BOJANA KUNST

The Authonomous Bodies of Dance

text by Bojana Kunst

© Bojana Kunst

At the festival of contemporary dance in Bytom (Poland) few years ago, I - purely by chance -
saw the performance of Conrad Drzewiecki, the famous Polish choreographer and the doyen of
contemporary dance in Poland. His creation Waiting for was not in the official part of the
program and was almost bashfully presented by the organizers, but the performance
nevertheless remained in the memory of those who saw it as a unique and extraordinary event.
Drezwiecki managed to stay within the history – probably by necessity of survival – with such
finality and determination that in his case we cannot talk about reconstruction or nostalgia but
about a basic commitment to past bodies and their past mode of articulation. His performance
ran in a manner of pure memory, revealing itself as an archive of bodies and their forgotten
movement which today exists chiefly as an object of historical research, frozen on faded
photographs. Drzewiecki's decision to remain at the point where contemporary dance was
conceived and articulated as an autonomous artistic form was a serious one; he is still creating
and shaping the images of bodies long since covered by the horizon of time. But what is
interesting in his work - which is also what provoked this essay – is not only the relic value of his
creations but also the incredible distance of his bodies. Drzewiecki thus reminded me of the
question about the original autonomy of the body, of the basic aesthetic utopia connected with
the beginnings of contemporary dance, the time of beginner's enthusiasm and physical self-
sufficiency, when the dancing body became the exclusive metaphor in the philosophical thought.
What was the position of the concept of the autonomous body within which philosophy favored
dance in the later development of contemporary dance? Can we still perceive its glittering from
under its linear history?

1. Aesthetics of autonomy

First I would like to talk about one of the basic aesthetic utopias and concepts of the body, which
are not only a part of the history of contemporary dance but also represent the starting point of
contemporary dance as an autonomous artistic form, at the same time effecting the image and
the representation of the body in the stage arts of the 20th century. We can call it 'point zero'
that dancers, philosophers and poets talk about and is most transparently evident in
contemporary dance. I do not intent to spend much time on some of the body connected
concepts from the beginning of the 20th century which shaped and influenced that utopia. I
would only like to mention some of the most enthusiastic thoughts that enlighten the concept of
the body in the same manner that was embraced by the contemporary dance. Firstly, there is
the overall tendency to return to the body, clearly evident from Isadora Duncan's statement in
The Dancer Of The Future: "1900. For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded
between my breasts, covering the solar plexus… I was seeking and finally discovered the
central spring of all movement." This return to the body was generally represented as the return
to the natural body, but not in the sense of the neo-romantic ideal of harmonious relation
between the inside and the outside. The new practices introduced those corporeal forms in
which the body becomes the exclusive bearer of aesthetic strategies, values and signs. Isadora
Duncan's personal discovery of movement should therefore be understood on the broader
scale; American writer Mark Franko claims that her discovery can be read as the essential story
of contemporary dance, as a myth about the origin that is written within the dance. John Martin,
the establisher of American contemporary dance critique, also places a lot of emphasis on the
movement; in 1933 he wrote The Contemporary Dance, in which he reveals some of the most
important characteristics of the developing artistic field. In his opinion, contemporary dance
begins with discovering of the current substance of dance, which is of course movement.
Discovering that, says Martin, places dance among autonomous art forms for the first time. The
movement is not accidental, it is defined by the body establishing it as an equivalent to all other
elements, what is more, the body becomes the autonomous bearer of aesthetic strategies and
can be understood as a pure aesthetic sign. Martin therefore describes the movement of a
dancing body with a term metakinesthesis, where the physical and the mental are just two
aspects of the same reality: the body as an aesthetic form. The movement is then the exclusive
aesthetic practice that ensures its autonomy and specific aesthetic power; the body is capable
of functioning as the bearer of representation, as well as of autonomously establishing the web
of signs. But discovering the movement and popular propagating of the natural body is not the
only impulse for the autonomy of the body. At the break of the century, philosophers and poets
also talk about a dancing body, revealing the existential side of the body autonomy, where a
dancing body is the one that is connected with the essence and is therefore entitled to nothing
less then ontological primacy.

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on the concept of the autonomy of the body was enormous – in
his philosophy he connects it to the state before intellect emerged, where dancing in the sense
of a light from the world before Gods always had its place. Dance is thus given the privilege to
describe thought and thought has the privilege of being like dance. A thought that is like dance
does not know the spirit of weight, says Nietzsche, therefore it is crucial to relax the benumbed
body by means of dance . In Nietzsche's words, dance can be thus defined as a self-rotating
wheel, or we can say, as Alain Badiou puts it in his interpretation of Nietzsche's thoughts on
dance, dance is like a circumference in space but a circumference which represents its own
principle, a circumference not drawn from the outside, a circumference that is drawing itself. The
body of dance is that original body which is cleared of intellect, separated from discourses. It is
a body in a constant first movement and it is never a consequence but always the origin of
movement. It is a metaphor for existing in a Dionysian world, and a field of direct experience.
With its rotations and movement it depicts original existence itself. It is autonomous yet evasive,
never fixed, non-repetitive, never entirely beheld.

Nietzsche's purification of the body, in which dance has a privileged function, is also reflected in
Mallarme's and Valery's poetic statements adding their specific character to the concept of
autonomy. For Mallarme, the body of dance can never be a body of somebody but always an
empty emblem, never a somebody. A dancing body therefore does not depict some other body
or person, and is not conditioned by anything outside it. This is how we can understand his
famous statement on the female dancer (which, of course, has also many other connotations
but let us read it just as a statement on autonomy): "The dancer is not a woman who dances for
the juxtaposed reasons that she is not a woman but a metaphor." The body is a form, a
metaphor for movement that is capable of creating representative webs. Valery's opinion,
described in his essay Philosophie de la danse, is similar to Mallarme's. He is also fascinated by
the female dancer. Valery compares the state of dancing to the state of sleeping, thus re-
establishing the finite form of the body. The dancing body is preoccupied with itself, nothing
exists outside the system formed by dancer's actions. A female dancer has no exterior, says
Valery, and such state is very similar to sleeping; the state, where everything moves but there is
no reason for or intention to supplement anything, there is no exterior reference. Dancing is thus
a specific manner if inner life that gives this psychological term a new meaning within which
physiology is dominant. In dancing, there is nothing but the body and this body is with its inner
web and epidermal surface self-sufficient and absolutely autonomous.

In the language of philosophy, which establishes its ontological/existential level, the autonomy of
the body is therefore conditioned by self-sufficiency, by rotation towards itself, and deletion of
referentiality and of the phenomena of imaginability and imitation. The aesthetics of autonomy
thus represents the original illusion - the enthusiasm of the beginning - where the body is
simultaneously the object and the subject of an artistic creation, the bearer of the image, and
the image itself. This is no longer a mimetic body, nor it is an expressive body; it is a body that
ceaselessly autonomously determines its own image and weaves the web of its signs. Such
aesthetics of autonomy seems almost exclusive in the words of a poet or a philosopher since it
gives an impression of a dancing body having some sort of ontological primacy, thus escaping
the realm of art: dancing is not an art but a sign of a possible art written within the body
(Nietzsche). But the enthusiastic zeal that as the point-zero of contemporary dance introduces
and favors the autonomy of the body, must be understood on another level as well – not only as
a utopian demand for a purified, almost ritual body, but also as a desire for establishing of new
representative strategies, of those modes of physical representation, then, that are no longer
hierarchically organized, that are no longer bound to anything or fixed anywhere. The
autonomous body thus playfully points at the field just a step ahead: the field where the body
wants to be free of denomination but demands denomination at the same time. With its
evasiveness, the movement establishes the autonomy of the body, which can also be a
possibility of dismantling of hierarchical relations written in the body, a possibility of separating
from the discourses and the freedom of instability of the subject-object relation. The aesthetics
of autonomy is reflected where the body in movement (equal to all other elements of the
performance) is represented in a way that is essentially anti-foundational: where fixed relations
are no longer fixed, where the body continuously disappears into gaps and where the event
weaving it is originally unstable and evasive. But at the same time, this autonomy –
paradoxically granting the evasiveness and disappearing of the body itself – is a reflection of
contemporary views upon the physical appearing at the beginning of the century: the physical
as a dynamic and energetic field where relations towards space and time are multiplied and
relative; and consequent understanding of representative modes that are no longer guided by
the traditional understanding of reality and the place of the subject within it. Contemporary
dance is a typical 20th century artistic form, where abstraction, evasiveness, disappearing of the
object (and later of the subject as well) and deconstruction of form and modes of representation
are not exclusive when compared to other artistic forms.

2. Different history

The concept of the autonomy of the body can be understood as a philosophical metaphor that at
the ontological/existential level reveals the unstable relation between the object and the subject,
and where it seems that within this relation body re-acquires its original (forgotten) power. Same
originality is typical of the aesthetic utopia of different stage-concepts that emerged at the
beginning of the century, and found its to-this-day unfinished mandate in contemporary dance. A
dancing body thus not only serves as a metaphor to philosophers and poets just because first,
original contact with the essence would glitter through it, but because within its autonomous
streak it reveals a different history, covered with hierarchical systems of the rational, of the
language, of the accepted representative webs. This different history that is in fact the history of
discontinuity and dispersion is also the one French philosopher Jacques Derrida has in mind
when quoting Emma Goldmann, the castaway feminist from the second half of the 19th century:
"If I cannot dance, I will not take part in your revolution." This sentence reminds us of the
original democratic impulse hidden within the autonomous body of dance, which unlike the
established and recognizable history of the body (as shown by the figurative-rhetorical context
of ballet) introduces a "history of paradoxical laws and non-dialectical discontinuities, a history of
absolutely heterogeneous pockets, irreducible particularities, of unheard of and incalculable
sexual differences…" This is the history of evasiveness and instability, where freedom hiding in
stitches and cracks makes language inefficient, where body is allowed to glitter without form and
freely performs the playful tension between presence and disappearing. This is the history of
exhibiting (presenting), which can be filled completely by the body alone, and is probably best
described by French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy in his famous essay Corpus: "Being exposed,
exposing, it is the skin, all the various types of skin, here and there open and turned into
membranes, poured out inside of itself, a rather whiteout an inside or outside, absolutely,
continually passing from one to other, always coming back to itself whiteout either a locus or a
place where it can establish a self and so always coming back to the world, to other bodies
which is exposed, in the same gesture that exposes them to itself." Such philosophical playing
with language with an intention to indicate all the evasiveness and paradoxicality of exhibiting
and naming of the body, is about the very autonomy we are dealing with in this essay: not the
autonomy in the sense of a new form of the body but the autonomy as a mode of existence and
a manner of representation of the body, where the more we are witnessing the autonomous
body the more we are witnessing its disappearing. The original concept, which among other
things also effects the development of contemporary dance, does not place the body anywhere
else but upon itself; in this context, the body is also the bearer of aesthetic strategies. The
different history revealed by the autonomous body is a history of discontinuity because it is
always the history of the present: a body is always bound to the present, to the moment, to its
own evasive presence. In other words: the autonomous body constantly articulates itself as
present, creating its own space and history. The present body interferes with established modes
of representation by not being bound to anything, always dwelling at the brink of fixation of its
own image, liable to disappear at any time. It has the freedom to remain fragmented or even un-
shown, it has the freedom to be an emblem (Mallarme), a self-rotating wheel (Nietzsche), a
thing that evades but still continuously demands to be named. Only by being present, the history
of the forgotten, of the overlooked and of the forbidden bodies can glitter through it.

Throughout the history of contemporary dance, we can follow different articulations of autonomy.
From returning to the movement and the autonomous expressive flow, Modernist
transformations of hierarchical relations in the body and minimalist dispersion of structures, to
Postmodern flirting with the narrative (autobiography, fiction, politic document) and other artistic
forms, the body of contemporary dance more or less successfully managed to dance and
remain a part of revolution - in the sense that it revealed the unbearable weight of denomination
and history of discontinuity which denies any final denomination. Because it always played its
altering game between the meaning and the comprehension, between reality and appearance,
between presence and disappearing, between subject and object, never allowing to be
embraced by one act, system or word only.
Nevertheless, the democratic impulse revealing itself within the concept of the autonomous
body is not as natural as it may seem. The utopian desire from the beginning of the century
does establish the forgotten history of bodies but on the other hand it can quickly become
trapped within its own enthusiasm which basically regards the autonomous body as a
transparent, predictable and exclusive body of a certain political group or ideology. At the
beginning of the century we are thus witnessing an interweaving of concepts of the natural body,
of movement, of eugenics, of eurhythmics with Fascist concepts of a perfect, pure and artificial
body, where the original democratic impulse can quickly turn into its opposite. Similarly, different
concepts of physical articulation that persisted on the line East-West for long years, starting with
a difficult communication only recently, show how fragile the concept of physical autonomy
really is if we are not ready for a painful searching of what always seems to be evasive,
therefore forcing us to be prepared for a continuous chase.

To describe the situation in the East we can slightly paraphrase Emma Goldmann's sentence: if
you dance, you will not be part of our revolution – the revolution, of course, that only admits one,
collective body, eliminating everything that is different. Where the original democratic impulse
has been silenced at its very beginning, where there was no possibility to discover another,
hidden history, where every body was subjected to carrying the weight of the official history,
contemporary dance could not develop, or – as in Drzewiecki's case – it remained within the
history by the necessity of survival.

The problem is, of course, a lot more general, connected to the existential status of the
autonomous body as well as to the modes of representation and aesthetic articulation that are
legitimate and allowed within a certain space. The autonomous body that philosophers and
poets describe by means of the metaphor of dancing is not only the formal criterion of an
aesthetic field but it is also legitimate on the existential level – a legitimacy within which the body
is living and experienced, a body-subject (Merleau-Ponty). The metaphor of a dancing body
being a self-rotating wheel (Nietzsche) therefore bears witness to an original existential
legitimacy that can be placed within a body and its existence, which was in the former socialist
societies always blurred and substituted by the legitimacy of the system. Similarly, it was not
possible or allowed to introduce articulations other than those established or prescribed for
decades; any different history, any attempt of autonomy, any different manner of representation
were made marginal in advance and considered political. The punishment for not conforming to
the one mode of speech was in the best case marginating (if not something even worse) of such
artistic practices in the former socialist countries. Therefore contemporary dance in Slovenia
developed no sooner than in the eighties, in a country that denied any form of movement except
ballet and bodies of communist rituals. Few attempts to present bodies differently were
hopelessly stashed under amateurism and it was not until the eighties that we could talk about
the beginnings of its professionalism. The circle of dancers and choreographers educated
abroad who gathered around Ksenija Hribar and the Plesni teater Ljubljana theatre (Dance
Theatre Ljubljana, established in 1985), appeared at the same time as some other artistic
movements that spoke the language of contemporary art in an original manner (by a retrograde
return to the original Slovene and foreign avant-garde). In a decade and a half, the present very
powerful generation of dancers of contemporary dance was formed as a consequence of a very
creative dialogue with different independent theatrical practices, which effected both the
physical image of the theatre as well as the theatrical image of dance.

On the outside, the difference between the two manners of articulation of an autonomous body
is seen primarily in the status contemporary dance has in the West and in the East. On one
hand, it has been acknowledged by institutions and history for quite a few decades, thus
developing its own institutional, pedagogical and production network; it is becoming a part of
urban art, it develops parallel to the rest of contemporary art, its theory and critique. On the
other hand, though, it has been marginal for decades, condemned to non-existence or fighting
for survival, without a basic structure that would assure its development, outside the dialogue
with institutions, critique, only in the last decade more or less on the rise and fighting for basic
infrastructure and survival production-wise. But if we wish to discuss the difference in the field of
aesthetic articulation of bodies in general now that the dialogue has been going on for the entire
decade, the answer is much more complex and connected with the basic evasiveness of the
autonomous body.

To answer this question we first have to discover how symptomatic the views of the West are as
regarding the East. The views are fragile, often showing a picture that does not in fact exist, or
an image that we cannot see. On one hand we are dealing with an almost institutionalized
autonomous body of contemporary dance, which managed to bring the beginner's enthusiasm
over its own autonomy of movement almost to perfection. By means of pedagogical and other
more or less developed infrastructural production networks, the Western body is trained to the
maximum, with a number of techniques at its disposal and an almost representative relation to
the present. Sometimes it seems as if the history of discontinuity got trapped within the loop of
continuity. The dancing body of the East, however, seems to be having problems with
articulation. That body somehow embarrasses us and we need a specific horizon within which
we can watch it. Let me just enumerate some of the horizons that the most successful Slovene
groups take abroad with them. The point of entrance for Iztok Kovac and his En knap troupe is
Trbovlje, Kovac's hometown and a center of mining industry where traces of devastating
socialist industry are still evident. Trbovlje does present part of the artist's personal mythology
but at the same time it presents a communication network by means of which his hyperactive
athletic bodies talk to the public. For Kovač, Trbovlje represents a network that only seemingly
facilitates the view, since it is highly misleading: the autonomy of his body is in fact bound to a
certain image but an attentive observer could detect another (for example Kovač's almost
metaphysical obsession with the structure of movement, etc.). Similar goes for the other two
authors, Matjaž Pograjc (the Betontanc company) and Branko Potočan (Fourklor), who take war
and various Balkan associations abroad with them. In this case, the view of the West is that
which breaks in advance, seeing only what it wants to see. But this is characteristic for any gaze
regarding what in advance has been determined different (same goes for the performances
from the even further East – Japan, for example, which we always consider within a specific
horizon of technology).

Thus we again find ourselves at the spot where we can try to answer the question with the
original concept of the body autonomy poets and philosophers at the beginning of the century
so keenly reflected on. The right to different history is the one that is revealed by the
autonomous body. The autonomous body participates in it and evasively establishes it. The
development of the Western contemporary dance has turned the autonomy of the body into a
specific privilege while its external appearance is defined by technical perfection and multiplicity
of techniques. Due to the ruthless dictation from the present, the position of which is almost
monumental in contemporary dance, we feel uncomfortable whenever we are faced with
something different, with the past, and we are incapable of finding a language to describe that
which is different. Western gaze is therefore still hesitant when it comes to attributing autonomy
of the body to the Eastern practices. In other words, the autonomy of the body is always bound
to the image the West has about it. But the original concept of the autonomy of the physical - in
the sense poets and philosophers mentioned at the beginning of this essay had about it – has
no desire to binding it to anything, just as it does not present any image of it apart from
metaphorical poetic allegories. Autonomy is primarily a field of different history, a field of letting
the body constantly disappear thus showing us a dispersed image, a field within which the hunt
for its original image never ends.

Conclusion

Despite everything, we can in fact detect a difference between the beginner's enthusiasm and
the established status of the autonomous body in the art of the theatre today. After the body had
appeared in front of us literally decomposed, fragmented and subjected to processes of
deconstruction in the name of its autonomy, after the beginner's enthusiasm about discovering
the Dionysian autonomous body had long faded away and had turned into an Apolinic
repetitiveness of techniques, the necessity to once again reconsider their disharmonious and
non-linear history and face it with new fields seems unavoidable. In the conclusion, I would like
to emphasize the two problems that still condition our contact with the field of autonomy of the
body to be extremely problematic due to endless possibilities (or impossibilities) of its aesthetic
articulation. A different history shimmering through the autonomous body has still not revealed
all of its stories, all of its marginal identities and traumatic searching for articulation of the
autonomous body. The project of setting as under the heterogeneous pockets and differences is
far from being completed, what is more, in the time when bodies are more and more becoming
uniform, such project proves to be a basic need. Furthermore, we must not forget the fact that
the beginner's enthusiasm has long been replaced by doubting the bodies per se, especially
when encountering the bodies of the "disturbingly alive" (Harraway) cyborgs, reproductions,
clones, invalid bodies of the present (Virilio), etc. The vision of an autonomous dancing body, to
which poets and philosophers at the beginning of the century admitted an enviable primacy due
to its evasiveness and simultaneous uniformity, today seems somewhat superfluous, lacking a
real, convincing relation towards the ecstatic present. A reason more for philosophy to once
again embrace the dancing body and by means of this unique metaphor examine whether it is
still possible to appoint it with the exclusiveness of a self-rotating wheel (Nietzsche) or whether
this exclusiveness is slowly being stolen by some other reality.