Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language: Thinking in Micromovement 3031302966, 9783031302961

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NEW WORLD CHOREOGRAPHIES

Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language Thinking in Micromovement

m eg a n v. n ic e ly

New World Choreographies Series Editors

Rachel Fensham School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne Parkville, Australia Kate Elswit The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama London, UK

This award-winning series presents studies of choreographic projects embedded in the intermedial and transcultural circulation of dance. Through advanced yet accessible scholarship, it introduces the artists, practices, platforms, and scholars who are rethinking what constitutes movement, and in the process, blurring boundaries between dance, theatre and performance. Engaged with the aesthetics and contexts of global production and presentation, this book series invites discussion of the multi-sensory, collaborative, and transformative potential of these new world choreographies.

Megan V. Nicely

Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language Thinking in Micromovement

Megan V. Nicely University of San Francisco San Francisco, CA, USA

ISSN 2730-9266     ISSN 2730-9274 (electronic) New World Choreographies ISBN 978-3-031-30295-4    ISBN 978-3-031-30296-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30296-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For my parents: Cynthia, Tom, and Jeanne

Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude to the artist-teachers who have shared their concepts, methods, energy, and wisdom with me: Trisha Brown, Kasai Akira, Deborah Hay, as well as Shelley Senter, Vicky Shick, Juliette Mapp, Yoshioka Yumiko, Endo Tadashi, Kan Katsura, Osanai Mari, Brechin Flournoy, Ann Rodiger, and many others. My life as a dance artist, writer, and teacher are fundamentally shaped by your work and its legacies. I am also indebted to the scholars and philosophers whose creative thinking graces these pages and has informed my own in mind and body. I am grateful for the opportunity this book has provided to think, feel, and share my experiences and insights in relation to those of others. Special thanks to Palgrave New World Choreographies series editors Rachel Fensham and Kate Elswit for believing in the project and guiding it into reality. Further appreciation goes to the staff at Palgrave/Springer Nature for answering my many questions, both large and small, as a first-­time book writer. Gratitude to the photographers, archivists, and performers who engaged in sometimes lengthy correspondence toward obtaining permissions and details for the book images. In particular I thank Bruce Baird, Anne Boissonnault, Diana Edkins, and Ximena Garnica. I also thank Japanese language translators for invaluable assistance with correspondence, interviews, and key texts: Bruce Baird, Ishimoto Kae, and Keating Atsuko. I could not have completed the book without the help of many readers, editors, colleagues, and friends, who patiently listened, offered suggestions, shared perspectives, and graciously provided both professional and vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

personal support throughout this project’s journey. Heartfelt thanks to editor Mariellen Sandford, whose fortitude and skill helped untangle and clarify my ideas. Thanks also to Gelsey Bell, Ludmila Cantamissa, Shoshana Green, Michelle LaVigne, Kendo Michael Moscoso, Selby Schwartz, Phoebe Sandford, and the anonymous peer reviewers for reading and rereading early articles and drafts. This book began as my PhD dissertation in the Department of Performance Studies at New  York University. The professors, graduate student colleagues, and team at TDR, where I was managing editor, engaged me in a lively performance-focused community that continues to inspire. I am indebted to dissertation advisor André Lepecki and his work on the relationship between dance and philosophy, which has influenced how I approach relating theories to movement practices. I also thank committee members Barbara Browning, Karen Shimakawa, Katherine Mezur, and the late Randy Martin for valuing and validating my embodied knowledge, interests, and modes of inquiry and for providing feedback on the earlier version of these ideas. I had the opportunity to workshop parts of the book at numerous conferences and gatherings. Thanks in particular to the butoh scholar-­ practitioner cohort: Bruce Baird, Tanya Calamoneri, Rosemary Candelario, Zack Fuller, Katherine Mezur, and Michael Sakamoto for sharing enthusiasm and insights on your own research, which helped me develop my own butoh-based scholarship; also to those I have spoken with as a participant in Deborah Hay’s SPCP and in studies of Trisha Brown’s repertory. I am especially grateful to the University of San Francisco College of Arts and Sciences, who generously supported this research through their faculty development fund and a one-year NEH Chair position (2019–2020). Invaluable space and time, as well as other resources, helped me deepen lines of inquiry and share them with others. This ongoing support allowed me to sustain the project over time toward the manuscript’s development and completion. Finally, I recognize just some of the many educational centers and arts organizations, and those who teach, direct, and contribute their efforts to running them so that they can continue to offer classes, performances, and opportunities for the study of movement: Movement Research, CAVE, Danspace Project, Independent Dance, DOCK 11, Balance Arts Center, ODC School, the San Francisco and New York Butoh Festivals, and many others. May we continue to learn by moving and move our learning as a lifelong practice.

Praise for Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language “Impeccably crafted. Nicely articulates the ways in which language manifests in sensation and movement. She asks important and nuanced questions about presence and awareness of ourselves and others in changing spaces and relationships, separated by Covid, ignited by social protest. An invaluable text to gain philosophical currency for sensate experience, offering exciting new formulations for dance studies.” —Tanya Calamoneri, Assistant Professor of Dance, the Ohio State University, author of Butoh America: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the Early 2000s “In Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language, Nicely investigates the use of language in dance practice by considering the somatics of micromovement in three phases—vibration, interval, and adaptation. Nicely’s ingenious move, after Deleuze, is to give language a body on the dance floor. Language, reconfigured as a source of sensation, becomes a critical analytic tool for Nicely to think through dance works past and present, contributing to performance studies’ ongoing inquiry into how speech acts.” —Melinda Buckwalter, Managing Director, Five College Dance, author of Composing while Dancing: An Improviser’s Companion

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 The Micropolitics of Micromovement 19 3 Interval: Trisha Brown and the Space Between Words 39 4 Vibration: Kasai Akira and Voice Power 83 5 Adaptation: Deborah Hay and “Call It That”127 6 Language as Agent: Doing and Allowing169 7 Movement’s Return: Sensations in Context205 Index239

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About the Author

Megan  V.  Nicely  is an artist/scholar whose research involves choreographic experimentation through the medium of the body. She combines critical dance and performance studies theory and philosophy with physical practice in release-­based dance, Japanese butoh, and somatics. Nicely is Associate Professor of Performing Arts and Social Justice/Dance at University of San Francisco. She has published in TDR, Choreographic Practices, Performance Research Journal, and others; her company Megan Nicely/Dance has performed on both U.S. coasts, in the UK, and in Europe.

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List of Figures

Cover

From left: Marýa Wethers, Shelley Senter, Adrienne Truscott, and Malcolm Low in Deborah Hay’s ten (1968), Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, MoMA, New York, NY, 2018. (Photo: Paula Court, courtesy of MoMA)

Fig. 3.1

Trisha Brown, Untitled (Locus), 1975. (Photo: Estate of Trisha Brown, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York) 40 Trisha Brown in Accumulation with Talking Plus Watermotor, dir. Jonathan Demme, Soho, New York City, 1986. (Photo: Film still, courtesy of the Trisha Brown Archives) 58 Jamie Scott teaching a Trisha Brown Dance Company master class during the BAM Spring Education and Humanities Series, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY, 2016. (Photo: Beowulf Sheehan, courtesy of BAM Hamm Archives) 70 Kasai Akira in My Own Apocalypse, Shonandai Cultural Center, Fujisawa, Japan, 1995. (Photo: Kamiyama Teijirô, courtesy of Ikeda Hayato and Minami Shôkichi) 86 Kasai Akira teaching a New York Butoh Kan Training Initiative, CAVE (home of LEIMAY), Brooklyn, NY, 2011. (Photo: Shige Moriya, courtesy of LEIMAY) 92 Choreography notes from Kasai Akira’s Exusiai taken by performer Megan Nicely, 1998. (Photo: courtesy of Megan Nicely)111 Cover of Art and Life score by Deborah Hay, 2010. (Photo: Megan Nicely, courtesy of Deborah Hay) 131

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 5.1

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3

From left: Jana Jevtović, Gregor Kamnikar, Deborah Hay, Ella Jane Romero, Jan Rozman, and Dejan Srhoj, Deborah Hay NOMAD residency, Ljubljana, Slovenia, June 2022. (Photo: Sunčan Stone) 141 From left: Vera Nevanlinna, Amelia Reeber, and Jeanine Durning in Deborah Hay’s If I Sing To You, Springdance (rehearsal view), Huis aan de Werf, Utrecht, the Netherlands, April 15, 2008. (Photo: Anna van Kooij) 156 Jeanine Durning in inging, American Realness Festival, Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY, 2013. (Photo: Ian Douglas) 213 From left: Derek DiMartini, Asahara Masanori, and Mar Galeano in LEIMAY Ensemble’s Frantic Beauty, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY, 2017. (Photo: Jeremy Tressler, courtesy of LEIMAY, Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya)221 Peiling Kao in per[mute]ing, Hope Mohr Dance Bridge Project Ten Artists Respond to “Locus,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, San Francisco, CA, 2016. (Photo: Margo Moritz)225

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Arriving comfortably to the floor, I lie on my back, arms and legs outstretched. I listen to the verbal guidance of the teacher as the warmup begins. Sensing my weight on the floor, I notice the feedback of tangible contact. The teacher’s voice guides the class through anatomical references such as noting how the ball of the femur head moves in the socket as the leg rotates inward and outward. We are instructed to place one foot at a time on the floor in parallel, hip distance apart, knees bent. I am aware of how the back of my body now contacts the floor’s surface in a different manner—more weighted, and seemingly with a larger surface area. Further leg rotations and cross-body movements ensue. I track the teacher’s words as they guide us to cross the right foot over the left leg and, leading with the toes, sequentially follow the direction of the foot to roll onto the stomach, observing how the body coordinates the process with minimal muscular effort and deep cross-lateral connectivity. Then we are asked to reverse the pathway, starting with the foot leading behind—and again take stock of what happens and where the diagonal pathway might be broken or less fluid as we return to our backs. We’re then guided to stretch our legs long and perform “heel rocks,” stabilizing the heels on the floor and using this anchor point to initiate motion through the spine. I allow the rest of my body to relax and follow this gentle motion. We then roll to our

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. V. Nicely, Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30296-1_1

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stomachs and press up to all fours. Moving the pelvis toward the ceiling and walking the hands back to the feet, we gradually make our way up to standing. This is one experience I have had that is typical of Western contemporary technique classes that take a “release-based” approach to alignment and pedagogy.1 I find myself again on the floor. This time, a different teacher asks the class to imagine our bodies as sacs filled with water. Absent of bones or muscles, this container has a membrane that holds the water as it moves inside. As the liquid shifts, and air rises to the top of the container that is my body, I follow, allowing one side to get heavier and the other lighter. The water is warm and calm, but at times it can also splash out, leaving trails of droplets behind. The teacher gives the general form for this exploration, then guides us in experiencing its content. The movement flow is ongoing, eventually bringing my body up to standing and then back down to the ground to roll over one shoulder, only to repeat this undulating pattern again and again until the water moves smoothly without interruption. Gravity, imagination, breath, and sensation are key aspects of this work, and the teacher’s voice encourages these as fluid qualities. The instructions do not relay actions to perform or images to represent. Instead, the instructions offer images that invoke qualities my body and the bodies of those around me explore by continually shifting speed, tone, and form. I track these transformations through attention to minute areas of my body, refining my sensorial experience in order to more completely participate in the flow. This exercise is like many I have experienced in “butoh-based” training classes in various Western locations.2 These two studio examples demonstrate some of the ways spoken language—not music—connects to bodies in dance studios. The first, based on classes I have taken for many years at Movement Research in New York City, exemplifies how more anatomically based directive language framed in the somatically oriented postmodern dance lineage invokes movement in the willing body. The second exercise is a warmup that draws on Noguchi Taiso, a physical training system developed by Noguchi Michizo in the mid-twentieth century as a means of finding more easeful movement and is often used in butoh training. This book is about dance’s relationship to language. Specifically, it is about how dance bodies work with the micromovements elicited by language’s affective forces, and the micropolitics of the thought-­sensations

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that arise.3 It asks about the ways dance movement and words accompany one another as they travel with and through bodies. Sometimes they work together to elucidate a situation; at other times they act in contradiction, each vying for primacy as evident truth.4 This book is about the impossibility of reconciling movement language with spoken words and written text, and the artfulness of approaching this impossibility as a creative act without moving toward a singular resolution—or any resolution at all. It is about relations between thought and action, intellect and sensation, individual and group, materials and environments, time and space, human and more- or other-than-human, technique and choreography, pedagogy and transmission. It is about expanding the capacity of dance to include language, not as a privileged voice that dominates movement knowledge in a field that values somatic, nonverbal wisdom, but rather as something kinetic and kinesthetic whose affective forces can give dancers new ways of perceiving sensations, organizing them into lines of thought, and choreographing with that thought to open themselves to unexpected outcomes, even within planned movement sequences. This book is about the choreographic thinking that takes place when language is considered a primary element in creating the sensorium. The phrase “choreographic thinking” originally referred to projects of two ballet choreographers, William Forsythe and Wayne McGregor, who independently worked with dancer-turned-researcher Scott deLahunta in the early 2000s in the UK.5 The projects used digital technologies to make explicit the more implicit ways dancers use their operative logics to make decisions within choreographic structures. The term denoted how dancers think in ways that differ from people in their day-to-day organization of movement and habitual tasks. The software and motion capture platforms that developed out of these experiments evidenced how, given certain prompts and parameters, dancers make decisions actionable.6 What these earlier projects offered, and the term “choreographic thinking” captures, is that certain tools can reveal refined and highly skilled thought processes that can then be further trained and developed. I suggest throughout this book that uncovering how to notice and work with different kinds of sensations arising from a body’s encounter with language sparks this kind of thinking. My premise for this book is that language is felt, both when uttered and when unspoken. Language as a bodily event motivates movement by imparting forces that stimulate the nervous systems of other bodies and surrounding environments, yielding any number of responses in those

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bodies and environments. Language and its affective forces are already in the world of dancing bodies: they are present in studio technique, somatic education, creative processes, rehearsals, dramaturgy, performances, research, and criticism. In forms like scores, verbal prompts, cues, dancer notes, words spoken during performance, post-show talkbacks, archival materials, and written scholarship, language is a choreographic and performance tool that serves to elucidate and initiate sensorial experiences and transmit them to others so that they can be shared. Understanding language affectively in this way—framing language’s affective qualities within particular structures so that they become forces, and observing, questioning, and relating to these forces—leads this project to a somatics that enables the reorientation and re-understanding of how bodies think, sense, and move, both in the studio and possibly beyond. The principles and methods of somatics are more than just a body practice.7 Somatics is a theory for understanding change, which studies the interdependence of mind, body, and specific current social and political contexts. Beyond merely bringing one’s awareness to bodily sensations, somatics is how “personal, collective and social systems perpetuate themselves, can be opened and leveraged to transform, and can purposefully be moved toward radically new ways of being,” alongside new practices and structures (generative somatics 2011). Undeniably, words are not the same as bodily movements. Dance modes of expression are unique in that a movement experience for either a mover or a viewer cannot be fully replicated in speech or writing. The multiple nuances of an isolated movement sensation would take pages to articulate in written form, and would still be incomplete. Systems like Labanotation record movement shapes and timing, similar to music notation, yet no language for communicating movement’s generative sensations has yet been developed.8 When, without a shared language, speech or writing is used to explain, justify, or otherwise speak for dance and supplement dance experiences, tension arises from the lack of clarity and specificity. At the same time, movement phrases and gestures do carry linguistic elements like grammar and syntax similar to other language forms, and so dance is often referred to as its “own language,” with its own ways of thinking (Bannerman 2014; Brooks and Meglin 2015; Hanna 2001, 2015; Sheets-Johnstone 1981, 2005).9 While the field of linguistics is one means of gaining insight into language in relation to dance, situating dance as a language among a host of others does not provide points of direct conversation.

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Some have reframed the problem posed by the different ways language and movement convey meaning by asking how language might more actively engage dance topics and questions. Dance philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2005) called for “re-languaging” particular terms and their use in the field of dance in order to strive toward greater specificity of words and phrases.10 Dance scholar Valerie Preston-Dunlop (1995) compiled a resource of dance terminology that researchers and writers might draw on to increase connections across dance discourses. Dance historians Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot have advocated for a “dance-­ centered methodology” emerging from within dance activities, based in close observation, movement analysis, and positioning within historical trajectories. They asserted that this methodology is fluid enough to be applicable to all dance genres and supports developing the field in ways that applying theories from outside the field do not (2013: 5). However, all of these approaches continue to advance the differences between language and dance, rather than initiate a shared conversation at the level of sensation. Instead, in this book I reframe the question of how dance and language relate by asking what language forces do and allow within dance contexts: How does language act or perform? How do bodies in certain situations respond, react, or otherwise work with language’s forces? What tools do dancers need in order to become more aware of language’s forces? How do bodies simultaneously navigate internal and external stimuli incited by language without simply repeating habits? And how might new relationships with language—ones that arise within a specifically defined context like choreography or training—be developed and creatively advanced in that context? The core areas of linguistic study include the following: semantics, the study of meaning; syntax, the study of how words combine; and phonetics, the study of speech sounds. However, in this book I strive to re-­ understand language somatically and affectively. I approach language as an affective force that does not necessarily arise solely from human-centered will or desire, yet which human bodies nonetheless experience sensorily. In other words, language is understood as vibrant and vibratory; it circulates through and beyond human bodies but also materially impacts those bodies. Sensation in this case bridges the phenomenological and affective meanings of the word: sensation is the felt engagement that an individual bodymind experiences when integrating into an environment, and the

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transference of qualities that circulate beyond that bodymind to impact relations between bodies, things, and the environments they co-create. Philosopher José Gil articulates the kind of felt connection between language and dance that I advance in this book. He describes how two apparently unrelated elements like spoken words and movement gestures, made up of a series of micromovements, unite through their affective resonance when performed together in a particular environment. This happens because forces—understood by Gil as framed energies with directional intention—continually escape the boundaries of domains like social exchange (1998: x). When free-floating energies are framed in a new context, as when language forces are framed within studio training or choreographic processes, they are transformed and can be utilized for other purposes like dance (x). Energy is force that is not determined or coded; it is the intensive feature of force and its specificity as the motor of a mechanism or a process. […] Energy becomes a force inside a “field,” acquiring a vectorial aspect, undergoing cracks and fragmentations that are part and parcel of the individualization of force. Since there is force only for another force, it has to be admitted that in the process of the individualization of energy the tension between forces is already in play, or, in other words, opposing vectors are in conflict. (1998: 11–12)

Using the example of a solo dance by Steve Paxton that included talking, Gil observes: “the words ‘entered the dance’” (2000: 60). Framed by this context, language and movement are vectors or forces that relate without collapsing into one another. Instead, the micromovements (what Gil calls “microgestures”) of the two series, language and movement, overlap and slide over one another, interacting to create something new out of the forces that have escaped their original functions (in social exchange or codified dance techniques). Their relation creates a continuous circulation of energy; the two series come into contact, and, rather than converging, one series (the talking) “hangs on the other” (the movement), to become a dance element (59). In other words, by entering the choreography’s structural frame, “extra-dance factors” like the energies released by language become dance forces,11 and like other forces working on the body (such as gravity), they can be organized and directed. Following Gil, I use the word “force” to indicate when language’s affective qualities are framed within a given context like choreography or

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dance technique, allowing it to operate in new ways. Because I also see the social sphere as a framed context, and “energies” as a word that often stands in for an unspecified sensorial experience, I refrain from adopting Gil’s use of that term. Instead, I refer to “language’s affective qualities” as the vital experience of sensations before they are framed in a given context or linked to a particular individual. I also acknowledge that different vocabulary choices resonate with different language forms and their movement contexts. Language takes many forms—as words, sound, image, touch, and movement. Each of these various language forms instigates, organizes, and punctuates thought-lines through which sensations travel; each can be a choreographic tool and pedagogic method; and each suggests a unique relation to the human body worthy of study. My inquiry in this book concerns common language—language that is already present in the social world. I suggest that dancers can utilize this language to inspire innovative choreographic actions and experimental knowledge production if we attend more closely to how its affective forces, already framed in social situations, are then reframed within choreographic structures and learning situations. I further propose that even when words are not spoken, they still enter into dance pedagogies and choreographic contexts to act as dance forces with and on dance bodies, as investigated in the following chapters. My interest in the habitual, quotidian language of common speech and writing in the context of the dance studio, and the thinking processes they incite, is a step toward renegotiating the power dynamic between the written and spoken word and nonverbal dance movement. In highlighting recurring daily language use, I challenge the dominance of common language—language that can be informative, communicative, and poetic yet also at times oppressive, limiting, and manipulative. In shifting attention to common language’s affective relation to human bodies and environments, I follow cultural critic Michel de Certeau’s broader proposal in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). De Certeau proposes that in the hands of users who are not its makers, everyday tools like language can serve purposes, goals, and desires not intended by its makers—in my case, in the hands of dancers, teachers, choreographers, and their audiences. Even when not crafted by dance artists, when daily social language is directed toward the goal of dance and framed in this context, words and their vocalization can become important tools for creating unique modes of movement attention and sensorial experiences through the micromovements they activate.

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Just as there are many language forms, there are also many ways to arrange and record linguistic elements. Lexicography, taxonomy, etymology, grammar, and vocabulary are just some systems for organizing and cataloging common language so as to study how meaning and communication happen. In contrast to these methods, I invoke “the choreographic” as a frame for the generation of new ideas and ways of arranging time and space.12 Choreographer Susan Rethorst’s notion of the “choreographic mind” captures the specificity of the body’s mind and the ability to think compositionally in this way. In her example of avoiding an oncoming car when crossing a busy street, a pedestrian body ascertains the space and time of the situation, and this somatic intelligence acts much quicker than the “cognitive, analytical, linguistic faculty that normally goes by the name of thought” (2012: 34–35). To think in this spatio-temporal way, even in less charged situations, is for Rethorst choreographic. A choreographic mind has “a kind of spatial emotional map of a situation, the emotional psychological reading of place, and of people in relation to that place and each other” (2012: xx). Rethorst calls this physical knowing “affect.” Rethorst perceives the choreographic mind mediating affective sensation through language. While she notes, “our reliance on words and the status of language overrule our body’s mind” (53),13 she recognizes that talking is a necessary component of understanding how her own choreographic mind functions. In her dance research, Rethorst found that speaking brought conscious awareness to assumptions she was unknowingly acting upon. By articulating through language aspects of relation, space, place, and empathy, she found she could then work with them. Rethorst’s narrative reveals that not only do we need tools to bring embodied thinking into conscious awareness, but that language can be a tool for doing so, so that what is unconscious becomes conscious knowledge, able to be studied, returned to the body with new insight, and built upon choreographically. My proposal for a felt sense of language is based on my experience as a performer, choreographer, scholar, and educator. My work includes both written scholarship on studio practices and live performance, and performed choreographies for the concert stage, smaller venues, and site-­ specific locations. The lineages I participate in are highly populated by language in many forms. They include on the one hand Western postmodern, release-based experiments with somatic influences, stemming from artists working on both U.S. coasts in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Anna Halprin, and many others,

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and on the other hand Japanese butoh, through the explorations of Hijikata Tatsumi, Ohno Kazuo, Kasai Akira, Yoshioka Yumiko, and others teaching in both Asian and Western contexts whose 1960s and 1970s explorations used an embodied approach to social action.14 For me, these various techniques, somatic practices, and choreographic approaches are opportunities to consider how language operates across concurrent but disparate aesthetic practices devised during the 1960s, and maturing in the 1990s and early 2000s. My experiences with those comprising the lineages of U.S. postmodern dance and Japanese butoh tells me that language can be a somatic tool for disrupting certain ways dancers learn to solidify experience in their training. Many from these two lines of inquiry favored environmental stimuli, chance, and an ability to navigate unpredictable situations—that is, thinking through action in the present moment by relating to elements in the environment rather than asserting individual will in order to control that environment. Including language in these situations then brought the social world and the thinking mind into play, expanding on many of the assumptions that humans hold about language in daily use, as well as in dance. My goal as an embodied researcher is to make the less evident relations between dance bodies and language explicit. In doing so, my aim is to examine how the kinds of sensations released by language can be recognized within the sensorium in ways that are socially and culturally relevant. Undeniably, language is deeply engrained in our bodies and histories. By revisiting certain 1960s dance experiments with language, following how these experiments were built upon by particular artists, and then looking at current works that participate in the conversations begun by these early postmodern and butoh artists, I not only assert language as an integral aspect of dance practice but also ask how its roles and functions have changed as certain techniques and practices from this earlier era are transmitted to new generations. I approach this project through descriptions of studio training practices, words that seek to capture particular sensations and theoretical concepts, and questions about what language does with and to bodies in dance contexts. I chronicle these deep dance knowledges within the practices of three seminal artists—Trisha Brown, Kasai Akira, and Deborah Hay—in order to expose particular language-body sensations that might be further explored by the reader in various circumstances. By drawing upon theories of the performative (a use of language that understands that language does more than its face value indicates) and somatic practices that

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use language to disrupt habitual thought-to-action pathways (allowing a body to have other movement choices), I question how language circulates both within and beyond human bodies. This research has been shaped by philosophies that decenter the human as the central point of reference, primarily those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; those that conceive expanded notions of space and time like Henri Bergson; and other more recent philosophies like those of Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Brian Massumi, and Erin Manning that are inspired to challenge how language moves alongside other elements in the social world. While white, often male voices do take space, I couple them with dancers and dance scholars who have been engaged with thinking through related corporeal discourses. These conversations continue to grow and develop. By opening an inquiry relating to language, I do not purport that dance practice, nor my particular and privileged position as a white cisgender dance artist, can adequately address facets of others’ lived experience. However, practicing in the studio with language methods presented by the artists included in this book sparked responses in my body that inspired unique modes of inquiry and physical action. The sensations that arose when language was an element in studio exercises activated my body to move in new ways, and perhaps this can work for others as well. As I spend more time entering dance with the intent to make space for language and notice the sensations sparked by encounters with it, I observe that my thinking becomes more focused and my bodily choices and actions more refined. My relations to others and my self-knowledge are clarified and opened to new courses of action when there is space for language’s affective forces to register in my body as micromovement.

Chapters Micromovement—an “ongoing kinesthetic” of small adjustments that bodies repeat, often unconsciously, in order to maintain composure—is a bodily politic that can be used to study the felt relation between a body and language. In “The Micropolitics of Micromovement,” I lay out the book’s main inquiries into this area of study: how dance bodies sense language that is unspoken; how dancers develop relations to language within choreographic structures; how language acts within those structures beyond human-centered goals or desires—as a force in its own right; how language at the same time maintains its common social use; and how, or

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even if, dance bodies can distinguish different kinds of language-based sensations as they arise, so as to think while in movement in new ways. The three examples of micromovement sensations explored in the case study chapters—the interval, vibration, and adaptation—are grounded in the spatio-temporal philosophy of Henri Bergson and further developed in work by more recent philosophers and scholars. These concepts inform the ongoing pedagogic transmission of the 1960s dance practices known as postmodern dance and butoh. In the score for her early dance Locus (1975), Trisha Brown refers to “the space between words” as a means of connecting various directives. In “Interval: Trisha Brown and the Space Between Words,” I align this space with the concept of the interval. For Brown, the interval is elemental to several aspects of her work: it refers to an educational approach, a way to connect or synch up with other dancers, and the transmission of knowledge through generations. Given her ambiguous relationship to language Brown might not characterize her work as language based, yet others have highlighted this aspect of it. I find the thought-lines she discovered in her early talking dances and score-writing integral to the development of her mature movement style. Key principles such as overlap, simultaneity, and “hanging out,” exemplified by the developmental processes of works such as Son of Gone Fishin’ (1981) and Set and Reset (1983), find their source in the interval. While all but absent in her later work, language initially allowed Brown to conceive and put into motion challenges for herself and her dancers. Scholarship on Brown links her work to visual art, but privileging sensation and moving away from the visual to instead focus on Brown’s work as a pedagogy founded on principles of the interval is critically important to understanding the impact of her legacy. “Vibration: Kasai Akira and Voice Power” delves into language vibration as a felt practice and a way of connecting across time periods and cultures. Butoh’s history, pedagogy, and circulation as a transnational practice have a far-ranging vibratory impact, which I anchor in the work of butoh artist Kasai Akira. Like Hijikata Tatsumi’s word-based choreographic method, which activated the bodies of his dancers, Kasai’s approach to dance likewise connects the body to language. However, Kasai’s approach relies not on manipulating language forms so much as releasing their vibratory power through sound. His unique aesthetic, at times contested as butoh, unsettles butoh narratives that identify Hijikata as founder. Drawing on principles from Kasai’s practice of “voice power,” analyses of My Own Apocalypse (1994) and Nobody’s Money (2011), and

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my role as a dancer in Exusiai (1998), I read Kasai’s work and training methods as efforts to rewrite butoh history and to critique today’s contemporary dance training. Understanding the relationship between Kasai’s and Hijikata’s use of language is critical to understanding the ways butoh is articulated and transmitted today, particularly within international contexts. As butoh continues to become better known and its methods incorporated into contemporary dance training and choreography, perspectives on the relation between bodies and language should enter the discourse and assumptions about the form and its history should be reconsidered. Choreographer Deborah Hay uses the word “adaptation” to refer to a dancer’s version of her choreography, which is taught through language practice. Her approach, which I examine in “Adaptation: Deborah Hay and ‘Call It That,’” mines the gap between what is named by language and how it is experienced in the body; the dancer is coached to find their adaptation using Hay’s language-based process. Words and physical movement for Hay are not the same, yet each is refined or adapted to approach the other. Captured in phrases like “call it that,” or in questions like “what if every cell in my body has the potential to get what it needs?”—which Hay uses as teaching tools—a somatics of direct encounter between bodies and language suggests there is more to literal words than we apprehend. Nuanced somatic adjustments are accomplished as dancers adapt to survive within a system, choreographic or otherwise. Meta-encounters between language and the body in Hay’s influential book My Body, the Buddhist (2000), her lecture-performance A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty (2002), and my adaptation of her solo Art and Life (2010) show how felt relations between bodies and language create productive ambiguities with material consequences. Hay is particularly interested in the agency of dance artists within the profession and society, and how dancers can advocate for their own experiences as the location of dance knowledge. Working between theory and practice to explore notions of body, language, and agency, in “Language as Agent: Doing and Allowing” I offer the variety of ways philosophers and artists have conceived language in relation to bodies and sensation, accompanied by movement examples drawn from my training. The chapter looks at language as both corporeal and incorporeal, as vital and alive, and as performative where the performative is not merely spoken but also felt and materialized. Focusing on the tension between doing and allowing—what I call a somatics of the performative—agency becomes a question for furthering the reader’s own choreographic experimentation. The chapter also journeys through a body’s

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relationship to labor, subjectivity, dance terminology, and economies of the dance landscape. Returning to the topic of micromovements in the context of the twenty-first-century global Covid-19 pandemic and racial reckoning, “Movement’s Return: Sensations in Context” also revisits the experimental work of the 1960s and 1970s to argue that language’s affective forces— registered in the felt micromovements I refer to as the interval, vibration, and adaptation—can play a vital role in today’s experimental dance landscape.15 Looking at a small handful of contemporary artists who may be seen to work within these lineages but whose work also significantly departs from them to forge unique relations between language and bodies, I reconsider the legacy of 1960s dance and the politics of its tenets. How do language’s sensations activate bodies and how do they come to mean differently today? Our current social, political, and environmental climate is one of increasing imbalance and uncertainty; we are similarly destabilized by the impact of all that we perceive through our dissipated senses and our equally dispersed and distracted attention. In this predicament, dance may have much to teach us about how to remain open to what is outside our knowledge base and to skillfully navigate—while moving—a precarious situation where resources, including language, are not owned but shared. Finding new relations between bodies, language, and sensation, and their accompanying micromovements, is a critical part of that process.

Notes 1. This generalized description is based on my training at Movement Research (New York) and various European and U.K. venues like Independent Dance (London) and DOCK 11 (Berlin). I use the term “release-based” to indicate the pedagogical method used in these dance technique classes; it is not the name of the technique itself. The pedagogy common in such classes considers anatomical alignment, efficient movement pathways, and forces like gravity, rebound, and momentum as motivations for movement, rather than muscular control. This approach is then integrated into dance training. I do link some release-based approaches to certain postmodern dance ideologies, but notably not all postmodern dance employs this approach, nor is a release-based approach solely a postmodern phenomenon. For a further discussion of the term “release” in relation to dance, see Chap. 6.

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2. I generalize this exercise based on workshops in both the US and Europe with teachers such as Yoshioka Yumiko, Takenouchi Atsushi, Semimaru of Sankai Juku, and particularly Osanai Mari, whose workshops are on Noguchi Taiso specifically. I adopt the term “butoh-based” rather than butoh to encompass a wider range of practices and artists, particularly those who are not Japanese and/or do not trace their lineage directly back to Hijikata’s ankoku butoh. 3. Brian Massumi, in the translator’s note for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, writes that affect/affection does not denote personal feeling: “L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include ‘mental’ or ideal bodies)” ([1980] 1987: xvi). 4. Martha Graham’s famous quote, “movement never lies” (1991: 4), along with other platitudes such as “the body says what words cannot” (Graham 1985), reinforces the notion of the body’s language as truth. 5. deLahunta’s research into the relation between embodied and machine-­ based knowledge forms, and the translation of contemporary choreographic practices into digital forms, developed through collaborations with Forsythe (Motion Bank), McGregor (Choreographic Language Agent), and other artists at numerous locations, including the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University, UK; the Institut Designlabor Gutenberg hosted by Hochschule Mainz University of Applied Sciences, Germany; the Dartington College of Arts, UK; and the Art Theory and Research and Art Practice and Development Research Group at Amsterdam School of the Arts, among others. McGregor’s research into creative cognition and software platforms also includes work with Professor David Kirsh at the University of California, San Diego. In addition to Motion Bank, Forsythe’s research into architecture and performance environments includes the computer application Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye ([1999] 2012) and installations at the Venice Biennale and numerous museums in the U.S., the UK, and Europe. 6. The visual, data-driven schemata materialized the ways in which dancers work temporally, spatially, and in relation to certain technical principles stored in their bodies. The theory of what came to be called “choreographic thinking” was furthered through subsequent writings and talks by deLahunta, Forsythe, and McGregor, and related terms like “dance

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thinking” have circulated as ways to advocate that dance is a field of knowledge, a position often contested in the academy (see deLahunta 2008, 2013; ­deLahunta et al. 2012; deLahunta in ECSS .tv 2013; Forsythe n.d., [1999] 2012; Manning 2008; McGregor n.d.; Portanova 2013). 7. For further discussion of the word “somatics” and critiques of its Euro-­ centric knowledge focus in relation to dance, see Drury (2022), George (2020), Fortin (2017), and Chap. 7. 8. Labanotation is Rudolf von Laban’s system for analyzing and recording movement. 9. Henrietta Bannerman further suggests of dance, broadly conceived, that passages of movement are more aptly described as performative utterances than grammatical sentences (2014: 71). While, like language, movement has vocabulary and syntax, in action it operates in a more abstract or loosely referential manner. Bannerman sees movement as a “virtual speech act,” and while she remains unconvinced that dance functions as a metalanguage, she does find it metakinetic—that is, able to comment on movement. 10. “Everyday speech rarely includes a fine-grained descriptive account of experience. […] Languaging experience takes reflective thought and effort beyond the easy flow of everyday speech” (Sheets-Johnstone 2005: 217). 11. For further discussion of how “extra-dance factors” become dance forces, see Massumi (2011: 142–45). 12. Contemporary choreographer Tere O’Connor explains that choreography is thinking: “You choreograph in the moment you’re in, ideas adhere to a dance and it becomes something, but you locate it through the process of choreographing” (in Kourlas 2007). Scholar Jenn Joy (2014) also poses the choreographic as not just a method for creating dances but as a means to activate theoretical inquiries and responses, a view I follow in this book by weaving together philosophy, performance and dance theory, and choreographic and pedagogic dance practices. The term “choreography” has also been theorized more recently as an organizing operation affecting social spaces, not just dance ones. See Susan Foster (2011) for a genealogy of the term’s changing definitions. 13. Rethorst also uses the term “bodymind” in her text, but she references BodyMind Centering, where each organ has its own mind or way of functioning; thus, “bodymind” can be singular but more accurately involves multiple modalities. 14. On names: for all Japanese artists I use the convention of Surname Given Name; this also applies to Japanese artists residing in Western locations. 15. I recognize that there are real-world problems inherent in this word choice. “Experimentation” and “innovation” describe aspects of movement practices in multiple cultures and contexts, including Black dance traditions,

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where methods of innovation differ significantly from those of 1960s postmodern concert dance experiments. White postmodern experimental ­performance is a particular kind of experimentation that has drawn from other cultural traditions, including those from Asia and the African diaspora, in service of their own interests and goals (see DeFrantz 2017, 2020; Munroe 2009). Further, as Lena Hammergren asks, while appropriation is a cultural exchange that works in multiple directions and transforms both sides, can embodied experiences of agency act as practices of resistance to cultural consumption within these frameworks of appropriation? (Hammergren 2020). While developed in Japan, Hijikata Tatsumi’s butoh was also created in dialog with Western European sources and similarly used them to his own purposes (see Baird 2012, 2022).

References Baird, Bruce. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2022. A History of Butô. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bales, Melanie, and Karen Eliot, eds. 2013. Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bannerman, Henrietta. 2014. Is Dance a Language? Movement, Meaning and Communication. Dance Research 32 (1): 65–80. Brooks, Lynn Matluck, and Joellen A.  Meglin. 2015. Language and Dance: Intersection and Divergence. Dance Chronicle 38 (2): 127–133. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Stephen Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. DeFrantz, Thomas F. 2017. I Am Black (You Have to Be Willing to Not Know). Theater 47 (2): 8–21. ———. 2020. The Future Has Always Been Black: A Dancing-Word Manifesto. Contact Quarterly 45 (1, Winter/Spring): 34–39. deLahunta, Scott. 2008, July. The Choreographic Language Agent. In Dance Dialogues: Conversations Across Cultures, Artforms and Practices. Accessed on Ausdance Website, 5 May 2020. https://ausdance.org.au/articles/details/ the-­choreographic-­language-­agent. ———. 2013. Publishing Choreographic Ideas: Discourses from Practice. In Share: Handbook for Artistic Research Education, ed. Mick Wilson and Schelte van Ruiten. ELIA: Amsterdam. deLahunta, S., Gill Clarke, and Phil Barnard. 2012. A Conversation About Choreographic Thinking Tools. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 3 (1–2): 243–259.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1980) 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Drury, Lindsey. 2022. What’s in a Name? Somatics and the Historical Revisionism of Thomas Hanna. Dance Research Journal 54 (1): 6–29. ECSS .tv. 2013. “CHOREOGRAPHIC THINKING TOOLS–Delahunta, S.” Accessed 5 May 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeDYFmxboMs. Forsythe, William. (1999) 2012. Improvisation Technologies. DVD.  Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. ———. n.d. Choreographic Objects. Accessed 5 May 2020. https://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/media/inside.php?p=essay. Fortin, Sylvie. 2017. Looking for Blind Spots in Somatics’ Evolving Pathways. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 9 (2): 145–157. Foster, Susan Leigh. 2011. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge. generative somatics. 2011. Why Somatics for Social Justice and a Transformative Movement? Accessed 22 April 2022. https://generativesomatics.org/wp-­ content/uploads/2019/10/WhySomaticsforSJ.pdf. George, Doran. 2020. The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training. Edited by Susan Leigh Foster. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gil, José. 1998. Metamorphoses of the Body. Translated by Stephen Muecke. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2000. The Dance, the Body, the Unconscious. Terrain 35: 57–74. Graham, Martha. 1985. Martha Graham Reflects on Her Art and a Life in Dance. New York Times, March 31. Accessed 12 August 2021. https://archive. nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/arts/033185graham.html. ———. 1991. Blood Memory: An Autobiography. New  York: Washington Square Press. Hammergren, Lena. 2020. A Contested Corporeality: Solidarity, Self-Fulfillment, and Transformation Through African-Derived Dancing. Dance Research Journal 52 (1): 7–19. Hanna, Judith Lynne. 2001. The Language of Dance. Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance 72 (4): 40–45. ———. 2015. Dancing to Learn: The Brain’s Cognition, Emotion, and Movement. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hay, Deborah. 2000. My Body, the Buddhist. Hanover, NH, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Joy, Jenn. 2014. The Choreographic. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kourlas, Gia. 2007. “Much Ado About Nothing”: Interview with Tere O’Connor. Time Out New York, April 12: 111.

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Manning, Erin. 2008. Propositions for the Verge: William Forsythe’s Choreographic Objects. In “Nexus,” Special Issue of INFLeXions 2 (December). Accessed 31 July 2022. http://www.inflexions.org/n2_Propositions-­Manning.pdf. Massumi, Brian. 2011. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. McGregor, Wayne. n.d. Choreographic Language Agent. Wayne McGregor Website. Accessed 12 January 2019. https://waynemcgregor.com/research/ choreographic-­language-­agent. Munroe, Alexandra, ed. 2009. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Portanova, Stamatia. 2013. Moving Without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Preston-Dunlop, Valerie. 1995. Dance Words. London: Routledge. Rethorst, Susan. 2012. A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings. Helsinki: Theatre Academy Helsinki. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1981. Thinking in Movement. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39 (4): 399–407. ———. 2005. What Are We Naming? In Body Image and Body Schema, ed. Helena De Preester and Veroniek Knockaert, 211–232. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 2

The Micropolitics of Micromovement

Micromovements—the small adjustments human bodies make to maintain continuity—are often imperceptible. They are nonetheless how sequencing happens and transformation occurs. Somatic educator and philosopher Elizabeth Behnke refers to micromovements as “ongoing kinesthetic holding patterns” (1997: 191). She understands them as types of “inner vectors or tendencies toward movement” that persist in the body, often unconsciously (181). Patterns of tension, bracing, trying, or what she calls “inadvertent isometrics,” such as outwardly complying but inwardly resisting, are present before a body goes into motion and can persist, even when a body is at rest. Culturally sourced and personally adapted, these “ghost gestures,” as she also calls them, actually make the body that we each operate within. Micromovements can be traced back to one’s training or past learning experiences, interactions with cultural artifacts like certain kinds of clothing, or social expectations linked to gender norms or racial stereotypes, and are often a layering of several factors (188–91). Behnke draws on phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s distinction between two kinds of “mine-ness”: possession, where the body is considered a thing from which humans distance themselves to assess sensation; and action, which considers the body as an ongoing process.1 The latter perspective, says Behnke, allows micromovements to be inhabited. This is a question of “tone,” when sensation is experienced from inside

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(1997: 183–84). Inhabiting this ongoing “making” of a body involves continual dialog with learned responses, culturally based assumptions, and one’s inner self-talk. By questioning what we know about our bodies in motion and inhabiting micromovements rather than inhibiting them, we can alter our movement patterns rather than merely reproduce them. This process in turn eventually alters our body’s structure, and by changing the kinesthetic tone of this structure and the relationships between body parts, a body’s relationships with other people and situations also change. Inhabiting micromovements is not just an individual act, it also impacts a larger politics: altering the patterns of immediate local relations between one’s body parts (i.e., the head and neck) changes how one relates to other proximal bodies, and to larger circumstances and how they unfold. Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s affective philosophy advances a similar view ([1980] 1987). What they term “micropolitics” opposes the kind of rigid power structures whose top-down organization and static principles they saw in government and capitalist society at the time of the Paris 1968 student uprisings. They instead advance using a molecular lens to view social change, where relations take place at a close-up grassroots level. In their self-organizing model, mobilized through micromovements, bodies are processes or open systems where relations happen in multiple directions, horizontally rather than vertically. While Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics also activates power at the level of individual bodies and local situations ([1975] 1995), his outlook differs from that of Deleuze and Guattari in its tendency to focus on how patterns that appear to be personal choices actually reinforce larger societal regulations and belief systems. However, the approaches of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Foucault, should be considered within a broader conversation. Humans are neither wholly independent of the social and cultural structures in which they live nor fully predetermined by those structures and their rules of operation. Instead, bodies and actions are realized through micromovements, which form an ongoing “kinesthetic consciousness” (Behnke 1997: 198). A body is neither strictly the author of their movement style nor victim to predetermined cultural and societal forces, or prior dance techniques. Instead, as Behnke suggests, bodies are something we do (198). By inhabiting micromovements as a research process that questions how sensations are sequenced, and how larger movement decisions and actions take effect, a dance body can start to challenge not just the tacit choreography of everyday life but also the kinds of movements and kinesthetic sensations used to create dance works.

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The politics of micromovement for dance, as this book will show, lies in the synthesis of successive decisions, actions, and sensations, whether arrived at consciously or unconsciously. Micromovement is a subversive kinesthetic that slips through cracks in a human adult’s imagined coherent presentation of self (see Goffman 1959). In dance contexts, the politics of micromovement calls into question how sensations are both individually experienced and collectively advanced. Regarding micromovements induced by language, whether in the studio or in the social world, we continually adjust our bodies to language forces, accommodating how they act upon us or actively interrupting those forces, or some combination. This book builds on tensions between individual performances and collective performances, between the studio and the social spheres, by looking at micromovements and how they work choreographically. Micromovements can arrive in the course of spoken conversation or at the level of thought. They happen in learned bodily mechanics and phrasing, such as reaching for an object and bringing it to you, the sequential steps of walking, and responses to common questions like “how are you?”— which change in quality depending on whether the object or destination is desired or not, and whether you are actually okay or not. In any case, subtle decisions and micro-adjustments comprise the somatics of how bodies perform in the world. Language can become a point of departure for artistic practice when understood to incite micromovements that manifest in a kind of presence. Dance scholar and philosopher Christine Greiner addresses this “self” in what she refers to as “interface micromovements”: “movements that are organized in the passage between the inside and outside of the body” and can be visually apprehended (2021: 73). She poses that bodily presence in the world is “the externalization of a thought that comes from interface micromovements,” where thought is recognized when the body’s internally composed “kinetic melody” meets the gaze of another (76). At the spatial and temporal moments when micromovements become organized and begin to make themselves known but are not yet fully actualized, they pose possibilities for movement, and are thus unique choreographic opportunities. Regarding the role of language in this micromovement process, I suggest that specific kinds of sensations arise from the interface between language inside and language outside the body. These can be useful choreographic tools that register not only as visual presence but through the dancer’s and the audience’s sensorimotor systems as well, forming the kind of kinesthetic consciousness that Behnke refers to.

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Cultural theorist and philosopher Erin Manning, writing on the political potential of the micro in relation to dance practice, similarly defines micromovements as “virtual contributions on the edge of actual movement […,] unsustainable—impossible to grasp and maintain—yet absolutely key to how movement resolves into taking-form” (2013: 83). Linking this to her earlier notion of preacceleration—the felt sense of movement before it arrives (Manning 2009)—micromovement’s politics suggests that dance practices may sensitize bodies kinetically and kinesthetically so that other forms can be felt and realized.2 Here, the body is not a container for or instigator of movement but instead “a force for the transduction of movement-moving,” where “the transitions between micromovements in the making and movement taking form” are activated and exploited (2013: 82–83). Manning asserts that in dance the body can become untethered from perceptions of its completeness through “the quality of becoming of the micromovements and the microperceptions that pass through not just the composing body but also the vibrating space of thought” (15). Dance knowledge provides distinct ways of attuning to micromovements, allowing dance bodies to use them compositionally by forging new transitions and pathways, both in thought and in movement. What excites me about Manning’s articulation of micromovement is her attention to transitions between sensations, and how this “between-­ space” becomes a possible means of experiencing “movement moving” as a force rather than as the displacement of a body in space. However, as Manning confirms, attending to micromovements is an ongoing practice, not given or readily available to all, and with this practice there is also risk. As Deleuze and Guattari similarly pose in their processual approach to creativity: “To think is to experiment, but experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about—the new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is” ([1991] 1994: 111). Their concept of the Body without Organs (BwO) advocates that experimentation is a practice, a “becoming-­ molecular” of a material body that replaces the individual and opens the body to other kinds of connections, yet “this is not reassuring, because you can botch it” and it can “lead you to your death” ([1980] 1987: 149). Thinking this through to our day-to-day lives, micromovements are not necessarily the key to finding a way out of difficult or oppressive situations, but they can allow a body to live differently within these situations. Attending to micromovements—to movement moving—alerts and invigorates the mind and body through the sensorimotor system. When

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language and its forces are included in the sensorium, the body’s micromovements can be understood as a bridge between one’s own self-talk and the language in the social world. One way to intervene in any situation is to alter the pathways and sequencing that link these inner and outer realms. As Greiner points out, when micromovements between inside and outside the body become organized, they generate thought that in turn manifests as movement, perceptible by others. Recognizing and shifting relations at the level of micromovement alters not only the pathways of a thought but also the kinds of thought that arise to be shared with others. By following the thinking arising from micromovements, a different present, and presence, might unfold. This book sets up a series of somatic questions about micromovement arising from relations between bodies and language, and the sensations these relations activate, and then tests these questions in practice. I ask how dance bodies sense language that is unspoken; how dancers develop relations to language within choreographic structures; how language acts within those structures beyond human-centered goals or desires—as a force in its own right; how language at the same time maintains its common social use; and how, or even if, dance bodies can distinguish different kinds of language-based sensations as they arise, so as to think while in movement in new ways. Toward these questions, I distinguish three examples of micromovement arising from relationships between bodies and language in artistic practices I have studied, identified as different sensations explored in the case study chapters. These sensations are the interval, vibration, and adaptation. Each of these sensations in my experience feels, means, and operates somewhat differently, as the following chapters will explore, and each suggests a unique way that dance bodies can work with language and its forces. I ground all three terms in the spatio-temporal philosophy of Henri Bergson and further developments of his work by more recent philosophers and scholars. While Bergson was not a somatic practitioner or dance educator per se, his writings on the main elements found in dance—time, space, and force—provide a rich conceptual framework for testing my inquiry into language sensation. Together, the three language-body sensations—the interval, vibration, and adaptation—when considered in relation to the practices of Brown, Kasai, and Hay, provoke questions about agency, pedagogy, and transmission pertinent to the legacies of American postmodern dance and Japanese butoh, and their practice in the twenty-first century.

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The Interval The interval is a relational zone of space and time where forces organize toward action.3 In dance movement, the interval might be between hearing a language directive and initiating a gesture, between a directive arising in the mind of the mover and the gesture, or simply between the sequence of sensations as they unfold in the course of a movement. In the interval—at any moment—the movement might take a different course. The term is theorized by Henri Bergson, and in the work of contemporary philosophers like Luce Irigaray, Erin Manning, and Elizabeth Grosz. For Bergson, the interval is “between what is done and what might be done” ([1911] 1998: 179). It is a way of feeling time, which he refers to as duration. In his writing, the interval describes a moment between two movements: received movement (affective excitation), and executed movement (reaction/response), which together result in a new present.4 In Matter and Memory, Bergson points out that to fill these intervals between received and executed movement, an education of the senses is necessary ([1896] 1988: 49). When sensorial micromovements are part of a mindbody experience, relations between the body and objects around it change, as does the body’s perception: “perception is, then, a function of these molecular movements; it depends upon them” (22). In short, the interval is movement-producing. Bergson’s theory, while not based in somatics, aligns with practices like the Alexander Technique. Developed by actor and orator F. M. Alexander in the early twentieth century, this technique characterizes the interval as a zone between thought and action, or stimulus and response, where one can make a different choice or perform an action with better use of what Alexander called the “self,” meaning the body and mind functioning together (see Alexander [1932] 2001). The technique traditionally works with a series of directional vectors in the body—head forward and up, back lengthened and widened, knees forward and away—activated linguistically at the level of thought. The Alexander Technique proposes that there is greater choice and possibility once we stop interfering with ourselves by engaging in unnecessary thoughts and tensions that are not actually needed for the task at hand. We can avoid what Alexander termed “end-gaining” by experiencing an activity’s process as it unfolds, which, according to Bergson’s theory of duration, means sensing the past, present, and future together, rather than focusing only at the ends of intervals (Alexander [1932] 2001: 57; Bergson [1911] 1998: 9). Alexander teacher

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Marjory Barlow finds that one creates a little free space by inhibiting end-­ gain reactions to stimuli such as “yes” and “no.” There is “a little bit of freedom there—and the only freedom we’ll ever have in this world, I think” (in Schirle 1995: 87). Part of the appeal of the interval as a concept is that intervals offer opportunities and openings to the possibility of living otherwise. They encourage tendencies toward change accomplished by degrees, with each shift proposing a new starting point rather than an abrupt and total change. This view has been advanced in feminist theory, notably the work of Luce Irigaray. Drawing on Bergson in developing her feminist ontology of sexual difference, Irigaray suggests that identities are fluid and mobile, forming and dissolving by way of the forces in the interval.5 “Overcoming the interval is the aim of desire, the cause of locomotion” ([1984] 1993: 48), she writes, a view Erin Manning builds upon when she describes the interval’s movement-producing capacity as: “the latent relationality of form-taking” (2013: 88) that connects actual movement to the virtual realm of “movementmoving.” Bodies, Manning notes, sense the interval when “affect passes directly through the body, coupling with the nervous system […]. This feltness is often experienced as a becoming-with” (2009: 95). The interval for Irigaray provides a space for women to become other than they are and thus claim a new identity within the patriarchal structures of French language. What interests me most in these conceptions of the interval and their practice is that the interval produces movement toward another way of being that is always already underway, latent yet waiting to develop. The interval’s micropolitics lies in the multiplicity of forces and possibilities that may manifest at any given moment, yet as feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz points out, the interval or space of in-betweenness is “not simply a convenient space for movements and realignments” (2001: 92). Rather it is, in her view, the only place where an opening to process—or becoming—can overcome conventional impulses that seek to conform to and retain coherent identities and unity. “It [the interval] is the space of the bounding and undoing of the identities which constitute it” (93). Many experimental dance practices already challenge social identities and seek to undo fixed ways of moving and being, yet we might ask about the deeper layers of these identities that continue to be exercised in certain techniques and choreographic structures. Can recognizing and attuning to the micromovement of intervals evoked through the relational forces between language and moving bodies expose those habituated structures to allow for different choices?

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Vibration Vibration is a rhythmic oscillation that agitates and disturbs restful equilibrium. Its vacillations unsettle locked patterns by loosening associations and creating the possibility of greater mobility. In movement, vibration may be a literal rhythmic action or an imagined one. Like the interval, vibration is a way of exceeding the known, as theorized by Bergson and by contemporary writers like Deleuze, Jane Bennett, and Steve Goodman. For Bergson, durational movement is a force that permeates everything and makes it move or vibrate, even on the subtlest of levels ([1911] 1998: 201). When something differentiates itself, it does so through its differing rhythm, or speed of vibration. While vibrations are successive, their repetition produces an appearance of continuity resulting in a stable object in the viewer’s consciousness ([1896] 1988: 70). Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body. ([1896] 1988: 208)

What strikes me as somatically relevant in Bergson’s thinking on vibration is that matter such as a human body—which appears to be continuous and stable—is actually a succession of sequenced vibrations or micromovements traveling in all directions. Early modern dance artists understood this by literally vibrating the body. Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman turned to vibration as a mode of transmission in their solo and group practices. For Wigman, “vibrato […] possesses this unbelievable wealth of possibilities, because it allows for differentiation” (in Ruprecht 2015: 32; see also Manning [1993] 2006: 93, 274). To access vibratory sensation Wigman instructed students in vertical bouncing exercises of the whole body or a body part. She also recognized the longer history of vibration in relation to bodies outside Western modernism. Many spiritual, mystical, and healing practices have employed physical rhythmic vibration, rocking, spinning, or undulation to invoke energy transfer and awaken the body to what Thomas Csordas calls “somatic modes of attention” (1993: 138). The awakened, vibratory human develops the capacity for greater attention and an ability to perceive micromovements. While vibrations can permeate and exceed human boundaries, and vibratory humans can thus exceed themselves to allow for new identities and experiences, human attention and responsibility remain paramount in

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practice, particularly in regard to vibrating language. Language is a complex thing that circulates socially in positive ways such as praise, or in harmful ways such as hate speech (see Butler 1997). Theorist Jane Bennett develops a politics of vibrancy in her call for human humility in the face of vibratory forces. What she terms “vibrant matter” is the capacity for nonhuman or not-quite-human things to exert forces on human bodies (2009: ix). Vibrant material in her view encompasses a range of “things,” from a human body to an environment, a network, or other kinds of creatures or objects (xiii). These vibratory things are not only able to impede the wills of human agents but they can also act as forces with tendencies of their own (vii). The agency of nonhuman things is also essential to electronic musician and sound scholar Steve Goodman’s sonic theorization of vibration as the incorporeal aspect of sound (2010: 82–83). Sonic vibrations can change entities from a distance, traversing boundaries, often unnoticed; we cannot fully control where sonic vibrations will go or direct them to particular recipients. Even with speakers or earbuds, sound vibrations arguably exceed these devices and the exact spaces they attempt to isolate. Goodman suggests that removing the limitation of the human opens up a larger field of microsonic forces that circulate to affect other entities, both human and nonhuman (82–83). While Bennett’s and Goodman’s views push back against human-­ centered notions of language and agency, in this book I also consider language to be an example of vibrant matter. Even as it can advance the wills of human subjects, language’s affective forces also exceed those wills and desires. Applying Bennett’s and Goodman’s views on vibration to language suggests that its forces may travel along unexpected pathways, impacting other things and environments even when humans are not present. Deleuze, in his solo writings and those with Guattari, also strives to understand what language does beyond conveying information or serving as communication. Deleuze and Guattari write: “language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience” ([1980] 1987: 76), yet by taking language to its limit and making it “stutter,” language’s excess—its affective forces or vibrations—are released (Deleuze [1993] 1997: 108). This use of language, which Deleuze recognizes in the style of certain authors, creates a second language within the dominant one that vibrates as “the outside of language,” but is not external to language (112). Important to this project from Deleuze’s writings on language is his conclusion that by aligning vibration—and by association language vibration—with sensation, language is understood as both linguistic and

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corporeal, of the human social world and also able to escape its systems of control ([1981] 2004: 39).6 For dance, this means that language forces both maintain something of their social use and also have the capacity to exceed those boundaries. Perhaps when language and bodies vibrate in tandem, the dancer may sense other kinds of vibrational forces in the studio or theater that will in turn alter how the dancer thinks within a choreographic system.

Adaptation Adaptation is a process of change by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment. When something adapts, it is modified or modifies itself to accommodate new conditions toward survival. This may mean changing shape, form, size, or intensity, as when a sense organ adjusts to the quality of stimuli. Dancers adapt when their bodies accommodate a movement directive to work with their own abilities, or when they align gestures with their interpretation of verbal instructions. If the gestures are repeated, adaptation occurs when the dancer refines the action after assessing the first iteration. Adaptation also describes altering something like a text to make it suitable for a particular context, such as filming, broadcasting, and the stage.7 Bergson uses the idea of the micromovement process as a basis for understanding adaptation. He states that the word “adaptation” must be taken in two senses: passive and active. In the first, one thing adapts to the structure of another, like water in a glass. This is a mechanical adjustment. However, in the case of active adaptation, as in the example of an organism and the circumstances of the life it lives, there is no predetermined form. Life creates the form based on the circumstances. “Such adapting is not repeating but replying” ([1896] 1988: 58). Bergson suggests that both kinds of adaptive processes are happening at once; evolution is therefore not a linear optimization of active responses. Bergson’s thinking on adaptation as replies to life circumstances sounds very much like the somatic processes of micromovement described by Behnke. These symbiotic processes are further elaborated in Carrie Noland’s and Sally Ann Ness’s writings on internal and external stimuli. Noland delineates movement skills and their application to particular forms or gestures as two kinds of kinesthetic experiences: “the ‘maintained’ gestural routine (produced through training, redundancy, acquisition of impersonal skills) and the ‘modulated’ gestural routine (emerging as a result of the more particularized energies of the performer)” (in Noland and Ness 2008: xiii). Ness (2008) adds a further layer to the

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application of learned skills by noting that as part of that process, stimulation comes not only from outside but from inside the body as well, and it is the inward connections that make complete thoughts possible in both language and their expression in movement. The zone between a dancer’s acquired skills and their choices around the skills’ application to a particular task resonates with Bergson’s approach to the two kinds of adaptation. A dancer draws on learned movement forms but does not merely repeat them in performance. Instead, a performer replies by applying the embodied memory of learned skills to the needs at hand. What I find compelling about how adaptation can work in dance is that certain kinds of habits can become opportunities for new variations, thus becoming the grounds for advancing experimentation. Philosopher and social theorist Brian Massumi discusses this point in his understanding of adaptation as the power to renew (in McKim 2009). Similar to Bergson, Massumi finds that a habit can be stagnant, merely repeating the past, yet it can also provide a means for innovation: Habit can rebecome a creative force for the acquisition of new propensities, because it makes capacities available for enaction, and something can vary in the course of that making-available, and then be added to a body’s repertory. To mobilize habit in this rebecoming way, the body, as you say, has to become sensitive to what’s coming. (In McKim 2009: 10)

The way Massumi understands habit temporally, as adaptive and also creative in terms of potential for future action, is useful in approaching the learned technical skills dancers practice and their application in particular circumstances. In another context, Massumi explores systems as similarly adaptive. Once a body engages a system through an action (his example is marketing analytics based in consumer transactions), the system changes: The system has adapted itself. It’s a kind of double capture of mutual responsiveness, in a reciprocal becoming. This is just a quick example to make the point that interactivity can be a regime of power. […] The power element is always there, at least on the horizon. You have to strategize around it. (Massumi 2008)

Strategizing is not a linear or clearly demarcated developmental process for a human to advance, and systems do not necessarily evolve toward the

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optimization of a singular goal. Grosz makes this point to counter the singularity of Darwin’s theory of evolution as solely for procreation: Evolution functions through reproduction, variation, and natural selection: as such, it should also, in principle, be able to explain the function of cultural phenomena such as languages, technologies, and social practices as readily as it can natural systems or biological species. (2005: 26)

Grosz argues for a more inclusive consideration of adaptation as a selection process that advances social practices and orientations within cultural systems (13–33). Adaptation is a correspondence with an environment, which is the general aim of life itself (Bergson [1896] 1988: 84). Linguistically, within human social systems, adaptation also describes the micromovements needed to accommodate the relation between the signifier and the signified. In semiotics, the sign comprises the form the sign takes (the signifier) and the concept that the sign refers to (the signified). In Ferdinand de Saussure’s work, they are together intrinsic to the understanding of the sign, yet the signifier and the signified are not the same. They accommodate by adapting to each other to create the sign and its meaning (see Barthes 1968; Saussure 1966). More recently, linguists like Charles Peirce hold that the sign involves an object (what is referred to) and an interpretant (the translation of what is referred to into meaning) (see Atkin 2010). In Peirce’s theory, which seeks to move beyond written and spoken language, there are three kinds of signs and ways that the signifier and signified relate: an icon relates through resemblance, an index through direct or causal relation, and a symbol through a context that is culturally agreed upon and required to assess meaning. For instance, a picture of a person in a tutu might be an icon for dancer, while someone expertly executing a triple pirouette might index a dancer. Finally, a word like “dancer” is a symbol for a collection of agreed-upon traits that together signal within a certain context that this is a dancer. The word “dancer,” like a particular image or movement, is a kind of constraint that assembles a collection of elements and their relations to arrive at meaning. Postmodern dance’s project can be understood as intervening in the range of traits that comprise dancer and dance, expanding them and in the process altering the relation between signifier and signified. Today, for some, “dancer” encompasses a range of bodies, not just a highly trained ballet one, and “dance movement” includes everyday gestures, in addition to virtuosic feats. Such adaptations are innovations and variations, but they are also survival tactics within the field of professional dance.

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Transmission Pedagogy is a key area of research for the transmission of dance knowledge. Often neglected as an artistic innovation in its own right, pedagogy and the teaching artists who advance its techniques and methods are largely responsible for why dancers and choreographers know about 1960s innovations like those found in U.S. postmodern dance and Japanese butoh, and how these innovations have been developed and passed on. The artists in this book are well-known representatives of these two fields of dance. Trisha Brown (1936–2017) and Deborah Hay (1941–) in the U.S. and Europe, and Kasai Akira (1943–) in Japan, the U.S., and Europe each utilized methods that exemplify the micromovements of language as a choreographic and performance tool. Each artist toured in the 1990s and 2000s and accompanied their performance work with teaching workshops and classes. During this period, I was able to study with each on multiple occasions, as well as view their work in performance and participate in their choreography in studio workshops. From this research, I advance the sensations of the interval, vibration, and adaptation as the basis of questions about the pedagogy and transmission of 1960s dance, and how and why these practices have continued to circulate and impact artists and their working methods to this day. My goal is to sharpen awareness of felt relations between bodies and language in these practices and, through my multiple roles as student, artist, and teacher, to bring specificity to the ubiquitous generalizations about the relation between bodies and language in 1960s performance while also providing a framework for understanding contemporary experimental work in which language plays a significant role. The past three decades have seen an outpouring of reperformances of 1960s dance works, and scholarship on this era continues to interest artists and audiences.8 Looking at this continued interest as a pedagogic process in relation to principles of the interval, vibration, and adaptation reveals aspects of 1960s dance that often go unremarked, such as language and sensation. The various roles language plays in the predominantly nonverbal performance genres of U.S. postmodern dance and Japanese butoh are not explicitly apparent, although perhaps different ways of using language within artistic methods is one reason for the range of aesthetics across these two categories. It is therefore only by turning to studio pedagogies that these methods become available for further study. My intensive studies with seminal teachers in postmodern and butoh genres from the 1990s

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to 2010s have revealed that for some key figures, including the three I focus on here, language remained an integral somatic feature of their studio practices and choreographic work after initial periods of experimentation. Without access to studio practices and the opportunity to observe the roles that language played in the conception of performance works and the development of technical styles required to perform them, its impact would have remained largely invisible to me. By bringing postmodern dance and butoh into conversation about the role of language, my project also seeks to disrupt common narratives of butoh as quintessentially Japanese and postmodern dance as a uniquely U.S. invention of the Judson Dance Theater.9 While Western narratives have until recently placed butoh within a U.S.-centered dance canon,10 butoh is neither a subcategory of postmodern dance nor a monocultural Japanese art form. Instead, like postmodern dance, which borrowed movement and spiritual practices from other cultures, including Japan,11 butoh is an intercultural or cross-cultural practice that initially included both European and Japanese sources of inspiration even as it challenged traditional Japanese forms such as noh. Given the global circulation of both forms, and the many artists who train across them, my hope is that using the lens of sensation in relation to language can spark new conversations about these earlier 1960s practices as well as contemporary work. As Grosz says of pedagogic process more broadly: “We need conceptions of knowledge, techniques of knowing, that are forms of contestation rather than merely a more equitable distribution of the dominant forms of order, reason, and truth” (2011: 81). The visibility of the artists in this book in the dance world speaks not only to their ingenuity but also to their relevance and reception, and hence their popularity and financial success within contemporary presenting structures. While this assemblage of artists may not be an obvious grouping, it is due to their disparity that I was able to notice and here highlight particular sensations arising from a body’s engagement with language in each practice. Such sensations engendered by language-body relations contest common means of perceiving dance, such as the visual and kinaesthetic ways of knowing that prevail in the field. Yet today is a different era than when I studied these works. The 1960s era of radical dance experimentalism is currently being reevaluated in light of changing social and artistic concerns such as race, gender, and the environment. Contesting these practices in new ways opens them to new

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discoveries. By highlighting sensation as a key feature of this era’s pedagogies and their transmission, I not only honor the legacies of artists of this period but also contest aspects of their current narrative histories, taking them in directions that give the artists and their work new life for future artists and scholars.

Notes 1. See Husserl (1989). 2. Manning references Deleuze’s writings on Bergson’s Matter and Memory (Deleuze 1991: 27) to make this assertion about movement. 3. Japanese culture has a similar term for the interval of betweenness, often used in butoh: ma. 4. Dorothea Olkowski, writing on Irigaray and Bergson, productively paraphrases Bergson: “[T]he interval is the moment between two movements: (1) a stimulus received, and (2) a movement executed in response to the call for action of the stimulus; thus the interval lies between affective excitation and reaction” (1999: 83). 5. Irigaray’s theorization of the interval has been advanced in more recent scholarship by Dorothea Olkowski (1999) and Rebecca Hill (2012). 6. For further scholarship by and on Deleuze and language, see Deleuze ([1969] 1990), [1993] 1994), Lecercle (2002), Olkowski (1999), and Stevenson (2009). 7. For more on theatrical adaptation, see Babbage (2017). 8. For postmodern dance, performance examples include the White Oak Dance Project’s PASTForward (2000), Stephen Petronio Company’s reperformance of Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy (2016), Hope Mohr’s Bridge Project Ten Artists Respond to “Locus” (2016), and MoMA’s retrospective series of performances Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done (2018); as well as scholarship by Banes ([1980] 1987, 1993b), Burt (2006), Bennahum et  al. (2016), Perron (2020), and many others. For butoh, performance examples include Trajal Harrell’s The Return of La Argentina (2017) and related projects that draw on the Hijikata archives, Kawaguchi Takao’s reperformances of Ohno Kazuo’s choreography, and scholarship by Baird (2012, 2022), Baird and Candelario, eds. (2019), Calamoneri (2022), Sakamoto (2022), and others. 9. The Judson Dance Theater (1962–1964) was a group of choreographers, composers, filmmakers, and visual artists who met in the Judson Memorial Church in New  York’s Greenwich Village for a series of workshops and public performances that questioned the boundaries of what constituted “dance.” Trisha Brown and Deborah Hay were among the group’s members (see Banes [1983] 1993a; Janevski and Lax 2018).

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10. Earlier English-language writings situated butoh as an example of postmodern dance (Banes 1994), and as a premodern form as part of a Western modernist narrative (Klein 1988). More recent writings have challenged this narrative, showing that butoh was not only a uniquely Japanese innovation developed by Hijikata Tatsumi, Ohno Kazuo, and others in the 1960s and 1970s, but that its global migration and proliferation further complicate a singular narrative of butoh (see Baird and Candelario 2019; Baird 2022; Calamoneri 2022; Fraleigh 2010). 11. Composer John Cage drew on Zen in developing his notion of all sound as music. In the introduction to Silence, he writes: “What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen (attendance at lectures by Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki, reading of the literature) I doubt whether I would have done what I have done” ([1961] 1973: xi). Cage was not the only artist to turn to non-Western practices. What scholar and curator Alexandra Munroe has called “Asia as method” describes a Western history of artists turning toward the East not to specifically learn about those cultures so much as to glean new perspectives that they might then apply to their own work (see Munroe 2009).

References Alexander, F. Matthias. (1932) 2001. The Use of the Self. London: Orion. Atkin, Albert. 2010. Peirce’s Theory of Signs. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed 8 July 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-­semiotics/. Babbage, Frances. 2017. Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre Performing Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Baird, Bruce. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2022. A History of Butô. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baird, Bruce, and Rosemary Candelario, eds. 2019. The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance. London: Routledge. Banes, Sally. (1980) 1987. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. (1983) 1993a. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1993b. Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1994. Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1968. Elements of Semiology. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang.

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Behnke, Elizabeth A. 1997. Ghost Gestures: Phenomenological Investigations of Bodily Micromovements and Their Intercorporeal Implications. Human Studies 20 (2): 181–201. Bennahum, Ninotchka, Wendy Perron, and Bruce Robertson, eds. 2016. Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bergson, Henri. (1896) 1988. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and William Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books. ———. (1911) 1998. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge. Cage, John. (1961) 1973. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Calamoneri, Tanya. 2022. Butoh America: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the Early 2000s. London: Routledge. Csordas, Thomas J. 1993. Somatic Modes of Attention. Cultural Anthropology 8 (2): 135–156. Deleuze, Gilles. (1969) 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and edited by Constantin V. Boundas with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. ———. (1993) 1997. Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (1981) 2004. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1980) 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (1991) 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel. (1975) 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. 2010. Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

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Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Greiner, Christine. 2021. The Body in Crisis: New Pathways and Short Circuits in Representation. Translated by Christopher Larkosh and Grace Holleran. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2001. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hill, Rebecca. 2012. The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson. New York: Fordham University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Irigaray, Luce. (1984) 1993. Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, eds. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, 34–55. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Janevski, Ana, and Thomas J. Lax. 2018. Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Klein, Susan Blakeley. 1988. Ankoku Butō: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 2002. Deleuze and Language. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Manning, Susan. (1993) 2006. Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2013. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, Brian. 2008. The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens: A Semblance of a Conversation. INFLeXions 1 (May). Accessed 10 January 2022. http:// inflexions.org/n1_The-­T hinking-­F eeling-­o f-­W hat-­H appens-­b y-­B rian-­ Massumi.pdf. McKim, Joel. 2009. Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview with Brian Massumi, 15 August 2008. INFLeXions 3 (October). Accessed 10 January 2022. http://www.inflexions.org/n3_Of-­Microperception-­and-­ Micropolitics-­An-­Interview-­with-­Brian-­Massumi.pdf.

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Munroe, Alexandra, ed. 2009. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Ness, Sally Ann. 2008. The Inscription of Gesture: Inward Migrations in Dance. In Migrations of Gesture, ed. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness, 1–30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Noland, Carrie, and Sally Ann Ness, eds. 2008. Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Olkowski, Dorothea. 1999. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Perron, Wendy. 2020. The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Ruprecht, Lucia. 2015. Gesture, Interruption, Vibration: Rethinking Early Twentieth-Century Gestural Theory and Practice in Walter Benjamin, Rudolf von Laban, and Mary Wigman. Dance Research Journal 47 (2): 23–41. Sakamoto, Michael. 2022. An Empty Room: Imagining Butoh and the Social Body in Crisis. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1966. Course in General Linguistics. New  York: McGraw-Hill. Schirle, Joan. 1995. A Conversation with Marjory Barlow. In Bone, Breath, & Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, ed. Don Hanlon Johnson, 85–92. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Stevenson, Frank. 2009. Stretching Language to Its Limit: Deleuze and the Problem of Poiesis. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35 (1): 77–108.

CHAPTER 3

Interval: Trisha Brown and the Space Between Words

The final element in the score for Trisha Brown’s Locus (1975) proposes its method for movement. To make the score, Brown created an imagined cube in space and numbered each corner and the midpoints as well as top, bottom, and center, creating a total of twenty-seven points. She then took the English alphabet and assigned each letter a number in order, 1–26. Using several autobiographical sentences, she matched the numbers to the letters to create a numeric sequence that could be mapped onto the cube. She identified the cube’s center as 27 and called it “the space between words.”1 This final element indicates how the parts relate to the whole. Brown then situated her body inside the imagined but spatially defined cube—a human-sized structure—and proceeded to address the points in succession with different body parts (shoulder, hand, foot, head), following the order dictated by the letters in the autobiographical sentences. She allowed herself to combine points as she worked, devising four different versions based on the same numeric sequence (Fig. 3.1). Brown described how the score operates choreographically: LOCUS is organized around 27 points located on an imaginary cube of space slightly larger than the standing figure in a stride position. The points were correlated to the alphabet and a written statement, 1 being A, 2, B. I made four sections each three minutes long that move through, touch, look

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Fig. 3.1  Trisha Brown, Untitled (Locus), 1975. (Photo: Estate of Trisha Brown, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York) at, jump over, or do something about each point in the series, either one point at a time or clustered. There is spatial repetition, but not gestural. The dance does not observe front, it revolves. The cube base is multiplied to form a grid of five units wide and four deep. There are opportunities to move from one cube to another without distorting the movement. By exercising these options, we travel. The choices of facing, placing and section are made in performance by the four performers. (In Livet 1978: 54)

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The space between words is a means of sensing the departures and arrivals of the points as a sensorial flow of movement coordination. The sensation of this “space between” is what I refer to in this chapter as the interval. In creating the score, Brown understood this interval as operating between her personal preferences as a choreographer and the movement sequence produced by the alphanumeric method. She treated the score as a collaborator, attempting to come up with a dance that was relevant to the system’s “random advice” (in Sears 1981b) but she permitted herself the option of dropping the score if necessary. The score proposed a challenge and made for unexpected movement solutions that Brown would not have constructed on her own. Brown created this dance with two goals in mind: to impose a formal structure on her creative process and to find a way to teach her unique movement style to other dancers.2 These goals, taken together, further elaborate the ways the interval can be understood pedagogically. Brown understood the score as a way to “talk to my intentions” in an attempt to “clear myself out of the way and let the dance come out of its physical source” (in Sears 1981b)—the body. Brown used language in Locus as a strict way of querying her own body about an approach to movement she could not yet verbally articulate.3 By highlighting the spaces between words or letters rather than words or letters themselves, Brown identified a bodily relation to language that could be sensed, and she then used this to clarify her unique movement style and subsequent nonverbal pedagogy. The word “language” and language-­ related words are used frequently to describe Brown’s signature movement style, what Yvonne Rainer referred to as a “new dance grammar” (in Brown and Rainer 1979: 31), and Brown used language often in her early improvisational practices (see Goldberg 1990). While her later work cannot be characterized as language-derived, the interval or “the space between words” characterizes how location as motion operates within many choreographic structures throughout her oeuvre. By allowing language and body to move together, by way of the intervals between them, Brown moved the relationship between a body and language out of abstraction and into practical application. Despite her playful ambivalence toward language, or perhaps because of it, Brown found ways to collaborate with the micromovements of language sensations, and her language-­ derived pedagogy of the interval—the how of movement—in my view is the substance of Brown’s legacy and its influence.

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Sensing Human Scale Like many of Brown’s choreographic works, Locus serves an instructive purpose. The interval or “space between” refers to the means of touching the specified points with one’s body, the method for moving with other bodies, and how body knowledge is transmitted between teacher and student, where each dancer is also simultaneously teacher and student of their experience. These principles inform not only how to perform the dance but also a particular way of moving in the world. I have learned portions of Locus in several contexts, including workshops by former Brown company members Shelley Senter, Diane Madden, and Eva Karczag. Often referred to as a barre for Brown’s work,4 the dance contains the pedagogic method Brown developed throughout her career whereby individual dancers find their own means within a shared context and goal. With Locus, even as the choreography strictly limits certain choices, it also sets up a situation in which each dancer might exceed this structure by opening options for relating to others by shifting energy and focus in relation to space. The choreographic structure of Locus makes room for a dancer’s agency on several levels: first is the dancer’s individual movement in relation to the cube’s score; then there is the tensegrity of the larger dance as performers change cubes within the grid structure; finally, there are the momentary relations between dancers as they synch up, often with different facings, to perform portions of the phrase material in unison. The effect is an unpredictable cascade of movement felt throughout the dance’s larger structure. A dancer’s agency in Locus involves recognizing the motion underway in both their part of the structure (their cube) and the whole (the grid) as they move. The choreographic system accommodates the choices, yet how they will play out in motion remains somewhat unpredictable. Dancers ride the sensations of their choices and their consequences. The interval or space between words in Locus locates the individual body within an ensemble experience by offering a perspective on, and sensation of, human scale. This scale is initially defined at the level of an individual body moving precisely within a cube of a particular size—just larger than a comfortable stride (4' × 4' with the top slightly higher for standing),5 and via the motion through individual cubes within the overall dance. Intervals arise as a way to sense scale in several ways. For an individual dancer, the points numbered on the cube are not destinations but

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instead references, or, as Brown calls similar aspects in other works, “appointments” (in Rosenberg 2016: 246). Movement happens when a dancer engages with the task, but, importantly, in Locus the points are just out of reach and a dancer is not granted transitions or opportunities to fully center themself. Rather, as a dancer moves through the sequence, in reference to the cube’s center, an interval—the empty center or space between—becomes the conduit through which forces move. A dancer’s body in this work is similarly understood as an interval, operating as a conduit for vectors that connect the points in sequence. In my experience, Brown’s work overall is about the empty center of potential. It is about the sensation of betweenness. It is about human scale not as something attained but as something to strive for—a means of exceeding one’s tangible physical form and relating instead to a larger spatial environment and other things in it. Importantly, while often presented and taught as a solo, Locus is a group dance, originally performed by four dancers. The dance’s grid structure allows opportunities for dancers to make decisions and move by changing their facings in their cube or relocating to other cubes, and thus individual actions affect how sensation moves through the dance’s entire grid structure. The overall structure changes qualitatively, even as the grid stays in place. The dancers first execute the tasks in unison, then move to other cubes in space and can interrupt the phrase material and rejoin at another juncture in the sequence. As the dance progresses, in cubes with shared sides but with different facings, bodies can, with practice, anticipate their encounter due to the shared choreographic sequence and ability to align with where another dancer is in the sequence. In this way, the dance connects individual self-contained dancers with what former Brown dancer Mona Sulzman calls “kinesthetic oneness among the four dancers” (1978: 128). A dancer senses the interval by integrating their individual experience into the whole. Sulzman remarks on the “peculiar state of split concentration that is as much a part of the piece as is the movement. […O]ur concentration extends outside the cube and allows us to share the magic of the very structure that has brought about this particular formal and kinesthetic relationship” (128–29). By expanding out into the overall structure, dancers return to themselves anew, with the support of their mutual engagement in the task at hand. Luce Irigaray understands opening out and returning to self as the movement arising from the interval, which she calls desire: “overcoming the interval is the aim of desire, the cause of locomotion” ([1984] 1993:

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48). The interval must be traversed; it precipitates movement and therefore propels the dancer/individual toward another way of being. Here, the relation between a body and language, as the sensation of the interval or space between, is the desire for movement that returns to a body in new ways—not to constitute a (male) subject but rather to propose a different, and (for Irigaray) feminist, way of moving in the world. Brown may have had a similar view in mind for her all-female company at the time—finding ways to move differently, more formally, in the world without moving as a marked female subject. The interval poses the potential for human intimacy via spatial relationships rather than identity: distance, choice, and individual task are held together through the grid’s tensile structure as bodies move through it. Sulzman notes that at one point she turned around and found herself in a very satisfying and distinct formal relationship with someone who could not see me. […] At this distance, and for a flash, I experienced much of what I would have if our fingertips had been touching and the moment had been longer. This situation evoked the thoughts and sensations of a moment of closer, less subtle contact […]. (1978: 120)

The dancer’s felt sense of the structure, and their embodiment of it through their individual cube and its movements in the larger ecosystem, grants a dancer an experience of motion that exceeds their personal space. The cube, said Brown, “was a way of touching movement in my mind” (in Jowett 1976); the former Brown dancer Cori Olinghouse refers to it as a way of “keeping track of ourselves,” and Diane Madden says the cube’s geometry is something to “nuzzle into” (in Madden and Olinghouse 2009), while Keith Thompson says working with Brown allowed him to “see movement 360,” both from within the cube and from outside (DTW 2010). Brown later said of her technique, “I geometrize my body in relation to the architecture of the three-dimensional stage space—the 45, 90, and 180 degree angles are active in my body and on the stage floor.” This constant reestablishing of the dance’s space is open to more than a singular perspective (in Goldberg 1986: 168). The geometry provides multiple points of view, allowing dancers to stretch out beyond the edges of habit. Erin Manning refers to an “enabling constraint” as an architecture that frames experience and highlights what habits can offer (2016: 89). While habits—such as language patterns, a dance technique, or a choreographic structure—direct a body’s movements and constrain other tendencies,

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these tendencies “are still operative in germ at the heart of habit. The challenge is to make these minor tendencies operational, thereby opening habit to its subtle multiplicity” (89). I understood this pedagogically when I learned portions of this dance from Senter, in the context of a workshop series on the Alexander Technique. The choreography had to be precise— I had to employ repeated, habitual knowledge—in order to let the dynamic movement vectors express themselves in subtle variation. I found that focusing on direction and precisely touching the points while allowing my empty center to connect them was not only how I oriented myself toward motion but also how the audience would be able to perceive the dance’s larger grid structure, rather than focusing on my individual body and its gestures. My and other dancers’ clarity and specificity in referencing and embodying the imagined structure communicated this architecture through continuous movement, rather than through static form or placement. Brian Massumi understands position to arise “from a relation of movement to itself” (2002: 18) rather than a fixed place in time and space, and this is how I understood the sensation of navigating the cube’s multiple points as a way to both orient myself and exceed the limitations imposed by a formal structure. Senter refers to the grid in Locus and other Brown works like Set and Reset (1983) as a kind of “GPS system for how space is organized” (TBDC 2021). My body remained in constant motion, both giving and receiving sensation by accessing intervals between each point. Because of this approach: “In motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary” (Massumi 2002: 4). With this organization, I was able to both affect and be affected by the dance’s spatial system and the other bodies moving through it. Performing the score was also precarious. The points were just out of reach and a body was always in a state of falling, catching, and redirecting. Gestures overlap one another (i.e., the body directs itself toward the next point and movement while also in the process of leaving the point just before), and the cubes are modular (i.e., a dancer can change cubes) so that location is the movement of the interval or space between, rather than the points of the cube, or the cube’s position on the grid. A dancer is in a sense swinging on monkey bars from one location to the next—leaving one point and aiming for the next as the condition of presence while the forces of rebound propel the body’s motion. As Brown said, “Movements should not be tied together with a connecting movement just because they appear sequentially” (in Rosenberg 2016: 163, n. 46). Finding the kinesthetic logic to Locus’s solutions without losing the graphic score or a

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sense of one’s own body is how the spaces-between-words realizes the experience. Elements are coordinated or linked such that the work manifests not the formal elements themselves, or a particular moving body, but rather the directional vectors that move through the body without getting caught or stopped at a center. The center is instead the interval of possibility because forces continually pass through it. The interval is where a moving body catches thought-lines and follows them. For instance, a dancer might slightly accelerate or slow down in order to synch up in unison or move in canon with another dancer, creating the cascade effect. They might also change facings in order to shift perspective and relate to other portions of the larger grid. In this way, a dancer has both an individual, local experience while also affecting the larger ecosystem. Even when performed as a solo dance, Locus maintains its ensemble ideals through a quality of awareness that includes both local and global perspectives. Scale is a relationship to space. In the case of dancing Locus, scale is determined by containing the gestures to the cube, rather than projecting energy outward or making the movement larger than the cube. At the same time, the gestures strive toward points just out of reach. A dancer does not merely perform the tasks at hand in a circumscribed way but instead recognizes that their cube and movement sit within a larger spatial field. Audiences see both the dance’s overall architecture and individual dancers exceeding their bodily limitations in relation to this structure. Due to the intervals—that is, the spaces between—human scale emerges as an effect of movement through the dance’s choreographic system rather than the outward display of particular bodies and gestures. Questions of presence and locations of movement put Locus in conversation with related thinking about space and scale in the visual arts at the time. Robert Morris, Tony Smith, and Donald Judd similarly used the limitations of cubic structures to expand perception. Their work called attention to the viewer’s position and size in relation to the artworks, whose forms appeared to expand and continue beyond their physical limitations, acting on the space around them, compressing it by entering the viewer’s space (see Wagner 1968). As artist Tony Smith noted when asked of his own six-foot cube’s scale: Q: Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer? A: I was not making a monument.

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Q: Then why didn’t you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top? A: I was not making an object. (In Fried [1967] 1998: 155–56) Art critic Michael Fried referred to this minimal sculpture as theater for the way it durationally extended into the viewer’s space, while art scholar Anne Wagner (1968) observes of minimal art that scale is not simply a matter of size and proportion but also its content—that is, how the artwork moves into the space around it constitutes its significance. The onus then shifts to the viewer who “reads” the situation, creating the artwork, much like, as Roland Barthes ([1968] 1977) suggests, the reader is the author of texts. Choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s piece “Trio A” (1966) also casts the how of movement as a dance’s content. In that work and the accompanying “No Manifesto” (1965),6 Rainer’s directives create a different bodily scale; by modulating the performance energy and movement dynamics, the human body becomes a sculptural object. In contrast to most performance aesthetics at that time, it is an “everyday body”: meaning that no extra energy or dynamic movement quality is added to “show” the dance to the audience (Rainer 1974: 67). In addition, in that work the dancer does not present their face to the audience or relate their gestures to proscenium-­defined facings, which further obscures their self-importance. Sculptor Robert Morris, who had also worked in these dance circles with Rainer, Brown, and Simone Forti, both as a designer and as a choreographer and dancer (Spivey 2003–2004), similarly interrogated movement in relation to performing bodies. He sought to bypass “pulled-up turned out, antigravitational qualities” by changing the “height or spatial position” of the mover, which thus “reduced him from performance to action.”7 As he explains of his own minimal art, “The object itself has not become less important. It has merely become less self-important” (Morris 1968: 234). Rainer’s and Brown’s choreography and minimal sculpture ask larger questions about humans in relation to the world. However, in contrast to Rainer’s and Morris’s sculptural work, Locus suggests a mutual and dynamic relationship between artwork and viewer by way of the score and the space it creates, rather than a one-way movement of sculpture into the space of the viewer. The object in the case of Locus is neither the dancer’s body nor another material element: the object is motion. With the understanding of movement as an effect of choreography, rather than its driving

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force (Rosenberg 2016: 3), Locus creates a situation in which “the movement reveals the structure and the structure dictates the movement” (Brown [1973] in Rosenberg 2016: 151). Thus, the focus shifts to the choreography and to the audience who can perceive its operations by way of the dancer’s orientation. In Locus, a performer understands the size of the movements through their continual modulation of the energy required to perform them clearly within a certain range dictated by the points and cube’s size. By focusing on the space between as a means of understanding scale, sensation is highlighted rather than form. Brown’s work not only performs a completely different relation to gravity and aesthetic than Rainer’s or Morris’s; it also suggests that the “everyday body” of postmodern dance is less an achievement or an assumed “neutral” subject to which all bodies can aspire than a vehicle by which to test and assess one’s energy output. Further, while Locus resonates with “Trio A,” which similarly does not present a front to the audience, in Locus multiple facings are an effect of how space is conceived to elicit movement. The approach is evident in this rule for performing the Locus score: “If a point comes up behind you, don’t turn around to face it, hit it from where you are with whatever is closest. […] Don’t make a big deal out of it, meet the point requirement and get on with it” (in Rosenberg 2016: 167, n. 63). This casual quality was essential to Brown: “Simplicity is very hard to perform. You have to have the courage to be there […]. That kind of ‘being there’ makes my heart beat double just talking about it. […A]ll of the person’s person has arrived at the same moment” (in Goldberg 1986: 170). Given the cube’s apparent simplicity and call for viewer presence, and Brown’s notion of “being there,” I am struck by how the cube in Locus so radically departs from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological cube, even though the notions of touch and felt experience appear similar. In The Visible and the Invisible ([1964] 1968), Merleau-Ponty proposes that the cube as a whole is actually invisible, only gleaned by moving around it to see various perspectives. Both Merleau-Ponty’s and the minimalist’s cube are interactive and require the literal movement of the spectator, whose shifts in position alter the relational, intersubjective space. In each, there is a copresence of the body to an object. While both signal a temporal unfolding of the cube, rather than understanding it as a static shape, the phenomenological cube can never be fully experienced, partly because all areas cannot be touched with the gaze at the same time. In the minimalist cube, on the other hand, the literal form is considered

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apprehensible all at once because change is a measurement not of an external object but of ourselves in relation to it. What Brown’s dance reveals about Merleau-Ponty’s perspective of experience is that while a back and forth between “me” and the object is an ongoing blurring of boundaries, where the object and I are mutually constituted, each creating the world for one another, both operations cannot happen simultaneously in the same temporal moment of experience. Humans are always, in MerleauPonty’s scheme, in some mode of self-reflection. Brown’s cube, in contrast, unmoors us from a particular selfhood because we experience the present as the sensation of the interval—an empty center where motion vectors connect past points to future ones (see Nicely 2006). While Locus was created in Brown’s Soho loft, and may have derived its scale and shape from that location (Graham 2016),8 the work suggests more broadly a way of inhabiting space and relating to other bodies and forces within it. Locus provides a means not only for a different body concept but also for a different form of habitation—both of architectural spaces and of the architecture of the human body. “Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation,” Elizabeth Grosz writes of architectural space (2001: 9), and by recognizing our position and attending to choices made from it, rather than considering our actions predetermined by a spatial position or particular identity, we live space differently, and thus can see other potential ways for being what we are—both as individuals and collectively. The human brain orients through the “shape of the space” rather than to the items in it (Massumi 2002: 4), and like the space between words, Locus’s imagined spatial cube does not locate the dancer in time and space so much as allow her to use it to experience the momentum of movement as it arrives. The Laban “kinesphere” commonly defines the area immediately surrounding the body and travels with that body in space;9 in contrast, the Locus cube’s imagined architectural structure defines the size of the dancer’s kinesphere but retains its location in relation to the performance space and its architecture, and thus the grid structure moves the dancer as they attend to the given task. In this way, two other kinds of spaces emerge. There is the dancer’s kinesphere as understood by Laban, which moves with the dancer; and there is the cube’s architecturally defined space, which is also acting on the body and moving the body in relation to it. These imagined but felt spheres, like the gestures within the cube, pass through and overlap one another, only aligning when the dancer passes through the cube’s center. The zone between the score and

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the dancer’s body constitutes that body while also allowing for its independence. This condition—the multiple conceptions of space in relation to a body, give the mover the feeling of exceeding their boundaries because as they perform the directional gestures, they are sensing intervals between the two spaces. As Deleuze and Guattari write, an artist’s intention is to free the line, or free the diagonal (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 295); the lines created through the directional gestures to Locus’s points branch out three-dimensionally. The Locus structure exemplifies Massumi’s understanding of the sensation of motion: “It is a dynamic unity of continual folding, uplift, and subsidence” (2002: 10)—the realm between “gravity and fantasy” (107).

Thinking in Activity Like many, I was initially drawn to the easeful spontaneity of Brown’s movement style, combined with the choreographic problems that occupied her beyond “dancing.” Her work is about the enlivening activity of thinking rather than learning how to perfect steps. As she put it, “Do my movement and my thinking have an intimate connection? First of all, I don’t think my body doesn’t think. My body has a strong voice and it does things that I observe” (in Morgenroth 2004: 63). I began an embodied study of Brown’s approach in the mid-1990s. At a workshop I attended in Berkeley, California, in 1993, the company was asking if there was something that could be called the Trisha Brown technique, and if so, what it was or could be. These questions arose in preparation for setting up a school, which opened on 55th Street and 11th Avenue in New  York shortly thereafter. I attended classes and summer intensives there until it closed in 2008. I have also studied with former Brown company member Vicky Shick at Movement Research for many years, as well as Shelley Senter in the Bay Area, and in workshops led by other present and past members of the company, although never with Brown herself. Each teacher I have studied with has shared their entry point into the kind of thinking body Brown’s work requires,10 which suggests that the “technique” is not a specific movement vocabulary but rather an approach or way of doing whose principles become clear in the process of learning Brown’s repertory. Functional clarity and spatial awareness are central. An ability to recognize intervals in movement so as to enter them and access their forces has been for me the most exciting and compelling aspect of this work. When applied to learning Brown’s repertory, principles for

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how intervals open and redirect action have allowed me to further understand the intentions underpinning how movement manifests and accelerates through one’s body, often allowing one to exceed the sensation of their known dance training. This “excess” is what best characterizes the work’s wildness and excitement, and its significance beyond formalism.11 For instance, in the initial Berkeley workshop I attended, we learned a movement phrase and then applied various procedures to it, as Brown did in rehearsal. Verbal directives like “blow it up” or “do it and get off it” created precarious situations in which dancers attempted to maintain the integrity of the original phrase while simultaneously letting gravity’s forces move through the body in more uncontained ways. The process exaggerated or altered certain aspects of the phrase’s form. The movement was both specific—the initial phrase was maintained—and beyond my full control with the new directives, adding elements of risk and challenge to its performance. By orienting myself to stable spatial architectural references such as corners, direction, and facing, I was able to keep gravity’s forces moving through my body, falling and redirecting the gestures without losing myself, much like what the Locus grid offers choreographically. The verbal language prompts, I found, were a key aspect of this movement process. The idioms like “blow it up” or “do it and get off it” recalled in my body sensorial movement experiences to then apply to the dance phrase. Writing about Brown’s earlier related performance games, which included cards on which were inscribed handwritten instructions, based on performance artist and composer Jackson Mac Low’s similar cards, scholar Marianne Goldberg notes: Taken together, these single-line instructions are the basis for a style of movement in which the body is always related to its environment, always ready to support or playfully challenge a partner, and particularly sensitive to its own weight and that of objects. The instructions develop a dancer who is flexible to unexpected contexts in which movement might occur, so that, for instance, a known move might become unknown when attempted in an uncanny relationship to gravity or to visibility. (1990: 59)

Some of Brown’s early instructions for practicing environmental interaction included “initiate movements but don’t complete anything,” “measure an area of the room with any part of your body,” “do two things at once,” and “get behind yourself” (in Goldberg 1990: 58–59). As I experienced in the Berkeley workshop, these instructions are not exactly

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specific things to do so much as plays on words that deliver new and often paradoxical conceptions of a dancers’ relationship to movement material. From these initial linguistic games, and understandings of the interval or space between, Brown developed a mature movement style and approach. In the early 1980s, in pieces like Son of Gone Fishin’ (1981), dancers studied and learned improvisational sequences, and then altered them through operations provided by Brown. Methods included “backing up to continue” and “retrograding movement” (WGBH 1980: 2:30-4:15), connecting up the beginning of a phrase with other parts, not necessarily the end, and compositionally having one dance take place inside of another (in Sears 1981b). Brown devised temporal strategies, which can be understood as features of the interval, so that dancers could “hang out” in order to synch up either with other dancers or with music cues (in Sears 1982). A central problem that Brown wished to solve was how to memorize, repeat, and perform improvised movement—movement that “takes its own time” (in Sears 1981b). Speaking of her process at that time, Brown said of the experience: It’s very exciting. The dance is coming at you and you are arriving to the dance at the same time. And that’s the moment you’re in. The shifting terrain is your knowledge of the dance coming at you and you are coming at a particular speed changing as the shifting terrain gets to you. (In Sears 1981b)

Brown described the resulting movement as irregular, yet not forced. It is movement you have to be patient and wait for (in Sears 1982). This waiting gives it the look and feel of improvisation, even when it is set, which became a main feature in Brown’s later work: These kinds of moves that I have been working with are harder or impossible—not possible—to do when you interfere with thinking and with desire. They really work better if you leave them alone; the body will take care of it. There will be an eventual set of moves that will follow. Some of them are truer or more organic or archetypal than others. […] There are actions that you can’t make happen, which is why I speak about waiting for the weight. It’s the weight of the body acting on its limbs and levers in conjunction with velocity and gravity. (In Sears 1982)

The resulting movement discovery will be “live”: “It would be as if you were running down a hillside and the footing was not laid out for you, the path, the foot places were not laid out in a logical manner. But you were

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moving at a speed too fast to figure out, so you are figuring as you place” (in Sears 1981b). The movement requires punctuation so that the movement of gravity and rebound can be directed through the body: “Just cast this there, then let it go making sure that you accent here and here along the way, on the way down, and it will happen. If [the dancers] try to break it down […] it doesn’t work” (in Sears 1982). Brown’s style and approach derives from an understanding of “thinking” as a movement process similar to what psychologist and educator John Dewey, describing the Alexander Technique, called “thinking-in-­ activity” (in Alexander [1942] 1947: 92). The Alexander Technique is a somatic practice Brown and many of her company members studied that works with movement at the level of thought. While thinking happens in many forms, including in images and sensations such as kinesthesia, I have found that the simple language directives used in the Alexander Technique, such as “head forward and up,” work as a reminder of dynamic balance and interrupt other kinds of thoughts I might have about my body’s relation to movement, a choreographic score, or the environment. I have studied this technique with both Shelley Senter and Eva Karczag. Engaging this kind of thinking process while in motion is an example of “reflective thought.”12 Dancers continually test, observe, and assess sensation while in motion as part of the choreography, which is required in Brown’s work since there is little opportunity to hold onto other kinds of ideas or plans. As Senter puts it, “we don’t do the choreography, we are the choreography” (TBDC 2021). Thinking in both Brown’s work and in the Alexander Technique refers to an approach to movement that is functional and responsive; a person is aware of intervals in the architectural space and in one’s body between the bones and at the joints. Brown and her dancers achieved this style in part through an understanding of their own anatomical alignment. Many of Brown’s dancers reference Mabel Elsworth Todd’s The Thinking Body (1937), a text that speaks to a similar bodily intelligence by calling attention to one’s anatomy as an enabling condition for movement not unlike a choreographic structure. Ideokinesis is the term now used in reference to the process at the root of Todd’s work, which aligns form and function as a condition from which to find greater ease for approaching physical challenges creatively. Humans usually control bone in order to achieve form, while function is tied to the neuromuscular system. Yet, Todd noted, the body is always moving, and dynamic alignment requires a balance between the nervous system and form so that energy is conserved and the

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mind remains at ease. When weight is balanced and distributed through a body’s anatomical structure, gravity can be harnessed for creative purposes, and one can think with its forces (Todd [1937] 1968: 38). This is not to say that humans are solely mechanical. Todd conceives of the individual as an integration of social, motor, and intellect faculties. She recognizes that behaviors are rarely rational (3), and that emotion constantly finds expression in bodily position (44). Yet if “we realize that function preceded structure, thinking preceded mind, the verb preceded the noun, doing was experienced before the thing done,” then we can understand that “everything moves, and in the pattern of movement, life is objectified” (3). In this understanding of alignment, and consequently biomechanics, ideas and feelings are not separate from movement, yet they are also not the motivation or intent for movement. The body feels because of thinking, and this can be observed when the mind is at ease. Brown’s formalism or so-called abstraction thus does not deny the expressivity of the body, “it’s just a nontheatrical kind of emotion” (in Sears 1981b). In most of the Brown repertory workshops I have attended, I have observed that while learning the precise steps and their sequence is important, this is only the initial layer of understanding their execution. Bringing conscious thought via language to the process, rather than remaining in the kinesthetic sensation of movement, changes the conditions from which dancers act, even as the steps are the same. As former Brown company member and rehearsal director Iréne Hultman (2009) also highlights, the use of language is a learning tool in dance. She notes that asking dancers to speak while moving often reveals what might have gone unnoticed, bringing it into consciousness. Language clarifies a body’s thinking while in motion by highlighting observation, awareness, and choice. Using principles and language from the Alexander Technique, I can question my kinesthetic sensations rather than accept them, and by inserting directions into my thinking using the Alexander phrases, I observe my gestures unfolding with a different focus and more clarity—not only in my body but also in my mind. The interval opened by language is a kind of “reset” to a condition of best use that is less habitual and more consciously defined, so that I can navigate the multiple directions common in much of Brown’s choreography. Erin Manning refers to the interval in dance as the “technicity” that accompanies technique (2016: 126), and Brown’s movement style

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likewise is not a formal technique so much as intent, direction, and rhythm as a means for fulfilling an idea. Hultman emphasizes that only looking to the quotidian aesthetic is a misinterpretation of Brown’s “kinetic self”: “Brown intentionality” can be learned from the repertory, yet a more “precise language” that can combine “intent together with perception and action of direction and rhythm” is needed (2018: 6). Brown was never fond of the term “release technique,” which has often been associated with her approach.13 While certainly there is value in finding ease in the body, and releasing unneeded muscular tension is a facet of her approach, Brown did so in order to allow particular intentions to move through the body, not as an end in itself, and it is this approach that is then exercised further through the repertory. Release is not a directive to use muscles less—muscles are needed to support hypermobility and give tone to one’s structure. Rather, “release” may refer to Brown’s goal to “clear myself out of the way” (in Sears 1981b) so that forces, and thought, move through. The result is a different feeling of dancing. The problems Brown set up for dancers are therefore not conceptual— they are practical and require present and continuous attention and practice. They must be danced. I understood this most fully during a summer composition workshop taught by Stacy Spence where we improvised daily, developed phrases with certain applications from Brown’s rehearsal processes, and then were given tasks that were to be activated during the informal performance. The piece included set phrases, an improvised use of space, and internal cues or “appointments” where we were to synch up. These cues were not temporally set, however. Instead, we had to be aware of each other in order to notice when the conditions of a particular cue had manifested and align with them. For example, when all three dancers formed a line somewhere in the space, then the unison phrase would start. It was both wonderful and somewhat terrifying. I began to understand the thinking body as one that could modulate individual timing so as to be with others, dancing with them while also attending to the larger dance structure. Seeing was haptic and participatory. Moving in this short dance was like waiting for the pebble to drop in the water, changing the present conditions of how the choreography would unfold. While in motion I also waited, and when the moment finally came, I aligned with it and was able to briefly seize and ride the rebound through as we danced the phrase together.

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Between the Body and Language Brown’s approach to language throughout her career was playful and ambivalent. It was not just a tool for challenging herself as a performer, it also became a means of organizing space and sharing with audiences her thinking process while in motion. I understand Brown’s oeuvre as a gradual process of taking the language structures and resultant movement principles that were initially visible outside to the inside of the dancer’s body and thinking process, to then be realized through the dancer’s spatial and temporal relations to other bodies and to the concert stage (see Nicely 2017).14 By deflecting recognizable and literal markers of meaning, like language or visual presentation, Brown’s choreography over time reconceived how audiences experience dance. What Hultman calls “language-­language” (to distinguish it from bodily movement language) (2018: 3) played a key part in Brown’s conception of relations between bodies, and between bodies and environments, even in her later work when language is absent. When language is part of moving, even when not materialized, it makes itself felt at the level of micromovement, as in the interval I have discussed via Locus. Like the architectural relations in her earlier Equipment Dances, language initially was explicit; it then moved inside the body to remain silent but still expressive via the intervals it opens: “The silent question takes the form of an opening” (Manning 2009: 14). Brown’s notebooks from the 1970s reveal how she initially used text as a way to understand space as well as certain mechanisms by which a body might think through movement challenges (see Rosenberg 2012b, 2016). Language was a way to map out how a body thinks. Puns, wordplay, accumulations and decumulations, numerical sequences, and schematic drawings are the kinds of language manipulations we find on her pages that made their way into the moving body. Pages from the notebooks combine these elements in creating scores, indicating that words, drawings, and spatial mapping were equally at play in Brown’s choreographic process. Art historian Susan Rosenberg, who has studied Brown’s archives, concludes that for Brown “the page was an analog for the body’s ability to think in language as a way of moving in space” (2012b: 8). Hultman refers to Brown’s approach to movement as “writing itself” (2018: 6). In later works like It’s a Draw (2002), Brown literally marked on large pieces of paper placed on the floor by holding a writing implement with various parts of her body (toes, hands, chin). Using her whole body to write, a further embodiment of her relationship to language as drawing in choreographic scores emerged in performance.

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Brown turned to language to create several early performances prior to Locus. In Skymap (1969), a spoken word piece staged in a darkened space, language directly evoked bodily sensation for audiences. Brown “informed the audience how to mentally construct an overhead map. The text was recorded. [Her] voice went to the ceiling” (in Rosenberg 2016: 302n35; see also the full text by Brown [1969] 2002a: 81–83). On the audience experience of building the map, critic Deborah Jowett reported: “the words that she speaks are to be our building material” (in Rosenberg 2016: 102). In 1973, two years prior to creating Locus and after her site-­ specific Equipment Dances in urban spaces, Brown moved the map to her own performing body with Accumulation with Talking, in which the dancer navigates the movement of talking and danced gestures simultaneously. An earlier dance, Accumulation (1971), adds to a single gesture performed while standing—the reach of a hitchhiker’s thumb—returning after each addition to the beginning gesture to repeat the sequence. This process already challenged memory; in Accumulation with Talking she then added an autobiographical story, testing her ability to keep the two elements in motion. Combining dancing with speaking further challenged authorial intention and attention. What moved, and what audiences experienced, was Brown’s thinking in language and movement. In 1978, Brown added more elements to the original work, creating Accumulation with Talking Plus Watermotor, which Jonathan Demme filmed in 1986 (Fig. 3.2). The written transcript from the performances shows how the silences between spoken words are timed choreographically in relation to the dance’s physical movement (Brown [1979] 2002b: 84–85). In the film, one can further witness how Brown performs two dances that interrupt one another, overlaid with the talking narrative and then, upping the ante, a second spoken narrative that further interrupts the first. As in Locus, personal information delivered through language is moved into a new context in which it exceeds reference to an individual body and instead becomes the mechanism for new motion challenges. In regard to movement, while Accumulation maintains the body in a stationary location, the second dance, Watermotor (1978), propels Brown through space with twists and turns at a speed that appears nearly impossible to maintain. Accumulation with Talking Plus Watermotor adds texts identified as “A” and “B” when spoken in the film to create the full composite version. Brown says in the film version, remembering an earlier performance of the work, “I found I liked the fact that I could not keep track of my dancing while talking and vice versa” (in Demme 1986).

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Fig. 3.2  Trisha Brown in Accumulation with Talking Plus Watermotor, dir. Jonathan Demme, Soho, New York City, 1986. (Photo: Film still, courtesy of the Trisha Brown Archives)

Accumulation with Talking Plus Watermotor reinforces intervals as zones where words and movement arrive at different times: they have their own momentum. For this performance, Brown begins with the words: “Start. Started. Starting to talk while doing this dance” and ends by saying, “Stop. Stopping. Stopped.” This linguistic play communicates the felt sense of motion in the dynamically aligned body. Like Steve Paxton’s “small dance” for which one simply stands and notices the body’s dynamic adjustments to remain upright, movement never completely stops, even when the body settles into a form. In Accumulation with Talking Plus Watermotor, there are intervals between the progression of the work’s various elements, so that the movement that results from the overlapping trajectories of the two dances that comprise the work takes its own time— similar to the ways a dancer navigates multiple points in Locus. A similar temporal wordplay appears in the title of the later work, Set and Reset, in which “set” indicates the moment just prior to moving—as in the phrase, “ready, set, go”—when the dancer has organized and focused all energy

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on the task at hand. Such preparation often indicates a tightening and condensing—a readying to go into motion. To reset is then to allow that action to stop. To reset may also be to change direction or course, or to change the thought process, operations that happen continually when the dancer is aware of their motion. Beginnings and endings can be found or made through chance or choice—they are relative.15 During this period, Brown “strove to render visible the relationships between language, choreography, and dancing” (Rosenberg 2016: 199). Rosenberg talks about Brown’s Accumulations in terms of structural linguistics: elements could be repeated and substituted (2016: 153); Rosenberg also finds “syntax” a useful way to classify how Locus’s movement principles are analogous to the score’s use of words and sentences (170). Other experiments with language in Brown’s early oeuvre include call-and-response structures that had one dancer call out “reverse” or “go forward” to other dancers who were moving through a particular phrase, such as in Solo Olos (1976), and giving dancers a list of language instructions to perform, as in Splang (1978). In Rosenberg’s words, such processes were like “pulverizing an existing choreography through the medium of language” (2016: 199).16 Moving with language challenged dancers, but it also served to help audiences understand the choreographic problems that had been given to the dancers. Brown’s earlier pieces, said Rosenberg, went so far as to say that her wish to provide language to explain her work had been a reason for making structured dances all along: that a dance was merely the means to generate a concept that could be explained in words: “It’s one reason I made dances that had systems,” she said, “because the conversation ends when you have nothing.” (2012a: 42)

Once Brown shifted away from making work that revealed the systems to the audience, however, the titles are what gave audiences and readers something to hang onto. Of the title Son of Gone ‘Fishin, Brown says it is actually for nonviewers—those who will not see the piece and only read about it (in Sears 1981b). Her titles do not explain the work so much as deflect mapping a singular meaning onto a movement work. Here again is a kind of interval or playful detour from a singular 1:1 correspondence between words and the dance. In Rosenberg’s estimation, works like Watermotor “exceeded Brown’s desire to describe or fix [the movement] in a verbal or visual score, just as her dancing of Watermotor’s

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choreography eludes vision’s capture” (2016: 89). Of the title Glacial Decoy, the “decoy” in this piece further identifies Brown’s relationship to both language and movement as one of deflection: “My personality embraces elusive behavior” (Rosenberg 1996). And of Glacial Decoy Brown notes: “It [A decoy] is not necessarily the real thing, but it looks exactly like the real thing. I make moves that deflect your eye all the time” (in Sears 1981b). Glacial Decoy foreshadows Brown’s shift from directly visible language and structures to an approach to both language and vision as indirect, working at the level of perception in later works. Using common ways humans verify meaning in dance—through language and vision—Brown’s work instead redirects the viewers’ perception of meaning by opening intervals between expectation and realization. Although by 1980 Brown had stopped using language as an explicit element in her stage work, it remained key to her creative process, not only in the form of drawing (see Eleey 2008) or musically as in her collaboration with Laurie Anderson on Set and Reset (in Sears 1982) but also in rehearsal. When dancer Carolyn Lucas became Brown’s choreographic assistant in 1994, she began to oversee the videotaping and notetaking of rehearsals. This process produced a log of notes referred to in the Trisha Brown Archives as the “Building Notebooks” (Olinghouse 2018: 11). Language here served to name particular phrases so that they could be recalled in rehearsal. The notebooks record the names of certain movement phrases like “Doughy Man,” “Thinker Phrase,” and “Cutbacks and Rucks Up,” all derived from improvisations. Neal Beasley, a dancer with Brown’s company, recalls, “I think of her words, the special names for movements, and all those glorious titles” (in Movement Research 2018: 21), and Cori Olinghouse refers to the naming of Brown’s movement phrases as offering “a visceral, and vibrational slippage between experience and language” (2018: 11). What Brown does with language she also does with movement and bodies. Rhyming or turning phrases upside down and proposing a paradox like up and down, forward and back, and restraint and freedom were language manipulations that could then be transferred and realized in physical movement. By thinking with language in the way Brown proposes, a body can move in reference to familiar concepts held by words while allowing the intervals between words and bodies to elicit movement from multiple directions.

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Beyond the Visual Apparatus Understanding Brown’s work in relation to the interval opened by language and its accompanying sensations adds to the significant scholarship that has tended to focus on her artistic collaborations in the visual arts sphere. Both language and the visual are often conceived as direct relations to an environment and meaning, yet each can take an indirect route to the body as well. For example, in works like Roof Piece (1971), dancers situated atop buildings in Manhattan passed gestures like a game of telephone. In this work and others, vision is the primary means of apprehending the choreographic movement. While Brown’s work is undeniably linked to and can even be read as visual art, I find it more accurate to understand it as dance in which the visual and language have their own choreographic kinetics, and in which both language and visual perception move by way of the sensation of the interval, in relation to bodies. Visual observation and linguistic instruction are key aspects of dance education, and Brown’s inquisitive approach to vision and language may have been reinforced through her role as a teacher. Brown grew up in Aberdeen, Washington, received her undergraduate degree in dance from Mills College, then taught at both Mills and Reed Colleges before relocating to New York, where she was a member of the Judson Dance Theater and Grand Union dance groups. Both groups explored what constituted dance and choreographic practice by engaging in public showings and discussion. In New York, Brown was also part of an artistic and intellectual milieu that questioned the relation between vision and movement. The group included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and others. As she says of the 1960s and 1970s: I was in the art world, and my friends were painters and sculptors, and they knew about gravity and velocity and distance and real physical things I was dealing with, so I got a very good kind of feedback amongst my circle of friends. And my only difficulty was in trying to right it with the dance world, who thought it was not dance, which likely it wasn’t. But the fact that I was a choreographer and I was dealing with elements of choreography—in my mind, it was somewhere in our dance world. (In Sears 1981b)

Questions concerning objects, images, motion, and their combined relations were often realized in performances. Rauschenberg, who collaborated with Brown throughout her career, experimented with the kinetics

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of objects and bodies. He frequently worked with dancers—such as Brown, Deborah Hay, and Carolyn Brown of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—to create what he called Combines, in which independent elements worked together or combined to realize motion.17 Of Pelican (1963), a duet for Rauschenberg and Carolyn Brown that juxtaposed various actions and included roller skating and a parachute-like contraption, the critic Erica Abeel wrote: “Rauschenberg breaks down the distinction between the scenic element and the dancer, merging the two in a sort of locomotive human combine” (1965: 53). Of a solo for Trisha Brown performed in a tire as part of his work Map Room II (1965), Rauschenberg said, “[H]er body was as abstract a form as the tire. […] I didn’t want the audience to be involved with who it was that was in the tire and what the person looked like. What I wanted was the most abstract image at that particular moment” (in Kostelanetz [1968] 1980: 91–92). Here, tire and body merge into a single image that is neither tire nor person. Images themselves could perform, rather than the performers in them. Paxton, a frequent participant in Rauschenberg’s performance work, further notes that Rauschenberg generated his movement “by couching people within images and then allowing the images to coexist, collide, or follow one another.” In his choreography, he “animated people with tasks within images” (1997: 264). With these kinetic experiments, Rauschenberg sought artistic compositions whose relation to a spectator was actual rather than representational: “My relationship to dance is […] directly responsible for my new interest in the spectator’s active role. […] You see, both parties are in a critical relationship in terms of immediacy and spontaneity. They combine to create a living, palpable force of contact” (in Gruen 1966: 34). In this case, “contact” is not linguistic communication but a tangible, physical encounter. Art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss similarly theorizes a changed kinetics in sculpture at this mid-century moment, arguing that while art objects have traditionally been assumed static, existing only in space but having no temporal component, in fact space and time cannot be separately analyzed (1977: 4). Once sculpture’s own movement became part of the work, as in Alexander Calder’s mobiles, the object was no longer perceived as sculpture but instead became an actor in the art experience, and, as espoused by Michael Fried in his essay “Art and Objecthood” ([1967] 1998), then became a new kind of theater. The theatrical stage presence of the object, which Fried in this essay opposed, served to challenge the frames that seemed to contain art elements and keep them separately

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fixed in place. In the cases of kinetic sculpture and minimal art, once objects moved off their presentational pedestals and out of the frame, architecture was no longer a support structure, nor was the wall merely a backdrop for presenting a known pictorial form. These objects were kinetic, moving into the viewer’s own space, in turn casting viewers as active participants in their own durational experience. The nonhierarchical cohabitation of subjects and objects in space called the spectator’s position into question in these encounters. By the late 1970s, Brown had shifted attention toward creating work for the proscenium stage, with the intention of forming a dance company, receiving funding, and reaching more people.18 She embarked on a project to “see” dance differently by perceiving intervals between what is visually apparent or expected of staged dance and what is actually happening but unexpected, which often hits the audience as a sensorial “aha” reveal. This happens in works like Glacial Decoy (1979) and Set and Reset (1983) from her Unstable Molecular Cycle. I suggest that Brown’s playful and ambivalent approach to language helped elucidate an approach to vision that, similar to her approach to language in earlier works, allowed Brown to present proscenium dances—whose mode of reception is visual—by allowing audience vision, rather than dance bodies, to be the moving element. Rauschenberg identifies Brown’s thinking as being like a painter, in that her work can be analyzed from different points of view. Like his own white paintings, which are both objects in space and whose surface reflects what is happening in that space as people pass in front of it, Brown’s proscenium dances move by redirecting the motion of the audience’s visual expectations.19 Some of the discourse on dance in museum settings understands dance as a new kind of object that reenergizes the visual by asking how viewers engage with objects, and Brown’s work is included in these discussions. However, I suggest that Brown’s work in relation to the visual asks viewers not only to see but to see dance in a different way, allowing vision to become a means to ask questions and inform bodily sensations. While some of her contemporaries, such as Rainer, were moving toward dance as minimal sculpture,20 Brown was moving even more fully into dance as motion, but with new questions about kinetics.21 Brown capitalized on what Rainer identified as dance’s “seeing problem”—that dance is hard to see (in Lambert-Beatty 2008: 1), by asking audiences to sense something other than a particular moving body or image. To do this, Brown did not deny the visual spectacle of dance but rather deflected dance’s common

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visible characteristics, much in the way she deflected direct meaning in language. The body for Brown was not an object, subject, image, or sculpture that makes motion visible; nor is movement expressive of deeper meaning. Rather, dance becomes legible by deflecting the assumptions that a dance audience brings to the proscenium’s framed picture. Audiences are asked to enter the interval between what is apprehended with the eyes and the sensations that arise from micromovements at the periphery. By redirecting the audience’s attention away from concrete objects (i.e., bodies), audiences can experience the kinesthetic aspect of motion. Brown’s focus on choreography as a mechanism for motion—rather than the dancer’s body as the vehicle for activity—sets her apart from her contemporaries. Both vision and language serve as means of sensing what is on the verge of actualization; they are ways to convey the perspective of motion. In her first proscenium work, Glacial Decoy, the dance appears to slip on and off the edges of the stage the way the frames of a filmstrip move across a lens. As one dancer exits stage left, another enters stage right, doing the same movement phrase. The dancing bodies, in contrast to this lateral movement of the entire dance, move in a highly unpredictable and affective manner. The movement is erratic in tempo and direction as accented punctuations give way to suspended leg extensions, falls, and small hand gestures. A series of four screens designed by Rauschenberg depict projections of mundane scenes such as a close-up of a tire or cows in a field. These images change during the performance but provide no additional information about the dance itself other than serving as a parallel set of images and temporal marker of time passing. As the dance slides back and forth, the viewer is prompted to consider what portions of the dance are unseen, and to question the scale of the actual dance. Glacial Decoy thus poses more than a singular interpretation of motion. There are the dancer’s individual bodily gestures, the movement of the dance sliding on and off the stage as a unit, and the partial perspective of the audience, who can follow the dance as film and/or maintain a singular proscenium approach in relationship to the stage, grounded by Rauschenberg’s stable screens. The audience is not moving but being moved, and made aware of movement via the actions in time—a series of passing, linked images. Later works like Foray Forêt (1990) and If You Couldn’t See Me (1994) continue the theme of the interval between what is seen, what is felt, and what is expected.23 Deflection is used in these dances to provoke the audience to question what they are in fact sensing and experiencing. Foray Forêt positions a live band outside the performance arena, their music

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becoming increasingly audible as the band approaches the performance space and eventually enters the theater. In her solo If You Couldn’t See Me, Brown’s tribute to Rauschenberg, Brown performs with her back to the audience so that the viewer never sees her face, thus asking what of the dance is visible if the face is not an essential means of communication. In these pieces, Brown questions dance as visual presentation by deflecting audience attention and expanding known boundaries, both spatially and conceptually. These themes, combined with other approaches such as gestural movements, many of which are private and only for the dancer, call attention to a somatics at the periphery of what appears to be unfolding as the actual event. Thus, while Brown’s dance innovations can be read as particular approaches to larger conversations on motion, vision, and agency within her artistic circle, such as those posed by Rauschenberg and Rainer, Brown’s conclusions return to dance, and to discourses that question not so much the forces that sculptural objects or bodies exert in space but instead what humans do with the experience of these forces. If Brown recognizes human bodies not as central points of focus but rather as conduits for movement happening within larger structures, her choreography proposes that the work of a dancer is to bring their skills and training toward accessing and sharing intervals as experience.

A Different Body Attitude Many former company members note that upon experiencing Brown’s work for the first time, they felt it was something they had to do. Vicky Shick calls what drew her to Brown’s work a “different body attitude”—a relaxed elegance that provided a singular paradigm for dancing, and what at first was a “flurry of actions” that could not be grasped, were, as her eye got better trained, perceived as moments where movement began. Eva Karczag says of Brown’s movement that it “just fell into and out of my body”; and Stephen Petronio recalls that Brown’s work made him think and dance beyond his grasp. When he saw Brown, Petronio “recognized [the movement] on a genetic level. I felt I was home.”23 Brown’s choreography evolved over the years. “Intervals are not stable” (Manning 2009: 32); like pedagogy, they continually change and offer new points of entry. I experienced this in learning Locus from different company members and upon reflecting on the piece’s movement aesthetic. Over time, Brown’s work has become a quintessential example of postmodern formalism, and the repertory learned and performed by the

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company in the years immediately prior to her death had retained a beautiful accuracy, yet in my estimation lacked the wild abandon I first experienced when seeing the company and taking class alongside some of her dancers in the 1990s. As the company continues to evolve its discourse and pedagogical approaches, the formalism seems to be relaxing and the work is moving toward renewed abandon. Formalism may be related to what Brown referred to as “pure movement.” In the 1970s, she wrote a statement that she used as a teaching tool in lectures and workshops to introduce her approach to dance technique, which promotes a level of abstraction: Pure movement is a movement that has no other connotations. It is not functional or pantomimic. Mechanical body actions like bending, straightening or rotating would qualify as pure movement, providing the context was neutral. I use pure movement, a kind of breakdown of the body’s capabilities. (In Livet 1978: 54)

This approach to movement has garnered recent criticism for erasing race (Chaleff 2018), yet Brown goes on to state:24 I also use quirky, personal gestures, things that have specific meaning to me but probably appear abstract to others. […] I make plays on movement, like rhyming or echoing an earlier gesture in another part of the body at a later time and perhaps out of kilter. I turn phrases upside down, reverse them, or suggest an action and then not complete it—or else over state it all together. I make radical changes in a mundane way. I use weight, balance, momentum, and physical actions like falling and pushing. […] I put all these movements together without transitions. I do not promote the next movement with a preceding transition and therefore, I do not build up to something. (In Livet 1978: 54)

While the criticism of Brown and other postmodern dance artists regarding race and abstraction is warranted, I think a reading of Brown’s work as purely formal misses the nuances behind Brown’s motives and thus the pedagogy that is there to be embodied by engaging this work. Dancers drawn to Brown’s work at the time, like those quoted above, found a new sense of themselves in the world by exceeding the selves they knew through movement. Brown’s approach proposes a way to be with others, environments, and circumstances by being with yourself in a different way as

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movement arrives. Manning’s characterization of motion in its incipiency as elastic, recomposing a body through the sensation of the interval (2009: 33), is an apt description of the pedagogic transmission of Brown’s infectious movement. It draws other bodies to it, recomposes them, and sends them into the world, even as not all bodies are drawn to or benefit from this specific process. I highlight this point to give context to “pure movement”: an approach that Brown describes as having “no other connotations” and is “a kind of breakdown of the body’s capabilities” (in Livet 1978: 54). While arriving at movement that has no connotations would be impossible to accomplish given the human social world, it is clear in looking at Brown’s method that she arrived at this approach by extending personal movement rather than eliminating individual contexts. Unlike much experimental performance in the 1960s and 1970s that either highlighted personal narratives or experiences, as with feminist body art in which the personal was an indication of a larger politics, or moved toward formal abstraction, as in some of Lucinda Childs’s work, in Locus the personal—found in the autobiographical statement and in the movement style—is worked through, not merely discarded in favor of formalism. “Pure movement” was an attempt to discover and work with dance’s “material”—movement—by creating intervals between the body and personal habits and preferences. Brown’s move away from the personal toward formalism at the time can be understood in response to the modern dance expressivity that had preceded her and of her drive to overcome personal narrative as source material. After reading Alain Robbe-Grillet’s series of essays, For a New Novel (1963), Brown said: “I had tears running down my face. The giving up of the self, of the tricks that can bring praise, put the performer in a highly subjective state” (in Goldberg 1990: 238). Other artists and writers at the time were, like Brown, using language to disrupt authorship. Roland Barthes’s shift from author to reader and his “redistribution of language” in The Pleasure of the Text ([1973] 1975), written two years before Locus, speaks to similar language-based manipulations as a means of sidestepping the personal: The more a story is told in a proper, well-spoken, straightforward way, in an even tone, the easier it is to reverse it, to blacken it, to read it inside out (Mme de Segur read by Sade). This reversal, being a pure production, wonderfully develops the pleasure of the text. ([1973] 1975: 26)

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Brown takes similar pleasure in language but, returning to Locus, does not locate herself within the personal language material used to create the score. Instead, Locus highlights other features that are more important— such as the body’s thinking and choice-making in relation to motion. The work’s autobiographical language spatializes and disperses personal identifiers rather than merely abstracting them into inert material or returning them to a phenomenological subject for confirmation. The language used to make the work is not effusive but it is personal, and even intimate. This intimacy is then expanded through the operations of moving from point to point in the individual cube, as part of the larger grid structure, so that local movement returns to the dancer as a collective experience with the other dancers. The sensation of the interval is the movement of relation rather than of having relationships with individual people. As Madden says of Locus, the multiple points passed through on the trajectory of the movement to the cube’s corners are each an opportunity to make a different choice toward an outcome (DTW 2010). Language in this score is therefore not merely abstract, “random advice”; rather, it is a tool from the human social world that, taken into a choreographic context, returns to a dancer’s body to inform an expanded and shared experience. Further, Locus’s center space is only “neutral”25 to the extent that it might precede personal identity or, following Irigaray, return one to the body in a changed way so as to live otherwise.26 Brown’s approach to language in devising the score is what leads me to this interpretation: she put the language of her autobiography through a series of manipulations to generate the sequence that would allow her to move beyond herself. A moving body in this dance similarly moves beyond a personal self, yet the individual is then reinformed of that personal self and body through their relationship to scale—scale that is not so much formal as informed through motion and relations with others. Brown considered herself self-taught and advocated a like approach for her company. While the Alexander Technique and Elaine Summers’s Kinetic Awareness, two approaches that influenced Brown, have been common among members, each person was encouraged to pursue the training that would best allow them to engage in her choreographic tasks. In the 1980s, Brown also shifted what was initially accomplished through language (planning) and drawing (documenting) to video. Notably, she also began working with her dancers nonverbally at this time. In discussing the development of choreographed and improvised approaches to movement in making Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503 (1980) and

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Son of Gone Fishin’ (1981), Brown said that she gave her dancers sets of instructions but not her own solution to them. In order to understand their own methods and bodies, rather than hers, each dancer was given phrase material and instructions but had to interpret how to work with them in their own way (WGBH 1980): I’ve taught it nonverbally by many repetitions, and I don’t make verbal corrections, because I wanted the dancers to get it through their kinesthesia, so that they would be making choices when they perform it like I do. If I define it for them I have to first define/verbalize my own imagery, which I don’t want to do. And then I would be supplying it to them, and they would lock onto what that’s supposed to look like, their interpretation of what this is, and they would reiterate that movement. It would be fixed and capable of precise unison, but this is about something else…it is about our differences toward a simultaneous image, nonverbalized. (In Sears 1981b)

In the film In the Steps of Trisha Brown (Rebois  2016), former Brown company members Carolyn Lucas and Lisa Kraus teach Glacial Decoy to the Paris Opera Ballet, both through verbal instruction and demonstration, and through the use of video. What becomes apparent in the film, however, is that the understanding of how movement progresses sequentially through different parts of the body cannot be captured on the video. It must be moved through the body; it must also be discussed in language. As Kraus remembers the movement by excavating her body archive, speaking as she rediscovers its pathways, we see micromovements within her body inflect and change the resulting movement’s form and execution— which look quite different than the same movement done by the ballet company bodies. Shelley Senter has similarly mentioned giving lectures in which she moves and speaks with the movement archive in her body. In a repertory class taught by Senter that I attended, a current company member was present. In the class, the two collaborated by combining their different memories and understandings of the movement: Senter consulted the current company dancer to remember the steps and then filled them in with what was in her own body archive. This kind of collaboration produces pedagogical intervals when teaching and learning flow in more than one direction. While language was an integral part of Brown’s self-teaching process, most of the repertory workshops I have taken involve very little talking. Instead, there is much more focus on observation of repeated

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demonstrations by teachers, with workshop participants then trying the sequence (Fig. 3.3). As a learning process, the student is tasked with asking their own questions and observing themselves in movement, rather than seeking outside validation. These are not primarily solo dances, so even if one is doing different movement, the larger task is to feel the rhythm of the whole as well as the multiple tempos within the phrases. Thus to “watch” the movement while learning is less about seeing than touching with the eyes in order to feel or sense the rhythms and phrasing in the other bodies dancing in the room. Brown’s work overall might be said to teach us how to see choreographically by sensing the intervals as they arise. I have learned Locus on three different occasions, and in each I see and feel differently. I first learned the dance’s opening movements in 2000 from Senter, who is also an Alexander Technique teacher. She introduced the dance as it was given to her by Brown, as a “warm up” where warming

Fig. 3.3  Jamie Scott teaching a Trisha Brown Dance Company master class during the BAM Spring Education and Humanities Series, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY, 2016. (Photo: Beowulf Sheehan, courtesy of BAM Hamm Archives)

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up is attending to the activity at hand, not doing something else to “get ready” for future activity. In this workshop, the dance served as a tool for practicing the Alexander directional principles, which operate in the same relation to the body—even as the body, and thus their direction in the surrounding space, changes orientation. The directions—head forward and up, heels back and down—are relative to the body in motion rather than the body’s position. The invisible cube that is the dance’s structure is also embodied as the dancer both moves within it and constructs it with her gestures. These two systems, the Alexander directions and Brown’s choreography, work together. Nine years later, I learned Locus from Diane Madden, a longtime Brown dancer who is not an Alexander teacher. Instead, she favors the Klein Technique, which organizes movement not from the head but from the end of the spine—the tail. Madden taught the same opening sequence as Senter, and we moved swiftly through the gestures, attending less to the points themselves than to the space—and time—between them. We then reoriented our cubes and danced together, as was done in one section of the original 1975 work. Given my past experience with the dance, I was surprised by my sense of disorientation. My body archive was of uncertain benefit within the present learning context, and so-called knowledge only seemed to hinder my motion as I attempted to reconcile my past knowledge with the present experience. Finally, I accepted my lack of knowledge and allowed for new relationships with others and the material. By bringing the past forward to the present moment without letting it define the moment, I released into the dance’s and my own structure so that movement could unfold. In these examples, my body had to change to accommodate the changed condition of the dance, despite the choreographic structure’s stability. Yet, understanding the score’s transmission required not only a redoing of the sequence but a teacher who embodied language, as evidenced time and again in Brown’s work. As I was writing this chapter in summer 2021, I was once again learning Locus in a workshop with Senter and Eva Karczag. We were on Zoom, in our small screen boxes, moving through the beginning sequences of the four Locus phrases in taped-out squares in our various personal spaces. Yet the workshop’s purpose, in addition to educating us on Brown’s work and methods, was for us to think with her methods in devising our own Locus dance. Working in groups of four, using our own autobiographical material, we could see what the score elicited from our own bodies. What problems did it pose? How could we solve them in ways that were unique to

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us? Where did the motion arise, and where were the intervals, particularly those between “getting” the choreography and dancing? I experienced my idiosyncrasies as magnified and was able to work with them and in time find language to accompany my movement when teaching it to others across the internet. In paradoxical fashion, Brown’s approach to anatomical movement devoid of meaning also includes personal gestures, and my dance phrase, derived from the Locus score, revealed something personal about my approach to movement in space. In fact, breaking down the movement in a formal way is what allows personal gestures to reside as part of larger movement impulses without taking precedence—a condition Brown understood as a “democratic distribution [of movement] throughout the body” (in Brown and Rainer 1979: 31). Brown’s work is thus not a universal abstraction devoid of identity—it has a politics. Some hold that Brown wanted to free dance of recognizable gestures and their associations (Kisselgoff 1991), while others characterize the movement grammar she created as idiosyncratic but not eccentric (Rainer [2001] 2002: 49), different from other kinds of dance at the time such as Graham’s symbolic vocabulary or Cunningham’s abstraction. Presently, the word “neutral” suggests a bodily condition that idealistically and naively resides outside the social,27 yet “neutral” is defined by Brown as “a way of measuring where I have been and where I am going” (in Livet 1978: 54). It is taking stock of oneself, and of sensing the interval before future action as the sensation of movement potential. The formal, structural elements of the choreography and the released movement style must be understood as working together and in response to the specific time period and subset of the larger population in which they were developed. As Susan Foster describes, Brown’s work “summons up an expression-­ filled self, only to direct its expressivity into the resolute matter-of-factness of moving and speaking. The movement’s difficultness, daunting in its complexity, is downplayed by Brown’s economical and relaxed execution” (2002: 192). This relaxed execution, the “release” of unnecessary holding, gives Brown’s work its human sensibility: The emotions are fully there. The humor is big. The dancing is very rich and feelingful. In the starkest versions of that work I thought I would explode. I was never so present and emotional. But I wanted to release the logic of the words so that the movement, which is every bit as articulate, would come into relief. It has now become more poetic. (In Sears 1981a: 4)

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Brown’s formalism may have also been a way to distance herself from a particular kind of female identity–driven work surfacing in performance art practices in the 1970s. Brown’s shift away from her own earlier autobiographical work and all-female company to a mixed-gender group of dancers distinguished her from the later work of contemporaries like Rainer, whose films dove more directly into feminist territory by subverting the alignment of text and body. Brown instead moved further toward dance choreographically. For Brown, “process is in motion” (Brown 2002c: 289). If the space between words is the interval’s new ontology that Irigaray proposes as (sexual) difference, then this opening to thought and life conceives a relation between man and woman—and by extension any binary relation—as nonhierarchical, and not one as dependent on the other (Hill 2008: 119). Brown’s interval operates similarly, and her work can be read less as a purely abstract aesthetic than as one that opens to other kinds of relations and ways of being, without discounting human sensations. If Locus serves as the pedagogy for this ontology, one that moved Brown away from her personal movement style to a notion of “pure movement” as a basis for movement she could teach to a mixed-­ gendered company, it also was a means of deflecting a reading of female identity to instead propose something else for a dancing body in relation to structures, choreographic or societal. Brown’s pedagogic legacy continues through educational projects like Set and Reset/Reset in which college and professional companies use Brown’s methods of generating choreography to create their own versions of the work, and Hope Mohr’s 2016 Bridge Project Ten Artists Respond to “Locus,” where artists in dance and visual arts learned Locus from Diane Madden, and then created and performed their responses. In each case, new questions arise—and that is the point. As Rainer observes, Brown’s early work was “a new way of thinking about body articulation, gesture, and feeling” ([2001] 2002: 51). That new thinking derived directly from observing how mind and body navigate language in all forms—physical, written, spoken, and thought—in dance contexts, and this question remains relevant to dance, as well as to the social world. Even as “language-­ language” dropped away from Brown’s later work, I find its impact defines not only her movement style but also the kind of thinking that it continues to inspire in dance artists. I cannot recall another artist from this period who has developed a signature movement style many call “infectious,” and whose choreography has circulated broadly, attracting countless dancers and audiences. Rosenberg calls Brown’s approach “the transmission of a

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new dance pedagogy to choreography’s composition” for which Brown conceived “the body as operating like a language, a system of differences: physical, syntactical, and visual” (2016: 114). I would add that it is less that the body is like a language than that Brown let language forces move with and through the body, so that the body could sense language by way of intervals—or the many spaces between.

Notes 1. Some have referred to this part of the score as “the space between letters” (see Graham 2016; McMillan 2018), which leads to a quite different interpretation. However, in the written score #27 is not between each letter but instead between each word, and in workshops I have taken and in other writings, it is called “the space between words” (see Rosenberg 2016: 153). 2. She later said that this was one of the few times she created a score for herself (Rosenberg 1996). 3. Of teaching Locus to the dancers, Brown said: “We talked about every aspect of the movement, we broke it down […] I was determined that I was going to go all the way in teaching this movement, which I had never done before. […] That took a long time. But once I taught that, we had a language, we had built up a rapport that really broke new ground” (Brown and Rainer 1979: 35). As Shelley Senter said while teaching Locus in a workshop: “Language is part of it. Language is in the body” (TBDC 2021). 4. Referring to the rote exercises a dancer does at a ballet barre. Senter spoke of the dance this way, as she learned it from Brown. Senter transmitted parts of it to us in workshops in the Bay Area in the 1990s. Rosenberg also refers to Locus this way (2016: 181). 5. These original dimensions were articulated by Eva Karczag during the TBDC 2021 Summer Intensive. 6. What is referred to as the “No Manifesto” is part of a longer reflective essay by Rainer that appeared in TDR (1965). See Coates (2021) on Rainer’s archive. 7. Morris made five dances (see Morris 1965). 8. The neighborhood surrounding Brown’s loft apartment contributed to other works as well. As a new parent, and without financial support, Brown walked everywhere, looking at the architecture that was her daily New York environment, and had “dance visions.” This she considers her first collaboration. Also, receiving “no invitations” to dance in Anna Halprin’s or Merce Cunningham’s companies, Brown embarked on writing her own art/life instructions (Rosenberg 1996).

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9. Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) is a system developed by Rudolf von Laban in the 1940s that uses effort and shape to describe, interpret, and document human movement. “Kinesphere” here is understood to be the space that the body is moving within, and the mover’s attention to that space. 10. Iréne Hultman notes that company members as teachers, sharing their perspectives, had good and bad results. Their warmups, while providing valuable entry points into Brown’s work, were individual, and she notes as rehearsal director she had to often cut this research component short in order to have time for the repertory, which was the focus of these workshops (see Hultman 2018: 3). 11. Steve Paxton, writing of Brown’s early work Trillium (1962), notes: “That’s what she thought about movement. It was wild; it was something that lived in the air” (in Banes [1983] 1993: 121). 12. Dewey, a student and advocate of F.  M. Alexander’s work, indicates that while there are a number of kinds of thinking, reflective thinking actively considers beliefs and evidence as the grounds of knowledge, further conclusions, and action (Dewey 1910: 2–14). 13. Critic Alastair Macaulay, describing pedestrian gestures in one Brown performance, wrote: “Brown’s release technique makes it lyrical and connected. Arm-pull; shrug; wiggle; dip; leg-swing; fall. The sequence of a phrase, as impulse passes through the body, is unpredictable in shape, in dynamics, in rhythm” (1992: 16). Movement researcher and writer Melinda Buckwalter observes of studying dance in the 1990s: “Release was ubiquitous in New York. The term had come to refer to a movement style—after the fashion of choreographer Trisha Brown, characterized by loose-jointed, relaxed movement” (2012). However, Brown rejected the term, at one point, stating: “I have no idea what release technique is. My body moves the way it moves” (in Harrell et al., eds. 1999: 17). 14. Brown organized her oeuvre in cycles, based on different concerns. These include Equipment Dances (1968–71), Accumulations (1971–75), the Unstable Molecular Cycle (1980–83), the Valiant Cycle (1987–89), the Back to Zero Cycle (1990–94), and then works with music such as jazz and opera (TBDC n.d.). However, I read this trajectory as a process whereby what were initially explicit choreographic problems and challenges designed for dancers and made visible to audiences were then taken into dancers’ bodies to yield a particular approach to movement on the concert stage (see Nicely 2017). 15. When working with integrated dance company Candoco on the Set and Reset/Reset project, where dancers learn the original Set and Reset movement material and then apply the same set of instructions Brown gave her dancers in order to create their own version, Trisha Brown Company member Abigail Yager states: the project “examines the shifting nature of choreography in relation to underlying structures that anchor a dance to itself. The process of

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re-construction (as opposed to replication) is a negotiation between freedom and limit—an exploration of possibility as the dancers create a new version of Trisha Brown’s landmark choreography” (in CDC 2021). 16. Rosenberg also draws parallels to music scores and reproduces written exchanges between Brown and composers Walter De Maria, Earle Brown, and others in the Cage/Cunningham circle that Brown knew well (Rosenberg 2012b). These scores and exchanges parallel the distribution of Fluxus event scores and Remy Charlip’s “Air Mail Dances.” Both Fluxus and Charlip have direct ties to Cage/Cunningham as well (see Friedman et  al., eds. 2002; Remy Charlip Estate n.d.). 17. For detailed analysis of the Combines and motion in Rauschenberg’s work, see Joseph (2003). 18. Brown’s understanding of dance choreography was not common at the time; despite asserting that her work was choreography, there has not always been a funding category to support Brown’s work. At a certain point, after the sitespecific Equipment Dances and Accumulations, which were performed for smaller audiences, Brown decided to abandon the equipment-related pieces and pursue the more traditional proscenium stage for her dance works, continuing to develop her relation to language and vision in this format (Rosenberg 1996). 19. Wendy Perron observes that Brown needed Rauschenberg in order to shift her choreographic work and movement approach to the concert stage, with its primarily visual mode of reception (TBDC 2021). 20. Brown says: “It was a crossroads; I had to decide whether to go in this quasisculptural direction or go back into dance” (2002: 291). 21. Yvonne Rainer’s work exhibits a similar tendency toward sculpture. The Mind Is a Muscle Part 1, commonly known as “Trio A,” and the accompanying essay “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A” (Rainer 1974: 63–74) compare dance to minimal sculpture and evoke object-like qualities in a dance body that performs “everyday” tasks. Rainer asserts that dance is hard to see because of the strong markers of identity and other visible traits of the physical human body. “Trio A” was created to counter this way of seeing a moving body. Absent energy fluctuations or phrasing that would signal a heroic “star performer,” the work exemplifies Rainer’s efforts toward “unhurried control” in her “actual” time task-dance and refers to autobiography as a “found object,” a fixed thing to be used. Her rebellion against expressive dance manifested in “static relationships of objects and people, which brought [movement] into the realm of ‘tableau’ and ‘task’ rather than ‘dance’” (1974: 67–68). However, Trio A is exceedingly hard to do and requires sophisticated dance skills not readily visible, such as an ability to resist orienting oneself in relation to space (because the face does not observe

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front), remember movement that does not have dynamic logic and also does not repeat, and to limit range of movement. 22. A “both/and” perspective is stressed by Brandon Joseph in his writing on/ with Rauschenberg (2003). Like Rauschenberg’s semi-­opaque work Random Order, the dance is both seen and seen through, a condition also presented in Brown’s later Set and Reset, whose translucent stage wings and costumes (made by Rauschenberg) allow the viewer to both see the body behind the screen and also the screen itself. These concepts play out differently in subsequent works. 23. All quotes from Dance Theater Workshop (2010). 24. Recent conversations on abstraction, formalism, and pure movement like Brown proposed have come under timely discussion in dance for erasing racial difference (see Gutierrez 2018; Kao 2016; Chaleff 2018; Hope Mohr 2018). 25. Rosenberg refers to “the cube’s neutral center” (Rosenberg 2016: 172). 26. For Irigaray, the interval of sexual difference constitutes a nonhierarchical spatial and temporal relationship of the sexes that allows woman to return to herself and have a place from which to move, rather than tending toward a male subject from a static place that defines this binary ([1984] 1993: 34–55). While Irigaray does not cite Henri Bergson, and her view of the sexes is binary and heterosexual, feminist scholars have analyzed her concept of the interval through Bergson’s work (see Hill 2008; Olkowski 1999). 27. In an overview of various postmodern release dance techniques, the authors note: “The term neutral here means a physical and spiritual attitude that precludes manipulation—that thus wants nothing, doesn’t wish to change others, but is solely a palpable counterpart” (Wittmann et al. [2011] 2014: 279).

References Abeel, Erica. 1965. Daedalus at the Rollerdrome. Saturday Review, August 28, pp. 51–53. Alexander, F. Matthias. (1942) 1947. The Universal Constant in Living. London: Chaterson. Banes, Sally. (1983) 1993. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barthes, Roland. (1973) 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. (1968) 1977. The Death of the Author. In Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang. Brown, Trisha. (1969) 2002a. Skymap. In Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961–2001, ed. Hendel Teicher, 81–83. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy.

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Rosenberg, Douglas, dir. 1996. Speaking of Dance: Conversations with Contemporary Masters of American Modern Dance, Trisha Brown. Interviewed by Charles L. Reinhart, 2 July 1993. American Dance Festival. Videocassette. Rosenberg, Susan. 2012a. Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art. October 140: 18–44. ———. 2012b. Trisha Brown’s Notebooks. October 140: 3–17. ———. 2016. Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Sears, David. 1981a. Forever New: An Interview with Trisha Brown. Dance News, October: 2. ———. 1981b. Interview with Trisha Brown 1981. Recorded 29 August, Trisha Brown’s Studio, New York City. Audiocassette. ———. 1982. Interview with Trisha Brown 1982. Recorded 6 May, Trisha Brown’s Studio, New York City. Audiocassette. Spivey, Virginia. 2003–2004. Sites of Subjectivity: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and Dance. Dance Research Journal 35/36 (Winter–Summer): 113–130. Sulzman, Mona. 1978. Choice/Form in Trisha Brown’s Locus: A View from Inside the Cube. Dance Chronicle 2 (2): 117–130. TBDC (Shelley Senter and Eva Karczag with Wendy Perron and Elizabeth Garren). 2021. TBDC 2021 Virtual Summer Intensive. 21 June–25 June, Zoom. Todd, Mabel Elsworth. (1937) 1968. The Thinking Body: A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic Man. Brooklyn, NY: Dance Horizons. Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC). n.d. Biography. Accessed 14 January 2021. https://trishabrowncompany.org/trisha-­brown/biography/. Wagner, Anne M. 1968. Reading Minimal Art. In Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, 3–18. New York: E. P. Dutton. WGBH New Television Workshop (WGBH). 1980. Dancing on the Edge. Frames of Reference Series, Boston; and WGBY, Springfield, MA; with Bennington College. Videocassette. Wittmann, Gabriele, Sylvia Scheidl, and Gerald Siegmund. (2011) 2014. Lance Gries  – Release and Alignment Oriented Techniques. In Dance Techniques 2010, ed. Ingo Diehl and Friederike Lampert, 264–295. Berlin: Henschel Verlag. Booklet and DVD. Accessed 1 August 2022. https://www.hzt-­berlin. de/en/publications/dance-­techniques-­2010/.

CHAPTER 4

Vibration: Kasai Akira and Voice Power

The first time I experienced Kasai Akira perform still resonates. It was June 17, 1995, at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater as part of the newly inaugurated San Francisco Butoh Festival, one of the earliest events of its kind in the United States.1 Kasai had recently returned to the stage, and this was his U.S. debut. The piece, My Own Apocalypse (1994), caused quite a stir that night.2 Through encounters between bodies and language, the work actualized the kind of energies described in chronicles of historical avant-­ garde art events I had only read about. Until that night, I had always questioned those descriptions and the impact they reported. Like Antonin Artaud and other earlier avant-garde artists who appealed to their audiences with a call to social action, Kasai’s physical and verbal expressions moved through the event to convey a sense of urgency. Words uttered in English, German, and Japanese; facial gestures; interactions with audience members; and an extended manifesto-like program note all indicated that the message of My Own Apocalypse extended well beyond this particular performance moment. The event seemed to be asking audiences to reconsider what dance performance could be and do in the larger world. In Kasai’s words, “Dance is not something possible. If it is possible, it is not dance at all” (1996: 22).3 Even today, I can still feel in my body the vibrations of the somatic encounter with language I experienced at this event. Their impact was not through what was said but rather how the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. V. Nicely, Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30296-1_4

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vocalizations activated the performer’s body and resonated in my own, creating an environment that was electric and alive. Kasai’s animated language-fueled performance painted a significantly different picture of butoh. At the time of the San Francisco performance, butoh was still somewhat of a novelty in the U.S. Recognized through a particular aesthetic stereotype, exemplified by Sankai Juku’s and Ohno Kazuo’s solo performances, which toured globally in the 1980s, many U.S. audiences knew butoh as an image-based metamorphosis performed by slow-moving bodies painted white. The aesthetic of My Own Apocalypse and the festival’s positioning of Kasai as a butoh artist challenged this notion. The videos Kasai initially sent to d-Net, according to festival producer Brechin Flournoy (2009), depicted a man wearing flowing, diaphanous garments and moving with a sense of levity and a high center of gravity. What Kasai ultimately presented at the festival was much different. Departing from expectations raised by the sample videos and from the popular butoh stereotypes, My Own Apocalypse included vocalizations, quick movements punctuated by stillness, and audience interaction. Language activated Kasai’s body, and in the spaces where it was absent, anticipation equally energized the audience. I was on the edge of my seat, and without slow-moving butoh images to relax into, my awareness expanded and my senses were heightened. My Own Apocalypse and the festival’s positioning of Kasai as a butoh founder functioned as both an expansion and critique of butoh’s more commonly known lineage. Hijikata Tatsumi is credited with instigating ankoku butoh or “darkness dance” as it was originally called (now simply called butoh, sometimes written as butô), a post–World War II underground movement that rebelled against modernism, Western dance techniques, and Japanese traditional theatrical forms. Kasai met Hijikata in 1964 and performed in his work until 1971, during butoh’s formative years.4 In the 1970s, Hijikata developed his most significant choreographic innovation with one of the group’s main dancers, Ashikawa Yoko,5 which concerned the use of language as a means of subverting the socialized body. While today Hijikata’s choreographic notebooks shed light on his language-body methods, at the time of the San Francisco festival they were not yet publicly available and international scholarship on butoh was scant.6 Kasai’s performance that night offered a compelling variation on Hijikata’s initial inquiry into how language and bodies connect and together can critique social norms. While Hijikata employed spoken

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language to evoke images that dancers then worked with choreographically, language, when sounded, also vibrates. With scholarship on Hijikata now available, I interpret Kasai’s vibratory approach to language in relation to a body as a stylistic difference rather than a departure from butoh’s early tenets. While Kasai does not explicitly use the word “vibration” per se, his studio and performance practices capitalize on the powerful force of the voice and an oral history of transmission. Kasai (2011a) finds that many dancers limit themselves by focusing their training on forms when instead they might work with language and its energetic forces. The expression of a vibratory connection between sound and body is not exclusive to Kasai, but in my experiences of his studio training and performances what is unique to Kasai is how language vibration acts as a physical practice, a theoretical tool, and a choreographic method linking the energies of certain impactful past events to future possibilities. By working with the vibratory sensations of language, Kasai poses an alternative to normative histories of butoh, its transmission, and its legacies.

Apocalypse of Words If an apocalypse is the ultimate destruction of the world, Kasai’s My Own Apocalypse was an annihilation of words as we commonly know them. In the performance, daily social bonds between bodies and language were severed and then reformed in order to generate a new kinesthetic consciousness. Audience members arriving to attend the performance first encountered Kasai while waiting in the theater lobby. He progressed stealthily through the crowd, approaching individuals and expressing exaggerated facial gestures. While these brief encounters acted as a kind of greeting, the gestures of his eyes and particularly his mouth indicated a force that challenged social composure. The Bay Area has a long history of interactive and site-specific work, and audiences by this time were likely familiar with direct interactions with performers, yet this was a different kind of encounter, in large part due to the punctuation and timing of Kasai’s facial gestures. Neither a casual pedestrian engagement nor the presentation of a narrative story, the meeting with Kasai’s body seemed simultaneously human and nonhuman, as if Kasai were a different kind of creature, less seeking contact than drawing the audience into his state of consciousness. Once inside the theater, the nature of this consciousness became more apparent. His hair painted silver and initially wearing a long black dress,

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Kasai gesticulated now with his hands, spoke apparently unrelated words seemingly plucked from thin air, and attacked the entire stage apparatus (Fig. 4.1). Moving his mouth as if gulping down information, he traversed the stage, seating area, and a small ledge that divided sections of the audience. While doing so, he often spat out a mixture of both sounds and fully formed words in Japanese, German, and English. It was as if these elements were already present in the air and Kasai was taking them into his body and using these forces to propel his form. The movement appeared

Fig. 4.1  Kasai Akira in My Own Apocalypse, Shonandai Cultural Center, Fujisawa, Japan, 1995. (Photo: Kamiyama Teijirô, courtesy of Ikeda Hayato and Minami Shôkichi)

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spontaneous and improvised, although as with much improvised work, likely a score or structure had been prepared to scaffold the work’s content. The linguistic fragments uttered were not additions to the movement so much as its fuel. The spoken words activated Kasai’s body, while the surrounding silence into which they fell suspended the audience in anticipation. These “world-lines”7 created by the various languages, which connected dancer to audience, allowed spectators to enter Kasai’s world by latching onto those that were familiar, as if these morsels might provide meaning. We waited for the next word as some indication of what might happen. As Kasai traversed the theater, audience members remained alert, particularly when Kasai removed the dress he was wearing and swung naked through the seating area on a rope, nearly landing in the lap of my surprised companion. Unfazed, Kasai seemed to regard people, objects, and sounds equally, all with the power to ignite his unpredictable and unguarded movements. His proximity to potentially volatile elements—the audience—only intensified his performance. Kasai ushered one audience member onto the stage, where he remained for quite some time as Kasai interacted with him before moving on to other things. Kasai’s naked female dance partner, whose slow movements until this point went nearly unnoticed despite her prone location center stage, remained a calm presence throughout, uninterrupted by Kasai’s actions around and in direct contact with her. Her process onstage was sustained and private, while Kasai’s was fast and erratic. He would enter and exit her world as if orbiting from another galaxy. At one point, an audience member, a butoh dancer from LA, yelled out to Kasai in Japanese, “You’re not doing butoh, you need to stop,” to which Kasai is reported to have said from the stage, “How dare you say that! This is my dance, this is my life” (in Flournoy 2009). Festival director and producer Flournoy urgently tried to get a translation of this outburst from her position at the back of the house. The tension in the air from this audience-performer exchange pierced the performance and then was seamlessly incorporated back into the event, adding further energy. The normally discrete spaces of stage, audience seating, and lobby also seemed to merge as events accumulated, creating a sustained, shared consciousness in the theater where almost anything seemed possible. Leaving the theater that night, my companion and I felt a social veneer had been broken to reveal an exciting yet unsettling reality beneath the surface of daily relations.

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The actions of My Own Apocalypse, with the juxtaposed movement qualities of the two performers, changing spatial orientations, and inclusion of audience members, both capitalized upon and subverted familiar relations between bodies and language in order to forge new kinds of felt connections. According to Kasai, both words and danced movement are limited by the “curse of meaning,” which can be broken in two ways: by vocalizing or by reaching a state of chaos. The former is training to prepare the body for larger danced movement, while the latter is actually creating dance, what Kasai refers to as “chaotic butoh” (2011b: 66). Like Artaud in his views on language,8 Kasai sees human imagination and thought as always arriving late to the present moment and an obstacle to movement. Spoken language, in contrast, is active and more immediate: I am very frustrated by so called “Butoh” dance, because countless words penetrate a body when it stands still in one place. That kind of body, with those slow movements, can barely be saved from being entangled by words, by the tactics of becoming an object. I can’t stand dance without much movement. I want to experience the body which breaks free of words in a 100-metre sprint run by my body and my words. If you break free of words, they come after you frantically. The same with images. Either you throw them away or you derange your mind by letting them come at you in infinite numbers all at once, so that you are not entangled in them. (Kasai 1996: 26)

Kasai articulates this method as a quest to understand the body, which can only be approached by disentangling it from fixed language and the limitations it imposes—something that happens only by dancing. In fact, he states, “I do not know which I want more, to dance or to understand my body” (in Kasai et al. 2007). One cannot know what butoh is in advance; it can only be recognized after it happens. In My Own Apocalypse, words were felt through contradiction. They were both emptied of their common meaning and treated as “things” with their own properties and agency; yet at the same time their familiar social meaning gave audiences something to hang onto. Language’s common use was activated through pronounced utterances in order to reach the bodies of audience members and also to exceed the limitations of human bodies and social exchange. For instance, the actual words vocalized by Kasai during the piece had an energizing effect on both him and the audience. Seeming to arise not from the conscious mind but from the surrounding ether, they propelled Kasai’s actions. Rather than preceding

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movements as directives or following them as outcomes, the words accompanied his bodily movements. At the same time, uttered with a sense of urgency, they appeared to surprise Kasai, even as they emerged from his body. His contorted facial gestures seemed to be efforts toward managing the force of language, and his mouth was tested to its limits in doing so. As Brandon LaBelle (2014) writes in his somatic explorations of the sonic, despite its efforts the human mouth cannot quite contain the energy of vocalization. Kasai’s performance was a human struggle to manage language’s affective and uncontrollable forces as they spilled out. The linguistic bombardment during the performance had a destabilizing effect. The words’ delivery was almost an assault on both Kasai’s body and those in the audience. It seemed necessary for Kasai to either deflect or ingest the language in order that all in the theater survive it. When Kasai shouted in multiple languages, the fully formed words connected to audience members in a different way than the nonsensical vocalizations. Each audience member attempted to place the words in a context that was meaningful to them. While perhaps some could comprehend all three languages, others likely understood only the English words and were left to posit meaningful connections with the non-English words, which acted more as sonic punctuation. The overall effect created a linguistic thread that tied together the culturally familiar words that were laden with meaning with unfamiliar words whose significance was not understood. Comprehension came by listening and taking in the overall sonic landscape in which both were situated, with familiar words acting as a bridge to meaning-making. This phenomenon recalls Deleuze’s advice on how to vibrate language so that it exceeds meaning and becomes corporeal: speaking “as a foreigner” in one’s own language releases what is foreign within language— what Deleuze calls “style” ([1993] 1997: 107–114). While Deleuze is not suggesting a process whereby multiple languages “vibrate” but rather pushing familiar language to a limit so that it “stutters,” the slippages between languages and the audience’s partial comprehension during My Own Apocalypse created a vibratory somatic consciousness brought about by the affective sensations released by the three languages together. By tracking the world-lines (or word-lines, as I call them), linking the familiar to the unfamiliar, one’s mother tongue reached beyond its common function. Importantly, attempts to find a narrative to the performance were thwarted and redirected, but never completely dropped in favor of abstraction. The words retained social relevance and an intention to

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communicate—although it was unclear if that communication was with those of us in the audience or other presences and possibilities. The connection was sensorial. An extended program note, printed in English translation, accompanied the piece. This too vibrated to ideological effect. Kasai’s basic philosophical tenets are laid out, including a critique of the current historical moment; a distinction between the factual, human world and the one danced through his body; the embodiment of the duality of that which is both true and false; and the promise of unification or oneness once words are “disintegrated from within.” I take this to mean that when vocalized, words are freed from the limits of form so as to be felt, embodied, and danced. The note reads: My physical self, “a shoreless ocean,” forces my foot to do a dance of disintegration. The world goes away as if rolling in a scroll. All I hear ringing in my ears is a sense of equilibrium alone in the Apocalyptic wilderness. To me the era and acropolis we now live in are the most intolerable times. At the same time, the tension of powers between the self and the whole [is] fading. I have no way of knowing where the evil power of our times originated from. The only way I am able to see through this chaotic power is to submit my whole body to it. Words are disintegrated from within. Tru[e] and false become embodied as one at all times. This enables the expressed actions and the factual world to connect in oneness as well. If this drastic change from cosmos to chaos is to be danced as the Book of the Apocalypse in present, progressive form, then I may be able to connect and present all territories within a daily time span. Like the world built upon [a] physical body versus [a] humanistic one, the world [is] expressed through my body versus the factual world presented as a result as well as human life before and after earth. (Kasai and d-net 1995: 5)9

The text is not explanatory but rather a manifesto, and, as a manifesto— like other kinds of performative writing—it seemed intended to change the reader’s thinking. The text cuts through society’s representational rhetoric to incite action. Many of the movement principles and methods I experienced working with Kasai appear in this early text. These include the frictional energy of oppositional forces; the dissolving of the singular self into the collective; the requirement to break free of the limitations of language (which Kasai later advocates is the task of the dancer); and entering a state of chaos in

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order to dismantle historical, linear time and instead offer a consciousness of duration. In my experience, Kasai’s philosophy suggests that competing energies actually work together by producing friction that eliminate singular individuals and their actions to create a larger shared consciousness. This view likely stems from Kasai’s eurythmy studies, discussed below, and his earlier anarchist political leanings, reworked in a butoh context as a connection between a human body and language. For Kasai, dance is a revolution of the body, yet in his work the physical body becomes the work of art itself. He calls butoh a rare kind of art where “either the creator becomes the art piece—the body is the art piece—or the art piece becomes the creator” (in Gross 2009).10 However, he does not see this as personal advancement nor is he interested in the development of a technically virtuosic body, or the liberation of the human spirit or soul into movement. For Kasai, dance’s purpose—and butoh’s specifically—is not to set humans free out into the universe but rather “to bring down the eternity of the universe to my transient material body, even if my body is destroyed in doing so. […I]f you don’t try to do this, art can’t come into being” (1996: 24). By titling the piece My Own Apocalypse, Kasai calls each dancer to perform an impossible destruction of the self so as to understand the body as connected to other forces, and he begins this process by challenging the singularity of many butoh narratives and aesthetic stereotypes. Kasai’s efforts to encourage a language-body apocalypse have continued to propel his career into the twenty-first century.

Voice Power Training Kasai self-identifies as a butoh artist and is even credited with suggesting the term “butoh” to Hijikata (Flournoy 2009; Kan 2007).11 When he and Hijikata ceased working together, Kasai gravitated more fully toward European culture while Hijikata discarded the European influences he had initially drawn on, such as the art of Aubrey Beardsley and the writings of Jean Genet. Instead, Hijikata pursued physical methods based in a surrealist approach to manipulating Japanese language that would in turn transform the social body. This language method included altered Japanese folk dialects and posed fantastical scenarios that, when embodied by his dancers, awakened their thinking and imagination. The language Hijikata developed and taught through speech, recorded by dancers in their own notebooks, is called butoh-fu, or butoh notation.12

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Kasai, however, took language and a relation to the European avant-­ garde in a different direction. After working with Hijikata, Kasai formed his own company and studio, Tenshi-kan (Angel House, or House of Angels) in 1971, dedicated to dance and esoteric studies. He then left Japan for Europe in 1979, drawn to art that, in his estimation, generated energy through friction and contradiction. In Germany, Kasai studied the esoteric philosophies of Rudolf Steiner, including eurythmy, which understands sounds as cosmic energies, residing in the air and able to be accessed by humans. Kasai remained in Germany for seven years, only returning to Japan in 1986 (the year of Hijikata’s death) and to the stage in 1994, just prior to his San Francisco appearance. Since his return, Kasai has taught his movement principles in workshops that accompany his international touring (Fig. 4.2). One key aspect of Kasai’s studio training is to use language as a means of sensitizing the body by connecting the body to the vibratory sensations of vocalized sound.13 The foundation of this practice at the time I studied with him was

Fig. 4.2  Kasai Akira teaching a New York Butoh Kan Training Initiative, CAVE (home of LEIMAY), Brooklyn, NY, 2011. (Photo: Shige Moriya, courtesy of LEIMAY)

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what he calls “voice power.”14 Kasai introduced it as a uniquely human power, which he further characterized as a kind of food or fuel for movement. Language is outside human bodies but also inside, and, importantly, it changes the function of the human sensory organs so that they gather energy rather than information. According to Kasai, voice power is always available. It both creates a body and provides the ability to connect to other bodies, cultures, and time periods. In workshops, we practiced voice power by repeating vowel sounds: A, E, I, O, U, using long tones (ahh, ayy, eee, ohh, ooo), accompanied by arm gestures and pliés, sending the energy of the voice out of the body and into the air. The vowels were extended, and the vocalizer then attempted to “listen with the whole body” and follow the sound, rather than place it in the space and disconnect from it. We performed similar exercises uttering the names of colors and moving forward and backward in the space, noting the different effects of these words on our minds and bodies. In later workshops, we moved forward and backward in space while vocalizing Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” staying with the vowel sounds and remaining sensitized to their vibrations. Over time, allowing the vibrations to remain resonant in the body created a larger sonically charged space through which all of our bodies seemed connected, similar to the audience experience of My Own Apocalypse. After sensing the vibration, the next step was to learn to keep the vibrational awareness inside the body as a way to relate to the larger space, even when no perceptible sound is made. To achieve this, Kasai asked students to repeat the vowel sounds while executing the plié, eliminating one vowel at a time but maintaining the sensation of the vibration. The progression continued until there was silence but the intensity remained, now held on the inside. Kasai noted that this energy could also be brought outside the body to activate the space. The power both outside and inside the body then became a means for movement and for relating to others. By continuing to sense the sonic vibrations silently, I found that my mind became focused and ceased to wander, yet it was also unbounded and extended in multiple directions. Moving this way in the studio with others seemed to suspend the rhythm of day-to-day concerns in favor of a more expansive wavelength. My movement had a quality and sensitivity that was neither willed by personal desire nor merely casual. My sense of awareness was expansive and at the same time proximal and intimate. It felt as if we collectively were registering the impact of sound heard from a great distance, each of us listening and carrying it through our attention and actions.

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Those familiar with eurythmy will recognize many of its principles in my description of Kasai’s philosophy and voice power training. Developed by Rudolf Steiner in the early twentieth century as one of his many esoteric and pedagogic projects,15 eurythmy is a theory of movement whose purpose is to make the inner forms and gestures of speech and music visible by harmonizing the physical human body with its forces or energies. The practice intends to strengthen the subtle or etheric body that surrounds physical form in service of spiritual transformation (see McDermott 2016: 265). Eurythmy is a kind of organizational system for energy whereby, as with Kasai’s voice power, language is broken down into vowels and consonants. When performed, the work is aesthetically similar to Isadora Duncan’s movement, with flowing formless gestures and diaphanous costuming, an aesthetic that has appeared in Kasai’s work, such as on the tapes sent to d-Net prior to his U.S. appearance. Eurythmy practice for Steiner served three purposes: performance, creativity, and pedagogy. Referred to during its time as a new art form and “an art of the future” where “conscious Imagination arises” through the movement of the soul (Steiner and Usher 2006: 3), eurythmy stipulates that movement is immortal and humans are instruments for activating life from the past to create a new future world. Steiner (1924) espoused that we are created out of sound—not sounds made by us, but the sound that is already present in the cosmos.16 Steiner’s view of natural forces outside the body to which humans can connect speaks to related art and spiritualist thinking at the time, which sought to reconcile the new sensations brought on by technological advances and urbanization with the human body and spirit. Linda Dalrymple Henderson (2002) uses the phrase “vibratory modernism” to refer to the ways human bodies have attempted to adjust to the energetic agitation and pulsing rhythms of modern society. In the visual arts, such vibratory rhythms are depicted in Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), while Edward Muybridge’s earlier stop-action photos in the series The Human Figure in Motion (1901) reveal some of the ways new technologies spawned artistic techniques to convey the new sensations. German choreographer and teacher Mary Wigman’s vibratory techniques further physicalized these modern sentiments, while also linking them to more ancient transcendent practices (Manning [1993] 2006; Wigman [1933] 1983). André Lepecki references modernism’s vibrations in dance as a “restless stillness,”17 while Lucia Ruprecht holds that vibration

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“belongs to the future” (2015: 28). It is a technology that opens a body to possibility. Theories of modernism that pinpoint vibration as key resonate not only with transformative states found in twentieth-century spiritualism and aesthetic art experiences but also with earlier performance techniques and shamanic practices. For example, fourteenth-century noh master teacher Zeami Motokiyo, in his writings on actor training, refers to onkank, the “tonal [or vibratory] feeling” achieved through vocalization,18 and the kotodama, a Shinto meditation technique that means “the soul of words,” which teaches that words have their own power and spirit (see Hara 2001). Kasai’s approach to vibratory language draws from both German modern dance approaches and earlier oral traditions. Expressionist dance was the prevalent contemporary dance training in Japan when Kasai began his movement studies,19 and he sees Wigman as working toward an esoteric construction of the body by organizing its energies through vibration (in Fraleigh 1999: 236). This context may have inspired his move to Germany to study eurythmy. Scholar-practitioner Maria Pia D’Orazi, who worked with Kasai in Italy in the 2000s, notes that each country has its own eurythmy based in the sounds of that particular language. While Kasai initially studied in Germany, he has developed his philosophy through a Japanese kotodama perspective, which D’Orazi describes as “a vibration in itself, the resonance preceding thought, leading to a sharpening of letters and sounds” (2016: 146). Today, Kasai calls his adaptation of eurythmy to a Japanese context “Ephesus’s technique” (146). In Kasai’s view, “the entire ‘external world’ exists within the human body, and it is words that bring it to life [within us]” (in D’Orazi 2016: 145). In workshops I attended, Kasai bookended voice power movement exercises used to sensitize the body with mini-lectures on the philosophical context for our studio experiences. These talks, which included question-­ and-answer sections, provided detailed concepts that further clarified the resonant sensations arising in practice and their significance. Giving the example of Homer’s Odyssey and Japanese rhythmic sung ballads such as Kojiki,20 Kasai stated that in oral traditions spoken words are free, not bound by the limitations of meaning. He asserted that oration for a dancer can both awaken the internal self and sensitize the body to listen to what is outside, something we had already experienced with the voice power exercises. This sensitivity to inner and outer resonances is for Kasai how a dancer can move beyond day-to-day relations in order to bring material and cosmic energies together. He also called voice power “a

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practice of orientation” between inside and outside by which we are born to the moment, or “initialized” (2011c).21 In order to bring inner and outer energies together as the impetus for movement, Kasai in a 2007 workshop at CAVE in New York asked us to move as an “announcer,” describing in movement what was going on in our bodies. He asked us to listen to what we felt prior to action by attuning to intervals he called the “between-space.” This for Kasai is where new bodies are formed and life arises. Kasai also calls it the “linguistic work of vocalization before the emergence of words” (2011b: 28), which recalls Erin Manning’s (2009) notions of “prearticulation” and “preacceleration” and Daniel Stern’s (2010) “vitality affects.” A body senses the conditions of language and movement prior to their actualization. Yet Kasai stressed that in order to announce the words in movement, the mind cannot be foggy or judgmental. It must be still and accept all sensations and thoughts, not just pleasurable ones. He guided us to be objective and remain truthful to allow the rational, judgmental mind to quiet. Accepting all sensations present can open up the private space of the “I” (see Kasai 1996) to “we consciousness,” reached when the self as a singular “I” is subsumed by a collective and the body then moves beyond a first-person singular perspective.22 The between-space arises when private and public are dissolved and the energy of language is allowed to move without individual authorship. Out of this quietness of the between-space arises a “germ.” Kasai asked us to catch the germ and announce it in movement. While delicate and small, he noted that this germ could have a very big impact on the moved outcome. José Gil proposes a similar concept to Kasai’s announcer called the “surveyor-body” (2002: 125). The greater notion for Gil across his writings on movement is that a dancer’s gestures make space rather than simply occurring within it, which he describes as a surveying process in another text: The sender of information is also its decoder, and in decoding it, it never stops (even indirectly) being a sender of it. Articulations allow the body its movement, which in turn allows it to measure the distance by using the body as a measurer (object-standard), but at the same time the body integrates the measure into itself—precisely because it only finds itself to be measurable by relation to itself as the absolute measure of itself. (1998: 125)

The body’s movement articulations measure distance as a continuous space of “nonrelation,” and Gil refers to this movement perspective as

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both objective and subjective. A moving body’s “exfoliations” are the virtual aspect of movement metamorphoses (136). Virtual exfoliations are in Gil’s terms an infralanguage, an “abstract body” that connects, translates, and communicates between actual bodies: “the body does not speak, it makes speech” (111), the way it also makes space. Linking this concept to Kasai’s announcer or surveyor: gestures are intensified and connect to others because the performer is tracking their metamorphoses each step of the way through a series of micromovements. Gil has discussed this approach in relation to both ritual practices and contemporary dance like that of Merce Cunningham (see Gil 2002, 2006). Kasai further elaborates his language-based philosophy of the body in Karada to iu shomotsu (Book of the body, 2011).23 In this text, he explains the dancer’s task as “reading” words that arise from the body, as we did in the studio exercise described above, where we read the body and announced the words in movement. A dancer’s reading—or perception— of these words produces movement by freeing the dancer from the entrapment of codified techniques and purely anatomical understandings of the body, and the way both govern movement (2011b: 12). Kasai advises that people can start this reading process first by observing day-to-day activities and their affect: For instance when you meet someone, instead of recognizing the person’s name or face you can try to feel the bodily sensation that comes from him/ her, is it warm or cold? When you visit a new place, you can try to sense the brightness of the space and see if you could recognize the weight of the impression as well. When you turn right on a street, not only the scenery but also the bodily sensation changes. You are already starting to read the body by acknowledging these small details. Once you get into the habit of sensing details, your ability to read the body will advance rapidly. (2011b: 67–70)

He goes on to note that we must then learn to read these sensations correctly; it is not simply a matter of noticing. Further, this mode of connective consciousness is somewhat dangerous in real life. Giving the example of a surgeon, Kasai explains that if the surgeon was connected to their task in this way, they would not perform their job and might be seen as crazy (2011b).24 Kasai also clarifies that training is a route toward connecting human movement to the energy of words, but it is not butoh per se (in D’Orazi 2016: 141). Connecting the body to words (and by extension vibration) alone is not sufficient to clarify the relationship of a body to

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language. That relation must be materialized in what Kasai calls “chaotic butoh” (2011b: 66)—and he recognizes that humans require tools for entering this state. The workshops progress toward learning not only how to read and interpret vibratory language sensations but how to use the sensations toward the project of dance. We learned to feel spoken language’s vibration and recognize the power of the voice while keeping it inside; we also attended to the gap between speaking and not speaking as a point from which to move and think, which became a new kind of listening and attuning. In the next exercise, we used voice power to connect our bodies to other material objects. Kasai asked us to simply look at a chair in the space, then to close our eyes. We were then asked to open them and connect to the chair using voice power. This kind of attention was not of the visual field. I did not see a chair so much as feel a potential for action that was both targeted and expansive. With this mode of concentration gleaned from the prior voice power exercises, I saw the chair differently. While the eyes as sense organs were undeniably part of the process, here seeing was sensing. Kasai described it as closing the second eyelid while keeping the first open. Unlike in other butoh experiences, here I was neither focused on an image in my imagination nor on a particular bodily form as a container for specific content. For me, the seeing as sensing that Kasai’s exercise proposed engendered a piercing quality in my approach to movement, as if I was cutting through a superficial visual layer to get to a felt connective relation underneath. Throughout my training with Kasai, this chair exercise remained particularly memorable. My sense of my own body changed in relation to other bodies and objects. I was both free to move autonomously in the studio, yet supported by a sensorial structure that organized my purpose in relation to others. “I” was not separate from the chair as object, but rather each was an extension of the other, and this may have been true for other participants in the room as well. Perhaps not by coincidence, Hijikata had asked a similar question of Kasai: “What is the consciousness of a table?” Kasai credits his time in Germany away from dance, instead studying eurythmy and other esoteric practices, as a quest to answer this question (in San Francisco Butoh Festival 1997). Kasai found that matter has energy that can be accessed by dancing, and by connecting to this energy a dancer can begin to understand that a body can utilize its unique language forces to create a larger sense of consciousness and the ability to connect to others (Kasai et al. 2007).

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Friction Across Time and Space As I sat in the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive at Keio University watching Kasai in a videotaped tribute to Hijikata, I saw how the force of language vibrates to connect bodies across historical time. Here, a relation between Kasai and Hijikata materialized through Kasai as he recited a manifesto written by art critic Tanemura Suehiro, a close friend of Hijikata. The words, spoken in the original Japanese, emanated from Kasai’s mouth into the room, activating his whole body. It was as if the text itself released power through its vocalization. The manifesto, originally distributed to the audience at the performance of Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihonjin: Nikutai no hanran (Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese people: Rebellion of the body, also sometimes translated as Revolt of the flesh) in 1968, is similar to the program note for My Own Apocalypse. An excerpt in translation reads: [M]ajor misfortunes are always led by dance that is [a] rebellion of the body. Is it impossible to state that the ignition point of the Russian Revolution is not at Lenin’s brain but at Nijinsky’s body? Every revolt is a dance. Every dance is, as long as it is a dance, a revolt. (Tanemura [1968] 2009: 42)

Kasai’s reading was a performance of the earlier text that activated something in the present, as has been argued of performance archives generally, yet Kasai’s reading of Tanemura’s words also served to further link Kasai’s body with Hijikata’s across time.25 In this performative reading, the passage’s energy and content connected the reader’s body to not only the words but also their affect and earlier purpose in Hijikata’s work. This reading, in my view, liberated multiple forces from language that moved beyond Kasai as speaker, yet it also reinforced how Kasai’s butoh is a variation on Hijikata’s and not separate from it. The productive points of tension between these two language-based butoh philosophies—Kasai’s and Hijikata’s—stems from the linguistic approaches Hijikata developed in conversation with other writers and social critics of the time. Hijikata was part of a literary and artistic circle whose members recognized the power of language beyond mere discourse. As Kasai tells it: Tatsumi Hijikata once told me that when he came to Tokyo from Akita, he could not make up his mind whether to be a butoh dancer or a writer. He performed as Tatsumi Hijikata, and wrote as Nue Hijikata. He had to walk with a mountain of books in a wheelbarrow every time he moved a­ partments.

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One day while he was pulling the heavy wheelbarrow up a long slope, he stopped a moment to take a breath. And at that second the wheelbarrow slid all the way down to the bottom throwing his books to the river. Hijikata stood there covered in sweat thinking, “I will be a dancer.” (2011b: 186)

There were, however, other challenges posed to Hijikata at that time. The eminent writer Mishima Yukio, with whom Hijikata frequently exchanged ideas, wrote an essay titled “Kiki no buyô” (Dance of crisis, 1960) in which he speculated that while language is socially constructed and thus subject to limitations, it still has fewer limits than the physical body, whose movements are formed and constructed based on language conventions. Language, according to Mishima, has more options for creating a new consciousness—the territory to be worked upon in order to break the repeatedly performed patterns of socialization, counter unwanted changes in Japanese society, and perhaps bring about a new social order.26 Hijikata apparently took on Mishima’s challenge by working with language in unique ways as part of his dance. As Bruce Baird’s detailed research reveals, Hijikata manipulated language’s written structures, grammar, and word choice by posing unlikely juxtapositions and even inventing new words in order to intervene in routine sense-making patterns (Baird 2012). He created performances based on this new grammar and symbolism, which required audiences to trace linguistic threads of meaning through words attached to certain physical objects. Here, problems posed paradoxes: objects were not meaningless but instead were given different meanings, which asked the mind to forge new relations in order to figure out the new meanings. For example, an object like a tatami mat became layered with different meanings as it moved through various contexts in the performance, and those meanings accumulated over the course of multiple performances.27 The body was a similar object. Initially, these linguistic mind games were intended for audiences who tracked symbols to construct linguistic meaning across various performances, developing an insider lexicon and performance community who understood the new language. However, as Hijikata moved away from his earlier European sources of inspiration, he also shifted the site of interpretation from the audience to the dancer. Hijikata left the stage in 1973 to develop a new choreographic method using language in order to move mental management of multiple elements from audiences to dancers, who were now the recipients and problem-solvers.

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The texts Hijikata developed for his dancers effectively disrupted the logic of movement sequencing. Often described as a kind of surrealist writing, Hijikata’s “words of butoh” (Kurihara 2000) posed fantastical situations and unusual juxtapositions that altered the recipient’s cognitive associations between bodies and objects. The words were communicated to Hijikata’s dancers, who, as translators, had to interpret or make sense of these language-based choreographic prompts by creating physical forms, thus writing a new body vocabulary. According to dancer Waguri Yukio, one of the original aspects of Hijikata’s choreography was “to awaken images through words, and then physicaliz[e] those images.” Each dancer took their own notes based on Hijikata’s words and devised their own physical forms in response (Waguri 1998). According to Kurihara Nanako, the words were “strange, equivocal, and incomprehensible even for Japanese or for people close to Hijikata” (1996: 14). It was like “disconnecting the joints of sentences,” with the intention of eliciting the same effect on the socialized body’s connective logic. Hijikata describes the process: For example, here is a finger. It’s used to pick things up. However, at certain extreme moments, one may wonder what the role of the space between joint and joint is. There are things in people which are not used for common, everyday aims. It is those things which I made them focus on with all their might. (In Lee 1998: 11)28

The writings altered a body’s own grammar by creating new physical logics that demanded high levels of concentration and management of multiple sensory inputs.29 As Kasai says of Hijikata’s use of language, “He uses words like striking lightening […;] he skillfully steals the word of animals” (2016: 65) and, in doing so, “seems to infuse new life into the Japanese language” (67). The language is also multisensory. In addition to the words themselves, their sound carried qualitative information. According to Kurihara, when Ashikawa asked students to become a “wet rug” in a workshop, she evoked a feeling of wetness by using the Japanese onomatopoeia “jyū jyū” to imply “water sweating.” Onomatopoetic language—where the sound of a word relates to its meaning—captures a physical sense of the word as well as an image of an object (2000: 15). Hijikata’s dancers worked with the phrases by first proposing images that held multiple words together, then subsequently translated the word groupings into movement, a process

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that teaches one to objectify their body as a material container emptied of meaning so as to receive new content. By sharing a felt sense of language, each dancer’s solutions are unique, yet united around the shared set of words Hijikata transmitted. The butoh-fu, the dancer’s notations and bodily forms, as I understand them, are not improvised.30 Instead, they are codified, serving as both a cuing system and a kind of dance notation; butoh-fu refers both to the poetic phrases themselves and to the specific bodily forms that they inspire. Waguri created a taxonomy of the butoh­fu, yet while Hijikata’s dancers shared a vocabulary, each dancer’s version is also slightly different, based on how they developed the word prompts. According to writer and performer Kayo Mikami, quoting Hijikata, “a poverty of language meant a poverty of sensation” (in Kayo 2016: 120).31 The forces of language in the butoh-fu notations reach the body-as-­ translator; by responding with their own sensations, the dancer transforms the sound of the butoh-fu poetic writings and the image they describe into movement forms. As Kasai says, “Hijikata never said take the dance inside and make it yours. Choreography is always considered something external” (in Kasai et al. 2007). In Hijikata’s case, choreography arrives from an outside source—language—and is then met and embodied by each dancer. However, while the butoh-fu are notated memories for certain choreographic forms or images, they are more accurately defined as audiovisual. Like Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema, where multiple sensations occur and are communicated simultaneously, the butoh-fu are realized through multiple sensory experiences cued by sound, imagination, and touch. Understood this way, the butoh-fu texts work on the dancer’s bodymind by asking that multiple stimuli be held in relation rather than resolved into a singular unified form or image. Noguchi Taiso also likely influenced Hijikata’s approach to holding multiple stimuli. Like butoh-fu, it utilizes words in order to transform the body. This gymnastic practice (as it is often called, given founder Noguchi Michizo’s background in physical education) uses flow and gravity as a means of muscular surrender rather than control. Imagery, particularly water, is used to motivate inner movement and guide the dancer in changing the body concept from muscle and bone to fluid tissues. Describing Noguchi’s work, Kayo notes that the distinct sounds of Japanese phonology offered Noguchi the possibility for new language combinations that, when spoken to movers, opened opportunities for new body sensations, similar to Hijikata’s work with language and bodies (Kayo 2016: 120–121).32 It is unclear if Hijikata worked with Noguchi, but they did

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encounter one another at Hijikata’s Asbestos-kan studio (Baird 2012: 171). Today, many butoh artists, including Yoshioka Yumiko and the company Sankai Juku, employ this approach. Hijikata’s approach intensifies sensation in other ways as well. Chronicles of physical discomfort brought on by extreme circumstances proposed by Hijikata to dancers, including the irritation and itching resulting from the white-painted body aesthetic that apparently initially was plaster left to dry on the body, and long periods without sleep, were just two of the tactics used to unsettle equilibrium by accessing the mind through the senses (see Kurihara 1996; Baird 2012). For Kasai, creativity materializes in a similar process of discomfort, as when a suppressed negative feeling or self-loathing in the body is forced out: You can’t go forward if you only love yourself, there also must be something you hate. You need conflict and must love and hate the body as food, nourishing and both keeping in and sending out or rejecting something indigestible that can then create something interesting. (In Gross 2009)33

This love/hate relationship with the self parallels Kasai’s relationship with Hijikata—frictional but productive, much like how Kasai understood the conflicting forces in European avant-garde art. Kasai holds great respect for his former teacher and collaborator, and it is certainly not arbitrary that Kasai engages language in his butoh approach. By drawing from writings by Hijikata and other writers that Hijikata used alongside his own performances, Kasai further materializes a conversation with his early mentor and collaborator. An example from his return to dance in 1990, after Hijikata’s death and performed at Hijikata’s Asbestos-kan studio, shows their point of contact.34 Focusing his critique on the relationship between Kasai and a separate narrator who reads from a text by Minoru Yoshioka published in 1986 and dedicated to Hijikata, critic Joel Perron writes: The narrator savored the sensitivity of the words, but they were directed to Kasai rather than to the audience. As Kasai danced, the narrator followed him and at other times led him in a constant game of alternately subtle and blatant exchanges. […At one point] Kasai leapt across the stage, grabbing the narrator by the scruff of the neck and hurling him into a somersault. Then tossing his head back and kicking one leg up, Kasai coquettishly laid himself across the narrator’s bent knee. (1990: 11)

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In Perron’s assessment, Kasai was not mocking dance movement or his mentor; his performance was also not an intellectual modernist toying with dance but rather a performer keeping the audience “spellbound in his trap of hate and love. Kasai was not simply putting on a show, but allowing parts of his psyche to surface before the audience,” also evident in his androgynous self-presentation. Kasai moved at times during pauses between words, “as if turning his body into a symbol of sound” (1990: 11). Kasai’s is but one butoh variation, yet his is the only one I am aware of that specifically develops Hijikata’s approach to using language to transform the body. In Kasai’s case, the approach manifests different forms and results in a different aesthetic. In contrast to Hijikata’s body as a receptacle for memory or imagery that is then lived out in movement, Kasai’s dance body is energetic and focused outward and toward connection with other bodies and things, even as there is inward sensitivity.35 Rejecting both the more common slow, image-based metamorphosis that gives way to gravity’s downward pull and the Noguchi Taiso approach to movement that characterizes the quality of much butoh movement, Kasai instead favors angular, forceful gestures that operate horizontally and are often realized instantaneously in bodily form. If for Hijikata, “crisis”36 is a lived condition at the edge of social language’s demise, Kasai’s related “chaos” instead works with the energy of words as they circulate, holding both dancers and spectators accountable for understanding their power and using words to create a shared condition in which to live. Hijikata’s language innovations, which have been characterized as effectively “tying the body up with words” and “turning it into a material object, an object that is like a corpse” (Kurihara 2000: 17) thus contrasts with Kasai’s “chaotic butoh,” which seeks an energetic body to materialize not inner sensations but the friction among forces perceived to be outside the body. As Kasai says, “Human beings must stay in the material world and imprison themselves in the essence of matter to bear something which is neither the universe nor human” (1996: 39). His studio and community, Tenshi-kan, takes its name from Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, which Kasai borrows for its dual historical roles as a prison and a kind of museum for paintings.37 This name itself alludes to Kasai’s perspective on the dual role of location and identity—as treasure and prison.

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Unsettling Butoh Histories Given his close relation to Hijikata and his commitment to butoh’s larger project of connecting bodies to language, why is it that Kasai’s status as a butoh practitioner is so often challenged? This may be because language vibrations and their role in butoh choreography are not fully understood. Kasai liberates language experiments in butoh from Hijikata’s singular lineage and allows the concept of using language sensorially to inspire movement to be more broadly studied and developed. In a world of mutual cultural influence, Kasai appeals not only to Japanese-language speakers, but also to other peoples, specifically those in the U.S. and Italy, where Kasai has long-standing relationships. If the relation between bodies and language is vibrational as I have suggested, with the capacity to change human bodies and spaces, butoh can activate bodies across multiple locations and even time periods, beyond the realm of Japanese culture. Audiences and critics have not yet caught up. This is nowhere more pointed than in responses to Kasai’s later U.S. performance, ironically and appropriately titled work Butoh America (2007), presented as part of the New York Butoh Festival at the Japan Society.38 In the piece, five women were dressed in skirts and tops that read as not just pedestrian attire but specifically as commercially made generic wear found at chain stores that outsource cheap labor. They moved onstage not quite like modern dancers, but not unlike them either. Indeed, many of the performers were contemporary dancers who had also studied butoh, and thus a merger of these styles was quite appropriate. The movement was only mildly contorted, remaining mostly upright, shape-based, and polished. In a final scene, Kasai appeared in full butoh-white makeup and white briefs, emerging otherwise naked from a white bathtub like a newborn. The American dancers proceeded to swarm around Kasai, fawning on him like star-struck fans while he soaked up the spotlight—until they descended on him and seemed to devour him. What better way to comment on America’s fascination with the exotic Japanese butoh body than to eat it up? After the performance, I overheard audience members describing the work as “just like modern dance,” a sentiment that seemed to indicate the work’s failure to access butoh’s elusive realm of human transcendence. Of the evening, Claudia La Rocco in the New York Times wrote, “This was Butoh with a big wink. Or maybe it wasn’t Butoh at all” (La Rocco 2007). But was butoh at its inception free of ironic comment on the West? On the same piece, Gia Kourlas, also for the New York Times, wrote:

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Certainly Akira Kasai’s “Butoh America,” a collaboration with five performers based in the United States, had its fair share of bizarre moments, but they were due mainly to the production’s jittery changes of scene and costumes than to its ability to redefine the form. In program notes Mr. Kasai writes, “Butoh in America is the most beautiful and fragile, the most complete form that contains both fulfillment and destruction, the life and death of the dance. […The scenes] failed to build a tangible portrait of “Butoh America”—whatever that is. (Kourlas 2007)

But as Kasai notes, “You are made out of what you make, that is what I say about butoh when I am asked about it” (in Gross 2009). With this work, Kasai used the energy of location and American ideas about butoh and star attention to create the kind of friction that makes a social commentary. In a sense “we”—U.S. audience-goers, critics, and dancers—had made this butoh that was “not butoh” by adopting a fixed aesthetic notion of what butoh is, rather than allowing butoh to include multiple aesthetic practices. The U.S. press’s judgmental characterization of Kasai’s piece as un-­ butoh-­like continues to enforce common essentialist beliefs about what butoh is, and modernist notions of dance more generally as determinedly sincere and truthful. U.S. butoh narratives have also promoted essentialist references to the Japanese body and locked butoh’s origin story to the figure of Hijikata. However, film and comparative literature scholar Miryam Sas counters that the “Japanese body” in Hijikata’s earlier butoh is not a literal Japanese identity but instead a metaphor signifying a paradoxical social condition rather than a natural origin or nostalgia for a lost past. While a release of the socialized body, if understood to return us to a “premodern” state, tends toward essentialism linked to cultural specificity, in Sas’s estimation Hijikata proposes a paradox of identity itself. Neither Japanese nor not Japanese, “the body dances around the idea of home, rather than locating home itself” (Sas 2011: 175–176). Kasai’s Butoh America also seems to dance around what it purports to narrate, in this case an American notion of butoh. For Kasai, butoh is unbounded by a particular aesthetic, geographical location, or a singular point in history. Like words it flows in multiple directions—vertically, from past to future, and from future to past (Kasai 2011b: 209). “Voice power makes our lives,” yet its forces depend on both the sound of a particular language and its significance within a given context (Kasai 2011a), and thus affects how butoh manifests in time and space. Kasai sees butoh in commedia dell’arte and in the bodies of Vaslav

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Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, and Hijikata Tatsumi. For Kasai, from postwar Japan to mid-1990s San Francisco, butoh’s vibrations enact a kind of time travel that transcends linear narratives and can inhabit bodies without discrimination (Kasai et al. 2007). Sometimes Kasai sees aspects of butoh in ballet dancers more than in so-called butoh artists; in the U.S., he recognizes it in hip-hop. Butoh is not a style of dance but something that activates style or variation (in the Deleuzian senses of these terms) by unleashing what is foreign or unknown in the familiar. Kasai finds that butoh happens when the sensations in a body at a particular time and place change: “Dance eliminates the physical self” (in Fraleigh 1999: 189). However: “If your senses do not change, the dance does not change. The consciousness of the body comes into the picture with the changing of the senses” (233). Finding a new relationship to one’s language, and thus forging a new sensorial experience by way of language in a particular time and place, requires opening to outside forces such that what was familiar now vibrates with new intensity. One example of this principle whereby Kasai activates the energy of earlier historical events in the present is Nobody’s Money (2011), performed in the theater at New York’s Dance New Amsterdam. Kasai drew on Akasegawa Genpei’s 1000 Yen Note Incident (1963), for which the neo-dada artist had printed fake money as part of an art event. Akasegawa was subsequently charged in Japan with counterfeiting and briefly served jail time, a bizarre merger of art and social values that set the stage for a frictional encounter and rhetorical exchange not only with art audiences but also with lawyers and government agencies. The absurdity of this earlier art-life event took on new valence in light of the Occupy Wall Street protest, which at the time of Kasai’s performance was encamped several blocks from the theater. Nobody’s Money raised the specter of the social outcry incited by Akasegawa’s prior art crime against the backdrop of current events to comment on global capitalism and the skewed relationship between money and the social body. In the work, Kasai conceives of the body as “nobody,” meaning a body that shatters “somebody” to instead merge with the collective, much like the Occupy gatherings. During this solo performance, Kasai often moved at the edges of the small stage, using the sharp angular gestures common in his work. He at times made verbal declarations to the audience, such as “I am Nijinsky,” referencing his own numerous press reviews, or “I am NOBODY” and “Nobody’s MONEY.” In the piece’s culminating moment, a flurry of bills was released into the air like confetti. Each was

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printed with an image of Kasai’s face contorted by a clown-like grimace, in a circle on the front and offset to the right of the centered empty oval (in Japan the oval holds a watermark portrait, visible when held up to the light) and marked with a “00000” denomination. While the program made no explicit reference to the 1963 Akasegawa event, the bills, one of which I obtained from the floor nearby, were a recognizable reference. On the back was another empty oval, a grouping of five seated and reclining dancers dressed in white cloth on the left, “00000yen” underneath, and the words “SOCIAL BLOOD” written across the top. Of the piece, Kasai said: “I see the affects of the rapidly crumbling trust of money and wonder … is money becoming ‘No money’ these days? Then how about the human body?” (in Denette 2011). Invoking Paul Celan’s notion of “no name” in the post-show talk-back, Kasai’s “no body” participates in a similar poetics of anonymity, refusing the power of naming while instead giving credence to the power itself.39 Only by becoming nobody can we together connect as a society of nobodys to dismantle the hierarchical power of the named 1%. Another example of Kasai’s historical activations is the piece Pollen Revolution (2004), which I discuss at length elsewhere (Nicely 2019). The work references Hijikata’s “pollen” butoh-fu while at the same time calling into question butoh lineage and transmission.40 Pollen in this work, I argue, is a metaphor for butoh’s transformations and ability to grow and change. In the piece, Kasai’s body shape-shifts and time-travels from Madame Dōjōji, the eponymous character from the classical noh play,41 to a contemporary hip-hop dancer. This transformation is evident through costume and music changes, as well as through shifts in performance quality and movement. Pollen’s nonhierarchical and nonlinear distribution method—an instance of affect across distance—further explains how Hijikata’s and Kasai’s views can both exist as butoh. These examples, taken together with Kasai’s activation of texts linked to Hijikata, show that for Kasai materialization of concepts or energies into physical form happens when a conflict produces productive friction in dialog with present circumstances. While there may be a danger in unsettling one’s learned identity as a dancer in relation to technique and performance, Kasai gives this advice to dancers: if you love your identity, the door is unlocked and you can go through it; but if you hate your identity, you take that energy inside. The energy found in the friction between oppositional forces is the food that fuels dance (in Gross 2009).

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Between Organic and Inorganic Jane Bennett describes “vibrant matter” as the capacity for nonhuman or not-quite-human things to exert forces on human bodies. This matter may seem inanimate, but it populates human life: “The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it” (Bennett 2009: 14). This inorganic vitality is the capacity of things to “not only impede or block the will and design of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (viii). Although Bennett does not delve into human somatic experiences of vibrancy per se, her work theorizes how everyday human life provides us with an ongoing opportunity to experience and exceed ourselves through the many systems and things we encounter. Her view pushes back against human-centered notions of agency that tend to assume one-way trajectories of origin and destination. In an effort to “counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought” (xvi), Bennett recognizes that an agent can also be a conduit for the will of something else, which suggests a larger politics and ethics of vibrancy beyond that of a human author (33). She derives her thinking on vibrancy in part from Spinoza and from philosophical views on nature, which continually creates new forms (x, 117). As she notes, in her view vibrancy is not a spiritual supplement to a receptacle but rather a material, which can be a human body, an environment, a network, or other kinds of creatures or objects (xiii). Bennett’s understanding of vibrancy in living and nonliving things illuminates how butoh practice can and does speak to some of our current pressing concerns. In 1998, I was a dancer in Exusiai, an evening-length work created by Kasai. In the piece, through the vibrancy Bennett and Kasai theorize, I accessed what I now understand as an environmental perspective. Presented at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Exusiai was Kasai’s first production involving Western dancers.42 It incorporated his unique butoh practice of voice power into a conceptual and choreographic framework focused on themes of organic and inorganic energies. Within Exusiai’s conceptual framework and choreographic structure, the vibrational forces of precise bodily forms were directed toward specific concepts and relations to other bodies onstage. I found that when performing Exusiai I could access and maintain a high level of focus in relation to both other dancers and the audience, as well as to the thoughts I was having as I danced. Abstract attractions to the life forces in

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minerals, machines, and astronomical bodies—concepts that framed the work’s various sections and supported the physical choreography—were made tangible in my body to the extent that I not only could feel that each life force had a different energetic quality in the atmosphere around my body, but I was also able to understand my human body in a new way. The work’s subtitle was “towards a new horizon of contemporary dance,” and in preparation we engaged in extensive conversations with Kasai on warring organic and inorganic forces, ending in an apocalyptic vision. Kasai explained “exusiai” as a Latin concept indicating a god who creates materials and forms in the universe.43 He referred to it as an angel of dance and the state before images arrive in a dancer’s mind, which gives rise to the particular connectivity of “we consciousness.” In Kasai’s formulation, exusiai means “a kind of life-force which exists in the inorganic matter or minerals,” in opposition to “a life force which can be seen in plants.” However, this nonorganic life force also inhabits bodies. Kasai noted that the human body gets life from two sources: from the botanical life found in the body and sustained by nourishment and emotions and from the nonhuman source of exusiai, which is the force that also gives life to a dead corpse. Butoh dancers try to find, sense, and touch the life force in the corpse while they are alive. In the parallel workshop Kasai conducted, he referred to “I consciousness” as light, which has a center, creates space, is located in the head, and is the color yellow; “we consciousness” is gravity and has no center, no time, and no head, and is the color blue— to experience no body, he noted, death is required. We worked with these different senses of light and gravity to propel us forward and backward in space but also in time: the blue energy of gravity moved from the periphery to inside our bodies, specifically at the solar plexus, while the yellow traveled from our interiors outward. In the midst of these directional forces, Kasai suggested, we should create planets colored yellow and blue in accordance with the energies practiced earlier. These concepts extend the principles found in the voice power exercises. After the initial conversations with Kasai, those of us in the Western cast were then left on our own for several months to work through these concepts, improvising together. In his absence, we attempted to sense and neutralize inner and outer duality, which later became the overarching task (and risk) of the upcoming live performance. We diligently arrived at practice, recalling the sensorial experiences from Kasai’s workshops and reiterating the concepts he had given us. Shortly before the performance, Kasai and a second Japanese dancer returned to work with us in the studio. Kasai

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quickly gave us choreographed forms and movements to hold the ideas, as well as spatial relationships, which became our lived reality onstage (Fig.  4.3). He demonstrated and we rendered these forms quickly. The movement process was no longer exploratory; the energy from the concepts was now directed into the shapes that would contain them. These forms, which acted like kata to contain the work’s energetic forces,44 recalled an approach in more traditional Japanese movement processes and served to contain the energies of the work’s themes. Our approach to manifesting the forms with our bodies was urgent and instantaneous, and our locations onstage were similarly precise. Choreography as something arriving from outside, and as the form-taking of concepts rather than personal expression, is a view Kasai and Hijikata share (see Kurihara 1996). However, for Kasai “strength comes out from the choreography if there is no room for [verbal] images to intervene, thus reducing the chance that the dancer will get carried away by an image” (Kasai and PANJ 2013: 3). As he states, “Choreography is not the process of shaping matter but of creating content. Without concepts you cannot choreograph. In order to

Fig. 4.3  Choreography notes from Kasai Akira’s Exusiai taken by performer Megan Nicely, 1998. (Photo: courtesy of Megan Nicely)

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teach dancers the movement, you are giving them concepts” (in Fraleigh 1999: 235), and that is how we worked. The piece’s philosophy recognized that each organism has its own power, and we were asked to access each organism’s forces and move with them in the piece’s five sections. The first section was a dreamlike, surreal “heaven in ruins,” as Kasai put it, and the spatial choreography had us enter onto the stage from the wings, one by one. The sense was of drifting in space after the planets have been destroyed, while detritus continued to circulate around us. The second section was the dark side of exusiai, a violent and destructive energy that Kasai called a “feminine rebellion of the machines.” In this section, we moved in a tight formation with fast arm gestures and steps, our bodies low to the ground. Kasai referenced Aphrodite, who exists inside machines and computers as a nonhuman artificial force of technology. However, Kasai also noted that this destructive power has a tremendous amount of love and is selfless as well as limitless. The third section, a duet, presented the opposite of concrete reality, where exusiai exists in a vacuum. This was dancing on the moon without gravity, only air, where the rate of movement was always the same. Here there was no botanical life force, only exusiai. I performed a series of sharp arm gestures and jumps and landed in held poses while the other dancer moved more fluidly but also stopped in forms. The fourth section was the mineral force made botanical in the body of the corpse, and here the movement was softer and more liquid in quality and included other dancers. The fifth section was the expansion of the mineral life force as if through a megaphone, like the voice moving out into space. Kasai referred to this as an echo of movement. The final section brought the two life forces together in a bright white light, like the center of a neutron bomb that explodes and leaves bodies floating after its destruction. All five dancers were onstage, yet we also moved as if in our own worlds, progressing slowly to the downstage corner while Kasai—the sixth performer—moved quickly among us. The two life forces engaged in a kind of extreme battle that Kasai referred to as both “dancing and not dancing.” In Kasai’s formulation exusiai is both within human bodies and outside of it. The movement throughout the work was alternately very slow and very fast. One section concerned minerals, whose movement is incremental and occurs over hundreds of years, and another the fast energy of machines. However, Kasai does not imagine that humans can directly access these powers except by unleashing their own force in relation to them—the voice power we had trained to access and create. The writings

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of Rudolf Steiner trace a related grappling with the forces of modern society. He saw the evolution of human consciousness as the loss of clairvoyance and the acquisition of intellect. For Steiner, this shift for humans happened because the Logos, or word, was not understood properly and modern society has not developed a way of thinking that combined the competing yet complimentary capacities of the intellect and the intuitive (spiritual)—both of which are necessary for human survival in the present age (see McDermott 2016: 267–268). Still, Steiner saw the evolution of new ways of scientific thinking as positive, and Kasai does as well. Steiner recognized that nonhuman elements are activated in the human body, giving it different kinds of life and experiences of temporality—something Exusiai also considered in the conflict between minerals and machines, and the final image of an atomic bomb whose scientific technology is both destructive and opens a door to other kinds of possibilities. At this concluding moment in the performance, Kasai, whose movement was improvisational within our strictly choreographed structure, passed extremely close to me as I maintained a form. The air was charged as chaotic forces were consolidated and materialized through Kasai’s unpredictable gestures. The dance invited other forces into human contexts, forces that might herald danger or, on the other hand, might allow humans to think beyond their limited worldviews. The duet section of Exusiai remains with me, in light of Kasai’s theory of creating a community body and Bennett’s notion of vibratory, ethical responsibility. I experienced profound intimacy through great distance with another human, yet this human was located beyond the earth’s atmosphere—and far downstage from me as well. The other dancer and I cohabited the time-space identified by Kasai as the airless, gravity-less atmosphere of the moon. Our connection was critical to survival it seemed, yet not rushed. Attending to the moment, fully regarded and lived, took extreme concentration so as not to break the thread that held us in relation during the performance. I had to remain with my sensations in the moment, and keep my mind calm and undistracted by movement forms or the next choreographic sequence. This was accomplished in part by feeling a dense void, heavy and imposed, so that our bodies did not float off the ground in this airless lunar environment. I saw the other dancer’s body as if through a telescope, near and far simultaneously, like viewing an image of the earth from space. While we moved independently, floating in our own stratospheres, we also moved together, attached through this thick atmosphere as if our lives depended on it. I trusted her, not on a personal

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level but as having a shared purpose: our commitment to the work’s concepts. At one point in this section my torso was upside down and I was balanced on my head and toe tips, arms suspended in the air in a precarious position only supported by atmosphere and consciousness. I surrendered to what the future might hold, knowing we were moving into it together. For Kasai, the body is both the oldest and the youngest thing, and likewise butoh uses the oldest forms and the most radical. This is not a contradiction; according to Kasai, there are two kinds of dance. The first is a piece constructed for the stage, and the second is the piece you call your body. People realize themselves as dancers to the degree that they enter into experimental processes to question the human body, which is how butoh is “to be contemporary” (Kasai 2011a). Kasai states that the body in turn has two creators: whether you subscribe to god or nature, this accounts for 20%, but the rest we each have to make. We create 80% of the body where either the body becomes the art piece or the art piece becomes the creator. Butoh can be either, says Kasai, but true revolution is not only the changing of society but of human nature. He is after both in this work: This [revolution] is a very old concept in China. It’s the highest Tao. Like the morning dew, you have the whole concentration of water and sunlight. In humans you have the whole concentration of earth and heavens. Humans are smaller than the cosmos, yet humans are much bigger than the cosmos. If you believe this, you can make a revolution in the cosmos through dance. […] When a young person can dance hip hop, he does not need a god. If you dance hip hop, you can see life from the inside. You can catch the body. If all [people] were dancing, we would not need any religion. (In Yafonne 2001)

Kasai has argued that contemporary dance’s focus on physical strength and form remains limiting in ways similar to when words are used only for explanation or the communication of information. He observes that “we dance because we cannot trust words” (2011b: 26), a sentiment that echoes Martha Graham’s oft-repeated dictum “movement never lies.”45 However, in Kasai’s view if we pursue dance based on a resentment of language, a crucial part of our body and its relation to other people goes unacknowledged. As discussed, Kasai instead advocates for dancers to find ways to sense language’s nascent forces and use them for movement. This kind of sensing, or reading, does not ultimately solve language’s

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limitations. However, by grappling with the question of how to link bodies and language through affective forces—in this case, vibrational forces— each is emancipated from known forms and predetermined meaning. Kasai’s project calls for dancers—and all humans—to create a community body whose organization is anarchic but shared (in Fraleigh 1999; Kasai 1996). The project is not without risk. The material body must be brought to the edge of destruction and possibly destroyed and the mind deranged in order to effect social change. This endeavor, however, is one that we should consider not just in relation to Kasai’s work, but also as dance’s practice more broadly. In dance, you confront not specific forms and movements but rather the question: “What is physical movement?” (Kasai 2011b: 200). In Kasai’s view, “Only by dance can you know life from the inside” (in Yafonne 2001), and ultimately this happens by “connecting one’s body with one’s language” (Kasai 1996: 21).

Notes 1. While Japanese butoh artists began performing in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, butoh festivals developed somewhat later. Ellen Stewart and La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City presented many early Japanese avant-garde performances, including Ohno Kazuo’s first U.S. appearance in 1981. Tomano Koichi, a member of Hijikata’s Asbestos-kan studio, first performed in California in 1976. San Francisco was the site of the first butoh festival (1993–2003), followed by the New York Butoh Festival (2003–2009). Others in Portland, Seattle, Olympia, and San Diego have occurred through the 2000s, including the current festival produced by the New York Butoh Institute (2017–present). For further information on butoh in the Americas, see Calamoneri (2022). 2. Bruce Baird alerted me to several meanings of the Japanese words in the title of Kasai’s dance: In Japanese, “Apocalypse” is the word for The (or a) Book of Revelations, from the Greek apokalypsis, meaning “unveiling” or “revelation.” The title also specifies that it is a mokushi (apokalypsis) roku (record)— that is, the title adds the word “record.” Baird speculates that perhaps the translators of the Bible into Japanese added the word “record” to indicate the “book” part of the Book of Revelations, and Kasai maintains this usage in his dance’s title. So the title could also be: “The Book/Record of My Own Unveiling” or “The Book/Record of My Own Revelation.” Apparently some Japanese theologians conceive the mokushi as a neutral word meaning simply to make clear, to show, or to make aware, while others are convinced that mokushi applies to the activity of indicating or demonstrating some implicit

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or tacit significance/intent; in current nonreligious usage, it just means “tacit” or “implied” (Baird 2022). However, Kasai created the English translation of the dance’s title and is likely aware of the multiple meanings of “apocalypse,” including destruction, and the physicality of the dance bears this meaning out. 3. None of the translations or interpretations of the original Japanese are my own. For Japanese print sources, oral interviews, and workshops, I relied on various translators/interpreters. Quotes from Japanese print sources are cited here in their English translation; for interviews and workshops, I wrote directly from the English translations conveyed to me. In some cases, the English translations were not edited for grammatical correctness, and due to the complex nature of Kasai’s philosophy, in many cases I have not attempted to smooth out the English for grammatical correctness. Instead, quoted is either the English translation I received or the English Kasai used to express his philosophy, which does not reflect his ability to express in English. 4. Kasai performed in seminal Hijikata works such as Anma: aiyoku o sasaeru gekijo no hanashi (The masseur: A story that supports passion, 1963), Barairo dansu (Rose-colored dance, 1965), and Keijijogaku (Emotion in metaphysics, 1967). 5. I align my historical narrative with recent critiques citing the omission of seminal female artists and their role in developing butoh. In particular, Ashikawa Yoko worked closely with Hijikata as his main dancer, realizing the potential of his language-based butoh-fu and later directing her own female company. While little is presently known about her work and life, her role is frequently cited and she should accompany Hijikata as a founding voice in butoh (see SU-EN 2019; Vangeline 2020: 12). 6. For an English-language overview of butoh’s beginnings, see Fraleigh and Nakamura ([2006] 2018) and Kuniyoshi (1986). For in-depth analysis of Hijikata’s choreographic methods, see Baird (2012) and Kurihara (1996). For discussions of butoh’s later generations, see Baird (2022), Fraleigh (2010), and Kuniyoshi (1990, 2004). 7. “World-lines” is Brian Massumi’s reference to Albert Michotte’s term describing the trajectories that bring objects together, in this case bodies and language (2011: 108, 121). 8. In his “Theatre of Cruelty,” Artaud often used screams, inarticulate cries, and other gestures to shock audiences into the present moment by attempting to release a suppressed subconscious realm not expressed in “civilized” society. Language here is a kind of incantation that, freed from the constraints of the text, has a powerful force when enacted (see Artaud 1958). 9. For a recording of the piece as performed at the Cowell Theater in  San Francisco, CA, see Kasai (1995a). The note that accompanied the 1995 performance of this work at the Shonandai Shimin Center in Japan, as translated on the Japan Digital Theatre Archive site, reads:

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The sensation that the landscape before you sprawling seems like layers of visceral smooth muscle. All past events are the focus of temporal perspective. The sensation of something continues to boil in a heartbeat. Since memory is never a replay of the past, but is something that is constantly reimagined, the past becomes a new present each time it is remembered. My own apocalypse, anti-revelation, the annihilation of the boundaries of all things. In life, there is death. In man, there is woman. In woman, there is man. In the cosmos, there is chaos. And in the fields of Apocalypse, the only sense of equilibrium in mineral life is ringing across. (Kasai 1995b) 10. All Kasai quotes in Gross 2009 were relayed to me from the participant’s detailed notes taken in a workshop I did not attend at CAVE, Brooklyn, New York. 11. Initially, Hijikata called his performances “dance experiences,” and only later adopted the term ankoku butoh (darkness dance) to describe his work (Baird and Candelario 2019: 3). 12. Hijikata kept scrapbooks of images and words that he used when speaking to his dancers. However, it was his dancers who recoded the words he spoke in lessons. The “fu” of butoh-fu literally means notation and refers not to Hijikata’s scrapbooks but instead to the notes that Hijikata’s dancers took down. The words of the butoh notation are more accurately described as a cuing system since the words themselves do not indicate specific movement forms. Dancer Waguri Yukio edited and categorized the words, which he then taught and recorded on a DVD (Takashi 2015: 23–31; Waguri 1998). 13. My discussion of language vibration in relation to unsettling fixed notions of the body recognizes that who or what is unsettled is based on my own Western context, understanding of energies and forces, and modern/postmodern dance training. While I cannot assume that my understanding of Kasai’s work fully grasps cultural aspects of the body learned by those who have grown up and lived in Japan, there is much to be gained from discovering new sensory-motor experiences by engaging another culture. By the same token, while from Japan, butoh also engaged Western sources. For Western perspectives on the value of cross-cultural movement training, and texts that explore Japanese somatic body systems, see Hahn (2007), Sellers-Young (1993, 1998), and Yuasa (1987, 1993). 14. My discussion is based on my work with Kasai in the U.S. from 1995 to 2011. Ximena Garnica, who attended Kasai’s first and only year-­long dance-specific training in Japan (his school primarily teaches eurythmy rather than dance), noted that his methods and approach to instruction were different in his home country of Japan than when working with Western students (Garnica 2014). In workshops I have taken, Kasai at times spoke in English while at

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others his Japanese words were conveyed through an interpreter. In cases when unusual words or phrases were used to impact his philosophy, interpreters would check with Kasai, who would then confirm the word in English. 15. Steiner developed a number of educational initiatives, including Waldorf education (see Steiner 1924; Steiner and Usher 2006; Carroll 2010; McDermott 2016). 16. Steiner drew a distinction between eurythmy and dance, stating that in eurythmy “everything is pushed back into the impulses generating the movements of the person, which are grasped with full consciousness, so that it is actually the soul which moves in the limbs, whereas in dance the soul gives itself over to the limbs and the limbs then create the required form in space” (Steiner and Usher 2006: 49). 17. Lepecki posits “still-acts” as a counter to modern dance’s ontology as ceaseless movement that is always disappearing and in need of capture (see Lepecki 2000, 2006). 18. For more on Zeami and the voice, see Nearman (1984), and Yamazaki and Matisoff (1981). 19. Primary teachers of Japanese modern dance include Takaya Eguchi and Misako Miya (both of whom studied with Mary Wigman), and Ishii Baku (who also instructed in ballet and later eurythmy). For connections between modern dance and butoh, see Baird and Candelario (2019: 2) Elswit et al. (2019: 126–136), Kusaka (1990), and San Francisco Butoh Festival (1997). 20. Kojiki is an eighth-century Japanese text transmitting myths via words and song. For further discussion, see Kasai (2011b: 66). This oral text was also the impetus for Kasai’s Kyoto Experiment (2011). 21. This was the word Kasai used, first in Japanese via translation, and then confirmed in English. 22. Baird similarly identifies Hijikata’s writings as moving beyond the singular “I,” in his case by playing with pronouns in order to position a dancer’s perspective outside the “I” of individual action (see Baird 2012). 23. Translations of this text into English are by Keating Atsuko. 24. This example was shared in a workshop held in New  York, November 18–19, 2011. 25. See, for example, Schneider (2011), Lepecki (2010), and Jones and Heathfield (2012). 26. Mishima Yukio’s “Dance of crisis” or “Crisis dance” ([1960] 1987) was an essay that accompanied the program for Hijikata Tatsumi Dance Experience no kai. Baird discusses this text in relation to two versions of Kinjiki (Forbidden colors, 1959) (2012: 49–50). 27. For instance, the common understanding of an element like a tatami mat was discarded as new meaning was posed within the context of a performance, and this new symbolism was then carried across multiple performances, a

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tactic that Baird notes put pressure on the audience to accumulate, track, and manage multiple sources of information both during one performance and over several events (Baird 2012: 89). This way of reading a performance created a new linguistic thread of meaning by emptying the known object of its social meaning so that it acted as a container for new significance—a tactic later applied to the human body. The body, like words, was rendered an object rather than a subject, able to be manipulated and transformed, and filled with new content. In this way, Hijikata sought to address consciousness through a corporeal route (see Baird 2012). 28. While exceedingly difficult to translate, several of Hijikata’s writings and scores are available in English (see Hijikata [1976] 2015, 2000a, 2000b). See also the film (Iimura 1965) and  an analysis of Rose-­colored dance (Morishita 2000). 29. While Hijikata’s principal dancer, Ashikawa Yoko, could manage a multitude of language prompts in her body, others could not accomplish this task to the same level (SU-EN 2019). 30. My understanding of how the butoh-fu operate is based on conversations with several dancers working with Waguri Yukio, Hijikata’s dancer who taught and archived the butoh-fu. The DVD-rom and iPhone app of the butoh-fu created by Waguri instruct through the use of words, images, and embodied demonstrations (Waguri 1998). 31. Note: this phrase appears in quotes in the text without citation. 32. For further discussion of Noguchi Taiso in relation to butoh, see Vangeline (2020: 110–114). 33. For further discussions on the conflict within Japanese identity and the reinvention of a Japanese postwar identity, see Ivy (1995), and Robertson in Jortner et al. (2006). 34. Most literature marks Kasai’s return to the stage in 1993 with his European and U.S. performances, but this studio performance occurred three years earlier (Perron 1990). 35. Kasai has been referred to alternately as the Mick Jagger or Nijinsky of butoh (Perron 2002; Yafonne 2001). 36. The word “crisis” is frequently used to characterize butoh; see Mishima’s essay “Dance of crisis” ([1960] 1987) and discussion (Baird 2012: 49). 37. See http://www.akirakasai.com/jp/tenshikan/. 38. Kasai’s status as a butoh artist has been challenged by others as well (see DuRoche 2004). The negative critical reception in the U.S. may have something to do with the only relatively recent knowledge and acceptance of butoh as an art form. Ohno Kazuo first came to the U.S. in the mid-1980s, and since that time large-scale touring of the group Sankai Juku has been met with positive response. Other second- and third-generation artists have also toured on a somewhat smaller scale, such as Dairakudakan, Yoshioka Yumiko,

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and Furukawa Anzu, yet it is accurate to say that in the mid- to late 1990s and into the early 2000s, Kasai was one of the major touring artists in the genre of butoh, having received a MAP Fund grant and support from several festivals and large arts centers (the Walker, PICA), and yet his aesthetic differed from the familiar butoh in the ways already stated. 39. Poet Paul Celan’s work on naming and language is based in his family background as a German-speaking Jew who worked in a labor camp and whose parents died during the Holocaust. 40. The butoh-fu for pollen reads: “The room is filled with pollen. Show the density and drowsiness of the pollen. The air itself is very sleepy. The dance of the pollen is itself wrapped in pollen. The air is dull and damp under an overcast sky, like during the spring flower season. The air is dizzy” (Waguri 1998). 41. Mishima Yukio modernized the play (1966), and given Mishima’s close relation to Hijikata this version may be Kasai’s reference. 42. The Western cast included Takami Craddock, Brechin Flournoy, Kristin Lemberg, and Megan Nicely. 43. Quotes from the workshops and rehearsal process are from my personal notebooks. One website refers to exusiai as the German name for the archangel Power in the New Testament (see Covenant People’s Forums 2011). 44. Kata are forms found in many traditional Japanese movement practices such as noh, nihon buyo, and kabuki. These forms are training tools for learning and developing sensitivity, awareness, concentration, precision, and ultimately artistry. Butoh, in my experience, does not use kata except in the case of Hijikata’s butoh-fu, which could be considered kata in linguistic form. However, reflecting on this work and Kasai’s performances over many years, I do see repetition of certain forms time and again, as if his “improvisational” work is actually based in a kind of kata language that allows different energies to move through. 45. Graham’s full quote reads: “Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it” (1991: 4).

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Calamoneri, Tanya. 2022. Butoh America: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the Early 2000s. London: Routledge. Carroll, Robert Todd. 2010. Rudolf Steiner. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Accessed 8 June 2010. http://www.skepdic.com/steiner.html. Covenant People’s Forums: A Christian Identity Discussion Board. 2011. Thread: Yahweh’s Angels, By Name! Covenant People’s Ministry, January 8 post. Accessed 28 June 2021. http://covenantpeoplesministry.org/forum/ showthread.php?1236-­Yahweh-­s-­Angels-­By-­Name!/page2. D’Orazi, Maria Pia. 2016. Building the Dancing Body. Akira Kasai, from Butoh to Eurythmy. Teatro e Storia 37: 139–150. Deleuze, Gilles. (1993) 1997. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Denette, Kelsey. 2011. DNA and CAVE Present NY BUTOH-KAN MASTERS, 11/18. Broadway World Dance, 8 November. Accessed 28 June 2021. https://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwdance/article/ DNA-­and-­CAVE-­Present-­NY-­BUTOH-­KAN-­MASTERS-­1118-­20111108. DuRoche, Tim. 2004. But Oh, Is It Butoh? Time-Based Art Festival, 22 September. Accessed 2 March 2012. http://www.tbafestival.blogspot.com/. Elswit, Kate, Miyagawa Mariko, Eiko Otake, and Tara Rodman. 2019. What We Know and What We Want to Know: A Roundtable on Butoh and Neuer Tanz. In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, ed. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 126–136. London: Routledge. Flournoy, Brechin. 2009. Interview with Author. San Francisco, CA, 15 December. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. 1999. Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. ———. 2010. Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton, and Tamah Nakamura. (2006) 2018. Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. New York: Routledge. Garnica, Ximena. 2014. Interview with Author. CAVE, Brooklyn, NY, 24 July. Gil, José. 1998. Metamorphoses of the Body. Trans. Stephen Muecke. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2002. The Dancer’s Body. In A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi, 117–128. New York: Routledge. ———. 2006. Paradoxical Body. Trans. André Lepecki. TDR 50 (4): 21–35. Graham, Martha. 1991. Blood Memory: An Autobiography. New York: Washington Square Press. Gross, Monika. 2009. Interview with Author. Brooklyn, NY, September and October. Hahn, Tomie. 2007. Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

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Kayo, Mikami. 2016. The Body as a Vessel: Approaching the Methodology of Hijikata Tatsumi’s Ankoku Butō. Trans. Rosa van Hensbergen. Birchington: Ozaru Books. Kourlas, Gia. 2007. Butoh America: A Quest to Put Butoh on the U.S. Map. New York Times, 27 October. Kuniyoshi, Kazuko. 1986. Butoh Chronology: 1959–1984. TDR 30 (2): 127–141. ———. 1990. Performing Arts in Japan Now: Butoh in the Late 1980s. Trans. Richard Hart. Tokyo: Japan Foundation. www.xs4all.nl/~iddinja/butoh (link discontinued). ———. 2004. Contemporary Dance in Japan: New Wave Dance and Butoh After the 1990s. Trans. Kyoko Yoshida, ed. Autumn Patterson. Accessed 1 August 2022. http://media.walkerart.org/pdf/akira.pdf. Kurihara, Nanako. 1996. The Most Remote Thing in the Universe: Critical Analysis of Hijikata Tatsumi’s Butoh Dance. PhD diss., New York University. ———. 2000. Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh. TDR 44 (1): 12–28. Kusaka, Shiro, dir. 1990. The Development of Contemporary Dance in Japan. Booklet text by Contemporary Dance Association of Japan. Tokyo: Video Corp. DVD and Booklet. La Rocco, Claudia. 2007. ‘Kazuo Ohno 101’: Markers, Raised or Razed. New York Times, 13 October. LaBelle, Brandon. 2014. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Lee, Chee Keng. 1998. Hijikata Tatsumi and Ankoku Butoh: A ‘Body’ Perspective. BA, National University of Singapore. Lepecki, André. 2000. Still: On the Vibratile Microscopy of Dance. In ReMembering the Body, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter and Hortensia Völckers, 334–366. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz. ———. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge. ———. 2010. The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances. Dance Research Journal 42 (2): 28–48. Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Manning, Susan. (1993) 2006. Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, Brian. 2011. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. McDermott, Robert. 2016. Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. In The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism, ed. Glenn Alexander Magee, 260–271. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mishima, Yukio. (1960) 1987. “Kiki no buyō” (Dance of crisis). In Hijikata Tatsumi Dance Experience no kai (program notes, July). Translated by Kobata

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Kazue as “Kiki no Buyou: Dance of Crisis.” In Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul by Ethan Hoffman, Mark Holborn, Tatsumi Hijikata, and Yukio Mishima, 123. New York: Aperture Foundation, Inc. ———. 1966. Dōjōji. In Death in Midsummer and Other Stories, trans. Donald Keene, 119–138. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. Morishita, Takashi. 2000. Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh and Rose-colored Dance. In The Iconology of Rose-Colored Dance: Reconstructing Tatsumi Hijikata, 6–8. Tokyo: Research Center for the Arts and Arts Administration, Keio University. Nearman, Mark J. 1984. Feeling in Relation to Acting: An Outline of Zeami’s Views. Asian Theatre Journal 1: 40–51. Nicely, Megan V. 2019. Growing New Life: Kasai Akira’s Butoh. In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, ed. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 192–202. London: Routledge. Perron, Joel. 1990. Butoh to Blur the Boundary. Japan Times, 9 September. Perron, Wendy. 2002. Akira Kasai. Dance Magazine, April. Accessed 28 June 2021. https://www.dancemagazine.com/akira-­kasai-­2306861114.html. Ruprecht, Lucia. 2015. Gesture, Interruption, Vibration: Rethinking Early Twentieth-Century Gestural Theory and Practice in Walter Benjamin, Rudolf von Laban, and Mary Wigman. Dance Research Journal 47: 23–41. San Francisco Butoh Festival. 1997. German Arts and Influences on Butoh Dance. Moderated by Yukihiro Goto, With Sondra Fraleigh, Akira Kasai, Delta Ra’i, and Yumiko Yoshioka. Symposium at Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 18 August. Videocassette. Sas, Miryam. 2011. Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge. Sellers-Young, Barbara. 1993. Teaching Personality with Gracefulness: The Transmission of Japanese Cultural Values Through Japanese Dance Theatre. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. ———. 1998. Somatic Processes: Convergence of Theory and Practice. Theatre Topics 8: 173–187. Steiner, Rudolf. 1924. Eurythmy as Visible Speech. Lecture Series, Dornach, Switzerland, 24 June–12 July. Trans. Vera and Judy Compton-Burnett. Audio. Accessed 18 August 2021. http://www.rudolfsteineraudio.com/eurythmyvisiblecw279/eurythmyvisiblecw279.html. Steiner, Rudolf, and Beth Usher. 2006. Eurythmy: An Introductory Reader. Forest Row, England: Sophia Books. Stern, Daniel N. 2010. Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. SU-EN. 2019. Interview with Author. 4 April, Tokyo.

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Takashi, Morishita. 2015. Hijikata Tatsumi’s Notational Butoh: An Innovational Method for Butoh Creation. Tokyo: Keio University Arts Center. Tanemura, Suehiro. (1968) 2009. Rebellion of the Body. In Hijikata Tatsumi’s Rebellion of the Body: Imagery and Documents of Butoh 1968, 42. Hijikata Tatsumi Memorial Archives and Keio University. Tokyo: Research Center for the Arts and Arts Administration, Keio University. Vangeline. 2020. Butoh: Cradling Empty Space. Brooklyn: New  York Butoh Institute. Waguri, Yukio. 1998. Butoh-kaden. Tokushima: Jasuto Shisutemu (JustSystems). DVD. Wigman, Mary. (1933) 1983. The Philosophy of the Modern Dance. In What Is Dance?: Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 305–306. New York: Oxford University Press. Yafonne. 2001. The Nijinsky of Butoh: Akira Kasai Returns with New Life. AsianWeek, San Francisco, 13 June. Accessed 8 November 2008. http://asianweek.com/2001_06_08/ae2_akirakasai.html (link discontinued). Yamazaki, Masakazu, and Susan Matisoff. 1981. The Aesthetics of Transformation: Zeami’s Dramatic Theories. Journal of Japanese Studies 7: 215–257. Yuasa, Yasuo. 1987. The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory. Ed. Thomas P.  Kasulis, trans. Thomas P.  Kasulis and Shigenori Nagatomo. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1993. The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy. Trans. Shigenori Nagatomo and Monte S. Hull. Albany: State University of New York Press.

CHAPTER 5

Adaptation: Deborah Hay and “Call It That”

For dance artist Deborah Hay, language is a ubiquitous condition of bodily possibility: “All my work is ultimately but a question of language” (in Katsiki and Pichaud [2016] 2019: 95 n. 29). Her choreography comprises written scores that can only be danced to the extent that a performer is willing and able to suspend their habitual dance and performance training, ask questions of themselves and their perception while moving, and release any intention to “do” the words on the page. Hay is prolific, and language inflections populate her workshops, performances, lectures, published books, and website. She is an advocate for dance artists learning to adapt to present dance systems by using language for their own purposes rather than succumbing to the meanings language holds in the academy, for producers and critics, or for anyone else who might speak for dance artists or interpret their work. Instead, Hay suggests that dance artists use language as a tool for both sensing micromovements in their bodies developed through years of dance training and for instructing audiences, producers, and critics on the significant place of language in dance. While Hay’s practice and performances offer possibilities for language to connect to dance bodies in new ways, Hay’s use of language is not open-ended or without rigor. Instead, she works between moving, writing, and editing to discover how daily language functions in relation to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. V. Nicely, Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30296-1_5

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bodies, and what a body reveals about how it is impacted by commonly used language: “It is so important to be able to put in linear form the nonlinearity of the experience of dancing” (88). My work with Hay in studio classes and workshops, in her Solo Performance Commissioning Project (SPCP), and in my “adaptation” of Art and Life (2010), the environmentally themed solo I learned from Hay, revealed how language can be both a survival tool for dancers within the Western dance world and an opportunity for connection and discourse with other artists and audiences, as well as with one’s own body. Of the three language-body methods I discuss in this book, Hay’s challenged me the most. The continual stimulation of language in phrases spoken by Hay to me and others in the studio while we moved, or recalled as part of my thought process as I worked, operated alongside attention to my dance technique. As Hay’s language called attention to and interrupted my movement sequencing habits, she was in essence asking that I both accept and adapt to micromovements of sensation as they arose, while simultaneously resisting others that might be easeful or familiarly pleasurable but took me away from challenges in the current moment. The fact that language in this case was not abstract or imagined but rather directed toward specific areas of my dance training kept me, while engaged in Hay’s practice, in a state of alertness to new adaptive strategies that ultimately transformed how I perform for others today. Social and environmental activist and writer adrienne maree brown notes that intention and care to the small changes that comprise adaptive processes are necessary in the effort to alter an organism’s resilience and maintain the complexity of an ecosystem (brown 2017). In her community organizing work, what she calls an “emergent strategy” is a form of lateral decision-making among groups of people that functions much like how living organisms change in relation to environments. Her work draws on Black feminist traditions to advocate that while remaining in social systems that are oppressive or in situations where communication is otherwise difficult is hard work, it can, and must, also hold a sense of pleasure to be sustainable (brown 2019). brown’s views help me think through the complexities posed by language as it is used in the ecosystems of dance practice and performance. One challenge within a larger system, such as a group choreographic practice, is to maintain complexity so that the system remains alive and adaptive to new conditions. How can language help bodies organize and bring large social justice issues, for example the current environmental crisis, into choreographic structures and to the

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movement of individual bodies? Can aspects of a dancer’s working life such as economics and labor be perceived not merely as obstacles to survival within a capitalist system? Can they hold pleasure? Processes like Hay’s, in which bodies and language meet and move together, can critique and even change systems like the professional dance world and the larger ecosystem in which it operates, not only through creative innovation but also by adapting the tools that are available (i.e., language, bodies, technical training) to those who use them—choreographers and dancers. A sensation of adaptation then arises when bodies attend to the micromovement of words affectively, without attaching them to movement to form a singular representation in action, or habitually following language’s social conventions. Instead, by allowing language and its sensations to become dance forces, bodies and relations can alter the dance system’s course of action.

Art and Life The phrase “art and life” refers to an adaptive strategy whereby the boundary between discrete realms called “art” and “life” is eliminated. While “art and life” today seems a cliché of idyllic union, for artists like Allan Kaprow, whose 1950s and 1960s Happenings strove to eliminate audiences (see Kaprow [1966] 1995), and others like John Cage, Anna Halprin, Linda Montano, and Tehching Hsieh, artistic methods that removed distinctions between art and life were seen as a way to infuse life with new meaning and rid art of its pretense and exclusivity.1 Practicing Hay’s Art and Life dance in 2010 with the health of the planet at stake revitalized this phrase by calling dancers to responsible environmental action. The piece was a solo of Hay’s shared with a small group of dancers through the SPCP, an initiative Hay developed that ran from 1998 to 2012. Part choreographic mentorship, part community-based activism, and part survival tool for dance artists, the project was initially held on Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington, north of Seattle, and later found its annual home at the Findhorn intentional community near Inverness, Scotland. Each year, 20 dancers, selected through an application process, commissioned, for a fee paid to Hay as choreographer, that year’s solo. Some of these solos have included FIRE (1999), The Match (2004), The Runner (2007), Art and Life (2010), and Dynamic (2012). Once participants were selected and enrolled in the project, the group gathered for ten days to learn and practice that year’s solo under Hay’s

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guidance. At the period’s conclusion, each dancer signed a contract agreeing to practice the dance daily for six months (in the earlier years it was three months, and in the final year it was raised to nine) before publicly performing their “adaptation” (Hay’s word) of the solo. Several aspects of the SPCP compelled me to apply. First was Hay’s conviction that investment in disciplined daily practice is a necessary component of one’s work and life as a dance artist, but that it need not look a certain way. Second was my curiosity, based on experiences watching performed adaptations of Hay’s solos in prior years, about a dancer’s complete immersion in a series of choreographic tasks that from an audience perspective are nearly incomprehensible as either human social gestures or movement based in a particular dance technique, yet are delivered by the dancer with exquisite precision. Finally and most importantly, I wanted to see if I could uphold the pledge to practice the solo daily, and what this might reveal to me about my own choreographic practice and commitment to discipline. In keeping with its community-minded mission, the SPCP project stipulated that selected participants could not pay the commissioning fee for the solo personally. Instead, they were to raise it from their dance communities prior to arriving at the group workshop. The politics of the larger dance world came to light at the orientation meeting the night before the ten-day workshop period. As participants from around the world relayed how they arrived at their funding, we heard that in some places individual donors were the source of support (more common in the U.S.), while in others (mostly in Europe) government agencies provided grants. By sharing our stories, we together learned what pursuing a career as a dance artist looked like in different parts of the world and by extension the challenges that subsequent daily practice might hold, given funding and other resources. Each dancer was to adapt their practice to suit the conditions of their own lives and locations, rather than idealize a perfect scenario, so that “the dance” could continue to live in different ecosystems. On the first full day of the commissioning session, Hay passed out folders holding the typewritten score with small images of the dance’s spatial pathways on the cover (Fig. 5.1). We gathered together in a circle to read the score aloud, then worked to quickly memorize the linguistic sequence so that we could begin a group practice of the dance. The piece included many of the hallmarks of Hay’s choreography such as making nonsensical

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Fig. 5.1  Cover of Art and Life score by Deborah Hay, 2010. (Photo: Megan Nicely, courtesy of Deborah Hay)

sounds, performing exaggerated facial gestures, and taking a reflexive perspective on where and when a performance begins and ends. The first page of the score provided questions for the dancer that also appear in other Hay scores and form the basis of her broader performance practice:

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What if the question “What if where I am is what I need?” is not about what I need but an opportunity to remember the question “What if where I am is what I need?” What if dance is how I practice my relationship with my whole body at once in relationship to the space where I am dancing in relationship to each passing moment in relationship to my audience? What if the depth of this question is on the surface? What if my choice to surrender the pattern, and it is just a pattern, of facing a single direction or fixing on a singularly coherent idea, feeling, or object when I am dancing is a way of remembering to see where I am in order to surrender where I am? What if how I see while I am dancing is a means by which movement arises without looking for it? (Hay 2010b)

The score’s second page provided items specific to Art and Life, including reminders to “remove my sequencing from the sequence of movement directions”; “remove hesitation and reconsideration”; and that words in a bold font were warnings “to avoid my habitual need 1) to be unique, or original, and/or creative, and, 2) to illustrate language through movement.” The dancer was guided to “dis-attach” from these impulses by noticing the whole body as the teacher, to open to the cellular intelligence of the body that is the basis of Hay’s performance practice, and to include the visual field, comprised of all one can and cannot see. A final note instructed: “the use of my voice is always spontaneous and non-­translatable whether I am speaking or singing” (Hay 2010a). Following these performance guidelines was a ten-page score—language typed spaciously on the page in several different fonts—indicating a sequence of events that begins “outdoors for 15  minutes prior to re-­ entering the venue” and concludes offstage with a “non-obvious vocal salute to the resilience of the earth, art, and life” (2010a). Between this beginning and ending, as the dance dissipates into life’s movement,2 are the dancer’s spatial and task-based directives for the stage, interspersed with commentary on how to approach them drawn from the preliminary questions for the dancer. Each directive in the score picks up some element of what came before, taking it in a new spatial or movement direction before the prior directive has fully concluded or solidified. For example, the score instructs the dancer to “invite being seen performing a drum duet more or less center stage,” but the duet is then “interrupted with music by making use of my visual field,” which, again, includes what the dancer can and cannot see. According to the score, these movements

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are interpreted as “music” by the dancer, and are then encapsulated in “Emily-Dickinson-like poetry” and spatial and temporal discernment as the dancer journeys upstage away from the audience. In a slightly later section, the dancer performs “good work,” yet as soon as the dancer notices they are illustrating good work in the tasks suggested—shoveling, digging, and chopping—the score instructs the dancer to change movements. Overall, the score raises the beauty and tragedy of environmental destruction for consideration, giving voice both to the earth through the performing body and to human sentiment regarding the earth’s resilience and pain. Songs and other vocalizations, as well as questions about human work ethics, provide a modicum of hope for the planet’s survival through the dance body’s survival of the dance. By the third day, having memorized the basic sequence, and assembled in a circle around the periphery of the large studio, we began performing the solos individually for each other, something we would do many times in the following days. The solos unfolded as variations of one another and ran anywhere from twenty to forty-five minutes. Our attention to the score’s nuances was enhanced through witnessing one another. It became a viewing challenge to determine where the dancer was in the score’s sequence and follow them on their journey as they negotiated their way from one element to the next. On one level, each solo performance of the same choreography looked different. On another, even though the score offered no set movements or forms, once you observed several adaptations of the choreography, as we did each day, the sequence was clearly recognizable. The words written in boldface in the score, such as “attack and recovery” or “earth anthem” were key markers that allowed me to recall the sequence in shorthand. When moving they allowed me to keep track of the order; yet I also kept the preliminary questions for the dancer in mind: each word or phrase in bold was also a warning to avoid habit, in particular the habit of merging language and bodily movement to show or illustrate either the language or one’s dance technique. I attempted to keep a critical distance as these key words rose to the fore in my mind. Often, I noticed my movement or attention had shifted even though I was holding the prior word in my head, or alternately the next word in the score would arise in my mind and I then held it while I moved, noting when the energy behind the word started to show itself in my movement, indicating I had moved into this particular section.

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This new way of adapting to language while moving highlighted how as a dancer I had previously transitioned between choreographic elements either through an external sense of timing or by way of a learned kinesthetic sensation, rather than letting the movement itself present the conditions: the experience of a movement’s timing, spatial trajectory, and dynamic could signal change, in collaboration with the dancer’s perception. There were also instances when I misremembered the sequence and thus eliminated a portion of the score. Should I move on or correct the error? Is this even an error of memory, or did I just not notice that what I am doing now is a different version of the next word in the score? By asking and attending to these questions, I discovered that a body adapts to the score, but the score is also a living entity that in turn adapts to a dancer’s understanding of it and response to it. Later in my daily home practice I sometimes returned to the score’s language and would notice a word or phrase I had forgotten, or noticed words in the score that had not stood out before. The adaptive process involved change that was also cumulative, refining my body’s senses in relation to the language of the score. Hay’s in-person verbal coaching was an essential component of the undoing of a dancer’s trained movement patterns and performance strategies learned throughout a career geared toward becoming a professional onstage. In the daily group session, Hay would provide pithy advice to help each of us with aspects we might work on: “ready, fire, aim” (do the action, then direct it, rather than planning before doing); “keep yourself interested/get what you need” (no hesitation, drop things once they no longer serve you); “exercise your choreographer” (craft your relation to time and space). On rare occasions, she made slight adjustments to the written score in order to further clarify the score’s language in certain sections. The process required me to serve at once as dancer and choreographer, interpreter and teacher. Hay’s spoken words loosened the bonds between my understanding of what a word meant and what it could mean in a dance context in relation to my dance technique, but “solving” the space between them in performance was my job. The score’s words proclaim both specificity and complexity as a dancer then moves with the language, its associations, their individual responses, and the embodied knowledge that has molded the dancer’s approach to movement through prior training. One does not explicitly “do” what the words say, but one does not not do them either. Rather, the score’s phrases, and Hay’s verbal coaching,

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provide complexity through paradox. One sentence reads, “invite being seen performing a drum duet,” yet Hay acknowledges that she does not know what a drum duet is. Another, “perform a blurry dance in a blurry space,” is further complicated by the performance directive: “You are not blurry.” A third, “sing a fast heartfelt song, using an alternate voice,” includes the instruction to take the song with you into the next movement after the singing has stopped. Alternating between the score’s instructions and the performance coaching directives, along with the remembered key word in bold, served to keep me on track as sensations arose in the sequence. These aspects also opened my body’s relationship to the score’s language. I strove to work with the score on my own terms, neither overriding its words nor allowing myself to be subservient to its requests. The adaptive process would eventually involve, in my understanding, keeping the space between movement and language open for discovery. I have come to understand this as a pedagogic method in that sensations intervene in learned associations between a word or phrase and what it suggests in bodily movement. By placing the human body into the knowledge-producing process, essentially making this body the teacher, and listening to the feedback from that body, a new kind of rigor and specificity emerges in both movement and in one’s understanding of language. A dancer must discover what a “blurry dance” is each time the score is practiced and each time it is performed; over time this element of the score starts to take on its own life, even as it may change form: No matter how detailed or broad the language, between the written score and the performance are hidden elements that cannot be defined because my “verbal dialectic” is deliberately powerless to define the performer’s movement dialectic. The significance of an adaptation includes the limitations imposed upon the performer by my choreography and/or the limitations that the performer imposes upon himself/herself. (Hay 2007)

The uses of the face and voice were other key somatic language facets to Art and Life that challenged more traditional dance performance practices. One directive in the score was to “speak of the beauty and destruction of the world.” The performer is to vocalize in a language that is not of known origin, yet with conviction and communicative intent. I found that my mouth could best commit to forming and sounding the new language if I thought of a familiar speech pattern, like a sentence I might say,

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and then moved my mouth differently while thinking about it. I liken this to how my body might perform a variation on a familiar danced movement sequence by changing the initiation point, spatial relationship, or dynamic quality. Phrasing and intonation were also important in the linguistic challenge; I felt it would be inaccurate to think one thing in my native tongue and mask it by changing the sounds, but I also needed some familiar thought-to-language trajectory to accomplish the vocalization task, otherwise the sounds would be mushy and not convincing as either language or performance. Committing to not knowing while sounding a rhythmic pattern seemed the best approach. I attempted to fully stand behind whatever came out of my mouth in order to avoid any sliding into form or sound. Other score instructions to be articulated orally or by facial gestures included “violation,” “attack and recovery,” and “earth anthem.” Approaching sounding as movement and moving by sounding heightened my sense of listening on a somatic level. At the conclusion of the ten-day group practice period, we each signed a contract with Hay to practice the dance and dispersed. What the 1960s art world mantra “art and life” would come to mean for me personally happened in the contracted six months of daily practice working toward my adaptation. On Hay’s advice, I kept a journal with entries and continued to attend to the dance as it arose each day. Over time, elements started to find their form in my adaptation. Alone in the lab, as Hay calls the time and space of practice, without the direct support of others but with Hay’s voice in my head, I worked through the written dance score, making my own adjustments and choices in internal conversation with Hay’s directives and approach. Choices, according to Hay’s directives, are not made arbitrarily or based on personal desire—at least not initially; Hay’s particular aesthetic and directives are always present as the original choreographer. At the same time, the dancer’s choices are integral to the adaptation—one is not a “dancer” in someone else’s work in the traditional sense. Instead, the score’s language allows the dancer’s own habits, preferences, and choices to arise for examination. As Hay responds to this paradox: I recognize my choreography when I see a dancer’s self-regulated transcendence of his/her choreographed body within in a movement sequence that distinguishes one dance from another. (Hay 2007)

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Hay also noted in a workshop I took the year prior to my participation in the SPCP that not every adaptation of her solo is in fact the solo, a point she has made in writing as well: When I see a singularly coherent choreographed body, performing a solo adaptation, I know that the dancer is not choosing to exercise the re-­ measuring tools needed to counter-choreograph the predominance of learned behavior. I use the words “choosing to exercise” because most of us know exactly what is required when we choose to train the physical body to adapt to a choreographer’s aesthetics. Training oneself in a questioning process that counter-choreographs the learned body requires similar devotion and constancy. (Hay 2007)

Questions about adaptation and its sensations arose for me on multiple levels during the practice period. First, there was discipline: What does practice mean to me as a dance artist? How do I show up? What are my minimum conditions for practice? We were encouraged to be expansive as to what practice meant and where it might occur. Could moving at the bus stop on my daily commute constitute practice? Second was the power relationship to the dance’s structure: How might I navigate between merely following the score on the one hand, and asserting my own wishes and refining skills within it on the other? How could I best honor Hay’s directives and choreography while also finding my own way through it? I often held in mind both Hay’s voice and my own and moved with them, rather than deferring to one or the other, and noting when I was shifting the power dynamic. Hay advised that solo adaptations are best presented together in a concert so that the kind of attention her work asks of audiences is not compared to other kinds of choreography that have a different agenda. When it was time to present my adaptation on a shared program with three other SPCP participants who had also learned Art and Life, I further learned that we shared hesitancy about the choices we had each made in our adaptive processes. We consulted Hay via email, made some decisions collectively, and learned more about our individual adaptive processes by performing and speaking to the audience afterward. Some adaptations edited out portions of the score (this was permitted, but changing the sequence order was not). Some used music. They varied in terms of costume and duration. We posted the funders who had supported us in commissioning the work on the lobby wall and spent much time speaking to

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audiences after, who were greatly intrigued by the language-to-movement process. Somewhat remarkably, when speaking to roughly a third of our audience, we found that the score’s choreography—the sequence of words—had emerged for the audience on a felt level through the different performed adaptations. Since this initial event, I have performed Art and Life in several other concerts, shared with other dancers/choreographers who in these cases have learned different SPCP pieces of Hay’s. Each time I’ve learned something new, and yet each time my adaptation has become more solid. The locations in the stage space, the energetic qualities for certain words, and certain facings and forms are becoming familiar. After the last performance, I realized that I could not perform the solo again without committing to finding out what else the score’s language offered. This would open the possibility of a new adaptation, one that would include the accumulated knowledge of the prior iterations yet also transform the dance, creating something that both resembles and deviates from its earlier version. While Hay’s employment of the phrase “art and life” went undiscussed in our ten-day session, for me it made a strong statement in support of a human body’s relation to the planet and their mutual survival by means of the dance’s survival through multiple adaptations. Climate change, nuclear disasters, oil spills, and wars—these global concerns demand that humans ask after their own role and actions in our shared reality, and this was something that my practice of the dance continued to highlight. How can overwhelming crises become present and responses actionable through our own bodies? How can sensorial perception change the disastrous course human actions and inactions have set for the planet? As dancers learn new means of survival by finding ways to adapt to the professional dance world, can what they learn and their individual acts of self-care be extended beyond the arena of dance to care for the planet as well? Can our care as dancers support ecosystems such as the planet, or the choreography called Art and Life, so that they might survive by adapting and changing form?

Practicing with Language Hay’s studio practice of working with unanswerable questions and prompts, delivered orally while a dancer moves, was the method employed in approaching the Art and Life choreography’s specific language—but it

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is also a training in its own right. Prompts such as: “What if every cell in the body, 350  trillion cells and more, had the potential to get what it needs?” and “What if you are not the object but the subject of my seeing?” are vocalized as dancers move improvisationally in a studio setting.3 The nature of these questions tends to disperse a dancer’s bodily or movement coherence in favor of a more reciprocal and multiplicitous attention. The language shatters many anchors of standard Western contemporary dance technique, such as training a dancer to organize their body in order to concretize an image or form, and then performing by showing particular movements to an audience. The somatics of this particular language process highlight the patterns and assumptions in the body as it prepares for movement. By pausing their habitual movement sequencing to ask a question about the desires of the cellular body or if they are the subject or object of their movement experience, the dancer releases their sense of autonomy while also gaining a sense of conviction about their own movement in connection to other movers in the room. The sense of conviction is due in large part to the phrases Hay voices during practice sessions, which are specific and, importantly, repeated. They are tools for sustaining a dancer’s attention. Answers come in the form of feedback from the body, which is felt; Hay refers to “the sensuality of the feedback” (2016: 11). She further notes that while language is the motivator, the questions eventually become a feeling and need not be verbalized (in Edmunds 2015). For instance, when Hay says, “What if? My whole body at once, the teacher, in the lab. I need the lab,” uttered lightly and with a slightly humorous inflection, the words are a proposal: What if dancers resist standard choreographic thinking such as planning a narrative, fixing on an idea, or representing types of actions, and instead respond sensorially by moving with feedback at each moment? Hay suggests that the body’s feedback to her questions is nonlinear: the multiplicitous response disrupts the body’s tendency toward a singular, coherent response in the form of an answer. She articulates this dispersed relation to language in an early performance practice called Tower of Babel/tower of babble: I feel like a tower of babble. Millions of voices speak from my body at once—no single voice dominates—a deliberate exercise to outwit the need to encapsulate. Tower is the continuity of my performance. Babble is the energy. […] The Tower of Babel is a metaphor for performance. Tower is the attention. Babble is each moment of movement. […The] tower/babble creates a self-induced continuum of attention. (2000: 20–23)

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The multifaceted somatic micromovement that is the response to the situation is coupled with the dancer’s continuum of attention to the language. Each phrase Hay poses has a specific meaning for a trained dancer, and in workshops I have attended participants often share a technical background in contemporary experimental dance, which also lends coherence to the shared task. For example, the notion of the cellular body, and being specific about what the cells need, softens a moving body and creates a condition of asking rather than the showing common among those who perform onstage. At the same time, phrases like “I see you practicing what I’m practicing” support each dancer’s movement process and self-­ assertion, countering uncertainty and other distractions of self-judgment by finding support in others and casting the dancer as a witness, both to their own process and to that of others. As dancer Jim Drobnick notes in his detailed analysis of Hay’s studio practice, the role of language in a mover’s process is to create “a shared focus that guides the group’s activities and bridges the numerous differences and heterogeneous goals” (2006: 44). In group settings like the workshops Hay conducts in cities throughout the world, and in residencies with other groups, language and discussion keep dancers together while allowing space to explore their own processes (Fig. 5.2). She also uses “familiarisms”—current jargon and facile words, which she imbues with deep sentiment. Drobnick identifies three tactics in Hay’s use of language: “ideosomatic awareness (recuperating bodily wisdom), de-definition (undermining received training and knowledge), and insight contemplation (concentrating upon paradoxes and affirmations)” (2006: 44). All three use language to counteract assumptions of mastery by stimulating alertness, awareness, and critical reflection. Imagination is part of the process as well, as in one’s ability to actually feel the body as 350  trillion cells. Yet Hay’s questions are not fantastical or implausible. The phrases are grounded in reality—we are all made up of cells—and it is up to the dancer to determine how the ideas play out in actuality.4 Hay’s approach to moving with questions is not a dance technique in the traditional sense, and Hay rejects calling it “the practice.” However, her somatic understanding of language and how it disrupts the kind of singularity and coherence particular to Western concert dance does have an aesthetic. While in theory the approach can be taken into any movement situation, language’s critical function in Hay’s approach highlights the degree to which dance training and prior knowledge are often a one-way route to mastery in which language plays a particular role, rather than a

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Fig. 5.2  From left: Jana Jevtović, Gregor Kamnikar, Deborah Hay, Ella Jane Romero, Jan Rozman, and Dejan Srhoj, Deborah Hay NOMAD residency, Ljubljana, Slovenia, June 2022. (Photo: Sunčan Stone)

symbiotic exchange in which a dancer already has expertise that can then be questioned and studied with the support of language. The shared training in experimental or contemporary dance or ballet that many dancers drawn to her approach are working to “undo” are aided by Hay’s own preferences and responses to the professional dance field. To generally characterize the aesthetic outcome of Hay’s pedagogy: the movement is not virtuosic in a traditional sense. It is absent of dance feats like leaps, jumps, handstands, or other kinds of levitation off the floor; the body stands upright, lies down, or is seated but in all cases the torso is fairly linear, not curved or arched; the arms and legs gesture, as does the face; bodily facing in the space and relation to the audience or other dancers is fundamental. If Hay’s approach were considered a technique, it is one that undoes what has been learned—and as such assumes that there is training that is the basis for the process of undoing. Hay’s performance practice, as a somatics of adapting to language stimulation and sensation without merging them into a singularity, takes

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inspiration from Buddhism, adapted to serve her own goals. Her influential book My Body, the Buddhist (2000) chronicles her experience of learning from her body by listening to what it has to say in ways that parallel what she has read of Buddhist thought (see Hay 2003). Susan Foster reinforces a direct link between Hay’s practice and Buddhism in the introduction to My Body, the Buddhist, describing the text as the “staging of a meditation on bodiliness, in all its devotion and doubt” (Foster 2000: xviii) and referring to the chapter headings as koan-like in their “spare summoning of full attentiveness” (xiii). Koans are short paradoxical statements delivered linguistically by a Zen teacher to a student.5 The book’s eighteen short reflections, gleaned from long solitary periods in the studio, include titles like “my body benefits in solitude,” “my body commits to practice,” and “my body trusts the unknown.” Hay’s research findings from this period of self-investigation transmit to dance readers a kind of pedagogy for practice. The concise summations of each chapter are descriptive observations and discoveries, laced with healthy skepticism, which parallel an inner monologue a dancer might have trying a new or self-fashioned practice whose results have yet to be proven effective. Hay also draws from Zen perspectives on impermanence in phrases like “here and gone,” and nonduality in phrases such as “I see you practicing what I’m practicing,” both part of her studio practice. Zen koans are presented by a Zen teacher to a student in order to draw attention to where the mind is at a given time. Koans offer a kind of pedagogy that guides a practitioner to understand their own processes of discernment, much as the phrases do in Hay’s practice. Hay’s repeated phrase “my body as my teacher” similarly suggests a Buddhist-influenced pedagogy: the site of experience is not the mind but the body, and in the dance studio the teacher is not a Zen master but rather the practitioner’s own body, which is the site from which questions arise. The dancer utilizes language to access where both mind and body are at a given moment, not as a means of attaining enlightenment but of recognizing paradox in the process of honing and refining movement. Buddhism, or perhaps more aptly Buddhism’s koans, here adapted, provide Hay with a way to access more possibilities for action toward a performative purpose. The 1950s and 1960s adoption of chance and meditation procedures from Zen on both U.S. coasts, most notably in the work of John Cage— who Hay credits as her main influence6—served to subvert the primacy of the rational planning mind in order to listen and relearn from the body. By adapting Asian practices, some artists found ways to interrupt Western

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assumptions and creative methods. Alexandra Munroe refers to such approaches as “Asia as method,” when Western artists turn toward the East for creative inspiration but not necessarily to learn about Asia or to dive deeply into Asian methods or techniques. Rather, artists use the methods and techniques they glean from Asian traditions to change themselves and their actions by gaining critical distance from habitual decisions (Munroe 2009)—which describes Hay’s turn to Buddhism. In workshops I have attended, while some participants have referred to what they knew about Buddhism or meditation, Hay adamantly objected to any attempt to view the work with her through the same lens they used for understanding Asian or other techniques. When students attempt to equate her approach with such practices, practices that, as she notes, ask for nothing as a goal or outcome from the practitioner, she counters that she, by contrast, asks for something specific: to become a great performer. Indeed, performance practice is not enlightenment.7 Furthermore, as Hay notes, meditation has a form while her practice has none (at least in theory). Finally, as she puts it: “The Zen approach to life tells us that ‘being’ in the moment is not necessarily a great thing however it is all there is. Performance as a practice suggests to me that there can be more to the moment than just ‘being’ in it” (Hay 2001). Hay’s use of language seeks this “more” through bodily awareness and feedback. While arguably philosophies such as Buddhism and various meditative practices can be viewed as merely techniques for the dancer, they are indeed practical ways for addressing Western concepts of self and action, the role of the teacher, and knowledge stored in the body. I find them key to understanding Hay’s pedagogy. An essay titled “The Sense of Zen” by D. T. Suzuki, whose translated texts circulated widely at this time, stresses that Zen accesses the foundations of personality and invokes change by dealing “with facts and not with generalizations” ([1956] 1996: 23), by which he means immediate experience. The intellect cannot solve things, for this is not where we live our daily lives; rather, it is in the body’s immediate experiences that personal, actual experience—the “facts” that in Suzuki’s words contrast with generalizations—is lived and accessed: “the truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect” (151). A body’s direct experience with language—in this case paradoxical statements that subvert our logical minds, whether as koans or Hay’s phrases—can access the somatic realm. In Zen, a teacher seeks to modulate not just the thoughts themselves but the student’s perspective on

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them, and I believe Hay is after something similar. Thinking can be regarded as consciousness, which in the everyday realm includes our perceptions, assumptions, memories, judgments, emotions, desires, or delusions about some object (Kasulis 1981: 65–86). Not-thinking is the negation of thinking and thus also an intentional and nihilistic act of denial. It is a process that has an object or target, which is thinking, and thus stopping one action (thinking) is merely another action. But the negation of thinking is not to logically stop thinking, for this does not alter the person. Rather, it is to evoke what is referred to as a “somatic negation,” which changes and thus transforms the person so that reorientation can occur (Nagatomo 1992: 116–117). This process is also referred to as “without-thinking,” a zero or nothingness in that it assumes no intention whatsoever. “It neither affirms nor denies, accepts nor rejects, believes nor disbelieves” (Kasulis 1981: 75). In this way, it is completely different from either thinking or not-thinking—it is prior to the separation into these binary oppositions. It is an objectless thought, and thus subjectless as well. Thus, the Zen teacher responds to the student rather than to the student’s question. Hay’s approach is similar when she notes that her practice is not about the content of the question but rather to keep the question in mind while moving and to see what arises. While unlike Zen practice Hay’s practice does have goals, the sense of a witness or larger consciousness that supports and even overrides a dancer’s individual thoughts, guided by Hay’s uttered phrases, disrupts a dancer’s singular subjectivity. Undeniably, Hay’s own embodied voice is essential to the process. Her tone and conviction allow the language to penetrate the minds and bodies of movers. Jeanine Durning, a longtime dancer and collaborator engaged in Hay’s work, observes that Hay’s voice is important because it is the “voice of experience” (in Lion’s Jaw Festival 2020). Hay’s words carry the intention to which they refer—they are not merely conceptual. At the same time, Hay removes herself as the final authority by reinforcing that performance practice is “a different experience of self and other,” when by “seeing you practicing what I’m practicing” dancers dissolve the boundaries that define us as separate entities. Simultaneously instilling agency and dissolving individuality are the paradoxical hallmarks of Hay’s pedagogy and what give me this sense of being a witness while moving. The language is not directed at the individual dancer but rather is set out for each individual via the questions they can ask themself. By activating a dancer’s ability to notice sensations in their body, language speaks to the mover— the one who thinks choreographically. The questions become something

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that “I” ask “myself” while moving. In this way, Hay lends agency to the dancer who is now also simultaneously the choreographer of their experience. When she says, “These are a trick to keep me in the studio, otherwise I’m outta here,” she is talking about language as a tool for taking hold of the creative movement experience and remaining engaged—and thereby disciplined to continue to ask questions, both of herself and for the dancers to ask themselves. When she says: “turn your fucking head [to] refresh your visual field” (Hay 2009b), she asserts that the dancer should continually attend to framing and direct their own somatic movement experience. Becoming a dancer and identifying as such is a tremendous struggle, and not a path open to everyone. Hay acknowledges the struggle: My choice to perform this material requires catastrophic acts of perception. I associate catastrophic with images of great loss. The magnitude and reoccurrence of choreographed behavior that I need to first recognize and then dis-attach from, again and again, is a personal loss of tremendous proportion. (Hay 2016: 110)

In this statement, Hay addresses the impact her proposal has on the dancer who, over many years, has trained, refined their technique and skills, and achieved proficiency. Her goal of disrupting this hard-won status can seem insurmountable. Hay simultaneously asks a dancer to step up to what is happening, without apology, to commit to exposing their vulnerabilities and uncertainties. The balance between letting go and reaffirming reorients a dancer away from personal shortcomings toward emboldened movement. Exercising choice rather than following prescribed movement qualities and technical skills means intercepting learned patterns in order to gain agency within larger dance and societal structures—and language helps dancers do this.

Writing and Editing Movement techniques contain the means for their own reversal. When Hay says, “My intent is dance,” but also says that “dance is not something you create,” she indicates that dance is already present if dancers can learn to sense it rather than accumulate more technical skills to realize a future goal: “I don’t have to make anything, I just have to notice.” Hay’s proposals ask dancers to unlearn and then rechoreograph themselves through new modes of thought-to-action sequencing by noticing that they have

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more choices around their adaptive practices and are able to change from one state of capacitation to another. Hay espouses, “I have been choreographed by my family, my politics, my gender, my relationships. […] I want to rechoreograph myself. One way is how I resequence my material, removing those patterns I don’t even know I have.” These patterns, starting with the pattern of facing a single direction, are evidenced in the ways dancers link movement materials—how they create transitions in order to show certain aspects of movement and not others.8 A common term used with dance movement, “transition” draws a distinction between two states; it involves a “separation-connection” of feeling and activation between two poles such as body and self, past and present, or dance training and new modes of moving like Hay’s. Brian Massumi refers to “transition” as the moment of change (in McKim 2009). However, as Massumi points out: “When you start in-between, what you’re in the middle of is a region of relation” (2)—a point of potential where things begin anew, but where they are already present. This describes well my experience of letting my dance technique subside while at the same time using what I know in service of something new. The “counter-choreography” that Hay refers to relies on working with what a body already perceives or senses in both language and movement—what is already underway, even if it may not be at the forefront, and how these foreground and background operations shift to alter a dancer’s state of awareness. One means of altering what operates in the foreground is by understanding that words, like movement, are not necessarily objects whose meanings we fully know. Instead, there is something known and something unknown operating at once. A dancer then relearns a word’s significance by connecting to it and sensing something through the word’s relation to their moving body. For example, in a 2009 workshop I attended in London, Hay posed the word “market” as part of a score. We were not to represent market; instead, we moved with the word and our knowledge of its meaning and noticed what aspects of the word and its meaning arose, finding “market” where we were rather than creating it from outside references. Learning from language this way happens when a body starts to attune to the environment so as to recognize when the word actively arises in movement, rather than preconceiving what it will look or feel like. However, the new notion cannot help but be informed by prior associations. Moving as a group, I recognized “market” as an emergent property of our collective movement with a shared word.

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In a second workshop I attended in 2009 at Movement Research in New York City, we similarly moved with particular words in order to learn from them their meaning. “Deconstruction” was posed, and by dancing and asking my body when “deconstruction” was happening in my body in relation to space, I found a sensorial understanding of what deconstruction might be rather than analyzing my knowledge of what it was in relation to language studies and trying to replicate that process somehow in movement. With a new understanding of deconstruction derived from my movement, I endeavored to continue to recognize when it arose in later movement moments—and then “call it that”—the “it” being the sensation/movement and the “that” being “deconstruction.” By placing “deconstruction” in the foreground of my experience, I was attuned to when it might arise versus deciding when it would take focus. I recognize Hay’s advice to “call it that” as a linguistic strategy whereby naming an action allows a dancer to move on with the process of learning from a movement experience rather than getting stopped by semantics. The phrase “call it that,” one of Hay’s keystones, identifies a way to anchor or stabilize a research process in order to acknowledge a movement sensation—here, the sensation of “deconstruction”—accept it, name it in context, and proceed, rather than getting hung up on looking for a right answer. Hay does not belabor the process of arriving at the specific language for her scores. She chooses her performance practice phrases very carefully, but they work in large part because they both counter-choreograph and then rechoreograph what is known simultaneously. Hay cites Cage’s cut­up method, which was also used by Beat writers like William S. Burroughs, whereby two texts are cut up and reassembled randomly to make something new, as a way to compile the initial language sequence for her choreography so that she can attend to practicing its performance. For Hay, writing the score initially clears the slate of any personal or psychological tendencies so that the mover can start to notice what else is present in both bodies and language, but often goes unremarked. Through the performance of the written material, dancers find out what the choreography actually is. Therefore, the editing process between language and body is adaptive in two directions. It is less that the body is the authority over language than that by moving with language, knowledge already present emerges in a way that can be perceived. In this way, the body feels language by connecting with it, and in turn language becomes more accurate as sensations alter which word is eventually chosen for the score. The process then creates a score whose transmission to other dancers has already

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undergone an embodied research process. The choreographic score is crafted to make room for the unknown during performance (Hay 2003), rather than serve as a way to, in Hay’s words, “fly from thing to thing” (2009a). I had the unique opportunity to experience this adaptive editing process between body and language in Hay’s first Choreographic Transmission workshop at Independent Dance in London in 2009. Here, language changed to accommodate the body’s movement, and in turn the body also learned from the language. The workshop was a deep dive into a process: five days long, and seven hours each day. The description read: What if choreography includes a process through which a choreographer transmits a dance to a performer, accounting for the many, and often discontinuous threads, visible and invisible, which affects the presence and immediacy of the dancer. What if the movement may change but the choreography may not be changed?

Throughout the week, we worked back and forth between words and the body to create our own dance scores, which we then conveyed to other dancers, much like what happened between Hay and participants in the SPCP. The Choreographic Transmission workshop provided insight into the painstaking detail of Hay’s language-based research, and the importance of word choice when creating a score that will be performed by other dancers. On the first day, as in the other Hay workshops discussed, Hay gave us a word sequence that included directives such as “golf” and “office furniture” and asked that we perform but not represent them. She suggested that the transmission of the words to our bodies acted to signal that these words were already present in tendency. We would recognize “office furniture” as it was happening rather than making it happen, and then “call it that.” Needless to say, this took some practice. I sought to discover how not to show “office furniture” through movement and instead learn how I might sense and dance with it. I moved with Hay’s performance questions and continued to be aware of when “office furniture” might present itself. After this word-body practice, we then wrote from our embodied performance the material of the dance we had just done, creating a first draft of a score in language. From this piece of writing, we again returned to the performance of it and, working between the two—the performance and the writing—created both a dance and a text-based score that moved

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toward one another in increasingly refined specificity. While the body took precedence as the authority and teacher, neither body nor text could fully act on its own as the dance. The next day we got into groups and chose one score. Dancers then performed their versions of it simultaneously, with the outside eye of the score’s creator directing. My score was chosen and I watched each moving body to see my dance unfold. While in some bodies I could see my score, in others it was obscured. And yet, to “see” it did not mean I knew what I was looking for exactly, or that dancers had to change their movement to realize it. Rather, as director I needed to understand how each dancer conceived the score’s language in their body and what I might change to move us together toward consensus on the choreography. I needed to somehow move us as a group toward understanding the score from a shared perspective—but one that I was also, as choreographer, directing and responsible for. I struggled with how to convey my intentions to dancers in either movement or language. I needed to be clear but also surrender my expectation to any particular outcome. I needed to discover what was invisible but present and operating to bring the group together, and move that back into the score’s language. Vision is never the sole provider of information in Hay’s work, any more than is language.9 Rather, Hay refers to dancing as being aware of the visual field, “which includes what I can and cannot see, as well as minute associative instances that arise spontaneously” (2010b: 4); as phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty recognizes, perspectives are not complete in themselves. In his example of the cube, he acknowledges that the form is known even though not all sides are seen at once. Only by moving, either the viewer or the cube, are the multiple perspectives actualized and thus what is invisible is actualized through their combination. He notes that the visual field can impose an orientation that is not that of the body, but rather that of “a virtual body with its phenomenal ‘place’ defined by its task and situation” ([1958] 2002: 290–91). In The Visible and the Invisible, he further seeks to uproot the sovereignty of his own gaze by understanding a look that palpates, or touches, so that “the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen” ([1964] 1968: 139). Hay does not explicitly reference phenomenology, but she does evoke the invisible as a means of inspiring action when she asks dancers to notice what is happening through other perceptive means, such as sensation. She also calls on vision as a means of continually shifting the dancer’s moving

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frame of interest when she asks the dancer to choreograph their visual field, something that happens as a dancer changes facing and orientation. The visual field for the dancer is mobile, not static. In the 2009 Choreographic Transmission workshop, she cited Lawrence Weschler’s book on the artist Robert Irwin: Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (1982). In it, Irwin discusses his journey toward his light- and perception-based artworks, where solitude and attention to bodily habits led him to conceive vision differently and find ways to create art situations where others can share his new perception. “Seeing” in this case is not to know but rather to question. Having experienced some of Irwin’s work in museums, I understand that visual perception, while reliant on the eyes, is a full-body experience involving all the senses. Seeing is not looking for but rather sensing what is unseen and experiencing it, prior to knowing what it is. After asking the dancers of my score many questions, I settled upon spatial relationships as a way to clarify one aspect of the score that would be visible to others. With this concrete spatial dimension, certain parts of the score started to unfold collectively within the group of dancers, regardless of the dancers’ varied interpretations. In other words, we started to work toward a shared understanding of the score. Eventually, with the dancers’ expanded awareness I could both see my dance and allow for individual variations. We were all choreographers of a different but shared experience. Hay recognizes that a dancer’s body plays multiple roles. The choreography relies on the dancer as interpreter of the score’s choreographic language, of Hay’s intentions, and of their own experience. She defines adaptation “as a medium for the transmission of dance”: The performer who adapts one of my solo works calls into action 3 parallel roles: the dancer, choreographer, and the executant. Executant means “putting into effect the exact demands” which underlie the practice of performance of my movement material. Each dancer must be a conscious executant. At the same time the virtues of “fidelity and sympathy” with my choreographic preferences has to be felt. I run a risk every time my dances are performed because a competent practice of the work depends on the unforeseeable and imponderable factors that make up the performer’s virtues of fidelity, sympathy, and streaming perceptual challenges. (Hay 2011)

Hay’s views on adaptations of her solo choreography, and what I also experienced in creating my own score following her method, are directly

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inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (1947), particularly Lesson #6: “The Performance of Music.” In the text, based on a series of lectures, Stravinsky distinguishes between “potential music and actual music.” Music exists on the page as potential actualized by a performer. The performer is paramount to its reception and the composer is therefore reliant on the performer’s understanding and sensitivity to convey the work: not just anyone can convey the music by reading or learning it. For Stravinsky, the “competent presentation of his work each time depends on the unforeseeable and imponderable factors that go to make up the virtues of fidelity and sympathy, without which the work will be unrecognizable on one occasion, inert on another, and in any case betrayed” (1947: 123).10 Hay adopts Stravinsky’s notions of “fidelity and sympathy” as an approach to her choreography, which I see in the dancer’s sensitivity to and caring for the choreography in any adaptive process. Adaptation for the dancer means finding ways to both accommodate the choreography and convey it to others clearly without “telling” or “showing”—operations that often remove a dancer’s agency from the performance process in service to presenters or audience expectations. Internalized expectations that are not the dancer’s own are a significant part of professional dance; dancers aim not only to perform the choreography to the best of their technical and expressive abilities as a personal challenge but also to meet the demands of the choreographer and the score. For instance, my role as a dancer in Art and Life was to understand and then uphold these standards with the support of Hay, while also caring for my process as a dance artist. Each day of coaching as part of the SPCP, when we practiced the score individually and were witnessed by the entire group, I found certain sticking points in the score where I reverted to habitual responses of show-and-tell in order to move through them. There were also moments of surprising ease. Both were opportunities to further interrogate the role of the executant. Were certain moments difficult because I was approaching them with preconceived notions? Or was I relying on my prior technique, which Hay’s process seeks to repattern? Were other moments pleasurable because I was open to discovery, or had I become attached to a particular sensation that I looked forward to recreating? Could the dance tell me what to keep and what to let go of, or was it my body that made these distinctions? Hay advises “not to be afraid of what you don’t know”:

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We want to hold on and know in this culture, as if you could just get it. What if we could learn how to not grasp when we see, but instead notice, then let it go? We might find millions of possibilities available because we are not holding onto one thing. (In Edmunds 2015)

Lecture-Performance Hay has chosen to remain in the field of dance, and to use language in that context, but with a different set of assumptions about what dance can be or do for a dancer’s or audience’s perception and awareness. She is a compelling speaker and writer, and by embodying language within commonly understood frames of knowledge as a lecturer and author as well as a performer, she has allowed language to inform not just her body but the bodies of audiences as well. When dance artist Miguel Gutierrez asked her, “Why are we dancing these ideas rather than writing an essay?” Hay responded, “Because we are dancers and that’s what we do” (Walker Arts Center 2012). Hay positions dance, by way of language, into more common knowledge systems to destabilize what constitutes a dance and assumptions about its forms and processes. One work that takes advantage of more standard structures of knowledge in order to convey dance to audiences in new ways is A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty (2003), which I attended at Cooper Union in New York City in 2010 and again at MoMA in 2018. In this piece, Hay stands at a lectern and delivers a performance in spoken form about the transformation of the solo dance o beautiful (2002) she had created into its performed version, titled Beauty (2003). The lecture presentation includes a large easel with a pad of paper on which Hay diagrams aspects of the dance Beauty, while a video of Hay performing a clip of the work plays in the background. While it is a lecture on a dance, what audiences experience throughout this lecture-performance is actually the dance’s further transformation into the lecture event before us. During the lecture, Hay explains how the solo dance o beautiful arose out of a daily studio practice of this name and an initial research question: If she practiced every day, would a dance be produced? Audiences learn that the impulse for the practice had grown out of Hay’s desire to respond to U.S. participation in the Iraq War by using the anthem “America the Beautiful.” Wishing to respond politically to the state of the country at that moment with irony, frustration, and sentiment, Hay set out to create the work through its emergence within the daily practice she set up for

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herself by committing to a second question: “What if every cell in my body at once has the potential to perceive beauty and to surrender beauty simultaneously each and every moment?” (2016: 17). As she verbally proceeds with the lecture, relaying this to the audience, Hay traces the pathway of the dance on the sketchpad with her finger and “reassures” the audience that she is aware that her goals for the piece are also impossible. Hay notes she does not usually make works “about” politics, and she finds the task is not a clear or easy one. Her spoken language engages the audience in her process, and serves as a means of conveying dance knowledge and how it comes about in the studio. The lecture follows the journey of the dance’s changing forms as it adapts to changing conditions. Speaking in a conversational and almost confessional manner, Hay uses a black marker to draw on the large sketchpad to illustrate the trajectory of her creative process and performance of the dance. However, the chart is soon revealed to also be the dance score’s spatial pathway. Other elements of this dance’s story also begin to layer. Hay relays how she commissioned an outfit for o beautiful that was Blade Runner-like in form, an “adorable post-apocalyptic costume that did not feel right at all,” which greatly influenced her dancing in the original Helsinki performance. Upon returning to Austin after the premiere and finding herself rehearsing early in the morning in the heat, and with limited funds, Hay tells us she just took her clothes off, and it felt wonderful. After this epiphany, Hay ditched the Blade Runner attire and changed the name of the piece to Beauty. In its single London performance in 2003, she had a member of the audience undress her, and she performed the work naked. The audience at the lecture-performance sees these shifts in appearance in video clips projected behind Hay. Lucia Rainer writes that lecture-performances like Hay’s are a means of questioning the dissemination of knowledge (Rainer 2017). Using a recognized frame such as the “expert talk” accompanied by slides or other images, lecture-performances intervene in the structures that legitimize and perpetuate assumptions about knowledge and its circulation. This format has been increasingly visible in the contemporary art world, and Rainer has observed that lecture-performances are a kind of “knowledge-­ in-­action” that “provide a space to exhibit and (re)negotiate the coalition between art and academia” (2017: 15). She asserts that lectures like John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” ([1950] 1959) are an inherently social praxis, even though the process of performing the text does rely upon the cognitive process demanded of preconstructed language structures

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(2017: 18). The trajectory of a singular, linear sequence of words is never quite adequate for performance. Instead, in these lecture-performances the performance is brought forth “in and against its material and discursive denotation” (19). By shifting focus from what lecture-performances are to instead what they know, Rainer proposes that such events frame a form of knowing that is both presupposed and at work, or in process (20). While drawing parallels between more traditional academic scholarship and artistic practice is not new, both do take on a different tone when the lecture-performance is understood as a practice of knowledge, rather than a demonstration of knowledge, as Rainer proposes. Hay’s lecture-performance as the dance is the practice and performance of a work as it continually changes form, explained in language, drawing, and video to the audience. As Gilbert Ryle draws the distinction, if “knowing how” is a practical process, “knowing that” puts that knowledge to work through practical operations like artistic praxis, or this lecture-performance (Ryle [1945] 1971).11 The distinction between “knowing how” and “knowing that” also describes how dancers apply their technical skills and background in a choreographer’s approach to a particular task or problem at hand, and how Hay’s practice of “calling it that” asserts knowing that, so that the dancer can move forward with the how. Hay’s lecture-performance is a dance piece that has gone through not only multiple editing processes but also changes in form. A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty had a precursor: an invitation from a journal for Hay to write on her choreographic process. Hay submitted the score for the solo dance o beautiful and then adapted that to its current lecture format.12 In the performance notes for Beauty, Hay remarks: “You are not required to write papers in order to be recognized…although I can attest to the fact that it can help your career” (2016: 19). As a portable lecture version of the dance, Hay has found a way to give new form to a dance and allow it to circulate through other channels—namely the academy.13 Hay’s multiple adaptations to get the dance to this lecture form involved surrendering to the initial question of daily practice, continuing to trust in her own voice, and not knowing how to make a political dance. She tested many options before going onstage naked and only performed this version once before adapting to a different set of performance conditions—the lecture. At each step along the way, Hay shed known dance forms, letting the dance find its way. The journey of allowing the work to emerge through the various environments and circumstances—from idea to daily

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practice to stage piece to essay to lecture-performance as metacommentary—shows what connecting language to a dance body can produce. Hay is a knowledge expert not because she stands at the podium. She is an expert in taking her audience through a process in real time, allowing them to think with her through the process as dance, where dance is what carries the knowledge to others. This questioning of the form a dance takes is present in her stage works as well, if in a different way. Hay’s concert dance performances are curious to most observers. Gestures and vocalizations seem to arise out of nowhere, momentum rarely links one movement to the other, and a singularly coherent narrative is markedly absent, even as the dance also maintains a remarkable sense of continuity. These performed works are intriguing in large part because they are unpredictable, odd by conventional dance standards, and strangely compelling from a human movement perspective. By questioning common elements like flow, momentum, spatial orientation, specific steps, and their presentation to an audience, the movement actions in her pieces appear neither abrupt nor nonsensical, which lends a suspended quality to time passing. There is a logic, or rather one develops, but audiences often cannot quite make sense of what, exactly, is happening. In If I Sing to You (2008), presented at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York as part of the Performa Festival in 2009, six female dancers, two dressed in male drag (a performer choice indicated in the score), merge social gestures and what appear to be unconscious urges (Fig. 5.3). With eyes and bodily movements, they take in the audience, the room, and each other with a remarkable lack of self-consciousness. Despite costuming, the performing bodies do not register as solid or stereotypical social identities in their gestures; the movements do not carry narrative meaning, yet there is clarity of purpose. Audience laughter and shifting discomfort bespeaks something human. Reviewing the work in the New York Times, Claudia La Rocco anchors her favorable assessment in known people—Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Gorey, Monty Python—and situations she can relate it to—a nature show, a sitcom (La Rocco 2009). La Rocco also references Hay’s 1960s Judson roots and interest in reconsidering everyday gesture as dance, as if by positioning the work in a familiar realm the audience’s initial anxiety of the unknown will, when reading the review, be alleviated after the fact. I experienced it differently. Leaving the theater I realized I had not tried to string the various events together into a cohesive whole. I was instead completely absorbed in the dancers’ thinking as it unfolded. My engagement as an audience member was with how the dance

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Fig. 5.3  From left: Vera Nevanlinna, Amelia Reeber, and Jeanine Durning in Deborah Hay’s If I Sing To You, Springdance (rehearsal view), Huis aan de Werf, Utrecht, the Netherlands, April 15, 2008. (Photo: Anna van Kooij)

materialized throughout the performance, yet what might be called “dance” or choreography—a series of forms and movement pathways— was elusive. The performance was not a stage work in the traditional sense, yet I felt its impact on a visceral, cellular level.

Asserting Variations Hay now identifies herself as a dancer and what she does as dance, but that has not always been the case. After participating in the Judson Dance Theater and the downtown New York dance world, and performing with the Merce Cunningham Company during a 1964 six-month tour of Europe and Asia, Hay largely rejected the professional dance world. She moved to rural Vermont in 1970. There she lived communally and created participatory movement practices chronicled in her first book, Moving Through the Universe in Bare Feet (1975). She eventually moved to Austin, Texas, where she conducted multi-month workshops on perception culminating in large group performances. Subsequently, she shifted focus to

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the solo dance form, returned to the professional dance world, and developed the SPCP (see Hay n.d.). Today Hay works with highly trained artists and her dance politics are prominent in the dance world. By no longer framing what she does as something “other” than dance, she makes visible unseen aspects of professional dance. In recent works like Figure a Sea (2015), “a meditation on seeing” performed by  Cullberg, a highly acclaimed company  based in Sweden, formal technical training in ballet, with clarity of line and form, are evident. The work layers iterations of a solo dance on top of one another so that audiences can see each dancer’s movement as a variation of the same shared choreography. This highlights small personal stylistic elements, like the rotation of the wrist, the angle of the head, or the inquisitiveness of the gaze, which provide moments of absurd humor and emotional tenderness during performance as dancers encounter one another and the shared space. As an artist researcher with the Forsythe Company’s Motion Bank project, a digital platform that brought cognitive scientists and artists together to examine choreographic thinking processes, Hay’s score to No Time to Fly (2010) was recorded many times. In working with the media, one of the data analysts superimposed the versions on top of one another. Hay adopted this layering as the score for the Cullberg performance. The stage became a sea of endless possibilities as audiences tracked unique individual versions of the score overlaid upon one another, evidenced through the dancers’ movements along a shared spatial pathway. The work is mesmerizing. The bodies display technical virtuosity in their clarity of focus within a multidimensional environment where facings are not always toward the audience. The ballet company’s presentation in the large Zellerbach Hall when I saw the work in Berkeley, California, was prefaced by a talk by Hay. As in her lecture-performances, Hay’s words were a strategic part of the event— an invitation into the work for an audience who might not be accustomed to her approach and an introduction to her life as an artist. Hay characterized the route of her dance career as “a continuity of discontinuity.” These same words acted as a primer for the audience on how to experience the work, and to find continuity in the dance that might appear discontinuous or nonnarrative in its actions. Hay shares an interest in consciousness with philosopher Alva Noë. Noë, citing Daniel Dennett (1991), notes that there is a discontinuity to consciousness, which reveals that continuity has holes or gaps that we do not yet perceive (Noë 2002). Dennett states that the theory that the brain

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fills in the gaps is incorrect; instead, the brain ignores the gaps completely. Our perception is “attention-dependent” (1991: 356). In other words, we only see what we attend to. This was clearly demonstrated by the two very different works described above: Figure a Sea and If I Sing to You. As the audience for Figure a Sea, we were primed by Hay’s preperformance talk to explore a different kind of dance viewing experience. However, the work’s polished aesthetic, including not only the technical prowess of the performers but also the silky flowing pedestrian costumes, white marley and backdrop, and sound score by Laurie Anderson, presented a refined image that differed from works like If I Sing to You, even though If I Sing to You was commissioned by prominent ballet choreographer William Forsythe (Pizzi 2009). The version of If I Sing to You I attended was performed by artists in the experimental dance world who have worked with Hay for many years, such as Jeanine Durning, Michelle Boulé, Juliette Mapp, and others. The difference between this performance and Cullberg’s, for me as a viewer, was in the ways forms manifested in bodies, and in the sensations they emitted. With Cullberg, while there are individual gestures, they are subsumed in the broader sea of the visual field within the larger proscenium setting for which it was designed; whereas in the piece with the experimental performers, in part due to their proximity and the smaller number of performing bodies, I saw the individually expressed gestures and traits as the substance of the dance. In other words, in the Cullberg work I experienced the affect or excess of movement and language in my own body, rather than a more literal, visual, and formal through-line. In If I Sing to You with the experimental performers, I felt the onset of movement possibilities, and witnessed when and if the dancers followed micromovements into actualization—something not explicitly revealed by the Cullberg ballet dancers. Perception—awareness of the elements of environment through physical sensation—requires skills of recognition. However, it is not only the ability to perceive and register sensory stimulation but also, in Noë’s estimation, the “ability” to understand those sensations (2004: 181). Much of Noë’s research on perception and action involves dance, and he has collaborated with Lisa Nelson and William Forsythe. He and Hay also shared a performance program and engaged in dialog about perception and consciousness at Hope Mohr Dance’s 2015 Bridge Project in San Francisco, which I attended. Reflecting on what he has learned from dancers and choreographers in the studio, Noë considers language to be supportive of awareness and sensory understanding.

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For Noë, “Every perceiver is always also concerned with seeing differently and seeing what was hitherto invisible. The act of looking presupposes a sensitivity to the possibility of reflecting on our own perspective” (2016: 235). A 2018 viewing of Hay’s work was the occasion for my own elevated level of perception; I experienced a refined awareness of my sensations in relation to social and political issues, and of framing that awareness in and as dance. Hay had revised the group piece ten (1968) for MoMA’s Judson retrospective. This restaging, for me, was “about” something specific to the current political context, and the sensations conveyed by the experimental artists in the piece were far more than aesthetic. In the 2018 MoMA work, ten dancers dressed in black positioned themselves in various poses while in front of and touching a metal bar placed horizontally at a low level across the otherwise white stage and walls of the museum. A live band played loud music throughout, positioned off to one side of the rectangular performance area. The work included shifts in formation as dancers approached one another and, speaking privately, appeared to give each other advice or directives. At times they would adjust another dancer’s position for accuracy or observe and correct themselves in order to match another body near them. I found the work a fascinating study on tension, care, and survival. The messages conveyed included watchfulness, precision, and adjustment in order that bodies would unite to work toward an agreed-upon standard. The black clothing, precise and form-based postures, and the spatial arrangements—people gravitated to and held on to the metal bar, while some bodies lay prone on the ground near a second pole, this one vertical, stage right—recalled more recent images of police arrests and violence. The need to “stay in line” and protect one another was palpable. At one point I released this narrative; it did not fully explain all that was happening, yet the tone of alertness and care in the performance kept me on edge throughout. The performers were choreographers familiar to the New York downtown dance scene, and their choreographic thinking was evident in their spatial and temporal awareness. My interpretation of the dance was partly due to the U.S. context in 2018—when police brutality, the immigration crisis, #MeToo, and other flashpoints of controversy had arisen under Trump’s presidency—yet this work was also in sharp contrast to the original version projected on the wall above after the performance. In the 1968 version, the dancers were dressed in white and at a higher bar; the earlier work’s message and values seemed the exact opposite. The attitude of the 1968 dance was carefree and open, the movement unbound

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and casual. This version embodied the era’s free spirit, while the 2018 iteration captured a moment of police violence, racial tension, and questions of care rather than the embodiment of “carefree.” Yet it was the same dance. In this case my perception was not facilitated by language but by the revised mise-en-scène. Language does not solve global capitalism or the problems of human communication, nor does it necessarily awaken bodies to increased perception. And it may not necessarily always serve dancers or assist them in reaching the goals they have set for themselves in their dance. Not all dancers wish to unlearn their training, or do so in the same way that Hay attempts this in her work; this goal may speak to a very specific and privileged subset of professional dancer who can afford to discard what they have worked—and likely spent money—to achieve. And words on the page cannot necessarily replace or be a substitute for ongoing practice or the communication of a present teacher. For a 2012 project at MoMA, Hay could not be present for much of the rehearsal time. As Hay says of this project in which tension arose among the mixed-race cast, “The dance I choreographed for MoMA was the result of my belief that writing might substitute for what actually inspires language—the experience, depth, tone, trust, and absence of fear that drive my teaching and practice” (2016: 126).14 Like any directive, choreographic or otherwise, different bodies have different relationships to language in their bodies, and to different languages, as well as to different movement vocabularies and lineages— and may not share a desire to let them go, or to retain them. Hay’s own journey has not been without conflict. In 2002, fed up with years of living in survival mode as an independent choreographer constantly expending energy-seeking opportunities, Hay wrote a letter of resignation to the dance world and sent it to several producers/presenters (2016: 28).15 In 2006, Hay expressed pity that dancers are reduced to working only with what is namable or visible and with what a body can do, rather than pursuing the invisible and asking questions to expand perception and bodily capacities. We are not yet experimenting with what we cannot name because “we don’t invest the body with intelligence” and “we don’t ask big enough questions of our bodies” (Hay in Technopia 2006). We need to ask tougher questions of ourselves as artists who dance. Looking to shift dance “away from the illustrative body” and toward methods whereby a dancer’s subtle insights, discoveries, and preferences can arise, Hay proposes:

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What my body can do is limited. This is not a bad thing because how I choreograph frees me from those limitations. Writing is then how I reframe and understand the body through my choreography. (2016: xxvi)

Yet for many, Hay’s approach to working with language in dance does provide multiple ways to adapt to and survive in the dance world. Her pedagogy has impacted not only amateur dancers and students, but now also professional dancers outside the postmodern lineage, including those in the Forsythe Company and Cullberg. Hay’s adaptive language methods highlight a challenge to the ecosystem of professional dance’s structures and demand that a dancer reorient language toward their own goals and projects. This approach is a means of working with what is present in new ways, as de Certeau (1984) advances in referring to tools adapted by users who are not their makers, to suit their own purposes. The capitalist forces and knowledge systems within the professional dance world (or worlds, since there are many) in which Hay participates promote certain aesthetic values, thematic trends, and ways of working to survive economically, and they rely heavily on meanings gleaned from language and vision. However, Hay encourages that dancers continually take risks by challenging the ways they have accommodated social and cultural conditions, finding new forms of experimentation using language and vision, and creating modes of adaptation that are collaborative and that serve their own goals and purposes. I have found that Hay’s language-body process allows me to move and find language for experiences beyond merely describing them. I can sense language moving with me. Hay no longer uses questions in her own studio practice: she has embodied them, yet she acknowledges that she needs written language to understand what she is dancing in order to more deeply learn from the movement and thus her body as teacher (in Katsiki and Pichaud [2017] 2019: 87–88). Her work teaches dance artists how to similarly survive by transforming their relation to language. Hay creates awkward movement-­ language tasks “to inhibit your desire to learn them” (1994: 64), a pedagogical value designed to embolden a dancer’s application of language not as an end in itself but instead as a tool for discovering how to practice dance with elements already at hand.16 Hay accepts that language is already part of the human social world and asks dancers how it can support their practice in order to participate in that world, rather than outside of it.

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Notes 1. For discussions on these art/life approaches and projects, see Cage ([1961] 1973), L.  Halprin (1970), A.  Halprin (1995), Kaprow ([1966] 1995), Montano (1981), and Heathfield and Hsieh (2008). 2. Per Richard Schechner, these pre- and post-performance moments are also part of the performance (see Schechner 2002: 28–51, 221–62). 3. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from Hay’s Choreographic Transmission workshop, London (Hay 2009a), and Hay’s Performance Practice workshop, New York (Hay 2009b). 4. Danielle Goldman (2007) addresses the transition of concepts into the physical dance body as she charts her participation in a Hay workshop and her gradual understanding of the work. 5. The two main schools of Japanese Zen Buddhism are Soto and Rinzai. While there are similarities in their practice, including zazen (sitting meditation), intellectual study, and attention to daily life, the Rinzai tradition uses koans as an encounter between teacher and student that can lead to sudden awakening, or enlightenment. 6. Hay danced briefly with Merce Cunningham’s company and was part of Robert Dunn’s infamous composition class and the Judson Dance Theater, communities in which Cage and his ideas circulated. Hay sees Cage’s work, Buddhism, and the I Ching as having the most influence on her dance work (see Lion’s Jaw Festival 2020). Hay acknowledged Cage’s influence in the workshops I attended in 2009 and elsewhere has credited Cage as a mentor. 7. Several participants in the 2009 Choreographic Transmission workshop I attended suggested that her practice was like meditation, but Hay refused this assessment. I believe the reason was to keep participants actively questioning the practice rather than aligning it with something known. Another reason was to distinguish her practice from other forms of self-knowledge and to differentiate dance practice from others kinds of embodied practices like meditation. 8. Hay is not the only artist to intervene in the learned dance patterns that performers automatically embody. Dance artist Chrysa Parkinson, who has worked with Hay and many others, instructs workshops on authorship that provide similar prompts, such as moving and changing the location of “front.” This, in my experience, radically alters one’s relation to space, and to one’s focus and interest; this reorientation engenders new movements and perceptions for the mover. 9. Vision was a common theme in dance around the time of this 2009 workshop. In her monograph on Yvonne Rainer, Carrie Lambert-­Beatty analyzes Rainer’s point that dance is hard to see, referring to dance’s “seeing difficulty” (2008: 1). In his work on Merce Cunningham, Roger Copeland notes

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the audience’s wandering visual field: “the principal emphasis for both artist and audience is on ‘seeing clearly’ rather than ‘feeling deeply’” (2004: 12). 10. Having been fixed on paper or retained in the memory, music exists already prior to its actual performance […]. This peculiar nature of music determines its very life as well as its repercussions in the social world, since it presupposes two kinds of musicians: the creator and the performer. Between the executant pure and simple and the interpreter in the strict sense of the word, there exists a difference in make-up that is of an ethical rather than of an aesthetic order, a difference that presents a point of conscience […]. To speak of an interpreter means to speak of a translator. (Stravinsky 1947: 121, 123–124, 127) 11. Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson critique Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between “knowing how” and “knowing that” (Stanley and Williamson 2001). They assert that there is no distinction between them. Alva Noë has countered that there are distinctions, and that not only ability but also conditions must be considered if one is to undertake an action (or not). As Noë (2005) points out, knowing how is practical and embodied, not just a matter of intelligence. 12. The score was first printed in Choreographic Practices journal (Hay 2014) and later in Using the Sky (Hay 2016: 16–27). 13. While Lecture on the Performance of Beauty is the most accessible example of Hay’s transformations between language and bodies, it is not the only one. The genealogy of her work Voilà (premiere 1995) tracks how it also adapts and changes form. Inspired by a large group workshop, the solo Voilà was accompanied shortly after its premiere by a 16-page libretto written by Hay that Ann Daly describes as an “intricate layering of description, memoir, commentary, and stage direction that slides between first- and third-person perspectives” (Daly and Hay 1999). Hay then performed the libretto as a monologue entitled a performance of a performance (1996), and in its final rendition Hay invited two former students to reconstruct the piece from the libretto and perform their versions with her. The piece was performed by Scott Heron and Grace Mi-He Lee and presented at The Kitchen, New York City, April 1997. 14. In making Blues (2012), a work created for the Some Sweet Day series at MoMA, Hay brought together a mixed-race cast and engaged a linguistic feedback method of writing and responding with the cast when she was not physically present. The work’s process inspired follow-­up discourse in the form of articles and panels (see Goldman 2012; La Rocco 2012; Malcolm Low/Black Sheep 2012) addressing the ways bodies and language can misalign in terms of purpose without a physically present teacher in a shared space.

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15. Her model of success now is when a presenter finds a choreographer who will impact the presenter’s audience, rather than the choreographer doing the work to find a presenter (Hay 2016: 28). 16. Kirsi Monni discusses technique in Hay’s work as bodily objectives that are revealed as world relations (2019: 64).

References brown, adrienne marree. 2017. Emergent Strategy. Chico, CA: AK Press. ———. 2019. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Chico, CA: AK Press. Cage, John. (1950) 1959. Lecture on Nothing. In Silence: Lectures and Writings, 109–127. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. (1961) 1973. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Stephen Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Copeland, Roger. 2004. Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance. London: Routledge. Daly, Ann, and Deborah Hay. 1999. Horse Rider Woman Playing Dancing. PAJ 21 (3): 13–23. Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. New  York: Little, Brown and Company. Drobnick, Jim. 2006. Deborah Hay: A Performance Primer. Performance Research 11 (2): 43–57. Edmunds, Becky, dir. 2015. Turn Your F^*king Head: Deborah Hay’s Solo Performance Commissioning Project. Commissioned by Independent Dance. London: Routledge. DVD and booklet. Foster, Susan. 2000. Foreword. In My Body, the Buddhist, by Deborah Hay, ix– xviii. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Goldman, Danielle. 2007. Deborah Hay’s O, O. TDR 51 (2, Summer): 157–170. ———. 2012. Judson Now Writer-in-Residence Danielle Goldman on Conversations Without Walls: Reflections on Some Sweet Day. Danspace Project Website, 21 November. Accessed 28 June 2021. https://danspaceproject.org/2012/11/21/judson-­now-­writer-­in-­residence-­danielle-­goldman-­on-­ conversations-­without-­walls-­reflections-­on-­some-­sweet-­day/. Halprin, Anna. 1995. Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance. Edited by Rachel Kaplan. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Halprin, Lawrence. 1970. The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment. New York: George Braziller. Hay, Deborah. 1975. Moving Through the Universe in Bare Feet: Ten Circle Dances for Everybody. Chicago: Swallow Press.

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———. 1994. Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2000. My Body, the Buddhist. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2001. Performance as Practice. DHDC Home: Writings and Notes. Accessed 2 March 2012. http://www.deborahhay.com/notes.html (site discontinued). ———. 2003. An Excerpt from Oh Beautiful: Choreography, Performance, and Text by Deborah Hay. DHDC 2003 Newsletter, p. 1. ———. 2007. How Do I Recognize My Choreography? Archives, Deborah Hay Dance Company website. Accessed 20 April 2019. https://dhdcblog.blogspot. com/p/archives.html. ———. 2009a. Choreographic Transmission Workshop. Fieldnotes. London Contemporary Dance Center, September. ———. 2009b. Performance Practice Workshop. Fieldnotes. Movement Research at Eden’s Expressway, New York, October. ———. 2010a. Art and Life. Unpublished Score. ———. 2010b. No Time to Fly. Self-Published Score. Austin, TX. ———. 2011. More About the Adaptation. Archives, Deborah Hay Dance Company Website. Accessed 20 April 2019. https://dhdcblog.blogspot. com/p/archives.html. ———. 2014. A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty. Choreographic Practices 5 (1): 65–71. ———. 2016. Using the Sky: A Dance. London: Routledge. ———. n.d. DH Bio. Deborah Hay Dance Company Website. Accessed 26 March 2022. https://dhdcblog.blogspot.com/p/deborah-­hay-­was-­born-­n-­brooklyn. html. Heathfield, Adrian, and Tehching Hsieh. 2008. Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Techching Hsieh. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kaprow, Alan. (1966) 1995. Excerpts from “Assemblages, Environments & Happenings.” In Happenings and Other Acts, ed. Mariellen R.  Sandford, 235–245. London: Routledge. Kasulis, Thomas P. 1981. Zen Action/Zen Person. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. Katsiki, Myrto and Laurent Pichard. (2016) 2019. Reading Deborah Hay. In RE-Perspective Deborah Hay: Works from 1968 to the Present, 86–97. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. La Rocco, Claudia. 2009. Sharing History and a Stage. New York Times, November 18. Accessed 24 November 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/ arts/dance/19hay.html. ———. 2012. Managing to Change the Mood in MoMA’s Atrium. New York Times, November 4. Accessed 28 June 2021. https://www.nytimes. com/2012/11/05/arts/dance/sarah-­michelson-­and-­deborah-­hay-­in-­moma-­ series.html.

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Lambert-Beatty, Carrie. 2008. Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lion’s Jaw Festival. 2020. Legacy Talks: Deborah Hay and Jeanine Durning. YouTube, May 19. Accessed 1 July 2020. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dhV34uO4J9U. Low, Malcolm/Black Sheep. 2012. Deborah Hay’s Work at MoMA Titled Blues. Blog Post, November 8. Accessed 28 June 2021. http://formalstructure. blogspot.com/2012/11/deborah-­hays-­work-­at-­moma-­entitled-­blues.html. McKim, Joel. 2009. Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview with Brian Massumi, 15 August 2008. INFLeXions 3 (October). Accessed 10 January 2022. http://www.inflexions.org/n3_Of-­Microperception-­and-­ Micropolitics-­An-­Interview-­with-­Brian-­Massumi.pdf. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964) 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1958) 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Monni, Kirsi. 2019. “I Am the Impermanence I See.” In RE-Perspective Deborah Hay: Works from 1968 to the Present, 53–70. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. Montano, Linda. 1981. Art in Everyday Life. Los Angeles, CA: Astro Artz. Munroe, Alexandra, ed. 2009. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Nagatomo, Shigenori. 1992. Attunement Through the Body. Albany: State University of New York Press. Noë, Alva. 2002. Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion? Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (5–6): 1–12. ———. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2005. Against Intellectualism. Analysis 65 (4): 278–290. ———. 2016. Newman’s Note, Entanglement and the Demands of Choreography: Letter to a Choreographer. In Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, ed. Maaike Bleeker, 228–236. London: Routledge. Pizzi, Rino. 2009. Ten Years in the Making. DHDC 2009 Newsletter, pp. 1–3. Rainer, Lucia. 2017. On the Threshold of Knowing: Lectures and Performances in Art and Academia. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag. Ryle, Gilbert. (1945) 1971. Knowing How and Knowing That. In Collected Essays 1929–1968: Collected Papers Volume 2, 222–235. London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Stanley, Jason, and Timothy Williamson. 2001. Knowing How. The Journal of Philosophy 98 (8): 411–444. Stravinsky, Igor. 1947. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Translated by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Suzuki, D.  T. (1956) 1996. Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.  T. Suzuki. Edited by William Barrett. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Technopia. 2006. Interview with Deborah Hay at Chez Bushwick, 21 January. Brooklyn, NY: Chez Bushwick. DVD. Walker Arts Center. 2012. Dancers Discuss Working with Deborah Hay. YouTube, September 21. Accessed 20 June 2020. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sZyVWXH969s. Weschler, Lawrence. 1982. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 6

Language as Agent: Doing and Allowing

In some experimental dance practices,1 such as U.S. American postmodern dance and Japanese butoh, language has been understood as an outside force that activates sensations inside a performer’s body, rather than as the materialization of the author/speaker’s thinking.2 In these practices, language moves through a performer’s body to spark thinking, which is further informed by particular movement techniques and choreographic directives to realize an artwork.3 This was true of language across many artistic disciplines in the 1960s era, not only those based in performance. At that time, neo-avant-garde artists4 turned to words as material, devoid of social meaning, that could be cut up, manipulated, reassembled, and repurposed in new contexts. From tape music and sonic poetry to graphical word art and experimental writing; and in forms like scores, drawings, prompts, cues, notes, texts, and words spoken during performance, language provided inspiration for composition and action. In performance situations, however, language was more than a malleable material. While not considered a direct expression of human thoughts and desires, language had autonomy and could act. Roland Barthes’s ([1968] 1977) “death of the author” and suggestion that the interpretation of a text, and even its creation, lies with the reader or recipient— rather than the text’s author—captures this new understanding of a body’s relation to language.5 If language was seen as separate from an author’s

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intention, then language recipients—readers—were tasked with interpreting language and constructing their own meaning of the text, thereby becoming a new kind of author. In performance, language had the potential to incite human action, as evidenced in events like Happenings in the U.S., Experiences in Japan, and Fluxus event scores that traversed multiple locations in the U.S., Japan, and Europe.6 These events put a variety of elements, including language, into play and asked participants (which included everyone since audiences were eliminated) to respond by interpreting multiple stimuli.7 Agency is broadly understood as action that produces a particular effect, and it is commonly attributed to individual humans and their ability to initiate and control certain kinds of movement through systems or environments. Agency is “doing.” Suggesting that language has its own agency presented a new understanding of human agency in these performance contexts: a body’s ability to navigate unpredictable forces (like language) by “allowing” them to guide action, rather than containing and controlling them. This navigation of outside forces mirrored the unpredictable conditions of the larger world. Action painting, automatic writing, collage, and dance and music improvisation are examples of this kind of affective experimentation in which outside forces could enter and move as agents themselves, becoming collaborators with human bodies within compositional processes. The experiments of the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s and Hijikata Tatsumi’s butoh in the 1970s opened the door to this new understanding of agency for a dancer: an interpreter who responds to language as one of many outside stimuli and directs sensations through their body in real time. This changed understanding of what a dancer does with language during performance required new skills and training. In order to meet the demands of new compositional approaches in which language played a role, many 1960s dance artists disregarded codified techniques, instead turning to somatic approaches for the physical and mental skills needed to satisfy new performance demands (Foster 2011: 62–64). The sources artists turned to for these skills were varied, ranging from a return to established somatic practices like the Alexander Technique (in practice since the late 1900s), studies in mind-body practices like Aikido (developed in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s), and the development of new practices such as Kinetic Awareness (developed by Elaine Summers in the 1960s).8 The words used in descriptions and instructions of somatic modalities developed in the mid-twentieth century offer further evidence of the importance of language as a tool for increasing

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sensorial awareness. Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT, developed by Joan Skinner) employs particular phrases to impart imagery that bodies move with, like “gossamer wings” and “head strings”; Klein Technique (developed by Susan Klein and Barbara Mahler) marks anatomical references to clarify joint articulations and relations, primarily the tail bone and its relation to the heels; Body-Mind Centering (BMC; developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen) includes a vocabulary of psychophysical and developmental principles to address its tenets of sensing, feeling, and action; the Japanese-language vocabulary of Noguchi Taiso (developed by Noguchi Michizo) utilizes onomatopoeia to convey the quality of movement to be performed. Despite the proliferation of language use in experimental dance and its role in challenging human-centered agency, there has been little discussion of how language, as an agent, does what it does. I am particularly interested in the agency of language in relation to dance bodies because while language forces may circulate beyond an author or speaker, they cannot be fully disconnected from the social world, or from how humans make sense of their own thoughts and actions. Language forces affect different bodies and spaces in different ways and therefore cannot be generalized. While the somatics of gestural knowledge is a growing field of study that considers cultural differences (Bradley 2018; Csordas 1993; Hahn 2007; Ness 1992; Noland and Ness 2008; Sklar 2008; Spatz 2015), scholarship on experimental dance has not fully acknowledged the affective role of language in defining or redefining the somatic aspects of human agency, and how this language works differently depending on the bodies and spaces it occupies and moves through. The question of agency in dance and where it resides in relation to a performer continues to be a critical aspect of movement research. The micromovements of language-body sensations are initiated through the interval, vibration, and adaptation, but what then do language forces do and allow and what does that reveal about language’s agency? Unlike the view of language as merely another material to be manipulated within compositional processes, I see language as a force that carries its social significance into dance contexts, impacting bodies in very real and felt ways. Often unobserved and unacknowledged, language forces produce sensations that have material consequences. In a dance studio, language can serve as a directive, an instruction, a correction, or a suggestion for movement. The tone and quality of delivery also has a significant impact on the performed outcome. Further, as feminist scholar and writer Sara

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Ahmed (2007) has pointed out in regard to whiteness, spaces carry and perpetuate corporeal schema and can be understood to acquire the shape of bodies that inhabit them. Agency in dance, understood as increased mobility, must thus be understood in relation to the underlying premises, agendas, and conditions of the practices that constitute physical action, and the particular spaces and linguistic avenues through which dance pedagogies unfold. The agency to experiment and discover what is unknown is based to a large degree on what is known, and by whom (see Foster 2003; Goldman 2010; Ravn 2020). Yet here I also view language as impersonal and as a material that is more-than-human. As Denise Riley says in her short book on language: “There is a forcible affect of language which courses like blood through its speakers. Language is impersonal: its workings through and across us is indifferent to us, yet in the same blow it constitutes the fiber of the personal” (2005: 1). I am therefore interested in how language operates both within and beyond human social and cultural realms, such that a human body exceeds itself and, in the process, gains new insight on what is possible. Language’s incorporeal aspects, which circulate in excess of language, and its corporeal manifestations, the materiality of words, each affects individual and collective lived realities. These realities in turn impact movement decisions and actions in dance studios and performance contexts. Traveling through environments, words affect a body’s nervous system and the thoughts and actions that supervene. Thus, the question of how language does what it does, and how different humans engage its agency with their own wills and desires elaborates an understanding of human agency as choice, decision, and navigation within a space and context. How can and do dance bodies move with language forces and sensations? Encounters between bodies and language require further attention and study as to the specific skills, levels of awareness, and attunement to sensations, spaces, and bodies they move with and through.

Uncanny Kinesthesia In release-based classes of the postmodern dance lineage, which I have taken for many years at Movement Research in New York City, anatomically based directives draw awareness to physical landmarks and movement pathways in the willing body. Because the pacing is often unhurried, it seems as if language and body move at nearly the same rate, yet there is still time and space for me to notice my responses to the language

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directives and to create a sense of directional connectivity that allows me to make choices and anticipate additional directives. This near simultaneous movement of body and language replaces a more common relation to language found in Western dance technique classes: a teacher speaks and demonstrates, and then students silently perform the activity. In the release-based sessions, the pacing of the encounter between my body and the language arriving from outside—initiating movement nearly instantaneously—allows me to notice my inner monologue and thought patterns. As the outside verbal instructions proceed, I also give myself directions to move. I find that when language moves with me in this way, I have access to the more subtle ways that I create continuity in my body, and a less reactive relationship to language’s seeming call for action. With input from both the outside language and my internal verbal and sensorial dialog, I begin to question how I accommodate or deny movement requests rather than merely respond by acting out of habit. In classes I have taken with Japanese instructors of butoh-based teaching in Western contexts, instruction is in English, sometimes with the aid of a translator. These classes employ more imagination- and sensation-­ based directive language that triggers related body memories. Instead of anatomical guidance, the words convey images—water, a landscape, the presence of an ancestor—delivered with an even and calm vocal quality. The body works to accommodate and meet language, that is, language and movement are directed toward each other. In these classes, there is usually no given shape for the image conjured by the language. Instead, dancers find their version of the form through their unique sense of the word and the image that word calls up. Embodying and moving with the image brings acute awareness to my entire body and completely changes my sense of its constitution and thereby the tone of my movement. Language here is less a point of conversation with my thought habits than a prompt that alerts me to small holding patterns as they dissolve, allowing the movement that is already circulating to proceed. Change happens through a depersonalized kind of mental attention to language, and a curiosity about how my body relates to the sensations it evokes. In this way, spoken language circulates through my entire body, which responds and recalibrates as physical movement forms arise and dissipate through a flow of micromovements. Micromovements initiated by a body’s relation to language can be opportunities for dance bodies to make choices about how to enter into movement that is less personally willed, in part due to a decreased focus on

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what in Western training is often associated with physical agency: muscular effort. Micromovements are a means of creating slight variations on the familiar that can shift entire systems. Attending to sensations instigated by language can feel uncanny: they are familiar since we experience encounters with language every day, and also odd because we do not often pause to register language sensations. Yet shifting our understanding of human agency to take into account the impersonal or more-than-human effects of language requires this kind of unsettling of the known. Carrie Noland describes agency in movement as the point when cultural conditioning is simultaneously embodied and put to the test (2009: 2), a process evident in the above movement experiences. Similarly, between a set choreographic sequence and its performance there is a gap that yields any number of slight variations, and these variations are how individual agency and the agency of other forces like language assert themselves within what appears to be a scripted, framed situation. This gap is where different elements meet and collaborate. Recognizing the impact of affect studies on conceiving agency as impersonal and not solely the purview of humans, Noland furthers the discussion: while affect studies has focused on emotion, other types of sensation, like kinesthesia, are also experiences that precede subject formation and pose conditions in which a human body has the capacity to alter the course from decision to outcome. By reassessing the corporeal experience of agency through the lens of kinesthetic sensation, Noland understands that the conversation between a body and the sociocultural realm is a more-than-individual one. Motor decisions are a particular kind of decision-making that can then challenge cultural meanings in profound ways (4), particularly in relation to forces from the social realm such as language. Feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad (2003) similarly expands understandings of agency beyond the human. In their posthumanist take on performativity, “agency” is not an interaction between already materialized or socially recognized bodies or matter but rather a dynamic exchange of forces that exchange and influence each other inseparably. Barad refers to this kind of collaboration as “intra-action,” a mutual constitution of entangled agencies that forms within a relation. While Barad deemphasizes words, which in their view often matter a bit too much, at the expense of other kinds of matter, the concept of intra-action is useful in highlighting agency not as a predetermined or intrinsic property of entities or matter but rather as emergent, similar to the ways I experienced language in relation to my changing body in the two movement classes.

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Bodies and other kinds of matter (in this case language) are potentials that materialize through intra-action, and kinesthetic sensation and feedback are critical parts of the materialization process.9 We can then understand agency as a comingling of directional options and actions that materialize both bodies and language as they move together in a given space or context. Thus, understanding what language sensations do expands understandings of agency and performativity within systems, be they choreographic, social, or environmental.

Making Sense of Language How can dancers make sense of language sensations and what they do? How are they felt and put to use by human bodies in ways that change those bodies? Linguists have identified five basic components of language: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (see Fromkin and Rodman 1974). Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that make language, often used to “sound out” words when one is learning to read. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning, including nouns and prefixes such as “un,” “re,” and “s” for plurality. Syntax is how individual words come together to form sentences, and how word order creates meaning on a basic level. Semantics takes meaning a step further, adding nuance, description, and figurative language to sentences. Finally, and important to my project, is pragmatics, which refers to how language operates within a particular community and context. For instance, a word may mean one thing in one place and something different in another. In a certain field—dance studies for instance—“choreography” means one thing (writing or creating dance), but another altogether in government (planning and scripting the actions of political figures). Here, I am interested in unpacking how language moves as an agent, affecting bodies and environments, by understanding its corporeal and incorporeal aspects, and its liveliness. The workings of these various facets make language, like dance movement, communicative and metacommunicative, referring both to itself and to something beyond. And it follows that the micromovements that happen when language meets and moves through bodies exceed rational intentions. Language’s felt aspects are recognizable in forms like poetry, experimental writing, storytelling, and song; yet as exemplified by the studio practices and performances of Trisha Brown, Kasai Akira, and Deborah Hay, even common language carries thought-sensation that can be used toward action. Further, while fields

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such as anthropology and linguistics study how unintentional linguistic expressions such as laughing and crying; characteristics of vocalizations like intonation, interjection, and insinuation; and extralinguistic sounds like sighs or groans reveal the sentiments that accompany spoken language, these sentiments need not be audible to be felt.10 Speaking is also not the only way language is embodied. Writing and reading also bring bodies to bear on thought and action. However, as Brian Massumi points out, many human adults misunderstand what language does. We delude ourselves by conceiving language as fact. Yet language is more conjecture than knowledge. “Words point toward, in active tending, more than they pin down, in logically fixed designation” (2011: 119), he notes. Language is neither purely informational nor only emotional. Rather, it is speculative (120–21). Massumi refers to experimental psychologist Albert Michotte’s research on causality in explaining how words find new ways of concluding movements that are not truths until they reach a final destination. And these movements can also go afield. Like Zeno’s arrow: at every point along the path there is the possibility that the arrow will go off course and not reach an intended target. Giving the example of a professor “lost in thought,” Massumi highlights how the meandering paths of language speculation can remain in the nonsensuous realm of imagination rather than arriving concretely in the present moment. In order to materialize, “word-lines” (my variation on Massumi’s discussion of Michotte’s term “world-lines”) must be sensed. Massumi refers to this kinetics as language’s affective dimension (2015: 150). He proposes that by returning movement to language (something his affect-based scholarship promotes more broadly), and noticing what language’s movement does, the thinking language produces can be sensed. It is not news to dance artists that language does more than communicate directives and content, yet having a theoretical basis for how language operates affectively beyond individual sensation can further help dancers move with its forces in practice without reverting to more literal engagements like obeying or rejecting. Elizabeth Grosz, who like Massumi, bases her work in part on principles from Stoicism and subsequent thinking by Gilles Deleuze,11 considers incorporeal forces in relation to language: Language becomes oriented in two directions incapable of reconciliation, material and incorporeal. Language, as utterance, is material and every statement it makes possible is material. Written traces, articulated breath, neuro-

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logical connections, sign languages, computer screens are all material means by which language expresses. Utterance and sonic breath in itself are not language, but, in Stoic conceptions, the animal conditions of language. […] Human language, however, brings thought to bear on what is or acts. What language expresses (rather than refers to, denotes, or designates, which is itself material) is incorporeal, a process, an event, a change of state, a modification, something that adheres to or floats on the surface without penetrating the identity and continuity of the body, a “thin film at the limit of things and words.”12 (2017: 39)

Incorporeal excess, per both Grosz and Massumi, is beyond but importantly also within materials of all kinds, especially living things and processes, in inexhaustible reserve. This understanding can be useful in dance contexts like the studio or in performance. Thought moves through the flow of words, even though not all thought registers in the human body’s sensory perception, or as specific meaning (Massumi 2011: 120–21). The word and the action that accompanies it cannot be reciprocally reduced or fully equated with one another. Grosz writes that for the Stoics, linguistic matter carries with it both the literal and the abstract (2017: 41): Language links the depth of bodies to the surface of events, not through reference, not through the truth conditions it provides, but through the sense that erupts or is emitted by both […;] language is the clearest mode of matter that expresses sense. (40)

I’ve encountered and moved with language’s corporeal and incorporeal forces, where outside language exceeds itself to connect to my own body, in technique classes with New  York teacher and choreographer Vicky Shick. Shick was a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company and draws on this background for her unique style of instruction. In class, Shick speaks and moves with students, accompanying her physical experience with her voice and thereby sharing it. Her language includes basic spatial directives and limb placement—such as pick up the foot and put it down, walk forward; or, extend the leg off the floor, fall to the right and land, then come back to center—yet it is the timing and phrasing of these verbal instructions that allows them to accompany my willing body rather than direct me into movement. I can sense the language movement and phrasing and almost know what is to happen before any words are spoken. What I am sensing, and what allows my body to remain in a state of dynamic flow, is the interval. Granted I have studied with Shick for many

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years and have a shared movement vocabulary, but I do not quite know what is to come next during class. I am able to move with the language because Shick is also working the language through her own body. Her embodied spoken language meets my body, and in this way my body and hers connect. At least that is how I experience it. In doing so, my weight and placement are where they need to be to organize toward the next movement. I find it almost uncanny the way her language accompanies me and gives my body support. Her words take the place of my self-talk, and my mind is free to observe and take in the experience. In this way, her words and my body step into the interval together, and then into movement. In Shick’s classes, after completing alignment activities, some while on the floor and some while standing, all without music, we learn a longer movement phrase. Then dancers move together, executing the phrase in groups, this time with music. However, our timing is not dictated by the music’s counts but rather a property of the shared movement phrase; the music simply provides the attitude and through line. Dancers move together—synch up—in ways similar to how my body and the words did for the alignment exercises in the release-based contemporary technique classes I’ve taken over the years (and as described in the Introduction). Dancing the phrase material is challenging: dancers must remember the movement sequence but avoid getting too internal and individual about it, since the practice when working with Shick is about clarity and finding a shared purpose. Moving with other dancers and joining them in unison when timing is somewhat unpredictable is the challenge of navigating the interval together. I try to catch the movement before it happens, in its incipiency. While tuning in to the others in the room, each mover must also remain open and allow those other bodies to synch with theirs. Each dancer senses other bodies and aspects of the space we create in order to know when to begin, and then to remain together in unison. These are instances of individual agency that connect as a negotiation of sensation in relation to the shared flow of movement and the phrase material, and it is not a one-time event; it is continuous. Dancers find ways to speed up or slow down in order to remain “in time” with one another and with the momentum of the phrase, similar to how Shick’s spoken language moved with my body during the opening warmup sequence. Language is never a neutral event. In the words of artist, linguist, and gender and sexuality scholar Mel Y. Chen, language “is a corporeal, sensual, embodied act. It is by definition animated” (2012: 53)—it has life.

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Studies of language such as poststructuralism or even new materialism, in Chen’s view, often reduce language to referential, structural, or performative actions; its animating forces are ignored. The rush toward answers in order to avoid the difficulty of staying with uncomfortable sensations or stress-filled problems that have no final resolution may be what limits language use in conflict situations. At times, Chen notes, language only recognizes and responds to itself, at which point it cannot suffice as a solution in harmful speech acts. Instead, by staying with language corporally, and navigating the “cacophony of anti-, re-, and mis-coordinations between objects, things, and beings” (54), we might better understand how sensation is carried through language, both corporally and incorporally, and therefore resolve conflict in different ways. “Vitality” is another way to describe the unique and concrete feeling of aliveness that Chen associates with language and how it can activate a body. Vitality refers to energy, strength, or the activity of being alive. In somatic terms, this “lively self-awareness” is an indication of health (Hanna 1979), and it is one way that human bodies are drawn to other bodies and things.13 Developmental psychologist Daniel Stern’s concept of “vitality affects”14 explains how forces,15 when framed—as, for example, through choreography—increase in intensity and endow mental movement or physical action with a kind or degree of aliveness. Stern explains these affects as dynamic forms that happen on a microscopic, everyday level. An organism translates them from the general to the specific so that the organism can fit into or attune to the environment it encounters (2010: 8, 15). Vitality affects are not movement goals, acts, motivational states, or sensations per se (8). They do not hold content such as “what” or “why”; they are the how of what movement does, perceived not with one bodily sense but collectively. Vitality affects are what philosopher Susanne Langer in the early 1950s called “forms of feeling” in dance (Langer 1953), and Stern acknowledges Langer’s work as a precursor to his own. Although Langer distinguished danced movement expressions from common language, which she thought could not convey affect, she was addressing language as meaning, not sensation.16 While Stern recognizes vitality affects in gestures of all kinds, he positions the arts, and dance by example, as able to amplify vitality affects in their “pure form.” Stern points out that while dance notation systems, specifically Labanotation, capture and record many aspects of movement, an understanding of how to (for example) turn the head to yield a particular quality cannot be fully rendered in Laban’s system. Only

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when linked to a precise energetic circumstance or reference point in body memory can a unique nuanced movement be quickly accessed and executed.17 Dance ethnographer Deidre Sklar (2008) challenges Stern on his idealistic view of “kinetic vitality” (her version of Stern’s term) in the arts as disentangled from daily life, instead arguing that vitality in the arts is also socially structured, transformed, and mediated, yet Stern’s observations remain valuable tools for understanding the felt qualities of gesture and language as they take form. Notably, Stern’s main reference point for aliveness concerns the relation of language and bodily movement, in his case in infants prior to language acquisition. Infants experience how their gestures grant a sense of agency and efficacy when they get a reaction from a caregiver. Further, while Stern’s formulation of vitality is primarily addressed as prelinguistic communication, he also suggests that we never lose vitality affects, even after we acquire language. They are part of all communication, even though we often do not pay attention to them, favoring instead the content of thought (2010: 10). As teacher-practitioners Paola Esposito and Toshiharu Kasai say in their discussion of butoh, Noguchi Taiso, and vitality affects, “We never fully lose this immersive sense of being in the world, being reborn in the moment, feelings-in-motion” (2017: 259). If vitality affects name qualities that either precede language or accompany movement gestures or spoken words, then they might have much to teach us about how dance movement and language relate and exceed the literal. Drawing on Stern’s notion of vitality affects, Massumi explores this zone of linguistic ambiguity in the example of animal play, which he similarly refers to as the condition from which language arises.18 With play, an action encapsulates both its literal meaning and a mutual acknowledgment that a form of play is just a game; for example, wrestling is a kind of fighting—it is not war. However, when the mischievous veneer of play falls away, leaving only the literal action and target of that action, there is actual combat (Massumi 2014: 9). The difference between play and combat is not quantitative (the degree of force) but rather qualitative (play holds space for ambiguity and multiple perspectives on “fighting”). In play, which is a key feature of dance and art-making, language and movement remain in a constantly changing relation rather than merging into one another to form a singular meaning or action (see Manning and Massumi 2014: 31). However, for language forces to move beyond their literal reception and be shared more broadly with bodies in ways that affect those bodies,

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as in performance, language’s incorporeal aspect must also be considered meaningful and significant. José Gil describes this capacity of language forces to transmit beyond the literal in the oration of certain charismatic leaders: “Speech becomes voice, voice becomes speech in this modality of the body without organs, which is the body of the voice” (1998: 190). Applying this thinking to movement, Gil notes that, “the body does not speak, it makes speech” (111). His discussion of mime and Vaslav Nijinsky’s dance performances parallels his discussion of language vocalization. He refers to gestural “overarticulations,” similar in both, that produce a series of “microgestures” in excess of the overall form a gesture takes in shape. Nijinsky’s movement articulations, for example, define the space around him, beyond just the individual bodily movement. His performing body consolidates forces in a form so that when that form moves (such as in his ironic archaic side posture in L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1912), the gesture comes to life by way of the overarticulations of movement. This in turn creates a charged space around the gesture (see Gil 2006: 27). In such instances, the body’s articulations take the place of words and aim directly at the bodies of observers, much like the body of the voice (Gil 1998: 109). Gil calls the body’s capacity for translating these excessive gestures an infralanguage—a virtual and silent grammar, or “preverbal meaning matrix” that takes in and absorbs the “exfoliations” of a performer’s overarticulations (126–132). The vibrational excess of the gesture changes each audience-recipient by creating a collective body that speaks through the individual performer. By conceiving language as corporeal and incorporeal, vital in its affective forces, and able to activate and move through and beyond human bodies, we can also start to see how even the pre-articulation of language, before it materializes as speaking, writing, moving, or thinking, is felt, activating, and has agency. This activation suggests a kind of agency that differs from human will, yet also does not erase human decision and choice. Yet while language is part of the human social sphere, it also acts beyond the purview of individual human intentions.

Somatics of the Performative While all language carries affective forces, performative language demonstrates a specific kind of affective agency. Broadly stated, language is performative when saying something is doing something. Stemming from the work of J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words ([1955] 1975), the

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idea is that certain kinds of utterances act beyond the speaker, based on context and social repetition. The “performative utterance” is characterized by its potential to go beyond speech and actually do something—as in the contractual (I bet), and the declaratory (I do). While these utterances may later be disproven or annulled, at the time they are vocalized they have force and are binding. In this way, a performative has agency beyond individual human intent. Humans uttering performative language are active not because of who they are but by virtue of what they do in relation to what language does. Although the “doing” or action indicates language’s agency, it is only an action by virtue of the utterance’s engagement with a set of social and physical conditions and conventions. In order to determine the meaning or nature of the action, it is therefore informative to consider the broader field in which the doing-by-saying takes place—the space and time of performative language. Further, the performative utterance, like other forms of doing, and other actions carry different qualities and amounts of force; there are many ways to act. These many ways of conveying action impact the many ways that action feels and garners response. From a somatic perspective, there is therefore more to a performative utterance than merely doing; the doing carries with it the affective forces of the language that set the doing in motion and the bodies through which these forces move. At the point of the setting-in-motion, performative doings are already accelerating toward these kinds of condoned social actions even before they manifest in form. Language forces are already acting in bodies at the level of micromovement. Similarly, according to Foucault’s conception of “biopolitics,” the power of external stimuli such as linguistic utterances manifest inside the body such that these performative utterances seem to come from one’s own thoughts and preferences. While performative actions may open conditions of possible agency, in some cases they can be charged zones of discomfort and performative repetition. I understand the linguistic performative to evoke sensations that may feel liberating to some but to others may feel profoundly uncomfortable. For example, as feminist scholar Luce Irigaray argued, there was no place for women in the preestablished structures of patriarchal language, which relies on women to define male subjects. Her response was to expand Henri Bergson’s concept of the interval, conceiving it as a threshold of difference preceding sexual identity as a known quantity, thus posing a new ontology for women (and by extension other nonmale-­ identified bodies as well) that is nonbinary (Irigaray [1984] 1993).19

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Psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon ([1952] 1967) asserts that to speak a language is to participate in a world and to adopt a civilization. Yet as a Black person (or any colonized or oppressed group), to adopt the language of the colonizer is to participate in one’s own oppression. Fanon sees the problem of diction and racial embodiment as inseparable: while a Black person can gain a degree of liberation and participation by perfecting the colonizer’s speech, the Black person is still marked by race. Ahmed’s (2017) somatic approach to unspoken pressures experienced by women and people of color in the workplace, specifically academia, acknowledges that difficult sensations arising from language, such as those Irigaray and Fanon expose, can be accurate measures of situations and should not be avoided or remain unconfronted. Sometimes feeling uncomfortable pressure requires equally uncomfortable active push back so that the problem remains front and center, rather than a response of complicity, which effectively denies the problem exists.20 Butoh uniquely works with uncomfortable sensations and challenging thresholds of action in order to experience those difficulties in the body (see Nicely 2018). One tactic in many butoh classes, such as those I have taken with Yoshioka Yumiko, is to exhaust the muscular body, and its control of willful action through the micromovements of vibration so that stimulation from outside forces—such as language—is received and acted upon differently than in common social situations. For instance, in Yoshioka’s classes, dancers assemble in a circle and bounce their bodies up and down by repeatedly bending and straightening the knees while keeping the feet on the floor, agitating all the cells that comprise the body. This is not initially a comfortable or easy motion to sustain since it takes time for tensions and holding patterns to release. Over the course of twenty minutes or more, muscular tension is reduced by the vibrations of the bouncing and eventually jumping, and the body is available for other kinds of energetic movement qualities and sequencing logics as the class proceeds. The vibrations and the repeated pattern of the jumping take over the individual bodies and activate a shared intensification of sensation. Each dancer’s form and its related identity are literally shaken off, and social constructs fall away to some degree as this other energy moves through and connects the bodies in the room to an outside force and a shared landscape that is not of the social world. However, I maintain that the social world is still acting on a micro level. Butoh is often described as existing in a suspended sense of time, connecting to past and future at once, yet this sentiment, following Bergson’s notion of duration, is always

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available. While the images often used in butoh, and communicated to the dancing body through language to motivate movement, can guide both dancer and, ultimately in performance, the viewer toward such perceptions, bodily states clarify and strengthen perceptions inspired by the images so they become lived realities in the moment of performance for both dancers and audiences. In this way, the dancer’s navigation of the sensations that uphold the social order might be altered but not erased, as was the case with Hijikata’s project and his language work with his primary dancer Ashikawa Yoko. Importantly, the vibrations created by the jumping in Yoshioka’s class are not only individual: while achieved and perceived individually, they are also part of the vibrations of the group, supported by a shared space and charged atmosphere. Applying artist and new media theorist Brandon LaBelle’s characterization of sound to the vibrations of the jumping, they are “promiscuous” (2010: xvii)—we cannot control where they will go or direct them to particular recipients. Linking this idea to a human body’s capacity to manage sonic forces, LaBelle points out that the mouth is a human organ that cannot quite contain the forces of vocalization, an excess that is similar to Nijinsky’s overarticulation as described by Gil. Humans struggle to manage language’s affective, powerful, and uncontrollable force as it spills out. While mother tongues “impress upon the body a map of potential routes in and around vocal pressures: for bending, flexing, silencing, or exaggerating our vocal alliances” (LaBelle 2014: 8), even with these tools, LaBelle suggests, the forces of language escape human control. A key question then becomes: How do dancers manage language forces and their vibrational capacity when they move through their bodies? After the vibrational exercise of repeated jumping in the butoh class, I remain standing upright, knees slightly bent and torso inclined forward. With eyes half closed, seeing beyond the wall’s limitations, and with a buzzing in my body, I allow the vibratory forces to lead me on a slow walk. The teacher’s voice might tell me certain conditions, like that wind is blowing and sand is underfoot. I sense these elements through an interval between listening and moving, and through the intensification of my attention I gradually adapt to them as a lived reality. My energized form is walking into a distant landscape; it unfolds exponentially and extends behind. Others around me are similarly activated, each with slightly different timing and form. Imagistic prompts and language conveying quality through tone of delivery continue to arrive from the teacher, populating

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my movement environment by way of a concentrated focus, the verbal cues imaginatively moving my body away from human form and day-to-­ day experiences to instead relate to other kinds of living creatures, natural elements, and archetypical figures. This studio example from a butoh class, like the earlier release-based contemporary class by Shick, suggests that rather than limit the notion of the linguistic performative to “doing,” particularly when this doing is often done to bodies, the somatic notion of “nondoing,” or “allowing” can serve as a kind of felt reply. Several somatic lenses provide insight on this nondoing phenomenon. Noguchi Taiso, for example, is intended to promote ease in the body through consciousness and the use of gravity. The practice values a soft body and smooth movement. By working with the force of gravity rather than in opposition, a body can relax and move with increased skill and ease. From a state of relaxation, more is possible. According to Noguchi’s philosophy: “By continuing to do gymnastics while exploring the relationship between ‘body and consciousness’ and ‘body and language,’ you will develop a basis and basic sense that leads to a ‘flexible way of life’ in every place” (NGA n.d.) This approach, for Noguchi, promoted attunement with the natural world and as used in butoh promotes a body that is sensitive to the possibility of “being moved” by other imagined forces, often including those found in nature such as wind, water, and fire. Noguchi Taiso (generally referred to as just Noguchi) has specific terminology, including “gravity” and “weight” that encourage surrender to more-than-human forces. The underlying philosophy of the method understands these as means of support and rest that connect all bodies and things to the earth. Shaking the entire body or swinging the arms, legs, or torso are other ways to sense the weight of gravity. Yoshioka, Semimaru from the company Sankai Juku, and Osanai Mari are some practitioners who teach this approach and use it in their choreography. My studies of Noguchi in the studio have been taught in English, and therefore I have not experienced the onomatopoeia that is also part of this work’s oral delivery. However, I nevertheless have experienced the technique’s overall principles: sensing gravity, finding flow and ease, and being more responsive and receptive to the outside world. The Alexander Technique is a Western somatic movement practice that promotes a similar “nondoing” approach, albeit via a different relation to language. F.  M. Alexander, who developed the Alexander Technique, engaged in an intensive period of self-study in the early twentieth century

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to reveal that his hoarseness and inability to project his voice were due to something he was doing—contracting and pulling in as he prepared to speak. When he stopped doing and simply allowed the voice to move through his body, he ceased interfering with what he called “the self” ([1932] 2001). In contrast to doing, which is willed movement, allowing refers to becoming aware of and then inhibiting the often-unconscious, socially learned patterns that interfere with more subtle functional pathways in the body and mind. Alexander’s approach allows “the self” to sense itself as dynamic and fluid rather than as a fixed entity. Interestingly, the approach often uses specific language—repeated patterns of words—to reset the body. Thought can happen in many ways, including but not limited to language; the Alexander Technique reminders are delivered through specific verbiage to give the practitioner a familiar reference point. The technique organizes the body by proposing these prescribed directions that are “thought” rather than imagined. By inserting specific directions in the pause between thought and action, the practitioner can interrupt habitual relations between stimulus and response and reset their body to its best use before entering into activity. From this condition of best use, the body can then act with more ease and overall awareness. To what extent can bodies do or allow action beyond or outside of socially learned patterns? This remains a question perhaps only addressed by taking the risk of inhibiting certain words, the socially programmed actions associated with those words, and the micromovements that undergird them. Just as language has sensorial consequences, sensations also have linguistic consequences. Sensations return to language to alter its affects. Judith Butler’s (1993) work on gender performativity, while not explicitly somatic, seems to suggest this kind of inhibition of learned response, and the possibility for a different threshold of sensation. Her work seeks to interrupt the causality of gender performance, understood as a “stylized repetition of acts” (1988: 519), performed and thus maintained to solidify a cultural norm often accepted as fact—that is, that biological sex yields gender expression, when there is in fact no causal relation between them. By unlinking sex from gender, other possible courses of action and expression become available, at least theoretically. Ahmed (2019) approaches performative action from the opposite perspective. She refers to the “nonperformative performative,” as when saying something does nothing—for example, in diversity and inclusion rhetoric within university or corporate structures that do not result in actual change. In

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Ahmed’s case, one might argue that these performatives are in fact disembodied, and thus not actually activated in meaningful ways. I find the ways Butler and Ahmed use language address the lived body on a level pertinent to language use in dance. A correction given by a teacher to a student or a choreographer to a dancer is repeated to achieve something that “looks” like the desired result but the means of achieving the outcome may not promote healthy bodily use. What is done or performed successfully may carry an uncomfortable or misplaced sensation— and so functionally something other than the desired movement is done. For example, to rise up on relevé, many learn to push with the toes, which for some causes localized tension and injury. However, following the head up and sensing the whole space can often achieve this outcome with more ease for the dancer and often a stronger visual image for the viewer. In this case, the quality of the sensation changes. There may be less physical sensation, which for many dancers is unfamiliar since we seek sensation as proof that we are “doing” something. However, shaking off muscular gripping or tight control not only allows movement to happen with more ease but also takes us beyond ourselves and into relation with larger environments. Inward and outward vectors of sensation in relation to external spoken language and internal self-talk suggest that the pathways between language and bodies are rarely direct.21 This is where questions of somatic translation come in. Writer and translator Douglas Robinson’s (2014) somatic theory of language, what he calls “performative linguistics,” recognizes that there are other kinds of language acts that perform, not just those typically categorized as performative language. Translators, for example, do something to and with language as it moves through their body, which affects the speaker, the recipient, and the material. While Robinson focuses his attention on “ordinary language” and acts of translation between different human bodies, his questions can be extended to consider translation as a kind of thought-action through the movement among all intermediary bodies in the transmission chain, not only a singular speaker and a recipient. A performer’s body is in a significant active role of translation. It navigates internal sensation, external choreographic intentions, and the transmission of these to an audience. Dancers mediate between outside instruction, inner monologue, and choreographic structures, continually interpreting and transmitting what is gleaned from language in classes and rehearsal to their bodies in motion. There is also a notable tension between

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what an activity feels like and what it looks like, which further impacts the translation process in rending form and sharing it in ways that a recipient might understand in the given context. This is a layered process for a dancer, even in the most straightforward situation, where a directive from outside is imbricated in a body’s particular somatic history and knowledge, and then realized in motion or form, with further feedback from a mirror (more common in Western training) or other bodies (more common in Asian approaches), or from an outside eye. As Michel de Certeau says of physical pedestrian acts like walking, movement cannot be reduced to a graphic trail. Similar to the difference between a choreographic sequence and its performed outcome, there is always variation in the walking, unlimited in its qualitative diversity and able, through these qualities, to affirm, transgress, respect, or counter the social sphere (1984: 98–99). In the example of the relevé, dancers’ senses give them signals, and they learn to adjust through multiple micromovements and, depending on the situation, to materialize different body concepts—skeletal, muscular, fluid, energetic—and manifest a qualitatively different relevé depending on what the context, technique, or choreography requires. This multisensory process differs from a visual one of representing what a relevé looks like by referring to an image in the mirror. The somatics of the performative addresses how micromovements awaken internal perception and manifest external forms, pathways, and movement qualities in endlessly varied ways. By developing a range of skills and capacities for various qualities of movement, a dancer develops different bodies, so to speak, from which to think and act, which leads to not only different performative actions but also, more importantly, different ways of “doing” the same action.

Words Matter Words have impact. Language tells us of our shared priorities and renders its effects in feelings and active response—experiences we attune to on a somatic level. That is why given that the meanings of words change with use, in context, and over time, revisiting their definitions is important. In dance technique and history, terminology comes to mean and perpetuate certain aspects of that meaning through performative repetition that has lasting effects. Words that name movement genres and that are found in movement vocabularies serve as foundational references that provide entry points for future movement experiences, or alternately limit those entry

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points and experiences. For example, movement genres like ballet have terminology that names technical movements. A movement sequence can be given verbally and dancers can execute it. Tombé pas de bourrée—the words themselves almost give the rhythm to the steps, and anyone trained in ballet knows what to do. In butoh, Hijikata’s butoh-fu comprise a similar lexicon where words like “pollen” or “peacock” indicate particular attributes and even forms that those who have studied with him and his dancers understand. In postmodern and contemporary release-based dance, anatomical reference points and developmental movement patterns provide a basis for releasing muscularly based approaches to locomotion. In these cases, a dancer’s skill and nuanced understanding of the language and the movement it articulates are their tools for studying this language and refining the associated movements through the micromovements that comprise it. In this case, language is a tool or shorthand for the delivery of directions to which bodies adapt. Adaptations to terminology should not, however, reduce the terms to one literal meaning, which can limit experience if these terms are outdated or presented as universal. This leaves no room for complexity and questioning. Dance genres, for example “butoh,” or “postmodern dance” and the associated term “release” do not indicate singular techniques. Rather, each is a collection of practices that seek to dismantle a particular understanding of dance and of the socialized body. In each case, this dismantling allows the dancing body to move with other forces, not just muscular will. An expanded sense of time and space, increased attention to sensation rather than rationality, and critiques of dance practices themselves are features of both butoh and postmodern dance, albeit achieved through different means. Given the histories of these dance genres, which both often seek to address current social concerns, it is important to also understand, redefine, and update terms and their current use. The term “butoh” has come to indicate a certain mode of movement research and investigation that sits alongside other contemporary dance techniques. It is also recognized as a performance genre that exhibits certain aesthetic markers. For some, what defines butoh is best exemplified in the work of the touring company Sankai Juku: slow-moving bodies painted white that unfold a compelling series of images onstage for audiences to contemplate. However, for others butoh refers to the earlier practice called ankoku butoh, often translated as “dance of utter darkness,” developed by Hijikata and his collaborator and dancer Asikawa.22 Butoh in this case is not designed for the concert stage, and, if presented in this manner, does

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not uphold its underground ideology and experimental methods of practice. Today, Western understandings of butoh are changing. Hijikata’s choreographic approach, which involved words and incorporated surrealist language manipulations, was until recently only understood by his close circle of company members. The Hijikata Tatsumi Archive at Keio University in Tokyo and the teachings of one of his dancers, Waguri Yukio, who passed away in 2017, and the DVD Waguri created are making Hijikata’s methods available for broader study. In Waguri’s (1998) view: “A word is not a tool for recording, but is used as a kind of medium to expand on a physical image with imagination.” Other butoh artists working after Hijikata have used words in a different manner and developed their own movement approaches and ideologies, some more explicitly ritualistic or spiritual. For instance, Ohno Kazuo’s work is also butoh, yet it lacks the darkness of Hijikata’s approach. Among the more current lineages of butoh, the methods and therefore the language of the genre are changing rapidly.23 The terms “postmodern dance” and “release” present similar limitations if held to strict definitions or aesthetics. “Postmodern dance” has long been debated for its meaning and historical accuracy.24 Today, postmodern dance refers to the task-based “everyday” movement of some work of the Judson Dance Theater, most notably the section of Yvonne Rainer’s The Mind Is a Muscle (1966) known as “Trio A.” Yet like butoh, postmodern dance is less a particular aesthetic than an approach to choreography that initiated studies of somatic modalities that repattern adult habitual responses to stimuli in order to promote easeful, efficient movement. Here is where “release” comes in. While some have understood “release” to simply mean the release of muscular holding, dancemaker and improviser Daniel Lepkoff (1999) maintains in his studies with teacher Mary Fulkerson in her early-1970s Anatomical Release Technique classes that it “did more than help develop an integrated, intelligent, and healthy body. I developed an appetite for focusing on physical sensation, an ability to teach myself, and a love for the renegade, mysterious, and insightful interplay of the imagination, mind, and the act of dancing.” Today, “release” (or “releasing” as it is sometimes called in reference to the work of Joan Skinner) draws together approaches such as Laban/Bartenieff and Feldenkrais in service of alignment, functionality, and ease applicable to any movement situation. It is not a dance technique per se, nor an elimination of muscular support, and the word “technique” is now largely absent in class listings yet, like butoh, release has also become a style, and it does

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tend to promote a particular aesthetic linked to Trisha Brown. However, Brown rejected the term, and it is perhaps only linked to her due to her Alexander Technique studies and the use of the word in that context.25 I find terms like “postmodern” or “butoh” less useful as categories than as opportunities to initiate conversations about thinking, sensation, and action that can be studied and continually refined as a practice, and in ways that extend what these terms might come to mean.26 However, as Alexander teacher Ann Rodiger has advised in class, saying certain ideas in multiple ways, using different language rather than standard go-to phrases, also expands one’s understanding of a method’s or a technique’s principles, rather than holding on to specific language as knowledge.

The Movement Underneath There is value in fully articulated language, particularly in sharing felt experiences such as dancing or attending a performance. While the specifics of an experience and its attendant feelings can never be adequately captured in language, an event’s incorporeal excess, as Massumi notes, can be brought to the forefront via language to intensify a given experience or foster new ones (2015: 1–46). Dance discourse can deepen understanding of dance experiences and of particular dances, as well as raise new perspectives—both for participants and for spectators. For dancers, articulating what is going on in their bodies in spoken words, or hearing the insights of others, can help clarify the actions they are performing and open new possibilities. As dancing bodies, we do not always consciously “know” what we are doing and cannot actively research and test principles until they become conscious. Thus, “language and thought, as they virtually go together, are creative” (Massumi 2011: 121). While language use tends to normalize experience, each event carries a unique feeling, and language allows the experience of the event and, to a degree the feelings released by it, to be shared. That unique feeling of each experience as shared is how I understand a shift toward a new kind of dancer agency brought about by sensing language as it circulates with and through bodies without those bodies either obeying its content or denying its value as a viable tool for movement practice. I see this new understanding of dancer agency as contributing to a pedagogic turn that is responsible for a changed relationship between dance and choreography that continues to develop in Western experimental dance practices that draw from earlier 1960s lineages.27 The dominant

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characterization of the earlier hierarchical model for Western professional dance describes a teacher instructing a dancer in a technique that the dancer learns through repetition, and a choreographer as solely responsible for creating and organizing movement that a dancer then performs, each according to a set of prescribed rules. The new pedagogy asks dancers to take responsibility for expanding their training to provide themselves with tools for meeting the needs of a range of choreographic propositions and related forces. Melanie Bales further notes in conversation with a range of contemporary New York–based dance artists that “shifts in both the dancer/choreographer boundary and in company structure” have seen a “rise in the agency of the dancer to determine his or her training” (2008: 1). This initiative responds to real-world economies in which choreographers are frequently viewed—and credited—as the “authors” of dance works while dancers merely perform them, albeit with an impressive hybrid range of skills. As performance theorist and maker Bojana Cvejić (2015) notes, many European artists now resist the descriptor “dance” for their performed work as a passive representation, instead referring to the performance itself as “choreography” to indicate creative thinking in the moment. Over the past decade or so, dance artists and writers have put forward a number of concepts and terms that, when taken together, prioritize the dancer’s perspective and labor and call for a new or expanded sense of agency within a capitalist system: the “dancer as agent” is the way Chrysa Parkinson (2014) describes skilled dancers working within processes they do not design; “solo dance practice” is an assertion by some contemporary dance artists as an effort to stake a claim in the process-product market economy that often renders them powerless (Cvejić and Vujanović 2012);28 “deskilling” is the process whereby dancers shed learned and habituated dance techniques in order to access other ways of moving and “reclaim” something lost in the initial training process;29 and “choreopolitics”—a term developed by André Lepecki (2013) for how state-controlled spaces dictate movement and how dancers can offer clues for how to move despite the choreopolicing of our shared spaces. The dancer likewise leads the way toward “decolonizing the body,” laying claim to their own body and movement choices.30 Acknowledging a dancer’s skills and labor as assertions of agency and acts of resistance against oppressive structures is long overdue. At the same time, as Gabriele Klein points out, practices constitute subjects. Assertions of dancer agency and the individual ownership of a daily practice lean

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toward a new way of thinking that might be seen to challenge rather than build upon the anti-authorial stance of much 1960s dance discourse and practice. Today, many of the choreographic practices in Western concert dance that engage creative, flexible, and cooperative forms of working are ones that owe a debt to 1960s community-based models, yet they are also the ones that yield to today’s neoliberal, gig economy to promote the freelance dance subject. The same artistic innovations from the 1960s such as chance procedures, movement scores, and improvisational structures that countered the capitalistic system have now, through the unwilling participation of so many dance artists putting these innovations into practice in the precarious gig economy, been absorbed and coopted by that same system (see Klein 2012; Blades 2019; Reynoso 2019). My experience with 1960s dance training and choreographic processes as they were developed and taught in the 1990s and 2000s leads me to a somewhat different articulation of the relationship between dance, choreography, and agency. I find dance and choreography coemergent in the practices I have studied: particular choreographic methods demand new dance training, and this training, when utilized to address these choreographic problems, gives dancers new sensations to explore and organize in support of informed movement choices in collaboration with other agents. My training suggests that dancers of the 1960s and today’s eclectic or “hybrid” bodies (Bales and Nettl-Fiol 2008; Foster 1997, 2010) are bodies that not only can accomplish a range of technical skills but also are capable of making choices by drawing on these skills and responding to them, and with the knowledge that these choices will have unpredictable outcomes. Dancer-choreographers do this by sequencing sensation—the movement underneath what is often seen as performed dance movement. As such, I see the dancer as a parallel choreographer. This perspective offers an understanding of the dancer’s agency in a choreographic thinking operation in relation to other bodies, materials, and their forces—both seen and unseen. Teacher and choreographer Juliette Mapp once asked in a class I attended, “What is the dance under this dance?” Asking this question, in language, drew my awareness to the somatic sequencing my body performs in every dance class, allowing me to ask about the assumptions and biases underlying how I self-organize micromovements to manifest a body in motion. By reflecting on this felt choreography, both in class and outside the studio, I was redirected to the doing and allowing that often occur on an unconscious level, bringing them to the forefront. There are choices

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and collaborative forms of agency to be had as we become aware of these layers, which are less “underneath” than riding affectively on the surface of the movement of bodies and language. As Alva Noë asserts, there is no “outside” of common language that dance or choreography occupies. “Not understanding is something we accomplish, like understanding itself, within language, and language contains the resources we need to let us make new meaning and communicate without, as it were, and per impossible, going outside of language” (2016: 234–235). This is why for Noë every language user is always a grammarian, every conversationalist a philosopher, and every dancer also a choreographer. While at times language sensations are invisible and go unacknowledged, bodily micromovements are the means of collaborative possibility. They can be perceived, and if followed, they can alter movement outcomes. Language sensations, their navigation, and the micromovements they initiate can suggest increasingly novel forms of agency.

Notes 1. As noted in the introduction, but worth repeating, I use the word “experiment” as it is used in the work of Gilles Deleuze to indicate process-­ oriented thinking as opposed to problem-solving. 2. Sally Banes highlights a shift to verbal language in relation to narrative structure in Judson performance ([1980] 1987: xxix–xxx); Bruce Baird makes a related observation of Hijikata’s work and this shift from audience to dancer as the site of language negotiation (2012: 159–84). 3. The body and action broadly construed (not just action derived from language encounters) have been the focus of numerous books on 1960s and 1970s art practices. See, for example: Schimmel, Stiles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (1998); Warr and Jones (2000); Archias (2016); and Bennahum et al. (2016), among others. Scholarship on language more specifically, as an artistic material and method in this era, includes Bruce Baird’s discussion of butoh artist Hijikata Tatsumi’s language work (2012), Liz Kotz’s analysis of words in visual art (2007), and writings by John Cage ([1961] 1973), Yvonne Rainer (1974), and Hijikata Tatsumi (2000), to name a few. 4. Following Hal Foster and Brandon Joseph (2003), I use the term “neo-­ avant-­garde” to indicate “a loose grouping of North American and Western European artists of the 1950s and 1960s who reprised and revised such avant-garde devices of the 1910s and 1920s as collage and assemblage, the

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readymade and the grid, monochrome painting, and constructed sculpture” (Foster 1994: 5). 5. Susan Foster (1986) similarly adopts Barthes’s perspective to dance audiences, who “read” and interpret a performed work. 6. Fluxus event scores, which date back to performances created by artists in John Cage’s course on composition at the New School in the late 1950s, are a good example of this kind of agency on the part of language (Friedman et al. 2002: 1). The scores are short written proposals or instructions for actions that when enacted realize a performance. Each performance version, created by the score’s recipient, was open to variation and interpretation (Knowles 1965). The language scores were printed on easily distributable cards and chapbooks published by Fluxus founding member George Maciunas and were shared by artists (see Friedman et  al. 2002; Galliano 2020; Harren 2020). 7. Perspectives on similar types of events differed in interpretation in the U.S. and Japan. Allan Kaprow’s Happenings aimed to eliminate audiences completely (Kaprow [1966] 1995), whereas for some in Japan, Experiences were unique to each individual audience member. Yoko Ono, a participant of Fluxus in both Tokyo and New York, views Kaprow’s Happenings as an “assimilation of all the arts” and quite different from Fluxus events, which were “an extrication from various sensory perceptions. It is not ‘a get togetherness’ as most happenings are,” Ono notes of Fluxus events, “but a dealing with oneself. Also, it has no script as happenings do, though it has something that starts it moving—the closest word for it may be a ‘wish’ or ‘hope’” (in Yoshimoto 2005: 30–31, n. 71). Hijikata also found Happenings suspect in their claims for real experience, preferring the terms “ceremonial” and “revolt,” where experience is not shared but different at the site of each spectator, and his “650 Experience no kai” event indicates this multiplicity of perspectives (Sas 2011: 160–61; see also Baird 2012: 44–49). Language differences, such as vocabulary definitions and understandings, combined with cultural perspectives, yielded varied audience responses to new experimental methods involving chance and indeterminacy as well, as Miwa Nagura (1996) points out in Merce Cunningham’s reception by Japanese critic Miyabi Ichikawa. 8. Trisha Brown, for example, studied the Alexander Technique to develop her movement style; Steve Paxton, founder of Contact Improvisation with Nancy Stark Smith, studied Aikido. Deborah Hay turned to Tai Chi. 9. Alison D’Amato (2021) draws on Barad’s notion of agency, object theory, and discourses on dance in the museum to suggest that a dance score—in her example, Simone Forti’s Huddle—possesses a capacity for a nonhuman form of agency. As material, the score and, more importantly, its movement come to “matter” in the world when enacted. I conceive language

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not as nonhuman but as more-than-human, and having its own agency, separate from that of humans. 10. See, for instance, Dennis Tedlock’s (1990) discussion of language as multisensory and Niko Besnier (1990) on language and affect. 11. In Deleuze’s work, affect is abstract and cannot be fully realized in language because it resides prior to and/or outside consciousness. However, Massumi’s writings on language suggest that we can at least approach language’s affective dimension. For instance, in Semblance and Event (2011) Massumi indicates that language is a particular problem requiring its own attention, although beyond the scope of his discussion of art and perception; he takes up the problem of language in What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014) via the perception of its arrival, and discusses language more directly in sections of The Politics of Affect (2015). 12. Quoting Deleuze, The Logic of Sense ([1969] 1990: 31). 13. Vitality is also a feature of ephebism, one of the five elements of the African dance aesthetic as defined by Brenda Dixon Gottschild: embracing conflict, poly-centrism/poly-rhythm, high affect, aesthetic of the cool, and ephebism—defined as power, vitality, flexibility, drive, and attack (Gottschild 1998). 14. Authors writing across a number of fields have productively drawn on Stern’s “vitality affects”: Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1981) and Deidre Sklar (2008) in somatics; Brian Massumi (2011) and Erin Manning (2013) in affect theory. Despite its usefulness in articulating a complex felt sensation, some say the term is still too broad (Koppe et al. 2008). 15. “Intensity” is a key word in Deleuze’s philosophy, referring to how the virtual gathers toward actualization. The term explains the affirmative, creative desire of his art and social politics and is found across his writings. 16. Langer (1953) marked a distinction between feelings evoked by dynamic life activities (most notably art engagement) that do not fall under the category of personal human emotion, and individual human emotions. However, for Langer expression in arts like music and dance is a kind of intuitive knowledge that everyday language is unable to convey. Stern replaced Langer’s word “feeling” (which for Langer was different than “emotion”) with “affect” since feeling is still widely used to refer to emotion (see Stern 2010: 37; Stern in Sklar 2008: 96). 17. Stern’s example is a movement action that choreographer Paul Taylor sought, but it was not accurately accomplished until Taylor told the dancer to turn their head “as if they had been slapped in the face, hard” (2010: 86). While I hesitate to repeat this particular example, it does show that dynamic movement qualities have multiple nuances that often exceed notation or other forms of codification. This sensorial memory or reference point is also an example of Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker theory

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(see Note 21 of this chapter). Deidre Sklar (2008) challenges Stern on his idealistic view of the arts as disentangled from daily life, instead arguing that “kinetic vitality” (her version of Stern’s term) in the arts is socially structured, transformed, and mediated. 18. Stoic philosopher Diogenes Laërtus wrote: “An animal’s utterance is air that has been struck by an impulse, but that of man is articulated and issues from thought” (in Long and Sedley 1987: 185; in Grosz 2017: 40, n. 45). 19. Other feminist scholars have extended this discussion. If language constitutes subjects and beings through relation, Dorothea Olkowski proposes that the interval can transform traditional metaphysical relations because it is process-based and unpredictable (1999: 82, 86). Rebecca Hill takes this further: Irigaray’s interval of sexual difference is a multiplicity of sexed forces articulating tendencies toward differentiation, and the interval is also a becoming—a place of desire (2012: 148–49). According to these conceptions of the interval, desire is not a biological drive for another being but rather a drive for a changed economy (Olkowski 1999: 25)— what I understand as a sensation prior to a known object or subject. It is a tendency toward life that is more-than-human. As Irigaray states: “overcoming the interval is the aim of desire, the cause of locomotion” ([1984] 1993: 48). The interval produces movement not toward another being but toward another way of being. 20. In Excitable Speech, Judith Butler unpacks the performative relation between bodies and speech, noting that they act together: “[T]he body is the blindspot of speech, that which acts in excess of what is said, but which also acts in and through what is said” (1997: 11). 21. In neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s (1994) somatic marker hypothesis, a body stores knowledge at the level of tissue and memory, which then inform thinking by giving bodies signals that impact how decisions are made and action is taken. Reason and emotion in this schema work together; they are not different realms. 22. Vangeline (2020) has recently highlighted the perpetuation of a misleading butoh narrative in which Hijikata is the sole male founder while his collaborator, female dancer Ashikawa Yoko, is rarely mentioned. While there is limited information on Ashikawa, according to butoh artist SU-EN (2019) who worked with her, Ashikawa’s skills allowed Hijikata’s choreographic methods to develop and fully manifest in their complexity. 23. I refer to Diego Piñón’s Butoh Ritual Mexicano, Takenouchi Atsushi and Komiya Hiroko’s Jinen Butoh, Seki Minako’s Seki Method, and approaches by Kaseki Yuko, Vangeline, and others. 24. See the debate between Sally Banes and Susan Manning in TDR (Banes and Manning 1989).

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25. “I have no idea what release technique is. My body moves the way it moves” (Brown in Harrell et al. 1999: 17). 26. I have studied the Alexander Technique in several contexts, more notably with Trisha Brown dancer Shelley Senter and with Ann Rodiger at the Balance Arts Center in New  York. Both of these experiences inform my understanding and use of particular terminology. 27. As Amelia Jones (2021) has also recently pointed out, historical narratives and categorizations of 1960s “radical” innovations, social practices, and their aftermath tend to overlook the crucial role of pedagogy, and the experimentation in this area as critical to action and activism. Melinda Buckwalter’s Composing while Dancing (2010) addresses some of the movement strategies arising out of the 1960s era through a pedagogic lens. 28. Cvejić and Vujanović argue that the turn toward dancers claiming responsibility for their own practice does little to advance their agency in the public sphere. Rather, the action in their view casts dancers as autonomous yet humble workers rather than intervening or critiquing the system (2012: 151). Jérôme Bel’s piece Véronique Doisneau (2004) is a performance example of invisible dance labor made explicit. 29. See, for example, Claire Bishop (2009) on Jérôme Bel; Katherine Profeta (2015) on Ralph Lemon. 30. At this writing there are numerous workshops on decolonizing through dance. Some include those led by Marina Magalhães in Los Angeles and Jill Sigman in New York.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2007. A Phenomenology of Whiteness. Feminist Theory 8 (2): 149–168. ———. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2019. What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alexander, F.M. (1932) 2001. The Use of the Self. London: Orion. Archias, Elise. 2016. The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Austin, J.L. (1955) 1975. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered in Harvard University in 1955. Eds. J.  O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Baird, Bruce. 2012. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Bales, Melanie. 2008. Introduction: Deconstruction and Bricolage, and Other Themes of the Post-Judson Era. In The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training, ed. Melanie Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, 1–9. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

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Bales, Melanie, and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, eds. 2008. The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Banes, Sally. (1980) 1987. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Banes, Sally, and Susan Manning. 1989. Terpsichore in Combat Boots. TDR 33: 13–16. Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28: 801–831. Barthes, Roland. (1968) 1977. The Death of the Author. In Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Bel, Jérôme. 2004. Véronique Doisneau. Accessed 10 June 2021. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=OIuWY5PInFs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= FjPcRRH_4CM, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L10LlVPE-­kg, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfsOj4a2ggA. Bennahum, Ninotchka, Wendy Perron, and Bruce Robertson, eds. 2016. Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972. Berkeley: University of California Press. Besnier, Niko. 1990. Language and Affect. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 419–451. Bishop, Claire. 2009. Deskilling Dance. RB Jérôme Bel. Accessed 10 June 2021. http://www.jeromebel.fr/index.php?p=5&cid=217. Blades, Hetty. 2019. Projects, Precarity, and the Ontology of Dance Works. Dance Research Journal 51: 66–78. Bradley, Rizvana. 2018. Black Cinematic Gesture and the Aesthetics of Contagion. TDR 62: 14–30. Buckwalter, Melinda. 2010. Composing While Dancing: An Improviser’s Companion. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay on Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–531. ———. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London: Routledge. ———. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge. Cage, John. (1961) 1973. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Csordas, Thomas J. 1993. Somatic Modes of Attention. Cultural Anthropology 8: 135–156. Cvejić, Bojana. 2015. Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Cvejić, Bojana, and Ana Vujanović. 2012. Public Sphere by Performance. Berlin: B Books. Accessed 1 April 2022. https://issuu.com/katalogija/ docs/____public_sphere_web-­single. D’Amato, Alison. 2021. Movement as Matter: A Practice-Based Inquiry into the Substance of Dancing. Dance Research Journal 53: 69–86. Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1969) 1990. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester, ed. Constantin V. Boundas with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. Esposito, Paola, and Toshiharu Kasai. 2017. Butoh Dance, Noguchi Taiso, and Healing. In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing, ed. Vicky Karkou, Sue Oliver, and Sophia Lycouris, 255–272. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foster, Hal. 1994. What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde? October 70 (Autumn): 5–32. Foster, Susan Leigh. 1997. Dancing Bodies. In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C.  Desmond, 235–258. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2003. Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind. In Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, 3–12. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2010. Dancing Bodies: An Addendum, 2009. Theater 40 (1): 25–29. ———. 2011. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge. Friedman, Ken, Owen Smith, and Lauren Sawchyn. 2002. The Fluxus Performance Workbook. Performance Research e-Publication. Accessed 6 March 2022. https://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/fluxusworkbook.pdf. Fromkin, Victoria, and Robert Rodman. 1974. An Introduction to Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Galliano, Luciana. 2020. Japan Fluxus. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Gil, José. 1998. Metamorphoses of the Body. Trans. Stephen Muecke. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2006. Paradoxical Body. Trans. André Lepecki. TDR 50: 21–35. Goldman, Danielle. 2010. I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 1998. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger.

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Grosz, Elizabeth. 2017. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hahn, Tomie. 2007. Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Hanna, Thomas. 1979. The Body of Life: Creating New Pathways for Sensory Awareness and Fluid Movement. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press. Harrell, Trajal, D.D. Dorvillier, and Sarah Michelson, eds. 1999. Release Part 2. Movement Research Performance Journal 19 (Fall/Winter): 17. Harren, Natilee. 2020. Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hijikata, Tatsumi. 2000. On Material II Fautrier. TDR 44: 60–61. Hill, Rebecca. 2012. The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson. New York: Fordham University Press. Irigaray, Luce. (1984) 1993. Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV. In Ethics of Sexual Difference, ed. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C.  Gill, 34–55. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jones, Amelia. 2021. Suzanne Lacy Between Kaprow and Chicago: Pedagogy and Performance. TDR 65: 103–130. Joseph, Branden W. 2003. Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-­ Avant-­Garde. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kaprow, Allan. (1966) 1995. Excerpts from ‘Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings’. In Happenings and Other Acts, ed. Mariellen Sandford, 235–245. London: Routledge. Klein, Gabriele. 2012. Dance Theory as a Practice of Critique. In Dance [and] Theory, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein, 137–149. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Knowles, Alison. 1965. Event Scores. New York: Something Else Press. Accessed 1 August 2022. https://www.aknowles.com/eventscore.html. Koppe, Simo, Susanne Harder, and Mette Væver. 2008. Vitality Affects. International Forum of Psychoanalysis 17 (3): 169–179. Kotz, Liz. 2007. Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. LaBelle, Brandon. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2014. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. London: Bloomsbury. Langer, Susanne K. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. New York: Scribner. Lepecki, André. 2013. Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer. TDR 57: 13–27. Lepkoff, Daniel. 1999. What is Release Technique? Movement Research Performance Journal 19 (Fall/Winter). Accessed 3 July 2022. https://move-

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mentresearch.org/publications/critical-­correspondence/mrpj-­19-­r elease-­ all-­about-­release-­part-­2-­what-­is-­release-­technique-­by-­daniel-­lepkoff. Long, A.A., and D.N. Sedley. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1: Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manning, Erin. 2013. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. 2014. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, Brian. 2011. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2014. What Animals Teach Us About Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2015. The Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity. Nagura, Miwa. 1996. Cross-Cultural Differences in the Interpretation of Merce Cunningham’s Choreography. In Moving Words: Re-writing Dance, ed. Gay Morris, 270–287. London: Routledge. Ness, Sally Ann. 1992. Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nicely, Megan. 2018. Butoh’s Subversive Somatics. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 10 (1): 111–126. Noë, Alva. 2016. Newman’s Note, Entanglement and the Demands of Choreography: Letter to a Choreographer. In Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, ed. Maaike Bleeker. London: Routledge. Noguchi Gymnastics Association (NGA). n.d. What Is Noguchi Gymnastics? English Google Translate Version. Accessed 10 June 2021. https://www. noguchi-­taisou.jp/noguchitaisou/ntp1.html. Noland, Carrie. 2009. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Noland, Carrie, and Sally Ann Ness, eds. 2008. Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Olkowski, Dorothea. 1999. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parkinson, Chrysa, ed. 2014. The Dancer as Agent Collection. Stockholm: DOCH School of Dance and Circus, Stockholm University of the Arts. Accessed 10 June 2021. http://sarma.be/pages/The_Dancer_as_Agent_Collection. Profeta, Katherine. 2015. Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Rainer, Yvonne. 1974. Work 1961–73. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

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Ravn, Susanne. 2020. Investigating Dance Improvisation: From Spontaneity to Agency. Dance Research Journal 52: 75–87. Reynoso, Jose L. 2019. Democracy’s Body, Neoliberalism’s Body: The Ambivalent Search for Egalitarianism Within the Contemporary Post/Modern Dance Tradition. Dance Research Journal 51: 47–65. Riley, Denise. 2005. Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robinson, Douglas. 2014. Performative Linguistics: Speaking and Translating as Doing Things with Words. London: Routledge. Sas, Miryam. 2011. Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schimmel, Paul, Kristine Stiles, and The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. 1998. Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979. New York: Thames and Hudson. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1981. Thinking in Movement. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39: 399–407. Sklar, Deidre. 2008. Remembering Kinesthesia: An Inquiry into Embodied Cultural Knowledge. In Migrations of Gesture, ed. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness, 85–112. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spatz, Ben. 2015. What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research. London: Routledge. Stern, Daniel N. 2010. Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. SU-EN. 2019. Personal Interview with Author. Tokyo, Japan, 4 May. Tedlock, Dennis. 1990. From Voice and Ear to Hand and Eye. The Journal of American Folklore 103 (408): 133–156. Vangeline. 2020. Butoh: Cradling Empty Space. Brooklyn: New  York Butoh Institute. Waguri, Yukio. 1998. Butoh-kaden. Tokushima: Jasuto Shisutemu (JustSystems). DVD. Warr, Tracey, and Amelia Jones. 2000. The Artist’s Body. London: Phaidon. Yoshimoto, Midori. 2005. Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Movement’s Return: Sensations in Context

It’s fall 2021, a year and a half into the global Covid pandemic and I am returning to the studio and to teaching dance in-person. As my university students and I circulate to begin our warmup, the room becomes electric, infused with possibility. We devour space and interact without hesitation, albeit at some distance; the sensations of movement are amplified in contrast to the more limited motion of the past eighteen months. We are diverted and redirected by other bodies in the space, which act less as obstacles to avoid than supple forces that alter the trajectory of our own kinespheres. Finding momentary stillness as a group, we then scatter, traversing the floor in a series of runs, leaps, and skips, only just missing one another as we make eye contact above facemasks. Our feet make audible sounds on the floor as heels and toes land and take off and gravity acts on our bodies. We are both quick and slow as the kinetic flow of energy suspends us in this shared condition of movement’s return. In the environment we cocreate, I notice that the familiar sensations of moving together in the dance studio have a slight variation in comparison to their pre-Covid iterations. I am struck by how movement seems less like an action than a quality. I have a sense of what Erin Manning calls “movement-­moving,” a choreographic thinking proposition “that asks how the plane of experience composes, how it remembers, how it becomes, and how it takes form, all in the register of the more-than-human” (2016:

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127). This register has tone, and its changes are perceptible through our highly sensitized human bodies. Whether in the swirl of full-throttle physicality or the relative stillness of a deep breath, I find nuances I had not noticed before that draw me in unfamiliar directions. I am aware of micromovements in my body that had been dormant through months in smaller spaces with limited pandemic activities but that now seem to have been training for this moment of reemergence. I want to savor the unexpected range of sensations, and the ways they activate in my body, before they are reabsorbed into habit where they may go unnoticed. The sensations I am having now in the studio are generally pleasurable (if sometimes uncomfortably heightened), unlike so many sensations from the past year and a half, since early spring 2020. Beyond the separate spaces of our isolation, the many embodied actions and street protests initiated by social movements like #BLM and #MeToo have challenged systems of all kinds for the ways they oppress Black, Native, Asian, trans, and many other peoples. Language that affirms the culture of white supremacy is at the forefront of conversations, heated debates, and change initiatives in U.S. education, companies of all sizes, government agencies, and arts organizations and in many other structures in the public sphere. Words and phrases that impart principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion populate college campuses and workplaces even as world leaders use threatening rhetoric to exert power over others. Furthermore, contradictory messaging about the virus and the necessary health and safety measures remain colored by highly politicized perspectives linked to economic agendas and so-called American liberties, while Covid-19 continues to impact nonwhite bodies and their livelihood disproportionately. The sensations left by all of this brutal language of disinformation campaigns, social media memes, and cancel culture that has been foisted on us over the airwaves promises to remain in bodies and systems for generations, and will do little to inform, change behavior, heal, or provide a sense of care. What does it take for bodies to remain a part of systems as the systems reorganize? What novel kinds of agency might these systems promote, and what kinds of thinking-in-micromovement might bodies then engage? Can language sensation at this current moment provide new avenues for working with persistent human social problems? If so, whose language? What language? Can decolonizing dance techniques and dance studies forge new relations between language and bodies that alter the ways dance systems operate?1 Does placing human social problems in the context of

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the more-than-human provide a choreographic strategy for planetary care and greater cultural sensitivity? What about systems that are change-­ resistant, or sensations that are intolerable? Paying attention to micromovement is a way of remaining with sensations in shared contexts such as ensemble movement practices, audience gatherings, and community meetings. While I have focused on solo studio practices and individual performance experiences, dance is a practice of collective action. Memories and legacies are carried forward less by individuals than through the circulation and repetition of ideas, experiments, and experiences; and as shared through conversations, learning activities, and of course performance. Prior knowledge and cultural norms inform each of these, but new thought-sensations such as those that are happening at this current moment in the early days of figuring out how to come out from behind Covid combine with them to potentially forge new pathways, variations, and understandings to interrupt habitual responses to stimuli. This is not to valorize community practice; assume that all relations are positive, mutually supportive, or meaningful to all bodies in the same ways; or that habits are of no use and can or must be completely altered. It is simply to recognize that change, like the change in relations we are experiencing in life after/with Covid-19, alters not only bodies but also the systems they constitute. Some of the changed relations between bodies and language that we are experiencing in more recent dance practices are possible indicators of future directions for dance systems—be they educational, economic, or political—and the thinking they promote.

Sensitivity Pil Hansen refers to “performance-generating systems” as “a semi-closed form of instant composition in dance and theater” where predefined rules and tasks provide a dramaturgy for how performers will interact onstage (in Hansen and House 2015: 65). These systems, while improvisational, have predefined characteristics that set interactions and processes in motion, causing the system’s architecture to shift and change (Hansen 2015). The system’s rule-based parameters and variables not only limit the system but also allow the system to be open to unknown outcomes. By activating movement decisions and engaging the system in this way, the performers utilizing the system learn and accumulate information over time. For Hansen, this separates performance-generating systems from the set movement sequences of much dance choreography, or improvisation

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structures that are considered in some cases to be more open-ended. Instead, performance-generating systems for Hansen have dramaturgical agency: a structural architecture that houses “a collection of creative strategies and principles that can facilitate creative processes, composition, and audience perception” (124). Importantly, such systems make explicit to audiences the performers’ interactions with the system’s rules in order to show that the system also thinks by guiding certain decisions and actions. To think with this kind of system, whether as a performer or audience member is, in Maaike Bleeker’s words, “to think no-one’s thought” (2015: 69). Dance studies, with its phenomenological basis, has historically focused on human bodies as the grounds for experience and knowledge, yet I find less human-centric views within dynamic systems and network theory, like those incorporated by Hansen in her performance scholarship, more generative at this moment of collective action and care. Areas like affect and thing theory, new materialism, environmental theory, and cognition studies, which tend to focus on relations rather than individual entities or authors, free us to understand how other kinds of things and their forces, including movement, express agency. Such theories propose models for interaction based on forces in environments and on how certain rules governing those forces develop as bodies and other matter in the system interact with them, so that the system evolves over time. A semi-open systems-based approach, as opposed to a closed one based on the habitual behaviors of certain human populations, suggests that by changing the operative principles of the system, humans within them will also change, possibly in ways that can be more inclusive and less identity-focused. However, I also question the inclusivity that affect theory seems to promote, and its positive views on relation, space, movement, and agency. Is affect theory a counter to the “I” of whiteness or to white spaces; or do such views sidestep accountability and reinstate oppressive systems and the spaces they create?2 As Sara Ahmed points out: “spaces acquire the shapes of bodies that ‘inhabit’ them” (2007: 156), and are oriented toward some bodies more than others (157). Certain bodies—in her discussion, white bodies—extend into spaces that have historically already taken the shape of white bodies, whereas the orientations and proximities of Black and brown bodies to those spaces are in relation to the whiteness that is there—whiteness that to white bodies is invisible. Thus, spaces already suggest different orientations and movements before human bodies even arrive. How can we make explicit the conditions of these spaces while also

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extending them to include nonwhite bodies? How do humans practice something together in and with our differences, and find words, sensations, and spaces to do so without trying to fix or simply replace one system with another? What affect theory and posthumanist thought presently offer to my dance thinking is a way to be with different sensations as they pass through my body, without necessarily concluding that a personal interpretation is the outcome of movement or its meaning, while also recognizing that sensations do impact our lived, human realities. As I lean toward this more expansive, less human-centered view that is still mindful of other humans, I appreciate how Donna Haraway navigates the more-than-human in her work. In turning to science, string theory, speculative futures, and other kinds of nonhierarchical and nonbiological perspectives, Haraway also calls for “multi-species justice”: a “situated kinship” that defamiliarizes and reorganizes local connections in order to create more inclusive spaces for humans and other creatures and things. She refers to “staying with” as a more-than-human kind of relating where “staying” means remaining in difficulty, specifically “the difficulty of living and dying on a damaged earth” (2016: 2). In Haraway’s view, if we persist through the difficulty, the situated knowledge gained forges deep relations that speak to particular rather than generalized conditions. Haraway’s view broadens the model of Hansen’s performance-generating systems and the situated knowledge gleaned by engaging their rules over time to suggest that larger social and environmental systems can develop and change as well, with performers who are attuned to the rules and tasks of those systems. Thus, by understanding how performance-generating systems think and develop, and how we as performers participate, we might find ways to affect or be with the environment in more healthy ways. Attending to sensorial changes within particular dance practices, and to which sensations are relevant in relation to and as indicators of shifts in social systems and their values, is still relatively unexplored.3 Yet as Jacques Rancière recognizes regarding aesthetic politics, in what he terms the “distribution of the sensible,” social and cultural forces determine which sensations are deemed valid, meaningful, and relevant to a community, and which are discounted as insignificant and go “unmarked.”4 Humans “make sense” based on “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception” ([2004] 2009: 12)—that is, what we see, hear, say, or think, based in “bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parceling out of the visible and the invisible” (19). For Rancière, the politics of art

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lies not in its messages or reflections of social structures or identities. Instead, its politics consists in suspending the normal conditions of sensory experience (23–25), thus altering the spaces, times, and forms of activity that determine how people participate in society. I am interested in how dance artists might interrupt the way they sequence sensation in their bodies as a strategy to experience different sensations, alter the ideologies within the performances they generate, and reorganize larger systems. For example, the word “freedom” is a quintessential example of how language as ideology links to bodies and movement, and how the quality of the relationship between language and bodies matters and materializes. As writer and art critic Maggie Nelson notes, freedom as a concept or ideology asks us to grapple with sensation. Politics is always somatic (2021: 14). Freedom is not an unbounded singular experience but rather is coupled with notions of constraint, which might take forms like restriction, discipline, and punishment. Yet according to Brian Massumi, constraints are what allow the sensation of freedom to creatively arise (in Zournazi 2003). Dance scholar Danielle Goldman offers that freedom, as a democratic ideal, state of liberation, or sensation found in the activity of dancing, is not an achievement but a process, and similarly not without constraints (2010: 3). As poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten’s writings attest, there are multiple and diverse structures creatively at play in the ensemble and in Black improvised music and speech, with varying degrees of constraint. In his later writings Michel Foucault ([1984] 1994) referred to freedom as a practice that takes the form of ethics and is a kind of positive resistance. In a related way, André Lepecki (2013) poses choreopolitics as the ways a dancer moves within systems to enact freedom that might otherwise be simply moving in ways that are choreopoliced. Seeing sensorial shifts in dance and its techniques as indicative of societal ideologies and cultural aesthetics gives rise to a different perspective on dance history and its futures. In U.S.  American modern dance, for instance, one can track changing beliefs about national identity through a sensorial history from Isadora Duncan’s unbounded “free” movement5 to Doris Humphrey’s fall and recovery to Martha Graham’s contraction, and so on. Susan Foster’s (2011) genealogy of kinesthesia also speaks to this kind of sensorial history of change. Andrew Hewitt’s (2005) scholarship on early U.S. modern concert dance does so as well, when he excavates the often invisible yet deeply impactful history of European colonization in the U.S.6 Hewitt notes that like the colonization of the land, the body and

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its movements in early twentieth-century American modern dance were “discovered” to be essential characteristics of human freedom, available to be garnered and exercised. Modern dance was presented, through the work of Isadora Duncan and later by critic John Martin (1936), as a “post-­ literate” ideology with direct access to the body and immediate cultural expression and transmission, despite the fact that bodies are not neutral or without histories.7 The early modern dance project located national ideology in the body by “discovering” dance as natural and free, characterized as pure movement. This view of the nation bypassed the indigenous bodies and movements that were “already there” (Hewitt 2005: 133). As Hewitt points out, early modern dance ideology required an expulsion of these indigenous bodies from dance to arrive at and claim as their own the embodiment of U.S.  American ideologies like freedom, expansion, and what is “natural” movement. However, these othered bodies continue to be present.8 What I am most struck by in Hewitt’s discussion is that the link between bodies and sensation eliminates language by silencing voices. The elimination of language(s) from dance in favor of a direct link between bodies and movement is similar to the erasure of bodies. Language has not gone away. It is still there. As I return to the studio and to dancing with these questions about language, sensation, and sensitivity, I realize that attuning to sensations of all kinds, not just familiar or pleasurable ones, highlights discontinuities—small areas of disorganization within a larger system, be that a body, a choreographic schema, or a space of training. As Davide Panagia similarly maintains in The Political Life of Sensation (2009), sensory experiences can interrupt perceived norms and hierarchies, creating opportunities to rearrange the political order. He contends that sensation disrupts linear narrative, a feature of much language and set choreography, and that for a process to be democratic, people need to draw awareness from what has been unsensed—perhaps language in this case. Panagia’s sensorial view of democracy suggests that by staying with sensations, whether pleasurable or difficult, and gradually allowing them to register, a new form of democracy might emerge. If both performers and audiences attune to nonnormative, difficult sensations in dance practices and experiences, thinking with them, nonnormative aesthetics, and a different political order in dance might surface.9 I see language as an important part of normalizing and sharing these uneasy sensations, even as what is beyond the human may also be beyond language.

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Several contemporary experimental dance artists exemplify a kind of “staying-with” the more difficult sensations produced by language; they challenge performers and audiences to remain in unfamiliar territory together. These artists, but more importantly their methods and work, extend and also redirect the initiatives of the earlier artists discussed in this book. These contemporary works importantly highlight how the relation between dance bodies and language opens spaces for sensations that are relational and qualitatively felt and shared, even as they are experienced differently.10

Suspend In Jeanine Durning’s solo inging (2010), “ing” refers to an ongoing process or activity, one that is without completion. In the piece, Durning talks continuously. Here, speaking is movement, yet the piece is not about speaking or movement per se. Instead, it is about thought as it takes shape, passing from virtual to actual. The language’s content is a kind of urgent, open-ended questioning through words that unhinge their own content. Philosophical propositions, existential questions, musings on consumer culture, stories we tell, what they mean, time, transcendence—these are the general topics, interrupted by self-reflective comments on the moment and the challenge she has set up for herself—to speak for forty-five minutes without stopping—and for us to remain with her through the process. The piece begins as Durning, dressed casually, welcomes us into the studio performance venue as if into her home.11 We sit in small groupings of chairs turned at slight angles in the space, close to others but also with space between groupings. A triptych of video images from past performances is projected on the wall behind a table, on which sits a high stack of books, their spines turned away from us. Durning sets a small camera on top of the stack of books and assumes a spot behind the table, the lens pointed toward her. She sees the book titles, we see her on the camera’s digital screen, the object and subject positions effectively disrupted. I later learn that this recording technique is a way to hold herself accountable, the outside eye an ever-present reminder. As Durning launches into talking, she speaks with barely a moment for breath, but in a colloquial manner (Fig. 7.1). The words flow out into the room—she is addressing the audience, and herself—and also not. She acknowledges that she is here, that we are here together, but nobody knows where this is going. There is an urgency in Durning’s speaking that

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Fig. 7.1  Jeanine Durning in inging, American Realness Festival, Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY, 2013. (Photo: Ian Douglas)

structures inging, but the work’s structure is not based in the words themselves. Hanging in the air, in this moment of the performance, in her mind, and at this time in human history, a nonlinear connectivity drives through the thickness of the words’ accumulation. Humor arises amid the serious tone of persistent, timeless questions: Why are we here? Where are we going? Who is this “I”? Who said that? The words seem fast, but in fact are not inordinately hurried in their delivery, just continuous and without pauses between. The thoughts spring forth and Durning’s mouth catches and articulates them—not all of them of course, how could she capture every train of thought that arises? She voices that she denies herself water, for this would interrupt the speaking that is her task. She often repeats words or restarts sentences, a strategy that effectively disrupts the solidity of her subject-based assertions. At the same time, she acknowledges her presence here with us. She is speaking not to but with us, and the fluid nature of ideas becomes apparent, as does the lack of any sense of ownership of them.

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As the words wash over me, I move in and out of engagement with Durning the performer, sometimes turning to my own thoughts and references triggered by the words but, noticing these drifts, I try to let them go and return to the moment of the performance, feeling somewhat guilty that I have strayed. The effect is of being inside an echo chamber. I receive Durning’s thoughts, which reverberate in my own bodymind, as they may for others sharing this performance moment. Durning refers to the group phenomena in inging as “the mind of the room,” a kind of collective consciousness where thoughts are triggered but we are not exactly sure whose thoughts they are, or when they came to be. As she explained when I interviewed her after the 2013 performance: What’s delicate about the work is that space where I don’t quite know if it’s working or not. I can only tell that within my perception of how it’s being received. As long as I can keep that osmotic secreting mechanism going, not just in my own solipsistic world, but if I can keep it moving out and coming in at the same time, then I’m in a good place with it. (in Nicely 2014b: 165)

Despite its process-driven nature and the fact that it is entirely unscripted, inging is not an “anything goes” situation. Rather, it is a rigorous practice that Durning has developed, and questions of how to navigate preparation, starting, and concluding are real, practical questions for the performer. The work needs to start. Durning considers the beginning a zone of both resistance and acceptance. “I’m resisting the director, I’m resisting the choreographer, I’m resisting the performer who says, ‘I know I can make this happen and I know what to do here,’” which requires that Durning strip away the tools of her many years of performance experience. This past practice includes a long history of working with Deborah Hay, who similarly questions language as a linear delivery system. When I ask how actions happen, she says: “I try to enter my mind. […] I try not to hold onto anything. It doesn’t work when I hold on.” Of the way the piece unfolds, Durning further noted: I’m aware of the compositional mind. I’m aware that the mind inherently has composition, that thinking inherently has composition. I’m trying to keep the satellite of that ongoing as I try to stay in the present of a thought. That’s the practice. (166)

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About halfway through the work, I realize I am riveted by the performance’s unfolding, my thoughts merging with, rather than taking me from, the moment I’m dissolving into. The work not only is intellectually engaging but also connects me intimately to the performer. While Durning’s talking continues, I am now in a realm of sensation—and sentiment. I am drawn not to the particularities of her predicament but instead to the layers of risk as she navigates this unwieldy situation that she has so graciously and vulnerably put herself in—with no guarantee of success. However, the work is never sentimental, and this is partly due to the constant interruptions of her train of thought as new openings appear. Stories fail to materialize or become personal. Instead, what remains are practices of accountability, responsibility, and a commitment to the tasks at hand, which re-ups her engagement with purpose each time she does the work. Durning noted that the heart of the piece is: To remind myself to take the vows again. To be a performer or dancer, being an artist, it takes a personal commitment, insistence, and persistence beyond anything that’s immediately attainable, […] being as committed in as vulnerable a position as I can put myself. That was the task, to put it on the line, to stay in the present of what’s available to me, to be with the audience and their experience. (166)

Durning’s piece advocates “staying with” the thought-sensations that flow through language, and her studio practice of “nonstopping” similarly demands this kind of attention. I experienced the practice in a weeklong workshop through Movement Research in 2017, titled “what we do when we do the thing we do before we know what we are doing.” We began with language. Seated in a circle, Durning asked us to speak to what we were “working on” in our dance practice, and to do so by speaking without stopping to consider or arrange our thoughts beforehand. We gave voice to our thoughts and listened not only to each other but also to ourselves. My thoughts flowed unedited, or generally unedited, for I could not speak all my thoughts. I followed certain thought trains as they departed from my mouth, and reached after them, attempting to form the words that had already landed in the space into some cohesion with the addition of other words, now carefully chosen. I heard myself say things that were true but that I could not have planned to say. It was anxiety-­ provoking and inspiring. I took some notes on myself. After the initial round, we were asked to go around again with the same prompt and

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approach—to essentially repeat and refine what we had said. We each had markers—things that stuck out as more truthful or resonant than others on which to hang the next round. Other elements also arose to suggest new trajectories for exploration. What was I working on, exactly? We were then asked to “work on” the things we had articulated in language with our physical bodies. Just exactly how to work on them was somewhat elusive. I worked anyway, noting what came up. I repeatedly asked myself if what I was doing in movement matched what I had said I was working on. I often was not sure; I realized I either did not know how to work in a physical way on an idea presented in language, and reverted to familiar ways of problem-solving in movement, and/or I did not know how to recognize if I was actually working on what I had said. I attempted to accept that I was working on it (whatever “it” was), and that this is what it looks and feels like. At a certain point, we were asked to teach what we were working on to someone else. I admit at this point my resolve broke down. I saw the result of what I had articulated in language to my partner, and it was far from what I felt internally or hoped would manifest to clarify my intention. Yet even having hoped for something specific to be realized by my partner seemed beside the point. I worked to give up on searching for something that might not have a form and to accept what had arrived, but questions lingered long after the workshop was complete: How do ideas take form, and should I accept the form they take? If I change them, am I forcing some preconceived aesthetic? And what are the politics I am enacting in these choices? What is lost or erased in this process of moving toward knowing something, anything? Is choreographic thinking here more about grappling with difficult sensations and judgments than about navigating the rules of an external structure? Or, was my confusion actually helping to break down old structures and propose a new model for creativity? Perhaps the practice builds resiliance. As one workshop participant wrote: In a political moment that is forcing individuals to question their relationship to systems of power, a nonstopping practice can heighten a person’s capacity to witness bullshit, understand that they are implicated in its formation, and act accordingly. Nonstopping demands that we see ourselves as creators in the world around us, whatever that world may be […]. (Reuter 2018)12

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I found that by not stopping the flow of thinking-in-language, I was privy to many more of the thought trains that cross my mind and was eventually able to stay with and weed through them in front of others, dropping some and picking up others. Each round of repetition, whether in speaking or movement—and often in combination—brought me closer to something nearly palpable, even if still undefinable. I kept certain anchors—that is, forms, movements, spatial orientations, and relationships—and allowed other elements to orbit them. Like the language articulation we had shared earlier, movement elements landed in the space outside my personal thinking, available to then be worked with. This was how I was implicated in larger processes that moved beyond my human-­ centered decisions and actions. I had to take responsibility for the words and gestures that I had introduced into the space, even as they were shared with others. I experienced the performance of inging on three separate occasions: at the American Realness Festival in New  York in January 2013; in San Francisco in 2015; and again in New York, also in 2015. Each time, I was struck by how the audience responded at the work’s conclusion. When the speaking stopped, we remained suspended in a profound silence of exhalation for nearly five minutes, the bodies of audience and performer held in the space now created and cohabited. Then, slowly the audience’s micromovements of attention began to penetrate and shatter the web of participation and process. The space between sound and silence and ultimately the felt openings to human and even environmental connections are the ever-present theme of inging—and nonstopping is the participation tool that got us there. A suspended duration of silence can evoke a range of felt nuances, from awe to discomfort. In daily life, this zone between sound and silence is often overlooked as language washes over the senses and takes our attention away from the between-space. Yet inging asks us to linger in this space so often missed yet ever-present in our human and more-than-human interactions. When I asked Durning about the sensations experienced in the aftermath of the piece, she noted that where we connect as humans is not in language but in the silence and continuity underneath. In the silence, we participate in “a continuity, a circuitry, that language no longer has a role in,” and yet we need language to allow our minds and bodies to get there: “We’re sharing time and space, which are terrifying, abstract notions that bring us to the inevitable—death, the void. The ongoingness

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of talking and silence are opposite ends of the same spectrum” (in Nicely 2014b: 167). inging brackets but does not restrain that spectrum.

Discompose In spoken language, consonants serve to stop the ongoing resonance of vowel sounds. One way to think of consonants is that they divide sound to create small units of meaning; they punctuate and articulate the energy of vowels toward particular outcomes, and each consonant has a different characteristic and way of doing so. For instance, in English “k” differs from “p,” which differs from “z.” These markers also serve to redirect and reform the flow of vowels into new shapes and forms. When embodied, consonants not only discompose and refashion bodies, but they also alter the contours of the space and how bodies inhabit it. I experienced this discomposure through language at the fall 2019 Butoh Next conference in New York City. There, two dancers from the LEIMAY Ensemble presented a section from Frantic Beauty (2017), a highly physical stage work for five performers that combines guttural sounds and other vocalizations made by the performers with disjointed movement that at times is volatile and at others slow and calm. The piece creates a landscape of contrast, with images that in the full stage work develop through long beams of projected light and video design. The LEIMAY dancers hurl and contort their bodies, using truncated sounds to propel their bodies off the ground, as if attempting to fly or otherwise escape the downward pull of gravity. The bodies are like little machines whose parts at times break down and yet they continue, adjusting and repairing in order to move. There are moments when the bodies collapse to the floor only to rise, roll, or jump as if motivated by an unknown force. The lighting design isolates the dancers as individual forms, yet to the viewer the unique solo gestures together comprise a larger condition in which life persists. A striking aspect of the work is the way vocalized sound acts as a spark that ignites bodily action, expression, and a nonhuman kind of communication within the world the dancers cocreate. At the Butoh Next conference, a section of the work’s corporal vibrancy was performed in an informal studio at close proximity to audiences standing in the space, highlighting the strength and control required to contain the sonic elements so they do not overtake the body. In the demonstration, Krystel Copper and Asahara Masanori used the energy of consonants to propel and contort their bodies into unusual shapes and directions.

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Bending, hurling their bodies to the floor, levitating—I felt as if a machine was moving out of control and might careen into me as I stood at the periphery of onlookers in the studio conference room. By not pausing to rest, these two bodies seemed to ricochet off the other bodies in the room. As one of those onlooker bodies, I was caught unaware and became animated as sensations washed over me. LEIMAY, directed by Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya, is a laboratory and performance group that draws on a number of experimental theater practices and vocal techniques, including butoh.13 One influence on Garnica’s training is the vocal work of butoh artist Kasai Akira, who according to Garnica introduced language as a performative rather than as a trigger for movement in the New York Butoh Festival she produced— and was the only butoh teacher to do so (see Nicely 2014a).14 Like Kasai, Garnica has an uneasy view of language: I have a very tense relation with language because English is not my first language, and yet, as we grow older, our mother tongue is always suspended in that tension. There is a lot of this in-betweenness, and when those moments appear in our dancers, or in our installation work, this is the thing I want to share with people. When these bodies are unpredictable, they’re also dangerous, they appear very hard to control and then all the structures, political powers, are going to be harder to stay in place. (In Davidson 2019)

I later attended a workshop at the conference where some of language’s consonant sensations materialized. Led by Garnica, the task was to embody the energy of consonants, and to experience the risk and danger they pose in human bodies. We first made the phonic sound of the letter, rather than saying the name of the letter. For instance “kuh,” “puh,” and “zzz.” We vocalized the sounds and attempted to move them through our bodies and allow the energy of the sound to displace our forms in space. This task was not initially easy to accomplish. Moving the energy from what is normally in the mouth into the entire body, and moving the body as if it were a mouth, demanded full commitment and the integration of one’s various body parts into a singular entity. I found it risky to hurl myself into action, yet leaving any portion of my body relaxed, grounded, or otherwise stable indicated something was holding me back. On the other end of the spectrum, we also worked to find the means of fully embodying the sound without overdoing—or performing—it. “Overdoing” in this case meant that the external form was there but the

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internal commitment to it did not match, and the form thus remained empty and merely a performed representation. To figure out this conundrum, many participants, me included, inadvertently either dropped the sound and expressed the force only in the body while thinking the sound or, alternately, relied on the mouth as the main vehicle with the body delayed in attempting to arrive to the movement. We continued to practice embodying the complexity of these contradictory sensations and coordinate sound and bodily movement. Soon, we were asked to perform the movement and sounds for one another. Attempting to find the energy of the consonant sound was our project, and it did not lend itself to open-ended flow. It was very clear when the sound moved fully through a body, and when it was obstructed by a familiar body pattern or means of stabilizing. Each time involved risk, for there was no guarantee that the task of embodying the consonant would happen every time. A body needed to be open and ready for the forces to come through it. In sharing our findings in the discussion afterward, it became clear that not every movement would convey the energy of the sounded consonant. We could see when the body’s movement and the vocalization did not match or align—that is, when the form was an aesthetic choice rather than a creation of the energetic force. In this case, we then saw a body and heard a sound, but did not fully sense the force of language moving through the body—sound and body did not synch up and the human body did not surpass its habitual limits through sensing language’s forces. Audiences of the full performance of Frantic Beauty see possibility and futility for a brief moment, as the sound levitates the dancers’ bodies and then returns them to a heap on the ground with a loud thud (Fig. 7.2). These moments alternate with suspended moments of floating stillness. The result of this contrast is both beautiful and unsettling. It is as if the dancers are trying to communicate with a larger force or power, but are not fully heard. However, it is not as if they are trying to speak to one another as humans per se, or communicate in a social way. There are also extended spoken word sections in the piece in an unfamiliar language, which highlights a single dancer as spokesperson for the community. Yet the bodies cannot quite relate to one another; even as they are part of the same community, they appear distant. One reviewer of the work noted, “It feels like everything is happening. It feels like nothing is happening. Whether it’s all the frenetic energy or the absence of such, my eyes remain alert, my emotions engaged” (Bomboy

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Fig. 7.2  From left: Derek DiMartini, Asahara Masanori, and Mar Galeano in LEIMAY Ensemble’s Frantic Beauty, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY, 2017. (Photo: Jeremy Tressler, courtesy of LEIMAY, Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya)

2017). Another observed: “With movements both otherworldly and primal, its dancers form uncanny configurations, skittering like insects, writhing in torment or ecstasy, melting into fetal curls or jerking as if electro-shocked” (Cordes 2017). In the latter review, the writer astutely acknowledges that the piece’s beauty is a combination of natural and artificial. The aesthetic elements—brightly colored form-fitting costumes that appear white under certain light, long beams of white or colored lighting—create a contemporary gaming environment of bright visuals and loud sounds that the bodies inhabit; yet the work addresses the urgency of the current moment, when human and natural chaos call humans to embrace life’s darker side and a struggle for survival (Cordes 2017). If Frantic Beauty now stands as a reference to a pre-Covid world where everyone rushes around, busy, struggling to relate to one another, it also highlights on visual and visceral levels that outside forces carry bodies past one another. Does this promote isolation, or is it a different kind of

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connection? The materiality of the human body, and the beauty of struggle, can be seen in the dancers’ forceful movements that land them in contorted forms, in a multisensory onslaught for the viewer. Rewatching video of the work now, I reflect that I have not fully registered the multitude of small daily struggles endured during late-stage capitalism: the constant mobilization of body and mind, the acquisition of not just goods but spaces and other resources, the labor to gain people’s attention, and the lack of return for one’s ongoing efforts. The focus on work, achievement, consumerism, commodities, the never-ending quest for “more.” By embodying the same kind of ceaseless driving energy that is behind these forces, Frantic Beauty does not seem to advocate stopping the body but rather fully inhabiting struggle, and showing that this might be accomplished by taking the risk to embody language. By not only aspiring to the infinite movement of open vowel sounds but also considering the dynamic punctuations of consonants, there are more options for diversity within the flow of sound and movement. Consonants suggest that by closing the space to air so that it cannot easily pass, thus redirecting that force, that life forces may take different pathways and forms, leading to new ways of relating. Frantic Beauty highlights a certain violence and agitation in forward movement. Stopping flow and redirecting it erratically is far from efficient, but it does illustrate the multidirectionality of aliveness. The notion of ma in Japanese is a between-space, the aesthetic of arriving at “not things” but the space in between them, which might be linked to open vowel sounds, yet LEIMAY suggests that ma can be found even in the smallest of spaces, and even without the vowels to support the space. In discussing Frantic Beauty, Moriya explains, “We are searching to find ways to adjust the norms around us. […] You have to search for beauty, maybe fight for it, before it’s too late” (in Davidson 2019). Of the larger practice that supports the work, Garnica states: We allow for the cycles of the body to work through thresholds, which sometimes manifest as the sensation of exhaustion, or impossibility. That sensation is just the condition that the body is in—I have to ask if I can work without judging it as good or bad. It’s a lot like fishing, just waiting for the fish to come. It’s related to the Japanese concept of ma so hopefully you get good ma while a lot of time you get bad ma. But good ma is elusive and even subjective. There will always be contradiction, tension, and danger of overdoing. (In Davidson 2019)

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Situate In 2017, Christopher-Rasheem McMillan created and performed Black Lōkəs, a work based on Trisha Brown’s 1975 dance, Locus. McMillan learned the score from Shelley Senter, as I had. However, unlike Brown’s imagined cube in space, McMillan’s piece situates the work inside a metal frame whose dimensions recall the size of a standard jail cell (Sakamoto and McMillan 2019). He also replaced Brown’s number and letter system with biographical and numerical information: the names of Black people who have been killed by police and others in the last ten years, such as Trayvon Martin and Freddie Grey; the order of when they were shot, and the number of times, also informed his version of Brown’s score. The letters of Black Lōkəs are the phonics for “locus,” literally instructing how to “say their names” out loud by speaking the work’s title—a reference to the all-too-familiar and ongoing calls to end police brutality against Black bodies (#SayTheirNames). McMillan, who is Black, refers to the “vast gap” between his work and Brown’s (McMillan 2018: 12) as his productive starting point for difference. His work uses Brown’s score as a means of articulating a space for Blackness. Citing Audre Lorde, McMillan notes, “I want to use the master’s tools, not to dismantle his house, but to evacuate hegemony from the premises and move in myself” (in Sakamoto and McMillan 2019: 207).15 By using the original method for making the work, but mapping different information onto the points of the frame, the work, in McMillan’s words: “poses questions that move beyond preservation politics, to suggest that race can be a lens through which dance reconstructions might occur” (2018: 12). By using the structure of Locus as a method for “pointing to black people in space,” the work uses “whiteness to make blackness visible” (in Sakamoto and McMillan 2019: 207). In conversation about this work with McMillan, interdisciplinary artist Michael Sakamoto—who similarly revisited an archival work, Hijikata Tatsumi’s and photographer Hosoe Eikoh’s Kamaitachi (1969)—challenges McMillan’s approach to postmodern “cool” devoid of any acknowledgment of Black people. McMillan responds: A black body reconstructing this material is always somehow something other. I do, however, read coolness and in some ways blackness onto Trisha’s relaxed form. That has been my entry point into the archive. That is where

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Black Lo ̄kəs starts. I sought to highlight this sense of cool and bring it out in a full way in Black Lōkəs. (206)

Brenda Dixon Gottschild similarly reads Black cool into Brown’s movement style. She notes that Africanist influences are often subsumed and we are acculturated to only see and read certain forces, so Black and African forces often go unrecognized. Brown’s style “could not have come about without the influence of a jazz (read, black) aesthetic working on her, albeit subliminally” (2005: 22). McMillan’s variation on Locus poses another way of visiting and activating Brown’s archive and recognizing the whiteness that so often remains undefined. Brown left some of herself in Locus through the biographical information (see Rosenberg 2016: 151–82), and McMillan sees his work as offering an alternate legacy for Brown: “a connection that disrupts as well as affirms the archive” being created through embodiments of Brown’s works by former company members. As he puts it: “Through Black Lōkəs, through blackness…. Trisha also remains” (in Sakamoto and McMillan 2019: 207). McMillan’s is not the first version of Locus to initiate conversations on race in postmodern dance. One year earlier, in 2016, Hope Mohr’s Bridge Project asked ten visual and dance artists to use Locus, taught by Diane Madden, as a springboard for new works. The transition from learning the dance as a performer and then responding as a choreographer posed certain challenges. The artist commentary following the performance incited further discussion on race, identity, and formalism in postmodern dance. Two artists in the project, Gerald Casel and Peiling Kao, raised the issue of ethnic erasure and the conflict of appearing “neutral” when neutral often means white. Kao, who trained in ballet, modern, and Taiwanese dance, discussed how she shifted away from her dancer identity toward a choreographer and incorporated a range of movement styles into her interpretation (Fig. 7.3): I decided to use Trisha’s sequence of numbers from the Locus score as a tool to create my response. […] The title of my piece per[mute]ing describes my creative process. […] In making the piece, I incorporated the movement from all the dance forms I’ve encountered, adopted, rejected, and absorbed living in this Taiwanese dancing body. […] An audience member asked me if I was “trying to empower my Asian identity.” […] Why do I need to do anything to “empower” my Taiwanese identity? Why does the doing of Taiwanese movement or speaking Taiwanese suddenly allow people to see

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Fig. 7.3  Peiling Kao in per[mute]ing, Hope Mohr Dance Bridge Project Ten Artists Respond to “Locus,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, San Francisco, CA, 2016. (Photo: Margo Moritz) me as Taiwanese? From my perspective I am already a Taiwanese, and nothing can change that. (Kao 2016)

Several years after the Bridge Project performance of Locus, Casel led the Bridge Project’s Community Engagement Residency (2018–2019). He developed a series of panels entitled “Dancing Around Race” to address the role of race across various dance spaces, including production and presentation. Casel endeavored to take a “systems thinking approach” to reveal how the different spaces that comprise the larger dance world are interconnected, and thus we are all affected by racism. The roles and sectors in the dance ecosystem are afforded different degrees of power and privilege, and are impacted differently by the supposedly colorblind race ideology that plays out in communication, and this view perpetuates certain assumptions and misunderstandings that affect all involved (in Mohr 2021: 51). Mohr, who is white and the Bridge Project’s producer and curator, was challenged as the event presenter, and Mohr has since reconsidered her curatorial mission, shifting focus to social issues such as race

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and gender and shared curatorial and governance structures (54). As of 2021, the organization has restructured itself and adopted a distributed leadership model in order to functionally practice the policies. Locus has served as the basis for scholarly critiques of whiteness and postmodern dance as well. Judson Dance Theater, practically synonymous with “postmodern dance” and long a symbol of “radical” experimentalism and acceptance of all bodies as dancers, is not exempt from the systems in which it participated and is itself a system that perpetuated certain values. While postmodern dance can be understood historically as an important step for female dancers claiming authority over their own training and movement style, as was the case for Brown, the structure of Locus still assumes a space of whiteness. As Rebecca Chaleff, a dancer who has worked with Casel, reflects, the “ordinary” within postmodern dance is a racializing technology of biopower: The question of if and how to reconstruct, reperform, or reenact choreographies that reproduce racial exclusivity remains relevant. […] The continuous co-constitution of American postmodernism’s whiteness and aesthetics remains cause for concern, as performances of ordinary, unremarkable bodies persist in re-forming racialized spaces of segregation without being remarked upon. (2018: 80)

As a dance system, the Locus score reproduces itself through dynamic material relationships. Following Karen Barad, Locus is “material-­ discursive,” not a given substance enacted through human linguistic agency, performative or otherwise, but rather materialized with bodies each time they intra-act. As Barad notes, humans are not independent entities but phenomena (2003: 818), and “discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said” (819), as Kao discovered in her response to Locus. Barad defines agency as a matter of change, where “objectivity means being accountable to marks left on bodies” by changes (824). Matter can arrive harmed or damaged, and we are all accountable to other bodies, matter, and systems beyond our own. McMillan’s variation on the score’s matter (the points located in space to constitute the cube, the sequence of movement gestures) and Kao’s and Casel’s critiques recognize this harm and, in doing so, alter the intra-­ actions within the structure so as to give rise to new embodied conversations.

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Sequencing Sensation Sensation is not neutral, the body is not a blank slate, and movement rarely, if ever, moves unobstructed. Presently, artists and scholars are voicing critiques of postmodern dance, butoh, and somatics for enforcing neutrality that erases specificity and multiple lived realities. The embodiment of values and assumptions promoted through concert dance and its techniques, and dance’s movement into spaces already perceived as white, excluded other bodies, or at the least did not make space for them. Discussions of race and gender are paving the way for these pedagogical systems to reorganize. The postmodern vocabulary of everyday activity, abstraction, and efficient movement have garnered criticism for their erasure of racial difference, a rhetoric of universality, and the unacknowledged borrowing from Black dance and improvisational practices,16 while in butoh, societal gender norms, ethnic essentializing, and undervalued labor are increasingly recognized as limitations impacting the training and careers of women in the field.17 The language that surrounds postmodern work, especially the “ordinary,” “natural,” “neutral,” and “abstract,” and words like “grotesque,” “preverbal,” and even “Japanese” for butoh have material consequences that are perpetuated each time the words are repeated to characterize these practices, whether in academia or the studio. How these practices are taught and felt, and how their sensations are archived across multiple bodies, matters.18 While notably both practices charted new routes for some female dance artists to claim more space within dominant and patriarchal systems, it is unclear to what degree the systems themselves have changed. However, recent scholarship on Black artists is one area of research where dance studies discourses do not always refer back to the 1960s fetishized objects of postmodern dance or butoh.19 Similarly, many somatic movement practices advance a universalizing view of bodily function that impacts dance pedagogy. As dance studies scholars such as Doran George and Deidre Sklar point out, particular ideologies are advanced through educational systems like somatics (George 2020; Sklar 2001). Even though a body has a certain degree of agency in its ability to steer away from socially formed habits with the support of somatic movement practices, and to become aware of how a social system operates and affects one’s actions, a body is in turn also an expression of culture, its values, and its beliefs. As writers like Rae Johnson and Resmaa Menakem remark, oppression also impacts the body somatically, and thus somatics is not a cure but rather a set of tools offering possible practices for movement experimentation (Johnson 2018; Menakem 2017).

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Somatics are therefore not a solution to societal issues, power imbalances, or emotional discomfort; nor are the sensations I’ve highlighted panaceas for oppression, linguistic or otherwise. Even the word “somatics” is a Western invention linking a series of related practices, despite the fact that Asian traditions have a much longer history of mind-body practices that do not fall under the rubric of somatics. Isabelle Ginot points out that in challenging the generalizing and essentialist ideologies of somatics that our sensations themselves are culturally determined rather than natural: “Somatics itself is a technique of fabricating a body” (2010: 24). Somatic discourses must be read as performative discourses, studied in a precise context and targeting thereby an equally precise efficacy. […] Their value is not universal but isolated, and their validity can only be measured by the effect they produce on a given subject, in his/her encounter with a given context. (18)

If “artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility” (Rancière [2004] 2009: 13), then shifting attention from seeing and kinesthetic sensations common in dance to a broader range of sensorial experiences, including those activated by language, can alter and expand the field of dance practice.20 Thinking in terms of micromovement requires an awareness of the microchoreography that underlies a body’s relations to language sensations. As Susan Foster states in her seminal dance studies text Reading Dancing (1986): “Literacy in dance begins with seeing, hearing, and feeling how the body moves” (1986: 58, emphasis added). This takes observation, questioning, testing, and refining our bodily relation to language, as well as attention to the significance of language and its sensations within larger environments. A dance history that takes into account the changing meanings of sensation itself has yet to be fully written. This history would include not only sensations linked to particular techniques and how sensations have transformed over time but also why some sensations have lost relevance. For example, the power of a Graham contraction is less studied today, whereas hip-hop athletic power moves draw attention; unbounded movement like that found in Isadora Duncan Dance seems dated, whereas the flow of contemporary lyric dance maintains a current popularity. Other sensations, like those in particular ballet jumps

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and turns, have remained, yet any sensation out of context can cause harm, and certain sensations open doors for some and close them for others.21 Observing which sensations are relevant today and why is a central concern of mine. Artists today are questioning the values, ideologies, histories, and relevance of movement techniques and the sensations they impart. An example is Netta Yerushalmy’s dance Paramodernities (2018), which takes the work of iconic figures in modern dance—including Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, and others—and opens up the techniques and resulting sensations to inquiry. In this piece, the dancers are not necessarily trained in the technical vocabulary of the artist they are parodying, but they are nonetheless highly trained dancers and are capable of performing “in the style of…” They may or may not reproduce exact steps or gestures but their movements are still markedly recognizable as the featured artist’s style. In performance, these parodies are accompanied by verbal commentary by a spoken-word performer or by the dancers, on topics such as gender and racial politics, and how the movement and bodies uphold certain ideologies. Works such as Paramodernities expose the meaning of certain sensations at the time of the technique’s origins and how we might understand them differently in the present. Yerushalmy’s piece pushes these dance languages to their limit, further propelled by accompanying spoken texts. In this way, a language is produced within a language, and within a larger system at the local level. The connection between a body and language is not automatic, nor should it be assumed. Instead, it must be practiced. Dorothea Olkowski recognizes this point in her discussion of Deleuze, language, and representation: “Obviously, we are pained to ask how language intersects with bodies or why it does not when it does not” (1999: 214). While I’ve suggested throughout that language forces are felt and can be utilized by dancers and choreographers, the question of specific sensations arising from the connection of language and bodies remains complicated by individual experience. Massumi makes some practical suggestions as to techniques of language use that are helpful to keep in mind when beginning to approach more specific sensations and their organization: first, language must be considered impersonal (“you must relieve yourself of having to represent and be judged accordingly”); second, language should be approached not as product but process (“a use of language that is procedural and has a poetic edge”); and third, language should be used improvisationally (“positive constraints, like structured improvisation”) (2015: 171, 172, 175). While his case studies take place in academic conferences

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and classrooms rather than dance studios, I find in his propositions useful directives when considering language’s social charge and how it affectively shapes the thinking and sensorial sequencing humans then bring into dance contexts. In order to use language as a tool for dance, our understanding of its use, function, and reception must be expanded. As Luce Irigaray says of conversation: If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the same story. Begin the same stories over and over again. Don’t you feel it? […] If we don’t invent a language, if we don’t find our body’s language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story. (1980: 69)

In a later translation of this same essay, the phrase “don’t you feel it” is translated as “don’t you think so” (1985: 205). Once again a correlation between thinking and feeling emerges. The goal then is to pause and ask how to remain, individually and collectively, with sensations of all kinds, including those that may be less comfortable for some and all too familiar to others, and that often get reabsorbed into systems without notice or are eliminated from the sensorium altogether. Somatics, language, choreography, and affect theory are not in and of themselves solutions to unjust social and political conditions. Nor does a sensorial approach to language or careful word choice ameliorate the very real and felt effects of hate speech, abusive language, bullying, and other kinds of harmful talk—or silence when action is called for. Yet by thinking with language sensation within existing structures like choreography, performance, and elsewhere, and asking different questions, the relations within these structures can begin to change. Turning to dance may bring insight for current ways of moving together affectively. Attuning to how language sensations move with dance bodies, and thinking in micromovements with them, may open new avenues for how to reengage with care, respect, and accountability. Heeding these forces is urgent, necessary, and already underway.

Notes 1. There has been significant attention paid to practices for decolonizing bod-

ies, pedagogies, and dance studies as a field. See, for example, the Dance Studies Association publication Decolonizing Dance Discourses (2020), King et al. (2020), Spatz (2019), Wang (2020), and many others.

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2. Alison D’Amato (2021) has recently asked a similar question of theory that promotes nonhuman agency—whether such theory perhaps perpetuates settler colonialism, even as it has offered a helpful shift away from dance bodies as the central focus and instead toward the movement incited by a linguistic score. 3. Changes in the relevance of sensations in modern dance and butoh practices are noted in Fraleigh (2010) and Nicely (2018). 4. A reference to Peggy Phelan’s (1993) ontology of performance. Here, given that many understand dance as ephemeral and the field’s struggle for concrete and lasting legitimacy, I work between disappearing and remaining, using Henri Bergson’s discussions of temporality and the idea that sensations are not linear but instead arise and fade within a system—bodily, choreographic, environmental, or otherwise. 5. Ann Daly (1995) has analyzed Isadora Duncan’s free-form “natural” movement and its alignment with American ideology. 6. Drawing on Paul Carter’s The Lie of the Land (1996), in Exhausting Dance (2006) André Lepecki makes a related point in regard to the smooth surface of the dance studio or stage, which covers over the bodies and histories that were there before in order to present a neutral space “discovered” and populated with bodies. Other studies of early modern dance practices and erasure include Susan Manning’s Modern Dance, Negro Dance (2004) and Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s The People Have Never Stopped Dancing (2007), which look to the influences of Black and Native peoples on dance practices and how these influences were neutralized and absorbed, their origins unacknowledged. 7. In America Dancing: The Background and Personalities of the Modern Dance, Martin wrote: “In the present period of civilization an excessive evaluation is placed upon literacy. […] Nothing has meaning until it is translated into words; there is no substance in an emotional reaction, no validity in a muscular response; there is only language” (1936: 87–88). Martin promoted kinesthesia and the expressive work of Martha Graham as dance experiences that met the bodies of audiences directly and did not require translation. 8. In The People Have Never Stopped Dancing (2007), Jacqueline Shea Murphy similarly illustrates the influence and presence of Native American dance on U.S. concert dance traditions. 9. Robin DiAngelo’s notion of “white fragility” (2018) hinges on the fact that many white people find certain kinds of sensations intolerable. adrienne maree brown’s activist call to empower pleasurable sensations suggests that pleasurable sensations can arise in unlikely places if we open to and focus on them (brown 2019).

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10. Works discussed in the following sections precede the pandemic.

11. Here, I refer to the first time I saw the work in 2013. 12. Reuter also sourced responses from others as to the work’s value: “All experiences are new experiences, unless we exist only in our patterns. The opposite of allowing sensory experience is not allowing sensory experience, or going on ‘auto-pilot’—I don’t want to live on autopilot”; “We never really know what’s going to happen next and a dance practice can build our capacity to tune into and out of this awareness” (in Reuter 2018). 13. They include those of Italian director Mario Biagini from the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards (the Workcenter closed January 1, 2022), theater director Robert Wilson, and butoh artists including Murobushi Ko and Kasai Akira (in Davidson 2019). I have trained with Garnica and members of LEIMAY at CAVE, their studio in Brooklyn. 14. Garcia subsequently studied with Kasai for one year in Japan, attending the only intensive pilot program Kasai led linking butoh and Eurythmy (see Nicely 2014a). 15. A reference to Audre Lorde ([1984] 2007). 16. See, for example, Casel (2016), Chaleff (2018), DeFrantz (2017), Gutierrez (2018), Kao (2016), Mckeon (2020), and Mohr (2021). 17. See Baird (2022), Baird and Candelario (2019), Coker (2021), Curtin (2015), and Vangeline (2021). 18. Scholarship on differences across bodies highlights how experiences of touch and sensation manifest in studio practices. On the politics of touch in Contact Improvisation in relation to race and differing cultural backgrounds and pedagogies, see Goldman (2021), Hennessy ([2018] 2019), and Mitra (2021). On ableism and disability, see Anderson (2020) and Kuppers (2017). On ageism, see Martin (2017) and Nakajima and Brandstetter (2017). 19. See, for instance, Das (2017), DeFrantz and Gonzalez (2014), Kraut (2015), Fensham (2013), George-Graves (2010), Manning (2004, 2015), and Wells (2021). 20. Anna Gibbs finds that language does not engage the body as a whole but rather is selective in the areas it activates. She conceives the body not as a medium but as a series of media that connects in its own way with technological media, including writing (2010: 201). 21. On the subject of Contact Improvisation, Royona Mitra (2021) discusses how touch in dance instruction in India was not reciprocal and relational, and the assumption of this relation in Western Contact Improvisation classes was disorienting for her.

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Index1

A Abstraction, 48, 51, 54, 65–68, 72, 73, 77, 115, 178, 211, 224, 227, 231 formalism, 54, 66, 77 pure movement, 66 Academia, 183, 227 See also Knowledge Accumulation with Talking Plus Watermotor (Brown) Accumulation, 57, 59 Accumulation with Talking, 57 Action, 3, 7, 9, 10, 15n9, 19–21, 24, 26, 28, 29, 33n4, 43, 47, 49, 50, 52, 55, 59, 62, 64–66, 72, 75, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 96, 98, 118, 129, 134, 138, 139, 142–144, 147, 149, 150, 155, 157, 158, 163, 169–173, 175–177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186, 188, 191, 194n3, 196n17, 197n21, 198n27, 198n28, 205–208, 214, 217–219, 227, 230 See also Do, doing

Adaptation (adapt) and environment, 28 Solo Performance Commissioning Project (SPCP), 128, 130, 137 and system, 12, 29, 30, 128 Affect affect theory, 196n14, 208, 209, 230 and language, 2, 4, 6–8, 10, 13, 27, 176, 184 and sensation, 8, 89 vitality affects, 96, 179, 180, 196n14 Agency action, 170, 182, 198n28 allowing, 169–194 choreographer as agent, 145, 151, 192 choreopolitics, 210 doing, 12, 169–194 muscular effort, 174 See also Allowing; Do, doing

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. V. Nicely, Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30296-1

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240 

INDEX

Ahmed, Sara, 171, 183, 186, 187, 208 Aikido, 170, 195n8 Ailey, Alvin, 229 Akasegawa Genpei, 107 Alexander, F. M., 24, 53, 54, 71, 75, 185, 186, 191 Alexander Technique, the, 24, 45, 53, 54, 68, 70, 170, 185, 186, 191, 195n8, 198n26 Allowing, 2, 7, 12, 22, 41, 44, 45, 49, 51, 60, 62, 63, 93, 104, 106, 129, 135, 140, 154, 155, 169–194, 211, 232 Animate, 62, 84, 178, 219 Chen on, 178, 179 Anma: aiyoku o sasaeru gekijo no hanashi (The masseur: A story that supports passion) (Hijikata), 116 Art and Life (Hay), 12, 128, 129, 131, 132, 135, 137, 138, 151 art and life concept, 129–138 Artaud, Antonin, 83, 88, 116 Asahara, Masanori, 218, 221 Ashikawa Yoko, 84, 101, 116, 119, 184, 197n22 Austin, J. L., 153, 156, 181 Author, 20, 27, 47, 67, 77, 109, 152, 169–171, 192, 196n14, 208 death of, 169 Avant-garde, 83, 92, 103, 115, 194n4 neo-avant-garde, 169 Awareness, 4, 8, 31, 46, 50, 54, 68, 84, 93, 120, 140, 143, 146, 150, 152, 158, 159, 170–173, 186, 193, 211, 228, 232 attention, 93, 172, 173, 228 perception, 152, 158–160 B Bainbridge Cohen, Bonnie, 171 Baird, Bruce, 16n15, 33n8, 34n10, 100, 103, 115–119, 194n2, 194n3, 195n7

Bales, Melanie, 192, 193 and Karen Eliot, 5 Banes, Sally, 33n8, 33n9, 34n10, 75, 194n2, 197n24 Barad, Karen, 174, 195n9, 226 Barairo dansu (Rose-colored dance) (Hijikata), 116 Barlow, Marjory, 25 Barthes, Roland, 30, 47, 67, 169, 195n5 Behnke, Elizabeth, 19–21, 28 Bennett, Jane, 10, 26, 27, 109, 113 Bergson, Henri, 10, 23–26, 28–30, 33n2, 33n4, 77, 182, 183, 231 and adaptation, 28–30 and interval, 11, 24, 26, 33n4, 77, 182 and vibration, 11, 26, 27 Between-space, 22, 96, 217, 222 Biopower, 226 Black Lōkəs (McMillan), 223, 224 Bleeker, Maaike, 208 Blues (Hay), 163 Body announcer, 96 bodymind, 5, 6, 15n13, 102, 214 body without organs, 22, 181 cellular, 132, 139, 140 choreographed, 136, 137 community, 113, 115 etheric, 94 everyday, 47, 48, 76 human, 5, 7, 10, 19, 26, 27, 47, 49, 65, 76, 88, 91, 93–95, 105, 108–110, 112–114, 119, 135, 138, 170, 172, 174, 175, 177, 179, 181, 184, 187, 206, 208, 219–221 Japanese, 106, 117 making a, 20 material, 22, 91, 115, 175, 226 social, 91, 107 surveyor, 96 as translator, 102

 INDEX 

Body-Mind Centering (BMC), 171 See also Somatics Boulé, Michelle, 158 brown, adrienne maree, 128, 231 Brown, Trisha, 8, 9, 11, 23, 31, 33n8, 33n9, 39–77, 191, 195n8, 198n25, 198n26, 223, 224, 226 and deflection, 59 individual/personal movement, 67, 73 movement style, 11, 41, 50, 52, 54, 73, 75, 195n8, 224, 226 space between words, 11, 39–74 teaching, 66, 74 and vision/visual, 11, 60, 61, 63, 65, 74, 76 Buddhism, 142, 143, 162 Asia as method, 143 See also Zen Burroughs, William S., 147 Butler, Judith, 27, 186, 187, 197n20 Butoh American reception, 119n38 ankoku butoh, 14n2, 84, 117, 189 butô, 84 chaotic, 88, 98, 104 festivals, 84, 115, 120 and postmodern dance, 9, 11, 23, 31, 32, 34n10, 169, 189, 190, 227 Butoh America (Kasai), 105, 106 Butoh-fu onomatopoeia, 101, 171, 185 pollen, 108, 189 words of, 102 Butoh Next conference, 218 Butoh training, 2 butoh-based training, 2, 14n2, 173 C Cage, John, 34n11, 61, 76, 129, 142, 147, 153, 162, 194n3, 195n6 and Zen, 34n11, 142

241

Casel, Gerald, 224–226 CAVE, 92, 96, 117, 232 Celan, Paul, 108, 120 Chaleff, Rebecca, 66, 226 Chen, Mel Y., 178, 179 Childs, Lucinda, 67 Choreographic mind, 8 system, 28, 42, 46 thinking, 3, 14n6, 139, 157, 159, 193, 205, 216 Choreography counter-choreograph, 137, 146, 147 motion, 41, 42, 55, 64, 72 rechoreograph, 145–147 Choreopolitics, 192, 210 Consciousness, 20, 21, 26, 54, 85, 87, 89, 91, 97, 98, 100, 107, 113, 114, 118, 119, 144, 157, 158, 185, 196n11, 214 See also Perception Consonants, 94, 218–220, 222 Contemporary dance, 12, 95, 97, 110, 114, 139, 141, 189, 192 experimental dance, 13, 25, 140, 158, 169, 171, 191, 211 Copeland, Roger, 162 Copper, Krystel, 218 Corporeal, 10, 12, 28, 89, 119, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 181 See also Incorporeal Covid-19, 13, 206, 207 Craddock, Takami, 120 Crisis, 104, 119, 128, 138, 159 dance of, 100, 118 Csordas, Thomas, 26, 171 Cullberg, 161 Cunningham, Merce, 61, 72, 74, 76, 97, 162, 195n7, 229 Cvejić, Bojana, 192, 198n28

242 

INDEX

D Dairakudakan, 119 Dalrymple Henderson, Linda, 94 Damasio, Antonio, 197n17, 197n21 Dancer as agent, 192 de Certeau, Michel, 7, 161, 188 Death of the author, 169 Decolonizing, 192, 198n30, 206, 230n1 Deflection, 59, 64 DeFrantz, Thomas F., 16n15 deLahunta, Scott, 3, 14n5, 14n6 Deleuze, Gilles, 10, 14n3, 20, 22, 26, 27, 33n2, 33n6, 50, 89, 102, 176, 194n1, 196n11, 196n15, 229 and Félix Guattari, 10, 14n3, 20, 22, 27, 50 stutter, 27, 89 vibration, 26, 27 Demme, Jonathan, 57, 58 Dennett, Daniel, 157 Dewey, John, 53, 75 DiMartini, Derek, 221 Distribution of the sensible, 209 Do, doing and Alexander Technique, 186 and performative, 12, 181, 182, 185, 187, 188 See also Agency; Allowing D’Orazi, Maria Pia, 95, 97 Drobnick, Jim, 140 Duncan, Isadora, 94, 107, 210, 211, 231 Isadora Duncan Dance, 228 Duration, 24, 91, 137, 183, 217 See also Time Durning, Jenaine, 144, 156, 158, 212–215, 217 inging, 212–214, 217 nonstopping, 215–217

E Emergent strategy, 128 Emotion, 54, 72, 110, 144, 174, 196n16, 197n21, 220 End-gain, 25 Energy, 6, 7, 26, 28, 42, 46–48, 53, 58, 76, 83, 85, 87, 89–99, 104, 106–112, 117, 120, 133, 139, 179, 183, 205, 218–220, 222 See also Force/forces Environment (environmental) cosmos, 90, 94, 114, 117 earth, 90, 113, 114, 132, 133, 185, 209 planet, 110, 112, 129, 133, 138 Esposito, Paola, 180 and Toshiharu Kasai, 180 Eurythmy, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 117, 118, 232 Ephesus’s technique, 95 Evolution, 28, 30, 113 Experiences, 2, 4, 5, 7–10, 12, 15n10, 16n15, 19, 23, 24, 26, 28, 42–44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 56, 57, 60, 62–65, 67, 68, 71, 85, 88, 91, 93, 95, 98, 102, 107, 109, 110, 113, 117, 120, 128, 130, 134, 139, 142–148, 150, 152, 157, 158, 160–162, 170, 174, 177, 178, 180, 183, 185, 188, 189, 191, 193, 195n7, 198n26, 205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 214, 215, 219, 228, 229, 231, 232 Experiment/experimentation and Deleuze, 22, 194n1 experimental dance, 9, 13, 15–16n15, 25, 29, 32, 59, 67, 114, 140, 141, 158, 169–171, 191, 211, 226 External of the body, 95, 182

 INDEX 

outside, 27 stimuli, 5, 28, 182 Exusiai, 110, 112 Exusiai (Kasai), 12, 109–111, 113, 120 F Fanon, Frantz, 183 Feedback, 1, 61, 135, 139, 143, 163, 175, 188 Feel/feeling and language, 83, 98, 139, 147, 171, 174, 179, 188, 191, 230 and sensation, 23, 97, 147, 174, 182 See also Sensation Feldenkrais, 190 Feminist/feminism, 25, 44, 67, 73, 77, 128, 171, 174, 182, 197n19 Figure a Sea (Hay), 157, 158 Flournoy, Brechin, 84, 87, 91, 120 Fluxus, 76, 170, 195n6, 195n7 Foray Forêt (Brown), 64 Force/forces, 2–7, 10, 13, 13n1, 15n11, 20–29, 43, 45–47, 49–51, 54, 55, 62, 65, 74, 85, 86, 89–91, 94, 98, 99, 102–104, 106–117, 129, 161, 169–172, 174, 176, 177, 179–185, 189, 192, 193, 197n19, 205, 208, 209, 218, 220–222, 224, 229, 230 Formalism, see Abstraction Forsythe Company, The, 157, 161 Forsythe, William, 14n5, 14n6, 158 Foster, Susan, 72, 142, 170, 172, 193, 195n5, 210, 228 Foucault, Michel, 20, 182, 210 Fraleigh, Sondra, 95, 107, 112, 115, 231 Frantic Beauty (LEIMAY), 218, 220–222

243

Fried, Michael, 47, 62 Fulkerson, Mary, 190 Furukawa Anzu, 120 G Galeano, Mar, 221 Garnica, Ximena, 117, 219, 221, 222, 232 George, Doran, 227 Gesture infralanguage, 181 microgestures, 6, 181 Gil, José, 6, 7, 96, 97, 181, 184 Ginot, Isabelle, 228 Glacial Decoy (Brown), 33n8, 59, 60, 63, 64, 69 Goldberg, Marianne, 41, 44, 48, 51, 67 Goldman, Danielle, 162, 172, 210 Goodman, Steve, 26, 27 Gottschild, Brenda Dixon, 196n13, 224 Graham, Martha, 14n4, 114, 120, 210, 228, 229, 231 Gravity, 2, 6, 13n1, 48, 51–54, 61, 84, 102, 104, 110, 112, 185, 205, 218 Greiner, Christine, 21, 23 Grosz, Elizabeth, 10, 24, 25, 30, 32, 49, 176, 177, 197n18 and adaptation, 30 and interval, 24, 25 and language, 10, 30, 176, 177 Guattari, Félix, see Deleuze, Gilles Gutierrez, Miguel, 152 H Habit, 5, 29, 44, 45, 67, 97, 128, 133, 136, 150, 173, 206, 207, 227 habitual, 3, 7, 10, 45, 54, 127, 132, 139, 143, 151, 186, 190, 207, 208, 220

244 

INDEX

Halprin, Anna, 8, 74, 129 Hansen, Pil, 207–209 Happenings, 28, 63, 65, 129, 145, 147–149, 159, 170, 195n7, 207, 220 Haraway, Donna, 209 Hay, Deborah, 127–167 and adaptation, 12, 127–161 “call it that,” 12, 127–161 and music, 133, 137, 151 performance practice, 131, 132, 135, 139, 141, 143, 144, 147, 162 questions, 12, 23, 127, 131, 138, 140, 144, 148, 152–154, 160, 161, 214 visual field, 132, 145, 149, 150, 158 Hewitt, Andrew, 210, 211 Hijikata, Tatsumi, 9, 11, 12, 14n2, 16n15, 33n8, 34n10, 84, 85, 91, 92, 98–108, 111, 115–120, 170, 184, 189, 190, 194n2, 194n3, 195n7, 197n22, 223 and butoh-fu, 91, 102, 108, 116, 117, 119, 120, 189 Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihonjin: Nikutai no hanran (Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese people: Rebellion of the body) (Hijikata), 99 Hip-hop, 107, 108, 114, 228 Hsieh, Tehching, 129 Hultman, Iréne, 54–56, 75 Husserl, Edmund, 19 I Ideokinesis, 53 If I Sing to You (Hay), 155, 156, 158 If You Couldn’t See Me (Brown), 64, 65 Image, 2, 7, 30, 53, 61–64, 69, 84, 85, 88, 98, 101, 102, 108, 110,

111, 113, 117, 119, 130, 139, 145, 153, 158, 159, 173, 184, 187–190, 212, 218 imagery, imagination, 2, 69, 88, 91, 94, 98, 102, 104, 140, 171, 173, 176, 190 Improvisation, 52, 60, 170, 195n8, 207 Incorporeal, 12, 27, 172, 175–177, 181, 191 Infralanguage, 97, 181 Inging (Durning), 212–214, 217 Inorganic, 109–115 and organic, 109–115 Internal of the bod, 5, 95, 187 inside, 29 and stimuli, 5, 28 Interpret interpretant, 30 interpreter, 116, 118, 134, 150, 163, 170 Interval and Irigaray, 25, 33n4, 33n5, 73, 77, 197n19 and space between, 41–45, 52, 73 Intra-action, 174, 175, 226 Irigaray, Luce, 10, 24, 25, 33n4, 33n5, 43, 44, 68, 73, 77, 182, 183, 197n19, 230 Irwin, Robert, 150 It’s a Draw (Brown), 56 J Jevtović, Jana, 141 Johnson, Rae, 227 Joseph, Brandon, 76, 77, 194n4 Jowett, Deborah, 44, 57 Judd, Donald, 46 Judson Dance Theater, 32, 33n9, 61, 156, 162, 170, 190, 226

 INDEX 

K Kamnikar, Gregor, 141 Kan, Katsura, 91 Kao, Peiling, 224–226 Kaprow, Allan, 129, 195n7 Karada to iu shomotsu (Book of the body) (Kasai), 97 Karczag, Eva, 42, 53, 65, 71, 74 Kasai Akira, 9, 11, 12, 23, 31, 83–115, 175, 219, 232 aesthetic, 11, 84, 91, 94, 104, 106 contemporary dance, 12, 95, 97, 110, 114, 139, 141, 189, 192 eurythmy, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 117, 118 and Hijikata, 9, 11, 12, 84, 85, 91, 92, 98–108, 111, 116 movement style/aesthetic, 11, 84, 91, 94, 95, 104, 106, 107 teaching, 9, 92 and voice power, 11, 83–115 Kata, 111, 120 Kayo Mikami, 102 Keijijogaku (Emotion in metaphysics) (Hijikata), 116 Kiki no buyô (Dance of crisis) (Mishima), 100 Kinesphere, 49, 75, 205 Kinesthesia (kinesthetic), 53, 69, 172–175, 210, 231 See also Sensation Kinetic Awareness, 68, 170 Kinjiki (Forbidden colors) (Hijikata), 118 Kisselgoff, Anna, 72 Klein, Gabriele, 192, 193 Klein, Susan, 34n10, 171 Klein Technique, 71, 171 Knowledge in action, 153 knowing how, 154, 163 knowing that, 32, 154, 163 knowledge systems, 152, 161

245

Koans, 142, 143, 162 and Zen Buddhism, 142, 143, 162 Kojiki, 95, 118 Kotodama, 95 Kourlas, Gia, 15n12, 105, 106 Kraus, Lisa, 69 Krauss, Rosalind, 62 Kurihara Nanako, 101 Kyoto Experiment (Kasai), 118 L La Rocco, Claudia, 105, 155 Laban, Rudolf von, 15n8, 26, 49, 75, 179, 190 Labanotation, 4, 15n8, 179 LaBelle, Brandon, 89, 184 Langer, Susanne, 179, 196n16 Language and affect, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 27, 89, 176, 184, 196n11 common, 7, 8, 175, 179, 194 gesture, 4, 89 infralanguage, 97, 181 language-body sensations, 9, 23, 171 linguistics, 4, 27 as material, 12, 68 parts of, 195n6 social, 7, 104 speech, 4 words, 3, 7, 12, 41, 57, 60, 89, 100, 101, 104, 134, 147, 170, 175, 186 See also Body; Sensation Lecture on the Performance of Beauty, A (Hay) Beauty, 152–154 o beautiful, 152–154 Lecture-performance, 12, 152–157 LEIMAY, 92, 218, 219, 221, 222, 232 Lemberg, Kristin, 120

246 

INDEX

Lepecki, André, 94, 118, 192, 210, 231 Lepkoff, Daniel, 190 Listen, listening, 1, 89, 93, 95, 96, 98, 135, 136, 142, 184 announcer, 96 See also Sound Locus (Brown), 11, 39–43, 45–51, 56–59, 65, 67, 68, 70–74, 223–226 and scale, 42–50 Logos, 113 Love/hate, 27, 103, 104, 108, 112, 190, 230 Low, Malcolm, 163 M Ma, 33n3, 222 See also Between-space Mac Low, Jackson, 51 Madden, Diane, 42, 44, 68, 71, 73, 224 Mahler, Barbara, 171 Manning, Erin, 10, 22, 24, 25, 96, 180, 196n14, 205 preacceleration, 22, 96 prearticulation, 96 Manning, Susan, 26, 33n2, 44, 54, 56, 65, 67, 94, 231 Map Room II (Rauschenberg), 62 Mapp, Juliette, 158, 193 Martin, John, 211 Massumi, Brian, 10, 14n3, 29, 45, 49, 50, 116, 146, 176, 177, 180, 191, 196n11, 196n14, 210, 229 and adaptive systems, 29 and affect, 45, 180, 196n11, 196n14 and habit, 29 and language, 10, 116, 176, 180, 191, 196n11, 229 and play, 180

McGregor, Wayne, 3, 14n5, 14n6 McMillan, Christopher-Rasheem, 223, 224, 226 Menakem, Resmaa, 227 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 48, 49, 149 and vision, 149 Michotte, Albert, 116, 176 Microgestures, 6, 181 Micromovement and Elizabeth Behnke, 19 interface micromovements, 21 and José Gil, 6, 96, 181 and language, 2, 6, 10, 13, 21, 31, 41, 127, 140, 171, 173, 175, 182, 183, 194 and micropolitics, 10, 19–33 and sensations, 11, 13, 20–23, 41, 128, 129, 171, 186, 194 Microperceptions, 22 Micropolitics, 2, 20, 25 Minimal art, 47, 63 sculpture, 47, 63, 76 Mishima Yukio, 100, 118, 120 Modern dance, 26, 67, 95, 105, 118, 210, 211, 229, 231 Mohr, Hope, 33n8, 73, 158, 224, 225 Bridge Project, 33n8, 73, 158, 224, 225 Montano, Linda, 129 More-than-human, 172, 174, 185, 196n9, 197n19, 205, 207, 209, 217 Moriya, Shige, 219, 222 Morris, Robert, 46–48, 74 Moten, Fred, 210 Motion Bank, 14n5, 157 Movement-moving, 22, 25, 205 Multisensory, 101, 188, 196n10, 221 Munroe, Alexandra, 16n15, 34n11, 143 My Body, the Buddhist (Hay), 12, 142 My Own Apocalypse (Kasai), 11, 83–86, 88, 89, 91, 93, 99

 INDEX 

N Nelson, Maggie, 210 Ness, Sally Ann, 28, 171 Neutral, see Abstraction Nevanlinna, Vera, 156 New York Butoh Festival, 105, 115, 219 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 99, 106–107, 119, 181, 184 NoBody’s Money (Kasai), 11, 107 Noë, Alva, 157–159, 163, 194 Noguchi Taiso, 2, 14n2, 102, 104, 119, 171, 180, 185 Noguchi, Michizo, 2, 102, 171, 185 Noh, 32, 95, 108, 120 Noland, Carrie, 28, 171, 174 No Manifesto, 47, 74 Nondoing, 185 Nonstopping, 215–217 No Time to Fly (Hay), 157 O O Beautiful (Hay), 152–154 Object, 21, 24, 26, 27, 30, 47–49, 51, 61–65, 76, 87, 88, 98, 100, 101, 104, 109, 116, 119, 132, 139, 144, 146, 179, 195n9, 197n19, 212, 227 Occupy Wall Street, 107 O’Connoor, Tere, 15n12 Ohno, Kazuo, 9, 33n8, 34n10, 84, 115, 119, 190 Olinghouse, Cori, 44, 60 Olkowski, Dorothea, 33n4, 33n5, 197n19, 229 Ono, Yoko, 195n7 Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503 (Brown), 68 Oral, 85, 95, 116, 118, 185 Organic, 52, 109–115 and inorganic, 109–115

247

Organize, 7, 24, 71, 128, 139, 178, 186, 193 self-organizing, 20 Osanai, Mari, 14n2, 185 Overarticulations, 181, 184 See also Gesture P Panagia, Davide, 211 Paramodernities (Yerushalmy), 229 Parkinson, Chrysa, 162, 192 Paxton, Steve, 6, 8, 58, 62, 75, 195n8 Pedagogy method, 7, 13n1, 31, 135 nonverbal, 31, 41 and transmission, 3, 11, 23, 31, 33, 67, 73 Peirce, Charles, 30 Pelican (Rauschenberg), 62 Perception, 22, 24, 46, 55, 60, 61, 97, 127, 134, 138, 144, 145, 150, 152, 156, 158–160, 162, 177, 184, 188, 195n7, 196n11, 208, 209, 214 Performance practice, 85, 131, 132, 135, 139, 141, 143, 144, 147, 162 Performative somatics of, 9, 12, 181–188 speech act, 179 utterance, 15n9, 182 per[mute]ing (Kao), 224, 225 Perron, Joel, 103, 104, 119 Perron, Wendy, 33n8, 76, 119 Petronio, Stephen, 33n8, 65 Phelan, Peggy, 231 Phenomenology, 149 Politics and aesthetics, 209, 211, 216 micropolitics, 2, 20, 25 Pollen Revolution (Kasai), 108

248 

INDEX

Postmodern dance, 2, 9, 11, 13n1, 23, 30–32, 33n8, 34n10, 48, 66, 117, 169, 172, 189, 190, 224, 226, 227 Practice, ix, 4, 8–12, 14n2, 14n5, 15n12, 15–16n15, 21–27, 29–32, 34n11, 41, 43, 53, 55, 61, 73, 85, 92, 94–98, 102, 106, 109, 110, 115, 120, 127–132, 134–144, 146–148, 150, 152, 154–156, 160–162, 169, 170, 172, 175, 176, 178, 185, 189–193, 194n3, 198n27, 198n28, 207, 209–211, 214–216, 219, 220, 222, 226–228, 230–232 Preacceleration, 22, 96 Prearticulation, 96 Preston-Dunlop, Valerie, 5 Process, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11–13, 15n12, 19–22, 24, 25, 28–32, 41, 45, 50–57, 59, 60, 67, 69, 70, 75, 87, 89, 91, 96–98, 101, 103, 111, 114, 120, 128, 129, 134, 135, 137–142, 144, 147, 148, 151–155, 157, 161, 163, 170–172, 174, 175, 177, 188, 192, 193, 207, 208, 210–212, 216, 217, 224, 229 processual, 22 Professional dance, 30, 129, 138, 141, 151, 156, 157, 160, 161, 192 Q Questions, ix, 5, 9, 10, 12, 19–21, 23, 31, 46, 47, 50, 54, 56, 61, 63–65, 70, 73, 98, 108, 114, 115, 127, 131–134, 137–140, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150, 152–154, 160, 161, 171–173, 184, 186, 187, 193, 208, 211–214, 216, 223, 226, 229–231

R Rainer, Lucia, 153, 154 Rainer, Yvonne, 8, 41, 47, 48, 63, 65, 72–74, 76, 162, 190, 194n3 “Trio A,” “No Manifesto,” 47 Rancière, Jacques, 209, 228 on aesethics and politics, 209 Rauschenberg, Robert, 61–65, 76, 77 Reeber, Amelia, 156 Relation, 3, 4, 6–10, 12, 13, 13n1, 14n5, 14n6, 15n7, 20, 22–24, 26, 30–32, 41, 42, 44–50, 53, 56, 57, 61–63, 68, 71, 73, 75, 76, 85, 87, 88, 92, 95–100, 102, 105, 108, 109, 112–115, 117–120, 127–129, 134, 138, 139, 141, 146, 147, 159, 161, 162, 164, 169, 171–174, 176, 178, 180, 182, 185–187, 193, 194n2, 197n19, 197n20, 206–209, 212, 219, 228, 230, 232 Release release-based technique, 2, 13n1, 178 release technique, 55, 75, 198n25 Rethorst, Susan, 8, 15n13 Revolution, 91, 114 Riley, Denise, 172 Robinson, Douglas, 187 Rodiger, Ann, 191, 198n26 Romero, Ella Jane, 141 Roof Piece (Brown), 61 Rosenberg, Susan, 43, 45, 47, 48, 56, 57, 59, 73, 74, 76, 77, 224 Rozman, Jan, 141 Ruprecht, Lucia, 26, 94 Ryle, Gilbert, 154, 163 S Sakamoto, Michael, 33n8, 223, 224 San Francisco Butoh Festival, 83, 98

 INDEX 

Sankai Juku, 14n2, 84, 103, 119, 185, 189 Sas, Miryam, 106, 195n7 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 30 Scale, 42–50, 64, 68, 119 size of movement, 42, 48 Schechner, Richard, 162 Score Art and Life (Hay), 131, 132 Fluxus, 76, 170, 195n6 language of, 56, 68, 71, 132, 134–136, 138, 147–150, 169, 170, 195n6 Locus (Brown), 11, 39, 40, 42, 45, 47, 48, 59, 68, 72, 224, 226 Scott, Jamie, 70 Sculpture and the body, 64, 76 kinetic, 62, 63 and performance, 76 See/seeing, 46, 48, 49, 55, 59, 63, 66, 70, 71, 76, 77, 98, 106–108, 130, 132, 139, 144, 149–151, 153, 157, 159, 162, 171, 181, 183, 184, 191, 210–212, 216, 220, 224, 228 as sensing, 98, 150 See also Vision Self and other, 144 self-talk, 20, 23, 178, 187 Sematics of language, ix Sensation kinesthetic, 3, 20, 54, 134, 174, 175, 228 of language, 3, 5, 8–13, 21, 23, 27, 31, 32, 41, 54, 57, 61, 85, 98, 102, 129, 141, 144, 147, 169–176, 179, 183, 186, 187, 194, 206, 211, 212, 215, 219, 228–230

249

sense, 134, 175 sensorium, 9, 230 sequence of, 20, 24, 135, 210 See also Body; Language; Multisensory Senter, Shelley, 42, 45, 50, 53, 69–71, 74, 198n26, 223 Sequence movement, 3, 20, 24, 41, 113, 132, 136, 178, 189, 207, 226 resequence, 146 sensation, 24, 135 Set and Reset (Brown), 11, 45, 58, 60, 63, 75, 77 and Set and Reset/Reset, 73, 75 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 4, 5, 15n10, 196n14 Shick, Vicky, 50, 65, 177, 178, 185 Signifier/signified, 30 Skinner, Joan, 171, 190 Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), 171 See also Somatics Sklar, Deidre, 171, 180, 196n14, 197n17, 227 Skymap (Brown), 57 Smith, Tony, 46 Solo Olos (Brown), 59 Solo Performance Commissioning Project (SPCP), 128–130, 137, 138, 148, 151, 157 adaptation of, 128, 137 Somatics of language, 5, 9, 12, 23, 83, 89, 135, 139–141, 143, 170, 171, 181–188, 193, 230 of the performative, 12, 181–188 practices, 9, 53, 170 somatic marker theory, 197n17 Son of Gone Fishin’ (Brown), 11, 52, 69

250 

INDEX

Sound microsonic, 27 sonic, 27 vibratory, 92 Space architectural, 49, 53 between-space, 22, 96, 217, 222 between-words, 46 of the body, 48 geometry, 44 grid, 45, 49 kinesphere, 49, 75 Speech speech act, 15n9, 179 See also Self, self-talk; Voice Spence, Stacy, 55 Spinoza, Baruch, 109 Splang (Brown), 59 Srhoj, Dejan, 141 Steiner, Rudolf, 92, 94, 113, 118 Stern, Daniel, 96, 179, 180, 196n14, 196n16, 196–197n17 Stimuli, 5, 9, 25, 28, 102, 170, 182, 190, 207 external, 5, 28, 182 internal, 5, 28 stimulation, 29, 128, 141, 158, 183 Stoics, 177 Stravinsky, Igor, 151, 163 Structure and adaptation, 28 choreographic, 3, 7, 10, 23, 25, 41, 42, 44, 53, 71, 109, 128, 187 Stutter, 27, 89 Style, 11, 20, 27, 32, 41, 50–54, 67, 72, 73, 75, 89, 105, 107, 177, 190, 195n8, 224, 226, 229 Subject, 27, 44, 48, 63, 64, 68, 77, 100, 119, 139, 174, 182, 192, 193, 197n19, 212, 213, 228, 232 Suehiro, Tanemura, 99 Sulzman, Mona, 43, 44

Summers, Elaine, 68, 170 Kinetic Awareness, 68, 170 Suzuki, D.T., 34n11, 143 System choreographic, 28, 42, 46 performance-generating, 207–209 T Teaching, 9, 12, 31, 66, 69, 70, 72, 74, 92, 160, 173, 190, 205 Technique, 2–4, 6, 7, 9, 13n1, 20, 24, 25, 31, 32, 44, 50, 53–55, 66, 71, 75, 77, 84, 94, 95, 97, 108, 128, 130, 133, 134, 139–141, 143, 145, 146, 151, 164, 169–171, 173, 177, 178, 185, 186, 188–192, 198n25, 206, 210, 212, 219, 227–229 ten (Hay), 159 Tenshi-kan, 92, 104 Thinking (thought) in-activity, 50–55 choreographic, 3, 14n6, 139, 157, 159, 193, 205, 216 not-thinking, 144 reflective, 15n10, 53, 75 thought-sensation, 2, 207, 215 Thompson, Keith, 44 1000 Yen Note Incident (Akasegawa), 107 Time, 1–4, 8, 10, 11, 20, 23, 24, 40, 44–49, 52, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64–68, 71, 72, 74n3, 75n10, 76n18, 76n21, 83–85, 87–94, 96, 98–108, 110, 117n9, 119n38, 120n44, 134–138, 140, 142–144, 146, 150–151, 155, 160, 162n9, 169, 170, 172, 178, 182, 183, 188, 189, 192, 207–209, 212–215, 217, 220, 222, 226–229

 INDEX 

Todd, Mabel Elsworth, 53, 54 Tomano Koichi, 115 Tower of Babel/tower of babble (Hay), 139 Transition, 22, 43, 66, 146, 162, 224 Translation, 14n5, 30, 87, 90, 99, 116, 118, 187, 188, 230, 231 translator, 14n3, 101, 115, 116, 163, 173, 187 Transmission, 3, 11, 23, 26, 31–33, 67, 71, 73, 85, 108, 147, 148, 150, 187, 211 choreographic, 148, 150, 162 Trillium (Brown), 75 “Trio A” (Rainer), 47, 48, 76, 190 V Vangeline, 197n22, 197n23 Variation, 29, 30, 45, 84, 99, 104, 107, 133, 136, 150, 156–161, 174, 176, 188, 195n6, 205, 207, 224, 226 Vibrant matter, 27, 109 Vibration vibrate, 26–28, 85, 89, 99, 107 vibratory modernism, 94 See also Voice power Vision invisible, 32, 48, 71, 148, 149, 159, 160, 194, 198n28, 208–210 visible, 56, 59, 60, 64, 65, 75, 76, 94, 108, 148–150, 153, 157, 160, 209, 223 visual field, 98, 132, 145, 149, 150, 158, 163 Vitality, 109, 179, 180, 196n13 vitality affects, 96, 179, 180, 196n14

251

Vocalization verbal, 1, 4, 28, 51, 59, 69, 83, 107, 111, 134, 173, 177, 185, 194n2, 229 and voice power, 11, 83–115 Voice, 1–3, 10, 50, 57, 85, 93, 98, 112, 116n5, 132, 133, 135–137, 139, 144, 154, 177, 181, 184, 186, 211, 213, 215 Voice power, 11, 83–115 Voilà (Hay), 163 Vowels, 93, 94, 218, 222 See also Voice power W Waguri, Yukio, 101, 102, 117, 119, 120, 190 Watermotor (Brown), 57, 59 Wigman, Mary, 26, 94, 95, 118 and vibration, 26, 94 Word of butoh, 88, 101 word-body, 148 See also Language; Butoh-fu World-lines, 87, 89, 116, 176 word-lines, 89, 176 Y Yager, Abigail, 75 Yerushalmy, Netta, 229 Yoshioka Yumiko, 9, 14n2, 103, 119, 183 Z Zeami, Motokiyo, 95, 118 Zen and Buddhism, 162 and teaching, 142–144