his former teacher Jean Duvignaud to examine the intersections of cultural, social, political, and everyday lives. Perec doesn’t literally define his “autobiographical mode” here; instead, he notes its pervasive presence in his work and names examples which variously refer to, evoke, and manipulate the fabric of his real life, however they directly, literally, and poetically represent it. Among the texts he identifies is the iconic W, or The Memory of Childhood, described above, whose double narrative pairs his non‑existent, altered, and actual childhood memories with the story of an increasingly dreadful “camp.” He also names two compelling books of lists. One is the 1973 La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams, which he called his “nocturnal biography” and which Perec scholar/translator Daniel Levin Becker calls out for its “sometimes unbecoming absence of the armor Perec so plainly sought” elsewhere in his writing (Levin Becker 2012 in Perec 2012 1973]: 260). Perec also names Je me souviens, the remarkable list of 480 memories, each beginning “I remember…” and referencing—rather than private memo‑ ries—only publicly known material, merging his recollections with others’; its stated principle is “to attempt to unearth a memory that is almost forgotten, … common, if not to everyone, at least to many” (Perec 2014 [1979]: 97). Bel‑ los’s and Philip Terry’s extensive notes elucidate the material likely unknown to readers not in France from 1946 to 1961, scattered throughout these acts of auto‑inference. At the same time, they suggest the idea of autobiography as a collective practice, adding to the ways readers participate in Perec’s work. In addition to these substantial and focused works about his life and auto‑ biographical choices, Perec wrote many works containing “autobiographical traces” (Perec 2009b: 4). Some of these embody the idea of implicit autobiog‑ raphy25; some resist the genre’s narrative positions and conventions.

136  Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition The “ludic” category, like the preceding areas, often overlaps with others. What could be more of a game than concocting enormous lists of dreams and memories variously laced with clues—words, punctuation, space, as well as information per se—beckoning or daring readers to figure out not necessarily what the text means but how it produces meaning? This writing most explic‑ itly demonstrates Perec’s commitment to the intensely and seriously playful acts of devising, defending, and putting into practice the many variations of ludic Oulipian “constraints, exploits and ‘exercises’” such as the “pangrams, anagrams, isograms,” the games, strategies, structures, and textual tactics threaded through material which somehow managed not to sound, as Perec had been labelled, mechanical or automatic. The area Perec calls the “novelistic” is the realm emerging from the “sto‑ ries and adventures” he loved, texts read “at a gallop” for sheer pleasure (4). He names his justly celebrated and very lengthy 1978 La Vie mode d’emploi, or Life A User’s Manual, simultaneously a wildly seductive page‑turner and inimitable in its compositional complexity. In 1976, Perec described Life A User’s Manual (then in‑progress) as a “jigsaw‑novel that describes a block of flats in Paris with its façade removed” (Bellos 1999: 582). This is true enough but doesn’t begin to get to the vastness of the book’s mathematically derived organization of time, space, and characters;26 literary, autobiographical, and biographical references, revisions, and interventions; quotations from multi‑ ple sources. Nor does it address the throughline: the single project of Percival Bartlebooth—doubling Perec and his Life A User’s Manual—whose twenty years of paintings would be made into jigsaw puzzles of 750 pieces each by Gaspard Winckler (whose name had already appeared in Perec’s Portrait of a Man and W, or the Memory of Childhood), then reassembled and—long story short—erased over another twenty years by their maker.27 While all of Perec’s work anticipates readers’ active involvement, Life A User’s Manual is most demanding; readers are pointedly urged into interaction with the text by the number and types (e.g., word, image, structure) of clues to what might be another secret under another rock—and a new experience, a revised perception of the book. (Certainly, it felt this way for me, though one could, of course, read it “at a gallop.” I read some of it as a slow‑shared adventure with a friend, neither of us remotely prepared at the outset for the investment of time, mind, and research, or the wrong turns and exultant hurrahs.) Life: Scoring, Composing, and Swerving Perec wrote in, and of, Life A User’s Manual that it was fully predetermined by its plan. The second of the book’s “three guiding principles” was logical: all recourse to chance would be ruled out, and the project would make time and space serve as the abstract coordinates plotting the ineluctable recursion of identical events occurring inevitably in their allotted places, on their allotted dates. (Perec 1987 [1978]: 118)

Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  137 Life A User’s Manual was published on September 10, 1978. Significantly, in “Statement of Intent,” appearing December 8 of this same year, Perec con‑ tinues in this vein—and then swerves. He writes that however predetermined his road to creating a piece may seem, he gets where he’s going “by follow‑ ing [his] nose” (5). How to respond to this?! (How) Is it possible not only generally but for Perec, in particular, to retain this element of spontaneity in the process of constructing work so thoroughly scored, researched, and developed? And how can he throw such a monkey‑wrench into his carefully laid out model? Was he “winking”? I don’t have Perec’s answers, but I have a few thoughts, some of which re‑ turn in the next chapters regarding dance. One way to think about this is that given how rigorously Perec would have preset the stage, constructing such a highly evolved skeleton, the work could support his deviations—which could also be understood within the terms of chance I laid out above. Another— and I don’t know whether Oulipians and other literary critics would approve of my appropriation—is to consider his comment as a kind of clinamen, a device dating back to Lucretius in which a critical element of a system is intentionally omitted. Perec, who often employed this device, argued for the importance of “introduc[ing] an error into the system, because when a sys‑ tem of constraints is established, there must also be an anticonstraint within it. The system … must not be rigid; there must be some play in it” (Perec in Motte 1998 [1986]: 19–20). Tellingly, Perec resituates the questions of ineluctability and systemic flaws, referring to the “unsayable,” and to “the question of ‘why I write,’” whose answers come, if at all, in the act of writing (2009c: 5). Perec ac‑ knowledges the seriousness of such an act, a matter of endlessly delaying his “image…of literature”; his reference to that image, which upon his “ceasing to write…would visibly cohere, like a jigsaw puzzle inexorably brought to its completion,” is at once a reference to his own death and a sly nod to Life’s multi‑layered plotline (2009c: 5). Perec had movingly addressed these questions the previous year: his yearn‑ ings and struggles to talk, to write, looped into his four years on an analyst’s couch. And then, “It happened one day, and I knew it had happened … There is no tense to express when it was. It took place, it had taken place, it takes place, it will take place” (Perec 2009b: 45). “Backtracking” postulates psychoanalysis as a physically and spatially framed ritual, a minutely repro‑ duced episode of a circumstance in which he sought “to recognize [him]self” (47), fought not to lose himself, held on to things and logged their existence. He had to break through his “hard shell of writing,” to locate “a story that offered itself up … like a gesture or tenderness resurrected” (52–53). Other views of classifying Perec’s writing recast both his work and mindset. Bellos, for instance, orders the work chronologically, substituting “phases” for “fields.” First is the early work, predating Things; second, in the mid‑1960s, the sociological writing, including Things (1965) and A Man Asleep (1967), which Bellos characterizes as looking at self and “social real‑ ity” without drawing conclusions. The third, 1967–1978, begins with Perec’s

138  Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition Oulipo participation: what Bellos, who elsewhere refers to Perec’s embrace by the group, tellingly refers to as being “co‑opted by Oulipo.” During this phase, which continues through Life A User’s Manual, he was also writing autobiography. Bellos sees the fourth as no single route, a period including “ever more constructed” prose, “soft constraint” poetry, and work “alleg‑ edly with no constraint at all” (Bellos 2009: 13, 15). * Clearly, the ludic spirit charging the work of the American and European avant‑gardes of the 1960s, however we mark the decade’s slippery bounda‑ ries, pervaded the art of multiple forms and disciplines. Given that this period was marked by big definitional questions—What is literature? What is art? What is music?—and a belief in the social values as well as the aesthetic possi‑ bilities of collective and cooperative practice, it is no surprise that groups like Oulipo and Fluxus, along with friendly renegades like the Halprins, Cage, and Kaprow flourished. The work of early postmodern dancers and chore‑ ographers, some already knowledgeable about new theater, visual art, and poetry, joined their compatriots. Unlike many Oulipians, they emphatically did not revive or reshape the ancient work, or even that of the more‑or‑less recent—but no longer useful—experimental artists of the field. Like Perec in particular, they dove into new territory, including that of their most intimate and adventurous experiences, their intellectual and conceptual excitement, their complex experiences of their own bodies, and their developing beliefs about performance. They came to the dance studio ready to explore and in‑ vestigate, bringing ludic approaches to making dances, thinking bodies. Notes 1 Elsewhere, especially the two final chapters, we encounter analogous structures, ideas, and compositional explorations initiated by choreographers. 2 See Motte (1998; 1984), both instrumental to this chapter. 3 See Perec (2009c). 4 Unlike most procedurals’ central‑character detectives, Lupin was widely known as a “gentleman thief.” He figured in Perec’s early plan for a novel about Gaspard, who by name and narratives would recur in Perec’s work, and who imagined him‑ self as “the Arsène Lupin of the twentieth century” (Perec in Bellos 1999: 198). 5 See Chapter 3. 6 According to Anna Halprin, “In scoring, we have a scale” designating a range from 1/open to 10/closed, or “set”); a score “tells people what activity to do, not how to do it” (Anna Halprin and Nancy Stark Smith in Anna Halprin 1995: 200–202). 7 John Cage’s 4’33” was first performed at the Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York on August 29, 1952. 8 Nearly forty years earlier, another demonstration of outrage in response to a mu‑ sical performance took place. On May 29, 1913, at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs Élysées, the members of the audience of Vaslav Nijinsky’s dance, The Rite of Spring, accompanied by Igor Stravinsky’s eponymous music, were famously un‑ settled by both the music and the dance, which disturbed expectations of beauty, rhythm, and affect. One hundred years later, music journalist Tom Service rethinks

Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  139 both the dance and the still‑“mechanistic and elemental” music and questions the apocryphal riots (2013). 9 See Perec (2010 [1975]). 10 An example of offering Cage’s work to the public eye (and ear), simultaneously holding it and him up to possible ridicule, was a February 24,1960 episode of the CBS television show “I’ve Got a Secret,” in which Cage performed Water Walk, a revision of Water Music (1952) with water and household objects. Host Garry Moore makes much of how seriously he takes Cage’s project but sets up the audi‑ ence to laugh—which it does. Cage, unflappable, assures viewers that their “laugh‑ ter is preferable to tears.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH‑U 11 See Kaprow (1993a), noting ways the author’s ideas develop from the 1950s through the early 1990s. 12 Philip Terry writes that Oulipo “became a sub‑commission of the College of ‘Pataphysics [sic] at the request of Raymond Queneau.” The College, associated with Alfred Jarry, “continues to have a subliminal influence on the work of the group” (2019: xx). Ben Fisher positions pataphysics “as an interface between the serious and the frivolous” (2000: 3). 13 As I acknowledged earlier, Oulipo’s participants represented a limited demographic— almost entirely male and white, largely French—which affected the culture of Oulipo, the work itself, and its future influences and its literary, as well as socio‑­ political, standing. Works addressing Oulipo through a critical contemporary lens include Levin Becker 2012a; Lauren Elkin and Esposito 2013; Daniel Louis Bury 2015; Michael Leong 2015; Anna Kemp 2021. 14 See Sol Lewitt 1999a and 1999b. 15 Quite a few Oulipians were former Surrealists; some of the post‑parting debates and attacks were rather down and dirty. See Warren Motte’s comment on Marcel Bénabou’s essay in Motte 1998: f.n. 1. 16 See Leong (2015). 17 See Chapter 2. 18 Most of these definitions originate in Motte 1998: 209–214; exceptions are identified. 19 See Motte (1984: 15–16). 20 See Motte (1984: 21–22). 21 See Bloomfield (2017). 22 These retellings also recall Roy Schafer’s description of psychoanalysis, in which the analysand repeats his story in dialogue with the analyst, who coaxes both story and telling into the practice’s language and structure—an arrangement with which Perec would have been familiar. See Schafer (1980). 23 Perec’s use of the word “man” was likely habitual, an outgrowth of French’s gen‑ dered structure, as well as possibly an element of casual sexism. 24 Queneau’s claim is quoted in Motte 1998: 6, and in Lescure in Motte 1998: 34. 25 See Chapters 1 and 2. 26 The book, and the frontless apartment building it represents, is based on “a 10 × 10 grid, an oversized chessboard,” each of its 100 spaces described in an order determined by an adjustment of a chess move, the knight’s tour. An outgrowth of Perec’s design for Lieux, referred to earlier, the plan for Life was a repeated orthogonal bi‑square. I urge interested readers to see Bellos (1999: 513–515). 27 The character’s name not only signals Herman Melville’s nineteenth ‑century “Bartleby the Scrivener,” whose disquieting central figure, meant to copy others’ texts, wants to do nothing; ”I would prefer not to,” he repeats. It also, writes Bel‑ los, suggests Valery Larbaud’s slightly later Diary of A.O Barnabooth—of which he guesses Perec read “at least the first twenty pages”: 1999: 624. Moreover, Portrait of a Man, Perec’s first novel, not published until 2014, was also about a copier: an art forger, hellbent on creating an authentic portrait.

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Ludic Literature: Oulipo and Rethinking Composition  143 Perec, Georges. 2014. Portrait of a Man. Translated and with an introduction by David Bellos. London: Maclehose Press. First written in 1959–1960, first published in 2012. Perec, Georges. 2014 [1979]. I Remember. Introduced, translated, annotated, edited, and indexed by Philip Terry and David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine. Originally published in 1979 by Hachette/P.O.L. Queneau, Raymond. 2011 [1947]. Exercises in Style. Translated by Barbara Wright. Surrey: Oneworld Classics, Ltd. Roubaud, Jacques. 1998 [1986]. “Mathematics in the Method of Raymond Que‑ neau.” In Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, edited by Motte, Jr., and F. Warren. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, Illinois State University. Schafer, Roy. 1980. “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue.” In On Narrative, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press: 25–49. Service, Tom. 2013. “The Rite of Spring: ‘The Work of a Madman.’” The Guardian: Feb‑ ruary 12. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/12/rite‑of‑spring‑stravinsky Stiles, Kristine. 1993. “Between Water and Stone: Fluxus Performance: A Metaphys‑ ics of Acts.” In In the Spirit of Fluxus: Published on the Occasion of the Exhibition, edited by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, Exhibition catalogue, Essays by Simon Anderson, Elizabeth Armstrong, et  al. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center: 62–99. Terry, Philip, ed. 2019. The Penguin Book of Oulipo: Queneau, Perec, Calvino and the Adventure of Form. London: Penguin Random House UK.

6 What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment

Georges Perec was a young writer in the early 1960s when a group of danc‑ ers and choreographers in New York City with expansive ideas, emergent compositional chops, and the energy and drive to support them embarked on a series of workshops and performances which radically altered long‑held ideas of what dance was and could be. These dancers came to be known as the Judson Dance Theater. From 1962 to 1964 and beyond, in a paral‑ lel to the Oulipians’ probing and playful devising of new literature, these dance‑makers set about to investigate “what choreography might be if it defied the aesthetic, performative, expressive, theatrical, physical, and spa‑ tial conventions of classical modern dance” which had continued, since the 1930s, to predominate in Western concert dance (Satin 2019: 156).1 This rethinking of choreography and dance was grounded in what Deborah Jowitt called “everyday bodies” (1988: 303–337). That dance/literature parallel, we know, was inexact. Nonetheless, there were many points of aesthetic and philosophical contact, as well as beliefs and enthusiasms, that might have been shared among the participants of the two art‑worlds. Judson’s “official” dates coincided with Perec’s early writing years and the start of Oulipo’s heyday: Oulipo began in 1960; Perec joined in 1967. I believe that had Perec encountered the Judson Dance Theater (from here, JDT or Judson) or other dancers then conducting similar inves‑ tigations, he would have recognized the intersections of their explorations and projects. Perec’s work, we know, almost never addressed dance; the only references I’ve located are in his 1973 book of dreams, La Boutique Obscure.2 While these brief texts are engaging, they don’t explicitly address or develop what I see as the inherent conversation with dance in his writing. That conversation emerges from multiple engagements with bodies—everyday, private, perfect, material, social, impermanent, imagined, emergent, public, humble, vulner‑ able, and absent bodies, to begin—as they populate our lives and as they are produced in Perec’s pages of remembering, dreaming, and yearning. The conversation emerges, too, from interventions by Perec, other Ouli‑ pians, and other 1960s artists into compositional ideals and expectations, many stemming from shared beliefs about dailiness and what Perec called the DOI: 10.4324/9781003143741-7

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  145 “infra‑ordinary,” and similar definitional questions: What is dance? What is literature? What is art? This chapter addresses the experimental dance of Perec’s day, primarily of the 1960s and 1970s, and considers some of its correspondences with compositional modes, concerns, and aesthetics of the period. Judson did not exist in isolation. It came into being amidst an unusually rich period of experimentation across literary, visual, and performing arts, locally and through the US and Europe. The interactive currents among con‑ temporaneous artists including Perec and Oulipo, whose aesthetic objectives and compositional strategies overlapped, suggest a charged changing of the art guard. An Abbreviated History of the Judson Dance Theater Judson Dance Theater has been voluminously documented, theorized, and historicized. This abundance is not reproduced here. I offer instead a contex‑ tual overview, largely addressing Judson’s early days, joining these dancers’ work and ideas with those of Perec and Oulipo. The group came into existence through a series of dance composition workshops, especially those taught from 1960 to 1962 by musician Robert Dunn, largely known then as a dance accompanist. Actually, he was quite knowledgeable about and experienced in the dance world, including having trained as a dancer, and was married to Cunningham dancer Judith Dunn. He had taken John Cage’s fabled New School for Social Research “Composi‑ tion of Experimental Music” classes, attended by many people whose work would (or already did) figure prominently in experimental arts.3 Cage, through many arteries of practice and pedagogy, was instrumental in the development of experimental dance. For six months, he taught a dance composition course for Merce Cunningham dancers; more broadly, his ideas and compositional approaches were evident in Cunningham’s choreography. Among these were the employment of compositional and structural scores, including the use of chance procedures and indeterminacy, and the parallels of openness to any sound as material for music and any action as material for dance. This last was more a matter of philosophy than practice; Cunningham explored instead the possibilities of body parts working independently from each other, shifting the body’s articulation of its own geometry and spatial relationships. These elements would find their way into Judson dance, as would the as‑ sumption that the piece itself—its sound or action—was enough, needing no explanatory touchstones of meaning, narrative, or expression. What would not continue into Judson was Cunningham’s near‑total adherence to a techni‑ cally virtuosic movement vocabulary. Sally Banes writes that for Cunningham, “the basis of expression in human movement is inseparable from the body, and it comes from the fact that everyone walks differently.” No “externally

146  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment expressive features” are necessary; “movement already is intrinsically signifi‑ cant, ‘in its bones’” (1987: 6). Cunningham’s dances were radical in their use of space, time, structure, and bodies; derived from his own ideas about every‑ day life and everyday bodies; and often emerged from scores and artistic col‑ laborations. Nonetheless, unlike many Judson works in which dancers might simply walk or run, they were insistently recognizable as dance. Dunn’s workshops followed by a few years both Cage’s workshop and an‑ other taught in 1959 and 1960 by James Waring. These were intentionally distinct from, even oppositional to, those taught by composer Louis Horst to the dancers and students of modern dance choreographers Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. Horst’s classes focused on pre‑classic forms and modern music in line with the theatrical, expressive, and narrative attributes of the dances themselves. Dunn taught students about Cage’s music, his explorations of noise and silence, chance and indeterminacy, and the music of other contem‑ poraneous experimental composers. He saw his classes as a “clearinghouse for structures derived from various sources of contemporary action: dance, mu‑ sic, painting, sculpture, Happenings, literature,” marking his teaching and the work emerging from it with its inherent interdisciplinarity (in Banes 1993: 3). A primary attribute of Dunn’s teaching, and a critical way to consider the relationship of these choreographers to Perec and Oulipo, was its focus on compositional scores to initiate a dance’s creation. This practice would not end with the workshop but would continue into the dance‑making these choreographers engaged in after. As with Oulipo’s project, making dances generated by scores—especially given the openness toward what a score could consist of, who might come up with the idea, and how it might be interpreted, developed, and performed—constituted a huge shift from the definitional aesthetic models, beliefs, and expressive qualities still prevalent in traditional modern dance. Another significant attribute of these classes was pedagogical: Dunn’s non‑ evaluative interaction with the score‑based work students created. Derived in part from Taoist‑ and Zen Buddhist‑inspired ideas, Dunn’s attitude toward teaching shaped his classes, offering an opportunity for people and their pro‑ jects to develop freely. Dunn “taught us ideas almost by neglecting us,” Steve Paxton said, “mentioning things but tending to disappear at the same time.” Indeed, Dunn described his teaching as “making a ‘clearing,’ a sort of ‘space of nothing’ in which things could appear and grow in their own nature” (in Banes 1993: 10, 5). That approach apparently fostered choreographic independence; it also developed skills at looking carefully at one’s own work and, in discussions following workshop showings, at others’ dances, at least generally addressing them in terms of each person’s objectives and process.4 Participants in Dunn’s workshops included Ruth Allphon, Paulus Be‑ renson, Trisha Brown, Judith Dunn, Ruth Emerson, Simone Forti, Da‑ vid Gordon, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Al Kurchin, Dick Levine, Marni Mahaffay, Gretchen McLane, John Herbert McDowell, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Joseph Schlichter, Carol Scothorn, Valda Setterfield,

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  147 and Elaine Summers—many of whom would remain vital contributors to dance or other arts. Visitors including Cunningham dancer Remy Charlip, filmmaker Gene Friedman, visual artists Ray Johnson and Robert Rauschen‑ berg, writer/sometime performer Jill Johnston, puppeteer Peter Schumann, and dancer/singer David Vaughan5 broadened Judson’s inherently interarts base. Over 100 people would eventually perform in Judson concerts; many more would participate in other Judson activities.6 After Dunn’s spring 1962 course, workshop participants continued to meet weekly. They wanted to bring their work to the public; at Rainer’s sugges‑ tion, they initiated a relationship with the historic Judson Memorial Church in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The church already had an active arts program, presenting uncensored visual art, Happenings, and theater. In what was an unusually supportive relationship for secular arts activities at a functioning church, the Judson clergy, Howard Moody and Al Carmines, who directed the arts program, were apparently delighted with the dances they initially saw at what sounds like a rather informal audition, and open to presenting it. The group, which began calling itself the Judson Dance Theater in April 1963, organized and presented a series of sixteen group concerts from 1962 to 1964, many at Judson Church; there were also three concerts by single choreographers under Judson’s aegis. It is not hyperbole to say that these events turned concert dance upside down.7 The statement acknowledges the breadth and depth of Judson’s significance for its work during those key years and for its continuing presence, direct and indirect, within experimen‑ tal choreography. It also points to differences, not unlike those of Oulipo, among “wings” of its field. In the introduction to Democracy’s Body, her comprehensive history of Judson, Banes points out that in addition to the “important individual choreo‑ graphic styles [which] grew out of the rich culture of Judson,” there were three such “wings”: primary categories of work typifying JDT’s dances. One was the “theatrical, often humorous, baroque style [characteristic of] David Gordon, Fred Herko, and Arlene Rothlein”; one was the “multi‑media” work of art‑ ists including Elaine Summers and Judith Dunn. But “the analytic, reductive wing” of Judson, associated with Rainer, Paxton, Hay, Brown, Childs, and others is the “work that proposed and tested theories of dance as art” (Banes 1993 [1980]: xviii). This viewpoint has largely, though not entirely, withstood the test of time.8 Still, the presence of the other categories calls attention to Judson’s diversity of offerings; the multiplicity of compositional approaches produced a range of applications rather than a single choreographic style. Judson Dance Theater’s First Dances The group’s first public showing, A Concert of Dance #1, in the Judson Church sanctuary July 6, 1962, illustrated its choreographic scope. Twenty‑three pieces were spread across fifteen segments, some containing overlapping

148  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment or simultaneous activity. All contributed to a general sense of challenging multiple existing boundaries and definitions of dance, as the samples below demonstrate.9 Overture, the opening piece, was a film, credited in the program to W.C. Fields, Eugene Freeman [sic],10 John Herbert McDowell, Mark Sagers, and Elaine Summers, and largely composed of film strips subjected to chance operations. Clearly not a dance per se and so resisting from the start conven‑ tional definitions and expectations, it was derived from chance operations similar to those of Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s iconic 1920 poetry/score11 and included the collage practices important in the visual arts. Steve Paxton’s Transit, performed in silence, in leotard and tights, was based on a ballet phrase he learned from Carolyn Brown, who had learned it in Margaret Craske’s class.12 Paxton’s movements and qualities, includ‑ ing a range of speed and energy, were “an analysis by dissection of ballet movement” (Banes 1982: 182), questioning the established processes of its teaching. His clarity of form and movement, along with his silence, must have been especially vivid as part of a unit of three men’s solos. One of these was Freddie Herko’s Once or Twice a Week I Put on Sneakers to Go Up‑ town: a camp and striking repetition of “a barefoot Suzie‑Q in a tassel‑veil head‑dress,” accompanied live by Dunn, playing Satie on piano (Johnston in Banes 1982: 180). The other was composer John Herbert McDowell’s February Fun at Bucharest, danced by McDowell; Jill Johnston described the untrained dancer’s “zany actions,” which poet Diane di Prima characterized as “leaping about like a demented pixie” (in Banes 1993 [1980]: 46). Yvonne Rainer’s Dance for 3 People and 6 Arms was performed by Rainer, William Davis, and Judith Dunn. The piece was “an improvised sequence of predetermined activities,” quite disparate, primarily featuring or initiated by the arms; it was periodically interrupted by all three dancers performing what Rainer described as “‘Blam‑blam. Blam. Blam‑blam,’ accompanied by flat‑footed jumping about” (in Banes 1982: 188, 191). Dancers had consid‑ erable freedom to choose in the moment among the sometimes‑complex ac‑ tions allowed or constrained by organizational rules. David Gordon’s Mannequin Dance featured the choreographer turning very slowly, then lowering himself to the floor singing “Second Hand Rose” and “Get Married Shirley.” Made for a class assignment “standing in a bath‑ tub waiting for A‑200 to take effect on a bad case of crabs,” the piece was accompanied by the sound of balloons, distributed by Waring to viewers, gradually deflating. Gordon recalled it as “slow, tedious, concentrated, theat‑ rical, virtuosic, and long.” While the tone of his comments recalls his efforts to undermine Dunn’s assignments and principles, viewers’ comments suggest that the dance was “touching,” “moving,” offering “the painful beauty of spastic helplessness” (in Banes 1982: 193–194). William Davis’s Crayon was a solo accompanied by but not set to music, in the manner of Cage and Cunningham, with whom Davis danced. That the

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  149 music was rock and roll was unusual in this context, and its pronounced beat emphasized the rhythmic disjuncture between what spectators saw and heard. Davis saw the piece as a kind of writing or drawing of movement in space, linked to “Merce’s own dancing, mainly the orchestration of energy— the development of energy around the space, and from parts of the body to other parts” (in Banes 1993 [1980]: 64–65). Elaine Summers’s The Daily Wake had a three‑part structure, enacted by Ruth Emerson, Sally Gross, John Herbert McDowell, Rudy Perez, and Carol Scothorn. It used a newspaper page as a score to structure the dance; the “already dead” reportage inspired the title. Dancers variously followed a movement sequence taught by Summers, assumed poses derived from the newspaper’s photographs, and applied individually assigned structural and qualitative elements to their movement. Judson, Moving On There were many more dances, many more indicators of what dance com‑ prised. Weeks after, Cunningham led a composition workshop in which he taught his company members, Bob Dunn’s workshop participants, and Judith Dunn’s Sarah Lawrence students Meredith Monk and Lucinda Childs the score for his 1953 Suite by Chance, which involved tossing pennies to create the sequence of actions.13 Workshop students made their own movements and taught the reconfigured dances to each other. Another Judson concert followed in August, in Woodstock, NY. It was smaller in scale, less structurally rambunctious than Concert # 1. One new work, 32.16 Feet per Second Squared, seems to have been a high‑octane shot at scored improvisation.14 A falling dance devised and performed by Sally Gross, June Ekman, and Laura de Freitas, its score was simple—just fall and rise—and its spontaneous movement choices and dynamics daring: “We started together and … just took as long as we could [to] fall … by spin‑ ning, twisting, whatever brought you to the floor” (Gross in Banes 1993: 74). Johnston extolled the dance’s “kinaesthetic shot in the arm … the raw power of a body to give in to itself after the initial impulse of falling: pure joy!” (in Banes 1993: 75–76; emphasis in the original). The next month, Dunn opted not to continue his classes. Rainer and Paxton initiated a new series of leaderless meetings in the loft Rainer shared with Waring and Aileen Passloff.15 These were paired with a lecture series set up by Waring and di Prima, linked to the poetry and performance newsletter The Floating Bear. One outcome was lectures generated by and exemplifying choreographers’ compositional approaches; Robert Morris suggested that these events contributed to dance’s “moving toward dance,” resisting the pressure of becoming theater (in Banes 1993: 79). The work‑ shops moved to Judson Church, where the choreographers continued to make dances and disrupt expectations. Over time, participants came and

150  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment went, created and revised artistic affiliations, choreographic possibilities, and presentational choices. Judson Dance Theater ceased to be what it had been, but its work spread and continued … and continues. What is Dance? Judson and James Waring When the Judson Dance Theater blossomed, I was very young, several years and several subway stops away from experimental arts activities. Later, when I was in college, James Waring introduced me to the heady mix of ideas and ideals that had propelled these art acts.16 He brought my attention to his own work as a choreographer and dancer and as a collagist, poet, essayist, and playwright who collaborated with and supported the work of these early postmodern dancers and their colleagues in theater, poetry, music, and visual art. These people were his community of avant‑garde artists, arts enthusiasts, and arts organizations from the early 1950s on. Many of them, individually and collectively, would cross paths with Judson; some would contribute to its theatrical and multi‑media “wings.” This community included Cunningham and Cage as well as Waring’s dear friends and collaborators David Vaughan and Aileen Passloff. Others in‑ cluded Katherine Litz, Merle Marsicano, Beverly Blossom, Marian Sarach, and Paul Taylor. His coterie would come to include future Judson dancers, es‑ pecially David Gordon, Freddie Herko, and Yvonne Rainer, as well as Remy Charlip, Valda Setterfield, Toby Armour, and Gretchen MacLane. Waring worked with composers La Monte Young, Philip Corner, John Herbert McDowell, Malcolm Goldstein, Richard Maxfield, and Hy Gubernick. He collaborated with or directed work by poets and playwrights Frank O’Hara, Maria Irene Fornes, Robert Duncan, Paul Goodman, Kenneth Koch, Alan Marlowe, and Diane di Prima, who in 1961, with LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), founded The Floating Bear. These names demonstrate the inter‑ twining of efforts and artists across fields and the value of Judson Church as a locus for experimental arts activities. Through his own Judson Church‑based activities—his plays were pro‑ duced by the American Theater for Poets17 and the Judson Poets Theater— Waring came to know Al Carmines, the minister and arts supporter who would come to be so valuable to the JDT’s projects. Waring was instrumental in Jill Johnston’s being hired as a dance reviewer at the Village Voice, where her writing about Judson was articulate, supportive, and unapologetically deepened by her interactions with the dancers; he also supported dance neo‑ phyte Allen Hughes’s entry into writing about dance, at the New York Times. As I understood the world Waring was describing, and the implications of his descriptions, the term “community” applied not so much to a common‑ ality of viewpoint regarding what dance or other arts should be but to the attitude of investigation and rethinking what it could be: the potential for the art and its discourses. While that perspective holds true for many periods and movements of arts experimentation, this moment’s art acts were particularly

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  151 assertive and inclusive. In the community Waring presented, experimentalists and their work intensified ideas about their individual fields and interacted with investigations of other forms. By extension, it was incumbent on art‑ ists, even we young dance‑artists‑in‑training, to know what was going on in other studios, theaters, museums, and galleries, to read new literature and commentary. The primary question informing the artists Waring introduced was “What is art?” (or dance or poetry or whatever applied). Artists had the option, or obligation, to make work engaging that question and flouting conventional answers—and respondents had the choice to refute them. Rather than being just a warning, this seemed to me an opportunity to participate in a recipro‑ cal, potentially generous relationship joining artist and respondent and sign‑ aling the inclusive possibilities of working across the arts, whether as a single artist merging forms or artists working collaboratively. Knowing Jimmy Waring contributed to my relative openness to Judson’s multiple choreographic offerings and to its later offshoots. My aesthetic preferences tend toward “analytic, reductive” work, but I am receptive also to the “baroque” offerings whose theatricality, often low‑key or low‑rent, contains elements of humor, tenderness, and beauty. Working with Jimmy contributed to both my ongoing pleasure in formalism and my doubts about its independent existence, later articulated by Allan Kaprow, who saw the formalism/non‑formalism debates as leading nowhere.18 However poignant or camp Jimmy’s dances often seemed, they were impeccably composed, and his composition classes were demanding and rigorous, whether we were navigating the challenges of chance operations or other score‑derived choreographic strategies or allowing ourselves to commit to the experience of stillness or speed or being looked at. Studying with Jimmy was the start of my peeking into Judson through my mentors. These included Aileen Passloff, who told me fabulous stories about Judson’s glory days as we rode the train to teach at Bard College, and David Vaughan, whose recounting of his and Jimmy’s and Merce’s early days mesmerized me for years. They included Bob Dunn, whom I brought to Santa Fe, where I lived, to teach “Choreography and Improvisation.” The workshop sessions were inspiring and challenging. Later, to my amazement and gratitude, Dunn watched (unasked) many videos of my work, responding with generosity and clarity, advising me to “open windows” in my choreography. Years later, I was honored to perform in his 1996 memorial at Judson Church.19 That I have been drawn to early postmodern dance and concurrent arts‑crossing developments remains a curious phenomenon in the overlaps of my personal and professional life. I wasn’t there; I have only seen these dances performed live in years‑later reconstructions or as they were docu‑ mented in film. I know them as they have continued to participate, trans‑ formed, in contemporary work; as they have been revived in description and analysis and remembrance; and as they evolve in literature and conversation, with people who were there, into narratives of dance history.

152  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment My take on postmodern dance is indebted to my experience studying with Jimmy Waring. In fact, I have come to realize, Jimmy also plays a role in my thinking about Georges Perec, in my (imaginary) relationship to him. This link evolves from my sense of these two men, one I never got to know at all and one my teacher/mentor/choreographer who set me on a lifelong aesthetic path. Through their words, works, and behaviors, they shared, I believe, both an empathetic sensitivity to people’s particularities and oddities and the awareness of their own fragilities and sorrows, their outsider‑ness. Jimmy, certainly, had a sharp tongue and intolerance for “low‑class boredom” and shoddy art‑making; certainly Perec’s work demonstrates no sloppiness or corner‑cutting. Both drawn to the fastidiousness of score‑driven composi‑ tion,20 they also had a taste for absurdity, even silliness; they paired humor and pathos; they gave and encouraged caring attention to what was beauti‑ ful, in grandness but even more in the stuff of everyday life. Dancer/choreographer Richard Colton first studied and performed with James Waring as a teenager at Camp Indian Hill for the Arts in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and later with Waring’s dance company. He recently traced his own interest in Perec, which he has explored choreographically, to Jimmy, in a lineage leading back “to Gertrude Stein to Kurt Schwitters.” (I remember using Stein’s writing as a score in Jimmy’s classes; Richard and I both came to see Stein’s sentences and Schwitters’s collages as models of seeing and rein‑ venting the world.) Moreover, he recalls, what “Jimmy always said to us was ‘questions are more beautiful than answers.’” Among the questions Jimmy distributed to his Indian Hill students in 1965 were, “Do you pay heed to faint echoes?/Do you believe in Robert Benchley?/If you believe in motion, where are you going?/Are you proud of the sun?” (Colton 2023). This kind of premium on what was potential, what could be investigated or discovered or, especially, used to open the imagination is critical to both James Waring and Georges Perec and to understanding their shared places in twentieth‑ century avant‑garde arts.21 Yvonne Rainer “Midst the Plethora”: Dance, Art, and Discursive Expression “What is dance?” could and would apply to artists blurring or tossing the definitions of individual arts. In 1966, Yvonne Rainer engaged in such revi‑ sion and in the repositioning of critical interaction across the arts, specifically dance and sculpture. In an essay titled, tongue‑in‑cheek, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activ‑ ity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,” she systematically called out the similarities of work by forward‑thinking contemporary artists in these fields. The piece was first published in Gregory Battcock’s 1968 Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, a collection of writings about advancements in the visual arts. Indeed, “A Quasi Survey” begins by setting up the visual arts

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  153 and dance as equivalent, equally deserving of careful attention; this reflected Judson’s joining of aesthetic forces with practitioners working across the arts. The inclusion of a choreographer’s commentary and analysis in a vol‑ ume edited and written by esteemed art writers was significant: It marked a step up and forward for dance into interdisciplinarity in arts practices and criticism and recognized Rainer’s own artistic status and critical prowess. As Rainer recently acknowledged, this was no small thing. As she wrote in that essay, dance had long been outside the conversations of art and artists in other forms, had “always been the most isolated and inbred of the arts.” The “close correspondence between concurrent dance and the plastic arts,” she wrote, was “perhaps unprecedented in the short history of the modern dance” (Rainer 1974b: 64; 2022). Rainer’s essay opens with a chart listing characteristics of Objects and Dances as they had previously been defined and characterized, under the heading “eliminate or minimize”; the new directives, listed under the heading “substitute,” demonstrated visual art’s and choreography’s similar paths of analysis and reconstitution. Elements in the Dances column, such as “phras‑ ing, development and climax … and the fully extended body” were replaced by “energy equality and ‘found’ movement, equality of parts, repetition… neutral performance, task and tasklike activity … human scale.” These recon‑ figurations of dance‑making were clearly paired with developments in the vis‑ ual arts, especially sculpture, in which “role of the artist’s hand, hierarchical relation of parts, illusionism … monumentality” were replaced by “factory fabrication, unitary forms, literalness … human scale” (Rainer 1974b: 63). There are several ways to consider this chart other than as a summary of the essay itself. For one, it could be read as a score for advancing the arts, with dance and art sharing pride of place: a manual for practitioners or, as Rainer’s title implied, for scholars and critics. By extension, it fit logi‑ cally into the history of art and culture manifestos, a crowded field in the mid‑twentieth century, and one with which Rainer was already associated. Her 1965 No Manifesto had been more directly aimed at what dance was not to do, and it was more hard‑nosed in its tone, not unlike some of the Oulip‑ ian anti‑chance harangues: No to spectacle / No to virtuosity / … No to the heroic / No to the anti‑heroic / … No to camp / No to seduction of spectator … / No to moving or being moved. (in Rainer 1974a: 51) “A Quasi‑Survey” also recalls certain modes of Perec’s writing, particularly through its layout: the visualness and visual “listness” of Rainer’s array of arms, armatures, and arguments making her case. (There are four titled lists, divided vertically and horizontally, each with seven components.) If dance is “hard to see,” as Rainer writes a few pages later, the chart, a thing to literally

154  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment look at and see, is a guide to linking the experience of watching dance to recognizing its broader alliances (e.g., minimalist sculpture) at the levels of conception, composition, and meaning‑making. And, like Perec’s many lists,22 it also calls attention to its form, its structure. This structure links Rainer’s chart to the sociological writing which con‑ stituted one of the four “fields” Perec identified as primary categories of his work. Sociologist Howard Becker looks at Perec’s work not as it addresses disciplinary concerns but as it exemplifies elements of the field’s ethnographic writing; he focuses on the strategic use of tense in the original French and the methodically calculated content of a given list as entries shift attention from individual to social phenomena. Using as examples Perec’s Things/Les choses (1990 [1965]), I Remember/Je me souviens (2014 [1979]) , and An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris/Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (2010 [1975]), he considers how each enacts this sociological perspective rather than producing depictions (in fiction, non‑fiction, and autobiography) of personal experiences, memories, or perceptions. About Les Choses, for instance, he writes that the book’s “chief interest lies … in its description of the way of life and the social character of” not only Sylvie and Jérôme “but of a whole generation of people like them” (2001: 64). Rainer’s list enacts a similar positioning. The chart’s careful arrangement is matter‑of‑factly convincing, even authoritative: This is what’s been done, this is what’s happening now and will continue to happen to effect change. Rainer makes light of her project’s reductiveness; still, the chart sets the reader up, like an abstract on its way to becoming a puzzle, to peruse the thoughtful, informative essay, grounded in personal dance experience and extending across the arts. The essay addresses the changes taking place in choreography and dance. Among these is the rethinking of phrasing and energy, and the recognition that these undo not only physical actions but a kind of meaning‑making. Rainer distinguishes between actual and “apparent” energy, the former refer‑ ring to physical output, the latter reflecting how the performer appears to be distributing her or his energy. She describes the traditional distribution of en‑ ergy within a movement phrase (a unit of sequential movements), especially its marking of climaxes, as urging the viewer to experience a piece’s and a dancer’s underlying theatricality, virtuosity, and “heroic” performative and physical presence (1974b: 65). Rainer unveils a range of resistances to this narrative of “artifice” and “exhibition,” replacing it with a theory of performance in which the dancer is a “neutral doer” executing tasks and other actions, allowing the spectator to focus on the movement itself rather than the mover. “Dancers,” she writes, “have been driven to search for an alternative context that allows for a more matter‑of‑fact, more concrete, more banal quality of physical being in perfor‑ mance” (1974b: 65). This was not only about style; it was about the material of the dance and the body. If one must “dance” rather than simply “do” a grand jeté (a leap), then one must jettison the jeté. One must, instead, “stand,

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  155 walk, run, eat, carry bricks, show movies, or move or be moved by some thing rather than oneself” (66; emphasis in the original). Logically, Rainer suggests, the generation of this material needs to change, too, to initiation by games, scores, and other devices aimed at articulating and refuting the prob‑ lems of the compositional status quo, including the specialness of the mover. Trio A, Rainer demonstrated, exemplified these perspectives and strategies. This has not always gone entirely as theorized. The first time I saw Rainer perform Trio A live was at a graduate‑school seminar in which I was a student, decades after the dance’s making. Watching this (impromptu) showing, I was struck by the duet of dance and dancer, each already historicized, their relationship merged. I was thrilled, but there was no denying that Rainer, whose execution of the movement was clear and unadorned, was less a neutral doer than a vibrant, long‑inscribed performer of her iconic dance’s everyday actions and qualities. She already recognized the impossibility of the neutrality she had championed; even so, she embodied the dance’s conceptual and corporeal fullness. As arts philosopher Noel Carroll eloquently argued, what postmodern dances expressed was ideas: Trio A’s expressivity is “discursive” (Carroll 1981: 101). I have had many subsequent viewings of the dance: in trios and groups, backward, “pressured” (in which a partner maintains visual contact with the dancer), nude except for a flag tied at the dancer’s neck, accompanied by the dancer’s recitation of an essay on terminal cancer, intentionally interrupted by acts of “demolition.”23 These have reframed the piece for me, pointing to individual dancers’ movement styles, rhythmic sense, health, and age, as well as the performance circumstance and, of course, the ideas. Learning to do the dance, in a wonderful workshop taught by longtime Rainer dancer and designated Trio A transmitter Pat Catterson and her assistant Brittany Bailey,24 brought all these elements “home.” The process was fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, but by the end, I felt like I’d gotten to embody a dance and its moment in dance history. Cycles, Scores, and Structures In Robert Dunn’s classes and the concerts that followed them, Judson choreographers, however they developed their individual aesthetic inclina‑ tions, made many works using scores. This is one of the significant tie‑ins to Perec, especially the writing he saw as linked to the constraints invented and enacted by his fellow Oulipians. That said, there are differences as well as similarities marking these definitions and practices of composition, and there are distinctions within each field’s province. Scores were not entirely new to dance. They were foundational in the phi‑ losophy of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and choreographer Anna Halprin, his wife and director of the San Francisco Dancers Workshop.25 When Lawrence Halprin’s The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Hu‑ man Environment was published in 1969, the process he and Anna Halprin

156  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment had developed, based on Resources, Scores, Valuaction, and Performance, had long been significant in their investigations of dance, space, and the “hu‑ man environment.”26 The Halprins understood this cycle to be intrinsically political and to re‑ flect their fundamentally humanist beliefs. That view acknowledged what they created on their own and with colleagues, students, and viewers: activi‑ ties whose germination lay in progressive world views and embodied involve‑ ment in public circumstances. Examples eventually included Anna Halprin’s Life‑Art Workshops, scored events for building “collective creativity” and bringing such experiences into people’s everyday lives (Anna Halprin 1995: 46–47). They also included Lawrence Halprin’s urban design practices, such as the ecologically focused development of Sea Ranch, an architectural envi‑ ronment along the California coast (L. Halprin 1969). RSVP was also vital to Anna Halprin’s dance, choreography, and peda‑ gogy practice. Not a technique, per se, it focused on movers’ experiences rather than “correct” duplication of a teacher’s modeling; dancer/scholar Susan Foster would later call this the “cultivation” of a student’s body by the “demonstrative body” of the teacher as well as by actual and mirror‑imaged bodies of other movers (Foster 1997). Halprin saw movement as the primary way her work challenged modern dance practice. She recognized the need to let it evolve from new ways of dance‑making, leading her to improvisation, task‑based action, pedestrian and vernacular movement, and the baselines of anatomy and kinesiology. Both trained dancers and participants in ad hoc group events were called on to execute the movement a score called for, whether to scale a scaffold or climb over a car or simply walk through streets en masse, rethinking dance as they redefined performance space and the space of the city itself. Later, Halprin would shift the attention of the dancers to a more personal focus. The Halprins’ work, including compositional scores, played a role in dance across the country. One participant in Dunn’s workshops, for example, was Simone Forti, who had worked for four years with Anna Halprin before moving to New York City in 1959 with then‑husband, minimalist sculptor (and later performer) Robert Morris. Other California participants, such as composer La Monte Young, would also join the east coast avant‑garde. New York City dancers who went west to study with Halprin included Rainer, Tri‑ sha Brown, and Sally Gross, who brought back experiences and viewpoints which affected their ideas about dance. I remember Sally talking about the pleasures of improvising on Halprin’s dance deck. Brown, in 1960, famously “flew” while dancing with a broom, launched by her own energy and appar‑ ent resistance to gravity. Douglas Crimp notes that this “legend … continued with her ‘levitation’—what she called ‘lying down in the air’” performing Trillium at Judson in 1962 (Crimp 2011).27 For some, the experience was less satisfying. According to Rainer, who studied with Anna Halprin in the summer of 1960, the scores were much less specific than those Dunn assigned in the workshop he would teach that fall.

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  157 Her description suggests that Halprin’s scores were more open‑ended, more conducive to encouraging improvisation and experiencing nature: “That was not my thing at all … carrying branches around,” Rainer said. “But the idea of carrying things while you were moving appealed to me … I never carried a branch … It was more like a tin can or a gear or something like that” (2022). Some of Halprin’s scores struck Rainer as more applicable to her interests, especially regarding the “radical juxtaposition” already engaging her, “or the idea of it, even before the Sontag essay” (which used that term to describe Kaprow’s Happenings).28 Some scores, for instance, encouraged the use of objects and task‑generated movement. Rainer remembers being pleased with a dance she made for a creaky screen door which provided sound to her im‑ provised movement. She also recalls enjoying “running and yelling” in the evenings (Rainer 2022). * Clearly, the word “score” covers a multitude of meanings. Scores are en‑ meshed with their makers’ time, place, and culture as well as individual or collective inclinations: e.g., San Francisco Dancers Workshop, Judson Dance Theater, and Oulipo. Among the questions raised is how (these) dancers and (these) writers, as well as artists in other forms differently understood, de‑ vised and composed using scores, how the scores—the “constraints”—of Perec and his Oulipian cohort were like and unlike those of the early post‑ modern dancers. Certainly, the word “constraint” has a more restrictive, even violent connotation than that of the more neutral‑sounding “score.” It suggests what cannot or what must as well as what might be done—but as we have seen, the choices and decisions of writers and choreographers work‑ ing within these ludic and other compositional frames are often more subtle, particular, and personal. Some scores are understood as an essentially conceptual leap; others are a way to jumpstart a piece. The word potentielle nestled into Oulipo’s full name29 suggests both the literature that its score’s deviser would go on to cre‑ ate, as well as the writing that someone else might complete, having grasped the score like a relay baton and run down the lane with it. That “might” calls to mind the enduringly potential Oulipian pieces, their constraining instruc‑ tions still floating, unfulfilled provocations. (Jimmy Waring’s Impossible/ Improbable Dance scores were a variation.)30 Historical postmodern dance scores were like and not like Oulipo’s and Perec’s constraints. Certainly, the writers and dancers engaged in score‑ derived composition took these efforts seriously (even when they were amusing, as action or result). We know that not all Oulipians were concerned with actu‑ ally making something new from the scores they devised, especially those chal‑ lenging Waring’s Impossible/Improbable divide, such as Raymond Queneau’s 1961 Cent mille milliards de poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems).31 But we know, too, that a work as mathematically and narratively complex as to be seemingly undoable, like Perec’s epic Life A User’s Manual (1987

158  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment [1978]), led its writer to create brilliant, utterly readable textual entanglements and to encourage (though not require) a fantastically active engagement with the reader. Dance presents a different baseline, a circumstance of immediacy in which the viewer/doer relationship happens in a prescribed time and place—the moment and site of performance—and through systems of embodied experi‑ ence and embodied thought occurring during and after performance. Danc‑ ers of the 1960s and 1970s searched through both constraining scores and more open ones for opportunities to link the dancing body’s relationships to social and political circumstances, to redefine dance and choreography, and to forge alliances with other arts. In some instances, such as Anna Halprin’s work, it reached toward accessing depths of sensation and emotion and ex‑ panding the idea of the dance community. While choreographers made and followed many kinds of scores, the underlying idea of each one was to invent and organize ways to generate and arrange movement. Oulipians’ generation and arrangement of material sometimes involved creating new language; more often, scores and struc‑ tures took an existing (and often ancient) literary form into new territory. The scores Dunn assigned or offered focused on systems, on assuming the score’s prevalence in the process of making work. A key element of scores for him was their object‑ness, their role in setting out, in written or graphic form, just what constituted the elements and the processes of composition, making them (as Lawrence Halprin wrote) “visible.” For Dunn and the Hal‑ prins, Perec and Oulipo, it was critical that scores be integral to conceiving a work, that scores would not lead to an already determined result but to a process. Moreover, that process might be malleable, might never land on a fixed art act or object but instead lead to improvisation, or to the creation of more scores. Dancing in Perec’s Four Fields In 1978, we know, Georges Perec wrote a short piece for Le Figaro, “State‑ ment of Intent” (“Notes sur ce que je cherche”) summarizing and categoriz‑ ing his work as it represented four “fields,” or “modes” (Perec 2009b: 3).32 These fields are useful both to address Perec’s writing and to consider its cor‑ respondences and other relationships to dance. This is especially germane to early postmodern dances, invented at choreographic crossroads and hyper‑­ attuned to new ways of choreographing within the context of concurrent questioning and development across the arts. Perec’s fields are quite close to some of the primary ways these dancers conceived and composed their works. Unsurprisingly, these approaches suffused the dances themselves, pro‑ ducing pieces quite unlike those preceding them and reflecting the multiple perspectives of dance history, contemporaneous arts practices, and individ‑ ual aesthetic views contributing to their making. Moreover, they accentuate the embodiedness of the dancers’ projects.

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  159 Briefly, Perec’s fields were: 1 “sociological,” work focusing on the “ordinary and the everyday” 2 “autobiographical,” including actual and altered life retellings, a dream diary, and a collective‑memory archive 3 “ludic,” which he noted “relates to my liking for constraints, exploits and ‘exercises,’ and gives rise to all the work based on the notions and devices gleaned from the Oulipo’s experiments” 4 the “novelistic mode,” coming from his “love of stories and adventures” and meant to be read quickly (3–4) Perec notes his taxonomy’s “arbitrary distribution” and overlaps among cat‑ egories, acknowledges the autobiographical elements present throughout his work, and claims that constraints are present in all his writing, “even if only symbolically” (4). Like Perec’s writing, dances seemingly exemplifying one field cross over into another. A dance’s compositional process is situated in one, the piece it produces in another. Always, dance exists in a historical and momentary tan‑ gle of bodies and language. Working in language or movement, discrete ele‑ ments partner with each other, shift their meaning‑making possibilities from one repetition in space or time to the next, from inky scripts and scrawls to written bodies or to real ones rolling on a hardwood floor. Body/mind inte‑ gration is more than a concept or practice: Language leaks into our eyes, our elbows, our hearts. Perec was a man of many words; dance still carries the yoke of silence, long after dancers have insisted on speech’s right to partici‑ pate in the dance. There are wounds to heal in the metaphoric body of dance, Robert Dunn suggested, back in the (Judson) day, contemplating the literary insults to that body. While in his workshops he drew on work coming from multiple arts practices, he worked less with literature, “feeling that dance had been so super‑literary in a very destructive way” (in Banes 1993: 3). * Sociological: The most significant element linking this category with his‑ torical postmodern dance is everydayness. The integration of everyday material into these dances, as in Perec’s writing, brought attention to the phenomena—objects, environments, actions, and interactions—of daily life, generating a new or revived sense of an object’s or action’s inherent beauty or sudden strangeness.33 In sociological terms, such attention to everyday phe‑ nomena stands in for the larger world from which the work arose, function‑ ing “as a kind of social description” for collective and individual experience (Becker 2001: 64; Wilken and McCosker 2012: unpaged). Perec’s writing, of course, is full of such instances, small scale and large. A striking example crossing stages of creation and result is the Project for a novel section of “The Apartment Building,” a chapter in his Species of Spaces. What Perec acknowledges as his “vertiginous” but not “exhaustive”

160  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment enumeration of rooms, objects, people, and actions emerges from a 1952 Saul Steinberg drawing of a rooming‑house and is joined to a superbly com‑ plex mathematical/spatial score (Perec [1974] 1999c: 40–45). These would grow into Perec’s huge, remarkable 1978 novel, Life A User’s Manual. No‑ tably, especially given the sociological implications of his text and the ludic compositional process generating it, Perec locates the book in his “novelis‑ tic” category, focusing on the reader’s experience.34 Everydayness in dance of this period figured most clearly in the movement itself. This included a range of non‑technical movement borrowed from every‑ day life, such as walking and running, usually unalloyed, unaltered, unstylized, and set apart from expected hierarchies of dancers’ bodies. The element of eve‑ rydayness applied as well to the presentational mode of this material, within frames of repetition, the execution of tasks generating movement, “backstage” behavior taking place onstage, performers’ non‑heroic self‑presentations, disruption of comfortable performer/spectator relationships, and unconven‑ tional, unfamiliar dynamics, speeds, and rhythms. One aspect of the movement’s everydayness lay in the corresponding per‑ formative qualities with which these movements were executed. Though some Judson dancers were untrained, most were clearly advanced mov‑ ers, some already professionally active.35 Some “untrained” collaborating participants, such as visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schnee‑ mann, Robert Morris, and Alex Hay, were both very well known in their own fields and adept as movers and stagers of movement. They were not, though, trained as dancers, with all the knowledge and skills as well as the embodied habits and assumptions inherent in that circumstance. Bringing pedestrian and vernacular movement into the rehearsal studio and the performance venue was a central, vital choice, part of a broader re‑ sistance to what had largely, until then, been understood as the elite province of concert dance, integrally and inherently associated with technical finesse and, in the case of traditional modern dance, with emotional expression. Spectatorship assumed not only the pleasure of seeing remarkable dancers but the experience for many viewers of being separate from them, awed by their finesse and, by extension, recognizing that one could not do what these performers were doing. Early postmodernists performing works of unembel‑ lished, unstylized movement created a critical disturbance as they walked, ran, fell, climbed, collapsed, carried stuff, followed game instructions, and generally toned down rather than flaunted their technical skills. Just as Perec urged readers to pay attention, to really see, choreographers directed viewers to do that as well. The specifics of what to pay attention to—the movement, the space, the sounds—lay in their individual works. Deborah Hay, for example, highlighted the complexity of seeing and being seen. We know that in her 1966 Rise, she made herself hard to see; later, she changed course and invited people to come and look at her from very close up. Either way, the element of visibility—especially of her own “visual acces‑ sibility”—was central in her relationship to the spectator.36

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  161 Some works drew attention to framing, the ways something changes along with the contexts of its presentation. As Kaprow wrote in 1976, “a cow in a concert hall is a musician; a cow in a barn is a cow.” The frame also en‑ compasses the spectator’s position: “A man watching the musician‑cow is an audience; a man in a cow barn is a farmer” (1993c: 174). Rainer’s 1963 We Shall Run reframed a single familiar movement— running—organizing it into changing groups and spatial patterns. Performed in street clothes, with a relaxed demeanor, the dance was ironically accom‑ panied by the majesty of Berlioz’s Requiem. Lucinda Childs’s 1965 Street Dance, made for Robert Dunn’s class, was explicitly sociological in its re‑ framing. As her colleagues watched from a loft window, listening to her recorded monologue, Childs stood on the street, “pointing out permanent aspects of the scene, like architectural features, and temporary ones, like the weather” (Jowitt 1988: 333). Later, she would make dances featuring “com‑ plex ostinatos of walking, stepping, leaping, and turning” (Satin 2015: 88). * In 2000, I saw a performance at Princeton’s McCarter Theater of White Oak Dance Project and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Past/FORWARD, for which Judson choreographers restaged early works and showed new ones. It was tremendously moving to see these pieces I knew but had never seen. Afterward, I encountered an irate group of local Russian‑­ born women who had come to see their kinsman dance. But not only had he not done so, no one had. “‘What was that dance?’ one woman demanded” about David Gordon’s 1979 The Matter Overture. “‘They were just walking. It could have been anything. A funeral march, a ­parade, whatever.’” Indeed. [Satin 2002: 315] * Steve Paxton made many works foregrounding reframed everydayness. In 1960, responding to Dunn’s assignment to make a one‑minute dance, he sat on a bench and ate a sandwich; presumably, this was among the “why‑nots” he was moving through then (Banes 1993: 9). In 1963, he and Rainer cho‑ reographed and danced Word Words, whose mix of technical and everyday movements were made familiar through repetition (first shown in solos, then as a duet) and made complicated, or re‑framed, by the dancers’ near‑nudity. Repetition was significant in many works in which, as here, both doers and viewers were confronted with options and expectations of immersion, familiarity, depth, and boredom, all loaded with personal predilections and realizations. The movement of Paxton’s 1967 Satisfyin Lover consists of walking across the stage, sitting on a chair, and standing still; the large cast, following a clearly laid‑out score, simply carried out these actions. *

162  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment On October 17, 2012, I went with a friend to see Steve Paxton’s early works performed at the Museum of Modern Art. Workers purposefully walked around, setting up chairs; other walkers scanned the crowd, looking for friends among the expectant spectators sitting on the floor, chatting, waiting for some‑ one to come out and announce the show. No one did. Thus, many people kept talking, missing the performance of Satisfyin Lover. My friend, one of forty‑two redheads in an early iteration of the piece, caught on right away. * Autobiographical: In his “field guide,” Perec refers to a specific and narrow aspect of his autobiographical writing: the works exemplifying explicit auto‑ biography, revealing and/or revising aspects of his actual life. He names W, or the Memory of Childhood (W ou le souvenir d’enfance), Je me souviens (I Remember), and his dream diary, La Boutique obscure, but of course, many works engage and reimagine aspects of his life more obliquely. These include his films, such as Les Lieux d’une fugue (Scene of a Flight) (1978), based on his 1965 short story of the same name; both the film and the story tell in the third person about Perec’s liberatory and vulnerable boyhood experience of running away, simultaneously offering and withdrawing from autobiography (Perec 1978, 1999d). Dance’s relationship to autobiography is sometimes a matter of histori‑ cal or descriptive or narrative clarity regarding a person’s life, a telling or confession in language. More often, it is a matter of the embodied perfor‑ mance of the dancer (and/or the choreographer) in that moment. Some cho‑ reographers make dances engaging actual events of their own lives: explicit autobiography, commonly associated with literary tracing in language “what happened” and the development of the writer’s identity. Choreographers, sometimes using language and/or narrative, sometimes not, endow dances with a broader and less fixed sense of who the performer is, in acts of implicit autobiography. Sometimes these approaches are fused through performative means, as when actual or fictional life details coexist with distancing mecha‑ nisms of structure, narrative, or other frames. Autobiographical perspectives were and continue to be evident in the work of several Judson choreographers. Rainer, early on, included autobiographi‑ cal speech in her dances, manipulating it as she would any choreographic material. Her work has become more theatrical and more textual, and much of that text is explicitly autobiographical. Even the ur‑formalist Trio A has been accompanied by speech, some commenting on Rainer’s own experience‑ that‑moment executing the dance’s increasingly challenging movement or coupled with another’s explicitly autobiographical text about dying.37 Sally Gross told me, “I don’t think I’ve left any of my history out.” That history was communicated implicitly with her minimalist signature through years of dancing with her daughter Sidonia Gross.38 An example was Rope

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  163 Dance (1975), in which the pair walked a square over and over as Sally gradually unspooled the coil of rope connecting them and adjusted her move‑ ment to maintain the spatial pattern; the increasing intensity of their rhythms translated into the sounds of the harmonicas they breathed into. They ended in a tug‑of‑war, a humorous commentary on the mother‑daughter relation‑ ship amid the interplay of time, space, and everyday movement. David Gordon merged dance and family for many years, especially through his partnership with his wife, Valda Setterfield. Dances, he wrote years after Judson, “may be glorious reverberating abstractions or eloquent high‑class dance storytelling or thoughtful, emotion‑provoking nonlinear narratives, but dancing, no matter what, always seems to be about the people who do it” (in Bissell and Caruso Haviland 2018). This embodied “about‑ness” was evident, for one, in Chair (1974), made initially to aid Valda’s recovery from an accident; the couple’s performance joined the many actions one might do with/on/under/over a metal folding‑chair with the calm, assured sense of scrolling through shared history. Viewers, especially if they’ve seen the piece before, and seen their other duets, likely experience this one as part of a serial circumstance of implicit autobiography. (This feels especially apparent now, very soon after both dancers’ deaths.) * Ludic: Clearly, a critical element of Perec’s and Oulipo’s work evolved from the devotion to creating and (sometimes, in Oulipo’s case) carrying out com‑ positional scores; early postmodern choreographers have explored the use of such compositional scores as well. Using scores to create art is a ludic act. That said, as with Perec’s writing, that ludic act and the work it produces may enter other categories (e.g., sociological, autobiographical, novelistic). Often, as viewers (or historians), we consider how a dance may have arisen from an artist’s ludic impulses or decision‑making, or, given the literally end‑ less range of possibilities, what that score was. We can distinguish among several types of scores, such as those which give a primary idea; those which impart specific instructions (perhaps but not necessarily toward enacting that idea); those which omit such instructions; those which develop along the way in response to movement and other material created from early ideas. That last is true of almost any creative process, exemplifying Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP Cycles and its attentiveness to the experiences of moving repeatedly through its stages (Resources, Scores, Valuation, Performance); it also takes into ac‑ count the choreographic choice to begin working with the exploration of a movement or image or something else that can only be clarified to the dance‑ maker through sensation, improvisation, embodiment. While we often think of scores as generating a work, sometimes they follow a work, being both retrospective and potentially re‑generative: either reproducing a piece more or less as it was or updating it within a new context, for better or for worse.

164  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment Numerous works and compositional practices of the Judson and other early postmodernists have exemplified this ludic approach. In some instances, such as Rainer’s Trio A, the score is identifiable, articulated in speech and writing by its maker. Both score and dance have been altered and expanded to accommodate changing personal and performative circumstances. The performance affect—especially the dancer’s gaze, resisting the viewers’—not only comments on the piece’s sociological framing, it embodies it. In some instances, the piece itself was a game, typically cooperative, sometimes com‑ petitive. Simone Forti’s oft‑performed 1961 Huddle simply directs a group of participants to create and climb a structure: a game with minimal directions (score) and considerable opportunity for playful and social collaboration as well as movement challenges. Huddle is one of Forti’s “Dance Construc‑ tions,” each involving one or more dancers and an object: a rope, a slant board, a pot, platforms. In Trisha Brown’s 1964 Rulegame 5, five dancer/ players travel a seven‑row course, improvising movement while maintaining particular levels in vertical space, talking to each other to guide their actions and decisions. Some performers played it straight; some “fak[ed] each other out” (Jowitt 1988: 306, 327). * Novelistic: “Story dances” have a long, rich history in ballet, certainly since the Romantic period, and in the turn to the mythological tales of Martha Graham and other classical modern‑dance choreographers. This field, so important to Perec’s writing, was less significant in early postmodern dance, which generally avoided literary options. Still, elements of narrative, especially as it might be rethought, occurred in some of the dances and movies of choreographers‑cum‑filmmakers; in some instances, this included a crosso‑ ver into the performance of autobiography. Examples of this include Pina Bausch’s distinctly theatrical dances, which she began showing in Europe in the early 1970s. These did not tell stories per se but staged emotive, theatri‑ cal, high‑intensity scenarios for individual dancers, duets, and groups. Many dancemakers since the 1960s, though, have considered ways to rethink nar‑ rative, and autobiography, as choreographic phenomena, or perspectives. We will return to these themes, and these dances and dancers, in the next chapter. Contextual Postscript: Perec, Dance, and Film There is no evidence that Perec ever saw live dance. He certainly never saw any “official” JDT performances since he didn’t make his first trip to the US until 1967. However, Judson participants continued making work and performing it internationally, so there were opportunities to see it later and elsewhere. We know that Perec was attracted to theater, as both spectator and con‑ tributor.39 As it happens, he had an introduction to experimental performance through New York City friends Babette Mangolte and Kate Manheim, whom he had first known as a young man in Paris and who came to this sphere of

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  165 performance through their work in film. Perec, a longtime film enthusiast, was eventually drawn to the medium for his own creations, perhaps urged on by his friends’ work; he completed three films.40 Not unlike other Oulipians whose artistic tastes and judgments encompassed erudition and populism, he made films aesthetically in line with his writing, but turned for pleasure to American westerns and Hollywood musicals (Bellos 2022). Film would also be important in the development of some early postmod‑ ern choreographers, particularly Yvonne Rainer. Duly celebrated for her seminal contributions to Judson and, after that, Grand Union, Rainer would temporarily leave dance, spending over twenty years as a filmmaker. In that role, she expanded on the ideas and concerns prompting her choreography, maintaining her work’s merging of critical, intertextual, and aesthetic per‑ spectives in film’s less confining real‑time‑and‑space framework.41 Perec had known Mangolte, the French‑born experimental cinematogra‑ pher, director, and photographer, at least since 1962, in Paris. In 1970, she moved to New York, where she filmed and photographed multiple dance‑ makers, including Rainer, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, Robert Morris, and Steve Paxton.42 As cinematographer for Rainer’s first feature‑length film, Lives of Performers (1972), Mangolte vividly under‑ scored Rainer’s pointedly fragmented narrative; structural, spatial, and dis‑ cursive shifts; and mix of everyday behavior, complex but non‑showy dance rehearsal footage, and Valda Setterfield’s dramatically elegant dance solo. In 1972, when both she and Perec were in Paris, Mangolte attended the Festival d’automne, where Rainer performed Three Satie Spoons, a very early (1961) solo; Trio A (1966); Inner Appearances (1972), which brought gender politics into everyday activity;43 and Performance (1972), with John Erdman, which the Festival program describes as “the culmination of her [Rainer’s] research on the most recent evolution of the narrative style.” It identified Rainer’s work as being “at the border of theater and dance,” noting that she brought “a text‑narrative element” into her dances. Rainer’s recent recol‑ lection of her work’s non‑matrixed behaviors44 is funnier and funkier than the program suggests, but its viewpoint gets to the shifts in her work: While in earlier pieces, “image, sound, and text highlighted the body and dance,” in 1972, these were used “for a more psychological and more intimate ap‑ proach to the dancer and [her] fictional character.” Rainer now incorpo‑ rated film and other technologies, as the program stipulates, prompted by her “need to deal more specifically with emotion” and by her belief that working in film would facilitate this (Festival d’automne 1972; Rich 1989: 3). Mangolte doesn’t recall whether she watched dance with Perec or if he went to see Rainer at the Festival. She knows, though, that they spoke about what she, Mangolte, was up to, including her thoughts about the dances she had been seeing. She “certainly showed him … all her new film” of former Judson dancers on return trips to Paris (Mangolte 2023). Notably, Mangolte would be the cinematographer for Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, whose radical articu‑ lation of dailiness would have certainly engaged Perec.45 Mangolte notes that

166  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment Perec was impressed by her own 1975 first film, What Maisie Knew, which he saw in Paris, and in which Rainer and Manheim appeared—prompting him to make his own film, Les Lieux d’une fugue (Mangolte 2023). Manheim, born in New York and raised in France, was a friend and col‑ league of Mangolte; she had known Perec since his early writing days when they were market researchers in Paris. Moving to New York City in 1969, she soon worked as a librarian at Anthology Film Archives. She became a pow‑ erful performer in the fledgling Ontological Hysteric Theater, which evolved into a longtime participant in NYC’s theatrical avant‑garde, and married founding director Richard Foreman. Manheim maintained a relationship to Perec through his visits to New York, and, with Mangolte, was an extra in his 1974 film Un Homme qui dort (A Man Asleep). Notes 1 The detailed history of the JDT best known in the US is Sally Banes’s Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962–1964 (1993 [1980]) and other of Banes’s writ‑ ings referred to in this book. See also Ramsay Burt’s 2006 Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces; Burt’s view of this period of choreographic experimenta‑ tion, which includes European contributions, differs from Banes’s more formalist, US‑centric perspective. 2 See Chapter 3. 3 Sally Banes mentions “the writers Jackson Mac Low and Dick Higgins, the com‑ poser Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Al Hansen, George Brecht, and Allan Kaprow, all … later associated with Happenings and Events” (1993 [1980]: 1). 4 Not everyone felt this way or recalls it as consistent. See Banes 1993 [1980] passim. 5 Vaughan inhabited the worlds of theater, dance, and music; he was a valuable, gen‑ erous contributor to this period’s history and was Cunningham’s longtime archivist. 6 A somewhat fuller list of the artists represented in the 2018–2019 Judson ex‑ hibit at the Museum of Modern Art—Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done—appears on the MOMA website (Museum of Modern Art 2018–2019). A list of 334 people who performed in Judson work from 1962 to 1966, displayed at the exhibit, gave a fuller sense of “the expansive and interdisciplinary spirit of the Judson” (Johnson 2023). A longer one appears in JUDSONOW, including 1962–1966 participants in JDT and affiliated concerts (Hussey‑Taylor, Jenn Joy and Lydia Bell 2012: no page number). 7 By 1964, Banes writes, “the rules of dance had changed” (1987: 14). 8 See note 1. 9 The descriptions are drawn from Banes 1982 and 1993. 10 Actually Gene Friedman. 11 See Tzara 1920: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/dada/word‑ play/ 12 Brown was a longtime dancer with Merce Cunningham, Craske a revered teacher of Cecchetti ballet. 13 Childs would become a Judson participant, Monk would be part of its second wave; both would become significant choreographers. 14 Improvisation, even when its material is invented in the moment, is often scored in terms of structure, space, movement, and/or other elements. 15 Passloff was an eccentrically and movingly theatrical choreographer and performer. 16 In this chapter, I generally refer to James Waring as Waring; writing about him as I knew him, I call him Jimmy.

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  167 7 The American Theater for Poets was also called the New York Poets Theater. 1 18 See Chapter 5; see Kaprow 1993b. 19 See Satin 1997. 20 Waring taught score‑based dancemaking in his choreography classes, but his own dances were not typically made that way. 21 See Chapter 7; see Satin 2003. 22 See Chapters 3 and “Entracte.” 23 Brittany Bailey dances these last two versions, in one reciting segments of art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s 2019 essay about his terminal illness, in the other breaking up the dance’s flow with irregularly timed and rougher, wilder movement. 24 The workshop was offered by Movement Research, April 6–14, 2017. 25 Anna Halprin was then known as Ann; she later changed her name to acknowl‑ edge her Jewish background. 26 See Chapter 5 for a general discussion of the Halprins’ RSVP Cycles, including the element of scores. 27 Rainer, who was present, recalls the astonishing sight of a horizontal Brown (2022). 28 See Sontag 1966. 29 Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle 30 See Chapter 5. 31 See Chapter 5. 32 Perec’s fields are also discussed in Chapter 5. In this chapter, the emphasis is on dance activities sharing similar ideas and compositional approaches. 33 See Chapter 3 and Banes 2003b regarding Viktor Shklovsky’s 1917 perspective of “defamiliarization,” the “making strange” of daily phenomena. 34 See also Chapter 5 and Bellos 1999: 513–515. 35 For instance, Steve Paxton and Deborah Hay were in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. 36 See Chapter 3; also see Satin 1999. 37 Schjeldahl 2019. 38 Her daughter Rachel Gross occasionally joined, as in One of Us, Two of Us, and Maybe the Three of Us. 39 Some of Perec’s works, including radio plays, were adapted for theater, and others were expressly written for it. See Hall 2019. 40 Perec wrote and collaborated with director Bernard Queysanne on Un homme qui dort (The Man Who Sleeps), 1974; wrote and collaborated with director Robert Bober on Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir Ellis Island Revisited: Tales of Vagrancy and Hope, 1980; and wrote and directed Les lieux d’une fugue (The Scene of a Flight), 1978, which was edited by Catherine Binet. With Alain Corneau and Jim Thompson, he wrote the screenplay for Série Noire, directed by Corneau, 1979; he wrote Retour à la bien‑aimée (Return to the Be‑ loved), directed by Jean‑François Adam 1979. 41 See Rainer 1989; 1999. 42 Years later, Mangolte would collaborate on another dance project, as a photogra‑ pher for “Ballerinas and Ball Passing,” Marianne Goldberg’s 1987 autobiographi‑ cal, scholarly photo‑essay investigating dance, gender, and “the body as discourse.” 43 See Rich 1989: 3. 44 Rainer recently recalled that material, which she would perform with Erd‑ man and Shirley Soffer in her film This is the story of a woman who…, as “contain[ing] some narrative‑like dramatic moments, such as a pantomimed physical struggle and a solo by Shirley that contained a screaming fit” (Rainer 16 February 2023). 45 Chantal Akerman wrote and directed the groundbreaking 1975 film, Jeanne Diel‑ man 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, with cinematography by Babette Mangolte. Distributed by Olympic Films (France).

168  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment Works Cited Banes, Sally. 1982. “The Birth of the Judson Dance Theatre: ‘A Concert of Dance’ at Judson Church, July 6, 1962.” Dance Chronicle 5.2: 167–212. Banes, Sally. 1987 [1977]. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post‑Modern Dance. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Banes, Sally. 1993 [1980]. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Banes, Sally, ed., assisted by Andrea Harris. 2003a. Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Banes, Sally. 2003b. “Gulliver’s Hamburger: Defamiliarization and the Ordinary in the 1960s Avant‑Garde.” In Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Pos‑ sible, edited by Sally Banes, assisted by Andrea Harris. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003: 167–212. Battcock, Gregory. 1968. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. New York: Dutton. Becker, Howard. 2001. “Georges Perec’s Experiments in Social Description.” Ethnog‑ raphy 2.1 (March): 63–76. Bellos, David. 1999. [1993]. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. London: The Harvill Press. Bellos, David. 2022. Interview: November 17. Bissell, Bill and Linda Caruso Haviland, eds. 2018. The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory. Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. https://www.pewcenterarts.org/sentient‑archive‑bodies‑ performance‑and‑memory Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces. London and New York: Routledge. Carroll, Noel. 1981. “Post‑Modern Dance and Expression.” In Philosophical Essays on Dance, edited by Gordon Fancher and Gerald Myers. Brooklyn: Dance Hori‑ zons/American Dance Festival: 95–114. Colton, Richard. 2023. Interview: March 25. Crimp, Douglas. 2011. “You Can Still See Her: The Art of Trisha Brown.” Artforum: January. https://www.artforum.com/print/201101/you‑can‑still‑see‑her‑the‑art‑of‑ trisha‑brown‑27046 Desmond, Jane C., ed. 1997. Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fancher, Gordon and Gerald Myers, eds. 1981. Philosophical Essays on Dance. Brooklyn: Dance Horizons/American Dance Festival. Festival D’automne. 1972. Program/archive: Performance Festival. Paris. https:// www‑festival‑‑automne‑com.translate.goog/edition‑1972/yvonne‑rainer‑four‑evenings‑ of‑yvonne‑rainer?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc# Forsdick, Charles, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips, eds. 2019. Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces. London: UCL Press. Foster, Susan Leigh. 1997. “Dancing Bodies.” In Jane C. Desmond, ed. Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 235–257. Goldberg, Marianne. 1987. “Ballerinas and Ball Passing.” The Body as Discourse. Issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. 3.2 #6: 7–31. Hall, Christopher. 2019. “Textual, Audio, and Physical Space: Adapting Perec’s Ra‑ dio Plays for Theatre.” In Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  169 and Textual Spaces, edited by Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phil‑ lips. London: UCL Press: 111–123. Halprin, Anna. 1995. Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England. Halprin, Lawrence. 1969. The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Envi‑ ronment. New York: George Braziller, Inc. Hussey‑Taylor, Judith, Jenn Joy, and Lydia Bell eds. 2012. JUDSONOW. Danspace Project Platform 2012. New York: Danspace Project. Johnson, Béatrice Matriona. 2023. Personal communication: January 28. Jowitt, Deborah. 1988. Time and the Dancing Image. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. Kaprow, Allan. 1993a. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Kaprow, Allan. 1993b. “Formalism: Flogging a Dead Horse.” In Essays on the Blur‑ ring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press: 154–162. Originally published in 1974. Kaprow, Allan. 1993c. “Nontheatrical Performance.” In Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press: 163–180. Originally published in 1976. Mangolte, Babette. 2023. Personal communication: January 16. Museum of Modern Art. 2018–2019. Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done. Exhibit and performances: September 16–February 3. https://www.moma. org/calendar/exhibitions/3927 Paxton, Steve. 1967. Satisfyin Lover. Score for eponymous dance. In Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post‑Modern Dance, edited by Sally Banes. Hanover: Wesleyan Univer‑ sity Press/University Press of New England: 71–74. Perec, Georges. 1978. Les Lieux d’une fugue. Film. Directed by Perec; written by Perec and Bernard Zitzermann; edited by Catherine Binet; produced by Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA). Perec, Georges. 1987 [1978]. Life A User’s Manual. Translation by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine. Originally published in 1978, Hachette. Perec, Georges. 1990. Things: A Story of the Sixties. Introduced and translated by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine. Originally published in 1965. Perec, Georges. 1999a [1974]. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and trans‑ lated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Penguin Books. Perec, Georges. 1999b [1974]. “Species of Spaces.” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Penguin Books: 1–96. Originally written in 1974, published as Espèces d’espaces. Paris: Galilée. Perec, Georges. 1999c. “The Apartment Building.” In Species of Spaces, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Penguin Books: 40–45. Perec, George. 1999d. “The Scene of a Flight. (“Les Lieux d’une fugue”). In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London and New York: Penguin Books: 103–112. Originally written in 1965, published in 1975 in Présence et regards. Perec, Georges. 2009a. Thoughts of Sorts. Translated and with an introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/ David R. Godine. Perec, Georges. 2009b. “Statement of Intent.” In Perec 2009a, Thoughts of Sorts, translated and with an introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/ David R. Godine: 3–5. First published as “Notes sur ce que je cherche,” Le Figaro,

170  What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment December 8, 1978: 28. Also published as “Notes on What I’m Looking For,” in Perec 1999a, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces: 141–143. Perec, Georges. 2010 [1975]. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Translated by Marc Lowenthal. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press. Originally published in 1975 as Tentative d’epuisement d’un lieu parisien. Perec, Georges. 2012 [1973]. La Boutique Obscure. Translated by Daniel Levin Becker. New York: Melville House. Perec, Georges. 2014. [1979]. I Remember. Introduced, translated, annotated, edited, and indexed by Philip Terry and David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine. Originally published in 1979 as Je me souviens. Rainer, Yvonne. 1974a. Work 1961–1973. Halifax and New York: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, New York University Press. Rainer, Yvonne. 1974b. “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A.” In Work 1961–1973. Halifax and New York: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, New York University Press: 63–69. Originally published in 1966. Rainer, Yvonne. 1989. The Films of Yvonne Rainer. Contributions by B. Ruby Rich, Bérenice Reynaud, Mitchell Rosenbaum, Patricia White. Bloomington and Indian‑ apolis: Indiana University Press. Rainer, Yvonne. 1999. “Yvonne Rainer on Autobiography.” Interview with Leslie Satin. In Performing Autobiography, edited by Satin, Leslie and Judith Jerome, Special issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 10.1–2, #19‑20: 89–103. Rainer, Yvonne. 2022. Interview: October 31. Rainer, Yvonne. 2023. Personal communication: February 16. Rich, B. Ruby. 1989. “Yvonne Rainer: An Introduction.” In The Films of Yvonne Rainer, edited by Yvonne Rainer and B. Ruby Rich, Bérénice Reybaud, Mitchell Rosenbaum, and Patricia White. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press: 1–23. Originally published in 1981 in Yvonne Rainer, Minneapolis, Walker Art Center. Satin, Leslie. 1997. “Untitled segment in The Legacy of Robert Ellis Dunn (1928– 1996).” Movement Research Performance Journal 14 (Spring): 16. Satin, Leslie. 1999. “Autobiography in the Present Tense: Deborah Hay, Living and Dying at Once.” In, Performing Autobiography, edited by Satin, Leslie and Judith Jerome. Issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 10.1–2, #19–20: 181–210. Satin, Leslie. 2002. “Review of Past/Forward, White Oak Dance Project by Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Gordon.” Theatre Journal 54.2 (May): 315–318. Satin, Leslie. 2003. “James Waring and the Judson Dance Theater: Influences, Inter‑ sections, and Divergences.” In Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible, edited by Sally Banes assisted by Andrea Harris. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press: 51–80. Satin, Leslie. 2015. “Dancing in Place: Exhaustion, Embodiment, and Perec.” Dance Research Journal 47.3 (December): 84–104. Satin, Leslie. 2019. “Embodiment and Everyday Space: Dancing with Georges Perec.” In Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces, ed‑ ited by Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips. London: UCL Press: 154–169.

What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment  171 Satin, Leslie and Judith Jerome, eds. 1999. Performing Autobiography. Issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 10.1–2, #19–20. Schjeldahl, Peter. 2019. “The Art of Dying.” New Yorker: December 23. https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/the‑art‑of‑dying‑peter‑schjeldahl Shklovsky, Viktor. 1965. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Ne‑ braska Press: 3–24. Originally published in 1917. Sontag, Susan. 1966. “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition.” In Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 263–274. Tzara, Tristan. 1920. “To Make a Dadaist Poem.” https://www.moma.org/learn/ moma_learning/themes/dada/word‑play/ Wilken, Rowan and Anthony McCosker. 2012. “The Everyday Work of Lists.” M/C Journal 15.5. https://www.journal.media‑culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/ view/554

7 Dancing into the Twenty‑First Century with Georges Perec

I’ve often imagined dancing with Georges Perec. For years, I had no idea whether he even liked to dance, and if he did, what did he prefer? The free‑form solo groove or murmuring cheek to cheek? The choreography of the Madison or the improvisation of le rock? Perec went to many gatherings, I knew, but he might have been too timorous or awkward to dance in public, uncomfortably observing himself with a mix of personal reserve and social anxiety. He liked to drink, though, so he might have chanced swinging his hips after a few shots. I was thrilled to discover that in the late 1970s, Oulipian Harry Mathews, his close friend, “saw Perec dancing le jerk at a party at Andy Warhol’s apart‑ ment in Paris” (Bellos 2022; 1999: 617)! I wish I’d been there. And I wish we could have talked about how his ideas and fantasies and questions regarding how we live in our bodies might extend to the stage or the dance floor or these pages. * My personal dance history is marked by crossings of formalism and non‑ formalism, by overlaps of compositional scores and structures with the more elusive elements of expressivity and affect, by the autobiographical presence in non‑narrative works. These emerge from my belated identification with early postmodern dance and its counterparts in other art worlds: I came to this party late and have never left. Earlier chapters address these factors as they have variously clashed, crashed, and survived across the arts, especially in dance and in the autobiographical undercurrents suffusing even Perec’s most formally and structurally vivid writing. The previous chapter addressed some of the overlaps of Perec’s work with early postmodernist dances. As those pieces and their makers and successors have taken their experiments further, or elsewhere, some of these common‑ alities have changed. This chapter considers these later dance‑makers’ works and their correspondences to Perec’s ideas and practices: their Perecquian takes. I first raise or revisit some of the ideas about bodies and memory and compositional practices contextualizing views of this work, then look at ex‑ amples of dances by a diverse group of choreographers. These include Judson veterans who have continued to explore dance’s possibilities, others whose DOI: 10.4324/9781003143741-8

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  173 work came later but emerged from those sources, still others whose parallels derive from alternate models. These examples, which extend back to just after Judson and continue through the present day, reflect recurring aspects or concerns of Perec’s work, variously joining profound personal experience, ludic extremes, humor, and beauty, connecting to performers, spectators, and scholars of contemporary concert dance. Bodies, Dots, and Lines I have been thinking lately about grids: the stuff of graph paper, intersecting blue lines supporting mathematical computation or determining the propor‑ tions of the body in figure drawing. More broadly, they represent the already known or a map to its making. Grids have other implications, including the system of formalism in mid‑twentieth‑century visual arts; its aesthetic asso‑ ciations with minimalism and hard‑edge abstraction were linked historically and thematically to men and maleness, a near‑exclusive club. Feminist visual artist and Fluxus challenger Carolee Schneemann moon‑ lighted in the early 1960s as a Judson Dance Theater choreographer of dar‑ ing physicality. In 1975, she stood nude and defiant, reading aloud the poem written on the long skinny scroll she drew from her vagina about these men, sharply dubbing their work “the grid.”1 Performance scholar Peggy Phelan notes that in Anthony McCall’s well‑known photographs of “Interior Scroll,” Schneemann is visibly engaged in the work of reading, “seem[ingly] immune to the psychoanalytic structure of the male gaze” Laura Mulvey articulated that same year. Early postmodern dancers had their own questions and revelations about being seen. (Deborah Hay’s choreographic phases, for instance, embodied her shifting beliefs and ideas about this.)2 Phelan, indeed, links Schneemann’s engagement to that period’s dance, specifically to Yvonne Rainer’s focused attention on the many physical and spatial details, especially the changing but always audience‑avoiding gaze, of her landmark 1966 Trio A. Moreover, Phelan saw in Schneemann’s scroll “associations that include the snakes of Medusa and Eve and also cryptological technologies that bring to mind dou‑ ble agents ingesting and unrolling coded texts” (Phelan 2021): an unlikely art‑historical reference to the quite different Oulipian and Perecquian acts of rereading and recasting ancient texts. I doubt that Schneemann had Oulipo or Perec in mind. I see correspond‑ ence, though, in the ways that Perec’s writing so often urges the reader to stay in the game but to recognize the tender spots coexisting with the clev‑ erness, to acknowledge the psychic as well as the mathematical complexity of his projects. Schneemann, however “immune” she felt in that moment (one among many, primarily in performative acts of visual art, in which she focused on her body as medium and message), devised and challenged her “to‑be‑looked‑at‑ness” and revealed the game’s—the grid’s—inherent flexibility.

174  Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec I like grids, just as I like lists, such as Perec’s. I am drawn, too, to the pale luminous grid paintings of Agnes Martin, who made art from the early 1950s until she died in 2004. They get to me in ways that I sense—their spatial‑ ity and spaciousness, their purity of vision—rather than explain or explain away. As when I watch a dance, I have an embodied, kinesthetic response to the paintings’ lucidity and their suggestions of bodies: square canvases, each side five or six feet long, like our adult wingspans. One morning in 2000, a friend and I spun and leaped through a Martin show at the Whitney Museum, animated by her works’ dots and lines.3 Years later at Taos’s Harwood Museum, I sat alone in a little octagonal gallery, moving from one of sculptor Donald Judd’s four benches to another, slowly rotating to look at—to look into—one after another of the seven Martin paintings. In 2004, I made a long dance for women and chairs, a quiet quar‑ tet in the wake of an accidental death. Its title, Blind Summit, was taken from the traffic signs in England indicating that you were about to go over a hill and couldn’t see what was on the other side. (I made several dances whose ti‑ tles began as traffic signs in the US and the UK, generally signifying danger or offering a double entendre.) The dance suggested the chaos behind the formal promise of grids, its single long‑diagonal solo—the only improvised move‑ ment, accompanied by a recorded fantasy about Agnes Martin’s drawing hand—a clinamen‑like exploratory intrusion into the gridded patterns the dancers traced on the floor and in the air. I hadn’t encountered Perec’s writing yet, but I would come to recognize in it the entwining, in life and art, of order with that chaos, the ways that formal beauty and clarity could and did share space with enormity and tragedy, the remembered and the imagined. Martin, whose work reflected Minimalist and Buddhist perspectives, said, “Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my paintings.” But she also said, “My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They’re just horizontal lines. There’s not a hint of nature” (in Cheim & Read 2017). “They’re just horizontal lines” gets to the inherent mystery and affect in art, in dance. In the early postmodernism of the Judson Dance Theater, an arm or a leg could be usefully understood as an object with particular func‑ tions and abilities: It was more or less a cylinder, it could bend or straighten or trace paths in space. But the idea of “the body as object,” as the phrase went, would evolve, though it was then so potent and contentious as a refu‑ tation of predetermined ideals of expression in classical modern dance. Of course, people don’t typically experience their body parts so reductively. Still, in the articulating and staging of such a viewpoint, there was a liberatory implication, cued not only to corporeal and artistic movements but to a time in the dancers’ lives. These mostly young dancers were full of ideas and plans and strategies to reimagine dance, to recognize the sociopolitical as well as artistic reasons to rethink the form and its relationships to other ones. They had physical vigor on their side, and plenty of time to work through their changing ideas.

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  175 Not only would these young dancers and those who followed come to regard their body parts as more than living geometric shapes, they would come to see their bodies as not always ideal, young, dependable, robust, not always—if ever—independent, unmatrixed, asocial. In 1994, a series called “Ages of the Avant‑Garde” ran in Performing Arts Journal; experimental art‑ ists who had turned at least fifty considered how they felt about their bodies all these years later (nearly thirty since Judson) and how others felt about them (Marranca 1994). “My body sometimes finds itself invisible,” Rainer wrote. Why can’t you look at me, it wonders. Because I … remind you of death? …Why is it so much harder to bring myself to flirt and provoke? Because I no longer desire you? Because you no longer desire me? (Rainer 1994: 34) * This was hard enough to read then. In 1994, I felt pleasantly removed from its viewpoint, though I noticed that the body‑as‑object “had become some‑ what less glorious, neither parts nor whole entirely dependable.” Eight years ago, “I realize[d] that contingency itself is only, as they say, a matter of time.” I remain grateful to be dancing and part of a dance community, even as I am less distantly aware “that any leap could be my last” [Satin 2015: 98]. And I continue to view Perec as an imaginary partner. Our Bodies, Our Archives One way we understand the bodies of dance and our individual histories is as holders of memory. These pages contain many references to memory, es‑ pecially as an embodied phenomenon and particularly as it applies to dance and dancers and to the life and work of Georges Perec. Memory, we know, participates in the experiences of making, performing, and watching dance; more generally, it participates in our everyday lives, our ongoing creations of ourselves. Notions of the “archive body” or the “body as archive” have become extremely common, the terms’ meanings and integration into our practices embedded in our experiences of ourselves and our worlds. As dance and performance practitioners and academics, among others, we continuously revise our definitions of such archives and what they contain, what I see as essentially the malleable material for autobiographical retellings and renarra‑ tivizings of our lives in our bodies. As dance scholar Linda Caruso Haviland writes, “No gesture is made, no matter how inventive or improvised, that does not draw in some way on a past bodily movement” (2018: 10). This view of archival contribution to dancers’ movement choices, quali‑ ties, affects, and choreography is significant to what I described earlier as im‑ plicit autobiography in dance.4 Psychiatrist/phenomenologist Thomas Fuchs

176  Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec notes that memory itself is either implicit or explicit. Following Maurice Merleau‑Ponty, he sees implicit memory as a kind of knowledge located in “the lived‑body” and explicit memory as “information that can be reported and described” (Fuchs 2012: 10–11). Both of these participate in the experi‑ ence of dancing, in the experience more generally of moving, of doing the numberless acts which we accumulate throughout our lives, which we know intimately but do not and usually could not narrate. Caruso Haviland, who with Bill Bissell edited The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, writes of the need to recognize “the knowledge that resides deep within and throughout the body. The body can generate, assimilate, and process knowledge and is an archive able to store such knowl‑ edge.” It is imperative, then, to see the wisdom of the body as equal in status to that originating in “more rational” constructions; we must acknowledge the research showing that “a dancer’s knowledge and memories are part of a dynamic cognitive system [joining] nerve, muscle, and the physiology of the brain, as well as of thought and language” (2018: 1). Moreover, the ways we see dance and respond to it (for example, kinesthetically as well as intellectu‑ ally and aesthetically) are similarly guided through these archived accretions of cultural information and imagery and individual experiences of doing and watching movement and performance. The concept of the archive body is not restricted to dancers, though many dancers are drawn or compelled to explore their relationships to their bod‑ ies’ memories, their individual and collective histories: to discover what they know—whether or not they can say it. Moreover, the relationship to one’s embodied history is dynamic. Just as returning to the scene of a circumstance may jog a long‑lost memory, the repetition of a familiar action might raise an unexpected or unfamiliar physical sensation or thought or feeling; even the archive changes. This dynamism applies, too, to ways our memories both persist and change. As the “Entracte” of this book describes, even the most seemingly routine attributes of a dancer’s daily work, from body scan to performance, involve the conscious and unconscious processes of finding out how you feel, how your alignment extends beyond hips‑over‑knees‑over‑toes to encompass the mind and the heart. Such dynamism figures in reading Perec, a project involving questions about the intersections of memory, autobiography, history, and fiction, even Oulipian constraints and other ludic scores. The significance of the childhood trauma which permeated his life pervades Perec’s work. He continuously re‑ vived and reconstituted it, in some instances in clear (if not dependably ac‑ curate) narration, in others in dropped hints and loaded images, variously beckoning the reader to find him and hiding behind (the memory of) his mother’s skirts. In W, or the Memory of Childhood, Perec strikingly reconfigures stories of his young life as he has variously understood or construed them, moving through his own much earlier writings and the small cache of photographs

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  177 that inspired them, accurately or not. In one, from 1939, he—Jojo—snuggles up to his mother, who peers out from under her hat‑brim, softly smiling; his little face with its shy and somewhat anxious smile presages that same ex‑ pression appearing in many later images (Perec 1988 [1975]: 26–42; photo in Bellos 1999). Multiple iterations of the scar on his upper lip figure in his self‑representations, appearing in his earliest novel, Portrait of a Man, and in the autobiographical W; the image is rooted both in Antonello da Messina’s 1475 painting, Il Condottierre, and in Perec’s childhood memory of being hit in the face by a ski‑stick. However much that scar and the incident produc‑ ing it distressed him, he deliberately kept his scar moustache‑free and visible (Perec 1988: 108–109; 2014).5 Bodies of Knowledge

Dancers/scholars Sally Doughty, Lisa Kendall, and Rachel Krische initiated a research project, Body of (as) Knowledge, in 2015. Its objective was to “challenge the traditional notion that archives only contain tangible arte‑ facts, by privileging the knowledge that resides in and with the dancer” and explore ways that such knowledge‑archives might be valuable sources in cho‑ reographic and performative practice (Doughty et al. 2020: 92). The project raised questions about ownership and naming: If one performs another per‑ son’s choreography, (how) can they both lay claim to their bodies’ archival stature? How does it matter if one studies or performs a technique whose continuing teaching is directed toward preservation? How does the devel‑ opment over time of a way of moving become or remain an archive as the mover returns to earlier material, borrows from other movers, intentionally changes the source material? What are the limits of such an archive? According to the authors, “our lived and living corporeal archives” are not limited to “our fleshy bodies” but include memories of the past and imaginings of the future, “an opportunity to weave the physical with the metaphysical” (94). They note Fuchs’s idea of the archive body’s in‑the‑moment malleability, which speaks to me of Perec’s insistent interactions with memory as much as it speaks to choreographic process: Body memory does not represent the past but re‑enacts it. But precisely through this, it also establishes an access to the past itself … through immediate experience and action. Thus, it may unexpectedly open a door to explicit memory and resuscitate the past as if it were present as such. (Fuchs 2012: 19 in Doughty et al. 2020: 96) In April 2017, I saw This Is, an excerpt from Renaissance, performed by Doughty and dance partner Pete Shenton. A tightly scored, mag‑ netically performed improvisation, it revived and invented memories,

178  Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec playfully complicating the contents and performativity of the archive body. Evolving from moderately energetic arm gestures and a dialogue of spoken lines beginning “This is …,” the material became considerably more physi‑ cally and textually vigorous, oddly matched, and hilarious. Not only did it challenge autobiography, it challenged the two dancers. Their guessing‑game score called for keeping multiple balls in the air: their own and each other’s actual and fictional memories; the physicalizing, vocalizing, and interpreting of these memories; and the evolution in real time of a jointly presented story about a relationship of twenty minutes or twenty years, any of which may or may not have been true, or theirs. * A throughline of this book, and of my thinking about Perec and dance, is the ways that ideas, feelings, affects, and bodies—embodied experience—come together. Certain artists produce actions and objects in which the intellectual elements of compositional approaches not only demonstrate the specificity and precision which follows and even exhausts these approaches—the self‑ or outwardly imposed rules, conditions, and constraints at their roots—but exceed and even transcend them. Of course, Perec’s oeuvre exemplifies this representation of desire, process, and interaction, in which, whether or not the scores are made evident, the work has its own life, its expressivity and vividness, its conversation with the respondent. The following pages consider current and (relatively) recent choreographers/choreographies exemplifying viewpoints and practices touching on Perec’s. It is not an exhaustive survey but an admittedly idiosyncratic selection.6 Intentional Engagements Some choreographers whose work suggests engagement with Perec’s have come to this circumstance by chance; regardless of whether they knew Perec’s writing or how it was constructed, their work demonstrates parallels or cor‑ respondences. Others have made this choice consciously after encountering Perec’s writing and considering how it might fit into their own ideas and compositional choices. Several examples of this latter group follow. Daniel Squire

Daniel Squire is a former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Com‑ pany and a Perec enthusiast. He used the univocalic (or monovocalic) score of Perec’s Les Revenentes (The Exeter Text) to make his 2014 solo, These Then Were the Perverse—Perverse’s the Werd, substituting physical actions as the material comprising the dance for words, Perec’s medium. This choice of score is not as simple as it perhaps first appears. A univocalism is a written

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  179 piece using, in addition to consonants, only a single vowel; thus, it also functions as a lipogram, like Perec’s La Disparition (A Void). Squire’s score, in a dance context, was limited to the limbs’ basic bend‑it‑or‑straighten‑it op‑ tions, effectively using/losing 50% of the extremities’ possibilities. From either angle, the result was a dance in which the arms and legs were constrained from bending, remaining straight throughout. Squire points out that the spelling in Revenentes “becomes increasingly unorthodox,” so he created a dancer’s challenge, “a series of tasks during which one would be increasingly likely to bend one’s limbs if that were permitted” while retain‑ ing the fullness of choreographic and movement choices, such as “scale of movement, complicated rhythms, tempi, articulation, and weight shifts” (in Cigánkova 2014). That is, he stressed rather than minimized the composi‑ tional score. When I raised the lipogram/univocalism overlap with him, Squire ac‑ knowledged that his response was largely to the spelling and that the straight arms and legs seemed to him—felt—“more like ‘only e as a vowel’ than ‘eve‑ rything but e as a vowel’” (my emphasis). This view again raises the feelings, the affects of embodied experience, which cannot easily or exactly fit with games of language. By extension—and this is a significant factor regarding dance—These Then … looks like Squire’s (rather than, say, Perec’s) work. It retains elements of his history with Cunningham through his body’s geom‑ etry and spatial clarity: his limbs stretching into space, the essential tension, and the inherent drama; more broadly, Squire, however constrained, recog‑ nizably moves “like himself.” He would not, I think, have wanted otherwise. Indeed, as he said to me, “Of course, it’s all just really an excuse to dance” (Squire 2015; Satin 2015): an expression of the ludic pleasure not only of moving but of making something by a set of rules, in this instance continuing a Perecquian and Oulipian game plan. Aurélien Bory/Compagnie 111

In 2019, director Aurélien Bory and Compagnie 111s Espæce—merging the French for Species and Spaces—came to New York City’s Brooklyn Academy of Music. This physical theater piece for three dancers, a singer, and an actor cast Perec’s life and work as a “jumping‑off point … into a physical riddle,” an exploration of the stage space as a void (Bory 2019). The stage design emphasized scale: large scale, space as looming, BAM’s vast Opera House occupied by dramatic exchanges with massive movable walls and towering set‑pieces. Perec’s investigations of space often urge respondents to pay atten‑ tion to what is too small or peripheral to notice. Perec, though, was equally concerned with what is too enormous to comprehend. Bory, whose back‑ ground includes architectural acoustics and circus skills, created a scenario in which the likelihood of “bump[ing] yourself” prevailed (Perec 1999b: 6).

180  Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec Sean Gandini/Gandini Juggling

Also drawn to Perec and looking forward to bringing his ideas into his own work is Sean Gandini, the London‑based director of Gandini Juggling. The company, known for joining its circus skills with ideas and actions explored in experimental choreography, has most recently brought Cunningham’s movement philosophy and technique to the work, featuring former Cunning‑ ham Dance Company member (and now juggler) Jennifer Goggans. Gandini is planning now to create a piece on the company based on his sense of Perec’s ways with language, with words themselves as “juggleable entities” (Gandini 2023). More obviously juggleable are objects; Gandini has in mind taking off from Perec’s 1965 Les Choses (Things), and the idea that “the more things we have, the more happiness we have.” A character might engage with this idea through interacting “with hundreds of ordinary objects, chairs, glasses, slippers…” (Gandini 2023). Richard Colton

Richard Colton, we know, links his attraction to Perec to a lineage leading to our shared mentor, James Waring.7 Colton first encountered Perec’s work by chance, in a bookstore, the title Things: A Story of the Sixties speaking to his interest in that period. Perec’s lists, he thought, were like Waring’s, ac‑ cumulations of inherently “beautiful” questions: “A page of Georges Perec was filled with questions, often literally,” he observes. “And if not literally. it would create questions because of the kind of inventory complexity… [H]ow do those objects relate to one another?” This “whimsical disharmony” itself seemed “very Waring‑esque.” Colton recalls Waring’s emphasis on paying at‑ tention: having students look at an object every day at the same time from a different angle, noticing and writing about how that changes your experience of the thing. This new way of looking at the world would later figure in his understanding of Perec. Waring’s choreography poignantly expressed the perspective of the out‑ sider, especially in his dances about performers in popular forms like vaude‑ ville and commedia dell’arte. His “wit and humor,” Colton recalls, “always had … a sad element underneath.” Certainly, Perec, too, often portrayed himself as an outsider; more broadly, his work exuded a sense of underly‑ ing sadness. Colton was struck reading Perec’s Species of Spaces (SOS) to find near the end a section about Auschwitz: a 1943 order for leafy trees and bushes to be placed around the crematoria as a “natural border” (Perec 1999c in 1999b: 90). However broad SOS’s representation of space was, there was no way it could not be colored by Perec’s personal history of loss. (His Auschwitz example is more specific than it might appear: 1943 was the year his mother “disappeared” there.)8 Colton’s engagement with Perec’s writing led him to choreograph Dancing About Architecture for graduate architecture students at the Massachusetts

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  181 Institute of Technology in 2018. Developing and teaching this piece exempli‑ fied for Colton the “mathematical, compositional elements and the human interplay of Perec’s writing on architecture as that writing connects to move‑ ment and choreography.” It also joined Perec’s and the students’ spatial and architectural inclinations. Colton began working with the four students, who were not trained danc‑ ers, by “jumping off” Trisha Brown’s score for Locus (1975), in which a dancer’s movement in an imaginary cube is linked to the twenty‑seven num‑ bered/lettered geometric markers of that cube. For Colton, this “Perecquian exercise” extended the writer’s unorthodox descriptions and contemplation of rooms, suggesting “how humans might aspire to cats’ experiences finding comfort in the angles. That was a key portal to getting into Perec with stu‑ dents … How do you find comfort [in spaces]?” Colton brought in other architectural ideas and spatial practices, particularly Frank Lloyd Wright’s incorporation of indoors/outdoors. He physicalized the image of “seeing the back of your neck” in the dance, expanding students’ ex‑ periences of knowing the space we don’t literally see. He introduced the embod‑ ied philosophies of Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (and their century‑later enthusiasts, John Cage and James Waring): taking the time to see, slowly, something familiar or ordinary, until it is new and unknown—a central tenet of Perec. Colton gave students a long list of Perec’s phrases, all from SOS, as guides to making movement. Among them: “How does one think of nothing? / We don’t think enough about staircases. / Drift aimlessly. / I like ceilings. / Detect a rhythm. / Space is what arrests our gaze.” The dance, performed in a long non‑theatrical campus venue—a nod to Perec’s ideas of spatial flexibility—focused on arrangements of the perform‑ ers in the space and on words (Perec’s) and images periodically projected be‑ hind them in Guy Bigland’s graphic designs: “The Apartment Building” and its grid‑like abstraction, “The Countryside” with a circle crossed with lines. The Neave Piano Trio played Haydn, Roussel, and Fauré, live. The performers, in casual black clothing, moved calmly, their energy and focus measured, their material largely pedestrian. They walked, lay on the floor, extended their arms, and turned their heads to continue with their eyes the path of their fingers past their shoulders. Sometimes they danced in unison, mostly not; sometimes, still, they watched each other. There was a carton of eggs, a coffee cup, a low ped‑ estal. Throughout, viewers’ eyes were directed to the beauty of the everyday movement, the complexity of the space, and the pleasures of noticing. Perecquian Choreographies Many dance‑makers who may or may not have known the work of Perec have touched on ideas similar to his in their compositional choices. In other instances, the dancers embody these ideas and beliefs in the moment of per‑ formance, in the complex merging of time, space, and movement, in the shared experience of dancer and viewer.

182  Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec Raimund Hoghe

I don’t know whether German choreographer Raimund Hoghe (1949–2021) knew Perec’s work. I know, though, that his 2010 duet, Sans‑Titre (Without Papers), emerged from his embodied experience of being an outsider, born with a spinal deformity which also led to his extremely short stature. It also suggested Perec’s feelings of loneliness and not belonging, on his concerns about bodies and beauty, about love and comfort. It shared Perec’s sensitiv‑ ity to space; the spaces of the body, the spaces within which the body lives. Hoghe was a journalist in Düsseldorf, moving into dance as a dramaturge for Tanztheater Wuppertal choreographer Pina Bausch in 1978, contribut‑ ing to her work for ten years. He began making his own dances, collabora‑ tively and independently, in 1989. His first performance was the 1994 solo, Meinwärts (Toward Me), about Jewish tenor Josef Schmidt, who had also been only five feet tall and who died in 1942 after being exiled by the Nazis (Hoghe 2009). Roslyn Sulcas noted that the dance was about Hoghe as well as Schmidt: “his memories of history and reflections on his own nonnormative body.” She quotes Hoghe’s observation that “[p]hysical handicaps shown on‑ stage … are more shocking than violence” (Sulcas 2021). Hoghe clearly saw his bodily circumstance as political, linking the value of bodies to social and historical circumstance, specifically to Naziism’s genocidal destruction and to the later destruction brought on by AIDS. “The starting point for my first solo,” he said, “was that I wanted to do political statement on stage” (2009). Sans‑Titre is certainly an act of political statement, just as it is an act of physical and psychic intimacy and the transportive properties of time. It exists within a space holding and revealing complex emotional possibilities, emphasizing the particularity of bodies and spaces, and of the human beings who inhabit them and are so largely defined by them. The short, white, middle‑aged Hoghe, his spine severely curved by kyphosis,9 is paired with the much younger, taller, and more classically beautiful Black Congolese dancer Faustin Linyekula. Several segments of the piece are etched into my memory. At the start, Hoghe very slowly walked around the periphery of New York City’s Dance Theater Workshop10 holding a stack of white paper, regularly pausing to place a sheet of paper on the floor, then resume his walk. It took a long time, during which viewers watched the gradual, inevitable transformation—the framing—of the space and felt the specific rhythms and actions of Hoghe’s re‑ petitive task. It was soothing for me to watch and breathe into, agitating for some others. Either way, the deliberately performed action called attention to borders as built and intentional, and to the constant shifts and balances within the time of construction. Linyekula made his own line from a pile of small rocks, adding to the space’s framing … then outlined his body with the stones. Later, as Hoghe lay prone on the floor, Linyekula gently placed those same rocks into the swell and indentation of his (Hoghe’s) naked back, beautiful on its own terms.

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  183 So many details at once emphasized, minimized, and celebrated the visible differences of the two men, the two bodies. What strikes me now as Perec‑ quian is not simply the attention to space but the integration of space‑making and human being or becoming: our human “species of spaces” as psychoso‑ cial creations. “I am not interested in virtuosity,” Hoghe said in 2009. “The movement of a finger or a hand can create something very strong.” Jérôme Bel

The intellectually as well as aesthetically challenging performances of French choreographer Jérôme Bel enlist text and talk as well as movement to explore the experiential and political dimensions of autobiography and identity, his own and others. I am not surprised to discover that Bel named Hoghe’s dances on his list of unforgettable performances, along with work by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Forgion, Yvonne Rainer, On Kawara, and others whose work I see as touching on Perec’s. Nor am I surprised to find Perec himself on another of Bel’s lists, which is interdisciplinary, intercultural, and inter‑ national, covering significant recent and contemporary terrain, and headed “Who taught you the most in your life?” (Bel 2021). Ishmael Houston‑Jones

Dancers bringing Perecquian mingling of scores and personal experience to mind include Ishmael Houston‑Jones, who made D E A D in 1981, for his thirtieth birthday.11 Its score began with recording a list the night before per‑ formance of everyone who came to mind who had died during his lifetime: people he knew, celebrities, fictional characters:“JFK * RFK….Grandma Shadwick … Jean Seberg … Joe Louis … Patrice Lumumba” (Houston-Jones 1998: 95–96). In performance, Houston‑Jones stood still as the recording played the first names, making the American Sign Language for “dead.” Upon hearing a name meaningful to him, he would “fall to the floor in some emblematic way” and get up, continuing to fall and rise with each name (95). Houston‑Jones saw, and still sees, the dance as “task‑based,” focused on carrying out the actions of the score. Indeed, what most brings Perec to mind are the score’s instructions, both the list structure and the urging to pay at‑ tention, to fully occupy each moment: Try not to anticipate a death. Try not to remember the death until I hear myself speak it on the tape. Try to respond to the death in the moment. Try to let go of the death as I rise from the floor. (95) Finally: “Continue until there are no more names … Allow myself to become exhausted with the effort. Don’t stop until the dance is over” (95), which echo Perec’s taking his own ideas and scores as far as possible, not knowing what the experience would be.

184  Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec As it turned out, performing the dance was physically arduous, and Houston‑Jones came to see the piece as being about exhaustion, about “con‑ quering exhaustion,” as well as about the list of names. Jennifer Dunning wrote that in a later performance, he “seem[ed] intent … on throwing himself to the ground as bruisingly as possible” (1988), but the choreographer/dancer came to see that “getting up was more crucial” as well as more physically de‑ manding. The interactions with the dead whose names he heard were less per‑ sonal than focused on the “emblematic” falls, which turned out to mostly be fairly direct, a few of them somewhat obvious. In fact, when Houston‑Jones has taught his score to students, he has them make a list but doesn’t specify that it name people who have died; he has only once passed along his own cat‑ egory. Houston‑Jones’s work continues, as ever, to be exploratory and com‑ passionate, insistently physical, social, personal, and political. Dancing in Perec’s Fields One way to consider contemporary dance and Perec is to return to his Four Fields: Sociological, Autobiographical, Ludic, and Novelistic (2009b: 3–5). Houston‑Jones’s D E A D, described above, fits the Ludic field, though clearly it could also be viewed as autobiographical. Such field‑crossing fac‑ tors into the experiences and ideas of artists and respondents. These exam‑ ples are meant more as prompts for understanding and articulating how a piece seems to “work” than as definitive acts of categorization. Ludic: Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion

An example of ludic composition is a 2004 collaboration of UK‑based dancer/ choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion, Both Sitting Duet, a fabulously mixed marriage of score and performance.12 The men, in their forties when they made the piece (which they still perform), look like two regular guys, in casual clothes, sitting side‑by‑side in chairs, carrying out more‑or‑less everyday gestures (brushing their thighs, circling their heads with one arm, extending their palms forward), mostly in silence, sometimes looking at each other, variously in or near unison or what could be conversation, tak‑ ing their movement cues from papers on the floor at their feet. These, it turns out, are the scores for Morton Feldman’s exquisitely beautiful (and unheard here) piano‑and‑violin piece, For John Cage, whose phrases unroll slowly, repetitively, alternating simultaneity and dialogue. Burrows and Fargion have turned these musical instructions into movement scores; they carry out the score’s constraints while maintaining their relationship’s affectual weather. Sociological: Cathy Weis, Jon Kinzel

Those whose work fits into the Sociological category might include Cathy Weis, whose down‑home Sundays on Broadway performances take place in

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  185 the Soho loft where she lives and works. Her pieces feature pointedly no‑frills technology, casual narration, lots of props and furniture to lug around, and a general sense of pleasure in the work of making and unmaking the space. This construction of everydayness is sharpened by Weis’s physical delicacy and her dry, friendly sense of humor. Jon Kinzel, a visual artist as well as cho‑ reographer who often performs at Weis’s loft, calmly constructs events out of objects he’s made or found. We watch him move quietly in his everyday clothes, placing and re‑placing objects. Somehow, he communicates a kind of quiet delight in his things, like Perec enumerating the objects on his desk. Sociological: Yve Laris Cohen

Yve Laris Cohen makes performances on a grander scale, in an insistently not‑fancy and quite Perecquian aesthetic. Trained in ballet, he focuses on space, specifically the architecture of theatrical space, and on the everyday labor usually unseen by the public. “I want to produce a leveling of ballet technique and manual labor,” he has said (Laris Cohen and Gordon 2012). In 2022, he created an installation, Studio/Theater, at the Museum of Mod‑ ern Art, from what remained after the Doris Duke Theater at Jacob’s Pillow burned down. Its action was Laris Cohen’s relentless raising and lowering of a grid of destroyed pipes, melted into “intestines”: the theater as (trauma‑ tized) body (Kourlas 2022). At Judson Church in Dog House ll (2013), accompanied by Couperin’s beautiful Mass for the Parishes, Laris Cohen constructed a set, a long line of wooden boxes stretching upstage to down (and into the audience). In work clothes, he made multiple trips up to the stage, emerging from a door with a long wooden box in his arms, carrying it down the steps and into the per‑ formance area. He interrupted his repetitions once, emerging from the door holding the hand of a gentleman, guiding him across the stage and down the steps to the downstage left corner. Laris Cohen adjusted the man’s fac‑ ing (as he had done with the boxes) and arranged his arms in a bent and hard‑to‑hold gesture, which he maintained for the remainder of the piece (about another twenty‑five minutes). The builder, meanwhile, resumed his building. The piece “ended” only when viewers left, prompted by Movement Research staff, and Laris Cohen began unmaking what he had constructed.13 Dog House ll highlighted the parallels of choreography and set‑making— space‑making—and the immediacy of a compositional score as plan and en‑ actment. It also recalled Yvonne Rainer’s 1963 We Shall Run, whose own chosen everyday movement, running, was carried out to the grand strains of Berlioz’s Requiem.14 Autobiographical: Susan Rethorst

Many choreographers’ formal structures coexist with or suggest the Au‑ tobiographical field: personal material, sometimes hovering at the border

186  Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec of fiction. Susan Rethorst, also working with the complexities of space— especially the hazy divide between public and private—literally reconstructed her living room at Dance Theater Workshop after being evicted from her loft in 2007, later expanding the piece, 208 East Broadway, and moving it to Danspace. These performances, in which dancers behaved in ways like and unlike usual interactions with furniture (I recall one dancer lying under a couch for a long time), were very moving, touching, and underscored by the real‑life complexities of New York City real estate. Autobiographical: Ralph Lemon

Ralph Lemon has created many works, often with Okwui Okpokwasili, which explore his personal history and the larger worlds (cultural, racial, geographical) in which it is made and remade. Some give him an opportunity to rethink or restage these worlds’ and his own difficult moments, to bring intimacy into contact with systems, scandals, conventions. His performances with Okpokwasili are vivid and intense, their charged physicality and im‑ mediacy making the pieces resonant regarding that very moment as well as their histories and references to films, politics, and real‑world circumstance. Simultaneously embodying Perec’s Sociological and even Novelistic as well as Autobiographical categories, the dances respond to his questions: ”Where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?” (Perec 1999e: 210). Novelistic: Vicky Shick

“Novelistic” is a word suggesting a greater span than most contemporary dance, whose narratives (to use the term loosely) often lean toward pri‑ vacy, mystery, autobiography. Vicky Shick’s little communities of women and the occasional man seem to be enacting partially remembered rituals: dancers tentatively or matter‑of‑factly touching or manipulating each other’s bodies, periodically arranging and re‑placing themselves and the domestic or unexplained objects in the space, trying on and removing clothing, lac‑ ing someone’s shoes, singing a little song. Each person has her own move‑ ment repertoire, lush or contemplative or nervous. Disruptions are rare and fleeting. Marjorie Gamso: The Body as Homeless Marjorie Gamso (1944–2011) was the most Perecquian of choreographers.15 Her life and dances most fully embraced Perec’s merging of the intellectual, the scored, and the deeply personal, the embrace of one’s challenging aes‑ thetic viewpoints, and the distance from mainstream expectations of art, performance, and everyday behavior. Like Perec, Gamso was a brilliant eccentric, a profoundly experimental artist who worked on the margins by both choice and default. She was fully committed to her vision of the

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  187 artist’s work and life as extensions of each other and as opportunities for exhaustion: of adherence to the compositional rules she devised for each dance she made, of indifference to the official and behavioral protocols she considered meaningless, stupid, or simply bourgeois. Gamso lived in New York City all her life except for a stint in southern California, where she studied with iconoclastic ballerina Carmelita Maracci, choreographed her first dance, and performed with Steve Paxton. (Character‑ istically experiencing both the emotional and formal dimensions of a work, she wept while dancing in Paxton’s State, finding herself unexpectedly alone after a blackout.) From the start, her dances were suffused with her belief in performance as implicative of the vast interplay of art and capitalism, integrating political ideology with personal, even intimate, revelations, and evocations. This extended to her own and her family’s place in history; not even remotely religious, she was highly attuned to the complexity of being a Jew, especially at a time that felt so close to the Holocaust. She was drawn to the writing of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Franz Kafka, whose philosophical, political, and cultural engagement with and questioning of Jewishness permeated their writing.16 Marjorie Gamso was a longtime friend and colleague. We met at the Cun‑ ningham Studio just after I finished college. She had studied by then with Merce Cunningham and James Waring, both of whom became deeply im‑ portant to her. I remember crawling slowly in a workshop she taught, feeling the changes in weight and skin and air as I softly lifted a hand from the floor and replaced it. Her embodied spatial sense was what I would come to see as Perequian: bringing the focus closer, engaging the smallest choices and really feeling them. In 1973, Gamso founded her company, The Energy Crisis. For twenty years, on and off, I danced in her works. (She performed in one of mine.)17 I spent considerable time learning to perform her fluttery, delicate gestures and odd acts of technical virtuosity, and the rigorous and formidable cho‑ reographic structures containing them: minimalist spectacles of radical com‑ plexity, shattered narratives, extremes of inexact repetition, disorientingly long pauses, and spasms of speech, often beyond the patience or attention of casual viewers. While Gamso was devoted to dance‑making and the dancing body’s ex‑ pressivity, she was equally committed to the complex, even conflictual merg‑ ing of dance and other arts; she paid scrupulous attention to experimentation across art forms. She saw her work as existing “on the periphery of the dance field in a region where other disciplines also have territorial claim—an em‑ battled region with a troublesome population of fugitives and refugees.” (Classifying the artist as outsider mattered to her.) In the early 1980s, Gamso was one of several dance and performance artists frustrated by dance’s continued use of conventional narrative and lan‑ guage, particularly when so much attention was paid to rethinking narrative in the literary world (including Oulipo and Perec). She, Tim Miller, and Jane

188  Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec Comfort initiated a series of ground‑breaking events at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS 1), including the 1982 Paranarrative Dance Fes‑ tival, featuring dance and performance artists working with deconstructed narratives. Participants included Blondell Cummings, Kenneth King, John Bernd, Wendy Perron, Charles Dennis, Marta Renzi, and the founders, all of whom would continue their choreographic and textual investigations and experimentations. Gamso often used video to open, disrupt, or resist her work’s spatial di‑ mensions. She made determinedly low‑tech pieces appropriating current and historical news footage or creating the content on two small screens approaching each other in a wood‑framed Video Clap (2002). In Scratch That (2003), she rotated slowly along a wall, holding a pillow to her head, her body camouflaged against the projected pattern of fabric as her recorded voice read the words of Franz Kafka. Increasingly antagonistic to traditional dance production and not on concert presenters’ A‑Lists anyway, she opted over time for non‑theatrical venues and circumstances. What Gamso did in these spaces was often revelatory. She placed dancers throughout the niches and balconies of a cathedral. She let props destroyed or neglected during an hours‑long dance accumulate on the floor, a gradual, accidental landscape. She positioned an audience to face its own mirrored reflection and a doubled dance throughout a performance. When the ceiling of the church we were performing in collapsed during dress rehearsal, she scurried to find a substitute space. She was unruffled as we danced her tiny gestures and complicated patterns under a strobe light in the hotel disco‑ ballroom where we ended up. Gamso was drawn to everyday life and its materials—and not just the pretty parts. I remember her collecting and washing filthy shards of broken glass recovered from the street, to be used in a stage set. I remember doing a tango with a chair for a partner and climbing to the top of a tall ladder. Gamso wrote of the animate and inanimate bodies [which] meet  all the time in so‑called “daily life”—and the intimate bodies I am thinking of, the chairs and ladders and TV sets with which I’ve often filled my dances, are surely daily‑life objects… [T]he very inanimateness of the object … seems to consume the performer’s total attention, something morbid about the mysterious, erotic bond that comes to exist between the dancer and the lifeless object she depends on to support her oddest, her most beautiful and daring maneuvers. (in Nicholas Gamso 2014: 32) Gamso died at sixty‑six after longstanding health problems; her last days were spent in a literal fever of choreography and writing, her final gesture of spatial defiance the rehearsals she directed in her hospital room. For several

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  189 years, having opted out of her hated day job and with no other income, she became, essentially, homeless, living in a minute subsidized room, cramming her many possessions—books, papers, costumes—into a tiny storage unit in a large industrial building. That she decided to perform a dance there, Inside Story: Your Life in Storage, Your Life on Hold (2009), was no surprise to followers accustomed to Gamso’s mining of her own life and to her pleasure in showing work in an unaccredited (and illegal) space. Months later, she showed an expanded adaptation, Video Veil, a live performance including dance, music, text, and video of the original material, at the Construction Company, a small performance venue supporting off‑the‑radar performance. These dances exemplified a Perecquian approach to composition, incor‑ porating several carefully devised scores and an almost painfully intimate if indirectly revealing self‑portrait. By the time she made Inside Story, Gamso had long coped with illness, poverty, and dubious housing arrangements, but she typically focused on what she would need to do to work. She had no money to rent rehearsal space, and no intention to not rehearse, or write and perform, as she always had. A site‑specific dance in a “self‑storage” unit, Inside Story was a practi‑ cal response to poverty and an expression of skepticism regarding artistic conventions of concert dance. It was also a performative commentary on the politics of the body as home and homelessness, simultaneously affirming and distancing itself from more comforting definitions. Louise Steinman, for example, opened The Knowing Body by positing “the Body as Home,” as source of knowledge, as the avenue (via body‑mind integration) to joining “the disparate experiences and sensations of one’s life” (1995 [1986]: 1). Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1994 [1958]) is characterized by its warm rush of images—drawers, corners, shells, nests—of places we want to be in or return to. Bachelard warned about the metaphorical as well as actual travails of the spatial seeker; for Gamso, these anxieties, beginning in the body and bleeding out, color the work. Inside Story didn’t take place so much in the storage unit as at its bounda‑ ries. As other renters, each with a story of spatial dislocation, entered or left the hallway, Gamso performed for her invited audience: a visitor or two, sometimes a videographer. First, her head would emerge from the unit’s door, then a limb … and then, as always in her choreography of restlessness and ambivalence, she would retreat. Eventually, she would re‑emerge, barely escaping the contours of the doorway itself, and dance. Sitting, lying down, her legs and sneakered feet against the wall, she executed a series of gestures focusing a viewer on her fingers, on her mysterious face, and, within the blank, blunt publicness of the building, on the weirdly private nature of the encounter. In Video Veil, Gamso’s repeated entrances and exits in the studio doorway echoed the charged video images of the storage‑unit performances and ex‑ tended the pathos of intermittent whispers of live violin. Audience members

190  Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec could hear clearly Gamso’s poetic existentialist monologue, whose recitation offered and withheld the story of her diminishment, the story of her powers. It was written, we learned, as Georges Perec and his fellow Oulipians might have done, using only the letters of the original dance’s title, Inside Story: Your Life in Storage, Your Life on Hold. Gamso’s words, spoken in her soft, seductive voice, reminded us that life is fragile and mysterious: “And so it goes, a tree falls in the forest…” Dancing Off the Page And so it goes. This project has been a processual rendez‑vous with Georges Perec, a very real human being as well as a figure of my research‑seeded im‑ agination. Much of that research, of course, is Perec’s own words. The rest includes the words of fellow followers and others whose ideas mesh with his and mine, and my many encounters with art and artists, especially dances, dancers, and dancing. It also includes looking back at years of my own notes, tracing the processes of conceiving and preparing for new pieces, of mak‑ ing and borrowing score after score. There are lists of instructions‑as‑art by On Kawara and Richard Serra, a drawing of Trisha Brown’s Locus score. There are alphabet lists generating scores linked to movements, rhythms, qualities, and spatial directions, to be animated by multiple movers in struc‑ turally indeterminate partnership with live readings about local flora. There is a copy of a fragment of Perec’s “The Street” from his 1974 Species of Spaces, a score for a solo in a group piece, performed in silence. (We hear the words later, while different movement is taking place.) There are scores tied to the lyrics of a well‑known (but secret in this circumstance) popular love song, performed in silence or with radically repetitive speech‑music, the two dancers’ unison guided by breath and by our own silent repetitions of the song’s familiar words. After working with some of these scores for weeks, my dance partner, David Botana, asks whether I realize that we’re making a dance about death, about loss. * And so it goes. I see the intersections of Perec’s writing with dance as emerg‑ ing from our dynamic personal and cultural histories, from our embodied experiences of living in the everyday world and the dance studio or writing room, where we make and change art‑rules and perspectives, making it up as we go along, revising ourselves. The closest I’ve come to “meeting” Perec in a not‑really‑embodied sense is onscreen: hearing his voiceover for Récits d’Ellis Island, the movie he made with Robert Bober, and watching him in filmed interviews, his charm and humor familiar from his writing, realized through his moving, his living face and body. I wish we could have met for coffee, talked about dance and art and Oulipo, bodies and space, ludic literature, and fractured lives. I think we would have really enjoyed dancing together.

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  191 Notes 1 See Schneemann (1977). 2 See Satin (1999). 3 Lovely Life: The Recent Works of Agnes Martin, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 1–29, 2000. 4 See Chapter 2. 5 See Chapter 4. 6 See Satin (2015) for other examples. 7 See Chapter 6. All Colton quotations come from a March 25, 2023 interview. 8 This long section, the final one of Species of Spaces, addresses an array of spatial elements and options. The Nazi Concentration Camp “greenery” order is in a subsection called “The Uninhabitable.” 9 I choose to use “Kyphosis,” the scientific term for “hunchbacked.” Hoghe, in 2009, referred to himself as having “a hunchback.” 10 The venue is now known as New York Live Arts. 11 The dance was first performed at the choreographer’s birthday party, at Lissie Willoughby’s downtown loft. Houston‑Jones performed it on PS 122 Field Trips into the 1990s. Any unattributed Houston‑Jones quotations or information come from a July 2, 2023 interview. 12 Burrows and Fargion both perform as dancers and musicians in their collabora‑ tive work. 13 This performance took place March 4, 2013 at Movement Research at The Jud‑ son Church. The videographer was Ashley Friend. Video courtesy of Movement Research. 14 The Berlioz and Couperin pieces, though separated by over a century, both lent the dances what could be understood as irony and/or aesthetic elevation. 15 Regarding her knowledge of Perec, filmmaker and friend Andrew Gurian notes that Gamso read Perec’s Life A User’s Manual (2023). Her partner, writer Philip Beitchman, confirms that they discussed Oulipo and notes “the self‑imposed dif‑ ficulty” of her compositions and theirs and the unlikeliness of her not knowing Perec’s work (2023). 16 See Nicholas Gamso (2014). 17 See Satin (2001).

Works Cited Alexander, Elena. 1998. Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page. Amster‑ dam: G & B Arts International. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994 [1958]. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Beitchman, Philip. 2023. Personal communication: June 8. Bel, Jérôme. 2021. The Theater Times: April 9. Interview. https://thetheatretimes. com/interviewwithjeromebel/ Bellos, David. 1999 [1993]. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. London: The Harvill Press. Bellos, David. 2022. Interview: November 17. Bissell, Bill and Linda Caruso Haviland, eds. 2018. The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory. Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. https://www.pewcenterarts.org/sentient‑archive‑bodies‑ performance‑and‑memory Bory, Aurélien. 2019. “Brooklyn Academy of Music.” Program notes: Espæce: June 20–22.

192  Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec Caruso Haviland, Linda. 2018. “Considering the Body as Archive.” In The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, edited by Bill Bissell and Linda Caruso Haviland. Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. https://www.pewcenterarts.org/sentient‑archive‑bodies‑performance‑and‑ memory Cigánková, Tereza. 2014. “With Daniel Squire on Cunningham in Ostrava.” Tanecni Aktuality: September 24. http://www.tanecniaktuality.cz/en/with‑daniel‑squire‑on‑ cunningham‑in‑ostrava/ Colton, Richard. 2023. Interview: March 25. Doughty, Sally, Lisa Kendall, and Rachel Krische. 2020. “The Holding Space: Body of (as) Knowledge.” In Sarah Whatley et  al., eds., Art and Dance in Dialogue: Body, Space, Object. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan: 91–103. Dunning, Jennifer. 1988. “From Field Trips, a Mix of Styles and Standpoints.” New York Times: August 25. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/25/arts/review‑dance‑ from‑field‑trips‑a‑mix‑of‑styles‑and‑standpoints.html Fuchs, Thomas. 2012. “The Phenomenology of Body Memory.” In Body Memory, Metaphor, and Movement, edited by Sabine C. Koch, Thomas Fuchs, and Michela Summa. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company: 9–22. Gamso, Nicholas. 2014. “Hotel Amerika.” http://www.hotelamerika.net/wp‑content/ uploads/2014/09/gamso.pdf Gandini, Sean. 2023. Personal communications. Gurian, Andrew. 2023. Personal communication: June 6. Hoghe, Raimund.  2009. Movement Research/Critical Correspondence. Interview with Lili Chopra: October 8. https://movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/ blog/wp‑content/pdf/Raimund_Hoghe_10‑08‑09.pdf Houston‑Jones, Ishmael. 1998. “Three Texts.” In Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page, edited by Elena Alexander. Amsterdam: G & B Arts International: 85–102. Houston‑Jones, Ishmael. 2023. Interview: July 2. Koch, Sabine C., Thomas Fuchs, and Michela Summa, eds. 2012. Body Memory, Metaphor, and Movement. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kourlas, Gia. 2022. “What do Two Fires Have in Common? It Comes Down to Guts.” New York Times: December 20. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/arts/ dance/yve‑laris‑cohen‑moma.html Laris Cohen, Yve, and R.E.H. Gordon. 2012. “Yve Laris Cohen in Conversation with R.E.H Gordon on Coda.” Movement Research/Critical Correspondence. https:// movementresearch.org/publications/critical‑correspondence/yve‑laris‑cohen‑in‑ conversation‑with‑r‑e‑h‑gordon‑on‑coda Marranca, Bonnie, ed.  1994. “Ages of the Avant‑Garde.” Bodies of Work issue of Performing Arts Journal 16.1 #46 (January): 9–55. Martin, Agnes. In Cheim & Read Gallery, NY. 2017. Exhibition Press: The Horizontal. https://www.cheimread.com/exhibitions/the‑horizontal_1#:~:text=The%20 exhibition%20was%20inspired%20by,to%20look%20at%20the%20ocean.” Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (October 1): 6–18. Perec, Georges. 1988 [1975]. W or the Memory of Childhood. Translated by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine.

Dancing into the Twenty-First Century with Georges Perec  193 Perec, Georges. 1990a. Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep. Translated and introduced by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine. Perec, Georges. 1990b. Things: A Story of the Sixties. In Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep, translated and introduced by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Publisher. Things was originally published in 1965. Perec, Georges. 1999a [1974]. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and trans‑ lated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin. Perec, Georges. 1999b [1974]. Species of Spaces. In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin: 1–96. Perec, Georges. 1999c [1974]. “Space.” In Species of Spaces, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin: 81–96. Perec, Georges. 1999d [1974]. “The Street.” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin: 46–56. Perec, Georges. 2009a. Thoughts of Sorts. Translated and with an introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine. Perec, Georges. 2009b. “Statement of Intent.” In Thoughts of Sorts, translated and with an introduction by David Bellos. Boston, MA: Verba Mundi/David R. Godine: 3–5. First published as “Notes sur ce que je cherche,” Le Figaro, December 8, 1978: 28. Also published as “Notes on What I’m Looking For,” in Perec 1999, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces: 141–143. Perec, Georges. 2014. Portrait of a Man (Le Condottière). Translated and with an in‑ troduction by David Bellos. London: Maclehose Press. First written in 1959–1960, first published in 2012. Perec, Georges and Robert Bober. 1980. Ellis Island Revisited: Tales of Vagrancy and Hope (Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir). Film. Directed by Rob‑ ert Bober. Screenplay by Georges Perec. Distributed by TF1. Phelan, Peggy. 2021. “Carolee Schneemann’s Sonic Shadow.” Camera Obscura 36.2: 135–143. https://read‑dukeupress‑edu.proxy.library.nyu.edu/camera‑obscura/article/ 36/2%20(107)/135/178805/Carolee‑Schneemann‑s‑Sonic‑Shadow Rainer, Yvonne. 1994. Untitled essay in Bonnie Marranca, ed. (1994): “Ages of the Avant‑Garde.” Performing Arts Journal 16.1 #46 (January): 33–35. Satin, Leslie. 1999. “Autobiography in the Present Tense: Deborah Hay, Living and Dying at Once.” In Performing Autobiography, edited by Satin, Leslie and Judith Jerome. Special issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 10.1–2, #19–20: 181–210. Satin, Leslie. 2001. “C’est‑à‑Dire.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23.2: 28–34. Satin, Leslie. 2015. “Dancing in Place: Exhaustion, Embodiment, and Perec.” Dance Research Journal (December): 84–104. Schneemann, Carolee. 1977. “Scroll 2” in “Text from Interior Scroll, 1975.” https:// www.schneemannfoundation.org Squire, Daniel. 2015. Personal communication: July 29. Steinman, Louise. 1995 [1986]. The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Sulcas, Roslyn. 2021. “Raimund Hoghe, Choreographer of Strength and Frailty, Dies at 72.” New York Times: May 31. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/31/arts/ raimund‑hoghe‑dead.html Whatley, Sarah, Katerina Paramana, Imogen Racz, and Marie Louise Crawley, eds. 2020. Art and Dance in Dialogue: Body, Space, Object, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Index

Adair, Gilbert 15 Afterlives of Georges Perec, The (Wilken and Clemens) 16 AIDS 182 Akerman, Chantal 165; Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975 film) 165 Akinleye, Adesola 110 Algerian War 41, 66 Allphon, Ruth 146 Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater 12 American Sign Language 183 American Theater for Poets 150 “Apartment, The” (Species of Spaces chapter) 73–74, 111–112 “Apartment Building, The” (Species of Spaces chapter) 111–112, 159–160 “Approaches to What?” (Perec) 56–57, 60, 81, 128 archives 71–75; body, of the 80–91 Arendt, Hannah 187 Armour, Toby 150 Arnaud, Noël 129 Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, An [Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien] (Perec) 61–63, 135, 154 Auschwitz 3, 12, 41, 180; greenery, order for “natural border” around crematoria 180, 191n8 autobiography 2, 3, 5, 10–11, 13–15, 33–35, 43–47, 68–70, 159; dance and 4–6, 175–177; embodiment in 43; explicit 14, 32, 43–45, 162, 177; implicit 14, 43–46, 175–176; literary 14; Oulipian 44; see also memory; Perec, Georges autofiction 13, 24n14, 47, 51n19

Bachelard, Gaston 17, 51n17, 189 “Backtracking” (Perec) 68, 137; see also psychoanalysis Baer, Ana 55 Bailey, Brittany 155, 167n23 Banes, Sally 17, 24n8, 24n22, 61, 67, 145–149, 159, 161; Democracy’s Body 147 Bannon, Fiona 17 Baraka, Amiri (né LeRoi Jones) 150 Barbour, Karen 18 Bard College 151 Bartlebooth, Percival 136 Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville) 139n27 Baryshnikov, Mikhail 161; Past/ FORWARD (with White Oak Dance Project) 161 Battcock, Gregory 152; Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (ed.) 152 Bausch, Pina 164, 182 Beat poetry 66 Becker, Howard 96, 154 Beethoven, Ludwig Van 123 Behar, Ruth 18 Bel, Jérôme 183 Bellos, David 15, 33, 36, 37, 38–39, 42, 45, 64, 66, 72–73, 95, 112, 127, 131, 133, 135–136, 137–138, 165, 172, 177; George Perec: A Life in Words 15, 32, 36 Bénabou, Marcel 7, 15, 131 Benchley, Robert 152 Benjamin, Walter 187 Berenson, Paulus 146 Berger, John 20, 24n21 Bernd, John 188 Bigland, Guy 181 Binet, Catherine 43 Bissell, Bill 12, 176

196  Index Blom, Ina 68 Blood Memories (McKayle) 12 Blood Memory (Graham) 12 Blossom, Beverly 150 Bober, Robert 30, 190 Body in Places, A (Otake) 110 body‑mind integration 67 Body of (as) Knowledge (Doughty, Kendall, and Krische research project) 177 body, the 8–10, 80–91; archive 80–91, 175–177; memory, as site of 11, 176, 177; see also dance; embodiment; lists; memory; mutability; Perec, Georges; space Borges, Jorge Luis 132 Bory, Aurélien 179 Boston Women’s Health Collective 16 Botana, David 106, 190 Both Sitting Duet (Burrows and Fargion) 184 Boutique Obscure, La (Perec) 68, 135, 144, 162 Breton, André 125 Briggs, Kate 65 Brooklyn Academy of Music 179 Brown, Carolyn 125, 148 Brown, Earle 125 Brown, Trisha 7, 85, 90, 107–108, 146, 147, 156, 165, 181, 190; Skymap 107–108; see also Grand Union Buddhism 66, 67, 113, 174; see also Zen Buddhism Burrows, Jonathan 183, 184; see also Fargion, Matteo Burt, Ramsay 17, 166n1 Bury, Louis 15 Caballé, Montserrat 132 Cage, John 19, 24n8, 35–36, 66, 67, 68, 123, 124–127, 138, 145–146, 148, 150, 181; compositional approaches 35, 67; First Construction in Metal 124; 4’33” 35, 123–124; Imaginary Landscape No.1 124; “Lecture on Nothing” 35; Water Walk [revision of Water Music] 139n10; see also chance operations Caillois, Roger 122, 127; Man, Play and Games [Les Jeux et les Hommes] 122 Calvino, Italo 7 Camon, Ferdinando 12 Camp Indian Hill for the Arts 152

Caplan, Marc 16 Carmines, Al 147, 150 Carroll, Lewis 106, 112 Carroll, Noel 17, 24n8, 155 Caruso Haviland, Linda 12, 175, 176 Catterson, Pat 155 chance operations 19, 67, 89, 122, 123, 124–127, 131, 136–137, 145–146, 148, 151; see also Cage, John; I Ching; Oulipo Chaplin, Charlie 37, 45 Charlip, Remy 147, 150 Childs, Lucinda 147, 149, 161, 165; Street Dance 161 Choses, Les (Perec) 135; see also Things (Perec) Claid, Emilyn 17 Clemens, Justin 16 Coates, Emily 17 Cohen, Joshua 15 Cohen, Marshall 20 Colette 47 Colton, Richard 152, 180–181 Comfort, Jane 187–188 compositional approaches 1, 5, 23; Cage, John 35, 67; dance 6, 15, 19, 21, 23, 67, 81, 120, 122–127, 144– 150, 155–165; historical 21; Oulipo 7, 8, 21, 23, 33, 121, 122, 145; Perec, Georges 8, 10, 15, 18, 19, 23, 33, 34, 56, 57, 64, 70, 74, 81, 97, 121, 134–138, 145, 158–164 Condottierre, Il (Messina painting) 101, 177; see also Portrait of a Man (Perec) Conference on Emotional Geographies (Edinburgh) 55 Contact Improvisation (Paxton) 7, 58, 90, 103 Copeland, Roger 20 Corner, Philip 150 “Count the I’s, or, the Autobiographical Nature of Everything” (Margolin) 64 Craske, Margaret 148 Crayon (Davis) 148 Crickmay, Chris 17, 103 Crimp, Douglas 156 Critique of Daily Life [Critique de la Vie Quotidienne] (Lefebvre) 95 Cubism 122 Cummings, Blondell 188 Cunningham, Merce 5–6, 19, 20, 24n8, 58, 81, 84, 85, 98, 125, 145–146, 148, 150, 151, 187; see also Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Index 197 Dada 19, 122, 129, 148 Daily Wake, The (Summers) 149 Dames, Nicholas 65 dance: autobiography, as embodiment of 11, 14–15, 44, 81, 172–173, 175–177; collective 175; compositional approaches 6, 15, 19, 21, 23, 67, 81, 120, 122–127, 144–150, 155–165; embodiment in 58, 67, 80, 88, 90, 98, 155; expressive aspects 17; grids and 173–175; history 16–18, 81, 90; intimacy in 106; Jewish identity and 12, 13, 109, 182, 187; language of 19–21; lists, use in 61, 108, 153; ludus and 157, 163–164, 173, 179, 184; memory and 23, 80, 101, 111, 172, 175; postmodern 2, 4–6, 16–17, 21, 22, 23, 85–88, 138, 150–166; scholarship 16–18; seeing in 61; space 17–18, 107–111 Dance for 3 People and 6 Arms (Rainer) 148 Dance Theater Workshop 186 Danspace Project 17, 186 Date Paintings (Kawara) 74 Davis, William 148; Crayon 148 D.E.A.D (Houston‑Jones) 183–184 Debord, Guy 94 defamiliarization 75n5, 167n33; see also Shkolovsky, Viktor DeFrantz, Thomas F. 12, 17 Democracy’s Body (Banes) 147 Dennis, Charles 188 disembodiment 48 Disparition, La (Perec) see Void, A (Perec) Dog House ll (Laris Cohen) 185 Doughty, Sally 177–178; This Is 177– 178; see also Body of (as) Knowledge Duchamp, Marcel 7, 19 Duncan, Robert 150 Dunn, Bob 149, 151; Suite by Chance 149 Dunn, Judith 145, 146, 147, 148, 149 Dunn, Robert 6, 145, 146, 155–158, 161 Dunning, Jennifer 184 Duras, Marguerite 47 Duvignaud, Jean 41, 135 Eiko and Koma 109–110 Eisenstein, Sergei 42 Ekman, June 149 Elkin, Lauren 15

Ellis Island 30–31, 39 “Ellis Island: Description of a Project” (Perec) 30–31, 39 Ellis Island Revisited: Tales of Vagrancy and Hope [Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir] (1980 Bober, Perec film) 30, 42, 51n10, 190 Éluard, Paul 105, 111 Embodied Collective Memory (ECM) 11 embodiment 4–6, 9–10, 16, 17, 18, 23, 44, 49, 80, 158; attention and 68; autobiography, in 43; consciousness and 84, 94; dance, in 19–20, 32, 39, 58, 67, 80, 88, 90, 98, 155; detachment and 88; gender, of 98; identity and 32; lists and 85; meaning‑making, and 97; memory and 9, 11–12; present and future, in 83; quotidian 65; space, in 95, 96, 99–100, 103–104 Emerson, Ruth 146, 149 endoticism 23, 55–57, 62, 66, 97, 105, 108, 110, 112 Energy Crisis, The (Gamso dance company) 187 Epstein, Mark 67; Zen of Therapy, The 67 Erdman, John 165 Espèces d’espaces (Perec) see Species of Spaces (Perec) Esposito, Scott 15 Exercises in Style [Exercices de Style] (Queneau) 130 Exeter Text, The [Les Revenentes] (Perec) 19, 178 exhaustion of observation 61–65 Fargion, Matteo 183, 184; see also Burrows, Jonathan February Fun at Bucharest (McDowell) 148 Feldman, Morton 126, 184; For John Cage 184 Fields, W.C. 148 Figaro, Le 134, 158 First Construction in Metal (Cage) 124 “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance” (Sklar) 97 Fluxus 21, 68, 122, 128–129, 138, 173 Foreman, Richard 166 For John Cage (Feldman) 184 Forsdick, Charles 16, 104 Forti, Simone 17, 146, 156 4’33” (Cage) 35, 123–124

198  Index Foster, Susan 75n10, 156 Fox, Daniel 120 Fraleigh, Sondra Horton 17, 103 Freitas, Laura de 149 Freud, Sigmund 15 Friedman, Gene 147 Fuchs, Thomas 175–176, 177 Fugs, the 116n28; see also Kupferberg, Tuli; Sanders, Ed Futurism 122 Gamso, Marjorie 186–190; Inside Story: Your Life in Storage, Your Life on Hold 189–190; Jewish identity 187; Scratch That 188; Video Clap 188; Video Veil 189 Gamso, Nicholas 187 Gandini, Sean 180 Gann, Kyle 35, 124 George Perec: A Life in Words (Bellos) 15, 32, 36 “Georges Perec and the Broken Book” (Motte) 133 Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces (Forsdick, Leak, and Phillips) 16, 104 Goffman, Erving 96 Goggans, Jennifer 180 Goldberg, Marianne 115n12, 167n42 Goldstein, Malcolm 150 Goodman, Paul 150 Gordon, David 7, 146, 147, 148, 150, 161, 163, 165; Mannequin Dance 148; Matter Overture, The 161; see also Grand Union Graham, Martha 12, 146, 164; Blood Memory 12 Grand Union (Rainer, Paxton, Gordon, Brown) 7, 122, 165 Gross, Rachel 167n38 Gross, Sally 5, 37, 113, 149, 156, 162; Rope Dance 162–163 Gross, Sidonia 162 Gubernick, Hy 150 Gutierrez, Miguel 17 Hair (MacDermott, Rado, Ragni) 84, 91n6 Halpern, Rob 15 Halprin, Anna 17, 23, 67, 103, 123–124, 138, 155–158; Life‑Art Workshops 156; RSVP Cycles, The: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (with L. Halprin)

155–156; see also San Francisco Dancers Workshop Halprin, Lawrence 23, 71, 103, 123–124, 138, 155–158; RSVP Cycles, The: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (with A. Halprin) 155–156; see also San Francisco Dancers Workshop Happenings 21, 67, 127–128; see also Kaprow, Allan Harrison, Lou 125 Hay, Alex 146, 147, 160 Hay, Deborah 20, 61, 103, 146, 160, 173; Rise 61, 160 Heidegger, Martin 97 Herko, Fred 146, 147, 148, 150; Once or Twice a Week I Put on Sneakers to Go Uptown 148 Higgins, Dick 128–129; “Statement on Intermedia” 128 Highmore, Ben 18, 21, 64 Hirsch, Marianne 12 Hoghe, Raimund 182–183; Meinwärts [Toward Me] 182 Holocaust 3, 13, 16, 24n15, 31, 34, 108–109, 121, 133, 187 Homo Ludens (Huizinga) 122 Horst, Louis 146 Hōshi, Saigyō 69 Houston‑Jones, Ishmael 183–184; D.E.A.D 183–184 Hughes, Allen 150 Huizinga, Johan 122; Homo Ludens 122 Humphrey, Doris 146 Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, A [Cent mille millards de poèmes] (Queneau) 130, 157 Hunter, Victoria 17, 18, 20–21, 55, 63, 103, 108, 110–111 Hussie‑Taylor, Judy 17 Hutton, Sam 65 Huyssen, Andreas 129 I Ching 124, 127; see also chance operations Imaginary Landscape No.1 (Cage) 124 Impossible/Improbable (Waring) 157 indigenous dances 98 infra‑ordinariness 23, 55, 57, 66, 107, 145 Inner Appearances (Rainer) 165 Inside Story: Your Life in Storage, Your Life on Hold (Gamso) 189–190

Index 199 interdisciplinarity 5 “Interior Scroll” (Schneemann) 173 intertextuality 45, 165 I Remember [Je me souviens] (Perec) 135, 154, 162 “I Remember Malet & Isaac” (Perec) 71 Ivry, Benjamin 15 Ivye Project, The (Rogoff) 108 Jacob’s Pillow 185 James, Alison 15, 126–127 James, Henry 65 Javal, Emile 65 Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman film) 165 Je me souviens (Perec) see I Remember(Perec) jerk, le 172 Jewish identity 2, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 39, 43, 187; dance and 12, 13, 109, 182, 187; Gamso, Marjorie 187; Perec, Georges 10, 13, 22, 30–31, 36–41, 70 Johnson, James Weldon 91n5 Johnson, Ray 147 Johnston, Jill 17, 147, 148, 150 Jones, LeRoi see Baraka, Amiri Jouet, Jacques 8 Jowitt, Deborah 17 Joyce, James 47 Judd, Donald 174 Judson Dance Theater 5, 6–7, 17, 20, 21, 23, 58, 61, 66, 122, 144–155, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 172, 173, 174–175; first public concert 147–149; history of troupe 145–150 Judson Memorial Church 147, 149, 150, 151 Judson Poets Theater 150 Kafka, Franz 187, 188 Kant, Marion 12 Kaprow, Allan 21, 126, 127–128, 138, 151, 157, 161; see also Happenings Kawara, On 74–75, 76n16, 183, 190 Kealiinohomoku, Joann 96 Kemp, Anna 15, 24n14, 44 Kendall, Lisa 177; see also Body of (as) Knowledge Kincaid, James R. 7–8 kinesthesia 99–100 King, Kenneth 188

Kinzel, Jon 185 Klein, Susan 86, 90, 114 Kloetzel, Melanie 18 Knowles, Allison 128 Koch, Kenneth 150 Kostelanetz, Richard 21 Kozel, Susan 9, 10, 17 Krische, Rachel 177; see also Body of (as) Knowledge Kritzman, Lawrence 16 Kupferberg, Tuli 116n28; see also Fugs, the; Sanders, Ed Kurchin, Al 146 Laban, Rudolf 116n19 Lacan, Jacques 48 La Cecla, Franco 94 Larbaud, Valery 139n27 Laris Cohen, Yves 185; Dog House ll 185 Lazarus, Emma 30 Leak, Andrew 15, 16, 104 Leblanc, Maurice 121 “Lecture on Nothing” (Cage) 35 Lefebvre, Henri 95–96, 99; Critique of Daily Life [Critique de la Vie Quotidienne] 95; Production of Space, The 95–96 Lejeune, Philippe 15, 46–47, 48, 51n17, 51n18 Le Lionnais, François 7, 129, 130 Lemon, Ralph 186 Leong, Michael 15 Lettres Nouvelles, Les (literary publication) 42 Levi, Primo 12, 13 Levin Becker, Daniel 7, 69, 135 Levine, Dick 146 Life‑Art Workshops (Halprin) 156 Life A User’s Manual [La Vie mode d’emploi] (Perec) 1, 2, 3, 42, 121, 136–138, 157, 160 Ligne général, La (Lg) [The General Line] (journal) 42 Linyekula, Faustin 182 lists 10, 23, 70–75, 174; art‑related 74–75; body, of the 80–91; dance, use in 61, 108, 153; embodiment and 85; Perec, Georges, use of 2, 10, 47, 49, 55–56, 60, 62, 69–74, 95, 100, 105–106, 111, 113–114, 134, 153, 174, 180 Litz, Katherine 150 Lives of Performers (Rainer) 165

200  Index Lucier, Alvin 120 ludus 2, 15, 23, 56, 64, 70, 120–122, 127, 159, 160, 173, 179, 190; avant‑garde and 138; dance, in 157, 163–164, 173, 179, 184; Oulipo 127, 179; overlapping of categories 136; see also Perec, Georges Lukács, Georg 64 MacLane, Gretchen 150 Magné, Bernard 15 Mahaffay, Marni 146 Mahler, Barbara 85, 86–88, 90, 114 Malnig, Julie 17 Man Asleep, A [Homme qui dort, Un] (Perec novel and film) 42, 47–49, 51n10, 83, 95, 137, 166 Man, Play and Games [Les Jeux et les Hommes] (Caillois) 122 Mangolte, Babette 164–166; What Maisie Knew (1975 film) 166 Manheim, Kate 164, 166 Mannequin Dance (Gordon) 148 Maracci, Carmelita 187 Marcenac, Bruno 15 Margolin, Deb 64; “Count the I’s, or, the Autobiographical Nature of Everything” 64 Marlowe, Alan 150 Marsicano, Merle 150 Martin, Agnes 173–174 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 180–181 Mathews, Harry 7, 15, 34, 121, 172 Matter Overture, The (Gordon) 161 Mauss, Marcel 18, 49, 83, 96, 98; Techniques of the Body 49 Mauss, Nick 17 Maxfield, Richard 150 McCall, Anthony 173 McCosker, Anthony 71 McDowell, John Herbert 146, 148, 149, 150 McKayle, Donald 12; Blood Memories 12 McLane, Gretchen 146 Meinwärts [Meanwhile] (Hoghe) 182 Melville, Herman 139n27 memory 11–12, 31, 37, 44, 48, 81, 83–84, 104, 106, 107; body as site of 11, 176, 177; collective 159; community 109; dance and 23, 80, 101, 111, 172, 175; embodied 9, 11; explicit 176; forms of 2; implicit

176; repression 41, 135, 176; revision and 112; studies 16; see also autobiography Merce Cunningham Dance Company 20, 58, 178, 180; see also Cunningham, Merce Merleau‑Ponty, Maurice 18, 67, 176 Messina, Antonello da 101, 177; see also Portrait of a Man (Perec) Mickey Mouse 45 Miller, Tim 187 Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (ed. Battcock) 152 Modiano, Patrick 24n15, 47 Molteni, Patrizia 15 Mondrian, Piet 126 Monk, Meredith 149 Monk, Thelonious 42 Moody, Howard 147 Morris, Robert 149, 156, 160, 165 Mortley, Kaye 15 Motte, Warren F. 7, 15, 33, 45, 121, 125, 130, 133–134, 137; “Georges Perec and the Broken Book” 133; “Work of Mourning, The” 133 Mulvey, Laura 173 Museum of Modern Art 162, 185 mutability, body/space 113 Napias, Jean‑Christophe 93 Narváez, Rafael 11 New Materialism 16, 17, 20–21, 124 New School for Social Research 145 New York Times, The 150 9/11 114–115 No Manifesto (Rainer) 153 “Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk” (Perec) 49–50 Nouvelle Revue française (literary publication) 42 O’Connor, Tere 20 O’Hara, Frank 150 Okpokwasili, Okwui 186 Oliveros, Pauline 120 Olney, James 51n18 Olsen, Andrea 17, 91, 104 Once or Twice a Week I Put on Sneakers to Go Uptown (Herko) 148 “On the Difficulty of Imagining a Good Life” (Perec) 71 Ontological Hysteric Theater 166 Ørum, Tania 21, 68

Index 201 Otake, Eiko 109–110; Body in Places, A 110 Oulipo 2, 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, 32–33, 34, 44, 120–123, 138, 144, 190; chance operations 124–127; compositional approaches 7, 8, 21, 23, 33, 121, 122, 145; constraints and practice 131–133; history and membership 7–8; ludus 120–122, 127, 136, 179; models 129–131; Perec, Georges, in relation to 133–134, 144; quotidianism 127–129 Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle [Workshop for Potential Literature] see Oulipo Paik, Nam June 75n12 palindrome 19, 133 Passloff, Aileen 149, 150, 151 Past/FORWARD (Baryshnikov, White Oak) 161 pataphysics 129, 139n12 Pavlik, Carolyn 18 Paxton, Steve 7, 17, 58, 90, 103, 146, 147, 148, 149, 161, 162, 165, 187; Satisfyin Lover 161–162; Transit 148; see also Contact Improvisation; Grand Union Perec, Georges; “Approaches to What?” 56–57, 60, 81, 128; Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, An [Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien] 61–63, 135, 154; autobiographical writing 2–3, 14–15, 22, 33–35, 46–49, 58, 68–70, 101, 133 (see also individual works); “Backtracking” 68, 137 (see also psychoanalysis); biography 2–3, 15, 30–31, 36–43 (see also Bellos, David); bodies in space and time, on 8–9, 49–50, 55–56, 101; Boutique Obscure, La 68, 135, 144, 162; compositional approaches 2, 8, 10, 15, 18, 19, 23, 33, 34, 56, 57, 64, 70, 74, 81, 97, 121, 132–133, 134–138, 145, 158–164; dance, reflected in work of 3–4, 21, 44–46, 158–164, 172–173; dreams, in work of 68–70 (see also Boutique Obscure, La); education 41; Ellis Island Revisited: Tales of Vagrancy and Hope [Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir] (1980

film, with Bober) 30, 42, 51n10, 190; “Ellis Island: Description of a Project” 30–31, 39; embodiment in work of 9–10, 104–106; Exeter Text, The [Les Revenentes] 19, 178; exhaustion of observation 61–63; family name, derivation 39; film and 30, 42–43, 162, 164–166, 190; four fields of “systematic versatility” 134–136, 158–164, 184; French nationality 39; interaction between artist and respondent 18–19; intimate relationships 42–43; I Remember [Je me souviens] 135, 154, 162; “I Remember Malet & Isaac” 71; Jewish identity 2, 3, 10, 13, 15–16, 22, 30–31, 36–41, 36–41, 70, 132; language play 32–33, 34; Life A User’s Manual [La Vie mode d’emploi] 1, 2, 3, 42, 121, 136–138, 157, 160; lists, use of 2, 10, 47, 49, 55–56, 60, 62, 69–74, 95, 100, 105– 106, 111, 113–114, 134, 153, 174, 180; literary prizes 3, 42; ludus 2, 15, 36, 56, 64, 70, 71, 136, 159, 160, 176, 179; Man Asleep, A [Homme qui dort, Un] (novel and film) 42, 47–49, 51n10, 83, 95, 137, 166; military service 41; “Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk” 49–50; observation, in the work of 59–63; “On the Difficulty of Imagining a Good Life” 71; Oulipo, in relation to 133–134, 144; parentage 37–39; Places [Lieux] 37, 60, 112; Portrait of a Man [Le Condottière] 101, 136, 139n27, 177 (see also Messina, Antonello da); quotidian, in the work of 56–61, 65–66; “radical fractures” 22, 30–32, 33; “Reading: A Socio‑physiological Outline” 49, 65; Scene of a Flight [Lieux d’une fugue, Les] (film) 162, 166; scientific archivist, profession as 42, 73, 76n15, 122; space in work of 105–106, 111–114; Species of Spaces and Other Pieces [Espèces d’espaces] 1, 57, 59, 73, 94, 105–107, 111, 113–114, 135, 180; “Statement of Intent” [“Notes sur ce que je cherche”] 33, 134–135, 137, 158; Things [Les Choses] 3, 42, 93, 95, 100, 154, 180; “Three Bedrooms Remembered” 72;

202  Index “Twelve Sidelong Glances” 72; Void, A [La Disparition] 18–19, 32, 33, 45, 69, 121, 130, 132, 179; W or the Memory of Childhood [W ou le souvenir d’enfance] 33–35, 39, 40, 44, 45, 60, 112, 133, 135, 136, 162, 176–177 Perez, Rudy 149 Performance (Rainer) 165 Performing Arts Journal 175 Perron, Wendy 188 Petras, Paulette 42 Pettinger, Alasdair 62, 66 Phelan, Peggy 173 Phillips, Richard 16, 104 Pillow Book, The (Shônagon) 72 Places [Lieux] (Perec) 37, 60, 112 Pollock, Jackson 126 Portrait of a Man [Le Condottière] (Perec) 101, 136, 177; see also Messina, Antonello da Prima, Diane di 148, 149, 150 Production of Space, The (Lefebvre) 95–96 proprioception 58, 82, 100 Proust, Marcel 47 psychoanalysis 68, 137; see also “Backtracking” (Perec) “Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A, A” (Rainer) 152–155 Queneau, Raymond 7, 121, 125–126, 129–131, 130–131, 135, 157; Exercises in Style [Exercices de Style] 130; Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, A [Cent mille millards de poèmes] 130, 157 Queysanne, Bernard 42, 47; see also Man Asleep, A Quiet Corners of Paris (Napias) 93 quotidian, the 66–68; see also dance; Perec, Georges quotidianism 159 Rainer, Yvonne 7, 17, 61, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152–155, 156–157, 161, 165, 173, 183, 185; Dance for 3 People and 6 Arms 148; Inner Appearances 165; Lives of Performers 165; No Manifesto 153; Performance 165; “Quasi Survey

of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A, A” 152–155; Three Satie Spoons 165; Trio A 61, 155, 162, 165, 173; We Shall Run 161, 185; see also Grand Union Ram Dass (né Richard Alpert) 66 Rauschenberg, Robert 147, 160 “Reading: A Socio‑physiological Outline” (Perec) 49, 65 Renzi, Marta 188 Rethorst, Susan 17, 20, 103, 185–186 Rise (Hay) 61, 160 Rogoff, Tamar 108–109; Ivye Project, The 108 Rope Dance (Gross) 163 Rothlein, Arlene 147 Roubaud, Jacques 7, 15, 69, 121 RSVP Cycles, The: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (Halprin, Halprin) 123–124, 155–156 Sagers, Mark 148 Salzer, Heike 55, 63 Sanders, Ed 116n28; see also Fugs, the; Kupferberg, Tuli San Francisco Dancers Workshop 155, 157; see also Halprin, Anna; Halprin, Lawrence Sarach, Marian 150 Sarah Lawrence College 149 Satie, Erik 148 Satisfyin Lover (Paxton) 161–162 Saul, Peter 85 Scene of a Flight [Lieux d’une fugue, Les] (Perec film) 162, 166 Schjeldahl, Peter 167n23 Schlichter, Joseph 146 Schmidt, Albert‑Marie 130 Schmidt, Josef 182 Schneemann, Carolee 160, 173; “Interior Scroll” 173 Schumann, Peter 147 Schwartz, Paul 15 Schwitters, Kurt 152 score‑based composition 122–124, 152 Scothorn, Carol 146, 149 Scratch That (Gamso) 188 Sennett, Richard 17 Sentient Archive, The: Bodies, Performance, and Memory (ed. Caruso Haviland, Bissell) 12, 176 Serra, Richard 74, 190

Index 203 Setterfield, Valda 146, 150, 163, 165 Shawn, Ted 116n13 Shenton, Pete 177 Shick, Vicky 85–86, 90, 186 Shkolovsky, Viktor 75n5, 167n33; see also defamiliarization Shônagon, Sei 72; Pillow Book, The 72 Situationism 21, 94 Sklar, Deidre 97; “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance” 97 Skymap (Brown) 107–108 Smith, Phil 94 Solnit, Rebecca 94 Sontag, Susan 157 space 23; embodiment in 96, 99–100, 103–104; reassurance, as 113–114 Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Perec) 1, 57, 59, 94, 105–107, 111, 113–114, 135, 180; “Apartment Building, The” (chapter) 111–112, 159–160; “Apartment, The” (chapter) 73–74, 111–112; “Street, The” (chapter) 57–61, 62, 94, 190 “Species of Spaces: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Georges Perec” (2014 conference) 1, 55, 65 spectatorship 100, 101, 110, 111, 149, 153, 154, 160–161, 162, 164 Squire, Daniel 178–179; These Then Were the Perverse—Perverse’s the Werd 178 “Statement of Intent” [“Notes sur ce que je cherche”] (Perec) 33, 134–135, 137, 158 “Statement on Intermedia” (Higgins) 128 St. Denis, Ruth 116n13 Stein, Gertrude 152 Steinberg, Saul 160 Steinman, Louise 17, 100, 189 Stewart, Kathleen 18, 97 Stiles, Kristine 128 Stone, Dan 15 Street Dance (Childs) 161 “Street, The” (Species of Spaces chapter) 57–61, 62, 94, 190 Structuralism 125 Suite by Chance (Dunn) 149 Sulcas, Roslyn 182 Summers, Elaine 147, 148; Daily Wake, The 149 Surrealism 122, 125, 129, 131, 139n15

Tanztheater Wuppertal 182 Taoism 146 Taylor, Paul 150 Techniques of the Body (Mauss) 49 Terry, Philip 135 These Then Were the Perverse— Perverse’s the Werd (Squire) 178 Things [Les Choses] (Perec) 3, 42, 93, 95, 100, 135, 154, 180 This Is (Doughty) 177–178 Thoreau, Henry David 181 “Three Bedrooms Imagined” (Perec) 72 Three Satie Spoons (Rainer) 165 Todd, Mabel Elsworth 115n11 Transcendental Meditation 66 Transit (Paxton) 148 Trio A (Rainer) 61, 155, 162, 165, 173 Tuan, Yi‑Fu 18, 97 Tudor, David 124 Tufnell, Miranda 17, 103 “Twelve Sidelong Glances” (Perec) 72 Tzara, Tristan 148 Van Der Kolk, Bessel 12 Van Dijck, José 11, 51n17 Vaughan, David 147, 150, 151 Video Clap (Gamso) 188 Video Veil (Gamso) 189 Vie mode d’emploi, La (Perec) see Life A User’s Manual (Perec) Village Voice 150 Vimeo 104 Void, A [La Disparition] (Perec) 18–19, 32, 33, 45, 69, 121, 130, 132, 179 Warhol, Andy 172 Waring, James 5, 89, 131, 146, 149, 150–152, 157, 180, 187; Impossible/ Improbable 157 Water Walk [revision of Water Music] (Cage) 139n10 Weis, Cathy 184 We Shall Run (Rainer) 161, 185 What is Dance? (Cohen, Copeland) 20 What Maisie Knew (Mangolte film) 166 White Oak Dance Project 161; Past/ FORWARD (with Baryshnikov) 161 White, Hayden 71 Whitney Museum of American Art 107–108 Wilken, Rowan 16, 71 Winckler, Gaspard 136 “Work of Mourning, The” (Motte) 133

204  Index Workshop for Potential Literature see Oulipo W or the Memory of Childhood [W ou le souvenir d’enfance] (Perec) 33–35, 39, 40, 44, 45, 60, 112, 133, 135, 136, 162, 176–177 Wright, Frank Lloyd 181

Young, La Monte 150, 156 Zard, Philippe 31 Zen Buddhism 36, 66, 125, 146; see also Buddhism Zen of Therapy, The (Epstein) 67