Unmarked & Reconstructing the dance

By Peggy Phelan[1] & Helen Thomas[2]

In here, I will use both of the articles that we were given to study.

They both refer to the present life that performance has. “Performance cannot be saved […]: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance”, says Peggy Phelan and Sigel agrees as “[Dance is] an event that disappears in the very act of materializing”.

Maybe keeping a description of the performance, would be a good try of maintaining the work, but in that way, what really happens is a transformation of the work in the words of this script. Indeed, on the one hand, a review or a script can fundamentally alter the event, on the other hand, though, it is a way to preserve it.

“Performance’s challenge to writing is to discover a way for repeated words to become performative utterances,
rather than constative utterances”

-Benveniste

Until now dance has no retrievable past, as “[it] has been pushed to the margins of aesthetic and philosophical discourse” (Elton, 1992, p.22). So, what we have is the gap between the text and the performance, the “arrangement” of the work, as Helen Thomas wants to name it, from debates and discourses. This gap is desired, intended and logically required.

The debate for the aura, the authenticity, the repeatability and the reproducibility of the works still goes on among the theoreticians of dance.

Tomlison prefers using the term “authentic meanings” to “authenticity”, because we cannot possibly know with any degree of objective certainty the composer’s true intentions in creating the work.  In that way, we become less absolute on our conclusions on authenticity and use our beliefs and memories. These memories are a mix of every “thing outside of the work” that makes the work understandable to the audience. Again, this brings us to the second paragraph that introduced the “alteration” of the work.

Peter Kivy follows with 4 different interpretations to authenticity:

  1. Faithfulness to the composer’s intentions
  2. Performance practice and original sound in the composer’s lifetime to the performer’s own self
  3. Original way of playing
  4. (through) performance

Maybe, the writing should come from the performers and the composer themselves and then from audience and critics. Maybe, this is what Franko means when he writes about “dance theorizing” that should replace repeatability.

[1] Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked: the politics of performance. London: Routledge

[2] Thomas, H. Reconstructing the Dance: In Search of Authenticity. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. pp. 121-145

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

By Walter Benjamin [1]

A reader of a chapter like this would not expect that what they are actually reading was written in 1935. Walter Benjamin is occupied with the reproduction of a work of art from its primitive ages (Ancient Greece) until, maybe even, now.

Trying to avoid adding many quotes, I will try to rephrase and debate some of his arguments, based only on my thoughts.

As far as we are concerned, there is nothing manmade in this world that it cannot be reproduced. So, it is not a surprise that people from ancient times tried to make more quantity of things (printing, lithography and then photography).

The subject of this chapter is how this reproduction can lower the value of a work of art, its quality – not quantity, with Benjamin saying that a copy lacks “its presence in time and space”, that is its history and everything that goes along with it, eg physical condition, ownership, tradition.

However, let me give you an example that will help us move one easily further this chapter.

Phantom of the Opera
The Phantom of the Opera

In 1986, Andrew Lloyd Webber adapted the very famous novel “The Phantom of the Opera” into a musical play. Since then it has been re-performed and re-performed by many people around the world. Is the first performance the same with the last one? Definitely not. It does not include the same cast, maybe the same theatre, the settings, the orchestra, the director. But, it gives the audience the same entertainment and message, as it includes the same story, plot, music and songs (the content). There are many more examples that we could use in the same sense, such as the Martha Graham technique or the Pina Bausch works.

Pina Bausch // Hillside
Pina Bausch // Hillside

I mentioned this example because of Benjamin’s saying: “The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated”. He is talking of “mechanical reproduction”, when I am referring to simple artistic reproduction, trying to move it towards dance and choreography.

Of course, if a painting was mechanically reproduced,
it wouldn’t have the same value with the original.

That means that some works of art cannot be reproduced or they will lose their tradition; their aura. Aura, defined by Walter Benjamin, is the unique aesthetic authority [2] of an object, which is based on its ritual. Consequently that means that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual”.

As much as I would like to argue if this a good or a bad thing, I will not. Each form and work of art have a very different function, purpose or aesthetics. This could begin a huge debate on why reproduction cannot be tradition, or, if reproduction can be tradition, how can a form or work of art evolve and become a modern form of art?

“In all the arts, there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be,
which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power”

Paul Valery

"The creation of Adam" - Michelangelo
“The creation of Adam” – Michelangelo

The truth is that, art has always been trying to create something new, something that people do not know that they want, something that they will understand they want after they have seen and experienced it. So, art, based on its history, is always trying to evolve (Renaissance, Εnlightment). To accomplish that, its creators reproduce and repeat and slightly change what they want to show, in order to give their own footprint on the art history. Indeed, this would benefit the progress of the art and the emancipation of the original from the copy, without erasing the past art archives.

 However, in Western Europe, many forms of art, such as cinema, do not permit the reproduction of their works. The films should remain as they are and can only be touched by their directors. Without the funding and their fame risks, though,  they never dare to do that, so they move on to new projects. The films remain copied in a cupboard, but if the last is lost from the archives, it could eliminate its existence in history. This could be the case to many (or all) performing arts.

 I would dare to compare this fact to Andre Lepecki’s  “Concept and presence: the contemporary European art scene” (2004), where he is referring to the change that choreography has shown since the beginning of the 21st century.

“Traditionally, dance enters economy by escaping its ephemerality through an investment and reliance on precise techniques defined also as signature of a choreographer’s personal style. This practice generates both a system of recognition (…) and of reproduction (each dancer is initiated in a specific technique that allows the choreography to enter into a fixed repertory and be transmitted along generations and across borders with a minimum of variation”, he writes. But, he contradicts, that now the choreographic art project is being challenged at the level of possibility of its reproduction, as it is not relying nor creating a technique, but distancing itself from dance.

 Walter Benjamin ends his chapter by showing that the renaissance of art will come only from politics, but since this is not the case after the WWII, I don’t think it matters talking about it.

[1] Benjamin, W. (1977) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Schocken Books

[2] ibid.

77 choreographic proposals

77 choreographic proposals: Documentation of the evolving mobilization of the term “choreography”
is a journal article by Jeaning Durning and Elizabeth Waterhouse

If you want to learn what “choreography” might be, there were 77 people in a workshop that shared their opinions on this question and on some more:

  • What is choreography?
  • What if choreography is…?
  • What more can choreography be?
  • What else can choreography look like?
  • When we speak of choreography, what are we speaking of? Are we speaking of the process, the outcome of the process, the score that is performed, the translation of a score by the performer or the performative event itself?

Before moving on to the article, I searched what the dictionaries say about choreography:

  • Dance arrangement
  • Sequence of dance movements
  • Dance notation

Reading these ideas, there were some I would agree with, some that were really odd to my eye and mind and then there were some more provoking. Let me give you some examples:

Choreography can be:

  • “A manipulation” or “a game of spectator’s imagination & experiences”
  • “A movable picture”
  • “A story”
  • “Another way of communication” or “a translation of information”
  • “Not what you see but what you feel”
  • “A path between dreamland and reality”

But could choreography really be:

  • “A pragmatic office work”, that is just a job?
  • “A fixed improvisation or an invention of rules” ?
  • “impossible to realize”?
  • “about recording your habits”?
  • “a body which is moving because of energies around”?
  • “when we don’t know what to do on the stage with our body”?

And, (wow), what if choreography was:

  • “not starting where it is finally ending”?
  • “a collective framing that ushers action into the actual”?
  • “a choice of different life status”, as in the way we are thinking now?
  • “desperate”?
  • “a distribution”?
  • “your own way to find yourself and understand what is really important in our dance life”?, which would mean that choreography helps us to start another way of self-recognition

But, the truth is, that each one of the 77 members of the workshop shared their truth, their own experiences on what choreography is, so I am not judging them; I am only being inspired to make my own term of what choreography is.

One semester of studying and debating about it, this is the term I have reached at until now.

And who knows? Maybe I will inspire another student to create another term for choreography.

Choreography is both a dance creating process and an output of a dance creating process. To be more thorough, choreography as a process combines human body movements or the absence of them based on a rhythm dictated by music[1] or not and is willing to express a message or an emotion. Sometimes costumes, locations, props and lighting help to transmit the message.

Choreography as an output includes all these elements with the difference that it can be alternatively interpreted by the choreographer, the dancers and the audience, as they all carry different experience towards the output. The choreographer has imagined and taught the dance, the dancers have been trained to perform it and the audience are watching, receiving and interpreting every stimulus. Also, this effect of this output is over when the feeling intended to be passed to the audience has changed or transformed.

To that extent, dance is the language, through technique and basic movements, that doesn’t speak; just shows, without using voiced words, but only human movements.

This is a definition of “choreography” that I’ve always been using in my work, in my way of choreography thinking and in my appreciation of dance.

Click here to read more about my thoughts on definitions

[1] As Eiko said: “People expect sound” ( from the book “DANCE: Documents of contemporary art”)

Hello world!

Dear reader,

I hope you like some of the things I will be gathering here from my academic readings for my MA in Choreography in Lincoln University.

In the future, I will be trying to add some of my works (videos) so that you have a complete sense of how I am thinking of performing as a choreographer or dance teacher in the near future.

For now, I will only tell you that I have studied many dance styles, but Hip-hop and Musical Theatre have stolen my heart. Well, in case you are wondering, the University of Lincoln teaches mainly contemporary dance (the technical one), so this has been a positive challenge for me so far.

Maybe, you will see me progressing or not… In any case, I would appreciate your comments or arguments, so that we can both learn from what the books and the ideas offer us!