Moving (Across) Borders: Performing Translation, Intervention, Participation [1. Aufl.] 9783839431658

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Gabriele Brandstetter, Holger Hartung (eds.) Moving (Across) Borders

Critical Dance Studies edited by Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein | Volume 40

Gabriele Brandstetter, Holger Hartung (eds.)

Moving (Across) Borders Performing Translation, Intervention, Participation

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Scene from »La Création du monde 1923-2012«. Artistic direction, choreography Faustin Linyekula, produced by CCN-Ballet de Lorraine, 2012 © Mathieu Rousseau. Proofread by Brandon Woolf Typeset by Vito Pinto, www.vitopinto.com Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3165-4 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3165-8

Contents Introduction: Moving (Across) Borders Performing Translation, Intervention, Participation

Gabriele Brandstetter/Holger Hartung  | 7

Translating Differences Human, Animal, Thing Shifting Boundaries in Modern and Contemporary Dance

Gabriele Brandstetter  | 23 Dance as Image – Image as Dance

Jean-Luc Nancy  | 43

Performing “Africa” Linyekula’s Re-vision of La création du monde as Critical Pastiche

Klaus-Peter Köpping  | 55 The Global Politics of Faustin Linyekula’s Dance Theater From Congo to Berlin and Back Again via Brussels and Avignon

Sabine Sörgel  | 79 “But you know I don’t think in words.” Bilingualism and Issues of Translation between Signed and Spoken Languages: Working between Deaf and Hearing Cultures in Performance

Kaite O’Reilly   | 93 A New War on Borders Artistic Movements in Contested Spaces

Sandra Noeth  | 117

Institutions, Interventions, and Participartion An Artist/Activist Moving (Across) Borders

Faustin Linyekula  | 135

Indian Idealism The Disenfranchised Body in Yoga, Dance and Urbanity

Navtej Johar  | 151 Risk Taking Bodies and Their Choreographies of Protest

Cristina Rosa   | 169

The Archiving Body in Dance The Trajectory of the Dance Archive Box Project

Nanako Nakajima  | 191 Questions of Participation: Implementing the German Dance Congress as an Artistic, Reflective, and Political Project

Sabine Gehm and Katharina von Wilcke in Dialogue with Holger Hartung  | 219 “Tea Times”

Creating Formats of Informal Exchange and Knowledge Transfer 

Christel Weiler  | 231 Contributors  | 239

Introduction: Moving (Across) Borders Performing Translation, Intervention, Participation Gabriele Brandstetter/Holger Hartung

Taking time, stepping back, looking ahead: this book was conceived at a moment in which borders, at least in Germany, had not yet become such a pressing, encompassing issue as they are today. From a European perspective only a few years ago, borders were not yet seen as a contested topic, neither on a national nor on a global scale, at least not on institutional levels. The Schengen Agreement, abolishing border controls between most European countries, was signed in 1985, later on even including non-EU states like Norway and Switzerland, the latter of which became an associate member fairly recently in 2008. Were these indications of a late, unconcerned postmodernity, as Ian McLean suggests? “The old borders that had long regulated daily life were disappearing. Privatized and de-regulated, the nation-state was being eclipsed by fugitive borderless spaces and fragile hybrid identities. [. . .] Riding the wave of cheap airfares (deregulated airlines) and the Internet, cultural critics cheered on the endgames of the nation-state.”1 In the dance world, there might have been a vague sense already that borders would soon become a hot topic again. Looking back, it seems that from an artistic as well as academic perspective, the contours of this issue were just on the brink of becoming clearer, that a major conceptual shift was about to happen: from notions of “flow” and “liquid modernity”2 as guiding paradigms to a (re-)forming and reformulation of borders that would soon crystallize as both topic and harsh material reality. “Such an emancipatory ideal – so affixed on the flowing, borderless, global world – neglects to confront the fact that migrants, refugees, or nomads don’t merely circulate. They need to settle, claim asylum or nationality, demand housing and education, assert their economic and cultural rights, and seek the status of citi-

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zenship.”3 As Homi K. Bhabha’s plea for a perspective change indicates, outside of Europe this shift was perceptible somewhat earlier. In a similar vein, Shahram Khosravi writes with a bitter undertone, based on his own experience of migration: “Ours is a time of the triumph of borders, an epoch of border fetishism.” And further: “Border transgressors break the link between ‘nativity’ and nationality and bring the nation-state system into crisis.”4 From a German perspective, these bitter but necessary insights would become apparent only a short time later. In 2013, the refugee crisis had somewhat quietly begun with a protest by a group of refugees against residence requirements that confined them to a certain federal region. Their protest resulted in a march from Bavaria through several federal states to the German capital Berlin, drawing attention to the “state” they are forced to live in as refugees – in a double sense. This march on foot through Germany across several state borders was followed by many months of occupying various public places in Berlin, starting with the space in front of Brandenburg Gate, moving on and being moved to different locations within Berlin. At that time, the refugee situation still appeared to be a local phenomenon that mainly concerned inner-city borders, even German state-borders, but was not yet seen as an all-encompassing phenomenon of Völkerwanderung (“mass migration”) on an international scale. The march as an act of non-violent civil disobedience functioned as a conscious self-positioning for the asylum seekers, foreshadowing much larger changes regarding movements, detours and reroutings of, from and for refugees on their paths to and within Europe. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in November 2014, the artist/activist collective “Center for Political Beauty” brought public awareness to the overlooked connection between the historic Wall and the then nascent debate on European borders – inside and outside. As an artistic intervention, Philipp Ruch and his collaborators “kidnapped” several crosses, dedicated to the memory of the people killed at the Berlin Wall during the GDR, and allegedly brought them to Spain. As The Guardian reported, the group then handed the crosses over to “Malian refugees in the forests of Mount Gurugu, outside Melilla, some of whom had spent the past two years trying to cross an eight-meter fence into Spanish territory.”5 Since this artistic intervention, more and more historical connections have been drawn, reminding us of historical parallels of people fleeing into exile or shelter from Europe and especially Germany in the past – and the resulting question of ethical responsibility. Over the past two years, the political climate has also changed drastically, and the discourses seem to have shifted from the vital interest in “contact zones”6 and various “welcome refugees” initiatives toward a growing call for the closing of borders – finally leading up to a major “European Border Crisis,”7 due to hotspots and countless “conflict zones” worldwide.

Introduction: Moving (Across) Borders | 9

With all of this said, it should be made clear that the present book will neither attempt to summarize the political developments about borders in the last few years, nor to give an overview of the complexities of the current political situation. Instead, it will aim to bring various fundamental questions on borders and movement together, as they presented themselves just before the so-called refugee crisis in Europe and afterwards, mainly from the perspective of dance and various other movement-practices. The aim of this volume is to examine the underlying principles at stake in the relation of borders and movement and the shifts between them, taking into account various acts of (cultural) translation, processes of participation, and possible interventions that can be easily overlooked in the current fast-paced, news-driven, often sensationalist and highly emotional political debates. It takes time to step back. Accordingly, this book examines the relations between movements of borders in various forms: political, geographical and/or conceptual borders, concrete or latent distinctions, and their visible or invisible lines of separation. How can we identify and examine different types of borders in and through movement, especially in relation to and through dance and other forms of artistic expression? How can we conceptualize borders not only as a matter of limitation and restriction? What are the underlying principles that influence the way we understand and theorize borders? How do these principles become graspable in artistic and everyday practices? How do various forms and practices of movement change and influence the way we look at borders, delineations, and seemingly fixed categories? How can movement and other creative practices help to prevent borders from becoming fixed (again)? How can “we” talk about borders differently, and what are the limits of these discourses? This book thus seeks to find ways to connect, or even regain, discursive flexibility (perhaps even fluidity), without losing sight of the reality of borders and their materializations. Secondly, in line with these thematic strands, this book is concerned with the social conditions that frame the diverse states in which we have to face various types of borders. More specifically, it is concerned with acts of cultural – and other forms of – translation, intervention, and participation that appear as we are confronted with and forced to deal with certain limits and bodily restrictions that might appear as dead ends. By looking at various practices and situations of moving across, along, and in between borders, we ask how these acts and practices shape and determine our social conditions and how we theorize them. Which roles and new relations can we find or imagine for the individuals, institutions, and national states in which they are embedded, as we are confronted with new forms of borders and bordering? How language and acts of translation can help us find new, or regain, forms of agency in these urgent debates has been the subject of a dialog between Judith

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Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – questioning the term and function of the “nation-state”: “[T]he term state can be dissociated from the term ‘nation’ and the two can be cobbled together through a hyphen, but what work does the hyphen do? Does the hyphen finesse the relation that needs to be explained?” Butler asks Spivak in Who Sings the Nation-State?8 By bringing together – and respectively taking apart – the two meanings of the English term “state,” Butler and Spivak critically question how legal systems of regulation influence our individual everyday lives and vice versa, to the point that we have to ask, what we mean when we say “our” lives – speaking, for example, from a perspective of the stateless and those sans-papiers, or from the borders, of how the nation-state defines itself. “[A]t the core of this ‘state’ – that signifies both juridical and dispositional dimensions of life – is a certain tension produced between modes of being or mental states, temporary or provisional constellations of mind of one kind or another, and juridical and military complexes that govern how and where we may move, associate, work, and speak.”9 In a beautifully observed twist, Butler juxtaposes these nationalistic and governmental structures with a scene of political self-determination, perhaps even civil disobedience – if we can call it that – in which demonstrators in favor of illegal residents sing the US national anthem in Spanish. With this unofficial, unauthorized translation, the participants perform an act of self-empowerment bringing the personal and the legal “state” of (il-/legal) migrants, if not in tune, then at least into resonance: “The emergence of ‘nuestro himno’ introduced the interesting problem of the plurality of the nation, of the ‘we’ and the ‘our’: to whom does this anthem belong?”10 This act of appropriation, this (re-)claiming of an official hymn, as ritualized, political, and symbolic practice undergoing an act of translation points to a plurality within and of the state, which often remains invisible – hidden in and by the dominant discourses, jurisdictions, political agendas, and official narratives of the “state.” The idea of this volume is based on a double meaning similar to Butler/Spivak’s notion of “state/state,” and thus addresses a related set of questions. Moving (Across) Borders is understood as a possible double movement: firstly, it can refer to someone who or something that is physically or mentally moving across borders. Secondly, through the parenthesis, it can refer to the act of moving or shifting of borders themselves. This can be a conceptual reframing or an interventional political act that often causes or is caused by more encompassing changes in the society. Under these circumstances, through acts of translation, or in relation to them, “movements” of re-interpretation take place and make possible various re-appropriations of public discourses and arenas. Thirdly, however, and this interpretation occurred to us more and more over the last months, the parentheses in

Introduction: Moving (Across) Borders | 11

Moving (Across) Borders can also indicate the tendencies and initiatives that make it more complicated, and even impossible, to move across borders at all; they can represent the stripping of rights, the “states of emergency” that are hastily declared – usually resulting in the (allegedly temporary) limitations of civil rights and the strengthening of the state’s powers as well as public authorities, justifying their violent, forceful interventions. Nevertheless, with Butler’s position in mind, we would like to ask how borders become effective, and affective, on a theoretical and corporeal level. In other words, how are they “performed,” how are they enforced, habituated by repetition, and how can they be questioned, subverted through acts of translation? What can we learn about “our” concepts of inclusion and exclusion, the realms of inside and outside, how can we keep these concepts dynamic? How can we re-define the “we” through interventions and active participation? How can we translate and re-define notions of borders? And, from a perspective of dance and performance: How are the borders related to our understanding of corporeality and various bodily practices, i.e. to forms and performances of movement in acts of transfer and translation? In his essay “The Intruder” (“L’Intrus”), the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy reflects on the theme of the “intruder” as an experience of the intrusion of death into his life, into his body. “Thus, the multiple stranger intruding into my life (my thin and winded life, sometimes slipping into malaise on the edge of abandonment, simply stunned) is nothing other than death, or rather life/death.”11 Nancy is writing about a heart transplant he has just undergone. It is a matter of life and death, of getting the “intruder” into the body, the inability to distinguish between what is “one’s own” and what is “alien”: the transplantation, the immunity, and the defensive reactions of the body.12 In relation to his own body, with its constantly changing borders and limits, Nancy discusses the subject of “intrusion” – a topic that has presented a constant challenge to our social and physical lives. Who is an “intruder,” in what territory and in what period? And how are we to transform these experiences – the falling into an “out of sync” and the re-synchronization of the collective movements of our notions of (physical, social, and political) identity? Nancy asks if there is a general law of intrusion and offers the following answer: “There has never been just one intrusion: as soon as one is produced, it multiplies itself, is identified in its renewed internal differences.”13 The body, like an internal collective, experiencing internal de-synchronizations – cardiac irregularities, extra systoles – becomes a model for the experience of intrusion and alienation in a social context. All current issues concerning borders, their violation, and the abandonment of familiar life synchronizations caused by migration, worldwide refugee movements, and “reception” culture (“hospitalité”), are affected by Nancy’s philosophy of the “intruder”:

12 | Gabriele Brandstetter/Holger Hartung To welcome a stranger, moreover, is necessarily to experience his intrusion. For the most part, we would rather not admit this: the very theme of the intruder intrudes upon our moral correctness (and is in fact a remarkable example of the politically correct). But it is inseparable from the stranger’s truth. This moral correctness presupposes that, upon receiving the stranger, we efface his strangeness at the threshold: it aims thereby not to have received him at all. But the stranger insists and intrudes. This fact is hard to receive, and perhaps to conceive [. . .]14

This paradox between the intrusion of the stranger and the abolition of his strangeness on the doorstep is a challenge and the basis of a translation that obviously can never fully “succeed.” In Nancy’s reasoning about his own condition, the heart is more than a “simple metaphor”; in a way, he inverts the common “romanticized” metaphor of the heart. By translating (trans-planting) the matter of the heart to its/his corpo-reality, he treats the question of the foreigner as personally as one can imagine. In this case, the necessity of having/receiving a different, a foreign “heart” becomes selfevident as the “intruder,” and the heart transplant is an inevitable operation to keep the “invaded” person alive. Speaking of the heart, speaking from the heart, singing from the heart – in the abovementioned examples it becomes a matter of speaking and singing about internal forms of foreignness, Otherness, and the dynamic shifts of such concepts: Nancy’s idea, it seems, carries further Jacques Derrida’s question of the foreigner. As he asked: “Isn’t the question of the foreigner [l’étranger] a foreigner’s question? Coming from the foreigner, from abroad [l’étranger]? Before saying the question of the foreigner, perhaps we should also specify: question of  the foreigner. How should we understand this difference of accent?”15 With this difference of accent, Derrida hints to questions that become relevant in his thinking about Shibboleth, the accent as a signature of the foreigner, as a linguistic marker to exclude Others. But here, he indicates rather another conceptual shift in how we understand foreignness. Still, this shift is effective through language and its ongoing dynamic processes of iteration – and translation. As Anne Dufourmantelle explains in her invitation to Derrida, which is printed side by side with his response: “This is why ‘the border, the limit, the threshold, the step beyond this threshold’ return so often in Derrida’s language, as though the impossibility of marking out a stable territory where thought could be established was provocative of thought itself.”16 With regard to such an “impossibility of marking out a stable territory,”17 Derrida concludes his text with a personal note, speaking as a French-Algerian (we could say, as someone with two hearts!):

Introduction: Moving (Across) Borders | 13

If I had had the time, and if it were appropriate to give a slightly autobiographical note to my remarks, I would have liked to study the fairly recent history of Algeria from this point of view. Its impacts upon the present life of two countries, Algeria and France, are still acute, and in fact still to come. In what had been, under French law, not a protectorate but a group of French departments, the history of the foreigner, so to speak, the history of citizenship, the future of borders separating complete citizens from second-zone or non-citizens, from 1830 until today, has a complexity, a mobility, an entanglement that are unparalleled, as far as I know, in the world and in the course of the history of humanity.18

It is such complexities around notions of inner and outer borders and their connection to forms of very personal acts of translation that are the subject of this book. We want to examine notions of borders not only in a strict but also in a wider sense. Thus, one of the central questions about the relation of borders and movement remains: whether we understand borders as inherently static or, on the contrary, as dynamic. As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson write, with reference to Étienne Balibar: “Borders today still perform a ‘world-configuring function,’ but they are often subject to shifting and unpredictable patterns of mobility and overlapping, appearing and disappearing as well as sometimes crystallizing in the form of threatening walls that break up and reorder political spaces that were once formally unified.”19 Borrowing a slogan from the US-Latino community, “we did not cross the border, the border crossed us,”20 they describe the performativity of borders. Indeed, the moving of borders, their sometimes-unexpected shifts or reemergence, does not necessarily result in more freedom, but can be a sign of even more restrictive limitations. This is the notion underlying this book: it would be an oversimplification to understand borders simply as a limitation of movements – borders are performatively produced; they produce different situations, force acts and actions, and are in turn enforced by them, for and from different groups of people, in official and unofficial discourses and actions by various interests and groups, which they categorize and divide into sub-groups. Borders seen in this way, not as static or fixed but as performative themselves, open up complex, dynamic fields of discourse. In this book, the proposed fundamental complexities and ambivalences within the terrain of Moving (Across) Borders will be addressed from two methodological angles: a) Translating Differences b) Institutions, Interventions, and Participation

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Section a) will ask how different cultures have different theories, concepts and images of moving bodies, or, conversely, how the latter produce different forms of culture. How are these foundational concepts and images translated, how are they set in motion, how are they transformed as they move (across) borders, or even: how might they facilitate exchange? This section will tackle categorical distinctions such as the separating lines between the so-called animate and inanimate, between visual and performing arts, as well as political and social lines of separation from historical and postcolonial perspectives. Gabriele Brandstetter will open this section in a double sense of the word: her considerations regarding humans, animals and things will address notions of borders that open up the field of discussion in a wide, encompassing sense. In her article, she tackles historical debates and more recent approaches to categorical boundaries and the politics involved between anthropo-centrism and the problematic persisting of Euro-centric discourses. She engages these questions to then examine various shifts and shiftings in modern and contemporary dance. A central figure and agent in this section (both as someone with agency and agent provocateur) will be the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula, who through his choreographic practice is an outstanding example to illustrate how artists can move (across) borders on different levels; political, geographical and historical. While Klaus-Peter Köpping will focus on Linyekula’s piece La création du monde (1923–2012), Sabine Sörgel will provide a broader contextualization of Linyekula’s work. The article by Jean-Luc Nancy is, in an indirect sense, linked to Linyekula as well, a form of “re-routed” presentation, which was planned as a keynote at Dance Congress 2013 but did not take place as such. It has been replaced, at Nancy’s own suggestion, by the dialogue between him and Faustin Linyekula, after seeing his performance La création du monde (1923–2012). While in this dialogue21 Nancy set out to discuss the relation between philosophy and dance (“Philosophy can talk about dance, but can the dancer dance philosophy?”), for Linyekula something else was at stake. Reacting to a misunderstanding about the (French) language and its English translation in surtitles, in which actor Djodjo Kazadi delivers a strong and confrontational monologue, Linyekula comments: “You know, the French belongs to us, too. If you live in a country like Congo where French has arrived with Colonialism in the nineteenth century, we had to accept the French language as ours, to the degree that the public sphere, the courts, the schools, the parliament all speak French. But the people had to re-invent the language because it has been the language of the elites and of power – and in order to speak the language you had to attend a school. How do you translate the reality of this language?”22 How do we translate the different meanings of language as such – as we move across borders, in-between or along the lines of cultural differences? Considering

Introduction: Moving (Across) Borders | 15

the role of language and translation with regard to borders and processes of cultural entanglements, it is helpful to take into account how Jacques Derrida interprets the German term Geflecht (entanglement, interlacing, interweaving), with a glance at Martin Heidegger: I could have chosen, among many other possibilities, the one that has just presented itself to me under the name of entanglement or interlacing – something I have long been interested in and on which I am currently working in another manner. In the form of the German noun Geflecht, it plays a discreet but irreducible role in “Der Weg zur Sprache” and designates this singular, unique interlacing between, on the one hand, Sprache (a word I will not translate, so as not to have to choose between language, tongue, and speech) and, on the other, path (Weg, Bewegung, Bewegen, etc.), a binding-unbinding interlacing (entbindende Band ) toward which we are incessantly and properly being led back, following a circle that Heidegger proposes thinking or practicing otherwise than as a regression or vicious circle. The circle is a “particular case” of the Geflecht. Just like “path,” Geflecht is not one figure among others. We are implicated in it, interlaced in advance when we wish to speak of Sprache and of Weg, which are “already in advance of us” (uns stets schon voraus).23

In this sense, it is a long way, not a straight line but rather a crooked, re-routed, detoured, perhaps circular movement, to find a “common” language. However, once on the way, language and translation play a key role in moving ahead. But, as the notion of Geflecht implies, we are already entangled, implicated in it, in the dynamic and linguistic complexities and complications of various interweavings. “Already in advance” – from a European perspective, with regard to cultural interweaving, this would also mean the always already existing, prior histories of imperialism, colonialism, and genocides. In the abovementioned claim to step back, to take time, and to look ahead, it thus becomes a task to properly acknowledge the fact that such historical “movements” of expanding national territories by violently moving the boundaries will always be present in dialogues between Europeans and Non-Europeans. In her contribution to this volume, Sandra Noeth will shift the perspective and direct the question of how borders and bordering processes influence and structure our environment toward artistic arenas, especially toward artists from various Arab regions with whom she has been in a long and ongoing exchange. She asks how borders and their changing dynamic qualities materialize in the body and how artists try to find artistic expressions and “languages” to make the corporeal influences visible and audible. As becomes apparent, borders understood in such a broad sense are not always clearly marked or even visible – nevertheless it can be sensed how they are deeply inscribed into the body. Moving across such invisible borders

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can even be experienced as acts of aggression and violence, especially from a perspective of cultural and/or gender differences, as Nora Amin explains in Migrating the Feminine, reminding us of the events and incidents at Tahrir Square in 2011: The movement of the singular body from indoor solitude towards meeting fellow humans and being in the public sphere is a unique movement for every person; it is a movement that forms the individual identity in such a harsh way that it can almost be considered an aggression. A body exposed to the open and public environment and to the politics of Otherness and the dynamics of distance and appropriation is a body at war.24

The first section in the book is rounded off with an essay by Kaite O’Reilly, who shifts the notion of translation, yet again, across a different border – and across borders of difference and self-identification. Translation here refers to the translation between verbal language and sign language, on the brink of becoming gesture, dance. The idea of “not thinking in words” becomes a matter of cultural difference, of different forms of knowledge and meanings of movements – also (but not only) in an ongoing negotiation with those who take “thinking in words” for granted. Section b) will then continue to examine the social implications of the above discourses: what kinds of bodily practices do they produce? Which borders seem to be or become fixed, which of them cause immobility and how? What kinds of interventions are aimed to work against these immobilities? What roles can institutions play in these processes and in which ways can forms of institutionalization be shaped “differently”? What could be subversive strategies and techniques of moving (across) borders? In this section, Jean-Luc Nancy’s aforementioned philosophical take on issues of relation between dance and image will be juxtaposed by Faustin Linyekula’s explications on borders, colonial histories, and ways of negotiating relationships through dance, also giving a brief insight into his current urban projects in Kisangani, Congo. Through her own practice that is informed by both academic discourse and dance, Cristina Rosa will examine how notions of risk-taking on and off stage can inform and lead to artistic and social “choreographies of protest.” Taking up Susan Foster’s notion of choreography in and as non-violent protest, Rosa transfers this approach to the Brazilian context. With such examples, the section contributes to debates of how forms of intervention and participation function differently in various cultures, and how far they can be seen as “cultures” themselves. In a similar vain, choreographer, dancer and yoga teacher Navtej Johar looks at the connections within his various practices and the resulting production of differences: how does yoga and dance training influence forms of urban activism and vice versa?

Introduction: Moving (Across) Borders | 17

Which contradictions arise from these parallel practices in the current political climate? How do different movement concepts help to negotiate the boundaries between the private and public sphere, especially with regard to their cultural differences? What kind of agency is generated in and through dance and other bodily practices in order to (re-)negotiate boundaries as well as bodily conditions along these lines? Where do we face limits of reciprocal understanding? These fundamental questions concern aspects of framing and institutionalization as well: how can we create environments to negotiate borders or exchange our different views and experiences with them? How can institutions support these platforms of exchange, and how do certain borders represent limits to such public forums and agendas? Do processes of institutionalization necessarily lead to static structures and fixed sets of inclusion and exclusion, or can institutions themselves be kept vital and remain open to the dynamics of changing societies? Two articles in this volume take a closer look at different initiatives and their innovative formats: Christel Weiler explores how the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” experiments with different forms of dialogues, making possible alternative forms of exchange between scholars and artists from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines. How can academic formats succeed to support and facilitate forms and practices of interweaving, and where are the limits of such dialogues? Sabine Gehm and Katharina von Wilcke discuss, in a dialogue with Holger Hartung, how their tri-annual Dance Congress (Tanzkongress) is increasingly faced with questions of transcultural perspectives and internationalization and how they develop strategies, alternative forms and formats of presentation that incorporate different ways of participation for various groups and their members. The central aspect in both of these contributions, the importance of (taking) time, is addressed from another angle in a third article: Nanako Nakajima will transfer and apply a similar set of questions to notions of the archive: informed by her thorough research on differing concepts of aging in European and Non-European cultures, she discusses how dance knowledge is passed on between generations and between different cultures, across socially constructed borders between generations and cultural boundaries. How do the changing institutional framings facilitate or impede such transfers of corporeal knowledge? Through these contributions, the sections ask how the two main strands, i.e. “translating differences” and “institutions, interventions, and participation,” can be related: Are they oppositional approaches; do they exclude each other or can they occur at the same time; can they be seen as inclusive or even as interwoven discourses? Finally, what are the limits of such cultural interweavings and how we translate and transform them?

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Changing perspectives and shifting perceptions, their underlying interconnectedness and the dynamics of previously fixed positions – this is what this book would like to address and thus provide impulses to further movements in these still undefined directions.

Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the input, help (and movements) of many careful minds and hands: we would like to thank the authors for their inspiring contributions and patience in the long publishing process; Katharina von Wilcke and Sabine Gehm, the artisitic and managing directors of the Dance Congress, for their collaboration and impulses in developing the thematic frame; Brandon Woolf for his thorough proofreading, editorial corrections and critical input that helped to sharpen many arguments; our students Helen Follert, Helene Röhnsch, Kristina Sommerfeld, Milos Kosic, and Omid Soltani for their research, careful eye for details and formatting adjustments; Vito Pinto for making the layout, preparing the proofs and thus shaping the look of the following pages. Thank you all, it was a tremendous pleasure to work together with you individually and collectively.

Notes   1 Ian McLean, “Back to the Future: Nations, Borders and Cultural Theory,” Third Text 57 (Winter 2001): 23.   2 See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).   3 Homi K. Bhabha, Our Neighbours, Ourselves: Contemporary Reflections on Survival (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2011), 3, original emphasis.   4 Shahram Khosravi, ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–2.   5 Philip Oltermann, “Art group removes Berlin Wall memorial in border protest,” The Guardian, 3 November 2014, last accessed 4 March 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2014/nov/03/berlin-wall-memorial-border-protest.   6 Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40.   7 See “Europe’s Border Crisis,” NBC News, last accessed 20 April 2016, http://www. nbcnews.com/storyline/europes-border-crisis.   8 Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (London: Seagull Books, 2007), 2.   9 Ibid., 4.

Introduction: Moving (Across) Borders | 19

10 Ibid., 58. 11 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 165. 12 Ibid., 162. 13 Ibid., 167. 14 Ibid., 161–2. 15 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3. 16 Ibid., 54. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 141–3. 19 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 6. See also Étienne Balibar, “What Is a Border?” in Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002), 75–87. 20 Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, xi. 21 The full discussion under the title “LA CRÉATION DU MONDE?: Exchanging Dancerelated, Postcolonial and Philosophical Perspectives” can be found under http://www. tanzkongress.de/tanzkongress2013/en/documentation/video/recordings.html. 22 Transcribed from the video documentation of the conversation. Translated into English by Holger Hartung. See also note 21. 23 Jacques Derrida, “The Retrait of Metaphor,” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 60. 24 Nora Amin, Migrating the Feminine (Berlin: 60pages, 2015), 15.

Bibliography Amin, Nora. Migrating the Feminine. Berlin: 60pages, 2015. Balibar, Étienne. “What Is a Border?” In Politics and the Other Scene, 75–87. London: Verso, 2002. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Bhabha, Homi K. Our Neighbours, Ourselves: Contemporary Reflections on Survival. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2011. Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging. London: Seagull Books, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. “The Retrait of Metaphor.” In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 48–80. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.

20 | Gabriele Brandstetter/Holger Hartung

—, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Khosravi, Shahram. ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. McLean, Ian. “Back to the Future: Nations, Borders and Cultural Theory.” Third Text 57 (Winter 2001): 23–30. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008. Oltermann, Philip. “Art group removes Berlin Wall memorial in border protest.” The Guardian. 3 November 2014. Last accessed 4 March 2016. http://www. theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/03/berlin-wall-memorial-border-protest. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40.

Translating Differences

Human, Animal, Thing Shifting Boundaries in Modern and Contemporary Dance Gabriele Brandstetter

Those travelling around Berlin on public transport in January or February 2013 would find themselves constantly confronted by large posters showing a large brown bear and the word: “Dance!”

Fig. 1: Campaign “Berlin tanzt!”, 2013; © www.smithberlin.com.

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Berlin’s heraldic symbol, the bear, was being used to advertise dance. The metropolis had been turned into a transit zone in which the summons to dance was delegated to an “other,” a non-human body. Was this more than a clever publicity stunt? If so, what was the point of it? After all, it is striking that in recent years there have been many choreographies and performances dealing with animals or featuring choreographic models taken from the animal kingdom, in the form of the swarm formations used by Thomas Hauert, for example,1 or in performances that refer in various ways to the history of animal dances: such as Martin Nachbar in Animal Dances (2013), or Antonia Baehr with her ABeCedarium Bestiarium (2013), or Xavier Le Roy in Low Pieces (2011–12), or Gob Squad in Dancing About (2012). Whence all this interest? Have the debates on “human-animal studies” been extended to the field of dance and choreography? And what specific debates have been unleashed by the question posed by Donna Haraway in When Species Meet.2 What happens when different species encounter one another? Haraway applies (in an allusion to Charles Darwin)3 the term “species” not only to “species,” genera, race, “sorts” in the animal kingdom, but also extends it to “species” of all kinds – including plants and things.4 In the theoretical context of human-animal studies, which deals very intensively with questions of “animal rights” (ethical and legal issues concerning the protection of animals), the term “speciesism” has been coined. In his book Animal Rites5 Cary Wolfe replaces the term “rights” with that

Fig. 2: Martin Nachbar Animal Dances (2013); © Anja Kühn.

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of “rites,” while expanding the “animal” metaphor and including in the question of “species” a demand to rethink “a whole set of nonhuman entities,”6 as W. J. T. Mitchell writes in his introductory article “The Rights of Things.” He continues: “When we have attained these new, utopian forms of botany and zoology, however, and the rights of plants and animals have been worked out in new forms of bioethics and biopolitics, there will still be work to do. At this point it will be time to take up the rights of things, of inanimate objects.”7

Fig. 3: Xavier Le Roy Low Pieces (2011–12); © Vincent Cavaroc.

Fig. 4: Gob Squad Dancing About (2012); © David Baltzer / bildbuehne.de.

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Does this raise once again the old question of life and what it means to be alive? And not just life but all variants of animation: artificial ways of creating life, clones and biotechnologies? And does the (renewed) topicality of “animal dance” have anything to do with ecological, economic and political crises and disasters? Is the possibility of a critical self-reflection of the “human” being manipulated in terms of the “otherness” of the animal? Is this not also evidence of a residual colonial, colonizing instinct? And does it not betray at the same time a desire to cross the boundaries that categorize, separate and hierarchize human/animal, subject/object? These are questions that were raised by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, for example, in her design for dOCUMENTA (13).8 In what follows, I shall be returning to these questions, and to some of the aforementioned examples of contemporary dance. First of all, however, I would like to return to the history of animal dances in which – as we saw in the “signature” piece of the Dance Congress 2013, La Création du monde (1923–2012)9 – modernism and colonialism, the “création du monde” of the aesthetic avant-garde and the interwoven patterns of a racist primitivism, are combined. The exploration of the boundary between human and animal is one of the great “culture/nature” themes, whether in myths and legends, in the earliest relics of ritual and art, or in the history of knowledge. In the Bible, the relationship is clear: Adam in the Garden of Eden, made in the image of God, gives the animals their names and, in naming them, achieves power over them. But Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on this Bible passage makes clear that this act of naming was also a step towards man’s experimental knowledge of himself. Reflected in the naming was the first man, as in Eden he needed the animals not for food, but as an aid to understanding his own nature. Since then the hierarchy has seemed to be self-evident: homo sapien, as “animal significans,” differs from the animal through the faculty of speech, his erect walk, and the use of his hands to manipulate instruments and media (Sigmund Freud’s “prosthetic god”10). Philosophers and scientists study the differences and the relatedness between man and animal in order to identify what is specifically human. According to Hegel, man is the animal that knows it is an animal and consequently is able to transcend the sphere of the animal.11 With this formulation, idealist philosophy defined the self-reflexive nature of man and his knowledge of his own finiteness. By contrast, science and art are concerned with the manifestations of the relationship between animal and human: on the one hand with what is human in the animal – in the countless anthropomorphous pictures and myths about the resemblances between humans and animals and animal-human hybrids; and, on the other hand, in the animal in man – and the accompanying undermining of human arrogance – which does not just date from Darwin. The recent debate on the animal and the limits of the human is fuelled by an epistemological as well as by a political/ethical, critical perspective.12

Human, Animal, Thing | 27

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben sees in this a fundamental metaphysical/political operation through which alone such a thing as a “man” can be defined and produced in this discourse. He understands the decisive conflict in our Western culture to be that between “animality” and “humanity”: a conflict, which by means of biopolitical strategies controls the administration and exploitation of life.13 In his critique of Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Agamben inquires into the “human” in view of the caesura between human and animal, between body and soul and logos in the tradition of Western thought: “What is man, if he is always the place – and, at the same time, the result – of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way – within man – has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values.”14 Agamben’s “rethinking the animal” is devoted to the same critical undertaking that also – albeit in a different way – preoccupied Jacques Derrida15 and Donna Haraway: namely the deconstruction of categories and boundaries of the human/non-human; and especially inquiring into what attributions such as “animal” (or “human”) actually involve. A key aspect of this is the process known as “anthropomorphizing,” or humanizing the non-human. How is this done? By endowing this “other” with human features. In the question of the “difference” between man and animal (and Derrida vehemently rejects the use of the singular form, “the animal” here), attention must be paid to the multiplicity of species and the chimerical which takes the place of the collectivized singular “l’animal.”16 From time immemorial, since the philosophy of classical antiquity, through Descartes right up to Heidegger, thinking and the faculty of language have been cited as marking the dividing line. Derrida turns this debatable and one-sided argument on its head and asks, as did Jeremy Bentham, not what separates humans and animals, but what they have in common: “Can they suffer?”17 Can animals suffer? This brings an emotional and ethical dimension into the discussion, which ultimately focuses on the physicality of living creatures, or “animals.” Is this the point where dance, performance, ritual and choreography pose the question of human-animal relations and shed new light on it, revealing a translation zone where it is not just linguistic reflection and rational cognition that determine the level of communication? Admittedly this does not offer proof against ideologizing and hierarchizing forces. On the contrary. Yet this process of “turning into an animal” in and through motion, through e-motion, is a field in which other relations between “species” are experienced, traversed, or constructed. The caesura between man and animal runs through man, it splits his inner self. This knowledge has always coloured human relations with animals. The oldest depictions of animals, the cave paintings of the

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Palaeolithic Age, indicate that: the hybrids, the phantoms of the animal man show that animal face as a mask which the man slips on to present himself. In totemistic, animistic processes the usurpative gesture of the anthropomorph, in which man projects human faculties onto the animal – i.e. the transformation of animals into humans – is turned into its opposite: the transformation of humans into animals. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have described the “transformation into an animal” (taking Franz Kafka as an example) as a process of mutual deterritorialization, a process in which (ideally) identities are dissolved, and hence fixed attributions (e.g. human-animal/human-non-human) are turned into mobile relations.18 The accent is on becoming, on the “transformation” of body and form. Is this process one that uses transformations to generate new forms of animism, and could this be a way of decolonising patterns of thinking, as Isabelle Stengers proposes?19 A resurrection of artistic and artificial totemism may be seen to have manifested itself in the craze for what were known as “animal dances” that swept Europe before (and after) the First World War. Under such suggestive names as the Turkey Trot, the Fish Tail, the Kangaroo Dip, the Grizzly Bear and – the only one to survive to this day – the Foxtrot, these two-step dances of African-American origin dominated the dance halls.

Fig. 5: “Fish Dance,” 191220; Fig. 6: “Grizzly Bear,” 191321.

Human, Animal, Thing | 29

This “carnival of animals” in ballroom dancing had its counterpart in the “Menschenzoo” (Human Zoo) and the Völkerschauen (exhibitions of so-called “savage” or “primitive cultures”) organized by the German showman Carl Hagenbeck (subtitled in Hamburg in 1886 as “Exhibitions of Prime Anthropological and Zoological Specimens”) and incorporated in the world exhibitions.22 Conversely, one might well ask if the craze for “animal dances” in the ballrooms of the early twentieth century was not a colonial legacy of this history of conquest in that it subjugated and dominated the “other” while at the same time assimilating it in the form of dance and thereby ritually placating it. The Bear Dance, or the “Grizzly Bear,” or – in Paris – la “danse de l’ours” may be taken as an example of these superimpositions of the colonization of the “other,” of other “species” and cultures, in animal form, of their exoticization in the course of their transmission to the cultural scenario of European ballrooms: a domestication in and through movement. The game of the sexualization and overstepping of rules in and through these dances becomes (as in the myth of the bear – that animal which, like man, can stand erect to walk, dance – even fence, as we know from the bear23) a blueprint of this colonized transmission. The outstanding feature of these “wiggle dances” was the autonomy of movement lent to the various parts of the body – pelvis, seat, shoulders, limbs – with pantomime elements of the relevant name-giving animals. Yet it was not the animals that provided the body masks for the new movement dynamic. They were rather stand-ins for the other, the colonially constrained nature of man: the subjugated black population and the mimetically parodic appropriation of this rejected “animal” nature of man:24 a grotesque in which the Western white population enjoys its liberation from “inhibited movements”25 – and finds itself looking at its own reflection.

Fig. 7: “Black Bottom,” 192626.

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There is one detail in this very complex structure of appropriations and connections – which has been very well covered in critical postcolonial studies27 – that is particularly worthy of note with regard to the questions that are dealt with in “human animal studies”: namely the element of “clumsiness” or “awkwardness” (i.e. the inability to imagine how one appears to others). In the descriptions of the animal dances (of so-called “savage” or “primitive” peoples) this crops up again and again. Thus the geographer Adolph Fischer, writing in 1879, states that the “animality” of dancers is shown by the fact that the “‘underarms’ are raised and placed at right angles to the upper arm while the hands at the wrists hang down limply.”28 He compares this with animals, especially dancing bears: “This is precisely the posture we can observe in animals that have been trained to dance.”29 But these very movements are now seen as “chic”! The dernier cri, and the “lurching walk” in the “Grizzly Bear,” the gross and lewd gestures and bodily attitudes of the dance partners became the game of a society which with these bizarre “eccentricities” participated in a difficult and novel body-transfer in the movement of “species” (i.e. cultures, “species,” peoples).

Fig. 8: Poster announcing a so-called “Negro-Operetta” in Moscow, 192930. Is this form of “bêtise” (Jacques Derrida’s translation of Heidegger’s term “Benommenheit”) a particularly difficult, opaque aspect of this colonizing practice along with the cliché of the naïve, simple-minded black as he appeared (admittedly as parody) in the cakewalks and revues nègres?31 The animal dances – which

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were said to be an attempt to transplant “the entire animal kingdom on to the dance floor” – are hybrid “mixed promenades”32 (the very choice of word testifies to this), in which nostalgia, phantasms of a “savage” Primitivism and Modernism are all involved. Fritz Böhme comments on these pagan “Animal Rites” in the ballroom as follows: “The effete drawing-room type capering about like a savage is a caricature of something that used to really exist.”33 Thus the Bear Dance is in fact a key image of the aporia of Modernism and its aesthetic and ideological entanglements.

Fig. 9: Gino Severini The Bear Dance at the Moulin Rouge, 1913; © VG Bild-Kunst. This painting by Gino Severini shows this by combining futurism, animal dance, mechanical movement, and fascination with machinery while at the same time fetishizing the primitive. Blaise Cendrars, the author of La création du monde,34 reduced this to a precise formula, saying that the poet now, in 1919 (i.e. on the rubble of the War), had no other option than to speak the language of the primitive in order to express it in completely modern terms.35 And in his poem “La Tour” (1913) he brings together the image of the Eiffel Tower (symbolizing Paris as a modern metropolis) with that of an African giraffe and an oceanic totem.36 It is hybrids like these which––in the name of progress––also contain within themselves those historical and political problems of identity which can develop into a “devastating argument”37 (as Maren Möhring shows in her study on “primates” and “subhumans”38). The concept of the “human beast” [“menschliche Bes-

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tie”]39 suggests a cruel type of behavior, which the animal (bête) does not possess. Thus it is not the similarity, not the desire to resemble, that brings humans and animals into contact. What strategies of transformation into animal, of boundary-shifting encounters, I would like to ask in conclusion, are employed in contemporary dance? And I am omitting here a very long chapter on “animal dances,” namely the suspended stage in nineteenth century ballet populated by fowl, swans and beach birds.40 The transition to the twenty-first century raises the question of the boundary between man and animal anew, aggravated by changed economic, technological and media conditions. Muscle power, whether human or animal, has long since been replaced by machines. The animal now appears in virtual form, in “fantasy,” in advertising, and films, as a harmless anthropomorph or as grotesque hybrid – Miss Piggy or Spiderman. It is not a symbol of desire for a body, but a symptom of a political situation. Man is the animal that has to recognize the human in himself in order to be it, as Giorgio Agamben has written. Dance performances subject these subtle questions to minute examination. It is no longer an imitation, a poetry of transcendence of the human that marks the preoccupation with the animal, but an encounter with the concrete materiality of the body. And this is entangled with the idea of hybrids, cyborg figurations of human/animal and electronic machine. Jan Fabre, for example, constantly returns to the question of those boundaries between human and animal when animals that have not been trained to do tricks burst into the performative framework on the stage. On the contrary, the twenty cats which share the stage with Els Deceukelier in Falsification as it is, unfalsified appear as the exact opposite of a staged act, being “animal” in the freedom of the unforeseeable movement, in the caterwauling of the cats – in the frameworkbursting physicality into the “Open.” And yet, after more than twenty-five years, the situation has changed. The “Animal Rights/Rites” demand a different ritual framework: namely the assurance that the rights of animals be “safeguarded,” as in the re-enactments of The Power of Theatrical Madness (1984/2013), where the act of trampling on the frogs hopping about the stage – unlike in the fairy tale (“The Frog King”) – does not produce a metamorphosis into a prince, but an administrative certificate, without our being able to distinguish within the frame of the theater performance whether the massacre of the frogs is a theatrical illusion or a genuine act of violence. The difficult – and moving – question of the suffering of the “animal” (the human-animal) is the subject of Meg Stuart’s Do Animals Cry (2009),41 a piece on which the programme comments as follows: “Weep if you will – now is family time! The house is closed, open for almost everyone: no dogs allowed.”42 A pale pink mini-house, a “kennel” and an installation woven from branches and reminiscent of a “beaver lodge,” (sets by Doris Dziersk) provided the spatial associations.

Human, Animal, Thing | 33

Fig. 10: Disclaimer at Hebbel-am-Ufer, Berlin 2013; © Alexander Schwan. The choreography was full of scenes of things going wrong, of disturbed and extremely highly charged emotional relationships: like family constellations on display in an animal’s cage. Weeping or screaming? Here, too, in a scale of irresolvable entanglements, the question of the boundaries of the human is posed. We must ask ourselves whether – in the relationship between human culture and animal nature – we have now arrived at the other side of the History of Creation mentioned at the beginning: at a point of “de-creation.” It is no longer the relationship of humans to animals that is the field of inquiry for scientists and artists, but the insoluble, life- and species-threatening strategies of biopolitical power. “[I]f at the center of the open lies the undisconcealedness of the animal, then at this point we must ask: what becomes of this relationship? In what way can man let the animal, upon whose suspension the world is held open, be?”43 Given this formulation of Agamben’s, we may ask: What scope does this leave for dance? It seems to me that this is a particular challenge to the critical commitment of those artists who work with body and movement. In conclusion I should like – alas only briefly – to come back to the three choreographies I mentioned at the outset, this time in the context of Donna Haraway’s engagement with Derrida’s last lectures on the “animal.” It is remarkable that now – in contrast to the situation one hundred years ago (in the Modernism of the twentieth century) – it is not the “wild beast,” not “savage nature” that constitutes the focus of the otherness of the “animal,” but the domestic animal: the cat, the dog. The key scene in Derrida’s philosophical observations in the Animal That Therefore I Am is the moment in which the thinker, in the bathroom, realizes that

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his cat has seen him naked and feels ashamed.44 Feels ashamed of being ashamed. This text – “more to follow”45 (à suivre) – focuses on the look,46 the field of vision between man and animal. Although Derrida poses the question: “And Say the Animal Responded?”47 he still remains in the thrall of a way of thinking involving deconstruction of the logos (of which the animal is bereft). Donna Haraway takes up this question of the look. She is interested in the possibility of looking back: a “re-spicere.” The word implies “respect” and “regard,” an active “looking at.” Not the logos, not the word and the spirit, but this form of “re-spicere” is for Haraway a form of “co-existence” which – beyond humanism or posthumanism – makes possible what she calls “companion species.” This is a (utopian) movement and mode of encounter that suspends the distinctions and categories of human/animal, subject/object, of thing, or living/not-living, and generating a companionship, a coexistence instead. It is interesting that Haraway sees these processes and dynamics realized not in speech, not in discourse, but in “embodied communication.”48 And in this connection, she makes repeated use of the concept of dance: a “dance of relating.”49 According to Haraway, it is not a question of the old philosophical dispute as to whether dogs can tell lies, but of the truth of non-linguistic communication based on an “exchange of looks”, or, as Haraway phrases it, a “looking back and greeting significant others, again and again,” in a “co-constitutive naturalcultural dancing, holding in esteem, and regard open to those who look back reciprocally.”50 Do such mental images of an almost nostalgic/utopian nature – When Species Meet – offer an opening for dance as body-performance? Or is it up to art to draft different “animal rites” so as to cast doubt on such theories of reciprocal “animality”? One could certainly read Xavier Le Roy’s Low Pieces this way. The piece alternates between speech and “naked movement.” The speech scenes start a question-and-answer game between performers and spectators: across the dividing line between stage and auditorium the more or less dynamic – or aggressive – communicative movement goes back and forth. In the movement scenes, on the other hand, the spectators are turned into observers of a case of “man into animal.” It is not an imitation, but rather a movement study that seems to arise out of the perception/re-spicere of animals: Cats? Wild cats? A special way of yielding to weight, gravity: creeping, lying, sitting down in groups without any other pacemaker than the “companion” movement of the others. A multipartite structure emerges which is neither anthropomorphic nor animalmimetic. The observer is confronted with the ambiguous question: “The question of the animal.” Is it a looking back, a retrospective questioning? And what – insuperable – framework of the “spectacular” is afforded by the theater in which all this takes place? Is it not the observation situation created by nakedness? Derrida asserts that it is the essential feature of animals (bêtes) to be naked without knowing it.51

Human, Animal, Thing | 35

Another approach to these questions is adopted by Martin Nachbar and the five female dancers in the piece Animal Dance (March 2013),52 an approach that Una Chaudhuri has called “zooësís”53 in performance. I shall just briefly pick out two scenes (in full awareness that this is unfair to the play). In the first scene the exploration of movements in the direction of other species from the isolations and repetitions of “animal studies” ends up with the handling of objects: with sticks and materials; an action, an “actors’ network” of animal movement studies, anthropological experiments on the use of objects as tools and body extensions, and bizarre body-object-material collages: A bizarrely lurching figure, a mixture of species, partly reminiscent of a totem, partly of a trash scavenger, partly of a scarecrow – or of a quotation from Anna Halprin’s Parades & Changes. The last part of the piece is concerned with the view: “Animal Dance”/”Animal Rites” as a staging of that “regard,” that “re-spicere,” of which Donna Haraway speaks. But how would it be possible to see this kind of “looking” as “facing” (of) the animal? We are in fact confronted with an apparently unfocused, non-“selfreflecting,” yet also “scenting” and dull way of looking at spectators! (The programme called this part “Turnout,” and referred to cows or the human view of cows/“happy” cows – the “stupidity” of which Heidegger speaks in relation to the animal?) Is this looking back “into the mask” of the face – that can never be an imitation, a “turning into an animal” – not ultimately something else? We witness a moment of “otherness,” which tends rather to bring about a de-facement54 of the exhibition situation in the theater as theater. And only in this way perhaps would a crack appear in the specular structure behind which that dance of “companion species” could take place, whose utopia, whose “joy” Donna Haraway invokes.55 By contrast Antonia Baehr chooses a completely different approach to the subject of “human-animal studies.” The experimental set-up of her ABeCedarium Bestiarium reflects her conviction that the whole situation of human-animal relationships is one of reconstruction. It is not living animals, like cats and dogs, that populate her bestiary (modelled on the old bestiaries from Giambattista della Porta to Elias Canetti), but the animal from the archive. And the performance consists in carrying out the various ways of reviving, in companionship; to share this with the public as with visitors to an exhibition or a natural history museum. Antonia Baehr requested that some of her artist friends select – in alphabetical order – an extinct animal, whose resurrection was also a metaphor to reflect the friendship with Antonia Baehr. Baehr’s invitation to her friends (musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists) was: “Find the affinity between yourself and an extinct animal. Create a score for a short and personal piece for me, about your affinity to this animal, keeping our friendship in mind. The animal represents you and the piece is about the relationship between you and me.”56 Thus it was not the Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest that was the selection criterion, but the irretrievably lost, only to be

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“revived” within the framework of an act of collaboration, a collaboration of elective affinities on metaphors of the human/animal. We hear the “Tasmanian Tiger” (an extinct Australian marsupial) groan, and are confronted with the question of what Derrida called the suffering/compassion of the animal. In an imaginary, and indeed invented and yet intellectual double movement of transforming human into animal and anthropomorphizing the animal, we shall become through poetic sound collages and in carnival masquerades witnesses of an animation of the “Culebra Island Amazon of Puerto Rico” – in a grotesquely farcical animal drag.

Fig. 11 & 12: Antonia Baehr ABeCedarium Bestiarium (2013); © Anja Weber.

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And we hear the siren song of the (extinct) “Steller’s Sea Cow” in a voice mix of Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Kittler and others, which produce myth and history retrospectively as open Gestalt. More than any other de- or re-facing show which explores the human/animal/ thing relationship, this makes clear that the process of reifying the Other, as a form of subjugation and hierarchizing, is reversible in the reflective movement arising out of the admission of distance. Only such a perspective, one of invention, might be able to create an “animal relationship,” a “rapport animal ” in terms of living movement.57

Translated from the German by Iain Taylor

Notes  1 Verosimile, by Thomas Hauert, Swiss Contemporary Dance, Lausanne, 16 January 2002; Accords, by Thomas Hauert, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 17 May 2008; literature: Gabriele Brandstetter, “Swarms and Enthusiasts: Transfers in/as Choreography,” Parallax 46, no. 1, Special Issue: Installing the Body (2008): 92–104.  2 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); see also Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago, IL: Indiana University Press, 2003). 3 See Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859).  4 Haraway, When Species Meet.   5 Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).   6 W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Rights of Things,” foreword to Animal Rites, by Cary Wolfe, xiii. 7 Mitchell, “The Rights of Things,” xi. 8 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, dOCUMENTA (13), last accessed 15 April 2015, http://d13. documenta.de.  9 La Création du monde (1923–2012), directed by Faustin Linyekula, produced by Faustin Linyekula and CCN-Ballet de Lorraine, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Düsseldorf, 7 June 2013 (Recreation of the choreography of 1923 by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer). 10 Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” last accessed 29 April 2015, http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Freud-CivDis.html.

38 | Gabriele Brandstetter 11 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werkausgabe, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), 415. 12 In the field of “Human-Animal Studies” numerous important publications have appeared: Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York, NY: Random House, 1975); John Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” in John Berger, About Looking (New York, NY: Vintage, 1980), 1–28. For studies in the sense of an “histoire engagée” see inter alia Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012). 13 See Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 14 Ibid., 16. 15 See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louis Mallet, trans. David Wills (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008). 16 Ibid., 47. 17 Ibid., 52 (although Derrida subdivides this issue, drawing a distinction between suffering and compassion; ibid., 54). 18 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 19 Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism/Den Animismus zurückgewinnen,” in Animismus: Revisionen der Moderne, ed. Irene Albers and Anselm Franke (Zürich: diaphanes, 2012), 110–23. 20 Fischtanz 1912, Archiv des Deutschen Tanzsport-Verbandes/Münster, from Astrid Eichstedt and Bernd Polster, Wie die Wilden. Tänze auf der Höhe ihrer Zeit (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1985), 23. 21 Bärentanz 1913, Archiv des Deutschen Tanzsport-Verbandes/Münster, from Eichstedt and Polster, Wie die Wilden, 22. 22 Bernhard Gissibl, “Das kolonisierte Tier. Zur Ökologie der Kontaktzonen des deutschen Kolonialismus,” Werkstatt Geschichte 56 (2011): 7–28. 23 Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” The Drama Review: TDR 16, no. 3 (1972): 22–6. 24 I refer here only in passing to the history of exoticism and primitivism, the reception of “Black Dance” in Europe – and the ambivalent assessment of Josephine Baker, for example. 25 Eichstedt and Polster, Wie die Wilden. 26 Black Bottom 1926, Archiv des Deutschen Tanzsport-Verbandes/Münster, from Eichstedt and Polster, Wie die Wilden, 63. 27 Annemarie Bean, “Presenting the Prima Donna: Black Femininity and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Blackface Minstrelsy,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 1, no. 3 (1996): 23–30.

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28 Adolph Fischer, quoted in Eichstedt and Polster, Wie die Wilden, 10f; see also Franz Wolfgang Koebner, Tanz-Brevier (Berlin: Dr. Eysler & Co., 1913), 66ff. 29 Adolph Fischer, quoted in Eichstedt and Polster, Wie die Wilden, 10f; on these questions (the colonization of the “Grizzly”) see Brett Mizelle, “A man quite as much of a show as his beasts: James Capen ‘Grizzly’ Adams and the Making of Grizzly Bears,” Werkstatt Geschichte 56 (2011): 29–45. 30 Eine Negeroperette im Zweiten Staatszirkus, Plakat in Moskau 1929, Archiv des Deutschen Tanzsport-Verbandes/Münster, from Eichstedt and Polster, Wie die Wilden, 62. 31 On “négrophilie,” “savage” dancers and the performances of Josephine Baker see Ramsay Burt, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, “Race” and Nation in Early Modern Dance (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1988), 57–84; on “négrophilie” see also James Clifford, “Negrophilia,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 901–8. 32 Koebner, Tanz-Brevier, 67. 33 Fritz Böhme, quoted in Eichstedt and Polster, Wie die Wilden, 65. 34 The ballet was based on the Anthologie négre (Paris, 1921) by the writer Blaise Cendrars. Cf. Bengt Häger, Ballets Suédois (The Swedish Ballet), trans. Ruth Sharman (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 41–4. For the reconstruction see as well Adrian Kear, “De-representing modernity,” in Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century (London: Palgrave, 2013), 189–99. Cf. Klaus-Peter Köpping, “Performing ‘Africa’: Linyekula’s Re-vision of La création du monde as Critical Pastiche,” in the present volume, pp. 55–78. See also Richard Brender, “Reinventing Africa in Their Own Image: The Ballets Suédois’ ‘Ballet négre,’ La Création du monde,” Dance Chronicle 9, no. 1 (1985): 119–47. 35 See Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900 – 1930 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). 36 Blaise Cendrars, “Tour,” Le Bac de Français, last accessed 29 April 2015, http://www. bacdefrancais.net/tour.php. 37 Jobst Paul, Das “Tier”-Konstrukt - und die Geburt des Rassismus. Zur kulturellen Gegenwart eines vernichtenden Arguments (Münster: Unrest, 2004). 38 Maren Möhring, “‘Herrentiere’ und ‘Untermenschen’: Zu Transformationen des Mensch-Tier-Verhältnisses im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland,” Historische Anthropologie 19, no. 2 (2011): 229–44. 39 Paul, Das “Tier”-Konstrukt, 173f. 40 See Gabriele Brandstetter, “Dancing the Animal to Open the Human: For a New Poetics of Locomotion,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 1 (2010): 2–11. 41 Do Animals Cry, choreography by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, Volksbühne, Berlin, 17 November 2009. 42 Do Animals Cry, Program Note, Volksbühne, Berlin, 2009. 43 Agamben, The Open, 91.

40 | Gabriele Brandstetter 44 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 9–11. 45 Ibid. 46 See also Berger, “Why Look at Animals.” 47 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 119–40. 48 Haraway, When Species Meet, 26. 49 Ibid., 25. 50 Ibid. 51 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 22; the animal “has no sense of its nakedness. There is no nakedness in nature.” (Ibid.) 52 Animal Dance, by Martin Nachbar, Sophiensaele, Berlin, 21–24 March 2013. 53 Una Chaudhuri, “(De)Facing the Animal: Zooësis and Performance,” The Drama Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 8–20. 54 Ibid. 55 Haraway, When Species Meet. 56 Antonia Baehr and Friends, ABeCedarium Bestiarium – Portraits of affinities in animal metaphors (Nyon/Berlin: Far° Festival des Arts Vivants and Make Up Productions, 2014), 7. 57 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 160: “a movement that we’ll call here that of the living, of life [. . .] whatever the difference between animals, it remains an ‘animal’ relation.”

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Bean, Annemarie. “Presenting the Prima Donna: Black Femininity and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Blackface Minstrelsy.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 1, no. 3 (1996): 23–30. Berger, John. About Looking. New York, NY: Vintage, 1980. Blake, Jody. Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in JazzAge Paris, 1900 – 1930. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Brandstetter, Gabriele. “Dancing the Animal to Open the Human: For a New Poetics of Locomotion.” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 1 (2010): 2–11. —. “Swarms and Enthusiasts. Transfers in/as Choreography.” Parallax 46, no. 1, Special Issue: Installing the Body (2008): 92–104. Brender, Richard. “Reinventing Africa in Their Own Image: The Ballets Suédois’ ‘Ballet négre,’ La Création du monde.” Dance Chronicle 9, no. 1 (1985): 119–47.

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Burt, Ramsay. Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, “Race” and Nation in Early Modern Dance. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1988. Cendrars, Blaise. “Tour.” Le Bac de Français. Last accessed 29 April 2015. http:// www.bacdefrancais.net/tour.php. Chaudhuri, Una. “(De)Facing the Animal: Zooësis and Performance.” The Drama Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 8–20. Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. dOCUMENTA (13). Last accessed 15 April 2015. http://d13.documenta.de. Clifford, James. “Negrophilia.” In A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier, 901–8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1859. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited by Marie-Louis Mallet. Translated by David Wills. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008. Do Animals Cry. Choreography by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods. Volksbühne, Berlin, 17 November 2009. Do Animals Cry. Program Note. Berlin: Volksbühne, 2009. Eichstedt, Astrid, and Bernd Polster. Wie die Wilden. Tänze auf der Höhe ihrer Zeit. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1985. Franke, Anselm, ed. Animismus. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2011. Last accessed 15 June 2016. https://www.hkw.de/media/de/texte/pdf/2012_1/programm_5/animismus_booklet.pdf. Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents.” Georgetown University. Last accessed 29 April 2015. http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/FreudCivDis.html. Gissibl, Bernhard. “Das kolonisierte Tier. Zur Ökologie der Kontaktzonen des deutschen Kolonialismus.” Werkstatt Geschichte 56 (2011): 7–28. Häger, Bengt. Ballets Suédois (The Swedish Ballet). Translated by Ruth Sharman. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Indiana University Press, 2003. —. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werkausgabe, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1970. Kear, Adrian. Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century. London: Palgrave, 2013.

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Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Marionette Theatre.” The Drama Review: TDR 16, no. 3 (1972): 22–6. Koebner, Franz Wolfgang. Tanz-Brevier. Berlin: Dr. Eysler & Co., 1913. La Création du monde (1923–2012). By Jean Borlin and Darius Milhaud. Directed by Faustin Linyekula. Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Düsseldorf, 7 June 2013. Mitchell, W. J. T. “The Rights of Things.” Foreword to Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, by Cary Wolfe, ix–xv. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Mizelle, Brett. “A man quite as much of a show as his beasts: James Capen ‘Grizzly’ Adams and the Making of Grizzly Bears.” Werkstatt Geschichte 56 (2011): 29–45. Möhring, Maren. “‘Herrentiere’ und ‘Untermenschen’: Zu Transformationen des Mensch-Tier-Verhältnisses im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland.” Historische Anthropologie 19, no. 2 (2011): 229–44. Paul, Jobst. Das “Tier”-Konstrukt – und die Geburt des Rassismus. Zur kulturellen Gegenwart eines vernichtenden Arguments. Münster: Unrest, 2004. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York, NY: Random House, 1975. Stengers, Isabelle. “Reclaiming Animism/Den Animismus zurückgewinnen.” In Animismus: Revisionen der Moderne, edited by Irene Albers and Anselm Franke, 110–23. Zürich: diaphanes, 2012. Verosimile. By Thomas Hauert. Swiss Contemporary Dance, Lausanne, 16 January 2002. Weil, Karl. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Dance as Image – Image as Dance1 Jean-Luc Nancy I would believe only in a god who knew how to dance. F. Nietzsche/Thus Spoke Zarathustra2

One understands what he means to say, but he should not say it thus. For, with a god who knew how to dance, it is not a matter of belief: it is a matter of extending one’s hand to dance with him. Zarathustra mixes the vocabulary of religious belief with a relation to the divine that is entirely different, which does not concern the kind of weak knowing or the illusory confidence that gives religion at least its most common allure. As for the hypothetical character of “a god who ‘knew’ how to dance,” this refers, too, to a religious image, first of a single god, then of a god whose supernature would not be led easily to dance. But the god who dances is not a hypothesis. It is not only Shiva Nataraja, the master of the dance whom the other gods accompany, Vishnu with his tambourine, Indra on the flute, and Brahma at the cymbals – which are also the breasts of his spouse. This god, this divinity, is none other than the dance itself, and, as the dance, he is as effective, present, and evident as the god is for Hölderlin: evident like the sky and which, like the sky, and as the visage of the sky – thunder, stars, or clouds – gives the measure of man.3 This evidence is called “divine” in that which it offers of man and for man – but, at the same time, of and for all that is under the sky, all that is exposed to the opening of the sky, in, or rather as, this opening – it is divine in that it offers an immense measure; a measure that is, properly speaking, immeasurable and nonetheless without the valences of excess, unreason, or disorder that one hears in this word. Immense, rather, insofar as it is a measure that exceeds all accounts of measure, yet without ceasing to be measure: measure that measures up to an immensity.

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It is without a doubt more correct, at this point, to forget the vocabulary of the divine, which always runs the risk of recalling those overarching figures in whom, in the end, immensity is destroyed, reduced to a power or a self-sufficiency. The immense is none of this; it is neither a power, for it, to the contrary, opens and exposes what exists to its limitation; nor is it self-sufficient, for it does not contain anything in itself that returns to itself or anything that could be said to “suffice” in any sense other than the infinite; that is, precisely, in the sense of what knows no sufficiency, no “satisfaction,” but also no privation of a lack: it is rather the immensity of an overflow. In this sense, Hölderlin can say further that there is no measure on earth, as the flower shows, which is beautiful solely in flowering under the sun (though, the poet adds, one could, in this life, see plenty of beings more beautiful still than the flower). No measure, then; that is, no limit posed in the form of a law, a télos, or a rule of sufficiency. What is beautiful is that the flower flowers and that each being is, be it a “being” or an “existence” or a “presence” (Wesen, as Hölderlin’s text reads). And this, in turn – to flower, to be, to exist, to come and go, to eclose and close – offers itself, to an extent [dans une mesure], in another sense: in a rhythm. Rhythm gives the measure of the immense. In terms borrowed from Hölderlin, one could say that rhythm gives access to an “infinite connection.”4 But it is not necessary to remain with Hölderlin (by whom one finds, certainly, much thought on rhythm, as well as several mentions of dance): it suffices that he gives us a first impulse [élan]. Let us say, then, that rhythm, generally, is characterized by a definite measure of which the recurrence is not defined – except by another rhythmic register (thus an entire song, with its internal rhythm, closes according to a rhythmic principle that, in a given context and culture, regulates the time of a song). A rhythm articulates cadence and abandon: not abandon of the cadence, but abandon to it and in it. The cadence gives the measure, the abandon it invites is borne by it to the immense. This is not due solely to the fact that the cadence could repeat indefinitely; it is due still more to the fact that even a brief sequence engages the infinite: not the infinite of an indefinite pursuit, but of an opening, sustained from the start by the temptation of attainment, and thus of closure [ fermeture]. This is as simple as the distinction between the walk and the dance. Walking goes a certain stretch, traverses a given distance – and when a choreography determines a walk [marche], let us say the step of a march [un pas de marche], the walk does not go anywhere but for a walk (to move about, to go, to stroll, to speed, to trample, to pass, even to pace back and forth, but in a sense that reverses, with its internal finality, the measure that pacing implies). Walking possesses its measure outside itself, in a destination. Dancing possesses its measure in itself, in the opening of a reprisal.

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Reprisal: it is necessary to reprise; that is what immanent measure consists of. Why is it necessary to reprise? Precisely because the measure does not proceed according to any external calculus that would be heterogeneous to the gesture itself. The reprisal of a gesture can be commanded by external necessity (one must strike the anvil repeatedly), but it could also be commended by the pleasure of a recognition of the body by itself: it has extended, flexed, balanced; it has traced a fleeting figure or rather the fleetingness of a figure – a figure in the sense of an outline, of an “enlevure,” according to a very expressive technical term that used to designate the relief of a sculpture. The reprisal of a gesture removes this gesture for itself, gives it its proper relief, gives it the drive and allure [l’allant et l’allure] of its proper outline. This is not the repetition of a determinate movement; it is the affirmation of a gesture for itself. *** Each artistic form proceeds from an intensification of the register of the sensible: painting, for example, comes from the intensification of the colored register, that is, of the stain or spill, of color, of impregnation in the play of the effusion of tones, their contrasts and contaminations. What does it mean to consider dance as a sensible intensification, an intensification of the sensible? It does not intensify a register of sensitivity to the world; it intensifies the body’s self-sensing insofar as it exists in the world. A body is always a self-sensing: beyond its organization, its functions, its integration into a unity of presence and action, it is also – and in a manner that is strictly coextensive with all of its actions and functions – a manner of feeling itself, of knowing itself to be distinct from all other bodies in plying and unfolding itself, opening and closing, displacing and fixing itself as a point of origin and end of the world – the world being nothing other than the incomplete texture [réseau] of these points referring to each other. It is origin and end, or, to put it differently, an “articulation” of the world – or of a world, “the” world being itself multiple, “pluriversal.” In the reprisal, a body relates itself to itself as the articulation – flection, tension, ductility, beat, fall – of a possibility of world, of an invention, of an exploration of world. It senses itself sensing itself; it senses itself as a world that experiences itself as a mutual referral of all things. It is also possible to say that dance is the place or the play of “self-consciousness,” once one unburdens this consciousness of its supposed pure interiority, immediacy, and spirituality. There, where Derrida showed that self-presence cannot take place as pure, silent self-identity, but must open to separation [écart], to the finite or infinite distance of the self, which is always, in itself, a “to-itself” (that is, its “in” is a “to”) –: exactly there, the body’s

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self-sensing plays out, or rather, what plays out is the body as self-sensing (of the soul, if one should wish to put it this way). The body is the lieu and the milieu or the mid-lieu, between “place” and “passage,” of the relation to oneself: this is why it is “out of itself” and does not satisfy the phantasmatic condition of a pure “being-in-itself.” What we consider ordinarily as the mediation of relations with the world – the things, the other bodies – is, in fact, also the mediation with “oneself,” with the “self” that retreats to the infinitely distant ground of a “spirit” and an “identity.” It forms what one could call a “place where one senses oneself tangential to the world and to oneself,” following a formulation of Leiris, taken up again [reprise] by Georges Didi-Huberman in his Le danseur des solitudes.5 Mediation that opens the “outside,” itself infinitely separate in all senses – the body estranged from itself, extended, splayed, bent, torn, spread, liquefied, evaporated, amassed, etc. The dancing body exposes this: the tangency or rather the innumerable tangencies, diverse, heterogeneous, “to the world and to oneself.” That is, it sets forth a relation to the de-instrumentalized, de-finalized world, exposing only the possibilities of this tangency up to the impossibility upon which they, necessarily, verge: there, where the tangency, the tangible and impalpable contact between the world and “oneself” could become concretion, indistinction, absorption of the one by the other. If this limit were crossed, the dance would be abolished. Tangency demands that one brushes it, that one parts from it and returns to it. Rhythm organizes this reprisal – releases [déprise] and reprises contact between “world” and “oneself,” between “oneself” and “oneself,” between “body” and “body.” It has to do less with repetition (the recommencement of an identical given), than with a reprisal, in the sense that one takes up a text or a movement again in what is called, in French, the “répétition” of a performance (and what is named even better with “Probe” in German, “prova” in Italian, and “rehearsal” in English, which evokes the working of a field with a harrow). In reprisal, the identical is not reproduced – this is precisely not the case – but, to the contrary, the same returns in order to take itself up again in taking up, in seizing anew, as for the first time, the gesture, the sound, or the word. Rhythm returns so that the marked time, the accent, the measure, appears for itself. Appearing for itself, the measure comes into relief upon the ground of immensity. Not only does the reprisal evoke its proper, incessant return; it also indicates that what reprises itself would be only that which the actual infinity opens once, the present of innumerable other possible gestures, an agitated ground, a swarming and an intrication of all possible motions and emotions; that is, of what prevents anything from being in pure identity to itself, neither a single thing nor an

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entire world. Rhythm opens to the first truth of the world, itself rhythmic, palpitating and pulsive. Lucian of Samosata writes in his treatise on dance: The writers who give us the most authentic genealogy of dance will tell you that it dates from the very origin of the universe and that it is as ancient as love. The chorus of stars, the conjunction of planets and fixed stars, their harmonious assembly, their admirable concert, are the models of the first dance.6

That the dance should be “as ancient as Eros” assimilates it from the start to the gods, that is, I repeat, to the evidence of the immense that is at once before us and in us, that traverses us and opens us, as does, for our gaze, the expanse of the sky. Further, the god Eros represents to us more particularly, in fictions of the incommensurable, the alliance of impulse [élan] or tension with accord or union – in terms of immensity, the furious transport of excess as well as the calm spacing of the opening. Dance is, without a doubt, not itself erotic – in the sense that one lends this word ordinarily – because sexual excitation is not made to be presented. (Or rather, it is presented solely for the ends of excitation, not presentation: this is called “pornography” and raises very specific questions with regard to “artistic” forms, or forms said to be artistic). In a sexual relation, bodies give themselves to selfsensing in the chiasm of being-sensed-sensing-oneself by the other and in the other: but precisely the erotic “self” does not present “itself;” it does not give itself form – to the contrary. Dance constitutes rather, in a way, an eros turned to the outside, towards form and presentation. (It would be necessary, certainly, to dwell much longer upon the complicity of dance, or certain dances, with sexual excitement, in order not to remain with distinctions that are too clear-cut, but this is not the place for such an analysis). *** In this movement of presentation, or formation, or the trans-formation of a form – for one could say that to dance is to trans-form a body, to metamorphose its configuration in order to present it as the intensification of a relation-to-oneself, as I have proposed to call it – rhythm conjoins two functions. On the one hand, it is the return of the same – yet, as we have said, this “same” is not a “subject,” or it may be a “subject,” understood as the flection, the articulation, and the beaten or marked strike, the beating or rather the beat (one could even say arsis/thesis, recalling prosody, another register of rhythm). In a way, one would have to say that the “subject” or the “to-itself” [à soi] of a body, qua body, or the form of the body – that is, the soul – takes place in the syncope, the simultaneity of the cut and

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the junction (another word for it would be the caesura that Hölderlin speaks of, and, after him, Lacoue-Labarthe). To this function of the syncopated return of the same, another is added and combined, which is the making of form, the giving rise to a form and, in some facet or some measure, a figure. The word rhuthmos had a sense that was very close to the word skhema: form, figure, contour.7 The return, the repetition of the return (which one must not necessarily understand as a regular or uniform return: rhythm is not to be confounded with a mechanism) does not take place in a simply linear manner: the return turns, too, into contour; it engenders an image. This does not mean, however, that rhythm is realized in a figure, if by “figure” one understands the plenitude or completeness of a return to oneself. As I have tried to underscore, the return to oneself is infinite, for “oneself” is not given: oneself consists, in the end, in the return itself. Moreover, this is, fundamentally, the reason for the dance: it exposes, in intensity, the self as return and the return as self. If I say that rhythm “engenders an image,” I refer to something other than the composition of a figure. One could say, for example, that “the King,” or “the Siren” are figures: one finds oneself then in proximity to the “type,” if not the “prototype” or the “archetype,” and therefore in proximity to the “model.” The image, to the contrary, implies that it is in resemblance to a model (which was called, in earlier times, a “configuration”: a figuration in the resemblance to . . .). To be a model oneself or to model oneself upon another, therein lies the crucial difference. If the “self” is not and cannot be given, it cannot produce a figure. It can only make an image of the other that it is for itself. Therefore, one would have to say that the model of this image is infinitely distant or absent. But the absence of the model is precisely the condition for the image to be fully an image. When the model is present and reproduced according to its presence, it not so much a matter of an image than a duplication – supposing that this would be possible, which is not simple if one envisages a model with volume and colors, sonorous and in movement: this is what the techniques of 3D try obstinately to achieve, and to which one cannot fail to add the hope for the reproduction of odors, too. However, one knows very well that these techniques cannot duplicate real presence without charging the copy with a manifest coefficient of the irreal, which is, at the same time, the refusal to admit the naïve desire of reproduction and what this very desire enjoys, to the extent that it is the desire of the image or of imaging. When it comes to the image, it is always necessary to return to irreality or absence: the absence of the model is not a merely marginal or provisional condition of the image. It is essential to it, co-substantial, one would have to say: the substance of the image is found in the absence of that of which it is the image. Or it may be still better to say “in the absence of that which it images,” in order to better convey that it is not a matter of a “copy” but, to the contrary, a matter of

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“the representation of the implicit sense of the real,” as Sartre says in his definition of the imaginary.8 Such is – to recall once more – the first valence of the Latin imago: an effigy in wax or plaster, obtained by the cast of the face of the dead – what we call a death mask. These effigies, kept in the house, had the cultic value of attachment to the line of one’s ancestors. They could, by a right reserved for certain families, be exposed to the outside for certain festivals. The presence in image of the ancestors who had disappeared has nothing to do with the “copy,” but with the imprint, the cast with which contact counts as communication, the communication of a sense: that of pertinence or membership to the lineage. In the imago, the lineage comes to itself as such, that is, as the sense of “lineage.” In the image in general, the sense of the imaged or imagined thing – one could say that here, the two terms are equivalent – comes to itself. But the “self” of a “sense” is not a fixed point; it is a referral (renvoi), in the sense of a counting for or being worth . . . for whoever envisages the image as bearing – or emitting – sense. Let us take the example of the portrait – this “absolute of the image,”9 according to Jean-Christophe Bailly. The portrait does not provide the resemblance of the traits of an original – its morphological resemblance – without opening, at the same time, to the sense of this resemblance as a resemblance to a self (à soi). What counts is not only that I recognize the appearance of “Such-a-One,” but that I recognize that “Such-a-One” is this person or this subject that he is, this beingoneself (être-soi), without which he is not “he-himself” (lui-même). He-himself, however, he-himself as the fixation of his ipseity, is only the self-identity of a cadaver – as Maurice Blanchot shows in a famous analysis. But this identity is that of “the impersonal being, distant and inaccessible, which the resemblance, that it might be someone’s, draws toward the day.”10 This would mean, if one unravels the logic of this phrase rigorously, that it is less a matter of saying that the resemblance is attained in the cadaver, than that the essential and infinite absence of death is what is at stake in every resemblance of the living. Perhaps, in truth, it is not even strictly necessary to proceed by evoking the cadaver in order to understand that, if the image bears the sense of being-oneself (and, let us add briefly, the being-oneself [être-soi] of anyone that may be [que ce soit]: person, landscape, still life or, in French, nature morte – a term one could dwell upon for a long time): with the absence or irrealization of its supposed “model,” the image exposes precisely the sense of the latter as “self [soi]” (as ipseity, if you will, or as a “subject,” and in such way that, to repeat, anyone who might be becomes a subject in the image, that is, a subject-of-sense). A “subject” is a subject-of-sense. A “sense” is the being-subject or being-oneself [l’être-soi] of something. It is in being “for itself,” in counting for itself, that a bundle of asparagus, as in a Manet painting, or the many-colored interlacings

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of a dripping by Pollock make sense, just as much as a battle scene by Uccello or a Titian portrait does – just as much as they each do so entirely differently. But a sense can only be essentially different and other, each time “proper,” singularly and absolutely proper. Whereby the “proper” is not a possessed or appropriated character, but always the infinite appropriation of oneself, which supposes the depropriation or expropriation of every possession at the same time as a renewed impulse towards a proper that is always more distant in its proximity, a proper to which one can only dedicate or avow oneself, without possessing it (in Heidegger, this triple disposition is called: Ereignis, Enteignis, Zueignis; Derrida has traced it as “exappropriation”). *** One asks: where did the dance go? We are there. We are there, for the proper subject of sense, which would be at work in the dancing body, or unworked or overworked and fixed in the cadaver, does not cease to haunt. It does not cease to pass back and forth obstinately, obsessively, on the ground [au fond], that is, on the surface, of this body, which is entranced or transfixed. It would be necessary, without a doubt, to pause here to meditate upon the arcane mysteries of what once formed the motif of the “dance of death.” If the dead dance, this is because they do not cease to reprise the rhythm of that relation to oneself which is realized in them in decomposing, in self-annihilating. The subject of sense “haunts,” for “[w]hat haunts is something inaccessible from which we cannot extricate ourselves. It is that which cannot be found and therefore cannot be avoided.”11 Blanchot continues: “What no one can grasp is the inescapable. The fixed image knows no repose, and this is above all because it poses nothing, establishes nothing.”12 The fixed image is without repose: that is, it does not repose, nor does it settle [se dépose] in the realization of a signification – and in this sense, it dances. That is, it exposes an extensive and frontal mode of that which the dance exposes in an intensive and proprioceptive mode (if it is permissible to use this barbarous word). The image dances because “it has no place,” as Blanchot writes: it only “stays” “there,” because it has no “proper” place. Its proper place would be resemblance: but resemblance to oneself “has nothing to resemble.”13 It is in this way that Blanchot can counter Sartre in affirming that “the image is not the sense of [an] object.”14 Not only is the image of an object not the sense of this object, and not only is it of no avail in understanding the object, it tends to withdraw the object from under-

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standing by maintaining it in the immobility of a resemblance which has nothing to resemble.15

It is not certain that Sartre would have wanted to speak of a “sense of the object” when he spoke of “the implicit sense of the real”16: it would be necessary here to gloss at length, and perhaps, fundamentally, Blanchot says the same thing as the one he wanted to rival. The “sense,” insofar as it is bound to an “understanding” when Blanchot evokes it here, is not, without a doubt, the “implicit sense” that Sartre meant and that corresponds to the inscription of what is called “the object” (the thing, the real) in a world, as an element of a world; that is, of a proper network or texture of significance – which is not the same thing as a horizon of “understanding” (of causality, means and ends, etc.). That which, without a doubt, brings both authors together, whether they like it or not, is the necessity of thinking that, in effect, we cannot not imagine – in the sense of “making images” and inhabiting them – because we cannot not expose ourselves to the infinite opening of sense and/or of the proper that, the one as the other and the one in the other, cannot simply be given, posed in self-identity. Simply because this self-identity does not exist: “to exist,” to the contrary, is to be out of oneself, which, strictly speaking, says nothing, for if there is no “self,” there is no “outside,” either. But “outside” is the place of oneself [du soi], of the subject, of sense and the proper: outside, that is, exposed as an image, in an image, and in tension, in pulsation, as a dancer, in a dancer, as a dance, in a dance. The image is the movement of a coming-to-oneself [venir-à-soi] of that which does not subsist according to a network of actions and reactions determined by causes and ends that are foreign to “subjects” (supports, substances). For example, not I who walks to take a bus to go to a commercial center, etc., but this body – “my” body – that displaces itself according to its most proper intimacy in plying itself, unfolding, feeling, separating, etc., according to the rules and impulsions that can exist and act only in the “world” that a “proper” defines. This “proper” is not, however, a propriety, nor is it an attribute possessed by a subject but, to the contrary, a “subject” without any attribute, a being-to-oneself [être-à-soi] considered in and for oneself – that which, in language, can only receive a proper name. One could say that there is no “proper name” if not in the image or as the image of this proper, and that such an image is made of the rhythms, advances, pulsations, impulses [élans], flections, according to which the proper appropriates itself. As Federico Ferrari writes: “rhythm is the evidence of the image, the movement with which the image renders itself evident, the pulsation with which it appears to sight, gives itself to be seen.”17

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In Heidegger’s terms, the appropriation of the proper – which does not concern an acquisition or a taking of possession, but a becoming-oneself, an appropriating one’s proper being or the proper sense of being according to which one is; in sum, the “being-oneself [être-soi]” in its most proper, singular absoluteness – this appropriation is called Ereignis, a German word that designates the event, that which arrives, “produces itself” or “comes to pass.” In fact, the appropriation of the proper – or better, the appropriation as the proper, to avoid any grammatical “complement” – is, in sum, a pure “self-producing” and “coming-to-pass.” Thus, Heidegger explains that the Ereignis declines necessarily into Enteignis; that is, into disappropriation or exappropriation, as Derrida calls it – which we should understand as the dispossession of all propriety, attribute, or quality – and into Zueignis, or allocation, consecration, dedication, offering, or homage: an imputation of propriety distinct from and beyond all kinds of possession or, in a way, an attribution without an attribute. The dedication of a book or a drawing does not concern propriety, but a destination that one would have to call “from proper to proper.” Such is the truth of the appropriation of the proper – but one must add that, of these three German words, Ereignis is, in fact, the only one whose provenance is not eigen, and that resembles that word only through a phonetic contamination. Heidegger himself elucidates this: it has to do with the er-äugen and the Auge, or “eye:” what is at stake is the event as the showing-itself, the giving-itself to be seen, or appearing. Whatever the interpretation of Heidegger may be, we must say that the being-proper or the coming of the proper as such is always a showingitself, or a making-image, and in the double sense, whereby “I” show myself to others and let them take my image, and I show to myself the others, the world (and, up to a point, myself) according to the way I imagine them properly. Which means: not according to the representation or interpretation that I form for myself subjectively, but according to the proper movement of the imagination, or, to put it in German, of the Einbildungskraft, the “force-of-becoming-image” (in form, gait, facet, etc.), a force that I do not possess but that, more properly, “I am.” Thus, this force, like every force, exists in its movement, in its tension, its impulse [élan] and its drive [allant], the gesture and the cadence according to which it draws, depicts, and discloses a world and carves a proper measure of the immense.

Translated from the French by Kristina Mendicino

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Notes   1 This translation is very much indebted to Jeff Fort’s excellent translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Au fond des images, which appeared in 2005: The Ground of the Image (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005) [Translator’s note].   2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 38.   3 I refer here to “In lieblicher Bläue . . .” See Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe und Dokumente in zeitlicher Folge, ed. D. E. Sattler, vol. 12, 1806–1843, Fragmente von Hyperion III; Turmgedichte; Register (Munich: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2004), 22–4. See also “Was ist Gott?,” ibid., 19.   4 See “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe und Dokumente in zeitlicher Folge, ed. D. E. Sattler, vol. 10, 1802–1803, Gesänge; Die Trauerspiele des Sophokles; Oden (Munich: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2004), 154–60. See also “Anmerkungen zur Antigonä,” ibid., 213–9. One might also recollect the many mentions of dance by Hölderlin in, for example, “An Diotima,” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. J. Schmidt, vol. 1, Gedichte (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker, 1992), 371–2; “Der Gang aufs Land,” in ibid., 276–7; “Brot und Wein,” in ibid., 285–90.   5 Georges Didi-Huberman, Le Danseur des Solitudes (Paris: Minuit, 2006). See p. 68, which is devoted to the dancer Israël Galvan.   6 I have translated the translation provided in Jean-Luc Nancy’s French original. In the English translation by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, the passage reads:

“The best antiquarians, let me tell you, trace dancing back to the creation of the universe; it is coeval with that Eros who was the beginning of all things. In the dance of the heavenly bodies, in the complex involutions whereby the planets are brought into harmonious intercourse with the fixed stars, you have an example of that art in its infancy [. . .]” Lucian of Samosata, The Works of Lucian of Samosata, ed. and trans. H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 241 [Translator’s note].

  7 Benveniste performs a famous analysis of this point in his Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).  8 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (Paris: Gallimard, 1940), 238.   9 Jean-Christophe Bailly, Le Champ mimétique (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 43. 10 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 257. 11 Ibid., 259. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 260. 14 Ibid.

54 | Jean-Luc Nancy 15 Ibid. 16 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, rev. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, trans. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2004), 188. 17 Federico Ferrari, L’insieme vuoto: Per una pragmatica dell’immagine (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2013).

Bibliography Bailly, Jean-Christophe. Le Champ mimétique. Paris: Seuil, 2005. Benveniste, Émile. Problèmes de linguistique générale. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Le danseur des solitudes. Paris: Minuit, 2006. Ferrari, Federico. L’insieme vuoto: Per una pragmatica dell’immagine. Milan: Johan & Levi, 2013. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke, Briefe und Dokumente in zeitlicher Folge. Edited by D. E. Sattler. 12 vols. Munich: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2004. —. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Edited by J. Schmidt. 3 vols. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker, 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1969. Samosata, Lucian of. The Works of Lucian of Samosata. Translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris: Gallimard, 1940. —. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Revised by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre. Translated by Jonathan Webber. London: Routledge, 2004.

Performing “Africa” Linyekula’s Re-vision of La création du monde as Critical Pastiche Klaus-Peter Köpping

“What Have You Done to Us, Blaise Cendrars?”: Experiencing the Plea of a Dancing Body Having experienced the “restaging” of La création du monde of 1923 through Faustin Linyekula’s choreographic version offered during the Dance Congress at Düsseldorf in 2013, I was stunned by the affective power of the only black dancer’s – Djodjo Kazadi’s – desperate cry at the end of the performance. This was a remarkable piece of choreographic framing in a reenactment that, as Linyekula commented himself, deliberately wanted to have the two dozen white dancers confront or be confronted by the black protagonist, thus pointing to the hidden dimension of racism: the veritable erasure of individual and collective identity. Linyekula was able to identify this previously unacknowledged meta-narrative behind the fairytale-like story of the original ballet – an assumedly Edenic or pristine origin of mankind in an African myth (supposedly told by the Fang people of Gabon). While Linyekula succeeded splendidly in a very personal “take” on the ballet of 1923, the anguished cry of the protagonist probably left many members of the audience slightly puzzled. I was myself intrigued as to why Linyekula was addressing the question to Cendrars, why not to Milhaud (whose jazz-tunes made the ballet, from the start, a hybrid construction, misleading as to its label “ballet nègre,” connoting, at that time in France, “African”); why not to Fernand Léger (whose cubism was as informed by encountering African sculptures as was Picasso’s 1907 “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” ushering in modernism’s invocation of a “primitivistic” imagery with – of all coincidences – a Fang mask as iconic

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prompter); why not to Börlin, the dancer and choreographer of Ballets Suédois, of the 1923 premier performance in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (Börlin having posed previously with an African mask as “sculpture nègre,” adorned with grassy skirt around his naked torso); of finally, why not address the cry to de Maré, the Swedish impresario and millionaire financing the theater’s productions from Le sacre du printemps in 1912 onwards to La création du monde (to finally shift his enthusiasm to the staging of Josephine Baker in her Revue nègre in the same theater in 1925)?

The Unraveling of the Background of an African Dancer’s Anguish Linyekula’s affective climax in the Düsseldorf choreography sent me on my own search for the historical sources of his dancer’s desperate plea. The story proved to be a veritable maze of fabrications, falsifications, even plain and bold forgeries, the recalling of which in detail would explode an essay’s limitations and certainly strain the reader’s patience. The following notes should therefore be understood as a partial rendering of complex entanglements crossing several continents and spanning almost a century of political history and its reverberations in artistic productions. These productions, in turn, crisscross the boundaries of the performing arts with other genres, such as modernist movements in the history of painting and literature. Such crisscrossings leave us nowadays – in the so-called postcolonial times – with a patchwork quilt of reimaginings, leading to the realization that colonialism has never been digested truly. It will probably remain a festering wound in our skewed perceptions about modernist productions, not realizing that they have actually erased the original voices of the colonized. Our accolades about the creative originality of a modernist turn in the aesthetic productions of the first two decades of the twentieth century will be stained with the amnesia – nowadays probably unconsciously, in the 1920s more likely by intention – about the high costs at which Europe gained such an innovative momentum only through an acquisition of cultural repertoires and properties which are not even plane “appropriations” but veritable forgeries through writing over and covering the sources. Specific productions such as La création are thus not to be elevated through the term of “free adaptation” (which “collage”1 hints at), as the conditions of those African creators where not even identified by name, a point about the complicity of European artists with colonial exploitation that is veiled. This point is emphasized and actually encapsulated in Linyekula’s angry shout “How could they not have seen the suffering?”

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Retracing Linyekula’s quest, we are moving constantly along the shifting currents, circulating geographically and metaphorically over what has become known as Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic.”2 I therefore impose on the reader’s indulgence narrations and digressions that are replete with repetitions, redundancies and an unavoidable recursivity of argument. Yet, as scholars and practitioners of dance and ritual well know, repetition and recursivity are the very tools of practice through which bodies are inscribed and inscribe our concepts and memories, whereby performativity remains the core of the possibility for transformation, of resonance with other bodies. The transformation through re-inscription of concepts may however, as research on memory has shown, never be a replication of experiences or of actual past events, but lead to the emergence, often unconscious and serendipitous as well as contingent, of re-combinations of clues and images at every re-play, in an almost Moebius-like recursivity. While Linyekula emphasizes the erasure of African memories through substitution by European imaginations, re-writings and re-performances, the filling of voids by re-framing the “re-creation” of La création will hopefully lead to a new and different way of perceiving the deconstruction of the mythologies surrounding modernism. The main question remains, how and whether we are prepared to confront our own voids. The path I have chosen here attempts to make sense of two major interventions by Linyekula, the key intervention of the anguished plea being taken as the starting point for an interrogation of the possible reasons behind this intervention. This being a more historically-oriented question, I am using a variety of clues – ranging from other performances and choreographies of Linyekula to some of his public statements about the aims of his endeavors – including some of the historical contextualities of both the 1923 ballet and the revision in 2013 of the Düsseldorf performance. In order to stay with the experiential focus on the restaging, I am picking up the discussion about the end of the first part of the performance, as it seems to have a bearing on the controversial reception of the much debated dialogue between Faustin Linyekula and Jean-Luc Nancy. The debate seemed to miss the central trajectory of Linyekula’s choreography. The dramaturgy of the restaging plays with different tonalities of affect which culminate in the “tragic” plea at the end. However, this is achieved by the plea’s juxtaposition with the humorous and jocular performance at the end of the first part that satirizes European audiences and, to use a very British vernacular expression, cocks a snook at them by pointing to the grotesque projections that informed the horizon of their reception of the original ballet in 1923. The dancer cheekily asks us whether we are nowadays free from such perceptions of “African” otherness, driving home the message that culminates in a comical variety of the angrily expressed shout of anguish at the end of the piece.

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Before coming to these projections, in their respectively comic and then tragic performative actualization, I want to pursue some points of Linyekula’s own explanations, by first addressing his perception of “void” and secondly, by conveying his own response to the question that I posed in the beginning about the plea of the dancer, addressing Blaise Cendrars.

Framing a Void However, I want to argue that Linyekula’s re-staging as pastiche is a veritable “transformation” of the original, in the sense that his embedding the piece of 1923 in the racialized imagery of that period, in effect, points to the unmarked political realities of high colonial exploitation and imperialist structures. At the same time, he emphasizes that he is trying to regain his own personal as well as collective “identity,” as he feels left in a veritable “void,” having to look at himself through the eyes of Europeans and their imaginary projections.

Performing a Personal Odyssey In a remarkable lecture-performance at the Walker Arts Centre in Long Island (presented as “Artist Talk” in September 2011),3 Linyekula makes the important point that the dismembering of his mind and body (and of other “African” or “Congolese” minds and bodies) is not only to be laid at the doorsteps of colonial policies of degradation, but that it has continued through the vicious politics of present-day African elites imposing a deadly authoritarianism. They thereby are destroying the “circles” of solidarity of villages, families and friends, as the communality among equals is disintegrating, when words (and songs or dances) cannot freely “circulate” any longer. Thus the only place he can go back to is his own body that under the name of “Kabako” becomes the synonym for a home to recollect and activate its memories. This is an obvious reference to his Studios Kabako, founded as a center for artistic experimentation in 2001 in Kinshasa and also with a branch in his hometown of Kisangani in the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Linyekula did return from his European and American choreographic circuit since, as he also intimates, he cannot find a footing or a “frame” for the experiencing of the void in places of “exile” (he stayed outside his home country for eight years), as he can only tell authentic stories from his grounding in a personal and localized past. Linyekula expresses in the lecture performance of 2011 in New York that as a storyteller he needs his body’s memory, because the sensations of the smell of the rainforest of his youth (the canopy of

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Joseph Conrad’s proverbial “heart of darkness”) stay with him.4 So do the tunes of his grandmother’s soft singing. Finding a frame to fill the void, Linyekula certainly also invokes to audiences the circulation of the personal fate of friends, like naming the studio in memory of his artistic colleague Richard Kabako who died of the plague. Linyekula pointedly tries to convey this personal empathy, of tragedies and comic experiences, through his choreographies, always returning to the problem of the multiple facets of “identity.” He gave an emotionally gripping example with his piece Sur les traces de Dinozord (conceptualized in 2006) which he premiered in Berlin in July 2013. Entering the theater, we as audience saw, on the right hand of the stage, an older man tapping jarringly away on an old typewriter. We only later realized that what we were attending was a performance, written by the typist himself, who was none other than Antoine Vumilia Muhindo. Muhindo was a revolutionary from Kisangani, imprisoned by government forces, and, after a harrowing experience of torture, was fortunate enough to escape certain death after ten years, now living in Swedish exile. The dancers made the point that the “performance” was for them more than a “staging,” when at the end they refused to bow to applause, instead huddling together on a wooden chest.

Linyekula’s Response about His Personal “Liberation” Before delving into the perplexing and contentious story of the European imaginations of “Africa” at the time after World War I, I want to relate a more upbeat ending of the search which Linyekula himself offered when he visited the Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” in Berlin on 12 March 2015. Linyekula talked at that time, among other topics, about his collaborative project to procure clean drinking water from rivers which were poisoned by debris from modern mining projects in Kinshasa and other places in the Democratic Republic of Congo.5 Having waded through huge amounts of archival materials on the social as well as ethnographic backgrounds of theatrical and other performances in the early twentieth century that were dealing with imagined representations of “otherness” at the high point of European colonialism, with particular focus on the ballet of 1923, I asked Faustin Linyekula, whether one may go so far as metaphorically connecting his new project with his artistic endeavor invested in restaging La création. I elaborated that I would infer, from his attempts to gain life-giving water from poisoned and contaminated rivers, that in some way he had set in motion a thread which reconnected this present civic and artistic project to his choreographic intervention with his reenactment and intervention in La Créa-

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tion du monde (1923–2012). Could, so I asked, the Congolese dancer’s desperate cry be interpreted as a “contamination” of Congolese history and identity through Cendrars’ supposedly original “African” mythic narrative, taking the latter not merely as a collage or re-interpretation, but a “writing over” and veritable replacement, therefore truly an effacement or erasure of the original oral tradition? I formulated this question also in the light of Linyekula’s observation that African artists were actually forced to see themselves through the lenses of European eyes. Along those lines of metaphorically connecting to an actor’s or dancer’s body, could one not speak of an actually “poisoning” of it as much as of the Congolese dancer’s mind, and of European spectator’s mind to boot? Linyekula’s answer was optimistic and liberating at the same time: he indicated that he had got Cendrars out of his blood for good!

Circumambulations Part II: Jean-Luc Nancy and “Black Bottom” Dance Focusing expectations on a debate between Faustin Linyekula and Jean-Luc Nancy, I want to address the central debate of the Congress in Düsseldorf revolving around the problem of postcoloniality. Judging from some critical reviews about a Congress that had been advertised under the banner of “translating movement” or “performing translations,” a certain uneasiness lingered on in many spectators and listeners who felt left in a void after what was considered to have been a failure in the practice of “dialogue.” This may be a harsh judgment, not unfounded, given the rather magisterial lecturing from Nancy whose paternalistic self-satisfied reminders to a young (but certainly not uninformed) audience about the great excitement and positively connoted “négrophilie” of the Paris of the 1920s was climaxed by his rhetorical question to all: “you know who Josephine Baker was”? While Linyekula, becoming visibly and, understandably, increasingly exasperated, may have had no chance in this exchange, I would like to argue post hoc that Nancy’s reference was possibly quite to the point, given the racist-primitivist trajectory of the original ballet of 1923 and of the very notion of “négrophilie.”6 The re-staging by Linyekula’s choreography does include a pointed reference to the notorious “Black Bottom” dance, a popular craze of Paris in the 1920s (not forgetting the Afro-American blueprint which obviously informed Milhaud after his encounter with the club scene in New York in the early 1920s). An important part of the “jazzy” dancing was intended in the 1923 production for the proverbial first human couple of the ballet’s narrative, to which the reconstructive drawings by Millicent Hodson in her choreographic notebook clearly refer: on one of the

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pages we are shown a collage of “Charleston,” “Apache partnering” and moves from the “Black Bottom”; on another one, labeled “Fetishists and Human Couple,” she has drawn the couple in a configuration reminiscent of the billboards and advertising leaflets for Josephine Baker’s “Revue nègre” of 1925.7

Fig. 1: Gold Wing Bird and Bird Man Fetishist: Notebook page for revised final of reconstruction in 2012. Pen and ink drawing and notes by Millicent Hodson: animation of original costume sketch by Fernand Léger, showing how figures can move in costumes. Costume reconstruction by Kenneth Archer. 2000; © Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer.

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From Josephine Baker to Sarah Baartman A typical example for this possibly naive exoticism and “playing primitive” may be found in the booklet of caricatures which Colin designed as a series of fortyfive lithographs around the revue of Josephine Baker, labeling it Le Tumulte Noir in 1925, which sold 500 unnumbered copies during the first day.8 Colin borrowed extensively from Miguel Covarrubias who brought sketches from American jazz performers, published in Vanity Fair, into circulation in Paris. Covarrubias, known otherwise for his satirical caricatures with political messages, had created, for Baker, the image of “Jazz Baby” in 1924, that shows her attired in a fluffy short white dress with her bottom sticking out through the clothing (not a naked bottom however).9 All these representations and images point to the ambiguity of their messages, merging into a complex “semiography,” which explores how symbolic ascriptions point to a nesting of an artist’s performance within the frame of cultural productions of that time.10 Such symbolically loaded performances and other “signs” resonate with contradictory affective triggers, intractably melding into each other, like disgust in combination with excitement. This at first sight paradoxical enfolding of apparently opposite attitudes was identified early in the twentieth century in the field of comparative religion, and later refined by the anthropologist Mary Douglas.11 The paradox consists in the confounding but pervasive combination of impurity within the sacred, applicable to ritual efficacy as much as to aesthetic sublimity. Baker was one of the few black artists to control her own iconicity, ranging from the image of the “savage” in a banana skirt (presumably designed by Jean Cocteau) to the bird in a cage in the film Zouzou of 1934. In this film she is also confounding boundaries of sexual and racial ascriptions, because she refused to make herself darker, while also subversively creating a song with the following lines: “If I were white, know that my happiness [. . .] would guard its color under the sun, it’s only one’s exterior that one tans.” As far as gender is concerned, she played a male bandleader in tuxedo in the revue La Joie de Paris of 1932 at the Casino de Paris. Her most famous change of her black iconicity goes back to a picture taken by George Hoyningen-Huene in 1927 for Vogue, showing her as “Black Venus” with her face lit white while holding a long white dress in front of her black body.12 But we may find in the referencing of “Black Bottom” dancing also less savory echoes of Western spectacularizations of African bodies, such as the infamous cartoons about the “Hottentot Venus,” the unfortunate Saartje Baartman (Saartje used as infantilizing form of Sarah, scarcely ameliorating the racist context of her objectification), who was exhibited – from 1810 until her death in 1815 – at fairs in London and Paris. Her case throws a light on both, the imperialist attitudes per-

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meating physical anthropology at the beginning of the nineteenth century and on Victorian obsessions. Thus, the renowned physical anthropologist Cuvier objectified the Khoi San woman through his scientific gaze and measurements, making her a case for being almost non-human, while the particularity of the buttocks was supposed to be the sign of that “excessive sexuality” ascribed to black African bodies. The referencing of both, Saartje Baartman as well as Josephine Baker, as “Black Venus,” may easily mislead into believing it to possibly have a positive connotation through the conflation of the Greek ideal of femininity with the bodies of color.13 However, there is a difference between “provocation” and “appreciation,” since provocation against bourgeois conventions may not imply an appreciation of Africans as artists equal to the avant-gardes’ creativity. It is in the spirit that we have to read the comments by Harris and Cox on their intentions to reclaim the image of the Hottentot Venus as a way “of exploring my own psychic identification with the image at the level of spectacle.”14 It is often surprising how complex the various trajectories of projections of “otherness” may be employed: Sarah Baartman’s body peculiarities were actually used in English cartoons – not only to sensationalize or mock the African woman, but also to jeer at the supposedly large bottom of the English politician Lord Wilberforce who, among other Quakers, argued relentlessly for the abolition of slavery. The avoidance of these roots of European skewed perception when dealing with otherness, may be one of the glaring spaces of our own void in collective memory. It should be remembered that it needed the intervention of Nelson Mandela to have Sarah Baartman’s bones (as well as body parts kept in a glass vitrine filled with preserving liquids) returned – in 2002 – to her South African home and relatives for decent burial, the cultural policies of the bureaucracies of the “Musée de l’Homme” refusing such humane treatment on grounds of “scientific value.”15 Such references could have become points of dialogical engagement between Nancy and Linyekula, as the choreographer included the obvious grotesque “imitation” of the “Black Bottom” into his ballet La Création du monde (1923–2012). As the reconstructions by Archer and Hodson clearly show, the dance was accorded apparently a prominent place in the 1923 production (as was the so-called “Apache Rill” and “Charleston”).16 It may remain open to debate whether the inclusion of this “jazzy” instrumentation and tonality as well as dance is racially insulting or rather an appreciative appropriation. As far as the artistic creators of the ballet of 1923 are concerned, Milhaud seems to have believed that “jazz” does belong to a revolutionizing of musical modernism, but then again the revolution is introduced by Milhaud, not by an African-American jazz musician.17 Appropriations often seem to stay within the orbit of hegemonial cultural politics, “peripheries” having to circle the “centre” (the dominant colonial power’s hegemonial view on cultural creativity).18

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Fig. 2: Green Wing Bird and Block Man Fetishist, the Birds and Fetishists were distinguished by different costumes but not named in 1923 production; role titles by Hodson & Archer for reconstruction in 2000. Pen and ink drawing by Millicent Hodson, 2000: animation of original costume sketch by Fernand Léger, showing how figures can move in reconstructed sculptural costumes, made with more pliable materials than the wood and card structures in 1923. Costume reconstruction by Kenneth Archer 2000; © Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer.

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It seems almost too much to believe that the three artistic collaborators – Milhaud, Léger and Börlin apparently having spent many a night discussing the performance – were trying to convince a gullible public that the ballet in 1923 represented “African” worldviews or lifestyles, when every Parisian bourgeois was clearly au fait with the geographies of jazz and also familiar with the places where one could enjoy such thrills in bars and dance halls. Yet it remains remarkable how the ballet of 1923 combined two jarring or contradictory images about Africa. On the one hand, we have the mentioned “Black Bottom” and related dance forms to cater to the imaginary of the effervescence of a body expressing an “instinctual” or “natural” joie de vivre or rampant sensuality and unbridledness, full of that “force” which was much bandied about in the early twentieth century philosophical circles. References were made from the late nineteenth century onwards on the l’âme nègre (with a similar spectrum of allusions as adhere to the self-ascription of African-American “soul” musical traditions), getting its philosophical crown through the élan vital of Henri Bergson’s work of 1907. The notion did re-appear in German anthropological works on sub-Saharan African life independently in the writings of German anthropologist Leo Frobenius who invoked for Sub-Saharan African ethnicities the notion of a direct artistic and somatic expressivity of life’s immediacy and its effervescent forces, taking a clue from the “philosophy of life” developed by Ludwig Klages who distinguished between attitudes emphasizing “soul” and those stressing “the mind.”19 Acknowledging both “sources,” the idea was hailed positively by the African-Caribbean movement of “negritude” in the Paris of the 1930s, becoming transformed through Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906– 2001) into the new cultural philosophy for a whole continent after he became president of independent Senegal in 1960, keeping this office until 1980.20 On the other hand, we find in the ballet the image of an Edenic and rather elegiac peaceful coexistence between humans and animals, both generating from plant life or its central symbol, the tree of life, the pristine image as reverse side of the coin, catering to the idea of “simple” life; “primitive,” “folk” or “peasant” becoming exchangeable ciphers for a perception (not only of an avant-garde) that felt that with the First World War, Europe had spent itself not only politically but also as cultural innovator. Today, we may find it irritating that from the first decade of the twentieth century onwards, salvation was expected from the combination of a machine-oriented mechanical modernism and folk cultural traditions.21 This is certainly most apparent among the artistic collaborators of Le sacre du printemps of 1913 who looked for a pre-Christian root of Russian paganism as reviving force, but also wanted to excel in a futurism surpassing Western, meaning in that case French, modernism such as cubism. At the same time, in the early 1920s, we find the experimentations with machine designs and the cinematic apparatus in the

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ballet constructions of Fernand Léger, Picabia or Oskar Schlemmer. The mechanistic designs of Léger for the ballet of 1923 which, as Linyekula remarked in a discussion, are negating the body of the dancer, and therefore not completely at odds with avant-garde experimentations of that period (the cinematic translation of it still to be marveled at in the productions of Charlie Chaplin as much as in the movies of Vertov or Eisenstein). The trope of the worn-out cultural capital is of course used by the protagonists of “primitivism” from Picasso onwards, when he painted “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907 after having been introduced through mediations by Matisse and Gertrude Stein to pieces of African carvings.22 The question of course would be, arguing along Linyekula’s perception of the erasure of his identity by having to look at Africa through European eyes, what would be left artistically to continue for the Fang of Gabon, as a Fang mask was appropriated by Picasso for his revolutionizing painting of 1907? Should they imitate Picasso? We shall encounter the Fang again, as they loom large in the mental universe of Cendrars and in the narrative of the ballet of 1923.23 To the problems surrounding the sources for the imagination and creativity of European artists of the primitivist era starting around 1905, we do well to remember that Léger in his design of African divinities on the backstage curtains for the ballet of 1923 copied extensively from the plates of Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik of 1915, published in French as La sculpture africaine in 1922, by just stenciling it through an overlaid paper.24

Circumambulation I: Who Is Encircling Whom? We are confronted with a ballet of two dozen white dancers, being “encircled” in the first part by one African dancer/actor/speaker who in the second part of Linyekula’s choreography becomes the central figure of affective concentration. We may indeed wonder what this circumambulation possibly signifies. The introduction of a black dancer/actor to circumambulate the stage, to unroll pieces of cloth being used as backdrop, setting in motion the stage machinery to pull up the huge back- and side-curtains of the original cloth designs by Léger, can be interpreted as the weaving of a net. It seems to me to be more to the point to interpret it as an “ensorcelling” through unseen ropes being wound around the stage, around the other dancers, around the figures of Léger, around the story and its original performance, and around us, the spectators, as well. This circumambulation sets in motion the machinery for the ballet’s decor, and it therefore also makes the Congolese dancer a kind of “puppet-master” who in the end, the second part of the re-enactment, lets the whole ensemble of original divine, human, and animal figures of the 1923 ballet-structure move from the back to the front of the

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stage, like a still photo becoming a slow-motion film, a moving citation or pastiche, meticulously adhering to the reconstructed designs. The choreography of the reenactment may thus metaphorically be read as “ensorcelling,” but also as an undoing of a spell, by uncovering finally what phantasy has captivated the European imagination for so long: the chimaera of an Africa as wishful projection of European deeply felt desires not coming to the surface in daily discourse. This exotistic and eroticized phantasy was covering the void – perceived as a lack of vitality through European self-awareness –, actually feeling stifled by Victorian bourgeois standard conventions of bodily restrictedness. However, Linyekula is also pointing to another void, one of memory, the forgetting or remaining silent about the slaughter in the colonies going at the same period of high imperialism, the fantastic Africa on the stage covering over the unacknowledged violence to others, an acknowledgement of which may have also led either to feelings of guilt or to a trauma. As the dancer unravels the hidden theatrical machinery and “unpacks” the contraptions of Léger from cargo-chests behind the dancers, he also unpacks the “story behind” the dazzling surface of the ballet of 1923. The “unravelling” of a story and a “design,” this circumambulation with the cloths used in the stage setting is indeed an unveiling, a bringing into a visible focus its constructedness, its artificiality, its theatricality, and the mimetic impulses informing European artists in the period of modernism. The choreographer and the dancer thus are showing the European mimetic desire in a form of a meta-mimetic performance, which includes a mockery of another European mimetic desire: the meta-mimetic reference to the “Black Bottom” dance having been part of the choreography of the 1923 design of Börlin and Léger’s drawings, he is mocking the European mimicry of “African,” as well as of “African-American” dance styles pervading the public performance venues of the time. Choreographer and dancer are now making fun of us, the audience, by asking a provocative question at the end of the first part of the ballet’s re-constitution: the Congolese dancer having finished with his hipthrowing slow-motion echoing of a “Black Bottom” shuffle, the curtain falling upon the darkened and silent stage, he comes back from the edge of the curtain, asking us mockingly: “Hey, why don’t you clap? You normally used to applaud here!” This put the audience at the premiere evening in Düsseldorf indeed into a bit of an uneasy quandary: some spectators were laughing and clapping then, some had hesitatingly clapped at the end of his cake-walk. Now, the joker was out in the open: “See there, you people, that is what you normally and in the past admired so about ‘African’ dancing.” The re-constitution of the original props may also be taken as a metaphoric reference to the trail which the choreographer had to hack his way through to uncover the hidden racialized agenda of a narrative suggesting the image of Africa that Europeans concocted during the very period, when the

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continent was literally cut to pieces to be thrown to the devouring wolves, the different European imperial regimes, while the author of the narrative, Cendrars (1887–1961), literally “devoured” the already forged collations of another “cultural cannibal,” the missionary Henri-L. Trilles (1866–1949) who put the myth of the cannibalistic Fang on paper.

Finally, Cendrars The extent to which this hybrid ballet erases any inkling of the genuine African origins is somewhat stunning as the story of Cendrars is only now being investigated in regard to his effacing of the very traces for which he was claiming to be an expert, initiating conferences on African oral traditions.25 Cendrars indeed used the tales and narratives of mythical origins by the major ethnic group in Gabon, the Fang, for his Anthologie nègre published with great accolade, though scarcely acknowledging that most of the tales were actually taken from the published work of the missionary Henri-L. Trilles. Trilles had lived in Gabon off and on from 1893–1907, publishing his Contes et légendes fang du Gabon in 1905. Trilles in turn has been found to cobble together, for his own aggrandizement and for Christianity’s superiority over “heathen” tales, a number of oral traditions from different speakers and different regions – adjusting the stories to a Biblical tradition, such as a divine “trinity” and the opposition of good and evil forces in paradise.26 Particularly galling is the fact that Trilles introduces a fake genesis (not used in the ballet) which puts black against white in an original creation time; the black ancestor, being “lazy” in responding to the divinity’s commands, is punished to drudging work to make a living, while the white ancestor is rewarded with all the goods of the earth, because he “obeyed” the divine commands. Trilles also implies that he heard the Fang tell him in Gabon and in the Cameroons of their descent from a Nilotic tribal group which through cannibalism literally “munched” its way to their present territory. Thus, Trilles has “left an indelible if controversial mark on the Gabonese ethnographic field,”27 as most of his writings are now more or less the source for Gabonese storytellers, and he is as admired for his salvaging of an ancient tradition among modern Gabonese folklore and anthropological fieldworkers. For Gabonese indigenous storytellers as much as for folklorists gathering their tales, the myth of a Nilotic origin (implying the descent from Egyptian “high” culture) is a strongly held belief, and with it the esteem of Trilles among Gabonese scholars has gone up. At the end of his career, Trilles took on the airs of a connoisseur of matters of “genuine African religion” and enjoyed to be taken as a reliable source. One of the luminaries falling for his expertise was the Viennese anthropologist Fa-

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ther Wilhelm Schmidt who believed in the linguistic abilities of Trilles, purporting to have a sound knowledge of the language of the pygmies.28 This means indeed that much of what was supposed to have been the oral tradition of the colonized in the huge geographical region of French Central Africa has literally been “erased” by a “cultural cannibal” whose tales about cannibalism seem to point to his own unconscious awareness about what he was doing through his writing. As Cinnamon sums it up: Trilles was a “mythomaniac, plagiarizer, forger, and novelist manqué as scientific expert.”29 Cendrars in turn, as plagiarizer of the work of Trilles, was apparently regarded highly by Apollinaire, was an assistant to the cinematographer Abel Gance and tried in vain to sell his scripts to Hollywood. He produced several novels, and one remarkably misogynist work (Moravagine of 1926), showing a blatant tendentiousness for assigning particularly derogatory roles to female ancestors in the reinscripted African myths, thereby revealing much of his personally held beliefs about women. His own airs of imitating Baudelaire and Rimbaud were considered forms of grandiloquence, as was his blustering loudmouthing in public, raising his left arm (having lost his right arm in the war), intimating a certain “anarchist” orientation. This form of anarchism which we would nowadays clearly and justifiably subsume under forms of a fascist orientation, comes to the fore in those concepts which he associated with “the new mankind”: seamen, soldiers, mulattoes, “le bon nègre,” missionaries, hybrids and the insane, and of course explorers as “trailblazers.” The English term seems to fit metaphorically rather well, as Cendrars took this pseudonym with an allusion to the term ashes (cendres), describing perfectly what explorers like Henry Morton Stanley – highly esteemed by Cendrars – were actually doing, namely blazing trails (in this case for the genocidal Leopold II of Belgium). Cendrars found Stanley’s heroism to rest on his merits to write down at night the myths and legends of those indigenous people he would have massacred in daytime!30 One can imagine Linyekula’s ire, as his hometown Kisangani was formerly called Stanleyville. In one of his monologic performance musings, Linyekula refers to this problem of “naming” for an identity: “Who am I, Leopold II-Lumumba-Mobutu”? Cendrars’ mischievousness comes clearly to the fore in his interaction with the choreographer Börlin. Cendrars, in his autobiographical notes, prides himself for having told Börlin: “Mon vieux, tu ne sais pas danser,” continuing with the following “congratulatory” note: “with your feet of a Swedish peasant” – we would have to interpret this as meaning something like “you clodhopper” – “you are the veritable antipode to the Ballets Russes, you are putting topsy-turvy the traditions

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of French ballet.” He ends with the following adulation: “You are on the same plane as the seamen, the mulattoes, the ‘nègres,’ the ‘savages.’”31 Interestingly, Börlin did fit another prejudicial image about the dance styles of indigenous populations from various regions of the world at that time. He performed in the early 1920s, adorned with mask and grass-skirting, a “ritual dance” which was apparently very slow and elegantly languid, while at the same time containing jarring movements of arms and legs. The reconstruction by Archer and Hodson seems indeed to follow these contrasting style elements in its dance dramaturgy, shifting between soft and energetic movements. Contrastingly and confusingly, Börlin was as well known for his innovative style of modernism, stressing the very geometrical and gyrating body forms, otherwise related to the so called “jazzy” style. This geometric jaggedness of bodies can easily be retrieved by reference to such ballets as Skating Rink of 1922 with the music of Arthur Honegger, or René Clair’s film Relâche of 1924, being a retake of a theatrical interlude of Erik Satie’s Entr’Acte (designed in the same year by Francis Picabia). We find here the confusing co-emergence of ideas about modernism that combine the mechanical or robotic quality of a body being steered by unknown forces from the inside or the outside, conflating it unfortunately with the image of socalled “natural” peoples, the “naturalness” of non-Europeans (and of “original mankind”).

Ironic Synchronicity and Aftermath: René Maran and Mario Vargas Llosa The irony of the whole story is the fact that his work Anthologie nègre of 1921 became such a hit not only in France, but also among African-American writers who preferred his work for some time to that of a genuine African author: René Maran’s Batouala, subtitled as “véritable roman nègre,”32 became the first African novel to be awarded the Prix Goncourt in the same year. Maran, hailing from French Guiana, lived, following his father, as a colonial officer in parts of what was then the huge area of French Central African colonial possessions. But critically parting from that service before World War I, he reported on daily life, on the atrocious conditions and the forced labor as well as on rituals, quarrels and self-destructive activities among indigenous people. Maran also was one of the few truly committed mediators making African-American literature available in France, in turn being celebrated by Alain Locke as well as Langston Hughes among others, advocating that his works be translated in the United States in 1927.33

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The other irony connected to criticism of colonial misrule castigated by Maran is the fact that the atrocities of colonialism are denied as propaganda until now by almost all former colonial powers. Concerning the Congo region, the film by Peter Bate of 2003 with the title White King, Red Rubber, Black Death, aired on most European channels, was accused by the Belgian Foreign Office as being full of “malignant lies.” The film, however, is only confirming the facts that Roger Casement had, as British envoy in French Equatorial Africa, recorded for his famous Casement Report34 of 1905, upon which the Belgian government saw itself forced to take the Congo from King Leopold II who had ruled this closed cosmos as a private property after the Berlin Congo Conference of 1885. Leopold had a private army of 16.000 mercenaries kill and suppress the population into forced labor, hacking off hands and feet if they did not bring in the required quota of liquid rubber. The human cost of this regime can be estimated from vague census reports that estimate for the 1880s a population of about 20 million people, but for 1908 show only maximally 10 million inhabitants. Not surprisingly, a Nobel Prize writer from a former colonial region, Vargas Llosa, is the first to publish this data in recent times,35 including the second Casement Report of 1911 on similar atrocities being committed on the Putumayo River by rubber barons in Peru. A final bitter irony seems to be the fact that no punishment for such human rights violations has been meted out, nor even an apology uttered by any parties in charge, while the only “revenge” was publicly taken when an unknown anticolonial activist group chopped off the right hand of the huge statue of Leopold in Tervuren, the location of the Colonial Museum. Peter Bate, however, also showed in his film, through interviews with young people on the street, what they thought about Leopold. He received the answer that Leopold brought “civilization” and “modernity” to the Congo region. The removal of Leopold’s statue in Kinshasa therefore also proves the ambiguity inherent in any form of historical erasure: while the youths may not have known better, as they had learned this through indoctrination in French schools, an older man who had lived trough the colonial period remarked that he found the removal of the statue to a scrapyard justified. He remembered that during the time he was growing up, he was told to always pass the statue of Leopold II behind the horse’s tail – passing in front would have been an “insult” to the “god-king” – and he recalls that even now, many decades later, he still can smell the gaseous farting of the bonze horse, even though he knew that that was a chimaeric imagination.

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A Coda of “Self-Subversion” The intervention by Faustin Linyekula is certainly alerting us to re-trace our own “white spaces” or voids in the collective Eurocentric artistic memory, making the former colonial geographical representation into an apt metaphor for joint endeavors to re-“member” by giving Europeans and their “Others” their inextricably entwined identities back through awakening their/our body-memories, being affectively “moved” by our mutually dependent inter-actions. What better potential to awaken us from our lazy slumber and the amnesiac tendency of admiring again and again some “authentic” re-performances of avant-garde positions, than garnering unmediated affective resonances to bodies in pain (or in ecstasy for that matter), through “re-sensing” body memories? May we not thereby arrive potentially at that form of “recollection” which Socrates considered the aim of dialogical encounters (“anamnesis,” recollection, replacing the “amnesia,” forgetfulness)? Could this interactional attitude not also undermine or put into question the traditional prioritizing the authority of the reflexive mind over the body-in-motion, the unfortunate overwriting of the living dialogicity of Socrates through Plato’s universe of ideas and ideals, which denounced the body as a “grave for the mind”?36 What Linyekula is presenting to us in his re-staging of La création du monde of 1923 goes beyond the titling of the performance as La Création du monde (1923– 2012). It is a veritable journey to the core of modern European ideas, ideologies and imageries about “nature,” “primitive,” “savage,” “African” and about the connections of these notions to those of “body,” “desire,” and “eros.” Nevertheless, I want to add a note of caution to the attempts of “finding the authentic self” through a project of “cleansing” the body of poisonous accretions with which I started my discursive explorations. “Cleansing” and “contaminations” have become dangerous concepts in a world full of internecine strife, leading easily to geno- and fratricidal atrocities, and the insidious vocabulary of fanatic ideologies for degradations of any “otherness.” These appellations would lead us concretely away from Levinas’s advocacy of “jouissance” as the aim of “interactionality” as much as from Kurt Wolff’s advice to “surrender” to the humaneness of the “other,” meaning “each other.” The aim of this attitude was, for Wolff, not the “losing” of our selves in mimetic merger, but the “finding” of these selves in encountering and acknowledging difference.37 A timely reminder for this is my recollection of a conversation with Ashis Nandy who valiantly maintained his stance against fundamentalist criticism in India, that he should cleanse himself of his “British inheritance,” countering by saying that it would not be possible as this very attitude would splinter his identity for good and thus actually create a false consciousness. I think Linyekula is far from falling into the trap of this fallacy, as he included in the re-enactment the memories of his own personal and collective

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experience, referencing home and exile at the same time, making us aware of the potentialities of “hovering” in and “in-between” a condition without claiming superiority for that position. But he invites us to experience, resonate with and then begin to cognitively engage with bodies that have scars, traumatized bodies, fragile bodies, and bodies in pain, thus becoming our “remembrancer” for recollections about our history, easily forgotten or overwritten by spectacular performative events catering to our own narcissistic and nostalgic inclination.

Notes   1 Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson are calling their reconstruction “a recreation” of a “Post-War Cubist Collage.” See Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson, “La Création du Monde – A Post-War Cubist Collage Returns to the Stage,” DanceTabs, last accessed 10 March 2016, http://dancetabs.com/2012/05/la-creation-du-monde-a-post-war-cubistcollage-returns-to-the-stage/.   2 Linyekula himself admitted that he was alerted through a work by the French anthropologist, specialist in Afro-Caribbean dance-styles, Sylvie Chalaye, Du Noir au nègre: l’image du Noir au théâtre de Marguerite de Navarre à Jean Genet (1550–1960) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). The book received the Prix Georges-Jamati.   3 Faustin Linyekula, “Artist Talk,” Walker Art Center, last accessed 20 June 2016, http:// www.walkerart.org/calendar/2011/artist-talk-faustin-linyekula.  4 Ibid.   5 See also the transcription of Linyekula’s presentation in the present volume: “An Artist/ Activist Moving (Across) Borders,”, pp. 135–49.   6 On “négrophilie” and its ramifications, see Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: AvantGarde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2000), critically amplified by Theresa Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).   7 The figure 1 by Millicent Hodson shows a clear reference to the imagery of Baker’s performances, as depicted by the posters of Paul Colin. See Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 132.  8 Ibid.   9 Ibid., 131. 10 Ibid., 7. 11 See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Abingdon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

74 | Klaus-Peter Köpping 12 For the photograph of the “Black Venus” by George Hoyningen-Huene, see JulesRosette, Josephine Baker, 24; for the photograph of Baker as band leader, see ibid., 67. The renowned adage of “Black Venus” covers such divers figures as the “muse” of Baudelaire, the Haitian born Jeanne Duval, the infamous display of Sarah Baartman, as well as Josephine Baker and, most recently, the empowering photographic staging of Renée Cox by Lyle Ashton Harris (1994), titled “Venus Hottentot 2000” in the series of prints labeled “The good life.” See Deborah Willis, ed., Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010). 13 See critical essays on this issue in ibid., the cover showing the performance artist Renée Cox, subverting the European dominant gaze by donning shiny golden metal breasts and buttock molds; see footnote 12; a cinematic docu-fiction was produced by Abdellatif Kechiche in 2010 on the life of Baartman as Venus Noire. 14 Lyle Ashton Harris, in “Artists’ dialogue,” The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1996), 150. 15 The first critical appraisal of this racist history of anthropological museum practices found around the globe came as late as 1982, through the publication by Gould. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981). 16 It may be noteworthy that the term “Apache Dance,” appearing in the choreographic score for the ballet of 1923, has nothing whatsoever to do with African origins: it is instead a well-documented (in early cinematic versions) form of what one could call a “gender-fighting-dance” of the French working class that was famous for its violent throws and kicks as well as full-body slidings and whirlings on the floor at the hands of the partner, women as well as men, changing places of being thrown or throwing the other. The use of the term “Apache” for the urban nomad (meaning more or less the bohemian artist gallery flaneur) from Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin is another matter. “Apache” was used in nineteenth century Paris for rival gangs. The dance may have a metaphoric reference to the fight between pimps and prostitutes. The dance descriptions of “rill” and “spin” were applied to a great variety of dances in the early nineteenth century. 17 Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) experimented early with African-Brazilian musical styles when he was secretary to Paul Claudel at the French embassy in Brazil from 1917–1919. In 1922 he visited a number of jazz clubs in Harlem. See Darius Milhaud, Notes without Music: An Autobiography (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1970). 18 In regard to the obvious love for exoticisms of Milhaud and the interphases between modernism and folk traditions in musical styles, it must be remembered that Brubeck actually studied with Milhaud. 19 On Frobenius see Eike Haberland, ed., Leo Frobenius on African History, Art and Culture: An Anthology, pref. Léopold Sédar Senghor (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007); Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (Bonn: Bouvier,

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1929). Leo Frobenius’s (1873–1938) use of the term “paideuma” (Greek for “education,” here implying the expression of a “folk spirit”) as close denotation for an “African soul” dates back to 1921 in volume 4 of his Erlebte Erdteile [Experienced Continents], his expeditions across Africa going back to 1904 (the seven volumes were published in 1915). Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) became better known for his work on graphology. 20 For Senghor’s high esteem of Frobenius, see Senghor in Eike Haberland, ed., Leo Frobenius on African History, Art and Culture: An Anthology, pref. Léopold Sédar Senghor (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007). On Negritude’s various strands, see Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Négritude,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, last accessed 6 July 2016, http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/negritude/. Senghor’s literary exposition of negritude started with his Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948). 21 The “robot” coming into its own, through multiple references to Czech artistic and particularly cinematic ventures, with echoes of a Golem, as well as to Fritz Lang’s depiction of workers in his Metropolis, the female robot becoming an icon of the century while the concepts of work and worker are in Slavic languages related to root words like “robotnik.” 22 See William Rubin, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). 23 On Picasso’s “discovery” of primitivism through African sculptures, see Jean Laude, La peinture française (1905–1914) et “l’art nègre”: Contribution à l’étude des sources du fauvisme et du cubisme (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968); Patricia Dee Leighten, “The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism,” The Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 609–30. 24 Reported by Jean Laude; see Jean Laude, Les arts de l’afrique noire, postscript Hannes Böhringer (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1990), 158; see also Laura Rosenstock, “Léger ‘The Creation of the World,’” in Rubin, Primitivism, 480. We find there on page 479 also a photo of Börlin in his choreographic stance of a “primitive,” adorned with grass-skirt and a mask taken from the catalogue of photographies by Carl Einstein. 25 Having spent not more than a few days on the soil of that continent; see Carole Maccotta, “Politics of Adaptation in Anthologie Nègre by Blaise Cendrars and the Ballet La Création du Monde” (PhD diss., University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011). 26 Trilles was openly involved in combining missionizing efforts with the colonial strategy on a government led expedition to the borders of the Cameroons in 1899, having the objective to explore the unknown boundary regions between German and French colonial domains through the ruse of “ethnographic” and Christianizing endeavors. 27 See John M. Cinnamon, “Fieldwork, Orality, Text: Ethnographic and Historical Fields of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Gabon,” History in Africa 38 (2011): 55.

76 | Klaus-Peter Köpping 28 Trilles’ publication Les Pygmées de la forêt équatoriale had an introduction by R. P. Schmidt, director of the Musée pontifical du Latran; see Henri-L. Trilles, Les Pygmées de la forêt équatoriale (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1932). 29 John M. Cinnamon, “Missionary Expertise, Social Science, and the Uses of Ethnographic Knowledge in Colonial Gabon,” History in Africa 33 (2006): 423. 30 Cited in Maccotta, “Politics of Adaptation,” 146ff. 31 Cited in Blaise Cendrars, “Hommage à Jean Börlin,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 10, ed. Claude Leroy (Paris: Denoël, 2005), 123 [translated by the author]. 32 René Maran, Batouala – Véritable roman nègre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1921). 33 See Michel Fabre, “Rene Maran, The New Negro and Negritude,” Phylon 36, no. 3 (1975): 340–51. See also Mercer Cook, “René Maran,” The French Review 17, no. 6 (1944): 157–9. 34 Roger Casement, “Casement Report,” Internet Archive, last accessed 4 May 2016, https://archive.org/details/CasementReport. 35 Mario Vargas Llosa, The Dream of the Celt, trans. Edith Grossman (London: Faber & Faber, 2012). 36 See Klaus-Peter Köpping, “Anamnesis,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1987), 253–61. 37 See Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987); Kurt H. Wolff, Surrender and Catch: Experience and Inquiry Today (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976).

Bibliography Archer, Kenneth, and Millicent Hodson. “La Création du Monde – A Post-War Cubist Collage Returns to the Stage.” DanceTabs. Last accessed 10 March 2016. http://dancetabs.com/2012/05/la-creation-du-monde-a-post-war-cubistcollage-returns-to-the-stage/. Archer-Straw, Petrine. Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Casement, Roger. “Casement Report.” Internet Archive. Last accessed 4 May 2016. https://archive.org/details/CasementReport. Chalaye, Sylvie. Du Noir au nègre: L’image du Noir au théâtre de Marguerite de Navarre à Jean Genet (1550–1960). Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998. Cendrars, Blaise. “Anthologie Nègre.” In Œuvres completes, vol. 10, edited by Claude Leroy. Paris: Denoël, 2005. —. “Hommage à Jean Börlin.” In Œuvres complètes, vol. 10., edited by Claude Leroy. Paris: Denoël, 2005.

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—. “Moravagine.” In Œuvres complètes, vol. 7, edited by Jean-Carlo Flückiger. Paris: Denoël, 2003. Cinnamon, John M. “Fieldwork, Orality, Text: Ethnographic and Historical Fields of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Gabon.” History in Africa 38 (2011): 47–77. —. “Missionary Expertise, Social Science, and the Uses of Ethnographic Knowledge in Colonial Gabon.” History in Africa 33 (2006): 413–32. Cook, Mercer. “René Maran.” The French Review 17, no. 6 (1944): 157–9. Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. “Négritude.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. Last accessed 6 July 2016. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/negritude/. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Abingdon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Fabre, Michel. “Rene Maran, The New Negro and Negritude.” Phylon 36, no. 3 (1975): 340–51. Frobenius, Leo. Erlebte Erdteile: Ergebnisse eines deutschen Forscherlebens. Frankfurt/M.: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, 1929. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981. Haberland, Eike, ed. Leo Frobenius on African History, Art and Culture: An Anthology. Preface by Léopold Sédar Senghor. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007. Internet Archive. “Casement Report.” Last accessed 4 May 2016. https://archive. org/details/CasementReport. Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Klages, Ludwig. Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele. Bonn: Bouvier, 1929. Köpping, Klaus-Peter. “Anamnesis.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 1, edited by Mircea Eliade, 253–61. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1987. Laude, Jean. La peinture française (1905–1914) et “l’art nègre”: Contribution à l’étude des sources du fauvisme et du cubisme. Paris: Klincksieck, 1968. —. Les arts de l’afrique noire. Postscript by Hannes Böhringer. Paris: Librairie générale française, 1990. Leighten, Patricia Dee. “The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism.” The Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 609–30. Leininger-Miller, Theresa. New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Lévinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other and Additional Essays. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987.

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Maran, René. Batouala – Véritable roman nègre. Paris: Albin Michel, 1921. Maccotta, Carole. “Politics of Adaptation in Anthologie Nègre by Blaise Cendrars and the Ballet La Création du Monde.” PhD diss., University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011. Milhaud, Darius. Notes without Music: An Autobiography. New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1970. Read, Alan, ed. The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1996. Rosenstock, Laura. “Léger ‘The Creation of the World’.” In “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, edited by William Rubin, 475–486. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1984. Rubin, William. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1984. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948. Trilles, Henri-L. Les Pygmées de la fôret équatoriale. Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1932. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Dream of the Celt. Translated by Edith Grossman. London: Faber & Faber, 2012. Willis, Deborah, ed. Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot.” Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010. Wolff, Kurt H. Surrender and Catch: Experience and Inquiry Today. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976.

The Global Politics of Faustin Linyekula’s Dance Theater From Congo to Berlin and Back Again via Brussels and Avignon Sabine Sörgel

Faustin Linyekula and Studios Kabako, Kisangani Faustin Linyekula grew up in Kisangani, in the north of ex-Zaire – today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He is the son of a Catholic father, who enrolled in a Belgian missionary school, and grandson to an African mulenge (traditional healer). Linyekula considers himself a contemporary choreographer who chooses from various sources including dance, theater, poetry, and mime in order to convey stories about his personal life and experience. He received his first formal theater training at L’Atelier Théâtral du Centre Kisangani (1991–93), which spurred an interest in exploring a career in the field. Linyekula’s life and early career were marked by years of travelling and migration, when Zaire under Mobutu’s late dictatorship became an increasingly dangerous and difficult place to live and work. Linyekula first migrated to Nairobi. Living as a clandestine migrant worker, however, he was soon arrested by the police and pushed out of the country, back to the frontiers of Zaire. In Goma, Linyekula found himself without money and started on a second voyage via Central Africa to the Western Coast. On his journey west, he stopped in Kigali, Rwanda, only six months after the genocide.1 This site of war and horror became a key moment, which would forever redefine Linyekula’s concept of the form and function of his work in theater:

80 | Sabine Sörgel The function of art, that of representation, concerns the creation of visibility – an image, differences, those windows to open up realities for a world enclosed by too much ignorance.2

For one of his first theater projects, Linyekula directed Hamlet with American employees of the International Court of Justice. Again, he was expelled from the country, apparently this time because his artistic vision could not pass as politically correct under the tense circumstances. Linyekula’s travels continued, and thus nomadism as a mode of life in dislocation would shape his way of creating art from the vestiges of ruins throughout his career. After several years in exile, Linyekula returned to Nairobi in 1997, where he met Opiyo Okach and Affrah Tanemberg. That same year, they founded Gaàra, the first African contemporary dance company in Kenya. Their first piece of choreography, Cleansing (1998), presented a creation at the crossroads of theater and mime, which explored the spectrum of cleansing gestures and purification in the context of the Rwandan genocide.3 Cleansing won the third price at the second Interafrican Dance Competition and toured France soon after. However, Linyekula mistrusted such a quick route to success, and he left the company only a few months later in order to continue his own nomadic travels through Réunion, Slovenia, Kenya, and South Africa. In 2000, he was invited to perform at the prestigious Vienna Summer Dance Festival, for which he created Tales Off the Mud Wall, an early collaboration with South African contemporary dancer Gregory Maqoma, that successfully resisted the festival’s stereotypic suggestion to create a piece on HIV, poverty, or war. At this point in their careers, both choreographers realized the importance of their collaborative work to position contemporary dance as a transnational cultural force with the hope that their touring would eventually allow for the funding and international recognition necessary to develop projects in their own countries. In 2001, Faustin Linyekula finally returned to Kinshasa to set up Studios Kabako – more of a community arts center and creative platform than a traditional dance company. Studios Kabako commemorate Kabako, a fellow artist and friend of Linyekula’s who died from the plague, indeed that anachronistic disease, at the end of the twentieth century. The two friends had planned to meet each other in Nairobi, but it was only Linyekula who managed to get there. Studios Kabako opened their first dance season with Spectacularly Empty – a reflection on returning home and that perplexing notion of the void at the center of Congolese cultural identity.4 Linyekula describes the scope of this artistic center: As for our Studios, they are not exactly speaking a space as such, this we don’t really have yet, but a mental space, for research, for doubts, for exchanges, a nomadic

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space which installs itself here and there, a certain manner of creating with what is there, of composing with those contexts and singular environments5

Work at Studios Kabako, now located in a new arts center in Kisangani, presents an embodied aesthetics of urbanization more typical of today’s African mega-cities than the false romanticism of clichéd images of rural deserts. As Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian of the Congo, describes: There is something deeply urban about the work of Faustin Linyekula. The received idea that the third world is predominantly the universe of emerald rainforests and ochre savannahs, sparsely dotted with cosy mud houses, is readily surpassed by today’s figures of the radical urbanization taking place in South East Asia, SouthAmerica and sub-Saharan Africa. Happening at a speed and a scale unseen in the West before, in Africa it results [in] bustling, humongous cities like Lagos, Cairo, Gauteng (the agglomeration of Johannesburg and Pretoria) and Kinshasa. This urbanity surfaces in the material culture of Faustin’s stage. Among his favourite props are the neon light and the sheets of corrugated iron, reminiscent of the shantytowns of Africa’s brutal urban sprawl. [. . .] Yet his vision on African-style urbanization is not pitiful or naïve. He accepts the urban condition as a given.6

As a dancer who provocatively considers himself African, yet decidedly not an “African Dancer,” Linyekula rebels against stereotypical representations of African identity. His choreography departs from earlier notions of African independence and Négritude, which he finds limiting. In that sense, he also considers Alphonse Thierou’s agenda for contemporary African dance too ambitious, for he does not believe in the direct political power of dance.7 And yet, it would be hard not to understand his dance as concerned with the history and future of the country where he was born. Faustin Linyekula’s dance theater thus presents Congolese history from a more subjective perspective of embodied experience outside the parameters of nationalist discourse. This is especially relevant in a country like DRC, which has changed names and political regimes ever so often since the arrival of the first colonizers. This is a country that has been exploited for its natural resources and been at the whim of self-declared rulers in a strange and uncomfortable sequence of continuity from King Leopold II to Mobutu and the two Kabilas. Choreographing dance in such a complex historical context necessarily becomes a practice of identifying and reconstructing a part of that ruinous state of personal as well as collective memory. As Linyekula explains:

82 | Sabine Sörgel In each project, it appears that I’m trying to reconstruct some of that identity. Anselm Kiefer, the German visual artist who in his work addresses the German Nazi past, said that his creations are a space in which he tries to create a bit of order in the chaotic environment. Let’s say that I feel close to this proposition which touches me very much. Each project therefore reveals such an attempt to clarify a piece of that history. In the way that one has a state of ruins for a heritage, one seeks to build a shed, without asking if one would rather have a tent, a piece of carton or a wooden block. One takes everything that one can find, whether that’s a ritual transmitted from my grandmother, a catholic song taught by my father or Latin quotation [. . .]8

Kinaesthetic memory of the atrocities past and present is thus evoked via movement, digital projections, lighting and costume design. In an ongoing quest and exploration of Congolese history, his dance theater works seek to address the violence and trauma, but also the healing forces at work in contemporary Congolese society.9

African Contemporary Dance and the Crumbling Politics of Identity My first encounter with Faustin Linyekula’s work dates back to 2007, when Studios Kabako first performed Dinozord at the Spring Dance Festival in Utrecht, spurring the initial idea for a book project.10 Since then, my own research itinerary followed Studios Kabako from Utrecht to Berlin (HAU), via London (Southbank and Battersea Arts Centre), Paris (Théâtre national de Chaillot) and Brussels (KVS), though never to Kisangani. And yet, Kisangani and the DRC are the central focus of all of Faustin Linyekula’s performance work up until today. To some extent, I can say that my knowledge of the DRC has been solely constructed from Studios Kabako’s dance works and the further reading it inspired; I have no actual embodied experience of the Congo itself, however. My response to Linyekula’s dance theater is therefore somewhat emblematic of the response most theater audiences will have, since it is based on a deterritorialized transnational imaginary that shapes the perception of the African continent for most people who have never travelled there. In this imaginary, the African continent and its many different countries and cultures are based on stereotypical media depictions of war, hunger and disease, as well as beautiful wildlife safaris, diverse song, dance and music traditions, arts and crafts. From Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) all the way through more recent films such as War Witch (2012), the Congo has dominated the global imaginary of Africa as a continent torn apart by colonialist violence.

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The Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren in 2011, for example, still presented the “history” of Central Africa as the early history of Belgian conquest and colonization of the Congo from the first journeys by Henry Morton Stanley through the reign of King Leopold II. Up until the museum was renovated and reorganized in 2012, the exhibition presented an interesting case study of how imperialist aspirations and nineteenth century colonialism continued well into the new millennium. Just a few kilometers from the hustle and bustle of today’s seat of the European Union and a large expatriate Congolese community, Tervuren bears architectural testimony to the bygone heyday of imperialist monarchy and its lust for power. The garden design and architecture at the top of a beautiful park, reminiscent of Versailles, mirror Leopold II’s desire for geometrical order, neo-baroque glorification, self-aggrandizement and ownership. The garden and palace were meant to enhance his prestige and public recognition, just like the vast geographical territory mapped as the future Congo at a conference table in Berlin 1884/85. David Van Reybrouck’s 2010 history, Congo: Een Geschiedenis, is an almost eight-hundred-page account of just how little we know about the country in precolonial times. Based on oral accounts, interviews, archaeological and archival findings, Reybrouck’s prize-winning research shows the entanglement of European and Congolese history all the way back to the sixteenth century and how Congolese identity since then was mostly a colonialist construction. A different perspective is presented by the literary and filmic images, museums such as Tervuren, even journalistic news-feeds, all of which compose the mixed-up knowledge and colonialist lenses that we bring to the theater as an audience. Contemporary dance, on the other hand, appears to bracket such presumed knowledge, as there remains something irrevocably alien in the encounter with the dancing body on stage. Bernhard Waldenfels describes this as the paradox of the alien experience, which is different from an experience of the so-called “Other” – as it is often encountered in the media – because it presupposes the simultaneity of relatedness and separation.11 The theatrical situation thus presents the possibility for new subjectivities to emerge by the mere fact that this is theater, which establishes its own epistemology as a critique of a capitalist-colonialist reality. Hence, Studios Kabako’s strategy creates a style of what I call nomadic performance, because it dislocates and deterritorializes Congolese politics from the actual geographic location. Deterritorialization does not only imply a spatial reconfiguration, but also refers to aesthetic interweaving of different dance vocabularies and choreographic concepts at the heart of Faustin Linyekula’s work. Nomadic performance not only presents its audiences with an assemblage of different cultural traditions as to avoid and deconstruct the stereotypical clichés historically associated with the representation of African dance on the European stage, but it also functions in order to circumvent state censorship and control at home in

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the DRC. Faustin Linyekula’s contemporary dance theater thus intervenes against stereotypical perceptions of traditional African dance forms, as his choreography and dance transposition Africanist aesthetics into a contemporary vernacular performance idiom that uses digital stage technology, sound effects and structured improvisation. As first defined by Paul Rae (2006), the cosmopolitan stage of today increasingly presents such an aesthetics of “anywhere-everywhere” so that cultural difference is almost erased – but not quite. On the surface, the contemporariness of the dance form allows somewhat easier access to work across different cultures and audiences, although it also presents a haunting surplus of non-decodable excess of culturally specific meaning. Spectators are therefore left enticed and wondering, as they have to make sense of a fundamentally alien experience, which calls upon their own affective-embodied responses that are often initially pre-verbal or which shocks our rational-intellectual minds. In that sense, then, nomadic performance as a theatrical strategy appears all the more important in this instance, because it demands that we leave behind our preconceived notions and expectations of watching African or Congolese dance in order to encounter for the first time a dance that speaks its own truth. Studios Kabako leave their audiences with an experience that demands further thought and contemplation to define the truth of a country nobody quite knows – since it exists somewhere between the history of colonialism, failed independence, civil war and the continuous greed for its abundant natural resources. The question arises, therefore: how may dance actually pierce through this poisonous legacy of colonialist discourse and appropriation? While colonialism presents layers upon layers of discursive violence surrounding the notion of “African” identity and subjectivity, dance has survived as a form of self-expression in the here and now linking several so-called traditional and contemporary forms. Similar to David Van Reybrouck’s new mode of oral history writing, Faustin Linyekula’s dance theater presents an effort to account for the global politics that underlie any construction of African dance in order to create a possible future for independent art and indeed an independent Congo to emerge at last.

Théâtre national de Chaillot Paris, Pour en finir avec Bérénice (2010) Pour en finir avec Bérénice (2010), a sequel to an earlier commission by the Comédie-Française to direct Racine’s Bérénice from a postcolonial perspective, presents Faustin Linyekula’s take on Racine’s seventeenth-century plot of imperialist longing entangled with love of the stranger and a murderous sense of honor

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and power politics. Colonialism, so the rewrite suggests, is heir to precisely such thinking of power and control of feeling, as was first discovered by the absolutist predecessors of Belgian Leopold II like Louis XIV. In Racine’s character of Titus, we find the underlying premise of a Hobbesian pessimism that conceives of human nature as a murderous play for power rather than Hegelian recognition. Rome and its promise of unknown riches loom large and prove more powerful than Titus’s love of and empathy for Bérénice. In an interview at the Festival D’Avignon in 2010, Linyekula explained his interest in taking the original production further by situating the play in Kisangani. The main focus is placed on the theme of estrangement and the othering of the other – in a Stuart-Hall-inflected postcolonial pose. Whilst Belgian colonialism has an ongoing presence in the contemporary Congolese imaginary, this violent past does not play a significant part for Belgian contemporary society. The fact that Bérénice is a classic French dramatic text is hence associated with European cultural imperialism and former colonial policy enforcing French as the official administrative language still spoken by about twenty percent of Congolese society. As a language, French represents access to the elite, whilst eighty percent of the population speak the local African languages. In the beginning of the play, the actors wear whiteface make-up and carry stones onstage to mark the performance space, which is also filled with red sand. Linyekula performs as well. He is the only dancer, and as is usual with his onstage presence, he appears to frame and comment upon the unfolding action in a post-Brechtian mode. Towards the beginning, he covers his body in red sand as if to refer to the native land, the soil of the earth out of which one is born and to which one will return. Typical for seventeenth-century neo-classical tragedy, the performance works via the entrances and exits of the three main characters who represent the postcolonial triangle between Titus, the colonizer, Bérénice, the colonized, as well as Antiochus, who is the nativist in the play. Apart from the stones and sand, very little scenery is used except for a table downstage right with three chairs on each side, a microphone upstage right, and a water basin upstage left. Again, the microphone is a key prop in Linyekula’s scenography as is the upstage projection screen for texts and images. The dramaturgy reworks Racine’s plot by inserting a parallel narrative, which relocates the entire performance from Rome to the Congo. In 1960, a Congolese professor of French named Andre Van Keulmans intends to perform Bérénice with white school children at the local secondary school to which black children do not have access. This imagined rehearsal takes place two days before Patrice Lumumba announces Congolese independence, when Van Keulmans and the white Congolese school children will lose their claim to the land and become strangers in the country of their birth. The promise of independence is again one of the

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Fig. 1: Pour en finir avec Bérénice (2010), dir. Faustin Linyekula, Studios Kabako; © Agathe Poupeney. recurring themes Linyekula’s dance theater explores by reiterating excerpts from Lumumba’s well known speeches proclaiming Congolese independence: The Republic of the Congo has been proclaimed and our beloved country is now in the hand of its children. Together my brothers and sisters we will fight a new battle, a sublime battle that will lead our country to peace and prosperity and greatness. We will establish social justice together and assure that everyone will receive the just remuneration for their work.12

Lumumba’s often quoted speech attacks the racist double-standard of colonial policy, whereby the black population was systematically segregated and denied access to public spaces such as cinemas, restaurants and certain shops, as well as higher education, administrative and managerial know-how and jobs. At the same time, though, it is also reflective of the ardent Afrocentric nationalism of the time, which was of course also part and parcel of the colonial heritage and amnesia of pre-colonial social structures and politics. The central focus is therefore placed on the issue of estrangement and alterity by investigating the changing dynamics between political allies, colonizers and colonized, as well as post-independence struggles over national identity. Bérénice thus represents an archetypal figure, a scapegoat torn between the legacy of colonialism and emancipation. It appears that the two movements partake in the same struggle for power and recognition, but the question is of course whether the

The Global Politics of Faustin Linyekula’s Dance Theater | 87

bloody sacrifice of bodies is a necessary consequence or if by the end of the evening one will come to realize that once and for all the world needs to put an end to the colonialist project. This is represented by wiping off the whiteface make-up as well as putting aside the seventeenth-century wigs. As part of the research that went into the original production for the ComédieFrançaise, Linyekula undertook his own ethnographic research by digging deep into the theater’s archive of costumes and paraphernalia used by such illustrious figures of European “director’s theater” as Klaus Michael Grüber and Benno Besson. The whole notion of cultural heritage and the classics cements the entire idea of a national theater and a national identity, culture and pride. Despite the recent efforts of decolonizing the European classical literary canons undertaken by postcolonial scholars, the architectural monuments themselves, such as the ComédieFrançaise or the Royal Museum at Tervuren, demonstrate the long-lasting perseverance of the colonialist mindset derived from the European imperialist legacy beginning with Louis XIV, Racine and the writers of the Enlightenment up to Leopold II. It seems that Linyekula unpicks the layers of colonialist violence underlying Congolese history as it is told via the deconstruction of the imperial monuments and texts he appropriates and digests to reveal their conflicted and ambivalent meanings on stage. Racine thus set up a dramatic model whereby he chose to set the scene in imperial Rome in order to address political issues close to seventeenth-century Paris, a model European countries were imitating in the later scramble for Africa where they played out their inner conflicts and competitions on foreign soil. And yet, Racine is an interesting case because he inserts the rebelliousness of the feeling and trembling body into the text. Inflected by the Racine’s own Jansenist sentiment, his characters shake and crumble underneath the epistemological violence of the seventeenth-century rationalist rhetoric. One may thus read a slight skepticism between the lines to allow actors and audiences a space to breathe through and contemplate some of the musical quality of the rhyme. This is where Linyekula steps in with a contemporary sensibility, as his nomadic performance strategy uncovers the lineage that rewrites European imperialist history inflicted upon a country which never fully marked a history of its own. Consequently, the performance begins with a symbolic stoning and sacrifice of the half-naked trembling body (Faustin Linyekula) upstage left. In fact, the initial trembling introduces one of the recurring movement motifs throughout the performance as well as in other works by Studios Kabako. Linyekula describes how this initial derivation occurred to him while working on Racine’s classical text: All the dramatic action is clearly outlined. But inbetween the words themselves, one word reoccurs all the time: the verb “trembling.” I asked the actors in Bérénice

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Fig. 2: Pour en finir avec Bérénice (2010), dir. Faustin Linyekula, Studios Kabako; © Agathe Poupeney.

to think about this word and what causes them to tremble in their lives. What is this kind of vague silencing before the monumental that makes the body act, speak, and that brings forth language? The choreographic dimension of my work places itself inside this simple movement, almost invisible; this physical state that affects the way of articulation, of emotions, decisions, the words themselves. That’s the trembling.13

Linyekula thus points towards the inherent conflict between body and mind in Racine’s play, which is emblematic of a European history split in the seventeenth century between felt realities and decisions of the rational mind. The monarch’s lust for worldly power replaced earlier beliefs of the God-given universe so that the absolute monarch saw himself not only in control of his own emotions, but also in control of the lives and deaths of his people. By means of the dancer’s symbolic sacrifice, the entire performance reworks the textual violence by confronting imperialist rhetoric with the reality of the dancing body on stage. In a way, the performance suggests that we read the dramaturgy alongside choreography. In particular, the performance suggests that we understand Linyekula’s dance as intervening in and disturbing the hegemony of the textual master narrative throughout the production. As he declared in an interview given at the Festival D’Avignon,14 the dancer’s role in the piece is to survive the sacrifice and become a symbolic savior. The dancing body is a crucial framing device, as we experience the violence of the play in the body’s reaction, trembling, falling, exasperated jumps (“Hélas!”). Bérénice becomes the tragic lens through

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which colonial power politics are dismantled, and the dance accounts for an indigenous history that has been sacrificed, yet which survives at the same time. The music and dance thereby serve as a space to breathe through the burden of the colonialist discourse. They also overcome a sense of collective amnesia, when it comes to recollecting a pre-colonial history of the country.15 “French killed the country,” is a prominent saying amongst Congolese, which expresses their ambivalent stance toward language being used as a colonial signifier of power, elitism and sophistication.16 Similar to the whiteface make-up, the eloquence of seventeenth-century tragic verse sits awkwardly close to the oppression of indigenous languages and cultural expression. The play itself is interrupted by scenes from Congolese French lessons and juxtaposes different levels of time and history with contemporary Congolese reality. At the same time, the actors step in and out of character by switching between the performance of the play and its 2010 rehearsal at the historical school gymnasium. For example: Here we are now, in 2010, and we try to fulfill that which M. Van Keulmans could never finish, we try to ask the same questions. How after independence things have accelerated, the political troubles, the wars, the rebellions of 1962, 63, 64, 96, 2000, the pillages of the early 1990s. The war of 1 day, 3 days, 6 days [. . .]17

One of the paradoxes posed by the confrontation of colonial past and postcolonial present is the near impossibility of performing a tragedy in a country, which itself is in a state of ongoing tragedy of violence and death. Faustin Linyekula therefore relates his choreographic process to improvisation as a technique of survival. As he explains: Improvisation comes as a state of being and the only way to survive. You make plans, but they never go beyond a certain point in time [. . .] Death is so much part of our lives that you can’t project yourself too far in the future. If you want to survive, you need to know how to improvise.18

Nomadic choreographic intervention thus dialogues with collective history by referencing everyday survival strategies as well as memories of pain. In this respect, Linyekula’s work will also reflect on the history of the Congo, yet somewhat matter-of-factly. He comments: I’m not trying to suggest how we can inscribe ourselves into the history of this country, but to tell how this history has marked us and changed our lives. Perhaps if I had never gone to Kenya and if the universities in the Congo had been opened [. . .] How this collective history of the country has decided the directions of each indi-

90 | Sabine Sörgel vidual? Today my dance is an effort to remember my name. That which one presupposes at each instant, I’ve had to lose or forget. And I return to the history of this country, which keeps changing its name.19

Hence, Faustin Linyekula’s dance theater demonstrates that the Congo does not exist in a historical vacuum – which is so often asserted in the persistent stereotype of the “heart of darkness” – but that its history needs to be told from the perspective of dance. As such, choreographing history becomes a global undertaking, a nomadic journey shared between Africa and Europe.

Notes   1 Ayoko Mensah, Faustin Linyekula, Danseur-Chorégraphe (Paris: L’œil, 2002).   2 “L’utilité de l’art, celle de la représentation, le souci de donner à voir – une image, d’autres, ces fenêtres à ouvrir sur les réalités d’un monde cache par trop d’ignorance.” [Translated from the French by the author], ibid., 6.   3 Ibid., 7.   4 Ibid., 10.   5 “Quant à nos Studios, il ne s’agit pas d’un lieu à proprement parler, nous n’en avons pas, mais d’un espace mental, de recherches, de doutes, d’échanges, espace nomade qui s’installe ici ou là, une certaine façon de faire avec ce qu’il y a, de composer avec des contextes et des environnements singuliers [. . .]” [Translated from the French by the author], ibid.   6 David Van Reybrouck, “My Only True Country Is My Body,” Studios Kabako, 13 May 2008, last accessed 21 October 2015. http://www.kabako.org/txt-entretiens/mybody. html.   7 Faustin Linyekula, in discussion with the author, Brussels 2011.   8 “Dans chaque projet, il me semble que j’essaie de reconstruire quelque chose de cette identité. Anselm Kiefer, le plasticien allemande dont l’œuvre s’inscrit notamment en reaction au passé nazi, disait que ses creations sont ces espaces où il essaie de mettre un peu d’ordre dans le chaos environnant. Disons que je me sens proche de ce propos que me touche beaucoup. Chaque projet relève donc de cette tentative de clarifier un pan de cette histoire. Lorsque l’on a en heritage un tas de ruines, on cherche à se construire un abri, sans se demander s’il vaut mieux une tente, un bout de carton ou un morceau de bois. On prend tout ce qu’on trouve, que ce soit un rite transmis par ma grand-mère, un chant catholique appris par mon père ou une citation latine [. . .]” Irène Filiberti, “Entretien avec Faustin Linyekula,” Studios Kabako, last accessed 21 October 2015. http://www.kabako.org/txt-entretiens/entretien-more.html.

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  9 Sabine Sörgel, “Transnationalism and Contemporary African Dance: Faustin Linyekula,” in Emerging Bodies: The Performance of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography, ed. Gabriele Klein and Sandra Noeth (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), 88–92. 10 Ibid. 11 Bernhard Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 76. 12 “La République du Congo a ete proclamee et notre cher pays est maintenant entre les mains des ses enfants. Ensemble mes frères, mes soeurs, nous allons commencer une nouvelle lutte, une lutte sublime qui va mene notre pays a la paix, a la prosperite et la grandeur. Nous allons etablier ensemble la justice sociale et assurer que chacun receive la juste rémunération de son travail.” [Translated from the French by the author], Faustin Linyekula, unpublished script, Studios Kabako, Kisangani. 13 “Toute l’action est racontee, clairement. Mais parmi les mots meme, un terme revient, regulierement, souvent: le verbe trembler. Aux comediens de Bérénice, j’ai demande de reflechir a ce terme, de questioner ce qui peut provoquer chez eux des tremblements. [. . .] Quelle est cette sorte de vague sourde ou monumentale qui fait que le corps agit, parle, et qui fait jaillir la parole? La dimension choregraphique de mon travail se situe dans ce movement simple, parfois imperceptible; cet etat physique qui affecte la maniere de dire, les emotions, les decisions, les mots eux-memes. C’est le tremblement.” [Translated from the French by the author], Faustin Linyekula, “Bérénice, un quartet improbable,” Studios Kabako, last accessed 21 October 2015, http://www.kabako.org/ txt-entretiens/berenicequartet.html. 14 “Faustin Linyekula pour ‘Pour en finir avec Bérénice’,” theatre-video, last accessed 15 June 2016, http://www.theatre-video.net/video/Conference-de-presse-du-16-juillet1828. 15 Linyekula, “Bérénice.” 16 Filiberti, “Faustin Linyekula.” 17 “Alors voila, nous sommes en 2010 et nous essayons de poursuivre ce que M. Van Keulmans n’avait jamais pu terminer, nous essayons de nous poser les memes questions. Car après l’independance, les choses se sont accelerees, les troubles politiques, les guerres, les rebellions de 1962, 63, 64, 96, 2000, les pillages du debut des annees 90, la guerre de 1 jour, de 3 jours, de 6 jours [. . .]” [Translated from the French by the author], Linyekula, unpublished script. 18 Brenda Gottschild, “‘My Africa Is Always in the Becoming’: Outside the Box with Faustin Linyekula,” WALKER, 1 September 2007, last accessed 21 October 2015, http:// www.walkerart.org/magazine/2007/my-africa-is-always-in-the-becoming-outside-t. 19 “Je ne cherche pas à exposer comment s’est faite notre inscription dans l’histoire de ce pays, mais à raconter comment cette histoire nous a marques, a changé nos vies. Peut-être ne serais-je jamais allé au Kenya si les universités avaient été ouvertes au Congo [. . .] Comment cette histoire collective a-t-elle décidé des directions prises par

92 | Sabine Sörgel chacun? Aujourd’hui, ma danse pourrait être une tentative pour me souvenir de mon nom. Ce qui présuppose qu’à un moment, j’ai dû le perdre ou l’oublier. Et je reviens à l’histoire de ce pays qui change de nom.” [Translated from the French by the author], Linyekula, unpublished script.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. New York, NY: Harvest Books, 1978. “Faustin Linyekula pour ‘Pour en finir avec Bérénice’.” theatre-video. Last accessed 21 October 2015. http://www.theatre-video.net/video/Conference-depresse-du-16-juillet-1828?autostart. Filiberti, Irène. “Entretien avec Faustin Linyekula.” Studios Kabako. Last accessed 21 October 2015, http://www.kabako.org/txt-entretiens/entretien-more.html. Gottschild, Brenda. “‘My Africa is Always in the Becoming’: Outside the Box with Faustin Linyekula.” WALKER. 1 September 2007. Last accessed 21 October 2015. http://www.walkerart.org/magazine/2007/my-africa-is-always-in-thebecoming-outside-t. Linyekula, Faustin. “Bérénice, un quartet improbable.” Studios Kabako. June 2009. Last accessed 21 October 2015. http://www.kabako.org/txt-entretiens/ berenicequartet.html. Mensah, Ayoko. Faustin Linyekula: Danseur-Chorégraphe. Paris: L’œil, 2002. Rae, Paul. “Where Is the Cosmopolitan Stage?” Contemporary Theatre Review 16, no. 1 (2006): 8­–22. Sörgel, Sabine. “Transnationalism and Contemporary African Dance: Faustin Linyekula.” In Emerging Bodies: The Performance of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography, edited by Gabriele Klein and Sandra Noeth, 88–92. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. Van Reybrouck, David. “My Only True Country Is My Body.” Studios Kabako. 13 May 2008. Last accessed 21 October 2015. http://www.kabako.org/txtentretiens/mybody.html. —. Kongo. Eine Geschichte. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2010. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011.

“But you know I don’t think in words.” Bilingualism and Issues of Translation between Signed and Spoken Languages: Working between Deaf1 and Hearing Cultures in Performance Kaite O’Reilly

Sophie: (spoken and signed) “You’re jumpy,” my girlfriend said, and we both

jumped, me at the sudden noise, and her at the shock of being heard.



“I keep forgetting you can hear me,” she said, her voice still a surprise, and



(signed) still a disappointment. (spoken) It’s (signed) thin and weak and flat



(spoken) and I expected (signed) full and rich and musical and beautiful.



(spoken) “I never had you down as the neurotic type.”



She’d never used that tone of face with me, before.



“You used to be better than diazepam:



(signed and spoken) a happy pill on legs. It was your U.S.P.



(spoken) and what attracted me to you in the first place.”



(signed) She’d never used that tone of face with me, before.



(spoken) I haven’t been able to sleep well since the operation.



I lie awake in bed. Before, I would dream – slide into sleep like



(signed and spoken) getting into a bath of warm water, all



(signed) dreaming, smiling, relaxed . . .



(signed and spoken) In water I’m weightless,



(signed) like a mermaid – in my own element, free to move.



(spoken) Now (signed) I lie awake, wide-eyed, in terror (spoken) hearing



(signed) robbers . . . ghosts . . . wild animals with big teeth (signed and spo-



ken) waiting to be slaughtered in my bed.



I wish the doctor had warned me.



Sound ambushes.



(signed) It creeps up and taps my shoulder like the children’s game Grand-



mother’s Footsteps. It pounces, close to the ear; it bounces screaming-

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out of the doorbell, or the phone, or a once gently vibrating alarm



clock. It tweets like a chatty budgie when the batteries on the fire alarm



are low, comes yelling round corners, jetting across the sky, roaring down



the road (signed and spoken) and I’m cautious and nervous, waiting for the



next attack.



(spoken) I liked it better when my house didn’t groan. I liked my home when it



was silent bricks and mortar, before it started to complain.



And then just as I’m (signed) dropping off to sleep – I’m woken by my blood



pulsing (spoken) my blood pulsing through my ear as I rest my head on the



pillow (signed) ticking – (spoken) it sounds like my body’s ticking – the



winding down mechanism of life itself.



Sound makes you aware of your mortality.



(signed and spoken) You can hear that doomsday clock in your blood.



“You’re getting morbid,” my girlfriend said.



I’ve decided hearing is (signed then spoken) existential. From After the Operation2

(Performed in spoken English and theatricalized British Sign Language [BSL])

I first signed in performance in 1987 when working as an actor with Graeae, arguably Europe’s foremost theater company for practitioners with sensory and physical impairments.3 I used Sign Supported English (SSE), following the syntax of spoken English, but signing the most important words for clarification to support my Deaf co-performer, as well as the audience. Even as a novice, I perceived the use of sign language in performance as something innovative, beautiful, enabling, and political. Shortly after I was introduced to British Sign language (BSL), a complex manual/visual language with its own grammar, syntax, and structure, which, contrary to what many hearing people assume, is independent of spoken/written English. I became more interested in the dynamic vivacity of theatricalized BSL, where the visual elements of the language are enlarged and expanded upon.4 The sinewy corporeality of sign performance delighted me; its visual fluidity made sense to my two-dimensional sight. I glimpsed a potentially transformative mode of theater that told new stories, with different protagonists, in diverse ways. With my burgeoning understanding of “what words look like when in the air,” and with an introduction from director Bill Hopkinson, I started writing and directing for Common Ground Sign Dance Theatre in Liverpool in the 1990s.5 The company – Denise Armstrong, David Bower, Isolte Avila, and visiting practitioners – combined spoken word, song, dance, live music and sign language in their performances. The company worked bilingually in spoken and signed languages,

“But you know I don’t think in words.” | 95

so I would first consider how the word sounded, then how it might appear visually. Considering both, I would try to find interesting juxtapositions of texture, content, and shape, which, in the company’s eloquent hands, invariably led to inventive choreography and sign-dance theater. Exploded into movement, text became, as The Guardian newspaper review coined it, “poetry of the body,”6 its imagery expressing the characters’ thoughts and feelings, revealing both the visible and hidden. Words I had written, anchored to the page, took spectacular flight – meaning sculpted in air. Ideas framed in ink developed contour, a heartbeat, breath.7 These early experiences initiated two ongoing strands in my work and career: I am a mainstream playwright and dramaturge, and a practitioner working within disability arts and Deaf culture. My work in Deaf culture, disability culture, and hearing majority culture remains largely invisible to one another, reflecting, I suspect, the complexities and indifference between the cultures, and particularly the distance between hearing and Deaf communities. Although I am hearing, it has been my great fortune to collaborate with innovative Deaf women dancers, performers, directors, choreographers, visual language and sign theater specialists. This influence has helped me shape what I call “alternative dramaturgies informed by a d/Deaf and disability perspective,”8 and some of these collaborations I write about here. The more I worked between hearing and Deaf cultures, the more I became aware of certain power dynamics. I started to question if it was possible to work between spatial and spoken languages without privileging the majority culture. Other questions arose, too: • How, in collaboration, might we protect the integrity of both languages and cultures, ensuring that the projected text is not merely surtitle, and that theatricalized BSL is not overly simplified into iconic signs or mime, but allows the immense corporeal and physical theatricality of the form? • What techniques might be used to facilitate a bilingual experience where, owing to the incompatibility of spoken and signed languages, the meaning cannot be presented simultaneously? • Might it be possible to have both languages and cultures equally present on stage without resorting to interpretation or translation from an apparent “primary” source or culture? This essay begins to address some of these questions, exploring cultural considerations of translation, collaboration, and interweaving across Deaf, disabled, and hearing cultures in three productions for which I was writer, dramaturge and/or director, working with hearing and Deaf actors across two languages – spoken/ projected English and BSL: peeling (Graeae Theatre Company 2002–3), In Praise

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of Fallen Women (The Fingersmiths Ltd, 2006), and In Water I’m Weightless (National Theatre Wales, 2012). However, before this analysis, I feel it is necessary to give some context and history to Deaf culture and disability arts.

A Brief Introduction to Disability Arts Following certain medical, cultural, historical, and ideological developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was an upsurge in the institutionalization and medicalization of impairment. Many people with sensory and physical impairments, learning disabilities, or mental health issues were locked away – often denied their human and civil rights. The outraged response to this oppressive practice eventually found form in political movements both sides of the Atlantic. I joined the United Kingdom’s Disability Rights Movement in 1986 as disabled people demanded access to mainstream education, training, and employment opportunities, along with physical access to so-called public buildings, with their endless flights of stairs and no alternative access. There is an ideology inherent in much architecture and use of public space, which indicates who is presumed to use those places. This presumption excluded almost one in five of the United Kingdom’s population,9 prompting anger and direct action from increasingly politicized disabled campaigners and activists. It was inevitable that such energy would also be unleashed into cultural expression, revealing the experience of prejudice and the narrow confines of normalcy. Disability arts and culture was born of the streets, in demonstrations and sit-ins of the UK and US Disability Civil Rights Movements, informed partially by the performative spectacle of the atypical body in protest. As Disability Studies scholar Colin Cameron explains: Disability arts has at its heart the principles of transgression, resistance and affirmation. It is transgressive in that it involves a refusal by disabled people to identify themselves in terms of personal tragedy, as the dominant culture represents and seeks to recognise them; it embodies resistance to hegemonic discourses of normality and abnormality; and it affirms by establishing physical difference as something to be expected and respected, valued on its own terms as part of ordinary human experience.10

Even now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, my and many other practitioners’ work still “answers back” to the moral and medical models of disability,11 attempting to subvert or critique negative representations of disabled and

“But you know I don’t think in words.” | 97

Deaf people as weak, psychotic, supernatural, “tragic but brave,” or sentimental caricatures. Many of us work from the social model of disability, which understands disability as a social construct, reflecting the values, prejudices, and fears of a particular society. It is the physical or attitudinal barriers created here that are disabling, not the actuality of impairment itself. Such an approach can be challenging or even destabilizing to the artistic status quo, building on the real, often atypical body of the performer rather than an idealized one. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren writes about how the practices of disability and Deaf performance parallel one another, seeking “a synthesis between activism and aesthetics, particularly in order to use performance as a site of resistance to normative cultural representational and perceptual paradigms regarding the extraordinary body.”12 She argues that both disability and Deaf aesthetics seek to create new public spaces for the inclusion of different sensorial experiences and “strive to shift mainstream cultural and experiential frames [. . .]”13 Just as the physical barriers in society often deny access and equal opportunity to someone with a mobility disability, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren claims there are cultural and sensorial norms of what is permissible in the public sphere, and what is assumed to be the appropriate baseline of the “proper” sensory orientation in the world. These, combined with historical norms, dictate the manner in which cultural and sensorial schema blend and so produce contemporary cultural practices.14 Work has yet to be done in order to understand and reveal the ways in which “hearing is haunted by deafness; not as a condition to overcome, but as the site of the repressed cultural other that has implications for how we can understand the practice of ‘hearing’ across theatres.”15 In this context, deafness can be rendered invisible. The performer who plays a d/Deaf character is often pathologized. The hearing majority may assume that deafness is based on a “lack” but in my own experience, and amongst those with whom I work, Deafness (with a capital “D”) is not a disability, but rather the marker of a linguistic minority, with its own culture, language, and troubled history.

The Culturally Deaf and the Audiologically deaf It was James Woodward (1972)16 who established the convention of using the uppercase “D” for those who identify as culturally Deaf and part of that community, and lowercase “d” for those who do not sign and regard themselves as having an audiological hearing “problem.” There are major differences between the culturally Deaf and the audiologically deaf, which may be broken into three groups: the congenitally deaf, often born into Deaf, signing families; the post-lingually deaf who become deafened after

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acquiring spoken language from the age of seven, but who may also learn to sign; and a third group who acquire the impairment later in life, often called “the hard of hearing.” This term clearly wears its cultural allegiance on its sleeve, suggesting that individuals are choosing to stay within the hearing majority culture, seldom learning to sign. Jemina Napier, a scholar, Sign Language Interpreter (SLI), and a hearing daughter of Deaf parents, suggests a similar definition for those who are not Deaf: Hearing people with a capital “H” “are those consumed by the Hearing culture; they are ignorant or naive [sic] about the Deaf community and its culture and typically regard deafness from a pathological point of view; hearing people [lowercase h] are those who have internalized Deaf culture, ally themselves with Deaf people, and are regarded as members of the Deaf community.”17 I would place myself within the category of being an ally of the Deaf community, interested and engaged in its culture. I have found such indicators useful when working across cultures, but for simplicity will use lowercase “h” throughout this essay. There is a hierarchy in mainstream culture – as Kochhar-Lindgren puts it: “The mouth and ear are first; the hand and eye are second.”18 This is something I try to challenge in my work with Deaf and signing collaborators.

Everyone Gets the Same Information, Just Not at the Same Time: peeling I first began to address this perceived hierarchy in 2000 when Graeae Theatre Company commissioned me to write peeling, first produced in 2002. The artistic director, Jenny Sealey, is a long-term collaborator and the Deaf actress I played opposite when first using SSE in a Graeae production in 1987. Jenny and I were intrigued by what a visually-impaired hearing writer and a visually-driven Deaf director could create together. Would we clash over trying to assert a dominant sensorial frame, or would we find a way to satisfy our potentially competing cultural, artistic, and access needs without compromise? We were both keen to experiment with so-called “access devices” and to exploit them to their full artistic potential. With peeling, we were predominantly at the beginning of our individual and co-experimentation in both content and form.19 In my writing of the play and in Jenny’s direction and design, we created a promising although not completely satisfactory synthesis between our cultures and impairments, pioneering various approaches from embedding audio description within the fabric of my authored text, to the dynamic use of surtitles and projections in performance.

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peeling is a metatheatrical play for one Deaf and two disabled female performers, playing members of the chorus of a fictitious postdramatic production of The Trojan Women: Then and Now, which is happening around them. They suspect they have been cast as a cynical nod to the demands for diversity in professional theater; they are “the right-on tick on an equal opportunities monitoring form,”20 left at the back of the inaccessible stage, hidden behind scenery, waiting for their cues. As they wait, they gossip, knit, share recipes, and reveal dark truths about their lives. These stories echo the unpalatable repetitions of genocide and eugenics they perform as the chorus of the play within the play. Alfa, the Deaf character, is joined by Beaty and Coral, who are disabled, but hearing. Much of their interaction when “off ” is a playful and sometimes spiteful exploration of the tensions and misunderstandings between Deaf and hearing experience. Alfa is often isolated, the butt of her non-signing colleagues’ jokes (“ooh, look, she’s doing that lovely stuff with her hands . . . It’s lovely . . . like disco dancing . . .”).21 She misses large parts of her co-actors’ conversations as she cannot lip-read them owing to where she has been positioned on stage by the (fictitious) hearing director. Jenny Sealey chose not to use sign language interpretation or integrated sign performance in the production. Rather, she projected the script onto the back wall, incorporating this element into her design, animating the text and incorporating visuals and, at one point, video. This was her attempt to be as accessible as possible: some people use BSL and others SSE, yet those who have acquired a hearing impairment might lip-read and have no knowledge of or relationship with any form of sign language. By using interactive PowerPoint projections and other visuals, Jenny aimed to reach a wider part of the audience in a creatively inclusive way. Marvin Carlson, expanding on Roman Ingarden’s work, calls the use of sign language interpretation, surtitles, and supertitles in the theater “side text.” “Sign language and supertitles,” he writes, “each utilized at one time only as a translation device in the theatre, both evolved into fully operative theatre languages. This meant evolving from tools for supporting a monoglossic experience, to new voices of their own, and thus contributors to the theatre’s increasing heteroglossia.”22 I would argue that in Sealey’s work, and in my own with Deaf collaborators, the use of sign language, visuals, and projected text goes beyond the marginal impact suggested by the term “side text.” The work makes creative use of such tools rather than merely providing access for Deaf audience members. It is an aesthetic choice, as well as a cultural choice. Deaf culture is visual. The devices Sealey uses – interactive PowerPoint surtitles, imagery, video, and other visuals – provide further information and experience for the Deaf audience about “tone,” context, and texture. Practically, visuals “rest” the reading eye, which can become

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exhausted during a performance. My preferred term for such integrated, creative use would be “parallel texts.” Although Sealey chose not to use sign language except as a kind of cultural “garnish” in the production, the pivotal part of the play is a story that is signed but not spoken. I was adamant that this would be a section presented solely in theatricalized BSL, with no projected or spoken English text, and therefore no “translation.” It was controversial to ask a company renowned for being accessible to present a central part of a production in sign language only. It took much discussion, but eventually, to their credit, the company agreed. I was keen to explore what I call “the dramaturgy of the audience,” and to make a cultural and political statement about the privileged majority culture and its relationship with the d/Deaf minority. Alfa signs a speech about what has become known as “The Deaf Holocaust,” the experience of Deaf people as part of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” and which has come to light only in recent decades. Unlike many other disabled people who were exterminated, Deaf people were seen as flawed and degenerate, but useful – so many were sterilized and used as a workforce. Whilst the Deaf character, Alfa, signs an impassioned speech about this hidden history, another character, Beaty, remains completely oblivious, if not indifferent. Bored, she lists in English all the kinds of bread she can think of, creating cultural tension and a commentary only the signing audience fully understands. In performance, this moment creates a dynamic that can come off the stage and into the audience. Suddenly, the privileged, hearing, non-signing majority are at a disadvantage – there can be a palpable change in the auditorium as the signing members receive information both textually and sub-textually that the non-signers do not. From a Deaf perspective, this was a potentially important and political moment – to have this neglected part of Deaf history told to the Deaf or signing community in BSL only, while a translation into spoken English was denied to a hearing nonsigning character (and by extension, the hearing, non-signing part of the audience). Alfa: I’m not going to voice-over for you, so don’t look at me expecting an interpretation [. . .] It’s not a secret language. It’s in the public domain [. . .] I’m not going to cheapen my exquisite signing with your words [. . .] JAW JAW JAW JAW, BLOODY TALKIES [. . .] Learn it yourself.23

As a dramatist working across cultures, I do not seek to create rifts in the audience, but I am keen to bring the audiences’ attention to what could be considered linguistic and cultural privilege, or sensorial hierarchy. As a dramaturge, I am interested in exploring what happens if everyone gets the same information, just not at the same time.

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Fig. 1: Alfa (Caroline Parker) signs “smoke from the chimneys” as Beaty (Lisa Hammond) lists types of bread. From Jenny Sealey’s production of peeling (2002) by the Graeae Theatre Company; © Patrick Baldwin. Alfa’s pivotal story of eugenics within the European Deaf community was retold towards the climax of the play as sign performance using theatricalized BSL, and this time voiced by Coral and Beaty. Rather than using my original English language outline of this story for the spoken text, we re-translated the signed version, keeping the BSL syntax, and so creating a different rhythm, content, and impact than if I had used standard English grammar. The effect depends on the translation, but the versions I prefer are literal, making the spoken language splinter and fragment, with unusual juxtapositions such as “LIVE-WIN” for “SURVIVE.” This technique defamiliarizes spoken language, and our understanding of what happened in the Second World War, through the telling of a neglected part of history. I also believe that by not translating BSL into smooth, flowing English, we are paying respect to Deaf culture and language, enabling BSL to “break” the mainstream language through its interaction with an ignored facet of Deaf history.

A Short Introduction to Deaf History and Education As a hearing theater practitioner collaborating with Deaf artists, having a sense of Deaf history has been important, providing a subterranean knowledge which has guided many of my dramaturgical decisions when working across and between

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hearing and Deaf cultures.24 Most aspects of Deaf history are unknown to the mainstream culture, and the Deaf community is often perceived as being insular, selfcontained, and as not wanting to participate in majority hearing culture. At times there is antipathy between the two cultural and linguistic groups, largely informed by a painful and difficult past, caused in part by the hierarchical “sensorial norms” Kochhar-Lindgren identified, above. In ancient Athens, Socrates referred to the use of signs by the deaf as if it were a matter of common experience. In 1637, Descartes was of the opinion that the “signs” used by those born deaf “constituted a fully human language and had nothing in common with the purely mechanical communicative behavior of lowly animals.”25 The vast majority in Europe, however, had a different opinion. Deaf individuals were unable to inherit property. They were seen as primitive and animalistic. Until the Renaissance, the idea of education for the deaf had seemed impossible – since they were thought to have no language, how could they be taught? Much of the history of education for the d/Deaf in Europe, and later in the United States, is fraught with well-meaning but damaging interventions from the hearing majority. It has been a fight between the manualists – those using some form of manual, or signed language – and the oralists – using speech or voice. Although initially viewed as model citizens, with the rise of oralism in the United States and Europe, “deafness – like other minority categories – became a liability, an indicator of infirmity or feebleness,” Kochhar-Lindgren maintains.26 The oralist tradition became primary and d/Deaf individuals were expected to become useful citizens living in a hearing world. Sign language was seen as primitive, belonging to “the inferior races” and as such should be eradicated, replaced by the written and spoken languages of the dominant hearing culture. In schools d/Deaf children were punished for signing, their hands tied behind their backs so they were forced to use spoken language – a disastrous experience making little sense to any but the post-lingually deaf, i.e. those who lost their hearing after the age of seven, when they had already learnt spoken language. One hundred years later, these oralist schools have been almost universally condemned. Knowing about this often difficult history and relationship between the two languages and cultures has made me sensitive towards my own partnerships. How can I, as a hearing writer, collaborate with Deaf practitioners without my language – which is also the central instrument of my practice – dominating, and subsuming BSL into a form of English, what a Deaf collaborator once called “a sort of braille for the Deaf”? How can we work without hearing culture being dominant? I soon saw that I would have to develop an alternative approach to form as well as content.

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The Fingersmiths Ltd.: In Praise of Fallen Women In 2004, I co-founded The Fingersmiths Ltd. with Deaf actress and BSL creative director Jean St Clair and bilingual theater director, performer, and SLI, Jeni Draper. We wanted to explore equality for signed and spoken/projected languages onstage through bilingual experimentation. From the outset, we posed several questions: • How could we explore performance and narrative using both languages, without resorting to interpretation? We did not want the “side text” of an SLI statically interpreting the performance in a lit corner of the stage, not participating in the action or the mise-en-scène. • How could we make a performance without privileging one language over the other? Our audiences were almost always a mix of Deaf and hearing, signing and non-signing individuals. We wanted to explore how narratives could be told without explanation, translation, or an over-simplification of form and modes of presentation, yet ensuring the dual audience could follow what was going on. • As Jean St Clair signed but did not use a sounding voice, how could we ensure that her “silent” performance would not be overwhelmed by the noisiness of vocal speech? Our collaboration found form in In Praise of Fallen Women: A Postmodern History of Prostitution, produced in London at the Drill Hall in 2006. I wrote and directed, and Jean St Clair and Jeni Draper performed and devised additional material. Our bilingual experimentation included creating dual narratives that followed separate trajectories through the performance – a dramaturgical device I first explored in peeling. A hearing audience member’s experience would therefore be different from a Deaf or signing audience member’s. In this experiment everyone gets the same information, just not at the same time. We also presented multiple versions of the same scene, presented live and pre-recorded, or we performed the same text live in both languages simultaneously: two characters telling the same story, in different languages, but without an awareness of each other. These figures were likely to be identified as one character who was Deaf or a BSL user, and one hearing, English-speaking character. I directed each performer in different ways, so their characterizations were unique and independent, the nuances of their performances filled with different physicality, energies, rhythms, and attitudes towards the content. We also explored ways in which the performers could be mirror images of one another, so the audience would see/hear double at the level of language delivery.

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Fig. 2: Jean St Clair and Jeni Draper from In Praise of Fallen Women: A Postmodern History of Prostitution (2006) by The Fingersmiths Ltd.; © Patrick Baldwin. In this bilingual presentation, we were determined that one language could not be “read” as primary, with the other as merely an aid for access/translation purposes. Aware that our mixed hearing and Deaf audience might expect the primacy of the spoken word and a form of integrated interpretation, we paid particular attention to the actors’ placement on the stage, so that the hearing performer could not see the visual language, and the Deaf performer could not lip-read the speaking performer. This staging signified to the audience no “interpretation” was possible, and therefore no language held primacy over the other. By using parallel language forms and modes of presentation, we found the potential for a place “in between” – a site of encounter and “chance” understanding between and across languages and cultures. This is a place I have occupied many times in my collaborations with Deaf women artists.

“But you know I don’t think in words”: Jean St Clair I first worked with Jean St Clair in 2002 when she was the BSL expert on Graeae Theatre Company’s production of peeling. Since then, we have collaborated on my performance texts often, including In Water I’m Weightless with National Theatre Wales (2012), and Kirstie Davis’s productions of peeling (2011) and Woman

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Fig. 3: Jean St Clair from In Praise of Fallen Women: A Postmodern History of Prostitution (2006) by The Fingersmiths Ltd. Jean is signing “Flirt;” © Patrick Baldwin. of Flowers (2014) for Forest Forge Theatre Company. When writing this essay, I emailed her, wanting her perspective on translation and our bilingual processes when working together. She requested we meet or Skype so she could reply in BSL, but that would entail me or another interpreting and translating her. I wanted her own words in English, in which she is fluent, although she does not vocalize. She emailed me: “But you know I don’t think in words.”27 The ease of our largely unvoiced, animated physical work in the studio is a very different experience from when we try to settle and communicate in one language rather than between, against, over, and across many languages. Translator and dramatist Colin Teevan asserts that “there is no exact correlation between languages.”28 When working across spoken and spatial languages, Benjamin Lee Whorf’s claim half a century ago that a different language is a different reality was never more acute and apt.29 From Jean St Clair’s perspective, sign language is experientially different from spoken or written language. Cognitive scientists confirm that although sign uses some of the same neural pathways as for processing grammatical speech, physiologically it uses different parts of the brain. As Ursula Bellugi discovered, although sign is based in the left hemisphere, despite its spatial organization, there is a representation of “linguistic” space in the brain completely different from that of “topographic” space.30 Oliver Sacks explains:

106 | Kaite O’Reilly Thus there develops in signers a new and extraordinarily sophisticated way of representing space; a new sort of space, [. . .] which has no analogue in those of us who do not sign. This reflects a wholly novel neurological development. It is as if the left hemisphere in signers “takes over” a realm of visual-spatial perception, modifies it, sharpens it, in an unprecedented way, giving it a new, highly analytical and abstract character, making a visual language and visual conception possible.31

In signed language, narrative is no longer linear and prosaic. The signer is the artist, the canvas, and the painting in the process of being painted – all at the same time. Signing is filmic – a process of establishing shots, close-ups, pans, and changes of point of view. A specifically Deaf culture performance mode is what the American National Theater of the Deaf calls the Visual Vernacular (V.V.). It is not sign language, nor is it mime, but something in between. Jean St Clair, who learnt V.V. when working with the company in the 1980s, describes it as a visual way of perceiving the world, and communicating the images “by using facial expressions, hand movements and body language without using either English or BSL.”32 The dramaturgy of V.V. is complex. St Clair likens it to cartoons, where the “set up” is similar, with wide, medium, and close-up “shots.” In her example, she uses a bird: “For the close up, I would describe or act like a bird with facial expression, with the medium close up, I would use my arms to move like wings and for the wide shot, I would use my hand to show the bird flying away into nothingness.”33 With V.V. the storyteller can flash back and then flash forward, move in time and even portray two periods of time and various characters simultaneously. “I could be a person looking at the statue of liberty and then in an instant I could be the statue of liberty looking down at the river,” St Clair explains. “This again comes from the skills of BSL, where role-shift, placement and eye-line is important.”34 When we work together across languages, cultures, and modes of presentation, we are not translating. As Oliver Sacks suggests, it is impossible to make a translation or transliteration from spoken to sign language, and vice versa. What we are doing is inhabiting this “place between.” I supply her with an English language text, ensuring she understands the words, but most importantly the concept. She then creates a visual counterpart to what I have written. As St Clair explains: “The best way to explain is as if I am in a dream. When I dream, I always see things in a visual way. There is hardly any signs or speech in my dreams. It is all spontaneous – bit like telepathy [. . .]”35 I will then make suggestions and adjustments to Jean’s “re-making,” and we further develop and polish the visual sequence together, often making it “anew,” but seeded by and linked to my original text. We are not involved therefore in an

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act of translation, but of collaboratively re-envisaging, across two languages and cultures. If the pieces are to be presented bilingually, I sometimes amend the text to be spoken, informed by St Clair’s work. She continues: “When I use BSL, I try to follow the timing of the English, as much as I can, so it flows – whereas with the visual work [V.V.], the timing is completely different. It takes someone brave like Kaite to find a different medium and then sort out the English to match the work, as the rhythm and timing is so different.”36 What strikes me here is St Clair’s phrase “a different medium” and her sense of our collaborating, moving between languages, cultures, modes of presentation and theatrical styles – and no “translation.” This is where I feel the work we make is different from the “linguistic collage” in the theatrical heteroglossia, which became popular in the late twentieth century in Western theater, where multiple languages are used not for humor, or the recognition of various linguistic backgrounds of the company or the public, nor even for political or social commentary, but, as Carlson puts it: “out of an interest in linguistic mixing for its own sake, as one might mix elements of various decorative, historical or theatrical traditions in the sort of open, decentered experimentalism that characterizes much postmodernist art.”37 There is nothing casual in this cross-cultural experimentation with Jean St Clair, but rather a desire to explore content and meaning through various forms, through differing linguistic centers in the brain, and through varying modes of cultural expression.

“I’ve decided hearing is existential”: In Water I’m Weightless From: Sophie Stone To: Kaite O’Reilly Sent: Tues, 9 Jul 2013 11:43 Subject: Re: In Water I’m Weightless [. . .] If there’s one place I believe any language including bilingualism can, should and will work, is the theatre. The stage is a place where I believe the act of communication really comes alive, where language and “non-language” is celebrated and where “listening” in all its forms is all that is required from an audience. If bilingualism brings a layered language to an audience of deaf and hearing people on an even platform, there’s already an increase on those “listening” [. . .]

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Sophie Stone describes herself as a performer, theater maker, aspiring writer/producer, and Deaf BSL/SSE user with speech, the first Deaf actress to be trained at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She performed the monologue After the Operation, reproduced at the beginning of this essay, in the 2012 National Theatre Wales production of my performance text, In Water I’m Weightless, at the Wales Millennium Centre and Southbank Centre. This was part of the Cultural Olympiad, the official festival celebrating the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics. I asked Sophie to engage with the material, our process in rehearsals and the potential of this bilingual work, and her response (above) reminded me of Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren’s plea: “to develop new ways of listening [. . .]. These new listening practices in the theatre must engage, as well, a deaf (and hard-ofhearing) aesthetic that begins to pull apart our notions of hearing, since traditional understandings of hearing rely on certain repressed assumptions about deafness.”38 In After the Operation, I attempted to imagine, understand, and elucidate the experience of deafness through a character coming back to hearing following a cochlear implant – the “operation” of the title. The content raised a few eyebrows: How could I, as a hearing woman, know what this would be like? I had done my research and interviewed a wide range of d/Deaf and hearing people, but the monologue is fiction, a work of the imagination, which is not complete until performed when someone else makes it flesh. As I write outside my gender and cultural heritage, surely I can write beyond and across impairment paradigms, too? Sophie Stone wrote: You fertilised your own seed, planted by those who live it . . . I don’t feel you were reaching for the voices and trying to write about something you’ve no experience of, more you were allowing those voices to come to you and using your skills [. . .] to create those voices in a way that theatrically communicates to an audience of bilingual abilities.39

In Water I’m Weightless is a montage of monologues and dialogues written from within the experience of disability. The 2012 National Theatre Wales production is believed to be the first time in Europe that an all disabled and Deaf cast performed disability content written by a playwright who identifies as disabled on a national platform, thus setting an important cultural and political precedence. Jo Ross worked as an integrated SLI throughout the performance, and the innovative design by Paul Clay incorporated visuals, projected text, and occasional prerecorded sign language interpretation. At times, all the cast members used sign in performance, but only Sophie Stone worked bilingually, alternating between signing, speaking, and speaking/sign-supporting – an immensely challenging and

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Fig. 4: Sophie Stone performing “After the Operation” from the National Theatre Wales production of In Water I’m Weightless (2012). She is signing “Sound ambushes;” photo: Toby Farrow; © Farrows Creative. difficult task. The grammars of BSL and English are oppositional. For example, Sophie translated “She’d never used that tone of face with me before,” into BSL syntax as “BEEN BEFORE EXPRESS (with facial contortions) NEVER.” I asked Stone to reveal the complex considerations and intricate process involved in transforming this line into theatricalized BSL or V.V. She said her initial task was to understand what the character wanted to communicate – and why – before considering any form of theatrical sign: BSL has a completely different structure, expression and contextual format than spoken English or Sign Supported English, and you couldn’t tell the same story at the same time in the same way, so there was a lot of limitations and a whole plethora of ideas and options brewing underneath that clashed. It was all about choosing the right options to express the particular story or idea for this particular character in a way that was still accessible to the audience and for me to embody and share that voice.40

Some signs do not support the language in the same way, so Stone found a new or different approach might need to be considered. In many cases the sign brought “a new level of freedom and exploration to the character, enabling me to express more freely what’s happening internally.”41

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Fig. 5: Sophie Stone from the National Theatre Wales production In Water I’m Weightless (2012); photo: Toby Farrow; © Farrows Creative. “Tone of Voice” means the same to a hearing person as a Deaf person, so “Tone of Face” is the visual equivalent. However, irony, and the play on words received by a hearing member of the audience may be harder to communicate to a Deaf audience member. Finding form for this “playfulness” in order to offer an equality of experience in performance requires more time and imagination. In Stone’s words: It may come in the form of establishing “Tone of Voice” first then adapting the signs to reinforce change has happened/applied facially or to merge signs theatrically, potentially breaking the rules of BSL and taking the form towards “V.V.” Although, as above, establishing the previous quote with facial contortions could well be enough to show tone comes in many forms.42

Stone’s comments reminded me of Sapir’s assertion that no two languages are ever sufficiently alike to be considered as representing the same social reality: “The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached .  .  . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”43 Through my experimentation with collaborators between and across linguistic and theater languages, I try to heighten the visual, spatial, and kinesthetic components of performance, creating a new space – not just for bilingual performance, but a new kind of relationship and aesthetic for all involved. This is not the notion

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of a “third culture” that Bienvenu (1987)44 and Sherwood (1987)45 discuss – i.e. one in which Deaf and hearing people come from different cultures and SLIs have a foot in each world, thus allowing Deaf and hearing people to meet in the middle. In my collaborations with Deaf artists, I seek new dramaturgies and forms in performance that engage all members of an audience. It is the “layered language” on an even platform that Sophie Stone wrote about when reflecting on our work in In Water I’m Weightless: Not everyone will experience the same level of access at the same time, but sometimes they will experience more and other times less than their peers, this rollercoaster worked for the most part [. . .] emphasised by the line “Hearing is existential,” which [. . .] told us to “listen” to what isn’t said, and to ourselves as much as to what’s external to us. Hearing, it seems, is what you want/choose to listen to, as much as what you don’t want to hear but have no choice . . .46

This touches on Kochhar-Lindgren’s notion of “the third ear” as a method of hybrid listening, where the audience shifts attention to more nuanced forms of expression – “the felt sense” of silences, or “the gaps between image and sound, the incongruities between movement and text, dissonant intercessions of noise and gesture, and the positions of the performing bodies that speak to us.”47 Rather than assuming a binary between Deaf and hearing, in my own practice, I have sought to create a more flexible, cross-communication mode of expression and cultural encounter, which questions old hierarchies through new sensorial framings. This type of work encourages a reimagining not just of the form, dimensions, and interactions of theater, and of the audiences’ engagement, but also of the idea of “listening” itself.

Notes   1 I use capital “D” Deaf to signify those who identify as culturally Deaf, and as part of a linguistic minority who uses sign language. Those who are born hearing and become deaf later in life are considered to be “physically deaf,” but “culturally hearing,” and for this group I use lowercase “d” deaf. I expand upon this later in the essay. The Deaf community does not identify as disabled, so I differentiate between disability and Deaf cultures/perspectives. Further information about d/Deaf definitions can be found at: http://www.signwriting.org/about/questions/quest024.html. For an American perspective, please see: http://www.deafculture.com/definitions/.   2 One of the “d” monologues I wrote specifically for Deaf and disabled performers, an Unlimited commission for the Cultural Olympiad, celebrating the 2012 London Olympics

112 | Kaite O’Reilly and Paralympics. After the Operation explores hearing gain following a cochlear implant. It was part of In Water I’m Weightless – a series of my monologues montaged and produced by National Theatre Wales, directed by John E. McGrath and performed at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, and London’s Southbank Centre in August–September 2012, as part of the official Cultural Olympiad festival. I worked on the translations from the original English into BSL/visual language with performer Sophie Stone, BSL/ visual language expert Jean St Clair, assistant director Sara Beer, and sign language interpreters Jo Ross and Julie Hornsby. The directions regarding which language to use and when in the text are specific, as the performer switches between languages, giving no translation or interpretation. Both languages are used only when specifically noted “(spoken and signed)” in the text. In Water I’m Weightless is included in Atypical Plays for Atypical Actors: Selected Plays by Kaite O’Reilly (London: Oberon Books, 2016).   3 Terminology differs from location, context, and individual to individual, and definitions of “disability” are complex, yet there are historical, social, political, legal and philosophical influences on its interpretation. Throughout this essay I differentiate between “impairment” and “disability,” as informed by the Social Model of disability. According to this model, impairments are the medical conditions individuals have – an illness, injury or condition that causes or is likely to cause a loss or difference of physiological or psychological function – whereas disability is a social construct, the restriction or loss of opportunities for those with impairments to take part in society on equal terms with others owing to physical or attitudinal barriers. I am therefore a woman with a physical and sensory impairment, who experiences disability. Further definitions can be found at http://www.disabilityartscymru.co.uk/equal-spaces/equal-spaces-background-todisability-issues/society-and-disabled-people/ and http://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/.   4 See my interview with BSL/visual language expert Jean St Clair: “Making Language Visual: An Interview with Jean St Clair,” Kaite O’Reilly, last accessed 23 May 2016, https://kaiteoreilly.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/making-language-visual-an-interviewwith-jean-st-clair/.   5 I gave dramaturgical advice on various productions, but collaborated as a writer and/or director on Answer Me with Silence, and Billy Can.   6 Quoted in Common Ground Sign Dance Theatre Summer 1995 newsletter.   7 Kaite O’Reilly, “What Words Look Like in the Air: The Multivocal Performance of Common Ground Sign Dance Theatre,” Contemporary Theatre Review 11, no. 3–4 (2001): 41–7.   8 “Alternative dramaturgies informed by a d/Deaf and disability perspective” was initiated, along with the founding of The Fingersmiths Ltd, when I was Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Creative Fellow at Exeter University’s Drama Department, 2003–06.

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  9 Figures from The Papworth Trust. See “Disability in the United Kingdom 2012: Facts and Figures,” English Federation of Disability Sport, last accessed 25 May 2016, http:// www.efds.co.uk/assets/0000/6333/OO143.pdf. 10 Colin Cameron, “Whose Problem?: Disability Narratives and Available Identities,” in The Community Development Reader: History, Themes and Issues, ed. Gary Craig et al., 259–66 (Bristol: Policy Press, 2011), quoted in Colin Cameron “Disability Arts: From the Social Model to the Affirmative Model,” Parallel Lines, last accessed 25 May 2016, http://www.parallellinesjournal.com/article-from-social-model.html. 11 Definitions and examples of the medical model, the moral model, and other models of disability can be found at: http://www.disabled-world.com/definitions/disabilitymodels.php and http://www.disabilityartscymru.co.uk/equal-spaces/equal-spacesbackground-to-disability-issues/society-and-disabled-people/. 12 Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, “Hearing Difference across Theatres: Experimental, Disability, and Deaf Performance,” Theatre Journal 58, no. 3 (2006): 420, last accessed 25 May 2016, doi: 10.1353/tj.2006.0159. 13 Ibid., 423. 14 Ibid., 418. 15 Ibid. 16 James C. Woodward, “Implications for Sociolinguistic Research among the Deaf,” Sign Language Studies 1 (1972): 1–7. 17 Jemina Napier, “The D/deaf–H/hearing Debate,” Sign Language Studies 2, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 145, last accessed 25 May 2016, doi:10.1353/sls.2002.0006. 18 Kochhar-Lindgren, “Hearing Difference,” 418. 19 Jenny Sealey and Graeae Theatre Company have since developed a well-deserved reputation for their innovative “aesthetics of access,” creatively embedding a range of tools including sign language and audio description throughout the artistic process. For more information visit: http://www.graeae.org/about-us/artistic-vision/. 20 Kaite O’Reilly, peeling (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 45. peeling is also included in Atypical Plays for Atypical Actors: Selected Plays by Kaite O’Reilly. 21 O’Reilly, peeling, 19. 22 Marvin Carlson, Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 18. 23 O’Reilly, peeling, 61. 24 I do not have space in this essay to give a full overview of the history of Deaf education. See also Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses – A Philosophical History (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999); David Wright, Deafness: A Personal Account (London: Faber & Faber, 1969); Douglas C. Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Carol A. Padden and Tom L. Humphries, Inside Deaf

114 | Kaite O’Reilly Culture (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989), etc. 25 René Descartes, Discours de la méthode (1637), quoted in Rée, I See a Voice, 121. 26 Kochhar-Lindgren, “Hearing Difference,” 428. 27 Jean St Clair, e-mail message to author, 2012. 28 Colin Teevan, e-mail message to author, 13 July 2012. 29 Daniel Chandler, “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,” Visual-Memory, last accessed 6 June 2016, http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/short/whorf.html. 30 Quoted in Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (London: Picador, 1990), 97. 31 Ibid. 32 “Making Language Visual.” 33 Ibid. 34 Jean St Clair, email message to author, 27 June 2013. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Carlson, Speaking in Tongues, 172. 38 Kochhar-Lindgren, “Hearing Difference,” 218. 39 Sophie Stone, e-mail message to author, 9 July 2013. 40 Ibid., original emphasis. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science,” Language 5, no. 4 (December 1929): 209, quoted in Chandler, “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.” 44 M. J. Bienvenu, “Third Culture: Working Together,” Journal of Interpretation 4 (1987): 1–12. 45 Ibid., 13–24. 46 Sophie Stone, e-mail message to author, 9 July 2013. 47 Kochhar-Lindgren, “Hearing Difference,” 423–4.

Bibliography Baynton, Douglas C. Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Bienvenu, M.J. “Third Culture: Working Together.” Journal of Interpretation 4 (1987): 1–12. Cameron, Colin. “Disability Arts: From the Social Model to the Affirmative Model.” Parallel Lines. Last accessed 25 May 2016. http://www.parallellinesjournal.com/article-from-social-model.html.

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Carlson, Marvin. Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Chandler, Daniel. “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.” Visual-Memory. Last accessed 6 June 2016. http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/short/whorf.html. “Disability in the United Kingdom 2012: Facts and Figures.” English Federation of Disability Sport. Last accessed 25 May 2016. http://www.efds.co.uk/assets/0000/6333/OO143.pdf. Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. “Hearing Difference across Theatres: Experimental, Disability, and Deaf Performance.” Theatre Journal 58, no. 3 (2006): 417–36. Last accessed 25 May 2016. doi: 10.1353/tj.2006.0159. Lane, Harlan. When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989. Napier, Jemina. “The D/deaf–H/hearing Debate.” Sign Language Studies 2, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 141–9. Last accessed 25 May 2016. doi: 10.1353/sls.2002.0006. O’Reilly, Kaite. Atypical Plays for Atypical Actors: Selected Plays. London: Oberon Books, 2016. —.“Making Language Visual: An Interview with Jean St Clair.” Kaite O’Reilly. Last accessed 23 May 2016. https://kaiteoreilly.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/ making-language-visual-an-interview-with-jean-st-clair/. —. peeling. London: Faber & Faber, 2002. —.“What Words Look Like in the Air: The Multivocal Performance of Common Ground Sign Dance Theatre.” Contemporary Theatre Review 11, no. 3–4 (2001): 41–7. Padden, Carol A., and Tom L. Humphries. Inside Deaf Culture. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Rée, Jonathan. I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses – A Philosophical History. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999. Sacks, Oliver. Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf. London: Picador, 1990. Sapir, Edward. “The Status of Linguistics as a Science.” Language 5, no. 4 (December 1929): 207–14. Sherwood, B. “Third Culture: Making It Work.” Journal of Interpretation 4 (1987): 13–24. Woodward, James C. “Implications for Sociolinguistic Research among the Deaf.” Sign Language Studies 1 (1972): 1–7. Wright, David. Deafness: A Personal Account. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.

A New War on Borders Artistic Movements in Contested Spaces Sandra Noeth

Introductory Note Parallel to my work on this chapter, two statements popped up in my mail account within a couple of hours of one another: accounts by two artists who decided to react and reflect publically on their recent experiences of being denied access into a country. Visual artist Walid Raad1 was refused entry to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for “security reasons” on 11 May 2015 at Dubai Airport, and performance artist Tania El Khoury2 was not allowed into Bahrain on 6 May 2015. The documents were spread and made available via different online sources and platforms, further extending the singular cases and the related experiences into digital and discursive space. The artistic practices, biographies, personal and professional motifs for the travels, as well as the form and language that Tania El Khoury and Walid Raad chose to communicate, differ in many respects. However, the trips of both Lebanese-born artists, which are the subject of discussion here, are both linked to research projects which critically deal with the conditionality and the political, social, economic, ethical conditions of contemporary art production and representation in the Arab region, and the individual and collective involvement of its international players, institutions as well as artists and audiences. Walid Raad’s journey had been coordinated with and brought into the awareness of diverse authorities and individuals beforehand. It was part of an initiative started in 2010, Gulf Labor3, where, as Raad states, “we have all spoken publicly about labour conditions in the Gulf, especially with regards to the building of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi [. . .]. We have done so peacefully and constructively.”4 Tania El Khoury’s trip to Bahrain was motivated by long-term research on art in the Arab

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world. Her text reads like a gesture of solidarity with the Palestinian people and introduces a historical perspective on the complex and ever-changing practices and procedures of bordering in the context. These examples appear as representatives of and inscribe within a narrative of uncountable, unnamed, silenced or silent voices. They build an entry point into the following reflections on the relation between artistic, political and civic strategies for action in bordering processes, and, more specifically, the role of the body and of movement-based strategies within these processes.

A New War on Borders Borders and bordering processes influence and structure artistic lives and processes on a daily level. Tightened visa procedures, changing legal frameworks for permits, and an observably rising number of travel bans, exclusions and deportations are proof of these dynamics, which seem to be in staggering contradiction with an economically fostered and internationally acclaimed rhetoric of “cultural exchange.” These concretely observable phenomena resonate, on a more symbolic, immaterial level, with the creation and re-introduction of nationalist and other identitarian but also disciplinary boundaries in a globalized arts industry and its circulating narratives and markets. Christine Tohme, founding director of ashkal alwan in Beirut, speaks about a “new war on borders”5 when referring to recent experiences. Concerning, but clearly not limited to Lebanon and the Arab region where a historically grown volatility marks the political, economic, urban and social landscape, she observes a drift: “[. . .] it feels like back to the 90s, when after the Civil War the restriction of movement and the question of mobility were the biggest topics to negotiate.”6 She describes a moment in time where borders are not irrevocably drawn, but “porous and mutable,”7 where maps are re-drafted and relationality teaches us that every detail is part of a network. In this environment, freedom of speech and expression seems to enter a state of regression again. These developments concern art as well as the role that art can and seeks to play in the myriad textures of measuring out, negotiating, legitimizing and claiming material and immaterial space: can and should art develop tools and attention, offer space and initiatives to rehearse protest and to develop cultures of resistance to these bordering processes?8 Highlighting the dynamic quality of borders, Christine Tohme states: “And of course art is secondary, when you’re thinking of it as an accessory. But when you think of it as a socio-political project, it’s not an accessory. It’s something that deals directly with the infrastructure of where you live, with your situation.”9 Consequently, current border dynamics not only affect our artistic and intellectual

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work by enabling or restricting freedom of movement, but they inherently challenge the way we conceive of structures and systems, of centers and peripheries, of the local and the international. Thus, borders and their changing dynamics concern our individual as well as collective capacity for action as artists, thinkers and citizens. They confront us with the obligation to work against the effects of fracturing that borders introduce on different levels and challenge our very contemporaneity when critically calling for a reformulation of our ways and tactics of spreading knowledge, of circulating ideas,10 of working and being together. In line with Tania El Khoury and Walid Raad’s statements, the experience and the concept of borders address our own responsibility for and involvement in the construction and representation of borders and bordering processes.

Zones, Borders, Boundaries The following reflections are part of a broader research project on the body’s capacity for action that I have been developing out of my practice as a dramaturge working mainly in the field of dance and choreography, and in close, process-oriented dialogue with other artists and thinkers.11 They are based on an understanding of choreography as a practice and a concept dealing with structuring and organizing movement in time and space and as a tool of analyzing and creating artistic as well as societal and political participation and intervention. Deep changes in the order of the world furthermore introduce specific features, structures and systemic patterns (like, in the context of unstable and dynamic borders, the simultaneity, heterogeneity, contradiction, vulnerability and ambivalence of movements) which in the following become the very material of choreography. Thus, borders here are understood in their performativity, as border-zones, or border-scapes,12 i.e. as nonabstract spaces, as constructed cultural, political, identitarian and social territories. They are approached as complex and dynamic networks13 and places of encounter more than rigid and immobile lines of separation. In what follows, I would like to focus the discussion about borders on the role, status and agency of the body in the process. Existing research in border studies predominantly highlights on the restriction and possibility of mobility, mostly in the context of migration and physical movement, or, in political and juridical terms, the question of the integrity of the body as a human right. It concentrates on the analysis of the body as one amongst different elements of strategic mass mobilization, or as a weapon or fighter.14 Next to these perspectives that value the materiality of the body, its symbolic potential and the question of how this enables and informs a legal, religious, political, national, ethnic, gendered understanding and legitimization of borders, is central.15

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My reflections react to and inscribe themselves in the above-mentioned discussions. However, they aim at re-valuing and re-imagining the role of the body in the production and representation of borders by drawing on artistic and theoretical knowledge from the field of choreography and dance as further orientations which focus the research. Studies on “social choreography” and the agency of the body16 seek to introduce choreography as an emergent order. Choreography here claims relevance as a practice and a concept that has historically been engaged in composing, organizing, structuring and documenting (artistic, social, political) territories. As a space of “unconditional hospitality”17 which, situated in the context of a growing critically engaged and self-reflective community of practitioners and theoreticians working on contemporary dance, deals with the consequences and ultimately the violence of its inscriptions. This opens up the choreographic to other media and disciplines, to urban and digital space, and links aesthetic questions to the social and the political. Furthermore, concepts and knowledge developed practically and theoretically in choreography, like presence, empathy, embodiment, or affect for example, are introduced in the discussion about the production and representation of borders. What is the status of affect, empathy and sensing in the process of producing borders (e.g., the fear or paranoia that installs itself in a bordering body, or the actualization of physically memorized movements and reactions)? In what ways do these experiences inform and help us understand the mobilization and aesthetization of borders and how this provides knowledge about theoretical concepts of territoriality, sovereignty and agency?18 Here, strengthening the aspect of “becoming-border” indicates a dynamic relationship between arts, civil society and the public and highlights borders as spaces of encounter.19 By examining the embedded logics of power and politics of decision, this chapter aims at initiating a critical reflection of the possibilities of participation as a citizen and individual in the process. On a methodological level, choreography provides a tool for the analysis of the organization of movement in time and space, and an understanding of how movement-based strategies are deployed and represented in bordering processes.20 Putting the body center stage in the discussion of bordering processes represents an important shift. It not only highlights the body as an element in bordering processes when it comes to organizing, enabling or restricting movement in time or space. It also suggests that the perspective of the body in its performativity introduces an ethical dimension into the debate. The body as a witness, the body as an agent that brings forward questions of responsibility, of involvement and participation. What is “speakable,” what is “expressable” by and through the body, movement and dance? How do bodies become evidence? Following the physicality and the performativity of the body, I propose to acknowledge proximity,

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distance, care, listening, responsibility and other elements as formative principles in bordering processes.21 Reacting to current discussions on mobility and migration, the following paragraphs propose to look at two artworks in order to, more specifically, understand the role of the body in bordering processes. The examples by Dictaphone Group as well as by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme refer to specific historical and contemporary border situations in Lebanon and Palestine. By dramaturgical analysis of the artworks, the interest is to understand how these artists use movement-based, choreographic strategies and procedures in order to address the construction and representation of borders.

“Absent Bodies” – Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme The artwork by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme situates itself in between performance, visual art and sound works. Both left Palestine during the second Intifada (2000–05), came back afterwards and are currently based in New York: moving on, moving in between, moving across borders. Contingency, which was first published in 2010, is part of a series of works examining the relation between sound and power relationships. It takes its starting point in a concrete situation of border crossing, the Qalandia-Checkpoint. As one of the biggest Israeli-controlled checkpoints, it not only defines a separating line between Ramallah and Jerusalem, but constitutes and defines a space in between the Palestinian cities Ramallah and Al-Ram and the Qalandia refugee camp. Above all, it represents an everyday situation, a reality of colonialism, occupation, surveillance and control, of restriction of travel and mobility. In this environment, the city of Ramallah resembles a kind of bubble, split off from the rest of the West Bank, surrounded by the separation wall, in direct proximity to the military zone with its watchtowers, lines to queue up for pedestrians and cars and big buildings with metal turnstiles inside. Basel Abbas describes entering the checkpoint as follows: [. . .] they make you sit, and you hear the voices of the military without seeing their bodies: metal sounds, machinery, distorted voices, orders. [. . .] They can stop you whenever they want. You actually don’t see the soldiers. The soldiers can see you from the cameras and they can speak to you from the speakers. Almost kind of low-fi speakers, so you almost cannot hear them, they are almost robotic. They give you orders and tell you what to do but you cannot see their bodies until you finish crossing.22

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In Contingency, the artists work mainly with the acoustics of the checkpoint and the physical experience that it produces. Over several months, they used hidden devices to record its soundscape: voices and sounds that, in the process of crossing the checkpoint, display the non-visible, abstract, absent bodies of the soldiers.23 The physicality of the voices of the soldiers attributes a sensible presence to the situation, like an extension of the bodies24 beyond their own individuality. Here, Contingency confronts us with the agency of the collective, i.e. with the moment when singular bodies become representative of one or several collectivities, its imaginaries, narratives and actions. In between the bodies that transgress the concrete, material, architectural border space of the checkpoint and the abstract, expanded voice-bodies that are fed into the engineered, digitalized space, another, a third body emerges: the neutralized, politicized, generalized and fleshless body of the collective – the Israelis, the Palestinians, the occupiers, the exiled, etc. It is the relation between borders and identity construction that is addressed here and which produces and re-produces distinct reactions, movements and spatial set-ups ascribed to the respective collectivity. To feel borders, to carry boundaries in your body before they become visible, before they find an imitable and exterior form: Basel Abbas frames the experience of the checkpoint as an “illogical reality,” a temporality in which memories, presence and fiction merge. An experience marked by contradictions in which one is confronted with physical strategies of disciplining and of concentration – an experience of embodiment which trains, inscribes, rehearses and affirms the possibility and restriction to act and to react in the body. “You have to be able to remain calm and sane, you have to disconnect your body from your mind. In the instant that you are crossing a checkpoint your body just doesn’t belong to you. You need to let your body go.”25 When moving with a visitor’s body through the installation in a gallery or an arts space, it seems that the point is not to recreate the emotionality of the bordering experience or to reconstruct Qalandia checkpoint. Much more, by strategies and means of fragmentation and disconnection, the complex constructedness of bordering processes, its constitutive elements and underlying politics become clear. Contingency works not on the imitation of borders, but on its denormalization. By directing our attention to the very strategies used and by re-defining them artistically, the artists’ proposal is, in my view, to exactly take away its normality and everyday quality again.

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Fig. 1, Fig. 2: Contingency, 2010; © Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.

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“Collective Bodies” – Dictaphone Group Nothing to Declare by Dictaphone Group (2012) is a performance that evokes the relation between the singular body moving through (urban, public, theatrical) space and the embedded, parallel process of becoming-collective. In a moment of massive urbanization that Lebanon faces today, the three artists take on a historical perspective and use the Lebanese railway as an example of the country’s and the region’s infrastructure and as initial material for the research-based project. Dictaphone Group combines academic and non-academic methods and procedures and uses the example of public transport and its historical and present use as a focus for their choreographic work on the production of borders. The train service in Lebanon, which once was supposed to represent a border-crossing project within the Arab region, was interrupted and gradually stopped during the Civil War 1975–90 and never restored afterwards. Today, this not only presents an infrastructural problem but also concerns the “contract” between the Lebanese state and its citizens when it comes to the question of responsibility for the freedom of movement and mobility in the country. Fig. 3: Nothing to Declare, 2012; © Dictaphone Group.

In the context of Lebanon, where space for the freedom of movement and expression becomes tight, in a literal as well as fictional sense, the artists bring up the question of how collectivity is produced in moments of crisis and catastrophe and how directed and non-directed action can be conceived in the process.26 During

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the working process, performance artists Tania El Khoury and Petra Serhal as well as urbanist Abir Saksouk-Sasso undertook individual journeys alongside the closed-down and largely abandoned tracks of the Lebanese train company, spreading into different orientations, trying to reach the exterior borders with Syria and Israel. However, they not only deal with the national borders and the consequences of the colonial history of the country and the region. During their travels through diverse parts of Lebanon and beyond, they were also confronted with expected and unexpected, material and immaterial borders and boundaries inside the country: military and protection zones as well as religious, ethnical, political or communitarian borders. In the performance, this material is positioned next to video documentation, stories and quotes delivered by oral history, interviews, biographical data and found footage.

Fig. 4: Nothing to Declare, 2012; © Dictaphone Group. Out of a dramaturgical perspective, the predominant element of Nothing to Declare is the continuous fragmentation, dis-orientation, and the disappropriation of space, material and authority and the redistribution of order and meaning. By the entanglement and the layering of space, the artists create a dispositive of concurrent, contradictory and simultaneous narrations and images and thereby deconstruct and set preconceived ideas of borders in motion. Their decision to accentuate the instability, incompleteness and brittleness of what is conceptualized as “knowledge” and “narrative” in this context might be read in relation to

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the Lebanese context where a strong mistrust towards overarching categories like nation, state or identity persists. While they (as well as their public during the performance) move and travel through urban, mediatized, performative, digital27 and physical spaces, collectivities are evoked and gain agency: religious, ethnical, family-related, political and institutional belongings and affiliations as well as the shared “we” of the stage situation. Collectivities, which are not based on a preset interest, ideology or form, but follow an irrational and decentralized form of organization. In Nothing to Declare, the choreographic and dramaturgical change of space negotiates borders not as rigid, static separation lines, but as dynamic arrangements which are actualized by shared histories(s), personal experience, fiction and memory. Consequently, the work is designed as a process and constantly edited depending on the context: “We aim to tour this project throughout the Arab world, including Palestine. In each Arab country, the performance will be expanded through site-specific oral history and people’s mobility in that particular country, and about our journey to get there.”28

Bodies of Evidence The absent and collective bodies addressed by Dictaphone Group, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme as well as the border-crossing bodies of Walid Raad and Tania El Khoury, are bodies in, as, and of evidence, which raise the question of our individual and collective agency. In responsive, performative and reflective modes, they discuss how bordering processes challenge artistic work and the position of the artist, and vice versa. But they are also an address, an invitation to investigate into how material and immaterial borders are constructed, perceived, defended and represented: How do we process these experiences? Which tools, strategies and tactics do we invent? How shall we deal with the gap between the “political content” of an artwork and “politics”? How can we create moments of tension and suspension that allow us to redirect our gaze at something that has become familiar? How can we reintroduce a distance, a hesitation into existing forms and narratives of borders in order to address the very construction of our perspectives? The artists use details, selected cases and materials in order to engage in a more general reflection on borders and the relation between artistic – choreographic, physical, movement-based strategies – and political, civic, activist strategies for action. Focusing on their body and movement-based strategies allows us to access a complex texture of invisible and visible movements, bodies and agents, and thereby, address our own involvement, participation and responsibility.

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Following the movements of the body points us to: • the choreography of bordering procedures – formalities of immigration processes, the preliminary establishment of a network of invitations and meetings, the repetitive elements of interrogations, the confiscation of passports, the waiting, escorts and rhetoric, the passiveness of institutions and inviting organisms in the process, but also the architectural and material framework of it, the walls, wires and concrete, which define and provoke movements and direct our gazes. • strategies and experiences of embodiment – physical and mental movements and narratives that rehearse, actualize, memorize, fictionalize, prepare, act and react to the very moment of border-crossings as well as the agency of emotions, feelings and empathy involved.29 • the entanglement of different spaces (physical, digital, architectural, urban, material and immaterial, political, private and public) in bordering processes as well as the temporal, symbolic expansion of the body, of movement and the relation between collectivity and individuality negotiated thereby. • the everyday nature of bordering experiences, and the tension between rights that protect the freedom of mobility and expression in their universal, international claim, and their realization and implementation in a regional, local context. The body appears as both subject and object of bordering processes. It introduces a resistance that points us to the fact that our assumptions, images and knowledge of bordering processes are dynamic and constantly actualized. Above all, it shows us the impossibility of being outside of the bordering dynamics, the impossibility to think or move from a safe point, from a non-situated position and the obligation to reflect on our own involvement and participation in the construction, representation and legitimization of borders.30 In line with the material and immaterial borders and border-scapes mentioned, philosopher Rosi Braidotti describes the challenge linked to the representation of a constantly changing, entangled environment: We already live and inhabit social reality in ways that surpass tradition: we move about, in the flow of current social transformations, in hybrid, multicultural, polyglot, post-identity spaces of becoming. [. . .] We fail, however, to bring them into adequate representation. There is a shortage on the part of our social imaginary, a deficit of representational power, which underscores the political timidity of our times.31

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Braidotti identifies here the necessity of an ethical project and states: At the core of this ethical project is a positive vision of the subject as a radically immanent, intensive body, that is, an assemblage of forces or flows, intensities, and passions that solidify in space and consolidate in time, within the singular configuration commonly known as the “individual” self. This intensive and dynamic entity is rather a portion of forces that is stable enough to sustain and undergo though non-destructive fluxes of transformation. [. . .] It is important to see that this fundamentally positive vision of the ethical subject does not deny conflicts, tension, or even violent disagreements between different subjects.32

Using the body and movement-based, physical strategies and choreography as research perspectives on bordering processes, the artists challenge our cultures of representation and introduce a process of denormalization: a process that draws attention to the aestheticization of conflicts and borders, that questions the status of a document, that forces a discussion and seeks to introduce a distance to something that has become everyday, a process which works against the normalization of a state of exception. The urgency in the quoted examples – political, personal, and otherwise – is more than a positivistic concept or a means or reason serving to legitimize a work. Much more, urgency here operates as a dramaturgical dimension, claiming a strong relation between arts, public and civil society. Using the performativity and physicality of the body as a means to address the construction and representation of borders also means to work on sharing an experience and engaging in a common process of distributing space. It is an attempt to think of our individual and collective capacity for action not as primarily something that is directed against or towards something (values, ideas, explications or images), but which constantly reflects on the conditions and prerequisites of our positions and positioning. It is an attempt to move in, to move through, and to move across contested spaces.

Notes   1 Walid Raad, “An Open Letter: Denied Entry and Deported,” e-flux, last accessed 15 February 2016, http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/an-open-letter-from-walid-raad/1657.   2 Tania El Khoury, “Bahrain: Access Denied,” Blogger, last accessed 22 February 2016, http://taniasnotes.blogspot.de.  3 Gulf Labor, last accessed 15 February 2016, http://gulflabor.org/.   4 Raad, “Open Letter.”   5 Christine Tohme in discussion with the author, 7 May 2015.

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 6 Ibid.   7 Christine Tohme, “Nouveaux Niches: On Art Institutions in Beirut,” ARTFORUM, last accessed 20 April 2016, https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201505.   8 “[. . .] many artists feel profoundly uncomfortable that they are being somehow asked to bring peace, or change the world for the better, or produce a quasi-shamanistic wisdom. And it is not easy to reconcile the often discursive, questioning, opaque and open-ended practice of art with the specific aims of NGOs and activists whose primary work is to bring food, security, peace and reconciliation.” Michaela Crimmin, “Introduction: Reflections on Art and Conflict,” in Art and Conflict, ed. Michaela Crimmin and Elizabeth Stanton (London: Royal College of Art, 2014), 11.   9 Christine Tohme in discussion with the author. 10 Christine Tohme points to strategies of live streaming that ashkal alwan has implemented for selected conference and festival formats as a tactic to deal with bordering restrictions. In discussion with the author. 11 See the artistic-theoretical research project dé-position which was developed and presented in collaboration with Antonia Baehr, Claudia Bosse, Tony Chakar, Janez Janša, Adrian Lahoud, Lejla Mehanovic and Jalal Toufic as a part of Dance Congress 2013 and in collaboration with ashkal alwan, Beirut. 12 See Gabriel Popescu, Bordering and Ordering the Twenty-first Century: Understanding Borders (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). 13 See Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones et al. (London: Verso, 2002); Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 14 See Paul Cornish and Nicholas J. Saunders, eds., Bodies in Conflict: Corporeality, Materiality and Transformation (London: Routledge, 2014). 15 See Sibylle van der Walt and Christoph Menke, eds., Die Unversehrtheit des Körpers: Geschichte und Theorie eines elementaren Menschenrechts (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2007). 16 See Chrysa Parkinson and Jeroen Peeters, eds., The Dancer as Agent Collection (Stockholm: Sarma and DOCH, Stockholm University of the Arts, 2014); André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006); Gabriele Klein, “Social Choreography and the Everyday,” in Rehearsing Collectivity: Choreography Beyond Dance, ed. Elena Basteri, Emanuele Guidi, and Elisa Ricci (Berlin: Argobooks, 2012). 17 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 18 See Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

130 | Sandra Noeth 19 See Rosi Braidotti, “Affirmation versus Vulnerability: On Contemporary Ethical Debates,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 10, no. 1 (2006): 235–54. 20 See the methodological framework of Dana Caspersen’s work on choreography and conflict resolution Changing the Conversation: The 17 Principles of Conflict Resolution (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2015); or Paz Rojo’s research on choreographic patterns and bodies in protest: “The Refusal to Choreograph and Its Movement: The Subaltern Pathway,” Stockholm University of the Arts, last accessed 17 February 2016, http://www.uniarts.se/forskning/pagaende-forskningsprojekt/koreografi/choreographing-dissidence. 21 See Sandra Noeth, “Intact Bodies: Langsame Gewalt, Gesten der Selbst-Berührung und die Unversehrtheit des Körpers,” Theater der Zeit 12 (2013), 1–4; and the conference entitled “Scores N°7: Intact Bodies: Artistic-theoretical Parcours on the Choreography of Territories,” Tanzquartier Wien, 19–22 June 2013, curated by Sandra Noeth. 22 Neil King and Kate Laycock, “The Incidental Insurgents: Interview with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme,” Deutsche Welle, 15 December 2012, last accessed 20 April 2016, http://www.dw.com/en/the-incidental-insurgents/av-16453377. 23 The absence of the body as a strategy in situations of conflict and war finds a new atrocity and cynicism in the medially constructed “ghost boats,” guideless vessels illegally transporting refugees from Syria and Africa to Europe. 24 See research by Monika Halkort on the economy of information in the context of unregulated migration movements and the expansion of the body in digital space through the usage of GPS-technology, Twitter, Facebook etc. in refugee camps. 25 King and Laycock, “Incidental Insurgents.” 26 On the community and collectivity in the context of catastrophes, war and environmental calamities, see works by Rebecca Solnit, Rob Nixon, Jalal Toufic and Mahmood Mamdani. 27 The performance Nothing to Declare is completed by a weblog, which is permanently actualized in dialogue with current events as well as the specific contexts of the places where the work is presented: Dictaphone Group, last accessed 22 February 2016, http:// www.dictaphonegroup.com/blog/. 28 “Dictaphone Group: Nothing to Declare,” Tanzquartier Wien, last accessed 22 February 2016, http://www.tqw.at/en/events/nothing-declare?date=2013-06-21_19-30. 29 “Frustration, disappointment, fear and anger at the militarisation of borders seem like a pretty familiar scene” and addresses an “immediate” yet indirect knowledge mediated by an anonymous group of refugees.” See El Khoury, “Bahrain.” 30 See Walid Raad in his letter when he states: “I am part of the Gulf ‘community’.” 31 Braidotti, “Affirmation,” 243. 32 Ibid., 238.

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Performances Cited Contingency. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. 8 min. four channel sound installation, minimum 3LED tickers, aluminium sheets. 2010. Nothing to Declare. Dictaphone Group. Performance and research project: Tania El Khoury, Petra Serhal, Abir Saksouk. Video editing: Ali Beidoun. Camera: Karam Ghoussein, Dahna Abourahme. Music/composition: Ahmad Khouja, Khairy Eibesh. Mapping: Nadine Bekdache. 2012.

Bibliography Balibar, Étienne. Politics and the Other Scene. Translated by Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002. —. We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Translated by James Swenson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Braidotti, Rosi. “Affirmation versus Vulnerability: On Contemporary Ethical Debates.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 10, no. 1 (2006): 235–54. Caspersen, Dana. Changing the Conversation: The 17 Principles of Conflict Resolution. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2015. Cornish, Paul, and Nicholas J. Saunders, eds. Bodies in Conflict: Corporeality, Materiality and Transformation. London: Routledge, 2014. Crimmin, Michaela. “Introduction: Reflections on Art and Conflict.” In Art and Conflict, edited by Michaela Crimmin and Elizabeth Stanton, 4–14. London: Royal College of Art, 2014. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Dictaphone Group. Last accessed 22 February 2016. http://www.dictaphonegroup. com/blog/. —. “Die Eisenbahn im Libanon: Überlegungen zu einer Reise von Niederlagen und Möglichkeiten.” Theater der Zeit 4 (2014): 41. El Khoury, Tania. “Bahrain: Access Denied.” Blogger. Last accessed 22 February 2016. http://taniasnotes.blogspot.de. King, Neil, and Kate Laycock. “The Incidental Insurgents: Interview with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.” Deutsche Welle. 15 December 2012. Last accessed 20 April 2016. http://www.dw.com/en/the-incidental-insurgents/av16453377.

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Klein, Gabriele. “Social Choreography and the Everyday.” In Rehearsing Collectivity: Choreography Beyond Dance, edited by Elena Basteri, Elisa Ricci and Emanuele Guidi, 39–43. Berlin: Argobooks, 2012. Lahoud, Adrian. “Floating Bodies.” In Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, edited by Forensic Architecture, 495–515. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014. Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. Manning, Erin. Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence: The Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Noeth, Sandra. “Intact Bodies: Langsame Gewalt, Gesten der Selbst-Berührung und die Unversehrtheit des Körpers.” Theater der Zeit 12 (2013): 1–4. Parkinson, Chrysa, and Jeroen Peeters, eds. The Dancer as Agent Collection. Stockholm: Sarma and DOCH, Stockholm University of the Arts, 2014. Popescu, Gabriel. Bordering and Ordering the Twenty-first Century: Understanding Borders. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Raad, Walid. “An Open Letter: Denied Entry and Deported.” e-flux. Last accessed 15 February 2016. http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/an-open-letter-fromwalid-raad/1657. Rojo, Paz. “The Refusal to Choreograph and Its Movement: The Subaltern Pathway.” Stockholm University of the Arts. Last accessed 17 February 2016. http:// www.uniarts.se/forskning/pagaende-forskningsprojekt/koreografi/choreographing-dissidence. Saleh, Farah. “Kunstproduktion als Form des täglichen Protests.” Theater der Zeit 10 (2014): 1–3. Tanzquartier Wien. “Nothing to Declare.” Last accessed 22 February 2016. http:// www.tqw.at/en/events/nothing-declare?date=2013-06-21_19-30. Tohme, Christine. “Nouveaux Niches: On Art Institutions in Beirut.” ARTFORUM. Last accessed 20 April 2016. https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201505. van der Walt, Sibylle, and Christoph Menke, eds. Die Unversehrtheit des Körpers: Geschichte und Theorie eines elementaren Menschenrechts. Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2007.

Institutions, Interventions, and Participartion

An Artist/Activist Moving (Across) Borders1 Faustin Linyekula

Dance as an Attempt to Remember My Name For a long time, I have never made any solo. Until today, I have only created one solo piece for myself – that was four years ago – simply because I believed and I still believe that the whole point of making work is not to be alone. It’s actually to try and find a place where you share something with people. You doubt together. You dream together. You reinvent your little world – together. Ultimately, it is about reinventing one’s own world. I could say that I still believe in revolution, but maybe not in the twentieth-century mode, where we all get together to topple the old monuments, but rather revolution in the sense of shifting my own relationship to my little world. It’s small-scale, it’s fragile. But from there: what is it that I can get to shift – just a bit? It’s only in 2011 that I created my first solo. This was my way of celebrating the tenth anniversary of our company, the Studios Kabako, in the Congo. So it was a way of asking myself the question: “What’s next?” I’m known as a dancer, a choreographer, but I like introducing myself as a storyteller. And the kind of stories that set me in motion, I understood it fifteen years ago, are not stories from exile. And yet, I’m very sensitive to the question of exile: intellectual exile, emotional, political exile. But when it came to creating work, that was never really what was coming forth. So, I decided to go back to DRC in 2001, simply because this is the country where I was born and grew up. I left Congo, or rather Zaire, as the country was known then. In 2001 I went back home to what had become in 1997 the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I didn’t exactly go back home, because in 2001 my country was still going through a terrible war. And this is a country as big as the whole of Western Europe, like five times France. In 2001,

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with the war going on, the government was only controlling about forty percent of the territory. The rest was controlled by various rebel movements. I grew up in the North-Eastern part of the country, in the city of Kisangani, former Stanleyville, as Belgians had christened it when they literally made the country and its cities. No African ever decided that: “We’ll make a country. We’ll make entities that will be mirroring the whole idea of nation-states as understood in Europe.” This was decided in Berlin, 130 years ago. European countries met here and said: “We’ll share Africa.” So Germany would get this, Belgium, France, England that, etc. And now we are stuck with these countries we call Congo or Kenya or Nigeria. After the independence in the 1960s, when the new independent African nations decided to form the organization of the African Union, one of the things that they agreed upon was that they should never touch colonial borders. Not only touch them, but even question them. So when I came back in 2001, the territory was split between the rebel movement and the government. Therefore going home for me was not exactly going home, because I could not go back to Kisangani, occupied by rebels. So I went to Kinshasa, where I had never been before in my life. In that big country, where we don’t have infrastructure – roads are almost non-existent, to travel from Kisangani to Kinshasa means either to travel on the river, about seventeen, eighteen hundred kilometers, and that takes a month, or to fly. But it’s so expensive to fly in that country that most of the time people just don’t move. They just move within a one-hundred-kilometer radius and that’s a world for them. Even today: flying from Kisangani to Kinshasa is around 600 dollars return; that’s just too much for the people there. A storyteller, as I like introducing myself, going back to Congo in 2001 – not home but to Kinshasa – the first thing I was confronted with, going back there, was that if I wanted to work and do the kind of dance, theater or storytelling that I wanted to do, I had to create the platform myself. No one was doing that kind of work. And, again, there was no infrastructure around. No theater or dance schools, no theater as such – in terms of buildings. But that actually became a strength in itself – you shift the question of theater from the building to relationships. It’s about negotiating relationships. And it doesn’t matter, whether you are in a room like this, or in a yard. It’s about meeting, and negotiating. That’s why, ultimately, I can talk of my work as theater because whether I’m just doing pure dance – I don’t know what that means, but I hear that word sometimes – pure dance, or text-based work, it’s about negotiating that relationship. With myself first, because I need to understand: Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going to? In any case, I believe that we are all in the becoming. Maybe, if there’s anything contemporary in my work, it’s just that knowledge that we are always in the becoming. A few years ago in France, a journalist wrote in Libération that is supposed to be a left-wing,

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progressive newspaper: “I had talent, but I was wasting my time by refusing to act African.” So? Good. But I don’t need to act. I don’t want to act African. I am African, and being African is maybe to say: “I don’t know.” Maybe the arrogance is to begin and say: “Africa is . . .” I don’t know what Africa is, that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing: I’m searching. The work is about: what is it? So the dialogue with myself is at that level. I like to talk about my dance as an attempt to remember my name. And what I like about the idea of a name is that, if you are really serious about it, you cannot afford to collapse into yourself, because names open a web of relationships. I’m not Faustin Linyekula for nothing. I’m Faustin because, again, Belgians came to the Congo about 130 years ago, and they introduced christianity. When my father was born, he was baptized. My father had a twin brother. He was also baptized, my uncle was baptized as Faustin. We don’t know where that name came from. But the Belgian priest who was there said: “If you have twins, it’s good to name one Valentin, that’s my father, and the other Faustin.” So my uncle became Faustin. And because I was their first-born son, they wanted to give me both names, so I became Faustin. But in the Congo we also have a post-nom, after-name. Because the French have pre-nom, name and surname. But in Zaire in 1971, Mobutu introduced what we call post-nom. It was a way of being different, of rejecting colonial heritage. That’s when he also decided to change the name of the country from Congo to Zaire. That was the policy he called Retour à l’authenticité – “return to authenticity,” meaning we have to reject everything that came with the colonial “ship.” The country came to be known as Congo, because Belgians had decided they would call this piece of land “Congo.” Why Congo? Simply because, when in the fifteenth century Europeans got to that part of the continent, coming from the Atlantic Ocean they saw a big river and asked the people living at the mouth of the river, the Kongo-people – with a “K,” they speak a language we call Kikongo – so the whole country became Congo after that. For Mobutu, in 1971, this was colonial history, and we had to reclaim our own history. So he called it Zaire. But the irony is that the word Zaire, he plucked it out of old colonial archives. Portuguese archives. It comes from the word Nzadi, which is the generic name for any big river in the Makongo [region] in Kikongo language. When Portuguese explorers got there, they asked people how they called the river and they said “Nzadi.” And, I don’t know by which miracle, Nzadi became Zaire in Portuguese archives. That’s what Mobutu chose in the name of authenticity! Then he decided to ban foreign names. In official documents, you could not be called Jean, Paul or Marie. You would go to prison for having that in an official document. You would even go to prison for wearing a tie. Mobutu decided that, from now on, Zairians should abandon their prénom, part of the colonial past, for a post-nom. We had to be different. He also replaced the tie and suit with what he

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called Abacost. Abacost means: à bas le costume, “down with the suit.” But the Abacost was basically a recycling of a Mao Tse-tung costume, but with a collar. So I have a post-nom, which is my father’s post-nom, Ngoy, which is a name that you give to the firstborn of twins. And I’m Linyekula, because in the thirties, Belgians instituted the family name tradition. It didn’t exist before in my country. My grandfather is the one who started the Linyekula family, because in the thirties, Belgians said: “You need to have a family name.” So my grandfather was called Linyekula and started the Linyekula family, and his brother, who was called Mangubo, started the Mangubo family. All that is to say, when you are serious about names, you cannot collapse into yourself. It opens a web of relationships to place, to history, to people. And negotiating that over and over, trying to understand the intricacies of those relationships becomes a project in itself, a lifelong project, an artistic project. My dance is a way of negotiating relationships. My dance is an attempt to discover another archive. I’m obsessed with History, with a big “H.” In this journey, trying to understand myself, where I come from, you are confronted very soon with one limitation, the prevalence of oral tradition versus the scarcity of written archives. If you are interested in history in a conventional sense – what archives do you turn to? To European archives. And how far back do you go with the European archives? Not more than two hundred years. What can you understand of the evolution of people over such a short period of time? Not much. Not much! And again, European archives are biased in essence. It’s how they view us. So, what am I left with? Maybe I could ask a few questions to my body, because I’m relatively young, I’m forty-one now, but I’m also ancient, it’s in my genes. There are things that connect me to generations from a thousand years ago. So, if dancing can become that space where I ask a few questions to the body. . . I don’t know if I have the capacity to understand the answer. But just shake it, set something in motion, hoping that it can tell me something. So, dialogue, negotiating relationships, negotiating relationships with myself, even before negotiating that relationship with others. It was Borges who wrote (and I read it in French, let me try to translate it) – “J’écris pour moi, pour mes amis et pour adoucir le cours du temps” – “I write for myself, for a few friends, and to appease the course of time.”

Shared Histories When you are born in a country like Congo, and I’m sure it’s the case with most former colonized countries, the former metropole is so much part of your life. For me it was really violent the first time I came to Europe, or to Belgium, and to realize that for young Belgians my age, Congo is not really that much part of

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their lives. It’s almost not even taught in schools. But for us, Belgium is a defining reality. A few years ago, I asked for a residence permit in France. The first time you apply for a residence permit, you are subjected to a day of civic education, where you are taught about the values of France, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, you are taught about French history and all that, it’s a full day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and then there is a whole hour dedicated to French history. It was fascinating for me to sit there for a whole hour with no mention whatsoever about colonial history. And I asked the lady who was teaching: “It’s a bit strange to talk a whole hour about French history and you don’t mention colonialism. Because somehow it’s the reason why we are here – it’s because you came first.” Stuart Hall, British intellectual of Jamaican origin said, a few years ago, that the first time he came to England, someone asked him, “Why are you here?” and he said: “I’m here to complete the colonial history. You started out in the fifteenth century, and in the twentieth century, I’m finishing the last leg. You shaped my life, I came to look you in the eye.” And so those examples for me pose the question, how come this shared history doesn’t seem to be acknowledged by one side? And because I don’t want to stop at just complaining; once I have realized that the other part doesn’t recognize this shared history, what do I do about it? What kind of steps do I make, even in a very small way, to try and say: “Hello. I’m here.” And actually, you know what, I’m just as European as you are. I studied Latin for six years in high school with Reverend Father Lommel, who came to Congo in 1955 and stayed there until 2004. When you study a language, even a dead language, the history, the literature, and you translate Cicero and Ovid, it frames how you look at the world. I speak French, for god’s sake, it’s my first language. And yet it’s not the first language that I spoke in my life, it’s not the language that I speak with my mother. But it has become my first language. When you go to school in Congo, the first two years in primary school, teaching is in one of the national languages, but from the third year, it switches into French and you get punished if you speak your own language in school. So with time I learned how to think in French. So that’s my first language, and it’s not just a vehicle for communication, it’s a way of shaping your world-view. So I’m just as European; but if you don’t acknowledge it – too bad for you. How can we deal with this? Whether you like it or not, we are stuck together. We are stuck together.

States of Instability The only stable thing in the Congo is the state of instability. That’s there. So I approach what I develop there with the understanding that it could stop overnight.

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But that should not stop me from dreaming and projecting myself. That’s the first point. The war officially ended in 2002. From 2003, I started going there every year for Christmas to see my family in Kisangani: maybe because it’s the city that suffered the most violent battles in the country and because people were so traumatized that they didn’t want anymore of it, it’s now one of the safest places in the Congo. It’s a city of around one million, we don’t know exactly, the last census was in 1984. And because there is nothing, paradoxically, everything becomes possible. There are no other references to tie you down. You just have to invent everything with the people who are there and with what is available. You can make infrastructure out of literally anything. You saw [in the video] where we work. That’s where my work is being developed, in that yard. There are three families living there, so when I’m working, kids sit around, and when we leave the space, they take over.

Fig. 1: Studios Kabako rehearsal space; © Virginie Dupray. In such a context, the question of being in your artistic bubble shifts. I need intimacy sometimes, but how do you find intimacy when you are working among families all the time? That’s an interesting space to be in – and it’s not just conceptually, it’s practically: how do I develop resources within me or find a sense of a bubble, when I’m in the public?

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When I’m in Kisangani, I don’t expect to have access to the kind of money that my colleagues in Paris or Amsterdam would have, especially in a country where the government doesn’t care about anything, where schools and hospitals are abandoned, where people die because they don’t have ten dollars to pay for a malaria treatment. So why should they care about the arts? When I’m in such a context, the most important thing becomes the capacity to believe in something, to build something. So if I’m there, who am I to complain, when I have the luxury to eat three meals each day in a country where most people cannot even afford a decent one, where I can get medical attention, and if it doesn’t work, I can leave the country. The most expensive piece that I have made cost us around 45.000 Euros. We developed it over a period of one year. Some of the performers did not live in Kisangani, they were coming from Kinshasa, one was coming from Paris. For [producing] the same piece elsewhere, you would need to multiply that by five. It’s a question of understanding where you are and dealing with that economic scale. For that piece, we actually raised 70.000 Euros, meaning we saved 25.000 Euros for other projects we developed in Kisangani. After all these years of war, the government collapsed. The state collapsed. The state is just a performance, where every now and then, they show you that they have the power. But literally you can do anything as long as those who are in power don’t feel threatened by what you are doing. We can say: “It’s only dance.” So I have never felt threatened by politicians, I know that they will never help us and I know that they can stop us if someone is not happy. I am juggling with those realities. I went back there fourteen years ago, I moved back to Kisangani eight years ago. I don’t see myself going anywhere else for as long as it will be possible to live there. Now the country is in a very delicate situation. We don’t know if Kabila will change the constitution, [and] if he does, how will people react? Already in January [2015], when the government tried to change the electoral law, there were protests and forty-two people killed in Kinshasa. So we don’t know. We know it can stop overnight, but we’ll figure out how to continue.

Lines of Transfer, Architectures of the Body, States of Dance If I’m standing like this, I can develop the sense of architecture. As I’m standing, the floor is supporting my feet. My feet are supporting my ankles, my ankles my legs. My legs my knees. My knees are supporting my thighs. My thighs are supporting my waist, pelvis. The pelvis is supporting the spine. The spine, the skull. And the skull . . . [has] all that activity there. And if I find a way of connecting

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all that activity with the earth, through the rest of the body, I’m entering a state of dance. And when I enter the state of dance, it’s about accepting that I’m always in the becoming. It means that this dance is to be found. I started dancing rather late. I was twenty-one. By conventional trajectories that’s late. But I came to dancing through the backdoor of theater and writing. When I was fourteen, fifteen, I started writing poetry. I started writing with the clear awareness of those who have written before me from the black world. Senghor, Césaire, Damas. At fifteen, we had the pretentious idea that we could change African literature. Today I acknowledge that it was pretentious, but if you are not pretentious when you are fifteen, then. . . Coming that late to dance, with that background, I realized that maybe one way for me to move forward was to analyze the whole idea of movement. And so, this body, which is trying to connect that activity [in the head] with the floor, with the idea of instability and the whole impermanency, had to learn tools to analyze movement. You can break any movement to the idea of points and lines in space. If I do that, you can say, it’s just a dance. But I can say it’s a point, a point and it makes a line. And this line, which is outside here, I can put it inside my body. Once it’s inside, I can break it, transfer it, throw it, take it back. So, depending on what I’m working on, the lines could be clear. But some other time, if not most of the time, these lines, whether inside or outside are blurred! Because I don’t know. I’m trying to see where, how. . . It’s about the body, it’s about space. My heritage really, it’s a pile of ruins. That country is a pile of ruins, and I’m not talking only about the physical ruins. Those are easy to reconstruct. It’s the ruins in our heads, in our hearts. Young people back home are so desperate that if someone would be rich enough to offer a million dollars to everyone, they’d sell out the country and leave. That’s why I like to have clear lines in space. It’s like trying to clear a small space for me to exist. It’s never permanent. I can’t claim that I’m strong enough to withstand that pressure for a long time. Maybe I can sustain it for forty-five minutes – but then it comes back. The work that I do with other dancers or actors is really that. It’s tiring, because you have to find yourself over and over again.

Points of Entry: Travelling, Writing, Speaking, Singing The first strategy [to work with other dancers raises the question of] how much time I spend with them. Papy Ebotani is really at the heart of my work, and we have been working together for fourteen years. After all those years, we started understanding each other or one another. It’s time, it’s trust. Because people are always changing: I’m changing; they are changing as well, it’s difficult to say, this is the specific strategy. There are things that worked yesterday, that don’t work today.

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So I need to have many strategies. Sometimes it could be just travelling. With some people, when you need to work [it’s best to say] let’s travel together. Maybe we’ll just go to a village eighty kilometers away and spend a week there. With others it would be reading, exchanging stuff. Yet with others, the point of entry is strictly physicality. “With you, I’d like you to work on the idea of stomping!” And through exhaustion – we’d just stay there! – until the material begins to tell us something. Strategies are just points of entry. The rest – we’ll discover.

Fig. 2: Statue of Loss (2014); © Andreas Etter. For the “Return to Sender”-Festival [at Hebbel-am-Ufer, Berlin in March 2015] [. . .] they asked for letters. I thought about it for a real long time, and then I realized that, actually, I’m really tired of writing. Because every time I write, it presupposes that someone knows how to read it in the first place. And this is a country of around seventy million, where the literacy rate is quite low, about forty percent. So if I write – who am I writing to? Again in this context – because the program was about how we deal with the history, the colonial past – I didn’t want to write a letter. Because those that I’d really like to have a conversation with about that past, are not from Europe. I’d like to understand my great-grandfather’s perspective on that history. The European perspective – I have that. Or rather: I only have that! But how do I deal with that other perspective, if archives don’t exist? I have been travelling a lot in the country. Going to villages or towns, and mostly I’d just go and spend time. I’d go there because I know someone who can introduce me to people, most of the time musicians and singers. It’s not like the griot tradition in West Africa, where they learn and tell the history of their people.

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But somehow, even in the Congo, when I spend some time with a percussionist, who is always a master of song, I learn stuff. What I learn from those people is shifting: they will never spend so much energy saying “It used to be like this!” No, it’s always in the present! Even when they say, “When I was young I did that – but we do it like this today.” And so, all that history is there. But what they really focus on is how relevant is it for us today? Here? At first, I was kind of sad as things were disappearing, but today I think it’s good. Because it means that we accept that everything has a beginning and everything dies at some point. But it’s not because it’s gone, because it’s not there anymore. It’s still “working” somehow. And if it’s really dead, then fine! It just means that it’s not relevant anymore. So today my focus is really on talking with people who are there. Now, leaving the country becomes like a bonus. I went back to Congo in 2001, with the only conviction that I wanted to tell stories from the Congo. But I didn’t ask myself the question of “whom to?” And so I participated in an economic mode where you work in the Congo, but you tour in the world, and that’s where the work exists for economic reasons. Today I’m asking: how do I tell stories from the Congo to the people of the Congo? And how do I make that economically viable? Yes there’s no money. Ok fine. But people are living there. People are making babies and projects there. How do they do it? It is interesting to see that cultural institutions from Europe that have been supporting the arts in Africa, did support the arts with this idea to make it more exportable. And yet the EU puts much more money in the education system on the continent, but not for our teachers to leave! They put [in] the money so that our teachers stay. How come with the arts, they put in money so that we leave? Is it possible for us now to reimagine this, to get money for us to stay? It doesn’t mean closing ourselves from the rest of the world, but sometimes we just need to deal with our environment first. And then if everyone in this society is finding [merely] ways of living, of surviving within that context, I must be doing something wrong as an artist. If you take schools in the Congo, for the past twenty years, every month, parents have to contribute some money to pay teachers. We call it prime de motivation. You need to motivate teachers. If parents go into that trouble, it means that they understand the relevance of schools. If they are not paying me as an artist, it means that I haven’t made myself relevant enough. In this quest for understanding history, I need to talk to the people who are there in my city, first, but also beyond, and try and make it relevant for them. I don’t know if we’ll ever succeed, but that’s the goal. It’s [all] only about the body. But the body can sing, can jump, can speak. It’s air, it vibrates here, it gets articulated and becomes words. For me it’s about activating the body. But how does the body speak or express itself? It depends on

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the situation. I said that my heritage is a pile of ruins, and so making work is a way of building temporary shelters. If you have a guy who just went through an explosion and survived, and this guy needs to build a temporary shelter, he doesn’t ask himself where that piece comes from, he just takes anything that he can find and bundles it together to build his temporary shelter. Sometimes, it’s dance for me. Sometimes, it’s literally words. I come and talk. If I can express it with words better, I’ll express it with words. Some other times, I’ll sing. Because I learned how to sing with my dad, who used to be a primary school teacher, but also a choirmaster at the local catholic parish. Some other times, I speak. In which language? French. Swahili. Lingala sometimes. But when I sing – it’s never in French! I have never sung in French. Really. When I sing, it’s always in Swahili or Lingala. But when I speak, it’s mainly in French. It depends on the situation.

Living in Peace with Ruptures To [take up the notion and to] continue with the image of blood-poisoning, I would say that today I have learned so much how to live with that poison, that I don’t want to get it out of my system, because then, I’d be erasing parts of my own self. I have become European, and I don’t regret it. I can say that I’m richer because I’m also European. And maybe one day Europe will understand that it’s also African, or Asian, maybe it will become also as rich as I am already today. So I don’t want to erase that poisoning. What I’d like to do is to develop strategies to live in peace with that rupture. There is an abyss. But what is it that I can do about it? Some things will never come back, but we can always re-invent new ones. Today, I don’t know if I want to continue fighting all the Blaise Cendrars of Europe. At some point, you just have to choose your battles. And with the little energy I have, I’ll put it elsewhere. That’s why a few years ago I made a piece I called “more more more . . . future.” It was my punk piece. As the punk in the seventies said “No future,” I said “I live in a world where everyone is destroying something, so if I want to be subversive, I have to construct something.” And the future, really, it’s not Cendrars. The future is imagined in the slums of Kibera in Nairobi. Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian thinker who lives in South Africa, said once, “If Europe had eyes to look at Africa, today, Europe would see its future.” That’s the future for Europe, and it’s going to be tough for everyone. But we have an advantage. We have developed strategies to deal with that and we are still developing. [. . .] I don’t want to put energy into the Cendrars whether past or present. There are still many Blaise Cendrars. People who claim that they know what Africa is. Africa is sunshine? Yes it is. Africa is safaris and Masai land? It is

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safaris and Masai land. It’s sex on the beach? Good. War and diseases? Aids and Ebola? Yes. But then what? Maybe that’s when the conversation can begin. That’s what I’m interested in. But I acknowledge that there is this rupture. And I don’t want to get it out of my blood. I want it to stay there. Because it’s part of me today, what can I do about it? If I go through my pile of ruins to build my temporary shelter, there are moments when I find tools that can be viewed as “traditional African dance” or rituals. But I really don’t ask myself the question whether it’s traditional or not. That’s what I need in that particular moment and I use it. As a child, I was taken through a few rituals. Many with my grandmothers, and it’s strange that my grandfathers never took me [through] that. Both my grandmothers are the ones who actually took me through rituals. And it’s still in the body, somehow, somewhere. We believe that religion or spirituality without a body is incomplete. So every ritual involves the body somehow. With codified gestures. But the moment I bring it on stage, in the theater space – is it still that ritual? I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure. . . But as an individual at that particular moment, it’s something that I really need. To say my name, so to speak. Some other times, it could be names that come from popular culture today. Maybe it’s a music video from Papa Wemba or Koffi Olomide or Michael Jackson. But it can also be newer dance techniques developed mainly in America, from the 60s, release techniques or contact improvisation. And as always, the question for me is how do I make something personal with it. That’s where analyzing and understanding movement comes to the rescue. But it’s only one of the tools. Talking of dance techniques in general, it just answers certain questions that people are confronted with at some point. For instance you can say that the whole idea of dancing on point in ballet, defying gravity, was an answer to the question, how do I deal with weight? Points were the answer from most European ballet. On the contrary, most traditional dances in Africa said: I’ll accept gravity, that’s why when we dance, we bend our knees, we can jump! If I see a technique, rather than just taking the answer, I ask myself the question, what possibly could have been the question? With contact improvisation, because the people who invented it are still here, I can have an answer: “How do you build this relationship with weight, sharing weight?” This question became a metaphor of a democratic society, or rather the ideal of a democratic society, because today we live in a world where democracy is reduced to the idea of the majority, but we strip it off the whole notion of responsibility. And that’s really when it becomes interesting, when being together and sharing means accepting to take responsibility for oneself, but also for that space that we have to share. So in contact improvisation, when I’m working with another body, it’s all about being together, taking care of one another, but also taking care of myself, and not preventing you from taking care of yourself too. Some other times, it’s about found objects: I take a piece from

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Fig. 3, Fig. 4: more more more . . . future (2009); © Agathe Poupeney.

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a popular dance step and put it there. These are various points of entry into the body and ways of trying to say something about myself or something which is close to what I think I am today. And I don’t know where this will go tomorrow. The question of the place of the arts in society is taking the center stage in my practice today. When I look to some possible models from the past, I see for instance that for ancient Greeks, the theater was a highly poetic space, but also a very political one. And it was a place where the whole community came together. But they were approaching their joys and fears in a very poetic manner. Could that be a model for how we relate to our space? And if I go back to traditional or ancestral practices, you’d realize that, at least in the traditions I know, the most beautiful masks or sculptures were never meant to be locked in the chief’s hut for the exclusive enjoyment of a few, but they lived in the public space. Children would play there and dogs would pee on them, but some other times they became magical. Because they were invested with that powerful moment. And then they get eaten by the termites and die. It’s part of a cycle. How can I approach my work today with this idea that it exists as part of the society in general and that I don’t need to say: this is art and this is activism? Maybe being an artist could be just another way of being a citizen. Maybe I don’t need to trade artistic objects to call myself an artist. Maybe it’s just about negotiating my relationship to a place with people, it’s about creating spaces of dreams, of possibilities in a context. The water project came about as part of this reflection. If I go to the district of Lubunga, South of Kisangani – I grew up in parts there – we always talk about water and problems linked to drinkable waters. Maybe this becomes an artistic project in itself. So concretely we started with a mapping project, where my friend Bärbel Müller came with four students of the school of architecture in Vienna and we spent two weeks mapping the water situation in Lubunga. That was September 2013. Last year, we organized an exhibition with the results of this mapping. Next week, I’m going to meet a company in Switzerland and we are trying to devise solutions toward having a pilot water treatment plant in Lubunga. Indeed, the most expensive is not producing clean water, but having a distribution system. Today most people in that district move to go and fetch water that they think is clean drinking water from a few specific places. We have around ten sources where people get drinking water from; for washing, they have other wells. If we had a project where we could replace these ten points with clean water production units, producing water that I can put in a baby milk bottle, it would be the beginning of a solution. Maybe later on, using the power of the Internet, if you interconnect smaller production plants you can have a mega-network. We hope that by mid-next year we’ll build the first pilot unit that also has to be a kind of architectural landmark in the neighborhood, as more and more I believe that the most beautiful pieces need to exist in the middle of ruins.

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Fig. 5: Woman fetching water in Lubunga; © Franck Moka. Another way of resisting . . . Using the metaphor of water as a source, this should also be the place where you can come and watch a film, come for a concert, come for a performance, a kind of neighborhood cultural center. And we also want it to be a place where you can learn. Even though we don’t have a place yet, we’ll have in May 2015 a workshop with sixty kids from the district – it’s an artistic workshop. I’m not expecting them to become artists, necessarily, but who knows? . . . But we’ll work together for a whole month with the idea of producing a short film. It’s about learning how to write with a team. So it will be a water treatment plant, but it [also] will be a neighborhood cultural center and we hope it will be a beautiful object. For me, that’s my new creation, I’m not making a new piece in the next two years. Is it activism? Yes. Is it art? Yes. And much more. . .

Notes   1 The text is a transcript from an oral presentation at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures,” Freie Universität Berlin, on 12 March 2015.

Indian Idealism The Disenfranchised Body in Yoga, Dance and Urbanity Navtej Johar

I am a performer and a practitioner. I engage in plural practices of yoga, dance (Bharatanatyam), and urban activism. As a rule, I am not interested in concentrating on only the “vertically ascending practice” of any one of these alone but am drawn to the horizontal connections, the insights as well as the overlapping patterns that may become apparent between these varied practices. I actively rely upon these cross-connections and overlaps, which are both real and telling of shared attitudes and patterns that may repeat across disciplines. These are also gentle due to their casual nature, and today I locate a sense of meaning in these ordinary yet revelatory overlaps. I think we are entering an age of ordinariness. Being special, being an expert, being an authority, or being a star seems to be losing credence. The common denominator in my three seemingly varied practices is the body; body both as material as well as an idea. In fact, my practice is progressively informed by the conflict that has historically pertained between these two for centuries. The materialists or empiricists – most notably the school of Samkhya that has been an influential rationalistic school of thought in India since approximately the sixth century BCE – who viewed the body as an intrinsically intelligent and revelatory organism, insightful observations of which may give rise to indubitable knowledge. And then, on the other hand, the idealists who can be said to comprise various schools of theistic thought that rely upon the superior intelligence of an external or divine entity, and thus consider intelligence as extrinsic to the body. For the materialists, the body is an inherently reliable mechanism, supremely responsible, materially endowed with the infinite potential of refining, rather distilling itself down unto its subtlemost dimension of essence or spirit, while for the idealists, the body is a treacherous entity, naturally sensual and thus morally irresponsible, and therefore in constant need of taming, disciplining, and

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conforming in order to befittingly house the ideal. Both spawn their respective set of “embodied” practices and rituals. While the idealists’ practice may be formal, evocative, prescriptive, corrective and even “self-deprecatory,” for the materialists, the practice is hands-on, experimental and revelatory, as well as a means to re-inscribe knowledge that has emerged out of the body, back into the body, thereby making the body and knowledge one autonomous whole. The post-Enlightenment nineteenth century saw a sweeping ascendency of idealism, both reformist and nationalistic. India’s grand romance with nationbuilding spawned fanciful idealizations and re-imaginings along with wild historical conjecturing about mythical pasts that were once lofty, illustrious, ethnically pure, and most importantly, true to the “book;” and conversely advocated expressly contemptuous measures against the morally irresponsible body that had to be subjected, subjugated, colonized, disciplined, rendered docile and, most of all, productive. It is within this exact time that I locate the re-imagining of the embodied practices of both Indian dance and yoga, an imagining that disposed the modern practitioners of these forms to become romantically and idealistically oriented towards their practice. It is this state of idealization that I seek to target and disable in my work. Thus my practice intermittently evokes or challenges the following four categories: a) the lived histories of the pre-modern practitioners; b) the nationalistic reconstructions of these embodied practices; c) the modern training methodologies of these forms; and d) the actual materialistic exploration or experimentation of the form independent of an ideal—notwithstanding the fact that this requires both rigor and information to resist the very well-mechanized exigencies of the ideal.

Reimagining of Yoga and Dance The history of pre-modern India points to yogis with radical, even “amoral” lifestyles whose esoteric practices and subsequent transformations were based upon un-interceded experimentations with the material body. However, yoga today is increasingly becoming conformist, moralistic, sanctimonious, and even traditionally religious. Similarly in dance, the traditional musical and textual repertoire of the courtesans suggests their sacred-amorous song to have been a tailor-made forum for exerting, airing and divulging the anxieties around the ever-slippery subject of intimacy and the liminal condition of the amorous heart, which today have been converted into a highly prescriptive, pious and curtailed mode of showand-tell expositions of moral correctness and sublimation of desire. Lastly, my engagement with urban activism is a response to India’s haphazard urbanity, which remains unfriendly and even hostile to the body. In this paper, I will share

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a little about these three practices within the Indian context; the modernized practice of yoga, the nationalization of classical dance – both of which are singularly invested in realigning the embodied practices with an imagined ideal – and the body-insensitive reality of our cities. The histories of both yoga and Indian dance were reconstructed by the Hindu reformists during the mid-nineteenth century. They sought to cleanse cultural practices of impurities and immoralities which, they decreed, had crept into the fold due to moral degradation of its irresponsible practitioners as well as foreign influence. They were categorical in rejecting the practices of both the hatha yogi as well as the devadasi (the traditional temple dancers from South India) on the grounds that they were obscene, immoral, repulsive, and reprehensible digressions from the norm. In fact, what is to be remembered is that first the imagining and then the constituting of India as an illustrious, moralistic, spiritual nation hinged critically upon the strident and self-righteous rejection of cultural practices that freely mixed the spiritual with the sensual, or the material with the ideal. The sweeping clarion calls of all reformists declared impeccable morality and stringent spirituality as India’s original and cardinal truths. Political and spiritual leaders of very high international stature such as Vivekananda, Blavatsky, Aurobindo, Annie Besant, even Gandhi became the advocates of such modes of self-attestations and lent modern India a new face, a new stance, a new mannerism that claimed to have been eternally even more moral than the puritanical colonizers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, yoga was still viewed as an obscure practice, a fringe subculture that was outside of the social norm and at odds with the life and aspirations of a householder. The yogi or jogi was seen as this selfinflicting outcast with magical powers, who was dirty, at times naked, sexually vitiated or depraved, and even a potential miscreant who was to be feared and kept at a distance. It was only in the beginning of the twentieth century that yoga as we know it today was fashioned as a form of physical culture, cleansed of its obscure, esoteric, secretive, no-holds-barred practices. This re-visioning and reconstruction of yoga was a direct result of the Protestant wave of aligning practice to original texts, in this case the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali that were ironically rediscovered by the British at the end of the eighteenth century with the singular intent of ruling the natives more effectively, and also the influence of “Muscular Christianity” that swept over Victorian Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century and resulted in the reform of physical fitness training in public schools. It equated “physical strength” with “moral strength” and hoped to use physical fitness as a means of both building “manly” character and instilling Christian morality in the young men. This project of “gentleman-making” “favourably predisposed Vivekananda to think seriously about – and take inspiration from – the numerous advocates of health reform whom he met in the United States between 1893 and 1895. Most

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certainly, his best-known book – Raja Yoga – reflects a concern with the physiology of spiritual fitness.”1 The same idea also later influenced Veer Savarkar, the father of the extreme right-wing Hindu movement of Hindutva, who dreamt of an India that would be energized by a Masculine Hinduism. However, the one who put his money into this idea was the Maharaja of Mysore, who opened a vyayamshala or gymnasium that offered European style routines of calisthenics and bodybuilding for the “muscularization” of the royal princes. A few years later he decided to add a yogashala for the teaching and promotion of our own indigenous practice of body conditioning, i.e. yoga, and appointed Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who is today recognized as the father of modern yoga, to head it. T. Krishnamacharya, a highly learned man of modest resources is better known due to the legacy of his illustrious students, prime amongst them being B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois (founder of what is popularly known as Ashtanga Yoga today), Indira Devi, and T. K. V. Desikachar, who happens to be my teacher. The history of Indian dance also follows a similar trajectory. The sacred/erotic temple dancer called the devadasi turned into an object of scorn by the end of the nineteenth century and was seen as “a blot on Hindu civilization” by the reformists and the Western-educated Hindu elite. These pleasure women or courtesans, who for centuries had singularly remained the repositories of both dance and salon music in India, were now seen as the agents of moral corruption, the succubi who through the seductions of their song, dance and wayward ways would suck the spiritual and physical strength of the young men of the nation. Rukmini Devi Arundale, the pioneer dance revivalist, took it upon herself to “save the dance” from the traditional community that was rapidly losing its moral standing and artistic space within the emerging modern nation-state. In 1935, she set up Kalakshetra, a school dedicated to the teaching of the reformed dance of the devadasis, which was by then christened as Bharatanatyam in the precincts of the Theosophical Society. Arundale was a prime protégé of Annie Besant, the president of the Theosophical Society as well as the Indian National Congress, thus a major architect of Indian nationalism. The revival and reconstruction of this dance was therefore squarely situated within the lofty and purist dream of nationalism. Whereas the new yoga taught at the yogashala at the Mysore Palace valorized the connection between physical strength and moral character of the young men of India, the new Indian dance celebrated the morally-cleansed and devotional ideal of dance. Under the new vision of an emerging nation, the men had to be upright and moral, and the women proper and virtuous; the men had to be athletic and strong and the women had to be refined, demure and modest. And this project of making proper Indian ladies and gentlemen would be fulfilled through the means of indigenous but reformed practices of dance and yoga. In this way, both traditions would be saved from the clutches of the morally gone-astray, mystery-

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mongering traditional practitioners, and preserved and domesticated by and for the middle classes who put them to new use in the construction of good and proper citizenry. It was a win-win situation that spawned a win-win narrative for modern India of which I am a part. As a practitioner of both these physical disciplines, I am viscerally implicated in this win-win narrative. To my mind, one main shift that this narrative has caused is that it has effectively extroverted these embodied practices, which are intrinsically self-curious and inward-looking. Indian dance to date remains the prime object of cultural exhibitionism, while yoga has become a standardized practice, of the “one size fits all” variety. Both of these practices have lost a critical specificity that is a prerequisite to first establish the primacy of the practitioner, and crucial for the embodied practice to materially engage, exert, express, reconfigure, and then reintegrate the material-energy for it to return and re-nest in the practitioner’s body. For me the prime purpose of the embodied practice is to uniquely re-make the body. Before I go any further, I would like to briefly touch upon India’s nodal materialistic philosophy, that of Samkhya, which is attributed to sage Kapila (approximately sixth century BCE). Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the primary text on yoga, is squarely based on the philosophy of Samkhya, which relies and is focused upon fully realizing the potency of matter. Because of the ever-in-flux nature of matter and no deemed discontinuity between matter, energy and spirit, it views the calibration of tangible matter as the most effective means to bring about desirable change in body, mind and being. According to Samkhya, matter can be methodically energized and subsequently distilled unto spirit, and conversely spirit may become re-coagulated unto matter. Towards that purpose, it offers a sophisticated grid of evolutes within which the distilling/coagulating process takes place. What is most important about Samkhya is that it remains determinately silent about and indifferent to the idea of God, i.e. it does not entertain the idea of an external intelligence or ideal. Towards the end of the first millennium, the school of Tantra further elaborates upon the Samkhya grid of evolutes and makes it even more complex. It incorporates into it both the aspect of sensuality as well as the idea of an abstract “God”: one who is not an external entity but a super-subtle phenomenon or a super-sensitive primal condition that is equally intrinsic to both body and cosmos, and more to the point, one that is materially achievable. The school of hatha yoga that offers us the postural practices that are so popular today is an offshoot of this sacred/profane school of Tantra.

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The Self-Energizing Mechanism of Matter According to the materialistic school of Samkhya, the mental and emotional states are seen to be directly dependent upon the physical or more precisely the “chemical” make-up of the body. The mind is considered to be directly un-approachable and can be affected only through the body and breath; thus, it is precisely for this reason that the physical practices of tempering the materiality of the body such as in yoga or tantra are devised with the singular aim of influencing the mind and disabling its compulsive tendencies. The “chemistry” of the body is seen to consist of physical substances called gunas. Gunas can be termed as fluid (not necessarily liquid) substances that are constantly flowing and influencing the state of the body/ mind, but these are not just substances, they are substances-with-tendencies. The literal translation of guna is “quality,” to be precise “positive quality,” and they are given the positive attribute because they can bring about desirable change in the body/mind and thus carry the promise of hope. But they need to be tempered. Gunas are three in number, two of them being opposing in nature while the third is neutral. The opposing two are tamas and rajas, representing the conflicting tendencies of inertia and dynamism respectively; these two tendencies are self-triggering, reactive and potentially compulsive, thus susceptible to lock into patterns of co-dependency with/against each other and as a result arrest free movement and change. The third, sattva, is considered “pure” as it is unbiased, free of habit, fixed identifications and conditionings, and therefore is considered to be autonomous, free, self-reflective or even illuminating. While tamas (slothful or inert) and rajas (dynamic or aggressive) have conflicting drives or forces, sattva does not have a drive, but is instead characterized by lightness or a buoyancy that because of its un-ambitiousness can be easily overwhelmed and overpowered by the drama of the conflicting two drives. It can be released and rise up only when the gridlock of tamas/rajas is relaxed or rather when their drama has been resolved or exhausted. So, one fundamental goal of any form of yogic practice, be it asana, pranayama, chanting, meditation, visualization, ritual, or contemplation, is to free sattva by disabling the yoke of tamas and rajas. And this disabling is done by effectively energizing and awakening the tamas out of its slothful and resistant slumber, and tempering or exhausting the aggressive rajas, so that they may both be temporarily de-programmed and, as a result, release their gridlock and allow for a clearance for the sattva to be released and rise. This can be orchestrated through a variety of means such as movement, stillness, sound, gaze, touch, voice, smell, substance, or just thought. The rising of the buoyant, calm, blissful, and clarity-conferring state of sattva then is not such an esoteric occurrence; it is materially orchestrated through technique and attention.

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A yoga asana routine conventionally ends with the mandatory shavasana, when a practitioner, after having gone through an energizing/exhausting routine of intelligently sequenced challenging postures interspersed with gentler counter poses, eventually lies down in the mandatory shavasana or the reposeful corpse pose. The practitioner lies down in a still pose not only to recover but also to allow for the body to “stop-doing,” and passively re-assimilate and re-absorb the fruits of its own qualitatively-effortful practice. This lying down in a state of “nondoing” at the end of a rigorous session of exerting, expressing and doing is the most important part, if not the very purpose of the practice. In my classes, I often describe this moment of repose in this way: if we shake a blanket or a rug, it throws out dust particles that fly out of it into the air, and if then we lay the same rug down upon the floor, these dust particles slowly resettle back into the rug, but they settle down in a new configuration. Shavasana is thus the passive state of an energized/exhausted body, which is being re-patterned through the re-absorption or re-nesting of the released energy dust, one grain at a time. At this point, I would like to point out three important things: a) that it is voluntary manipulation of the tangible body that produces an involuntary and intangible aftereffect such as deep repose shavasana, b) that the mind-altering intangible aftereffect is extracted or farmed out of the material body through the fine balance of an energetic/exhaustive calibration, and c) that such a moment of absorption cannot only be stilling, deeply satisfying and pleasurable for the practitioner, but is also visible to the viewing eye. A methodically-calibrated body absorbed in the reposeful moment is a visible body, visible to the naked eye. I would even go a step further to say that it is also a transmitting body, a body that can elicit attention as well as sympathetic identification of the viewer and thereby transmit a portion of this aftereffect. And I attempt to incorporate this possibility of “infectious absorption,” into my performance work. The sensitive potency of materialism upon which the transformative promise of yoga and Samkhya rests has today been overshadowed by projections and prescriptions of religious as well as New Age idealism. As a yoga teacher, I see students lying on their mats in shavasana, sweetly immersed in a state of repose and relaxation after an energetic/exhausting practice, but hardly anyone of us seems to know how to further build upon this experience that is physically orchestrated, can be repeated, and has such a palpable and abiding impact on the mind. The popular responses to the reposeful aftereffect can be broadly generalized to range between these two extremes, those who wish to romanticize and make “much” of it and then the more pragmatic lot who do not want to pay anymore heed to it than is necessary. So while some sit to pray and meditate after class, there are others who paste gentle smiles on their faces and ostensibly become elated into what can be euphemistically called the “Om zone.” And while a good number of them choose

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to take the experience at face value and sit it out, there are also the impatient ones who are discomfited by this state of non-doing and are quick to brush it aside in order to get on with their day. But hardly anyone seems to be able to “sit with it!” and become absorbed or suspended in the buoyancy of the moment without falling into the trap of either further embellishing or dismissing it. And I feel that this is because relying upon the body and becoming trustful of the sensitive aftereffects have become culturally and even religiously forbidden. To stand rooted in the face of the body, out of which are erupting materially-induced aftereffects, requires an education in materiality, as well as rooted certitude in the intelligence of the body, which have both been historically disrupted by the idealists. So, getting sensitively familiar with the material requires a re-education into the wonders of the body and a systematic de-conditioning of the internalized ideals that maybe undermining of the body. It is important to note that the theological construct of Advaita Vedanta, which predominates the brand of modern Hinduism prevalent today, does not accept the materialistic philosophy of Samkhya or yoga, and is categorically dismissive of both body and matter. According to this school, matter and body are immaterial, i.e. they are maya or a false-illusion, which is the root cause of ignorance or spiritual blindness. The post nineteenth-century imagining of essentially materialist, embodied practices within an idealist philosophical construct that is categorically dismissive of the body is curious to say the least!

The Amorous Song of the Pleasure Women If I look at the repertoire over the last decade and a half, I realize that what remains a common thread through almost all my choreographic works is the “amorous song” of the pleasure women of yesteryear, i.e. the padam, that was sung and danced by the devadasis. The padam is essentially a song of unrequited love that is grave in import and sung in slow tempo. These songs were central to salon singing and dancing in pre-modern Southern India and remain central to the traditional Bharatanatyam repertoire even today. However, what is presented today is a rather prescribed or even moralized version of this song. The padam freely equates not only god and lover, but even god and pleasure-customer. One major anthology of padams put together by the notable A.  K. Ramanujan is befittingly titled When God Is a Customer. Musically brilliant, grand and very sophisticated, the padams can be textually candid and sexually explicit to the point of sounding indiscreet or pedestrian to morally-correct viewers/listeners. During the reconstruction of Bharatanatyam about a hundred years ago, the padam repertoire was severely edited – deleting all risqué references and notorious details in order to tailor them to suit the gentle ears of the morally-upright gentlemen and their modest ladies. The

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rather bold yet musically sophisticated sacred/erotic padam is now made to sound more like a love-prayer of supplication or sublimation of desire, and surrender of the soul to an idealized God, a soul that is considered to have “tarnished” due to the contaminating contact with corrupt matter and body. By doing so, it has become first of all categorically moral, and effectively flat in its declarations of idealized “innocence” and pious supplication, rather than a complex, soul-searching, and materially engaging exploration of desire within the dialectic of autonomy and powerlessness, and laced with the carnal sensitivity of the body. The sensitivity, richness, humanness, and material-potency of the padam can still be gleaned even within its cleaned-up form. The Bharatanatyam repertoire is traditionally arranged in a specific order, and the slow-paced padam is placed in the second half of the evening in contrast to the fast-paced, rhythmic dancing that takes place in the varnam and other rhythmic sequences during the first half. So by the time it is time to perform the padam, both the dancer and the stage have been amply energized or warmed up and the spectator has realized and registered the extraordinariness of the event and is viewing it from one-remove or even an altered state of mind. The legendary Balasaraswati, last in the line of devadasis who was particularly known for her padam rendering, compares the padam to the sanctum sanatorium of a temple, where the devotee after having done the obligatory perambulations and gone past the noise and clamor of the temple, arrives in the dark sanctum, a quiet and somber space of prayer, self-divulgence, and reflection. The padam basically is a simple entreaty to “let love be!” It slowly airs and loosens resistance, fears and anxieties around love and intimacy, it divulges, hesitates, doubts, ponders, pleads, banters, implicates, and mocks both self and other like any other love song perhaps. But what sets it apart is that the address is neither aggressive nor expectant, it just is! It carries within both its musicality and its meter the carriage of its own resignation, the exhaustion of perpetual un-begetting. So though it is fully real on one hand, it is also fully aware of the impossibility of its love pleadings. Both the longing of the heart and the unrequited-ness of the song are concretely entrenched in songstress’s reality of being but a pleasure woman, thus her entreating and pleadings are both fake and painfully real at the same time. Her job is to beautifully and perennially sing the song of ever-unrequited love, peeling the heart layer by layer, shade by shade, while still managing to give it one new shade for that one last time. The connoisseur of a padam or a thumri (the padam’s North Indian counterpart) is on the lookout for that one more shade that keeps him “one more last time” within the forbidden space of the salon. Companionship, togetherness, the promise of forever-ship are outside the realm of a courtesan’s reality. Her freedom and fulfillment lie in a highly-energized, poetic and even romanticized moment of her “telling” and in its being heard. And the courtesan’s heartfelt need and design are to just make that moment of the heart’s

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disclosure a little more elastic. The padam is thus no ordinary song, but it is the story of the courtesan, and only she can tell it the way she can. I am drawn to the padam because, first and foremost, I feel it is the song of “being” the very condition of liminality. I feel it is tailor-made to momentarily orchestrate a condition-less, suspended state of freedom. I am personally drawn to it for its beauty, emotional honesty and poetics. It is gentle; it has the gentleness of resolved intimacy, and at the same time, it is infinitely cruel in its disclosure of the impossibility of intimacy. To me the padam is highly romantic, but my attraction to it is not just based on my personal proclivity towards romance. I am also drawn to it because it is a very important socio-political marker of a historical time that remains glossed over by a nationalistic narrative that is romantic in its own way; it marks India’s historical “shift of premise” from being paradoxical to becoming rational, materialist to idealist, pluralistic to nominal, and amoral to moral. But what is even more significant is that in its re-tailoring it makes this shift historically indecipherable. So the sanitized padam is used as a political foil. Enfolded into the padam is the history of shaming by the colonizer of India’s belief in sacred-sexuality (which the devadasi singularly embodied) and its ceremonious abandoning by the Hindu reformists in their bid to remodel themselves to find a foothold in the new, “progressive” world. It brings into relief the idealizing, nationalistic dream of realigning India to its pure, illustrious, and moral Aryan past, an Aryan past that was at that time being fancifully co-entertained by both the colonized and the colonizing “Aryans.” According to the native idealists, India was not modernizing itself, it was authentically and already modern; all it had to do was to weed out the paradoxical practices and once again tap into its authentic moral, textual, “modern” past. And for this, all it had to do was feign continuity. In fact, feigning continuity at the cost of annihilating lived histories and cultures became the defining force behind the forging of Indian tradition and nationalism. The padam also carries within it the Indian elite’s ingratiating “identification with the aggressor,” viewing them as none other than their long lost “Aryan cousins” and conversely the vengeful, self-loathing, slighting and shunning of the devadasi on grounds of morality and reducing her to destitution. It is a reminder of those superior stances, self-righteous posturing, and the passing of sweeping moral judgments that all became integral to the Aryanizing, “self-pride” building project, which reeked of a narcissistically-wounded India shaping its “Indianness” to suit, please, identify with and resemble the British aggressor. And lastly it is a reminder of the appropriation of the devadasis art by the moralists. This space of the devadasi has gone, even her “unreplicable” music has lost its idiosyncrasy, but within the idea of it is still uncomfortably contained the genesis of our selfredefinition: a colonially coerced redefinition, not out of force but through the elicitation of an eager and ingratiating submission to the ostensibly superior and

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progressive model of modernity that fancifully mixed up the past and present. The padam also marks the disenfranchisement of a morally problematic and complex song, the unspeakable ambiguities of which draw upon the material sensitivity of the body, i.e. the weight of its bones, the texture of breath, the shape of sound, the anchorage of gaze, the import of the words, gestures, and utterances that emanate out to viscerally divulge and explicate the ineffable condition which cannot be explained, or illustrated, but which can be “seen” upon the body. The revised and reconstructed version of the dance of the devadasis as it is danced today makes embellished platitudes of the idealized, un-paradoxical, self-definitions, which reduce the body to becoming a mere mouthpiece for an idea. Within this flattening of the amorous song of the pleasure-songstress, there not only lies a kernel of collective national shame for having compromised or selfslighted ourselves at a very essential level, and secondly the rage of the obliterated embodied practitioners that India will do well to recognize in order to come of age, but most importantly also exemplifies the loss of a material tenacity between the inside and the outside, between the body and the signs it makes, between interiority and its tenaciously contiguous extension in word, sound and gesture. An idealized, non-paradoxical, unambiguous word does not need visceral tenacity or engagement, because it relies not on the body but on the flat nominalization of the word, or on belief in an ideal, which can be stated or proclaimed in show-and-tell gestures that are purely external and disconnected from the body. The prevalent phenomenon of belief in an external ideal has, in a way, overwhelmed the body, if not divested it of interiority; it certainly has disenfranchised materiality, and this is what is marring our embodied practices. Idealism has no need of materiality, no need of the body; its proclamations of truisms do not require the complexity of the body or of lived histories. Today, the padam is a dying art. There would perhaps be a handful of vocalists who can actually sing a padam capably, and this is not only because the padam is musically very sophisticated, but also because it is idiosyncratic and contains unique traits and mannerisms of vocalization, which characterize that particular school (gharana or bani) or “family” of musicians and their lived histories. To me, the padam, because of its slow and dragging pace, allows a luxury to deliberate and sensitively unearth and engage with the materiality of the body, the word, as well as the voice to create a resonant and nuanced moment when the body may reveal and reflect the changing shades of the season as the ineffable condition of the heart vacillates from a “yes” to a “no,” from the amorous to the sacred, form holding tight to letting go, from specificity to continuity. No amount of skill or preparedness can allow for such a resonant moment in performance; it is a result of an informed and, most of all, a trusting engagement with the material of the body. The padam, which seems to be customized to the externalization of human

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vulnerability, is today reduced to a trite display of well-rehearsed mono-acting, which is frankly uninteresting if not boring and the main cause why not many people want to sing, dance or see padams anymore. Apart from the padam, another social reality that has become central in my dance-work over the last few years is that of the domestic helpers or servants who cohabit with us in our middle class Indian homes. In a way, this is also an extension of my occupation with the devadasi narrative, as devadasi is literally a “maid of the god” and a potential pleasure-server, either purely aesthetic or even carnal. I find the proximity between the haves and the have-nots potent and volatile. Between the commandeering memsahibs, who only instruct and supervise, and their servants, who do all the menial work from cooking, to cleaning, to scrubbing floors and bathtubs, there lies the gap that makes the ideal and the material non-continuous. And this non-continuity is both enraging and paralyzing. My last three major works have dealt directly with this topic, the first being a solo called Grey Is Also a Colour, inspired by Doris Lessing’s award-winning novel, The Grass Is Singing, in which a white woman gets erotically charged and involved with and eventually murdered by her black male servant in apartheid South Africa; the second being a trio, Charumathi Claire Singh (CCS) that juxtaposes a generic narrative of the devadasi with The Maids of Jean Genet, who are both constantly impersonating and plotting to kill the madam; and the third, a duet called Frenemies, which is a sequel to CCS that centers around the viscerality of the padam, the cruellybeautiful amorous song that emerges out of the ghettoized existence of the maids and whose beauty, power and embittered lives warrant a material engagement with the bones, breath, desire for love and violence within the body.

Urban Activism Indian cities glaringly exemplify a lack of tenacity between the material and the ideal. Quite literally, our cities lack the glue that adheres one pavement block to the next. What is planned, designed or envisioned on the drafting table is not what meets the eye on the ground. Making a pavement that stays intact and facilitates orderly movement of vehicles and pedestrians is not an insurmountable task; we have the expertise, skills, resources and the manpower. And yet our roads, pavements and public spaces remain in a state of perpetual disrepair, quite literally un-tethering even while they are being built, the various street elements are haphazardly placed, ill-logically designed, ill-fitting with quite often no attention to detail, specificity, or measurement. Our urban policies are often arbitrary, inconsistent, unregulated, derivative, and perfunctory, and the construction and main-

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Fig. 1: Navtej Johar and Lokesh Bharadwaj in Frenemies; © Anshuman Sen.

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tenance work is slapdash, uncoordinated, and erratic, resulting in our cities being haphazard, chaotic, inconvenient, hazardous and even unsafe for its human users. Since 2006, I have been running a project with school children called “The Power of Seeing,” which facilities the children to adopt one street element in their neighborhood and then document its history over a period of time. During this period, the children make a case study of the ground reality and the requirements of that area pertaining to this one street element; and realistically review its actual “materiality” along with its design, plus the regulations and policies governing it. It is an exercise in “sustained observation” with the aim to first instill a sense of identification with the outside in the child, which then might develop into deeper interest in and analysis of materiality in relation to function, efficiency, mobility, safety and even fun in public spaces. The upper hand of idealism over materialism in the Indian mindset that I have mentioned earlier plays out very prominently in the way we relate to our streets and cities. Most middle-class Indian homes are almost picture perfect, well-designed, organized, pretty, comfortable and super clean. Traditionally, “cleanliness” for the upper- and middle-class/ caste Hindus translates into the maintenance of “purity.” Most homes, particularly the kitchens, are sparklingly clean, obsessively so; ideally the prime dharma of a Hindu wife or mother was to keep the home pollution-free, and housekeeping would even include rites of ritual cleansing and purification. This obsession with purity directly translates into exclusivity and the drawing of a very rigid divide between the “pure” inside and the “polluted” outside, which reflects in not only an absence of concern, but even disdain for the outside that is both the place of pollutants as well as the unclean social other: the social other being that class of people who physically deal with materiality and, for that reason, are less-than. The idealistically bereft working-class may often also belong to the lower castes. Thus the glaring inequality between the haves and the have-nots is not only economical or socio-cultural, but it is also deeply philosophical, as it reflects the un-bridgeable divide between the materialists and the idealists. Whereas the post-independence obsession with moral purity can be seen in the policing and moral-cleansing of the embodied practices of dance and yoga, both of which were actively domesticated in the last century, the pure/polluted, insider/ outsider divide is glaringly visible in the disparity between how we keep our homes and how we treat and accept our cities. The inside space belongs to the purityobsessed middle-class insiders, whereas the outside space is for those belonging to the underclasses who have been contaminated by contact with polluting matter. And therefore, the real underlying philosophical tenacity that actually pertains is that of keeping this gap (which is realistically quite easily surmountable!) wide open. At one level, middle-class Indians do not only accept the dirty and chaotic outside (which we obviously do!) but seem also to be comfortable and content with

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it, as one hardly ever hears any protest against it. Broadly speaking, Indian society divides itself between the idealist upper/middle classes and the matter-engaging lower classes, and there is not just a social hierarchy that pertains between the two, but in fact an unbridgeable divide. While one enjoys the commanding privilege of idealizing and “knowing better” the non-material, higher truths of life, rational or irrational, the other is born into and destined to a life of material engagement or servitude. Without delving into it deeper, another thing that I would like to draw attention to is the fact that the spaces that are most dysfunctional on our roads are not the carriage ways, upon which our vehicles ply, though they are bad enough, but the worst affected are the pedestrian spaces. And the pedestrians in India are comprised of the poor. The rich barely walk in India; they are chauffeured around and avail door-to-door service. Our cities are not only dirty and dysfunctional; they are disrespectful, if not contemptuous, of the human body as well as the poor. So idealism is not only in opposition to materiality; it is also anti-body and invested in keeping the poor classes adequately inconvenienced. For the idealists, engagement with materiality is fundamentally base, polluting, and corrupting or contaminating, thus best to be ignored and held in disdain. This results in a huge gap between the ideal, i.e. an idea on paper or the drawing board, and its implementation and efficacy on the ground. The top-heavy idealism of the urban planners, designers, policy-makers hardly ever effectively translates on the ground. And one main reason is that their idealism doesn’t really take into consideration or engage with or effectively survey the ground reality, does not take into consideration the compunctions of matter, space, context, and the behavior of the human user, nor is the human body used as a point of primary reference when designing a public facility or urban space, which can often be absurdly unergonomical. Thus there remains a perpetual gap between the proverbial “cup and the lip,” as the “lip” may never ever touch (and in some cases even come to the ground to see, survey or supervise) the polluting “cup.” How the design and its intent is fixed on paper and what shape it takes on the ground when “unfixed” by the flux of matter and human users is not only quite another matter, but one of unconcern for the idealist. Because in the final analysis, primacy is neither granted to material nor the human user, it is the idea that retains supremacy and continues to govern the Indian mind and inconvenience the Indian body. For the sake of this paper, I have focused on only a couple of observations that have emerged through working on the ground and which are indicative of the lag between the ideal and the material, which in real terms translates into the overlooking of specific nature of materiality; a specificity that warrants detailed observation, survey, visualization, real experimentations of trial and error, precision,

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Fig. 2: An Indian kitchen; © Monica Chand.

Fig. 3: Overflowing garbage dump in a middle-class residential area; photo taken by a student of St. Mary’s School, New Delhi.

Fig. 4: The pavement is so high that an old woman has to be hauled up in order to cross the street; © Mona Metha.

Fig. 5: The pavement tiles peeling off as the uncompressed ground beneath them begins to sink with time; photo taken by a student of St. Mary’s School, New Delhi.

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an understanding of the nature of different material, tenacity, rigor, rules, foresight and, above all, common sense. Rules and common sense pertaining to matter are respectively flouted and suspended with alacrity when building streets and cities. It is quite common to see two street elements not precisely adhering to each other or even precisely fitting the space that they are meant to occupy. This could be due to a) no attention to measurement or calculation, b) no prior planning, c) no prior preparation, e.g., the soft earth is not first compressed before the tiles are laid upon it. This is one of the main reasons why our pavements are un-tethering within weeks of being built, d) not using appropriate materials that will adhere well with each other, e) not using the right kind of tools to ensure precision, etc. None of these things are insurmountable or foreign to us. After all, we live in homes that are designed precisely to suit our requirements and specifications, and we will not brook even the slightest deviation or negligence. But we accept and remain complacent when it comes to shoddy workmanship that meets us right outside our own homes. The inability of our municipal authorities – and this includes the urban designers, planners, constructers, policy makers, city councils, etc. – to effectively stitch the roads and the street elements together is neither a myth nor an exaggeration. It is there for all to see. India is no longer a poor country; we have the money, the expertise, the material, the know-how, but we lack a will, and often it is termed as the political will. But I would again say that it is the lack of a deeply internalized philosophical will of not taking matter seriously. Paying heed to matter, the body, and the poor is not a part of the brand of idealism that we have become conditioned to privilege. To me this is in some ways reminiscent of the moralized, or shall I say nationalized, padam that though it may talk of the love play of the god-lover Krishna and the human vulnerability that it may evoke, is but fundamentally very conscious of keeping it within the parameters of idealized morality, middle-class propriety, and the model of sublimation that is constantly declarative of purity, innocence, non-carnal spirituality and the unbroken continuity of a chaste tradition. But it does not have the ability or the permission to engage the materiality or the ambiguities of the heart or the carnal resources of the body – the very stuff that art, poetry, and life are made up of. I will conclude by saying that what lacks is material tenacity, and it reflects clearly in the practices of domesticated yoga, nationalized dancing, and in the onpaper envisioning of cities without placing the human body as a central point of reference, and furthermore with scarce attention to how the plan may get implemented on the ground. Both dance and yoga continue to remain emblems of morality and thus are invested with middle-class anxieties that do not permit curious and visceral engagement with the body. The body must not tell, divulge, express, or reveal itself, as it is fundamentally unreliable and has to be instructed,

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sublimated, corrected, repressed and made to become a mute carrier of the bodydismissive ideals. Similarly, the city planner does not deign to pay heed to what the human user needs on the street and thus continues to get away with perfunctory planning, making and maintenance of Indian cities. The towering idealism has effectively muted the body and axed its resources and needs. Until we begin to engage the body, get our hands dirty with the earth of the body and the messy stuff of the heart, we will keep making extroverted, non-absorptive yoga postures; self-congratulatory dances that grow progressively vapid and poetically bankrupt; and continue living in nerve-racking, abrasive, chaotic and unsafe cities in which the body does not matter.

Notes   1 John J. MacAloon, ed., Muscular Christianity in Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), 61.

Bibliography MacAloon, John J., ed. Muscular Christianity in Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008.

Risk Taking Bodies and Their Choreographies of Protest1 Cristina Rosa

In her essay “Choreographies of Protest,” dance scholar Susan L. Foster proposes that we consider “the body as capable of both persuasion and obstinate recalcitrance,” demonstrating, as she puts it, “the central role that physicality plays in constructing both individual agency and sociality.”2 To prove her point, in the article Foster examines three historical non-violent events in the United States. In these examples, she argues, agents take center stage and execute a set of planned or preestablished actions in order to implement representational strategies that amount to choreographies of protest. Departing from Foster’s approach of the body as capable of articulating disruptions and disseminating them through choreographed strategies, in this lecture performance I share my recent examination of the socio-political significance of choreographed actions within body politics discourses in contemporary Brazil. Combining dance and post-colonial studies, today I consider three distinct cases where precarious bodies adopt risk-taking performances as ways of articulating subversive ideas corporeally and producing knowledges otherwise. First, I take a look at the Afro-Brazilian fight-game known as capoeira angola, whose daring feats have been historically despised, persecuted, regulated, and now is facing one of its biggest threats in the age of globalization: commoditized exoticism. Secondly, I examine the work of Alejandro Ahmed, the resident choreographer of the contemporary dance company Grupo Cena 11. Moving away from the Western tradition of concert dance, Ahmed encourages his dancers to fulfill both the roles of researchers and objects of study in their creative projects. At Cena 11’s performances, function takes precedence over form and movement is investigated as a cognitive strategy, pushing dancers to execute daring actions such as free falls, while minimizing their risk of injury. Lastly, I consider the dilemma of the

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Guarani-Kaiowás from Mato Grosso do Sul (Central-West region). In particular, I pay close attention to a letter written by a leader of the Guarani-Kaiowás, sent to Federal Court in October 2012, in which he pleas for the court and central government to intervene and overrule the eviction of their people from their homeland. As discussed below, said letter acts as a triggering text, which leads to a series of physical protests and virtual interventions via social media around the world, against the current situation of the Guarani-Kaiowás and other indigenous populations in Brazil.

Fig. 1: Scene from the Dance Congress 2013 lecture presentation; © Anja Beutler. In this presentation I consider how the players of capoeira angola, the dancers at Cena 11, and the activists engaged in the “we are all Guarani-Kaiowá” movement execute set or improvised choreographies in which they voice their marginalized opinions. Yet it is worth noting that, like Foster, “I do not intend to read these events as dances.”3 Following Foster’s methodology, I rather identify the kinds of bodies that are engaged in each particular scenario, asking of them the kinds of questions that dance scholars might ask in these specific contexts. For instance, what are these bodies doing and what are the motivations behind this collection of actions? What kind of significance or impact do their performances have in the midst of their social surroundings? How have these bodies been trained, and how has that training mastered, cultivated, or facilitated their actions in the world and the view of it? How does the environment inform the actions and transform­the bodies doing them? What kind of relationship do they establish with those who

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are watching their actions? What kinds of connections can be traced between their daily routines and the special moments of risk in their performances? How are they implicated in the production of meaning and the exchange of information with other bodies? How does their choreography problematize their marked bodies? How is the body of the researcher, implicated in the investigation? Can the body signify and avoid signification? Departing from this set of questions, my observations below are guided by performance scholar Randy Martin’s definition of risk as “a process by which an apparently single action, movement or result triggers a whole series of consequent events that bear on an entire social process.”4 Despite their distinct motivations and results, the capoeira players, the dancers at Cena 11, and the Guarani-Kaiowás of Mato Grosso do Sul all constitute what Martin classifies – in a related article – as “populations at risk,” whose efforts also “craft corporal economies where risk counts.”5 Hence, my findings take into consideration both the movements these bodies perform and the effect their actions spark. In particular, I address how these groups and communities learn to take risks in society as well as how they plan, rehearse, or perform a set of actions that may mount to choreographies of protest. But, contrary to Martin’s analysis, here risk counts not as reward but as a rhetorical strategy of persuasion. Despite their differences, what ignites these agents and fuels their risky procedures of non-cooperation or disobedience is their quest for the visibility and credibility of their distinct ways of thinking about and moving across the world. In all three cases, these men and women living in Brazil have put their own bodies at risk to take a stand and voice their point of view against a broad range of effects derived from colonialism, raced division of labor, and cultural imperialism. Their choreographed actions protest, in their own ways, against the pejorative framing of their non-hegemonic ideas as exotic, violent, pathologic, or irrelevant. In the end, these risk-taking bodies gesture towards the precariousness of human lives and the strategic power of choreographed actions.

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Act 1: Capoeira Angola Do not linger in dangerously isolated positions. In hemmed-in situations, you must resort to stratagem. In desperate position, you must fight. Sun Tzu/The Art of War6

Fig. 2: Mestre Gege (left) and Contra-mestre Dija (right) playing capoeira at FICA-Bahia (2012); © Ugo Edu. Over the past 10 years, I have researched a particular lineage of capoeira known as capoeira angola.7 I have investigated how capoeira angola’s players practice movements connected to a marginalized way of organizing bodies to think and act. Inside the circle (roda) of capoeira angola, I propose, players deploy Africanist aesthetic principles in their processes of self-fashioning, combining risk with playfulness. Moving against the grain, they connect blackness to concepts such as grace and pride. Capoeira is a corporeal regime – a means of expressive self-production – which rearranges the relation to oneself, through call-and-response maneuvers. Capoeira games function as complex and reversible processes of self-other relations, witnessed by a participating audience, where the improvisation of pre-established movement procedures and forms amount to processes of identification, which take precedence over the way one looks or the position one occupies in society. The process of re-organizing one’s body to execute a particular set of daring feats, has

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also transformed how capoeira players relate to themselves, to other people, and to the world around them.

Fig. 3: Professor Xixarro (Angoleiros do Mar) playing capoeira in Bordeaux (2012); © Cristina Rosa. The world that extends from the body of capoeira angola players is grounded on a heterogeneous logic or system of bodily organization and knowledge production centered on aesthetic principles such as polycentrism and polyrhythm. Contrary to Western regimens of training, most of which privilege the unity of the torso, erect posture, precise gestures, and movement efficiency, these polycentric and polyrhythmic bodies follow a non-hegemonic way of articulating ideas centered on concepts such as decentralization, dissonance, fragmentation, reversibility, inversion, coolness, apartness, and serious play. The (non-verbal) call-and-response dialogues they enact at the center of the circle combine an array of tactics such as aggression, seduction, and mockery with rhetorical strategies such as fakery and indefiniteness and other mental procedures such as game planning and foresight. Capoeira has been historically performed by black and mulatto males. As I have argued elsewhere,8 capoeira has enabled these marginalized bodies in Brazil to exercise new ways of thinking about and moving across the world. In that sense, it has contributed to disrupting and overcoming the colonial paradox, which du Bois calls the “Double Consciousness,” constructed between categories of identification such as masculinity and blackness.9 But instead of sorrow, capoeira players put their own bodies at risk on the streets of urban centers, improvising, between revelry and revolt, non-verbal dialogues that both keep their cultural heritage alive and stir up fixed ideas about gender, race, and sexuality.

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Fig. 4: Scene from the Dance Congress 2013 lecture presentation; © Anja Beutler.

Act 2: Cena 11 Before I turn your attention to the work of the Brazilian dance company Grupo Cena 11, I would like to clarify that my argument below is not concerned with this company’s dances, i.e. its cultural products. Rather, it considers the risks surrounding their research on the limits of the body, on themselves, and the socio-political effects of their process. The “do-it-yourself” motto of the 1980s, Randy Martin tells us, was a time when “risk and art made happily strange bedfellows.”10 It is in this scenario that the Cena 11 emerged, influenced by the risk-taking bodies of the punk movement and contact-improvisation, as well as graffiti, body-piercing, video-games, and cyborgs. At the same time, Cena 11 also emerged from the risks that Alejandro Ahmed, the choreographer and director of Cena 11, was personally facing at the bodily level. Briefly, Ahmed was born with osteogenesis imperfecta – a disease where bones break for no apparent reason. To cope with this problem, Ahmed got together with a group of dancers and began developing a radical dance technique that would enable them to perform a number of risky tasks, including free falls and take downs. The technique, called “physical perception,” involves a number of exercises designed to strengthen the structure of the body, especially its skeleton, thus eliminating (or at least minimizing) the risk of serious injury. Over the last 20 years, Ahmed has led his company in unorthodox movement research. Along with their “physical perception” technique, the company has also developed a number of

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Fig. 5: Cena 11 Monotonia de aproximação e fuga para 7 corpos (2014); © CLAP.

Fig. 6: Cena 11 Carta de Amor ao Inimigo (2012); © Cristiano Prim.

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concepts such as “voodoo bodies,” in which dancers personify dolls, risky movements and daring feats function as needles, and the audience becomes the sensorial victim. Generally speaking, Ahmed’s choreographies may be understood as the result of an on-going research project trying to figure out how to deal with a crisis or how to live with it. Dancing is a critical moment, dancers articulate tactics of survival at the bodily level. In the studio, dancers must figure out how to take risks and how to move safely – but not freeze – despite the state of emergency. In earlier pieces – Respostas sobre Dor (Answers to Pain; 1994), O Novo Cangaço (The New Cangaço; 1996), IN’perfeito (IN’perfect; 1997), and Violência (Violence; 2000) – Ahmed mixes punk and pop aesthetics with prosthetics and video-game references. The dances amount to short scenes and experiments, through which the amazing physical strength and endurance of Cena 11’s dancers is highlighted. For dance scholar Christine Greiner, in the first decade, Cena 11’s experimental dances deal with the effect of gravity on the body, the body’s limits, and the dynamics of puppets and robots to better understand physical action under control and the transmission of information between animate and inanimate bodies.11

Fig. 7: Cena 11 Carta de Amor ao Inimigo (2012); © Cristiano Prim. Their experiments also include the manipulation of objects, some of which become an extension of the dancers’ physicality, from prosthesis to video cameras, thus amplifying their potencies (e.g., locomotion, vision) but also imposing a new set of limitations onto their bodies. According to Spanghero, these artificial tools grant “superpowers” to the dancers, who become taller, stronger, and capable of performing tasks most humans cannot.12 In that sense, Spanghero uses the term “post-human” when she addresses the dancers of Cena 11. Other times, the inter-

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actions with objects lead to a number of risk-taking experiments such as catching a metal rod dropped from the ceiling, running towards a chair and throwing yourself at it, or dipping your head into the belly of a giant stuffed bear until you cannot breath. Despite the efficiency of their techniques and the resilience of Cena 11’s dancers, the risk (of injury) remains alive and, according to Greiner, the ambivalence associated with Cena 11’s risk-taking performances “is an important aspect of Ahmed’s technique.”13 In the end, Greiner points out: The way the dancers’ bodies crashed against each other and against the floor during the performances is a strong image illustrating his main starting point: the idea of a body as matter, and the inevitable risk of being alive and in motion.14

The work of Cena 11 protests against the neo-liberal commodification of dance and its primary understanding as a form of entertainment. For them, dance is a space for cognitive inquiry, a field of knowledge that investigates theories of and about their bodies, as well as mastering and caring for them. Skinnerbox (2005), for instance, departs from the work of the psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner, especially his “operant conditioning” theory. Additionally, they designed a series of taskoriented experiments grounded on the work of the cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett and the chemist Ilya Prigogine, aimed to investigate the applicability of entropy and other principles of thermodynamics. During its creation, the rehearsal space became a laboratory in which the members of Cena 11 implicated their own bodies in the process of testing or otherwise putting these theories in practice.

Fig. 8: Cena 11 Skinnerbox (2005); © Gilson Camargo.

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Closing this cycle of experimentation, in 2010 Cena 11 premiered Guia de Ideias Correlatas (Guide of Correlated Ideas), a summary of their primary experiments over the last decades. With scenes extracted from previous works and others created especially for this dance, it presents a collection of ideas that interweave dance, science, and technology. Over the past twenty years, Cena 11’s innovative dances have been pushing the notion of risk to its limits. However, its dancers have faced their biggest risks offstage. Like many contemporary dance companies in Brazil, Cena 11 has struggled to survive, chasing financial resources to develop their research projects and produce their creative works. Yet, in 2012, the company suffered a series of nonrelated setbacks, which pushed them, after twenty years of solid and acclaimed work, to a new level of precariousness. First, the company lost its rehearsal place, and was forced to rely on a series of temporary spaces. Shortly after, two of its dancers left the company. Finally, despite their recent awards and accomplishments, in 2013 Cena 11’s major sponsor, the Brazilian oil company Petrobrás, did not renew its contract. With the accumulative loss of rehearsal space, human resources, and financial support to develop their research (i.e. pay their staff, commission musical scores, produce costumes, etc), the company faced a new crisis, where its own subsistence became “at risk.”15

Act 3: The Guarani-Kaiowá People At the end of the day, strategy is the management of risk, whether personal or military strategy. The question is, how much risk are we willing to live with? Jeffrey D. McCausland16

The Guaranis are the second largest Indigenous population in Brazil, today amounting to about forty-five thousand people. Like many other Amerindians living in Brazil, the Guarani-Kaiowá communities living in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul have endured a dramatic situation in the last twenty years regarding the demarcation of their land.17 They have been raped and murdered as a consequence of conflicts with agribusiness. Similar to many Amerindians, the Guarani-Kaiowás have risked their own lives to remain physically “rooted” in their homeland, which bears their sustenance, their ancestors, and their cultural legacy. For these indigenous populations, it is often unbearable to live elsewhere, yet they live in exile inside their own country.

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Confined to small areas, near one percent of their original land and often next to freeways and under subhuman conditions, they are unable to practice their way of being-in-the-world or Teoká. It is in this precarious context of abandonment and loss of cultural identity that many of them stopped practicing their cultural traditions and religious rituals to become, as Washington Novaes tells us, “day laborers, alcoholic, beggars, and madmen. And suicidal, like the 17-year-old boy that, one day after his wedding, hanged himself from a tree and, below his feet, in the soil, left it written ‘I don’t have a place.’”18 In fact, the suicide rate by hanging, or jejuvy (literally throat strangle, suffocation), has increased dramatically amongst the Guarani youth in the recent past. The Guarani-Kaiowás believe that their souls reside in their throat and manifest themselves in speech. To speak and to stand upright are, therefore, the two principle characteristic of its people. Subsequently, the self-inflicted “strangling of the throat,” or jejuvy, is a way of shutting down, or suffocating, the soul.19 There were thousands of Guarani-Kaiowás killed in recent years by murder or suicide due to conflict with commercial farmers. Yet most of these fatal actions remained, until last year, invisible to the Brazilian society. Things began to change on 29 September 2012, when the Federal Court of Mato Grosso do Sul ordered the withdrawal of the Guarani-Kaiowá’s encampment Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay from the Farm Cambará in Iguatemi (MS). In response, the leaders of the Pyelito Kue/ Mbarakay community wrote a letter addressed to the Federal Court and the Brazilian government, refusing to be expelled from their land, saying they would be there till death. “We have lived on the bank of Hovy river for over a year and we are without any assistance, isolated, surrounded by gunmen and resisted until today. We went through all that in order to regain our ancient territory [. . .]. And we decided collectively not to get out of here alive or dead.”20 In the letter, the Guarani-Kaiowás also requested assurance of their rights to be buried in that particular (sacred) place, so that when they pass away their remains may continue to occupy their sociohistorical territory. If their demands are not answered, they ask the Government and the Federal Court, in a mixture of revolt and despair, “not to sanction the eviction order/expulsion, but we ask to decree our collective death and to bury us all here.”21 Given the high suicide rate amongst the Guarani-Kaiowás, when these events hit the media, the “over-my-dead-body” tone of the letter was interpreted as a mass-suicide threat. Once their “suicidal letter” hit the media, sympathizers joined the victims in a series of choreographed protests. Under the slogans “I am Guarani Kaiowá” and “we are all Guarani-Kaiowás,” these public manifestations of support were anchored in an on-going resistance for human rights and land demarcation in Brazil. Over the next weeks, a number of protests and marches organized by indigenous

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communities as well as other organizations committed to human rights and social justice sprawled across the country, with the help of social media. On 19 October, for instance, a group of Amerindians from Mato Grosso do Sul covered the lawn in front of Brazil’s legislative congress and Senate in Brasilia with white crosses, drawing attention to the violence against them and demanding the definitive demarcation of their land. In Rio de Janeiro, the Indigenous Museum became a strategic point of congregation, where local students and activists, along with Indigenous peoples from different states, created a number of performative protests against the court resolution. In São Paulo, protesters occupied the heart of the financial district. In Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, the international activist group FEMEN gathered at Estação park to protest against the agribusiness and the violence towards the Guarani-Kaiowá women from Mato Grosso do Sul. Back in Brasilia, high school and college students met with representatives of social movements and indigenous leaders of several states. During these meetings, many expressed support for these marginalized communities by painting their faces. Outside Brazil, there were a number of protests in defense of the Guarani-Kaiowás of Mato Grosso do Sul, in major cities such as Washington, New York, Paris, and Berlin.

Fig. 9: “Genocide Guarani Kaiowá,” digital flyer disseminated on social media.22 Besides marching in the streets, organizing forums, and signing petitions, many also added the words “Guarani-Kaiowá” to their Facebook and Twitter account names, implicating their own virtual identity, or avatars, in the process. Through action in both the “real” and the “virtual” worlds, these modern and globalized individuals became a community of resistance, giving visibility to that indigenous cause. Finally, on 30 October, a Federal Regional Court in São Paulo reverted the original decision and decided to keep the Guarani-Kaiowá in the Cambara Farm until an official demarcation of their territory is concluded.

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Fig. 10: Members of the organization FEMEN Brazil in Belo Horizonte (MG) protest against the agribusiness appropriation of Indigenous land and the violence towards the women of the Guarani-Kaiowá community of Mato Grosso do Sul; © Samuel Aguiar. The manifestations of support via the Internet received its share of criticism, for they lacked the “traditional” structure of bodies marching on the street in acts of civil disobedience. Yet, given their efficiency, a number of scholars and activists have defended these innovative kinds of protest, for they took advantage of social media’s format, especially its easy access, its decentralized structure, and its broad reach, as a platform to voice their political agenda as well as their sentiment of solidarity and indignation. In an article published in November 2012 in Época magazine, Elian Brum collected several of these opinions, some of which are worth reproducing here. For the law professor Pádua Fernandes, for instance, these Internet manifestations represent: [a]n attitude of solidarity and resistance. It is true that most of the [Brazilian] population has indigenous ancestry, as I do, but the defense of this endangered ethnic group is not only a tribute to our historical formation. It is a present time fight that concerns everyone, because there is a fundamental principle that is being hurt, the principle of human dignity, and there is a huge wealth being destroyed in the name of the gold, so often false, of agribusiness: a wealth of environmental and human diversity. Without the dignity and diversity, we have no future.23

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The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, also supported the act of name change on social media, stating that: The significance of this gesture is to show solidarity with someone, person or community, that needs support and is not having their name, their cause, or their pain appropriately broadcasted by those who should do it. It is a form of protest, [a form] of public identification with those who are not being “published.” [This is] a way to draw attention to a person, a people, or a cause that is being deliberately silenced by the media, or is the target of a smear campaign. Someone whose right to be heard is not being respected by the powers that be.24

Idelber Avelar, professor of Brazilian Portuguese literature at Tulane University in New Orleans highlights that social media has played a decisive role in new social movements and has filled a void left by the Brazilian press. Except for rare and honorable cases, he concludes, “the press has barely covered the situation of the Guaranis and the reality of the indigenous Brazilians in general.” And further, “[o]f course, the social media does not replace the physical struggle, on the streets, but there is no doubt that it offers powerful tools.”25

Fig. 11 and Fig. 12: Scene from the Dance Congress 2013 lecture presentation; © Laura Pacheco. Along these lines, the environmentalist Marina Silva, history professor and exminister of Environment during Lula administration concludes that: This solidarity with the Indigenous peoples [living] in a more dramatic situation happens at a time when more than 1 million people have signed the request to veto the changes in the [Brazilian] Forest Code, in which thousands were mobilized in defense of the forest, in defense of the communities affected by the construction of the [hydroelectric power plant] Belo Monte, in addition to the mobilization we had during [the conference] Rio + 20. The identification with the Guarani Kaiowás, is

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not a fad, it is a demonstration of change in the feelings and the consciousness of a broad segment of the population, who is attentive to what is happening and take a stand.26

In sum, as the statements above illustrate, this decentralized sprawl of events protested against assaults on human dignity, in which Indigenous peoples are not regarded as citizens or subjects, but as obstacles to the national project. They also protested the Nation’s failure to abolish and overcome the raced division of labor, knowledge, and subjectivity, reminiscent of the colonial encounter in Brazil, to embrace the ecology of human conditions and the diversity of cultural experiences and systems of beliefs.

Conclusion Human beings are not the unified subjects of some coherent regime of domination that produces persons in the forms in which it dreams. On the contrary, they live their lives in a constant movement across different practices that address them in different ways. Nikolas Rose27

Nikolas Rose has proposed that Modernity in the West has long been credited with the “invention of the self.”28 If so, Coloniality, which Walter Mignolo defines as the darker side of Western Modernity29 may be credited with the “invention” of otherness, which opposes “normal” human beings and the “appropriate” way of acting in the modern world. Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls this hermetic opposition between “us” and “them” an abyssal line dividing the social reality into two sides, where everything on the “other side of the line” is rendered invisible, irrelevant, or incomprehensible, thus sub-human.30 The examples I examined today belong to an umbrella of interventions that problematize this abyssal way of thinking. In fact, their choreographed actions have questioned one of its fundamental characteristics, that is, “the impossibility of the co-presence of the two sides of the line.”31 While they rehearse or try out solutions to deal with the condition of crisis in which they live, all three examples share a recalcitrant physicality that not only refuses to comply with the bodies of those in positions of authority, but also acts in protest against the precariousness and invisibility of their condition.

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As Foster writes: In achieving this sense of agency, protestors are not enacting a script, where the body would function as mere instrument of expression, the meat that carries around the subject. Nor is agency the product of the heightened sense of physicality that results when the body steps outside the quotidian routines of daily life and into non-normative action.32

Their actions, not only have produced a series of psychosomatic effects in the audience, from shock and disbelief to empathy and mobilization, but they also question the normalcy of a nation-state that continues to create restrictions for those who should be qualified as full human beings, and the rights and responsibilities associated with this classification, be that in relation to gender, race, class, or ability. “Agency,” Foster concludes: does not manifest as the product of a transcendent state. Instead, the process of creating political interference calls forth a perceptive and responsive physicality that, everywhere along the way, deciphers the social and then choreographs an imagined alternative.33

And it is within these multilateral, fragmented, and diverse alternatives that we will find renewed ways of exercising the care of self (self-esteem) as well as the care of others (solidarity) and the world in which we live (ecology). In one of his popular TED talks, the educator Sir Ken Robinson reminds us of an interesting quote by Walter Benjamin, which seems applicable to the three cases discussed in this lecture-presentation. According to Benjamin, Robinson tells us: There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don’t get it, they don’t want to get it, they’re not going to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen. And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. And, if the movement is strong enough, that is, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. And that’s what we need.34

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Notes   1 The text below is an adaptation of a lecture performance with the same title, presented at the Dance Congress 2013 in Düsseldorf. All translations from the original Portuguese are mine.   2 Susan L. Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (2003): 395.   3 Ibid., 396.   4 Randy Martin, “Art Attacks,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 3 (2007): 287.   5 Randy Martin, “A Precarious Dance, a Derivative Sociality,” TDR/The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 76.   6 Lionel Giles, trans., Sun Tzu on the Art of War: The Oldest Military Treatise in the World (Leicester: Allandale Online Publishing, 2000), last accessed 1 August 2016, https://www.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf, 30.   7 Cristina Rosa, “Playing, Fighting, and Dancing: Unpacking the Significance of Ginga within the Practice of Capoeira Angola,” TDR/The Drama Review 56, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 141–66.  8 Cristina F. Rosa, Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification: Swing Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).   9 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, NY: Dover, 1994). 10 Martin, “Art Attacks,” 287. 11 Christine Greiner, “Researching Dance in the Wild: Brazilian Experiences,” TDR/The Drama Review 51, no. 3 (2007): 142. 12 Maíra Spanghero, A dança dos encéfalos acesos (São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2003), 94. 13 Greiner, “Researching into the Wild,” 142. 14 Ibid., 143. 15 Since I presented this lecture, Cena 11 has secured a permanent rehearsal space, received a couple of national awards, launched new research projects and premiered a couple of choreographies. Recently, the company developed the choreographic projects Sobre Expectativas e Promessas (2013), Monotonia de Aproximação e Fuga para 7 Corpos (2014), and Protocolo Elefante (2016), all funded through Rumos Dança Itaú Cultural (via Brazil’s tax incentive laws). 16 Jeffrey D. McCausland, a retired Army colonel now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council in New York, quoted in Thom Shanker, “More Sabers to Rattle, Perhaps Fewer to Thrust,” New York Times, 25 February 2007, last accessed 22 June 2016, http://www. nytimes.com/2007/02/25/weekinreview/25shanker.html?_r=0. 17 According to anthropological report by FUNAI, the then government started to donate land to settlers and farmers as part of its settlement project in 1938. At the time, local indigenous peoples were expelled from their homeland and confined to small reserves.

186 | Cristina Rosa 18 Washington Novaes, “Quem poderá salvar os guarani-caiovás?” ESTADÃO, 9 November 2012, last accessed 23 March 2016, http://opiniao.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral, quem-podera-salvar-os-guarani-caiovas-imp,957849. 19 According to the anthropologist Miguel Vicente Foti, this particular form of suicide is a complex act. Though practiced by an individual, it obeys a strong cultural motivation. Furthermore, since they seldom announce their suicide, the act functions as a form of affirmation of one’s individuality through an extreme negation of the individual. See Marcelle Souza, “A morte guarani,” Revista Singular (2008): 34. 20 Extended original: “Moramos na margem do rio Hovy há mais de um ano e estamos sem nenhuma assistência, isolados, cercado de pistoleiros e resistimos até hoje. Comemos comida uma vez por dia. Passamos tudo isso para recuperar o nosso território antigo Pyleito Kue/Mbarakay. De fato, sabemos muito bem que no centro desse nosso território antigo estão enterrados vários os nossos avôs, avós, bisavôs e bisavós, ali estão os cemitérios de todos nossos antepassados. Cientes desse fato histórico, nós já vamos e queremos ser mortos e enterrados junto aos nossos antepassados aqui mesmo onde estamos hoje, por isso, pedimos ao Governo e Justiça Federal para não decretar a ordem de despejo/expulsão, mas solicitamos para decretar a nossa morte coletiva e para enterrar nós todos aqui.” See “Indígenas ameaçam morrer coletivamente caso ordem de despejo seja efetivada,” Conselho Indigena Missionário, last accessed 1 April 2016, http://www.cimi.org.br/site/pt-br/?system=news&action=read&id=6553. 21 Original: “não decretar a ordem de despejo/expulsão, mas solicitamos para decretar a nossa morte coletiva e para enterrar nós todos aqui.” Ibid. 22 “Solidariedade aos GUARANI-KAIOWÁ,” MJD Brasil, last accessed 1 August 2016, https://juventudedominicana.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/solidariedade-ao-povoguarani-kaiowa/. 23 Original: “Trata-se de uma atitude de solidariedade e resistência. É certo que a maior parte da população brasileira tem ascendência indígena, como eu mesmo, mas a defesa desta etnia ameaçada não se trata apenas de uma homenagem à nossa formação histórica. Trata-se de uma luta do presente que interessa a todos, pois há um princípio fundamental que está sendo ferido, o da dignidade humana, e há uma enorme riqueza que está sendo destruída em nome do ouro, tantas vezes falso, do agronegócio: a riqueza da diversidade, ambiental e humana. Sem a dignidade e a diversidade, não teremos futuro.” Eliane Brum, “Sobrenome: ‘Guarani Kaiowa’,” Época, 26 November 2012, last accessed 1 April 2016, http://revistaepoca.globo.com/Sociedade/eliane-brum/noticia/ 2012/11/sobrenome-guarani-kaiowa.html. 24 Original: “A significação desse gesto é manifestar solidariedade com alguém, pessoa ou comunidade que precisa de apoio e não está tendo seu nome, sua causa ou sua dor devidamente divulgados por quem deveria fazê-lo. É uma forma de protesto, de identificação pública com quem não está sendo ‘publicado.’ Um modo de chamar a atenção para uma pessoa, um povo ou uma causa que está sendo deliberadamente calado pela

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mídia, ou está sendo alvo de uma campanha de difamação. Alguém cujo direito a ser ouvido não está sendo respeitado pelos poderes constituídos.” Ibid. 25 Extended original: “As redes foram fundamentais neste movimento e têm suprido, já há algum tempo, uma lacuna da imprensa brasileira. Com raríssimas e honrosas exceções, a imprensa tem coberto mal a situação dos guaranis e a realidade dos indígenas brasileiros em geral. As redes possibilitaram, por exemplo, que as próprias lideranças guaranis testemunhassem sobre sua situação e que circulassem notícias, fotos e depoimentos em tempo real, com toda a dramaticidade que isso acrescenta à questão. Como veterano das primeiras gerações de blogueiros, sempre fui entusiasta das possibilidades abertas pela internet, mesmo que o impacto que um dia tiveram os blogues tenha hoje se deslocado para formatos mais instantâneos, como o Twitter e o Facebook. É claro que as redes não substituem a luta presencial, nas ruas, mas não há dúvidas de que oferecem a ela uma ferrramenta poderosíssima.” Ibid. 26 Extended original: “Há poucos dias assinei assim (Marina Silva Guarani Kaiowa) um artigo no qual expliquei o significado que essa ‘identidade’ tem para mim. Comparei com o que fazíamos, nas assembleias do movimento estudantil, nos anos 70, início dos 80, quando respondíamos ‘presente’ sempre que era citado o nome de algum líder assassinado. É uma declaração de que os companheiros permanecem vivos, em nós, que prosseguimos com seu trabalho e sua luta. [. . .] Essa solidariedade ao povo indígena em situação mais dramática acontece num momento em que mais de 1 milhão de pessoas assinaram o pedido de veto às mudanças no Código Florestal, em que milhares se mobilizaram na defesa da floresta, em defesa das comunidades afetadas pela construção da usina de Belo Monte, além das mobilizações que tivemos durante a Rio+20. [. . .] A identidade com os guaranis caiovás, portanto, não é um modismo, é uma demonstração de mudança nos sentimentos e na consciência de uma ampla parcela da população, que está atenta ao que acontece, e se posiciona.” Ibid. 27 Nikolas S. Rose, “Identity, Genealogy, History,” in Identity: A Reader, ed. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman (London and New Delhi: SAGE Publications), 321. 28 Nikolas S. Rose, “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies,” in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas S. Rose (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 58. 29 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 30 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges,” Eurozine, last accessed 1 April 2016, http://www.eurozine.com/ articles/2007-06-29-santos-en.html. 31 Ibid. 32 Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 412. 33 Ibid.

188 | Cristina Rosa 34 Ken Robinson, “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley,” TED, last accessed 1 April 2016, http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley/ transcript?language=en.

Bibliography Brum, Eliane. “Sobrenome: ‘Guarani Kaiowa’.” Época. 26 November 2012. Last accessed 1 April 2016. http://revistaepoca.globo.com/Sociedade/eliane-brum/ noticia/2012/11/sobrenome-guarani-kaiowa.html. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York, NY: Dover, 1994. Foster, Susan L. “Choreographies of Protest.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (2003): 395–412. Giles, Lionel, trans. Sun Tzu on the Art of War: The Oldest Military Treatise in the World. Leicester: Allandale Online Publishing, 2000. Last accessed 1 August 2016. https://www.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf. Greiner, Christine. “Researching Dance in the Wild: Brazilian Experiences.” TDR/ The Drama Review 51, no. 3 (2007): 140–55. “Indígenas ameaçam morrer coletivamente caso ordem de despejo seja efetivada.” Conselho Indigena Missionário. 10 October 2012. Last accessed 1 April 2016. http://www.cimi.org.br/site/pt-br/?system=news&action=read&id=6553. Martin, Randy. “A Precarious Dance, a Derivative Sociality.” TDR/The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 62–77. —. “Art Attacks.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 3 (2007): 283–97. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Novaes, Washington. “Quem poderá salvar os guarani-caiovás?” ESTADÃO. 9 November 2012. Last accessed 23 March 2016. http://opiniao.estadao.com. br/noticias/geral,quem-podera-salvar-os-guarani-caiovas-imp,957849. Robinson, Ken. “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley.” TED. Last accessed 1 April 2016. http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_educa tion_s_death_valley/transcript?language=en. Rosa, Cristina F. Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification: Swing Nation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. —. “Playing, Fighting, and Dancing: Unpacking the Significance of Ginga within the Practice of Capoeira Angola.” TDR/The Drama Review 56, no. 3 (2012), 141–66. Rose, Nikolas S. “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies.” In Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Govern-

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ment, edited by Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas S. Rose, 37–64. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996. —. “Identity, Genealogy, History.” In Identity: A Reader, edited by Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman, 313–21. London and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2000. Shanker, Thom. “More Sabers to Rattle, Perhaps Fewer to Thrust.” New York Times. 25 February 2007. Last accessed 22 June 2016. http://www.nytimes. com/2007/02/25/weekinreview/25shanker.html?_r=0. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges.” Eurozine. Last accessed 1 April 2016. http://www. eurozine.com/articles/2007-06-29-santos-en.html. Souza, Marcelle. “A morte guarani.” Revista Singular (2008): 32–7. Spanghero, Maíra. A dança dos encéfalos acesos. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2003.

The Archiving Body in Dance The Trajectory of the Dance Archive Box Project Nanako Nakajima

In the recent European contemporary dance scene, the form of re-enactment provides an opportunity for artists to reconstruct dance histories as being non-deterministic, non-linear and non-homogeneous. The question of how to archive this most ephemeral art of dance illuminates the ontological and political questions that concern dance history. When one dance is archived for a recreation, the originators of the work are mostly gone, which is also the reason to archive their legacy of dance. However, when dance is archived and passed on to the second artist for a recreation, what happens if both are present? Do they have to have the same communal root or collaborative consent? If the second artist takes certain artistic liberties by re-contextualizing the dance, does that degrade the first artist’s works? Does an idea of sharing dance subvert the boundary of ownership and function in favor of the artistic freedom for the second artist? Does the ecological circulation and artistic impact in the form of interweaving exceed the risks of cultural reappropriation? How do historical and economical backgrounds of the artists affect the power politics in processes of sharing dances? In this study, I discuss a contemporary dance archive project, the Dance Archive Box project. This project was proposed and initially conceived in 2014 by Ong Ken Sen, a theater director and the artistic director of the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA). The Dance Archive Box project was originally launched in collaboration with The Saison Foundation and the Agency for Cultural Affairs and contemporary dance makers in Japan. In this project, dance makers archive their own works not for conservation but for performing and having them performed. This international project was planned to end after it was handed from its first sponsor in Japan to the second one in Singapore. As I followed the process, however, I became convinced that this project, initiated in Japan, should not

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conclude at the SIFA to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of independence of Singapore; rather, it should continue to be open to all regions and spread around the world. A dance history project should be truly shared with other communities only through dissemination. Therefore, I inherited the project and became a “user” of the project itself, curating and realizing presentations in Japan with the sponsorship of the Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama (TPAM). Dance deals with body movements, which disappear at the moment of appearance. Thus, archiving dance poses a question of ownership: to whom does dance and its history belong? I have considered this issue of legacy in dance in another thematic frame, this being “the aging body in dance.” In Asian performing arts, including Japanese traditional dance, there already exists a form of archive in which dance is passed across generations by dancers dancing into their old age.1 In the presentations of Dance Archive Boxes @TPAM2016, I interweave the perspective of “the aging body in dance” as a form of archiving dance in Japan, in addition to the existing Dance Archive Box project.

Fig. 1: Dialogue Session of Natsuko Tezuka and Venuri Perera at TPAM 2016; © Kazuomi Furuya, TPAM 2016. Considering the situation above, I invited a traditional Japanese performing artist, in addition to emerging and established dance makers from South and Southeast Asia, to use and perform the Archive Boxes. The Chankethya Chey–Tsuyoshi Shirai and Venuri Perera–Natsuko Tezuka pairs reperformed their exchanges from the SIFA. Both Chankethya Chey and Venuri Perera are trained in their respective traditional dance forms and are now internationally active as emerging artists. While Chankethya Chey presented her original but also characteristically Asian

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approach to receiving dance by mediating the digital information from Tsuyoshi Shirai’s Archive Box through objects and the body, Venuri Perera adeptly recontextualized the instructions from Natsuko Tezuka’s Archive Box with her Sri Lankan passport, which she claimed to be the world’s tenth worst passport.

Fig. 2: Dialogue Session of Chie Ito and Oohisui Hanayagi at TPAM 2016; © Kazuomi Furuya. TPAM 2016. There were also premiere performances by two pairs, comprising Navtej Johar– Yukio Suzuki and Oohisui Hanayagi–Chie Ito. Moving between Indian traditional dance, such as Bharatanatyam and contemporary dance, Navtej Johar has worked on concepts of “the other” and gender within Asia for many years. Although he was unable to participate in the SIFA presentation, he received Yukio Suzuki’s Archive Box and performed his response for the first time at TPAM. Oohisui Hanayagi is, on one hand, highly regarded for her work as an emerging traditional Japanese dance maker, whereas on the other hand, she has inherited the dance of her master, who is accredited as the holder of Important Intangible Cultural Property. Oohisui Hanayagi received the Archive Box made by Chie Ito of the Strange Kinoko Dance Company, which has essentially established the contemporary dance scene in Japan. The presentation by this pair posed the question of what was traditional or contemporary within and outside communities. When a Dance Archive Box is opened, what type of relationships does the archivist build with its users? Does a meaningful and attractive Archive Box set both parties free without losing the original context?

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1 The Term “Archive” Before we discuss the meaning of archives in dance, let us study the term itself. “Archive” originated from the Greek word arkheion, which means “public house.” Regarding this concept of archive, Michel Foucault elaborated two dimensions of this term: the law governing what can and cannot be said in a given period or situation and the general system that governs the formation and transformation of statements and sentences.2 Jacques Derrida also discussed the term “archive” according to two principles, referring to its etymology as arkhe. He wrote, “This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence – physical, historical, or ontological principle – but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given – nomological principle.”3 The characteristics of an archive can be explained by examining its differences from other existing documentation. A functional separation distinguishes archives from other areas of documentation – e.g., the library, the museum – although this separation does not occur until the modern period. The archive is the product of modern ambition to register time in more ways than one. Sven Spieker explained this transition from the nineteenth century’s model to the new database form of archive in terms of temporality: specifically, “the transition from a model of the archive dominated by the nineteenth century’s concern with registration and contingent time to database-like forms that eschew the nineteenth-century emphasis on chronological arrangement and linear reading.”4 Rooted in the European culture, the concept of the “archive” is also concerned with the construction of histories from surviving documents. The Holocaust – particularly, the controversial issue of erased memories – precipitated a heightened interest in archives as repositories of memories and knowledge. Since then, whenever a nation state or culture approaches a turning point in its history, judgements are often made for the legacy of its past to be reinterpreted from a contemporary perspective. The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, for instance, has driven recent archive theorists in Japan to emphasize the preservation of oral history through archives.5 Archive concerns the lost past: how, then, do we tell these missing stories and for whom?

2 Archiving Art In the late twentieth-century art and art criticism, the idea of the archive became the trope of choice for various activities. This accompanied the contemporary art

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movement in which artists started appropriating everyday objects and found materials, which would have been thrown away if not archived, for their artworks. A well-known example in art is the Fluxus Box. Inspired by the work of John Cage and organized by George Maciunas, Fluxus was a networked movement of artists that were already working and collaborating along the same lines; it emerged in the early 1960s in the United States, Europe and Japan. Artists of the Fluxus movement used found materials and adapted their own do-it-yourself approach to them. This often produced experimental ideas of randomness and the recombination of everyday objects and events into artistic practice. Dozens of Fluxus Editions included affordable items made in multiple copies; these were intended to communicate the group’s ideas and activities on an international scale, moving across national borders. Their productions included collective anthologies, or “yearboxes,” and works by individual artists, often inventively constructed for mailing. These stored instruction scores, film loops, audio recordings, games, puzzles and documentation from the group’s extensive program of performance concerts. Some of these, called Fluxfests, represented good examples of the Fluxus artists’ fascination with the mundane fragments of life and their interdisciplinary, playful humor. Particularly as represented by its yearboxes, Fluxus was a fluid community based not around a stable identity but on the exchange and repeatable performance of a flexible repertoire of event scores. This was the method used to transmit the art movement to a wider audience and to other artists. Although production of Fluxus Editions was inconsistent, and most of the works were not sold, this project circulated among artists in the 1960s and 70s, thereby catalyzing discourse around experimental practices during that period. Influencing artists across borders through postal circulations, Fluxus’s archived materials as artworks significantly impacted international artistic communities despite the movement’s lack of economic success. In the visual arts domain, the project of archiving has recently been connected to the medium of performance art. The idea of archives has gained prominence in discussions of performance arts for several reasons. Performance art, which has long placed a high value on interdisciplinarity and spontaneity, has shifted its focus from action as the core of the creative work to the physicality and personality of the performer as being the critical media. While this form of art was widely developing in the 1960s and 1970s, people confronted the problem of how to collect these ephemeral art works within a museum. In this context, the aging of performance artists has sparked urgent discussion on how collections of their ephemeral performances can be framed as artworks and preserved through reconstruction. This debate has resulted in the expansion of the concept of re-enactment – origi-

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nally, a theatrical means by which medieval rites and historical events could be restaged – to the arena of fine arts.6 One reason why the question of documentation takes on a special significance for performance art is its ontological ephemerality. Material or media objects, which could be presented independently by the performer and circulated in the art market after the performance, are not typically produced. This discussion on archiving performance art is clearly represented by Seven Easy Pieces, performed by Marina Abramović in 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. This piece features her re-enactments of historical, seminal performances by five different artists, namely Bruce Nauman (Body Pressure, 1974), Vito Acconci (Seedbed, 1972), Valie Export (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969), Gina Pane (The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portrait(s), 1973), Joseph Beuys (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965) and those of her own works (Lips of Thomas, 1975 and her new piece, Entering the Other Side, 2005). This re-enactment also reflects the interdisciplinary, bridging moment of visual art and performing art. Performances dating from the 1960s through to the beginning of the 1980s embody the so called “heroic” period of performance history: while expressing a radical new definition for the genre, these performances were also influenced by an interdisciplinary dialogue between performance movements within dance and the fine arts.7

3 Archiving Dance What kind of information is necessary when reconstructing a dance? What aspects of dance in the past should be passed on as an archive for the future? In the recent contemporary European dance scene, the form of re-enactment using an archive has opened up a broader perspective that allows dance makers to reconsider various dance histories.8 This also offers opportunities to contemporary artists to tell the counter-history and many find creative possibilities in these attempts. One example in dance is Urheben Aufheben, which is the German choreographer Martin Nachbar’s re-enactment of Dore Hoyer’s cycle of dance solos titled Affectos Humanos (Human Affects) since 1999. Maaike Bleeker explains Nachbar’s re-enactment as follows: “In his remembering of Hoyer’s work, as well as in the text ‘Training Remembering,’ Nachbar reflects extensively on how actualising Hoyer’s work through his body made him very much aware of the historical distance between her and him. What he is tracing in redoing her work is not Hoyer’s feelings or experiences, but how actualising her work involves figuring out the physical logic through which the various elements of the choreography (and Hoyer’s

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mode of moving) are connected.”9 This piece was also presented in various countries, including Japan, which also acted as a trigger for the dance archive project by the Saison Foundation.10 Another example is Takao Kawaguchi’s About Kazuo Ohno. In our previous seminar in Tokyo in 2014, Takao Kawaguchi, a dance maker and former member of the artist collective Dumb Type, talked about his 2013 solo performance About Kazuo Ohno and the approach as well as processes he employed in creating the work. About Kazuo Ohno is a solo performance based on the past works of Butoh legend Kazuo Ohno, which premiered in August 2013 and was subsequently presented in October 2013 as part of the Kazuo Ohno Festival. Kawaguchi made observations about Kazuo Ohno and his works through video documentations of La Argentina that premiered in 1977, My Mother from 1980, and The Dead Sea from 1985. He then chose one or two scenes from each piece and attempted to enact the exact movements of the dances. Kawaguchi’s method was unique in that he deliberately chose to focus on the physical aspects of the choreography. Kawaguchi said, “Kazuo Ohno is said to have created his dances from the inner-self, dancing from the soul and connecting with the cosmos, but I purposefully took the opposite approach.”11 For example, Kawaguchi made sketches of Ohno’s movements from the video documentation of La Argentina. In addition, he referred to handwritten memos by Ohno and collected descriptions of the dancer from those who knew him personally. In the actual performance, Kawaguchi used sound taken from the videos and assembled costumes that were similar to the original. In the end, Kawaguchi inserted his own improvisations in certain scenes instead of performing an exact copy of the original works, and he wore other costumes rather than female dress. Kawaguchi emphasized that, throughout the process, he had tried to copy the work faithfully and not make it into his own dance; he felt it was necessary for him to be empty inside, without emotions. Inspired by the form of re-enactment in performance art, the French dance maker Boris Charmatz also questioned the form of archiving dance and the system of museums, which usually does not cover forms of performing arts. His attempt to display dance and performance in a museum transformed a gallery space once again into a stage, thus influencing what it means to be dancing: “We are at a time in history where a museum can modify BOTH preconceived ideas about museums AND one’s ideas about dance. Because we haven’t the slightest intension of creating a dead museum, it will be a living museum of dance.”12 This is a quote from a manifesto for his project entitled Musée de la danse (Dancing Museum). Appointed as an artistic director, Boris Charmatz proposed to transform the national choreographic center into a museum of dance/dancing museum.

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What is implied is that the museum itself needs to be redefined by means of dancing. Charmatz asked what dance can do for museums: “To an extent, museums missed the great moment of performance in the 1960s and 1970s, which is now being compensated for by the large-scale acquisition of performance archive.”13 During an interview, Charmatz explained how the dancing museum functioned, insisting that it had its own rules of archiving: “We are, above all, not making a museum of modern art, but a museum of dance, which must define its own working rules, whether economic, aesthetic, or symbolic.”14 As a living museum of dance, Charmatz’s piece 50 Years of Dance (2010) also suggests what a museum should be in a dance context: it included Gus Solomon, a 70-year-old former Cunningham dancer reconstructing the previous pieces as a corporeal witness, along with the photo catalog on stage. Through his attempt to create a dancing museum, the durational presentation of performance and dance affected the exhibition format of the museum as well as prepared the way for a new type of performance dance artists, such as Tino Sehgal.

4 Dance Archive Box Project In this project, seven contemporary dance makers in Japan archived their works through their respective methods, each creating an “Archive Box” and handing it to another artist from Asia for reperformance. In the field of contemporary dance, which had been emancipated from the familial relationship that governed the Japanese system of passing on an art tradition, the project was a way of posing the following questions: how is it possible to separate a dance from the communal histories of the dance maker and to produce an Archive Box as creative common ground for all people? What does it mean to share a dance without sharing the time with the dance makers themselves? All the questions regarding this project concern the lost past: how do we reconstruct whose histories for whom? This project of archiving contemporary Japanese dance involves several discourses concerning dance archiving. Here, the process of archiving deals not only with materials but also with the requirement of other artists to perform archived dance using an Archive Box, formed of collections of materials and texts chosen by the artist, and to literally “restore” them in one box as a source of reperformance. This raises an ontological question concerning dance in Japan, namely whether a dance work can be separated from dancers’ bodies.

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5 Contemporary Dance in Japan The state of contemporary dance in Japan originated from that of French contemporary dance, and this genre is comprised of independent artists who have searched for their own physical expressions, as well as their own technique. These dance makers came from the various backgrounds of Butoh, modern dance and ballet, and have enjoyed acclaim since the late 1980s. They have been supported by private foundations, such as those of Saison, Asahi and Toyota, and have received awards at contemporary dance competitions, such as the Toyota Choreography Awards and the Yokohama Dance Collection. One dance critic, Takao Norikoshi, named the year 1986 as marking the beginning of contemporary dance in Japan because the following influential events in the history of dance occurred in this year: Pina Bausch’s first performance in Japan and Saburo Teshigawara becoming the first Japanese award winner in the Bagnolet International Choreography Competition.15 This period occurred during Japan’s “bubble” economy, which brought increased opportunities to engage such artists, which had previously been limited due to the expense. Thus, contemporary dance artists were able to make a departure financially and communally from the existing dance training culture and its familial school system, which had previously sustained artistic activity.16 The structure of dance activities in Japan depends on an apprenticeship to a master artist or teacher, which forms the basis of the professional familial system. This is a humbling and lengthy process for the student, in which the concept of new creation is not highly regarded.17 This principle holds true not only for traditional dance, such as Noh, Kabuki and Buyo, but also in contemporary dance. Yoko Shioya, director of the Japan Society in New York, indicated that in the late 1980s, most of the dance activities in Japan were related to the familial system, teacher-student apprenticeship and okeiko-goto culture, which provides artistic training as well as social discipline and domestic training for amateurs and professionals. Thus, according to Shioya, in the late 1980s, Butoh was the only Japanese contemporary dance form recognized as being the artistic expression of individual artists from the international perspective.18 Today, many dance communities in the form of familial schools coexist in Japan. For example, the Japanese Federation of Dancing Artists (全日本舞踊連合) was established in 1977 to engage in research and practice to solve common social problems for dance makers in Japan. This association includes four dance associations, namely traditional dance, ballet, contemporary dance and children’s dance, and it publishes a yearbook of all the dance performances in their categories. The Contemporary Dance Association of Japan (CDAJ) is the largest group in modern and contemporary dance; it also promotes the familial, teacher-student apprentice-

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ship, which also provides members with a continuous support system in terms of funding and artistic legacy.19 Alongside Butoh, or afterwards, contemporary dance makers then became active, supported by the 1990s bubble economy and by private foundations. Many contemporary dance makers supported by the foundations did not belong to the association of the CDAJ. Because of their independent status and their limited marketing opportunities, with a few exceptions such as Saburo Teshigawara, most of their works have unfortunately neither been handed down to the next generation as repertoire nor become known to an international audience. The purpose of archiving dance, the initial phase in this project, is not only to allow their legacies to remain in Japan but also to increase their visibility overseas. In addition, from the perspective of the Saison Foundation, it is their aim to archive their 28-year history of support to dance makers, not as accumulated, visual and written documentations but as an alternative format for live arts.20

6 Process of the Dance Archive Box Project This project of “archiving dance” began as the Dance Archive Box project in 2014 in Tokyo and was initiated by Ong Keng Sen. The project was conducted by two other facilitators, namely the Japanese dance critic Daisuke Muto and myself as dance dramaturge. In this project, seven contemporary dance makers from Japan archived their own works through their respective methods and rules, each creating an “Archive Box” and handing it to another artist for reperformance. The Dance Archive Box project arose primarily from two vibrant scenes: Japanese and Asia-Pacific dance scenes. There were also two phases in the process: the Saison Foundation implemented the first one in Japan in 2014 while the SIFA implemented the second one in 2015. In 2014, eight contemporary dance makers – namely Chie Ito, Ikuyo Kuroda, Ryohei Kondo (who joined only in April), Yukio Suzuki, Tsuyoshi Shirai, Natsuko Tezuka, Mikuni Yanaihara and Zan Yamashita – participated in a five-day seminar session in April and a ten-day workshop session in December, together with facilitators, Ong Keng Sen, myself and Daisuke Muto. The concept of the Archive Box was developed through the session in April. Then, in the period between April and December, the dance makers each took on the role of an archivist and created their Archive Box. In December, each of the dance makers – seven of them by then – now took on the role of a user to test each other’s Boxes to see how the Archive Box would function when handed to others and used for recreation.21

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実験とは 自然の多いところを散歩をして、

１ 事柄の当否などを確かめるために、

野生動物のうんちを探してください。

 実際にやってみること。また、ある理論や

そして、その匂いを嗅いでください。

 仮説で考えられていることが、正しいか  どうかなどを実際にためしてみること。 ２ 実際に経験すること。

体の一部にものすごく意識を集中して ください。例えば、あなたの右手の薬 指に蚊が止まり、その蚊があなたの薬 指の中に入り込む。そしてしばらくす るとその蚊は姿を消すけれど、意識だ けがとどまっている。そんな感じ。

信頼している人一人と一緒に、他の人には見ら 人に見られないところで、リラックス

れないところでリラックスして四つん這いに

して四つん這いになり、気持ちよく歩

なってください。その信頼している人に頭頂を

き回ってください。気持ち良さがしみ

押してもらい、自分が押し返したくなるような

てきて、それが普通に感じるまで。

押し方を模索してもらってください。気持ちよ

自分が心地よいと感じることを１０個 書き出してみてください。

く押し返してみてください。

あなたにとって正しくない、と思う

あなたにとって正しいと思うことを

自分がとても不快だ！と感じることを

ことを１０個書いてください。その

１０個書いてください。その中で、

１０個以上書き出してみてください。

中で、一度でいいからやってみたい

誰かがそのうちの一つをしていたら

ことをひとつ選んで、自分が何でそ

ムカっとくるかもしれないと思うも

れをしてみたいか？自分に聞いてみ

のは何か？自分に聞いてみてくださ

てください。

い。

Fig. 3 & Fig. 4: Natsuko Tezuka’s Archive Box includes a letter, an instruction manual, and a set of supplementary cards which may provide hints when a user has difficulty with the creation process. For example, “Walk around where there is a lot of nature, and look for poo of wild animals. Then smell it.” All of them were contained inside a glass jar; © the Saison Foundation.

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Fig. 5: Tsuyoshi Shirai’s digital Archive Box; © Tsuyoshi Shirai. After this first phase, Ong Keng Sen hosted a three-day workshop in February and March 2015 in Singapore, where seven dance makers from South and Southeast Asia – Rani Nair, Padmini Chettur, Chankethya Chey, Preethi Athreya, Venuri Perera, Margie Medlin and Mandeep Raikhy – were invited and introduced to the Archive Box project. Most of them were connected to each other through the Gati Dance Forum and the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts in India. Margie Medlin and myself served as the dramaturges from this workshop on. Similar to the process used in Japan, the users chose whose Archive Boxes they would like to use and were paired with them. Each Archive Box was translated into English and delivered to its user from Japan via Singapore. In addition, a license agreement between each of the archivist-user pairs and the SIFA was exchanged. Then, in June at the O.P.E.N., which was the pre-festival of the SIFA, Daisuke Muto and myself gave lectures about the project. Finally, for two weeks in August and September in 2015, the SIFA hosted a curatorial series entitled “Dance Marathon: OPEN WITH THE PUNK SPIRIT!” through which fourteen dance makers – seven archivists and seven users – performed their own works. As the climax of this series, the Dance Archive Box project was presented over a period of two days. In addition to the preparation for the SIFA, the TPAM programing had also proceeded; by the end of November 2015, the participating pairs of artists and the presentation format as an exhibition/performance–dialogue/symposium for the TPAM presentation were finalized. In December 2015, the new users, Navtej Johar and Oohisui Hanayagi, chose their preferred Archive Boxes and received them

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by the middle of December. At that time, even though Chie Ito’s Archive Box was being exhibited in the temporary dance exhibition at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, the museum staff removed the Box from their exhibition and let us use it.

7 Dramaturging the Archive Boxes The first period of this archiving dance project was composed of two parts: a seminar session in April and a workshop session in December. In the seminar, all participants engaged in discussions, lectures and dialogues on the themes surrounding archives – their significance, concepts, and the ideas behind these concepts – and formulated their thoughts on the possible methods of archiving their works. In the second period of the project, the three-day workshop in Singapore provided the same discussion platform of archiving dance for users before all the artists introduced their own works and their approaches to the other participants. While the artists explored how to pass on works to people who do not belong to their group, I myself, as dance dramaturge, played the role of cultural translator and negotiator to democratize dance knowledge without being submissive to the culturally imperialistic, globalized power. Communicating unwritten narratives in dance history is in line with my role as a dramaturge for this project. My objectives were to tease out the various histories from the Archive Boxes and see if they could be transformed into more powerful realities, as well as to communicate, through oral history, vital information that was not included in the Boxes. An example is Chie Ito’s Archive Box, which was performed by Natsuko Tezuka, Rani Nair and Oohisui Hanayagi as users. Since her announcement last year that her dance company would be moving on from contemporary dance, Ito has been studying the uncontrollable nature of crowds, something she had remarked upon during this archival process. Her remarks suggest that she was inspired by a phenomenon in the audience, whose sense of “self” proliferated through performances of her archived work. Such essential information had slipped through the cracks and was not found in her Archive Box at the beginning but was only rediscovered through oral history. Natsuko Tezuka created her style of party rituals by interacting with the audience, and through Rani Nair’s dialogue with Chie Ito’s Archive Box, the Box is radically deconstructed in the European form of lecture performance in the same format as her previous archived piece by a Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger, Future Memory. In contrast, Oohisui Hanayagi copied Chie Ito’s first dance by watching DVDs. After she mastered the choreography, Oohisui Hanayagi reconsidered how to transform this piece into a 20-minute response

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Fig. 6: Chie Ito’s Archive Box; © Chie Ito. in her Japanese traditional dance style. Oohisui Hanayagi decided to dance the monthly ceremonies in Japan as a duet with her colleague. Dressed in kimono, they danced to the music of radio gymnastics, which for many Japanese people evokes the early-morning school custom in a playful manner. Through the process of making their responses to the Box, some users started re-experiencing the history of the Archive Boxes and investigating archivists’ personalities, which were included within the performative aspect in the Archive Box. Along the way, I together with archivists and users, experienced linguistic and cultural translation within the global circulation of knowledge. Through their own processes, and in confronting the other, both “archivists” and “users” encountered conflicts, negotiations, control, resistance, arrogance and vulnerabilities. Though the archivists might have tried to retain their original forms, these could never remain unchanged in the users’ responses. In contrast, miraculous coincidences also happened through exchanging Archive Boxes, even though archivists and users had never shared that information before. Tsuyoshi Shirai’s Archive Box originally contained a combination of digital information and the props used in his previous piece, Still Life. In the process of transporting the Box to the user for the SIFA, he decided not to include his props, and as a result, his Archive Box takes the pure form of a digital archive, a website. However, this website once again returned to tangible objects in Chankethya Chey’s response. On the floor, Chankethya Chey started scattering dishes and tableware, together with her family photos and clothing from Cambodia. Simultaneously, she asked a few volunteers to reorganize those objects on the floor in obedience and disobedience to her requests.

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Fig. 7: Chankethya Chey responds to Tsuyoshi Shirai’s Archive Box; © Hideto Maezawa, TPAM 2016.

Fig. 8: Venuri Perera responds to Natsuko Tezuka’s Archive Box; © Kazuomi Furuya, TPAM 2016. In contrast, Natsuko Tezuka’s glass jar transmitted to Venuri Perera her concept of decolonizing the body by means of her Sri Lankan passport in relation to westernization and modernization. Tezuka once commented that through the Archive Box, she wanted to transmit a kind of heat she felt during the creative process.

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During her previous creation process with her dancers, many of them appeared to be suffering from enteritis, as if they were undergoing their initiations with the group. Her Archive Box as well might secretly demand users to be initiated into the heat. In her Archive Box, of course, the fire could not be stored in a jar to be transported to the next user. However, in the case of Perera, the fire appeared again to burn her visa application form during her response. By setting fire to her visa application, her underwear, and her hair and cleansing them in a bottle with powder milk in her ritual, Perera aimed to set her free from the colonial past of her country, Sri Lanka.

8 An Alternative Method of Archiving the Body: Intangible Cultural Property This project of archiving contemporary Japanese dance is contrasted with the previous method of archiving dance in Japan, which had been in place since 1950 as the legal system of Important Intangible Cultural Properties of Japan within the framework of Japanese law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. This system of archiving dancers’ entire bodies, which was legitimized earlier in Japan than in any other country, supports the idea of the aging body in traditional Japanese dance, with its bodily knowledge embodied through a continuous lifelong practice of dance within one familial dance community. In Japan, as I mentioned above, the autonomy of the arts is developed through the professional family system, in which a teacher at the top tier holds together a hierarchy of professionals, semi-professionals and amateurs. This familial, teacherdisciple method, called the iemoto system, has become entrenched in many of Japan’s artistic and cultural traditions. It has also worked well to ensure the survival of the continuity of traditions. According to Voltaire Garces Cang, “the 600year-old Nogaku repertory and the 400-year-old traditions in Kabuki have been preserved and refined precisely because of the iemoto system.”22 This family-school system enforces the idea of preservation of an original form without change. This aspect is also described as being historically authentic. Keith Howard argues that this principle reflects the Confucian philosophical approach, which respects the aged.23 There is a very minimal standard of originality, either in a tangible, communicable, written form, or in the secondary work, because dancers pay great respect to older dancers as authentic dance makers. The intellectual property of their works is unprotected in this sense; in other words, members of the familial school system safeguard the knowledge of dance as communal property. Therefore, the aesthetic principle in traditional Japanese dance conflicts with

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the system of copyright based on an individual author, which originated in the European Enlightenment and in Romanticist thought.24 The recent legal protection of the cultural heritage of Japan followed this aesthetic principle and appeared at first to offer a resistance against modernization in the form of rapid westernization. Noriko Aikawa oversees the historical and legal procedures concerning the Japanese law for the Protection of Cultural Properties and UNESCO’s efforts to promote worldwide this Living Human Treasures system that originated in Japan. She explains the legal procedure in the context of Japan’s modernizing process: “In line with the Meiji policy, put in place in 1868, of favouring westernisation in Japan to the detriment of Japanese traditions that were regarded as impediments to the country’s modernisation, and the privileging of Shintoism to the detriment of Buddhism in order to enhance Japanese nationalism, many elements of Japanese cultural heritage were destroyed or sold abroad. The Meiji government then realised that there was an urgent need to protect Japanese cultural properties by statutory means.”25 To ensure the transmission of traditional artistry to future generations, it was decided to recognize individual or collective bearers possessing the highest levels of skill and technique, designating such individuals as the holders of Important Intangible Cultural Property, or “Living National Treasures.” In 1955, the first thirty holders were selected.26 Despite the disappearance of manners and customs that had been in place since before the Meiji modernization, this legal system has preserved the past in the present and has immobilized certain performing arts genres. In one respect, Oohisui Hanayagi’s commitment to the project can be considered as crossing communal dance borders in Japan. Traditional dance artists have never been supported and archived by the Saison Foundation. While their practices in traditional and contemporary dance do not fit into the clear categories of “traditional” or “contemporary” and blur the communal boundaries, the different funding systems construct their own communities and maintain different styles of creation and training. Thus, collaborative experiments involving different dance communities are stressful, and it is difficult to evaluate their success. However, Oohisui Hanayagi’s response to Chie Ito’s Box illuminated the complex structure of dance communities in Japan by raising another question. Working on this Archive Box project influenced participants’ notions of archiving. When a traditional Japanese dancer, such as Oohisui Hanayagi, becomes a new user of Chie Ito’s Archive Box, the legacy of contemporary Japanese dance is transported to the traditional Japanese dance community, thus transcending dance communities. Thereby, this pairing justifies the possibility of archiving and inheriting dance outside the previous systems. Oohisui Hanayagi has professionally inherited her teacher’s dance of the Hanayagi school. As an emerging, award-winning dancer in this traditional dance

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field, she has practiced the classical method and lived with her ninety-year-old master teacher, Toshinami Hayanagi, who has been recognized since 2004 as an Intangible National Treasure in Kabuki buyo, traditional dance in Japan. While Oohisui Hanayagi confronts the critical situation of shrinking traditional dance audiences and the narrow perspective of her traditional dance communities, she has also confessed that the term as an “artwork” was foreign to her and she was never able to say freely what Chie Ito as an individual artist had written in her Archive Box: she lives in a more formal and conservative society of traditional dance. Oohisui Hanayagi’s confusion during the Archive Box process also illuminates the previous and alternative systems of dance in Japan, where artworks and artists are differently constructed. In traditional dance communities, transmission of dance knowledge happens after both teachers as archivists and students as users are admitted to the dance family, which requires years of practice. The archivist transmits one’s dance to the user without any personal relationship: this would never be imagined, or ethically avoided, in traditional dance communities.27

Fig. 9: Oohisui Hanayagi’s response at the TPAM 2016; © Kazuomi Furuya, TPAM 2016.

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9 Cultural Appropriations and the Power of Control An Archive Box enables the user to inherit the first dance without any encounter with its dance maker. The separation of dance knowledge from the knower is embodied in the process of archiving by archivists, and the transportation of this knowledge without any personal commitment is enacted in the process of users performing the Archive Box. In this sense, this Archive Box project also deals with issues surrounding the relative intellectual property rights of dance among “archivists” and “users.” When objects are employed to mediate the transmission of physical knowledge from one person to another, can the relationship between both sides transcend apprenticeship or contractual exclusivity? Does this attempt result in traumatic emotional injury to archivists while providing users with successes in the art market or vice versa? This proposition – encapsulated by a contract in Yukio Suzuki’s “Archive Box” obligating him to conduct workshops at the user’s request – could well become a major theme in cross-cultural negotiations between artists from Japan and other countries.

Fig. 10: Yukio Suzuki’s Archive Box includes a contract and an instruction manual; © Yukio Suzuki. Archivist Yukio Suzuki described his philosophy in his Archive Box using a performance contract with light bulbs as stage props, which symbolized the idea of his evaporating bodily energy. He has a training background in Butoh as well as ballet, and these internal and external, invisible and visible methods seem to be explored with his working experience with disabled dancers and children and his workshop

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experience overseas. The recent loss of his Butoh mentor Ko Murobushi in 2015 also added to the significant meaning of archiving dance for Yukio Suzuki. During the Dance Archive Box Project at the SIFA, Preethi Athreya from Chennai responded to Yukio Suzuki’s Archive Box using his workshop and mostly following his voice instructions through her earphones while at the same time integrating her rich dance language, gained through her training in Bharatanatyam, with no trace of ballet. However, Athreya also resisted his instructions by letting the audience hear what Yukio Suzuki was saying to her during the performance, contrary to his request. In Singapore, the legacy of contemporary Japanese dance is passed on to AsiaPacific contemporary dance through the transportation of the Archive Boxes. Invited to attend TPAM this time was Navtej Johar, an established dance artist from New Delhi, as a user of Yukio Suzuki’s Archive Box. Thus, the legacy of contemporary Japanese dance was given to the previous generation of contemporary traditional dance beyond the boundaries of nationality and age. Yukio Suzuki’s Butoh background, together with his international and contemporary experience, was translated into Navtej Johar’s sincere approach to the Box. In his response, Navtej Johar also simply followed the recorded instructions of Yukio Suzuki’s, listening to his voice in his earphone during the performance and incorporating his theatrical gestures when playing with Yukio Suzuki’s flickering electric lamps. The timing of the dance was strictly framed because it was already scripted and recorded, and Navtej Johar signed the contract on stage. On the other hand, a specific aspect of Yukio Suzuki’s physicality, which could be suggested as being the metaphor of the evaporation of energy in flickering lights, was transformed into Navtej Johar’s experienced physicality and more theatrical approach. All the users of Yukio Suzuki’s Archive Box shared the same temporal structure but produced slightly different interpretations. On one hand, this is an intimate, invisible collaboration between an archivist and users in terms of a bodily experience beyond spatial and temporal boundaries. The two parties may have seldom met; however, they follow strict rules to collaborate simultaneously. On the other hand, I also have seen that this particular Archive Box tends to limit the freedom of interpretation as well as control users. The project of the Dance Archive Box is considered as being the modern attempt at dance archiving in an Asian and Japanese context, which is an expansion and verification of the original archive concept. During the initial process of the project, Ong proposed the idea of a meaningful and attractive archive, whereby the Archive Box itself needs to have the potentiality, which is a latent driving or invigorating power beneath the artwork.28 He also attempted to democratize the artistic relationship within the teacher-student, archivist-user, thereby proposing the idea of “copy-left” as opposed to copyright of the first dance.29 After the SIFA

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Fig. 11: Navtej Johar responds to Yukio Suzuki’s Archive Box; © Hideto Maezawa, TPAM 2016. production, a few user artists started showing their responses at other venues. At the TPAM presentations, in contrast, a platform was set up to invite both archivists and users as a pair. Only when both parties were able to attend were they then invited to present a performance with their dialogue. There are generally few artistic exchanges between the various communities of Japanese contemporary dance and other dance communities, such as traditional dance. If both archival processes co-exist, this Dance Archive Box project creates further possibilities in terms of archival and artistic exchange. The Dance Archive Box project may open up a new way of transmitting dance knowledge through multiple international, distanced artistic collaborations – not only between contemporary and traditional Japanese dancers but also among South Asian and Asia Pacific contemporary dance makers across borders.

10 Dramaturging the Third Space Because I have practiced the traditional Japanese dance odori for 20 years and have lived abroad as a teacher and dramaturge, I have experienced some problematic cases in terms of transmitting dance knowledge to contemporary dance makers. Although these classical choreographies and dance forms are handed down from teachers to students in a professional milieu and people have to spend years to be accepted as members, some contemporary dance makers learn these

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choreographies and use them without permission or giving credit for their performance. While learners in Japan maintain the continuity and classical philosophy of dance in its cultural practice, some contemporary dance makers adapt the form without its content and consume the dance culture for their artistic creation in terms of global capital. Using materials in other cultural domains without their reception models produces culturally problematic artwork in the field of intercultural performance; this is because the original audience is excluded and a different audience is targeted by means of cultural appropriation. This becomes a political question for artists in terms of how to deal with other cultural domains. As theater critic and scholar Rustom Bharucha posits, “[w]e have to get beyond the ‘use’ of other cultures for the assumed rejuvenation of our inner states of desiccation; instead, we need to develop a more heightened awareness of the ecology of cultures, whereby we do not enrich ourselves at the expense of others.”30 If Bharucha’s ecology of cultures can be realized, the relationship between nationality and culture will be diverse. For others, dance opens up the field of transgressing cultures. One can also formulate this consciousness as follows: do not use locality only for the sake of globality. At this point, the intercultural dialogue has already anticipated the globalized art condition.31 Intercultural work does not consist of collections from various cultures but the projects in which various local reception models are reflected. Referring to Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space,”32 curator Johannes Odenthal organizes this ideal intercultural place and its “Third Body” in his curatorial project with Koffi Kôkô at the House of World Cultures, where all the artists meet each other to work as equals: “The Third Body is the ‘impossible’ body, the body between worlds, the body in cross-border transition. In search of a vision of humanity, the body becomes the medium for experience, communication, and transformation. The Third Body awakens echoes of the Third World and a ‘Third Space’ – thus transcending those concepts embedded in bipolarity.”33 According to Odenthal, the House of World Cultures in Berlin became a Third Space for encounters, exchanges and new productions and this is “a symbol for crossing borders, for open communication in the broadest sense of the word.”34 This is also the space for the meeting of aesthetics, politics and religious aspects. Behind this utopic idea, there is also a considerable risk present in cultural practices and globalization. Globalization can amount to capitalistic cultural politics manipulated by the First World contemporary context. Arjun Appadurai mentions this risk in his book, Modernity at Large: India – in this book – is [. . .] rather a site for the examination of how locality emerges in a globalizing world, of how colonial processes underwrite contemporary politics, of how history and genealogy inflect one another and of how global

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facts take local form. In this sense, these chapters – and the frequent invocations of India throughout the book – are not about India (taken as a natural fact) but about the processes through which contemporary India has emerged.35

Appadurai explains not only the situation in his own country of India but also the processes through which his country has emerged as a contemporary nation. The different approaches for transmitting dance knowledge explain the cultural negotiations between global and local communities through the complicated process of modernization in Japanese dance history. The idea of archiving Japanese contemporary dance as a form of Archive Box can also raise the issue that we should understand external pressures from abroad in the context of Japanese dance. This idea involves the never-ending process of linguistic and cultural translation within modernization and the global circulation of knowledge between English-speaking worlds. In an essay entitled “Translation as Culture,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak justifies the translation process of traditional knowledge in this time of globalization as follows: “What is the relationship between the scene of global ecology and the appropriation of traditional knowledge as trade-related intellectual property in the name of biopiracy coded as bioprospecting? What is the relationship between standardised environmentalism on one hand and traditional knowledge systems on the other, compromised by unequal development and the ‘green revolution’?”36 Here, systems of traditional knowledge are continually encoded in a standardized environment of language and culture to be more globally visible. Simultaneously, however, this process is also one of resistance, where physicalities unique to local dance cultures contend with the global accumulation of dance knowledge. As a dramaturge and curatorial director of the Dance Archive Boxes @ TPAM 2016, as well as a scholarly writer publishing this article on the project in English, I am also risking the cultural appropriation of the previous process of the Dance Archive Box project in Japan and Singapore by moving it across artistic, linguistic and ethical borders. Archiving the Dance Archive Box project was, actually, using the project itself. If this innovative curatorial and dramaturgical practice is to remap the world order, by redrawing the boundaries of the art world and its politics as well as recontextualizing the artwork from its original context, then my attempt to promote the ecology of dance cultures needs to be criticized, as do all our archivists and users.37 The past and the present are to be decided by the future. The historical moment does not allow what is at stake to be neglected.

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Notes   1 See Nanako Nakajima, “Aging and Dance: Dance against Archiving,” in Saitama Liberal Arts 6: Hidden Traditions of Musica Mundana (Saitama: Faculty of Liberal Arts and Graduate School of Cultural Science, Saitama University, 2015), 31–44. [中島那奈 子「 〈老い〉 と踊り―アーカイブ化されない踊りをめぐって」]

  2 Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 166–73.   3 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.   4 Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 15.   5 For example, Toshinari Nagasaka explains how important but difficult it is to collect oral histories for 311 Marugoto-Archives. Toshinari Nagasaka, “We need the archival system to publish and share the past memories with each other,” Archive Rikkoku Sengen (Tokyo: Pot Shuppan, 2014), 87. [長坂俊成「公開・共有の為の仕組みづくりが必要 だ」]

  6 See Nakajima, “Aging and Dance.”  7 Peter Weibel, “Die Performative Wende im Ausstellungsraum,” in MOMENTS: Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten, ed. Sigrid Gareis, Georg Schöllhamer and Peter Weibel (Köln: Walther König, 2013), 13.  8 See Krassimira Kruschkova for her observation on European contemporary dance scene along with the concept of Re-Enactment proposed by Rebecca Schneider. “Tanzgeschichte(n): wieder und wider. Re-enactment, Referenz, révérence,” Original und Revival: Geschichts-Schreibung im Tanz, ed. Christina Thurner and Julia Wehren (Zürich: Chronos, 2010), 41. In 2011, in Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, Rebecca Schneider mentioned that the purpose of Re-enactment was to tell the counter-history. (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), 38.   9 Maaike A. Bleeker, “(Un)Covering Artistic Thought Unfolding,” Dance Research Journal 44, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 14, last accessed 9 May 2016, doi:10.1017/ S0149767712000083. 10 Atsuko Hisano, “About Saison Foundation’s Archiving Dance,” Presentation, TPAM Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, Yokohama, 14 February 2016. 11 Takao Kawaguchi’s comment in the Saison Foundation’s final project report: “Large Group Session 1,” in “Archiving Dance,” The Saison Foundation, last accessed 1 June 2016, http://www.saison.or.jp/search_past/archiving_dance/ArchivingDance_all.pdf. 12 Boris Charmatz, “Manifesto for a National Choreographic Centre,” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 (December 2014): 47, last accessed 9 May 2016, doi: 10.1017/ S0149767714000539. 13 “Interview with Boris Charmatz,” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 (December 2014): 51, last accessed 9 May 2016, doi: 10.1017/S0149767714000540.

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14 Ibid., 50. 15 Takao Norikoshi, Contemporary Dance Complete Guide HYPER (Tokyo: Sakuhin-Sha, 2006), 9. [乗越たかお『コンテンポラリー・ダンス徹底ガイドHYPER』] 16 See Eiko Tsuboike, “An Overview. Latest Trends by Genre: Contemporary Dance,” Performing Arts Network Japan, last accessed 11 May 2016, http://www.performingarts.jp/E/overview_art/1005_07/1.html. 17 Akira Amagasaki, Dance Critique (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 2004), 89. [尼ヶ崎彬『ダンスク リティーク』]

18 Yoko Shioya, “Flourishing and Obsolete Dance Industry in Japan – An Observation from NY,” Buyonenkan, 2012–2013, ed. Committees of the Buyonenkan: 19. [塩谷陽子 「発展し停滞する日本の舞踊界—NYからの視察」]

19 Amagasaki, Dance Critique, 90. The CDAJ has also conducted their dance archive project since 2010, presenting their classical choreographed repertories performed by younger generations. 20 Hisano, “Saison Foundation.” 21 The final report by the Saison Foundation, Archiving Dance, describes the detailed program of the project. Archiving Dance, The Saison Foundation, last accessed 1 June 2016, http://www.saison.or.jp/search_past/archiving_dance/ArchivingDance_all.pdf. 22 Voltaire Garces Cang, “Preserving Intangible Heritage in Japan: the Role of the Iemoto System,” International Journal of Intangible Heritage 3 (2008): 75. 23 Keith Howard, “Living Human Treasures from a Lost Age: Current Issues in Cultural Heritage Management,” Korean Research Journal of Dance Documentation 3 (2002): 51–74. However, the Korean principle that he argues is slightly different from the Japanese. 24 Anthea Kraut questions copyright law of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression, because the white mainstream culture has dismissed African American artistic forms as the product of natural expression rather than original authorship. Anthea Kraut, “‘Stealing Steps’ and Signature Moves: Embodied Theories of Dance as Intellectual Property,” Theatre Journal 62, no. 2 (May 2010): 174, last accessed 11 May 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40660601. 25 “In 1871 a decree was issued entitled the Preservation of Antique and Ancient Objects, which was the first Japanese legal measure to protect cultural property.” And in 1950 law, the term “intangible cultural property” was adapted and 155 were selected, of which 113 concerned the performing arts. Noriko Aikawa-Faure, “Excellence and Authenticity: ‘Living National (Human) Treasures’ in Japan and Korea,” International Journal of Intangible Heritage 9 (2014): 40. 26 Ibid., 41. 27 I finish with a remark: the public system of dance notation is rarely used because the code system has not been historically encouraged or developed. Instead, private and non-systematized, secret methods (秘伝) in teacher-student apprenticeships are more

216 | Nanako Nakajima powerful as effective methods of knowledge transmission in dance and performance education. 28 Refer to the keynote speech by Ong Keng Sen, “Sustaining Ephemerality: Creating a Meaningful and Attractive Archive of 1 Dance,” at the TPAM symposium on 14 February 2016. 29 Ibid. 30 Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 159. 31 Johannes Odenthal analyzes the intercultural projects from the global perspective, referring to Okwui Enwezor’s curation on Documenta 11. Johannes Odenthal, Tanz Körper Politik: Texte zur zeitgenössischen Tanzgeschichte (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2005), 107, 122. 32 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 56. 33 Johannes Odenthal on their curatorial project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, IN TRANSIT 2004/05. His term of the Third Body is coined to describe Koffi Kôkô, his co-curator and dance maker from Benin. “The Body is a Library: Koffi Kôkô in Conversation with Johannes Odenthal,” in The Third Body: Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt und die Performing Arts, ed. Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2004), 52. 34 Ibid. 35 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 18. 36 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translation as Culture,” in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), 247. 37 See Okwui Enwezor, Nigerian-born poet, art critic, art historian, and curator who helped bring global attention to African art, “Redrawing the Boundaries: Towards a New African Art Discourse,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 1 (1994): 3–7, last accessed 18 May 2016, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/422411.

Bibliography Aikawa-Faure, Noriko. “Excellence and Authenticity: ‘Living National (Human) Treasures’ in Japan and Korea.” International Journal of Intangible Heritage 9 (2014): 37–51. Amagasaki, Akira. Dance Critique. Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 2004. [尼ヶ崎彬『ダンス クリティーク』]

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Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1994. Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Bleeker, Maaike A. “(Un)Covering Artistic Thought Unfolding.” Dance Research Journal 44, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 13–26. Last accessed 9 May 2016. doi:10.1017/S0149767712000083. Cang, Voltaire Garces. “Preserving Intangible Heritage in Japan: the Role of the Iemoto System.” International Journal of Intangible Heritage 3 (2008): 71–81. Charmatz, Boris. “Manifesto for a National Choreographic Centre.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 (December 2014): 45–8. Last accessed 9 May 2016. doi: 10.1017/S0149767714000539. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Enwezor, Okwui. “Redrawing the Boundaries: Towards a New African Art Discourse.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 1 (1994): 3–7. Last accessed 18 May 2016. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/422411. Foucault, Michel. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Hisano, Atsuko. “About Saison Foundation’s Archiving Dance.” Presentation, TPAM Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, Yokohama, 14 February 2016. Howard, Keith. “Living Human Treasures from a Lost Age: Current Issues in Cultural Heritage Management.” Korean Research Journal of Dance Documentation 3 (2002): 51–74. “Interview with Boris Charmatz.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 (December 2014): 49–52. Last accessed 9 May 2016. doi:10.1017/S0149767714000540. Kraut, Anthea. “‘Stealing Steps’ and Signature Moves: Embodied Theories of Dance as Intellectual Property.” Theatre Journal 62, no. 2 (May 2010): 173–89. Last accessed 11 May 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40660601. Kruschkova, Krassimira. “Tanzgeschichte(n): wieder und wider. Re-enactment, Referenz, révérence.” Original und Revival: Geschichts-Schreibung im Tanz, edited by Christina Thurner and Julia Wehren, 39–46. Zürich: Chronos, 2010. Nagasaka, Toshinari. “We need the archival system to publish and share the past memories with each other.” Archive Rikkoku Sengen, 82–94. Tokyo: Pot Shuppan, 2014. [長坂俊成「公開・共有の為の仕組みづくりが必要だ」] Nakajima, Nanako. “Aging and Dance: Dance against Archiving.” Saitama Liberal Arts 6: Hidden Traditions of Musica Mundane, 31–44. Saitama: Faculty

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of Liberal Arts and Graduate School of Cultural Science, Saitama University, 2015. [中島那奈子「〈老い〉 と踊り―アーカイブ化されない踊りをめぐって」] Norikoshi, Takao. Contemporary Dance Tettei Guide HYPER. Tokyo: SakuhinSha, 2006. [乗越たかお『コンテンポラリー・ダンス徹底ガイドHYPER』] Odenthal, Johannes. Tanz Körper Politik: Texte zur zeitgenössischen Tanzgeschichte. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2005. —. “The Body is a Library: Koffi Kôkô in Conversation with Johannes Odenthal.” In The Third Body: Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt und die Performing Arts. Edited by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 49–52. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2004. Ong, Keng Sen. “Sustaining Ephemerality: Creating a Meaningful and Attractive Archive of 1 Dance.” Keynote speech, TPAM Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, Yokohama, 14 February 2016. The Saison Foundation. Archiving Dance. Last accessed 1 June 2016. http://www. saison.or.jp/search_past/archiving_dance/ArchivingDance_all.pdf. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2011. Shioya, Yoko. “Flourishing and Obsolete Dance Industry in Japan – An Observation from NY.” Buyonenkan. 2012–2013, edited by committees of the Buyonenkan: 19–20. [塩谷陽子「発展し停滞する日本の舞踊界—NYからの視察」] Spieker, Sven. The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Translation as Culture.” An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 241–55. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012. Tsuboike, Eiko. “An Overview. Latest Trends by Genre: Contemporary Dance.” Performing Arts Network Japan. Last accessed 11 May 2016. http://www. performingarts.jp/E/overview_art/1005_07/1.html. Uchino, Tadashi. “The Diastrophism of Performing Arts: From the Field of Mobility and Residency.” Shincho (February 2016): 160–73. [内野儀「舞台芸術の地 殻変動：移動性（モビリティ） と滞在（レジデンシー）の現場から] Weibel, Peter. “Die Performative Wende im Ausstellungsraum.” In MOMENTS: Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten, edited by Sigrid Gareis, Georg Schöllhamer and Peter Weibel, 13–20. Köln: Walther König, 2013.

Questions of Participation: Implementing the German Dance Congress as an Artistic, Reflective, and Political Project Sabine Gehm and Katharina von Wilcke in Dialogue with Holger Hartung

Regarding processes of participation in the field of movement and dance, the German Tanzkongress (Dance Congress) is an interesting case in a double sense. In its aim to continuously map the “landscape” of the dance scene(s) in Germany – taking into account its diversity, critically-reflecting forms, conditions, and historical developments – the Dance Congress functions at the same time as a catalyst for further developments. Accordingly, participation works in multiple directions. In the preparation of this tri-annual event, the artistic and managing directors of the project, Katharina von Wilcke and Sabine Gehm, together with a small production team, seek to identify current trends and themes in the field, conceive corresponding formats, communicate and mediate them to specialized and non-specialized audiences. The congress involves representatives of the “independent” dance scene, makers and venues, as well as institutional ones such as established cultural organizations, interest groups and major institutions – including the German Federal Cultural Foundation, which funds the event.1 After three editions of the Dance Congress over a period of ten years, the conditions, artistic interests as well as institutional and political frameworks for dance in Germany have changed tremendously. The Dance Congress influences and is influenced by these shifts: while undergoing considerable changes as a project in both artistic and structural ways, it has been a major voice in critically reflecting and reformulating the conditions under which dance takes place. The following six questions addressed to Sabine Gehm and Katharina von Wilcke touch upon aspects of participation, documentation, institutionalization,

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translation and transformation and their respective limits in the process of implementing the Dance Congress as an artistic, reflective, and political project.2

You have conceived and organized the Dance Congress on behalf of the German Federal Cultural Foundation approximately every three years since 2006. Could you sketch the project’s development in terms of content and structure – also in its historical dimension? Sabine Gehm Our models were the dancers’ congresses of the 1920s.3 They were organized by the initiative of artists such as Rudolf von Laban, Kurt Jooss, and Mary Wigman, who reflected on artistic, aesthetic, educational and social issues as well as artistic performances. Through their commitment, they became the protagonists of the demand for a dance lobby and an improvement of artistic and pedagogic qualities. The idea to organize a dance congress was suggested to us by the German Federal Cultural Foundation in 2004. Although neither dancers nor choreographers ourselves, we wanted to take up the tradition of the historical congresses with their close connection to theory and artistic practice. What mattered to us was that content originated from the dialogue with the highly diversified and international dance scene, so we could find out what topics and issues are currently essential. We systematically extended this approach from the first to the third congress, again and again scrutinizing the possibilities and limits of participation. This becomes clear from the development of the programs’ priorities and their content, as well as the resources and formats we tried. The special format that has thus developed is a mixture of expert meeting, reflection platform, presentation forum and festival. Katharina von Wilcke When developing the program for the first congress in 2006, we selected topics from current aesthetic trends, academic discourses on dance and cultural-political debates, while also having many personal conversations with the various artists and stakeholders. For the congress was aimed at a wide range of dance professionals – dancers, choreographers, dance instructors and scholars, as well as at students and representatives from the areas of cultural management, journalism and politics. In preparation for the 2009 and 2013 events, we then sought to involve the scene even more, using the so-called Open Space technique, a workshop method developed specifically for the interaction of large groups and the structuring of conferences. The procedure relies on the self-organization of the agenda in real time, and it is characterized by a strong participatory factor. For the work on the program’s content, this meant that a much larger group of dance professionals

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actively contributed topics from their working practices and visions. Independent initiatives – e.g., the exchange among the protagonists of the scenes, working groups on dance dramaturgy, and regional networks – were already initiated during the planning phase of the congresses. At the same time, the increasing awareness and greater publicity of the Dance Congress resulted in growing participation and the marked interest of associations, organizations and artists. In this way, both the range of interested parties who approached us with offers and suggestions and the spectrum of positions represented at the Congress were expanded yet again. However, the possibilities of actively contributing to the Congress content have also a limit. This is due, on one hand, to the event’s financial, logistical and funding framework and, on the other – namely, on our part – to the focusing of content in the course of the program planning. SG With regard to the development of content, the first edition of the Congress, which took place in Berlin in 2006, can perhaps be described as a stocktaking exercise, a kind of attempt at self-reassurance and self-assertion. With the topic “Knowledge in Motion,” we made a strong statement, and were faced with the challenge of conveying the relevance and potential of dance as both a knowledge culture and producer of knowledge to a wider public. This approach also met with criticism, but from today’s perspective contributed to an even more self-confident demeanor, as well as a stronger positioning and visibility of the dance scene. Following the rather inward-oriented approach of the first Dance Congress, the 2009 edition in Hamburg, entitled “No Step Without Movement,” began with the question of the openness of dance for bordering artistic and scientific fields, discussions and developments. In other words, to what extent do dance and movement harbor a political and utopian potential? And what are the social effects possibly related to them? This included questions regarding improved funding structures and production conditions. How would you describe the relation of theory and practice, and the role of different disciplines and fields of knowledge at the Dance Congress? How do they come into dialogue, and what influence does the aspect of internationalization have in this context? SG Right from the beginning, the bringing together of theory and practice, i.e. of the physical experiment, the exploring of movement, with the reflection and contextualization of these developments, was a major concern of the Congress. We have always been interested in an exchange between these two “fields.” For example,

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suitable premises and formats must be available to facilitate and promote a physical reflection of one’s own practice. These are important aspects that have subsequently influenced curatorial decisions.

Fig. 1: Opening performance at the Dance Congress 2013. Ligna Tanz aller – Ein Bewegungschor; photo: Lutz Bongarts; © Anja Beutler. KvW The first Congress and its framing conditions must quite clearly be seen in connection with the start of Tanzplan Deutschland.4 The revival of the Dance Congress coincided with this comprehensive structural measure launched by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, which was a clear commitment to dance and a strong cultural-political message. Also at the second Congress, the needs and developments of dance professionals in Germany were the starting point when working on the program, but we enhanced them with impulses and prospects from “outside” – irrespective of the fact that the practice of dance professionals has always had a strong international orientation. For certain topics, we looked at developments in other countries and examples of best practices there, for example, in terms of consultation offers for dancers in transition, or the considerations for artistic research in practice and education. The international research project “Déposition” within the framework of the 2013 Dance Congress in Düsseldorf is an interesting example in this regard. “Déposition” was an artistic-theoretical research project concerned with the question of body and its agency. It took up the question of the significance of “practicebased research” raised at the previous Congress. What was particularly interesting from our point of view was its focus on recent developments in the Arab region.

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As early as nine months before the actual conference, initiator Sandra Noeth gathered an international group of artists and theorists for a working meeting in Beirut. Based on their respective practices and environments, they exchanged views on questions relating to the body’s agency. During the Congress, they then continued this discussion in a public format. Placing special emphasis on the research aspect and the question of sustainability, this experiment in hindsight proved to be very successful in the development of the Dance Congress. Of course, it is exciting to detect current trends and to stimulate research projects of this kind. In this way, however, the structural limits of the Dance Congress project also became manifest: as a temporary event with a clear mandate, it cannot function as a separate funding institution. In this respect, it has been a one-off experiment. SG This once again touches upon the choice of formats within the Congress, particularly in view of an international trans-cultural exchange in which the time factor plays an important role. It takes time to enter into mutual dialogue and to delve deeper into topics. Generally, it can be said that projects that require a long lead time in terms of research, investigation, and cooperation, are the most interesting for the Congress: a quality becomes visible here different from that in one-off formats. Hence, our most recent edition increasingly offered multi-part working formats as a kind of series that ran through the whole Congress. Another series of programs, next to “Déposition,” was “Interweaving Dance Cultures,” organized in cooperation with the staff and fellows5 of the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” Entitled “Tea Times,” these rather informal talks dealt with methods of imparting movement techniques and different models of interaction and collaboration. In addition, questions and topics of discussion raised during the Congress by other events were again and again taken up. The final panel of this series, which wrapped up the Congress, as it were, was particularly fruitful because both the content and limits of exchange processes were looked at from different work and research contexts, as well as from various cultural backgrounds. What do you think is the role of the Dance Congress in relation to established institutions, on one hand, and institutionalization processes, on the other? KvW The institution behind the Congress is the German Federal Cultural Foundation. With the 2013 edition, it turned the Dance Congress into its cultural beacon for the dance. This guarantees the continuity of the event, which enables us to evaluate

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our experiences and take advantage of them for the next Congress, but also to try other approaches each time. The Dance Congress is an interesting model in that its financial basis is coupled with parameters and working methods found especially in the field of contemporary dance in non-institutional contexts. Our team, for example, is very small; in the initial stages of each Congress there are only Sabine Gehm and myself, as a kind of agency commissioned by the Cultural Foundation. As the Congress approaches, the team extends to include free-lance employees. The structure, then, is newly defined by us for each edition and adapted to the framework conditions of the venue and the program development. This requires a very high degree of flexibility, which pretty much follows the logic of project-based work and is connected with personal responsibility in terms of using the funds. Therefore, I would rather describe the Dance Congress as a “liquid institution.” SG As a large-scale event which is regularly recurring and financed by federal funds, the Congress must satisfy certain requirements regarding representation, sustainability, as well as political and artistic relevance, of course. However, the expectations are sometimes contradictory, which always raises the question for us as to the extent to which processes of participation, dialogue, and transfer are in need of mediation, merging, and supervision. So, again and again, we are dealing within areas of conflict. What space is there at the Dance Congress for friction and misunderstandings – in terms of consensus and controversy – particularly in transcultural exchange? SG When in doubt, I am disposed to favor controversy in that it brings out and makes us aware of questions, errors, or imperfections. Disagreements, even where they cannot be solved, can be productive and may initiate translation processes. However, I find it difficult to stage confrontations by bringing together a panel that includes proven “opponents” who merely exchange arguments prepared well in advance. Conversely, an exciting discussion emerges where participants are interested in one another and allow for a controversial debate to unfold between them. In the events of the Congress, there should always be ample space for processes of this kind and for opponents who treat each other with respect.

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KvW Interestingly, we only have verbal communication in mind when we speak of “controversy”; this is all the more surprising since other forms of interaction occur at the Dance Congress. One might need to take a closer look here and ask whether disagreement and the productivity of exchange are produced differently, depending on whether they emerge physically or discursively.

Fig. 2: “Choreographic Resources Lab” at the Dance Congress 2013; © Anja Beutler.

Fig. 3: “The Misery of Form” at the Dance Congress 2013; © Anja Beutler.

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SG For us, the basic question is whether there are situations where we as organizers and hosts should intervene. After all, the participants of the Congress are all selfdetermined adults. When do we as mediators need to take action if, for example, we notice disrespectful behavior or the infringement of agreements? This is certainly an ethical question, especially when it comes to participation and the possibilities of diversity, which we do not wish to restrict, of course. What are the methods and strategies of documentation used during the different stages of the Congress? In what way do they correspond with the different formats of the Congress, and what are their limits? SG During the 2013 Congress, we experimented with different forms of documentation. For one thing, there were daily “video impressions” with short excerpts from that day’s individual events and interview excerpts with different speakers. Moreover, the Congress was accompanied by a blog, which did not quite work as we had imagined, though. What was lacking especially was the feedback as a further interactive comment level. Following the Congress, we used the classical forms: photos, videos, and texts. KvW Of course, what we hope to bring about by developing new discussion and working formats for the Congress are other forms of exchange and discourse in theory and practice. Unfortunately, where forms of communication are becoming more complex, the classical forms of documentation often produce gaps. Lectures or panels are easy to document. But if you are looking at a work situation that is open, where people are moving about and talking, a completely different type of documentation is required. Or else, you would need to produce elaborate, documentary-like movies. But are we to forgo offering and trying formats just because they are difficult to document? That would mean putting the task of processing and producing “added value” before the actual event, which might then not even take place. What an absurd idea! Especially for the participatory, physical formats, the challenge is to find appropriate documentation formats. In these situations, we used to commission authors to write about the events from their perspective, and with their expertise. Such problems of documentation and “making history” will be a more important issue at the next Congress in Hanover, all the more so as these questions frequently recur in reconstruction processes and with regard to the canon of dance history.

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SG But I also wonder whether it’s really necessary to always register and record everything down to the last detail and achieve a transparency that makes it possible to see and experience everything via monitor. In view of the unique way in which each of us perceives and experiences the events and carries them along in terms of sustainability, it might be said that this format in all its fleetingness is perhaps much more appropriate. At some events, no videos were taken because the participants would have felt they were being watched, and the camera would have disturbed the intimacy of the situation. KvW To my mind, the question whether documenting has an impact on the intimacy of the event or on the intensity of exchange is less interesting because today’s recording devices are as good as “invisible;” the question is rather: how do we publicize? What do you do with the material and where does it become visible? SG But it’s a question on which participants do not necessarily have an influence. In the “Déposition” project for example, it was clear from the outset that the speakers did not want video or audio recordings. For them, it was important that what they said remained in the room and only in the minds of the listeners. They distrusted publicizing because some had had the experience that comments that came to the public’s attention in their countries led to government reprisals. Under the title “Translating Movements – Performing Translation,” questions concerning “limits” and “translations” informed the content of the 2013 Dance Congress. How did this focus originate, and how do you assess its future relevance for dance? SG Looking back at the process of choosing a title for the last Congress, it is clear that we have evolved away from the concept of border and its connotations of delimitation and exclusion; we are now looking at processes of translation and transfer, thus emphasizing the idea of connection and mediation. Naturally, the connections between the two are obvious. KvW Of course, today, a few years after the third Congress in 2013, the border issue has become highly topical due to global migrations of refugees and all the related

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problems. Today, I would no longer be able to work with the word “Über-Setzen” (“trans-lating,” literally: “crossing over” / “ferrying over”) in the same way without taking this topicality into account. For “Über-setzen” in the sense of “crossing borders” – and particularly in the sense of “ferrying over” – now evokes very different associations and potentially even negative connotations. SG At the 2016 Congress, we will once more address the topic from the perspective of contemporaneity. What does it mean for a dancer, choreographer, researcher, pedagogue, and for an audience “to be contemporary” and, against the background of the current crises and migratory movements, to deal with the related circumstances and changes? The focus of work entitled “Border Effects” looks at the role and significance of higher-level and everyday border demarcation processes and the agency of the body to act in such processes. KvW We are also using the phenomenon of contemporaneity as a source of friction for a critical confrontation with power structures, collaborative working methods, as well as aesthetic and cultural reference systems. The core of the program for the Hanover Dance Congress was developed from 220 submissions from artists, theorists, students, etc. responding to our call for proposals. A prerequisite for the application was the discussion of phenomena of contemporaneity and the willingness to work dialogically. We had not expected such a huge response from all over the world. This way, the program of the 2016 Dance Congress includes many contributions from speakers and artists whose names are (as yet) little known in Germany and, at the same time, very interesting perspectives other cultures have on this highly Western concept.

Translated from the German by Christoph Nöthlings

Notes   1 Since its inception in 2006 by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, which is also providing the financing, the Dance Congress has established itself as one of the most relevant international forums dedicated to discussing and presenting dance, choreography, and movement. The triennial project is since 2010 a cultural beacon project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Each edition is hosted by another city which,

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prior to the event, has to apply for and co-fund it. After 2006 in Berlin, 2009 in Hamburg and 2013 in Düsseldorf, the fourth edition took place from June 16 until 19, 2016 in Hanover. See www.tanzkongress.de.   2 The conversation on which the present text is based took place in July 2015.   3 Hosted in Magdeburg, Essen, and Munich, in 1927, 1928, and 1930, respectively.  4 In 2005, the German Federal Cultural Foundation decided to support dance with a budget of 12.5 million euros. It thus launched a large-scale initiative for dance that is unique in Europe. Set to run for five years, the project was to act as a catalyst for the German dance scene and as a pioneering model of sustainable cultural practice, its goal being the comprehensive and systematic strengthening of the artistic genre of dance.   5 Contributors included choreographer Navtej Johar from India, dance scholars Katherine Mezur, Susan Manning and André Lepecki from the USA, Avanthi Meduri from India, Peter Eckersall from Australia, Cristina Rosa from Brazil, Nanako Nakajima from Japan, as well as Gabriele Brandstetter, Sabine Sörgel and Gerko Egert from Germany, author Femi Osofian from Nigeria, theater scholars Philipp Zarrilli from the USA, Maria Shevtsova from Great Britain, Christel Weiler and Holger Hartung from Germany, playwright Kaite O’Reilly from Great Britain, and anthropologist Klaus-Peter Köpping from Germany.

“Tea Times” Creating Formats of Informal Exchange and Knowledge Transfer  Christel Weiler

A Brief History of the Format as Practiced by the Research Center Even before the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” actually started its work in 2008, we had the plan to create an additional format (next to the academic discussions where all fellows were to present and discuss their research efforts with one another), which would provide an opportunity for exchange and conversation. We thought it would be useful to have our investigation of interweavings accompanied by a series of events primarily intended to familiarize our guests from all over the world with the diversity of theater in Germany and with the characteristics of German/Berlin cultural politics. What we had in mind were informal, animated discussions over tea and cookies which, next to the transfer of knowledge, would serve as an introduction to practical areas, thus extending the work of the Center into non-academic fields. Unlike the weekly academic presentations that were to take place in the morning, these events were intended for the afternoon, which made it sensible to call them “Tea Times.” We invariably started from the assumption that, in each of these “Tea Times,” something would be presented and discussed which the majority of attendants did not know, or hardly knew about (Berlin theater history, practices of dramaturgy at Deutsches Theater, function of the German Federal Cultural Foundation and other institutions, etc.). So far, more than eighty guests have helped to reduce these deficits.

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Knowledge Transfer and Curiosity Thus, initially, the “Tea Times” primarily served the purpose of transferring knowledge. They were motivated by the desire that the attending scholars from Tokyo, London, New York, Cairo, Melbourne, Delhi, Beijing, Tangier, etc. should learn something about the country in which the majority of them would spend several months and whose theater landscape most of them were exploring with great interest.

Fig. 1: Tea Time with Annemie Vanackere (Artistic and Managing Director of HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin) at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” in 2015; © Christina Stivali. One of the first invitations was extended to Nele Hertling who, drawing from the wealth of her experience – as a member of the Academy of Arts and, later, of the Berlin Senate, but especially as former artistic director of the Hebbel Theater – reported on the internationalization efforts in the Berlin theater scene of the 1980s. Other guests included dramaturges, directors, actors, and performers from Berlin theaters, who shared stories from their everyday work, offering insights into institutional and artistic processes. Curators from the German Federal Cultural Foundation and representatives of the Berlin Senate readily introduced the support programs of their institutions; the President of the Federal Center for Political Education spoke about interculturality and its meaning for institutions; and artists of various genres took the opportunity to discuss their work with us. “Tea Times” thus presented itself as a format characterized by mutual curiosity and the desire for exchange. It offered the possibility of transferring knowledge

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and expertise, asking simple questions, gradually forming opinions, and producing thoughts while speaking, allowing errors, and expressing oneself emotionally. There were moments when, after listening to academic lectures, we asked ourselves whether we had not better turn them into a Tea Time; there were artists who had been invited to Tea Times and who behaved as though on stage. What we learned from all of this, however, is how convenient it can be to be in a state of not-knowing, to be allowed to be ignorant and not to have solutions and answers at any moment.

Things Unfinished, Imperfect, Contentious It was certainly a result of the easy and casual atmosphere of the discussions that the fellows subsequently availed themselves of the opportunity offered by the “Tea Times” and discussed specific aspects of their work in a context different from the usual academic framework. Anything (formerly or currently) unfinished and in need of discussion and inspiration did – and still does – come up at the “Tea Times”: drafts of new projects, artistic experiments, common viewings of films with subsequent discussions, to name just a few examples. Most of the times, the effect was, and is, one of inspiration and encouragement: one is given food for thought for one’s own research project. Seen from this perspective, the “Tea Times” are an open space—open to many other spaces of possibility. The “Tea Times” are also capable of producing dissent and turning into spaces of contention.

Tea Time in a Large Format: On Tour Finally, in 2013, having gathered some experience with the format and its variants, the idea was formulated to take the “Tea Times” into the public and put them to the test as an afternoon event at the Dance Congress. For the first time, the small form, which had been more or less closed until then, was prized open and incorporated into a larger framework. This particular “Tea Time” was supposed to attract viewers and present itself – and thus to explore its own boundaries. Not only were the topics under discussion declared “public affairs,” but also the format itself was to take on new contours. In the following, I wish to clarify once more the difference between the smaller format at the Research Center and the public “Tea Time” hosted at the Dance Congress – a difference which, in my opinion, also highlights the characteristics of the public discussion.

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Fig. 2: Public Tea Time at the Dance Congress 2013 in Düsseldorf, Germany; © Anja Beutler. In the context of the Research Center, one can generally take it for granted that the subject-matter presented and the person re-presenting it are inseparable from one another. The director of Berliner Festspiele, for example, when talking about the work he is responsible for, simultaneously introduces himself and his institution; and whether the invitee is a choreographer, a dancer, or a dramaturge, they too talk about their latest work and thus, of course, also about themselves. Gained from artistic or institutional practice, the knowledge conveyed by the guests of the “Tea Times” is, in a certain way, knowledge general and particular at the same time. Also, as has already been mentioned above, these stocks of knowledge and the forms of practice from which they result are unknown to the majority of listeners at the Center. In addition, the invitees here talk to a somewhat exclusive group of listeners who may at any time interrupt and ask questions, whose facial expressions are clearly perceptible and whose attention – or indifference, as the case may be – is easily discernible. As a result, there is some kind of interactive alignment between the discussion partners. Obviously, it would have been possible to implement all of this also at the Dance Congress. In this specific case, however, we made an attempt to present the International Research Center’s work at the Dance Congress and to tackle the question what is understood by, and discussed under, the term “interweavings,” particularly in the context of dance. Input on this issue was provided by dance and theater scholars and was further developed, criticized, and commented on by the experts present. Therefore, it was an exchange of experts on different aspects of a topic or a question rather than a discussion of how “interweavings” – whether initiated by artists

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or by the Center’s scholars or staff – might take shape in practice. On the other hand, it was this form of public discussion that probably served as an incentive for theoretically-interested visitors to attend the event. The attending members of the audience were given the opportunity to ask questions and to participate in the discussion. However, with a number of approximately hundred participants, the discussion atmosphere that emerged was different from the one we usually perceive at the Center. Also, those attending the event certainly did so not merely out of interest in the topic under discussion but also because of the opportunity to experience experts – just like pop stars – “live;” or, perhaps because it so happened that they had nothing else planned for this particular moment in their daily schedule, or a friend also attended the event, etc. For the participants, topics such as belonging, (self-)distancing, self-presentation, competition, etc. certainly mattered. All of these aspects need to be taken into consideration. The emergence of a different discussion atmosphere may thus be attributed to a number of factors. The limited experience gained from it at the Dance Congress is, however, hardly a sufficient basis for a final judgment. I would therefore merely like to venture some possible critical reflections on the previous descriptions. Ultimately, it is not my aim to deny legitimacy and meaning to the excursion of the “Tea Times” format and its “publication.” What is far more interesting in trying to comprehend this movement beyond the boundaries (set by us) is to make obvious the differences of the various formats a culture of academic discussion assumes.

Formats and Their “Portability” At the above-mentioned festival, the “Tea Times” format, otherwise restricted to the protected area of the Research Center, was itself turned into a res publica, a “public affair.” This “transportation” was indeed motivated by the wish that it should be possible, also in a wider framework, to participate in a discussion where what matters in the first place is to enter unknown territory, or to witness a stimulating conversation of intelligent and knowledgeable people from which everybody can learn. Strangely enough – but, maybe, there was also a certain logic to this – the large-scale “public Tea Time” format, as I want to call it, from my perspective lost some of its density at the Dance Congress. In many respects, it resembled the academic lectures that, within the Center’s agenda, it is supposed to counterbalance. What are the reasons for this shift? An essential aspect of the “Tea Times” at the Center can be seen in their allowing a kind of togetherness where expert knowledge and experience can be coupled with both curiosity and the pleasure of asking questions and participating in the debate. There is a dynamic “back and forth,” a “flow” in the conversation, whose

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further course cannot be anticipated, but to which all participants contribute. The weekly academic lectures, on the other hand, are often “lectures” in the truest sense of the word. At the “Tea Times,” a speaking time of approximately twenty minutes is allotted to each invitee, whereas the academic lectures often last longer than sixty minutes. One may well wonder what sense these lectures appeal to. The intellect? The spirit of opposition? Maybe their aim is to address the sense of hearing in order to demonstrate something, such as the wealth of knowledge and learning, the ability of precise and thorough thinking, the novel and interesting things of a particular field of research. If this were the case, the lectures would in the first place challenge the critical understanding of the listeners and their power of judgment. Any academic lecture resembles, a little, this type of demonstration of its speaker’s critical skills. It is part of a scholar’s habitus that finds its stage in presentations, lectures and lecture performances, and also in contributions made at discussions. Something is shown to the ear – this is the paradox the academic lecture thrives on. Lecturers, who make concessions, admit to something they do not know, or who formulate sentences out of the blue, are much less often found. In many cases, however, academic lectures try the patience of their audience, for example, by exceeding the time allotted to them, getting bogged down in details, or remaining completely uncritical of the presuppositions made by them, etc. The listening capacity reaches its limits when confronted with any kind of monologue. The flow of a conversation, on the other hand, a sense of togetherness, any sort of interactive alignment – all of these create a different resonance. Resonating with others, being in a room where different voices have a chance to resound and make themselves heard means that, beyond the academic, the strict separation between members of different communities is given up. What is foreign is being welcomed; participants are not seen as intruders but as voices that contribute to creating a dense space of resonance.

The Current Practice and the Future of the “Tea Times” at the Center The group of those participating in discussion and conversation at the Center varies from meeting to meeting. Sometimes there are guests, scholars who happen to be in Berlin and are interested in the Center; the fellows themselves come and go, so that the group of discussion participants gathered around the table is in a constant flux. However, the number of participants does not exceed a certain limit and, due to the spatial conditions, the atmosphere is pretty “homely.” Not by chance, we call this room “our living room.” There is a modest library; people sit close to

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one another on sofas and armchairs around a low table; participants know each other at least by name. All of this creates some kind of “intimacy,” i.e. a relatively “free” space where what is being said by the speaker can be further revised, attenuated, strengthened and explained by the participants. A different structure and a different mood are created in a larger context, with people in the room whose primary interest is to listen to others whom they consider “experts” and who might have something interesting to say. In other words, a “Tea Time” with one hundred people in a room where speaker and listeners, in many respects, are kept at a distance from each other and where the “public nature” of the event passes for quality, necessarily entails a different way of speaking – even if one were to make oneself comfortable on a sofa to listen to the presentation. With the opening of the room, aspects having to do with the desire for self-presentation assume greater prominence. The “expert talk” creates a show effect with self-staging qualities and corresponding assessment standards. Put simply, one could say that a different mood prevails and different vibrations become apparent. Giorgio Agamben has made some insightful remarks on this etymological relationship between Stimme (voice) and Stimmung (mood) in the German language.1 Looking to the future, the format cannot and should not become part of a “curriculum”: not every new group of fellows is to be served the selfsame program. Thus, the format does not follow a predefined “mission,” even though it is to promote exchange and knowledge transfer. There is no intention to institutionalize it. Similar to the diversity of English tea times, it grows and changes together with desires, wishes, needs, and whims.2 It is quite possible that one day the “Tea Times” will no longer be needed or be given a new name. What hopefully remains from the format has been wonderfully formulated by Sherry Turkle: “Face-to-face conversation is the most human – humanizing – thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood. And conversation advances self-reflection, the conversations with ourselves that are the cornerstone of early development and continue throughout life.”3

Translated from the German by Christoph Nöthlings

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Notes  1 Giorgio Agamben, “Vocation and Voice,” Qui Parle: Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History 10, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1998): 89–100.   2 Numerous interesting connections could be drawn to the colonial history of tea and the concomitant history of the tea time. See, for example, Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001); or Peer Vries, Zur politischen Ökonomie des Tees: Was uns Tee über die englische und chinesische Wirtschaft der Frühen Neuzeit sagen kann (Wien: Böhlau, 2009).   3 Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2015), 3.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. “Vocation and Voice.” Qui Parle: Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History 10, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1998): 89-100. Chatterjee, Piya. A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2015. Vries, Peer. Zur politischen Ökonomie des Tees: Was uns Tee über die englische und chinesische Wirtschaft der Frühen Neuzeit sagen kann. Wien: Böhlau, 2009.

Contributors

Gabriele Brandstetter has been co-director of the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” and Professor of Theater and Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin since 2003. Her research focus is on the history and aesthetics of dance from the eighteenth century until today; theater and dance of the avant-garde; performance, theatricality and gender differences; concepts of body, movement and image. Publications include: ReMembering the Body (Hatje Cantz, 2000; co-edited with H. Völckers); Dance [and] Theory (transcript, 2013; co-edited with G. Klein); Touching and Being Touched: Kinesthesia and Empathy in Dance and Movement (De Gruyter, 2013; co-edited with G. Egert and S. Zubarik); Poetics of Dance: Body, Image and Space in the Historical AvantGardes (Oxford University Press, 2015); Choreographic Practices. Special Issue: Dis/abilities: The Politics of a Prefix (intellect journals 6, no. 1, 2015; co-edited with A.C. Albright, V.L. Midgelow and J.M. Bacon); The Aging Body in Dance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Routledge, 2016; co-edited with N. Nakajima); Movements of Interweaving (forthcoming, co-edited with G. Egert and H. Hartung). Sabine Gehm has been the director of the Dance Congress (together with Katharina von Wilcke) since 2006 and the artistic director of the international festival “TANZ Bremen” since 2004. As a freelance curator and culture manager, she is member of diverse juries (Fonds Darstellende Künste, Hamburg) and mentor at Performing Arts Programm (PAP) in Berlin. A graduate of cultural studies, she coordinated the international network for performing arts “Junge Hunde” (2001–05) which she co-founded. She has been a dramaturge and project director of diverse festivals (including “Junge Hunde,” “Independence Days,” “Tanzplattform Deutschland 2000,” etc.) at Kampnagel Hamburg (1994–2001). She was previously responsible for organizing the International Hamburg Summer Theatre Festival. Sabine Gehm co-edited Wissen in Bewegung/Knowledge in Motion (transcript, 2007; with K. von Wilcke and P. Husemann).

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Holger Hartung studied theater, media and communication and North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He has been working as research associate at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” Freie Universität Berlin since 2008 and as coordinator of the Research Center since 2010. Currently he is completing a dissertation on “Ruptures, Tears, Cracks as Performative Figures of the In-Between.” His publications include: “Fissure(s): Walking/Dancing Along, Across and In-Between Lines of Difference,” in Performance Research (2014) and Movements of Interweaving (forthcoming, co-edited with G. Brandstetter and G. Egert). Navtej Singh Johar is India’s leading dancer/choreographer, yoga exponent, and urban activist. He trained in Bharatanatyam at the Kalakshetra; yoga at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai, India; and Performance Studies at New York University. Johar’s work traverses freely across the traditional and the contemporary, twines critical theory with practice, and focuses on the body – particularly on the impact of nationalism on traditional, embodied practices. He performs and teaches internationally in Dance Studies, is faculty member at the Ashoka University, Sonipat, India, and the founder-director of Studio Abhyas, a non-profit organization dedicated to dance, yoga, urban activism and the care of stray animals in New Delhi (www.abhyastrust.org). Klaus-Peter Köpping holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology (Ethnology) on millenarian and nativistic religious movements in modern Japan based on field research between 1966–1969. His various positions include: Associate Professorship at Fullerton, California (1969–72); Senior Lecturer and Reader at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1972); Foundation Chair (Baldwin Spencer Chair of Anthropology) at the University of Melbourne, Australia (1984–91); appointed professor at the Institute of Ethnology, University of Heidelberg, Germany (1991, Emeritus since 2005); Guest Professorships in Japan at Sophia and Nagoya City Universities, ANU Research School of Pacific Studies, Canberra, Australia, and in the Philippines; Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College, London, in charge of Post-Colonial Studies and Postgraduate Advisor at the Centre of Cultural Studies (2005–07). He was a Fellow at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures,” Freie Universität Berlin (2008–09) where he now acts as Senior Advisor. Faustin Linyekula is a dancer and choreographer living in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo. After studying literature in Kisangani, he moved to Nairobi and in 1997 set up the Gàara company, Kenya’s first contemporary dance company. Back in Congo in 2001, he created the Studios Kabako, a space

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dedicated to dance, visual theater, music and film, providing training programs, as well as supporting research and creation. In his works, Faustin addresses the legacy that decades of war, and the collapse of the economy have left for him, his family, and his friends. He has created 15 pieces within the Studios Kabako that have toured worldwide. In 2007, he received the Principal Award of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development and in 2014, the first prize of the Curry Stone Foundation for the work developed in Kisangani. He is currently associate artist to the city of Lisbon, Portugal. Nanako Nakajima is a dance researcher, dance dramaturge, and master of traditional Japanese dance, performing under the professional name of Kannae Fujima. Currently she teaches at the Aichi University and Shobi Gakuen University, Japan. Nakajima’s dramaturgical work includes Luciana Achugar’s Exhausting Love at Danspace Project (the New York Dance and Performance Award, 2006), koosilja’s mech[a]OUTPUT (Japan Society in New York, 2007), Osamu Jareo’s Theater Thikwa plus Junkan Project (KEX, 2012), and Sebastian Matthias’s x / groove space (tanzhaus NRW/Festival Tokyo, 2016). She curated and organized international symposia “The Aging Body in Dance” in Berlin (2012) and Tokyo (2014) as well as Joint Research Project “Dance Dramaturgy on the Topic of Aging” with Raimund Hoghe in Kyoto (2014). Her publications include The Aging Body in Dance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Routledge, 2016; co-authored with G. Brandstetter);『講座スピリチュアル学 第6巻 スピリチュアリティと芸術・芸能』(Bing Net Press, 2016); Who Dance? 振付のアクチュアリティ』(Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum of Waseda University, 2015); Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement (Palgrave, 2015). Jean-Luc Nancy is a renowned philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg who has held visiting positions at the Freie Universität Berlin, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, and UC Irvine. His numerous books, articles and films include seminal publications such as Que faire? (Galilée, 2016), Being Singular Plural (Stanford University Press, 2010), Corpus (Métailié, 2008), The Creation of the World or Globalization (State University of New York Press, 2007), The Ground of the Image (Fordham University Press, 2005). He collaborated with the French choreographer Mathilde Monnier with whom he also published a book about dance, Alliterations: Conversations sur la danse (Galilée, 2005). Sandra Noeth is a curator, dramaturge and researcher based in Berlin. Since 2015, she is a fellow of the Research Group Loose Connections at the University of Hamburg. From 2009 to 2014, she was Head of Dramaturgy and Research at Tanz-

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quartier Wien where she developed a series of research-based projects on concepts and practices of responsibility, protest, religion and integrity in relation to the body. Noeth is co-author of MONSTRUM (Books on Demand, 2009; with K. Deufert and T. Plischke) and co-editor of Emerging Bodies: On the Performance of World-making in Dance and Choreography (transcript, 2011; with G. Klein) as well as the publication series SCORES (Tanzquartier Wien, 2010–14) and Tanzhefte (2007–09, with E. Boxberger). She is internationally active as an educator, amongst others at DOCH-Stockholm University of the Arts and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. Kaite O’Reilly has won many awards for her work, including the Peggy Ramsay Award, M.E.N. best play of the year, Theatre Wales Award and the Ted Hughes Award for her reworking of Aeschylus’s Persians for National Theatre Wales. Widely published, she works internationally, with plays translated/produced in eleven countries worldwide. 2016 productions include Cosy at Wales Millennium Centre, The Almond and the Seahorse in Estonia and Germany, and the Taiwanese production of the 9 Fridas in Mandarin, transferring to Hong Kong Repertory Theatre. A leading figure in disability arts and culture in the United Kingdom, she received two Cultural Olympiad Commissions for In Water I’m Weightless, produced by National Theatre Wales/Southbank Centre as part of the official festival celebrating the 2012 London Olympics/Paralympics. She is the patron of Disability Arts Cymru and DaDa (Disability arts Deaf arts). Dramaturge for The Llanarth Group, she co-creates work internationally with theater director Phillip Zarrilli. Cristina Rosa is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton’s Department of Dance. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has previously taught in multiple colleges and universities in the United States and was a research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin’s International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” (Germany, 2012–13). In her book Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Rosa examines how aesthetic principles cultivated across the black Atlantic contributed to the construction of Brazil as an imagined community. She has also been published in the edited volume Performing Brazil (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) and Cultures in Process: Encounter and Experience (Aisthesis, 2009), and peer-reviewed journals such as TDR and e-misférica. Her current research project addresses the relationship between dance and sustainability. Sabine Sörgel received her PhD in Performance and Media Studies from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, where she lectured in theater and dance until 2008. Her book Dancing Postcolonialism: The National Dance Theatre Company

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of Jamaica was published by transcript in 2007. From 2008 to 2012 she was Lecturer in Drama, Theater and Performance at Aberystwyth University and research fellow at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” in Berlin in 2011. Since 2013 she is Senior Lecturer in Dance and Theater at University of Surrey. Her publications include the recent textbook Dance and the Body in Western Theatre: 1948 to the Present (Palgrave, 2015) as well as several articles and book chapters on contemporary theater and dance, cross-cultural corporeality, globalization and transnationalism. Katharina von Wilcke has been the director of the Dance Congress (together with Sabine Gehm) since 2006. In 1995 she founded the production office “DepArtment” at Kampnagel. In addition to her activities as manager of various dance and theater companies, she has regularly worked as project head of diverse events, including Theater der Welt 1996, Expo 2000 in Hanover, Tanzplattform Deutschland 2000, ErsatzStadt at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Festival Politik im Freien Theater 2002, Heimspiel 2011. In 2014 she and the cultural managers Katja Sonnemann, Peter Boragno and Harriet Lesch founded the flexible structure “Wilson*Borles – Arts Management” to realize events of the German Federal Cultural Foundation as one of three umbrella agencies. Katharina von Wilcke has been active as a mentor in the Performing Arts Programm Berlin (PAP) since 2013 and she regularly advises artists and cultural producers. She co-edited the publications Wissen in Bewegung/Knowledge in Motion (transcript, 2007; with S. Gehm and P. Husemann). Christel Weiler is Program Director at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures,” where she is also responsible for having installed and organizing the Tea Time format. Her research interests include practices of transcultural cooperation, actor-training, performance and spirituality. She has published a monograph on Intercultural Theater, various essays on contemporary theater, and – among others – together with Jens Roselt, a collection of essays on subjecthood and actor-training/acting, and with Peter Stamer and Silke Bake, How to Collaborate? (forthcoming).