Thesis Performative Document

Performative Document: an open ended succession of relocating differences

Christopher Engdahl

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree MA in Dance Theatre: The Body in Performance. Laban. October 2008. 1

Abstract.

This document aims to act as a record displaying both its own and the piece Yet AnOther’s performative elements. It is the outcome of a practical and theoretical exploration of language and performativity within the context of dance.

The doing of this research becomes the strive to push further the detachment of any authentic origin within the field of dance, by displaying documents as open and incomplete, emphasizing the rupture in presence and detaching the choreographer’s corporeal body, its expression and (authentic) authority from the process of making the piece, Yet An-Other. The latter being a choreographic reinforcement of the melancholic trait of dance as disappearance.

The following chapters will present a discussion on these topics sourcing from disciplines such as philosophy, poststructuralist literary theory, cultural studies, dance and performance theory and criticism.

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Table of Contents.

Abstract

2

Table of Contents

3

Introduction

4

Starting

5-7

Operating through language and vice versa

8-9

Authentic original and appropriation

10-11

Performativity and decomposed original

12-15

Performativity and possible difference

16-19

Not ontological

20-25

Conclusion

26-27

Appendix – Evaluation of the presentation of Yet An-Other

28-29

Appendix – The notation

30-36

Bibliography

37-40

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Introduction.

As you read this text a certain amount of time has past since it was written. As I write this I perpetually elude my own writing. Incomplete. I am dressed in a doublet, functioning in relation to the absence of the past and of that which will come. A lingering of my precursors, and a suspension of my successors. Aperture. My writing is nothing else than that movement, which leaves behind traces. Part of a machine which will be functioning whether I am present or not. Whether I am alive or not. Unsustainable. What I write has been written before me, and awaits to be written again after me. I do not hold the key to my own text. Cut off. I am brought into being through processes of signification, constituted. Plunging through my forerunners to enable the emergence of any writing whatsoever. Or rather, I let my forerunners plunge through me, let them address me, so that writing can begin. And as it starts I enter the inevitable position of spending, with a melancholic, but yet a smile, seeing the words run away through my fingers.

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Starting.

There is a pleasure in letting precursors, these strangers, speak, to enable an articulation of oneself. One can contently stand on their shoulders and from there take a firm leap towards what will come. This leap would be slightly more problematic though if one was caught in their lasting grip. If, when taking the step away from their support, they insisted on sticking around. If one was exploited in order for them to pass on their own knowledge, essentializing their methods by thrusting another re-embodiment of the same again. Has this discussion now been turned towards the context of dance? Is this operation not utilized in the show-copy model that exists (with a few exceptions) within dance training today? Is this not noticeable even in the choreographic practice of the 21st century when it occurs that choreographers ban reproduction of their work due to the indispensible authenticity of its performers? Is not this attitude attached to modern dance’s notion of self-expression of an “inner truth”, or indicated when, for instance, Bill T. Jones says;

I’m a good dancer and I can get a lot of colors and reveal many states of mind and feelings in a series of movements…. I make good movement when I do it on my body. I’m a persuasive dancer in the moment. Now I’m trying to become stronger at translating it for the company, in managing the grand palette. (Morgenroth, 2004: 143-144)

In dance the implement (the body) and the expression is one and the same, which means that the ability to stand back from the creation of ones work is limited and where this constant merging often results in the notion of irreplaceable authenticity; 5

Examining the more recent history of stage dance, it is significant to what amount choreographers, at least in the 20th century, stress the importance of how the process first operates in and is tries out on themselves. It is only later, after an initial contraction of deliverance, that the interpreter becomes involved, and a material is passed on a dancer. (Spångberg in Lehmen, n.d.)

If a choreographer decides to step back from his accomplishment to reflect upon the work, to distance himself in order to enable a critical stance, he takes off the mantle called producer and puts himself in the position of recording;

The choreographer standing away from his creation, externalizing his tools from his body in order not to stain himself or to become synonymous with them… considering the next sign to put on his, in this case, stage, having to his left the signifiers of his composition (the models/dancers). (Spångberg in Lehmen, n.d.)

The process of the piece Yet An-Other, a piece which places choreography in the context of language, perceived as a series of signs that are distributed, repeated and reactualized, enabled this stepping away. By replacing the role of active producer of movement material with that of an active recorder the piece’s originating authenticity could be disrupted. The movement written in the notation, which will be discussed later, did not originally emerge from the one who wrote it but is a collage, assembled by the act of replicating, creating a cluster of signs to be further translated. The dancers were left to the undertaking of its translation, incorporation and staging in which ever way they needed/wanted, having the choreographer not attending any rehearsals (not sticking 6

around) but only its final presentation/performance. Aiming with this distance, between the initiator’s body (and its expression) and the dancer’s, to make possible for the latter to be the creator, as much as it could be achieved, of the corporeal, assimilated interpretation presented as the performance outcome. And not treating the dancers as vehicles for the choreographer’s intention to pass on his own movement material.

In Yet An-Other the choreographer was placed in the position of recording, and the piece in the realm of documentation. The latter not necessarily in order to create a “stiff body” (Lepecki arguing that documentation perseveres in the purity of presence as it does not recognize the motion of the trace, 2004: 133), but to acknowledge the elusiveness of the document and engaging with it in a performative fashion. Inserting the element of rupture by focusing on the document’s incompleteness. Using documentation not in order to preserve a singular event nor to insist making present that which was absent, but on the contrary to introduce absence into presence, displaying the break of/in the latter.

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Operating through language and vice versa.

The alphabetical writing of our Western cultures necessitates the world of representation and outlines our apprehension when it “allows us to understand that things are not always the same, not always identical to themselves, but can be represented in a variety of ways” (Danaher et al., 2001: 156). This reasoning, in relation to subjectivity, goes in line with a comprehension of a subject not concerned with solidity, essence nor realness but with variety, multiplicity and fiction. This lays the foundation for a subject who, while holding the ability of challenging the fact that it is part of more or less undifferentiated and anonymous structures, is continuously formed and re-formed as a negotiating recipient of cultural captions. It is an indistinguishable subject who is performing not always aware of its supplementary traits. The language, which one writes through and which writes through oneself, operates as an irresolute sprinkler, getting one’s intentions to slip away, precluding any clear meaning of the words.

Following on from and reacting to the poststructuralist conversation which asserted that bodies and subjects are seized by language and subjected to representation, recognizing ones inability to position oneself in an abstract place beyond language, as with Barthes’ writing where he states that language is fascist by saying that “[t]o write, to speak, to read or even to think is to engage in an act of discursive production” (Sheie, 2006: 136), Jacques Derrida points out these thinkers’ authoritarianism as they were trying to explain and categorize “anything and everything about human affairs and the world around us” (Sim and Van Loon, 2004: 86-87). After acknowledging that “[o]ne can not act both witness and judge in one and the same [linguistic] trial” (my translation, 8

Schönström, 2003: 138), and while insisting on a constructionist view of identity, he inserts his term différance by which he dislocates the notion of presence as something metaphysically “pure”, an understanding which Western philosophy throughout its history has been a persistent enthusiast of. Différance “is used to disrupt a view of language as a self-presence that offers total and immediate access to the thoughts which legitimate the representation” (Rimmer, 1998: 49) and thus makes the pure presence impossible by indicating that writing always is delayed and deferred. This term used by Derrida is, as he writes himself;

a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on the basis of the opposition presence/absence. Différance is the systematic play of differences, of traces of differences, of the spacing [espacement] by which elements relate to one another. This spacing is the production, simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates the indecision as regards activity and passivity, that which cannot yet be governed and organized by that opposition), of intervals without which the “full” terms could not signify, could not function. (Derrida cited in Culler, 1982: 97)

Derrida includes absence into presence, introduces death into life with the imperative “Memento mori!” (Kemp, 1990: 121), an imperative neglected by the overbearing of prior thinkers. This acknowledgement of past traces of other meanings existing within the present moment makes pure presence impossible due to its constant sliding in the act of communication. As Lepecki states it: “[t]he trace is always already referring one signifying element to another set of traces of traces, other absences of absences” (Lepecki, 2004: 132). 9

Authentic original and appropriation.

When regarding dance as operating within the context of language one is led to encounter the work of Jérõme Bel. In his clever piece The last performance from 1998 he is concerned with the concepts of representation and subjectivity, occupied by tackling the centrality of presence attached to dance. In this piece, performed by four dancers, Bel exposes, turns and twists the elements of choreography addressing “the body as a site of a certain production related to originality [and] presence” (Spångberg, n.d.). At one point during the piece the dancers performs a dance originally choreographed and danced by Susanne Linke. Each of the dancers introduces him- or herself, by announcing through a microphone, as being Susanne Linke, then, one after the other, dances the phrase (and if one is not fully familiar with the tradition of dance one would suppose that the female dancer in the performance actually is Linke and not refer the name to an absent initiator of the phrase). By multiplying, varying and relocating the dance, the latter seemingly being in close connection to a specific performer, Bel positions the phrase within an open ended succession of displacement which dissolves this particular performer’s authenticity, leaving her in a position of haunting. This rupturing of movement material should be seen in the light of Derridean writing, where the condition of the sign is its perpetual iteration never exhausted in the present of its inscription;

[a] written sign is proffered in the absence of the addressee… One might say that at the moment when I write, the addressee may be absent from my field of present perception… My “written communication” must… be repeatable in the absolute

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absence of the addressee or of the empirically determinable set of addressees. (Derrida, 1971)

In relation to Linke’s (original) authenticity, as this constant repeating of the sign also comprise the sender or the producer, the movement phrase will break from its origin and will continue being produced even if “the author… no longer answers for what [s]he has written” (1971). As one does not own one’s words, letting the words speak through oneself rather than the opposite, language cannot be dominated, and “to assume this impossibility would be to assume that we are its origin, a claim that cannot be sustained” (Webster, 2007: 21). The displacement of the movement-phrase mentioned above also gets its explanation by the written sign’s constant involvement in the process of contextualization, de-contextualization, and re-contextualization;

a written sign carries with it a force of breaking with its context, that is, the set of presences which organize the moment of its inscription. The force of breaking is not an accidental predicate, but the very structure of the written… This force of rupture is due to the spacing which constitutes the written sign: the spacing which separates it from other elements of the internal contextual chain (the always open possibility of its extraction and grafting). (Derrida, 1971)

If one takes a sign from one context and puts it in another it can still be legible, since “meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless” (Culler, 1982: 123). Acknowledging the inevitable, evasive, melancholic reiteration at the centre of its own organization is to accept that constant re-using and re-framing of movement-material is part of its structure. 11

Performativity and decomposed original.

The body is a site where the elements of recording and producing is put together. It is an active receiver, inescapably part of the realm of repetition persistently constructing and re-constructing (the image of) itself. These argument tags along and breaks from the linguistic tradition where J. L. Austin contended for a division between what he called “constative” utterances, which are descriptions of fact that can be regarded as true or false, and the ones which are “performative”. The latter, which represents utterances (speech acts) that perform the action to which they point, is what Derrida ascribes to all utterances, by stating that all language is doing something. Another distinction which Austin made was between non-serious and “parasitic” (Culler, 1982: 117) performative utterances and those serious ones within “ordinary” (Derrida, 1971) language which excludes the element of citation. The former being vacant utterances made on a stage by an actor or in any other way involved with a production of quoted, re-used statements in which one cannot grasp the entirety of an intention or communicated meaning, and the latter, if it is successful, brings about the fully present and transparent conscious intention behind what is said while being grasped with its total context. In his disruptive manner Derrida counters this binary structure by stating that all performative utterances function within reiteration;

Could a performative statement succeed if its formulation did not repeat a “coded” or iterable statement, in other words if the expression I use to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming to an iterable model, and therefore if they were not identifiable in a way as “citation”? (Derrida, 1971) 12

In other words, what he proposes is that all utterances perform within a realm of reiteration, the latter being its constant state of possibility (and impossibility of its scrupulous stainlessness). As with a signature, which Derrida takes as an example (Derrida, 1971), Austin would assert it as something that would confirm the occurrence of a signifying intention at a specific moment in time, an origin, and Derrida would emphasize its dependence on iterability;

In order to function, that is, to be readable, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to be detached from the present and singular intention of its production. It is its sameness which, by corrupting its identity and its singularity, divides its “seal”. (Culler, 1982: 126)

The signature is not dependent on the presence of its inscription, on the original moment when it was first created. The signature, part of our everyday, is mechanically reproduced in an echo of Walter Benjamin (as with checks or validation of other documents), which implies that the thing reproduced is removed from the sphere of tradition and by “making many copies of the reproduction, it substitutes for its unique incidence a multiplicity of incidences” (Benjamin, 2008: 7). It enters the realm away from its origin where the structure of the sign is dislocated and “repeatable-withdifference” (Collins and Mayblin, 2005: 83);

… the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having

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somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected. (Nietzsche cited in Butler, 1993: 121)

Performativity, as it is part of an ongoing activity of marking, is that which is not a singular act but a repeated one, an act which is no longer in clear relation to its origin. In contrast to the notion that “[e]very beginning is marked, traced and haunted by that which stands before it”(Wolfreys cited in Webster, 2007: 38) Rousseau was longing to turn back to nature, Husserl aspired to metaphysics and Christians are determined of a paradise and they all assume(d) a transparent and immediate relationship to the original;

The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man,… the name of that being who… throughout his entire history… has dreamt of full presence, of reassuring foundation, of the origin and the end of play. (Derrida cited in Culler, 1982: 131)

Performative acts are covering the traditions of which they are reiterations. They reveal the original itself as something that already is a repetition, something which itself constantly reposition differences. And with repetition’s element of duration, it operates both by delaying (which implies the recognition of something that is already there, recognizing traces of other meanings that have been constructed in the past) and by deferring (where the recognized meaning will be perceived again and again). And by its constituent of spatiality which implicates the constant production of differences. Here (the notion of) the original is unpacked. After a long travel compressed within a 14

mannish briefcase stuffed to its edges by purity, now unraveled in a volatile but yet comfortable crib.

As choreography, like presented in Yet An-Other, is an active cluster of reiterable signs that constantly passes on from one creator to another it will inevitably decompose “the present and singular intention of its production” (Culler, 1982: 126), decay its original moment of creation;

Even if the circumstances into which the product of technological reproduction of the work of art may be introduced in no way impair the continued existence of the work otherwise, its here and now will in any case be devalued… Reproductive technology, we might say in general terms, removes the thing reproduced from the realm of tradition. (Benjamin, 2008: 6-7)

Yet An-Other was arranged to display its inclusion within the domain of reproduction by exhibiting several altered copies of the same notation. Its insertion into this sphere, where the question of the original has lost its value, releases the movement material from its notion of being a freeloader upon an authentic original. The use of the projection within the projection, where an almost indistinguishable (its clarity depending on the location of the spectator, and it being effected by the lighting of the show which will be discussed later) copy of itself at a different location (the first reproduction made; Reproduction No 1 presented at a different venue)1 is shown, displays the dropping out of the here and now of the original. It offers itself as malfunction, as glitch, while it (the past event, the absent mark) struggles to make what is absent present. 15

Performativity and possible difference.

When discussing the materiality of bodies (especially the gendered body) and its metaphysical implant, Judith Butler, with a strong will to contest what is considered as ‘real’, ‘true’ and ‘natural’ by transferring de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of the body as a pre-existing essence outside culture and Derrida’s metaphysical critique into the realm of gender sexuality, argues for its site within the process of signification, contained by the process of reiteration and repetition:

The body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as prior. This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes its own action. If the body signified as prior to signification is an effect of signification, then the mimetic or representational status of language, which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary mirrors, is not mimetic at all. On the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one might even argue performative. (Butler, 1993: 30)

She argues, when recognizing how the body is produced through obstinate procedures of cultural inscription, that each (unavoidable) reproduction (in her case of a stylized gender identity) is also a new act. The body (tabula rasa, not) is not only a site for inscription but an implement of (re)writing, constantly in the act of doing, perpetually and performatively exceeding the language which inscribes it. This performative aspect of the constitutive mark can be seen in the light of live performance as a (just another) “reproducible text” (Auslander, 1999: 50), a point of view that will be argued for later. 16

In the process leading up to the piece Yet An-Other 1 six different dancers were given one and the same written notation. This notation and the following performance process were then left to the dancers alone, for them to interpret and stage the notation without any choreographer’s participation. They individually translated the signs, incorporating them to set dance material. Approximately four days before the performance presentation (amount of days depending on the production context and the performance venue) they met the other dancer whom they would perform together with, and rehearsed their different interpretations simultaneously in the performance space. The dancers reused the signs, each of them presenting them with different meaning due to its re-contextualization. Performing each sign differently, presenting each body as a performing recipient which does something with/through the shared, citable marks.

The argument that Butler brings forward, that one constantly generates outcomes with language (which within one also inevitably operates), is something other than conceiving the performative body as acting randomly, apart from the norms and conventions which etches it. But then, how does one actually find the way to break away from the fascist (following on from Barthes) conventional structures which within one operates? If one is produced by the very power structures that one attends to confront, how can a profitable defiance manifest itself? Well, according to Butler, the fact of positioning oneself within the realm of the regulating reiteration of conventions, as with the performance process of Yet An-Other, and by then working through it (and not from an assumed outside, as in external opposition) one can achieve an expression of insubordination.

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Butler discusses drag in relation to a possible insurrection within gender identity, although drag not implicitly involves subversive action but can benefit “both the denaturalization and reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms” (Butler, 1993: 125). Paris is burning, a film produced in 1991 about drag ball contests in New York where the participants compete in how to most convincingly produce a naturalized realization of reiterated social norms, displays how hegemonic gender (our “compulsory heterosexuality” (Sim and Van Loon, 2004: 158)) comprise imitative structures itself. Gender here perceived as the materialization of forceful reiteration of norms, with its performative trait that constitutes as a consequence the subjects it expresses.

The contest… involves the phantasmatic attempt to approximate realness, but it also exposes the norms that regulate realness as themselves phantasmatically instituted and sustained… [The subject] is constituted in and through the iterability of its performance, a repetition which works at once to legitimate and delegitimate the realness norms by which it is produced. (Butler, 1993: 130-131)

It displays a stylized body which provides cultural renovation by acknowledging prospects of re-embodying differences, reiterate so as to recreate. It recognizes that ones operations are not only performed within conventions but actually performs conventions themselves, and thus facilitates, if not in fact makes possible at all, subversive corporeal acts.

She poses the question that if all gender is considered as being drag the possibility of a different kind of repetition is presented:

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[If one] suggest[s] that “imitation” is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarism, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealization… then, drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality. (Butler, 1993: 125)

Here she, within the realm of gender identity, decomposes the original by stating its inclusion in perpetual reiteration.

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Not ontological.

Lepecki argues that the current project of documentation is that which preserves, that which descriptively sustains the same. When one creates a video recording of a dance piece, makes a dance notation or theorizes dance by employing descriptive writing one counters dance’s self-erasure and “works against the trace as [insisting] on the centrality of presence” (Lepecki, 2004: 133). These undertakings maintain the force from the metaphysical ascendancy, contending to make visible that which (could) have disappeared. One acknowledges here a division between dance with its characteristics of ephemerality, erasure and disappearance on one side and documenting/writing with depiction and conservation at its core on the other. A similar division is decipherable in Phelan’s ontological argumentation where she states that “[w]ithout a copy, live performance plunges into visibility… and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control” (Phelan, 1993: 148). By discussing performance in terms of “ephemerality-as-disappearance”, acknowledging the (f)act of absence in relation to performance and with the persisting argument that it becomes something other than itself if it enters “the economy of reproduction” (1993: 146), thus arguing that performance can not be influenced by the motion of the trace , she consolidates the purity of presence through her strict ontological attitude. Auslander answers to Phelan’s viewpoint, deconstructing her ontological proposition by claiming a joint dependence of the live and the reproducible, as the former can be mass-produced (taking the example of the theatrical performance of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast which is reiterated in itself and circulating together with versions presented in animated films, CDs, books etc) and the latter can be located in the realm of evanescence (as with a video-tape’s ephemeral feature; “[t]he tape that I 20

initially placed in my VCR or audio player started disappearing the moment I began watching it or listening to it” (Auslander, 1999: 45)). One has to consider that performance, if one for a moment would accept Phelan’s argument that “[p]erformance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations” (1993: 146), fails in its ontological striving to “clog… the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital” (1993: 148). It actually fails due to its own ephemerality (the very quality which Phelan points out as the one which creates its ability to resist), due to its inability to stick around. When following on from the line of argument that suggests performance’s impossibility of existing outside of reproductive economy, Lepecki acknowledges that dance, even if it would prefer to, can not be carried out or comprehended without the involvement of reproduction, and writes;

it is precisely dance’s self-depiction as a lamentably ephemeral art form, the melancholic drive at its core, that generates systems and performances of high reproducibility: strict techniques named after dead masters applied to carefully selected bodies, continuous modeling of bodies through endless repetition of exercises, dieting, surgeries,... the international and transcultural spreading of national ballets performing nineteenth-century steps for the sake of and glory of dancing their status as modern nations,… the merchandising of brands and names. (Lepecki, 2006: 125-126)

If one continues the trace of thought which is less concerned by ontology, affirming that dance and writing, as well as documentation hold evading features, suggestions arise of the latter’s path away from conservation and preservation, following the movement of 21

the trace towards its own ephemerality. Mark Franko asks “[m]ust we choose between writing and dance?” (Goellner and Murphy, 1995: 205), while discussing how to write along with dance, and states that Derridean deconstruction facilitated the view of writing as marked by disappearance, where “each character is produced by a series of subsidiary motions that themselves cannot accede to meaning” (Franko, 1993: 25), as well as it has enabled a shift in the ephemerality of dance as a problematic phenomenon, which should be worked against, to something affirmative. This concern, regarding the elusiveness of dance and writing, was also indicated at the dawn of dance theory. Thoinot Arbeau, during the 16th century, was discomforted by dance’s disappearance and advocated a (mournful) system of writing as documentation, consisting of descriptions of familiar steps and positions together with figure illustrations, which is still echoing four-hundred years later (with the example of the development of modern notation-systems with an uncomplicated translation between symbol and step where the originator can make his way “to transcend presence as that which must always be present” (Lepecki, 2006: 26) by having dance scholars “saving” dance from its unfortunate fate of mortality). Arbeau employed writing as a way to demand dance to be arrested by an archival force, in an attempt to preserve what was lost. This unproblematic symbiosis between dance and writing, where one without a hitch related to the other, was questioned in the 18th century with the effect of a new uneasiness with the relationship between dance and writing, distancing them from each other. And it is in the challenge to link these two things together again (with the awareness of its symmetric impossibility) where one finds the project of writing together with dance’s ephemerality and documentation’s course away from a stiff body with the aid of deconstruction;

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Derrida’s emphasis on disappearance, on erasure, on specters… identifies metaphysics’ attachment to presence as a desire to make presence always visible… Therefore metaphysics can only offer dance theory the endless description of what “happened on stage”; this secures the presence of dance, keeps it fixed within a certain visibility. With Derrida, dance studies can finally leave this morbid photology. (Lepecki, 2004: 133)

In Yet An-Other the document in itself is “a set of ‘signs’ as elusive as those dance steps to which they refer” (Lepecki, 2004: 133), thus acknowledging the movement of the trace, and moves away from the preserving document to a performative one. The piece consists of a notation, a set of signs that are interpreted and staged by the dancers. In order to disrupt the document from its preserving features the notation is a written document of already existing dances and/or pedestrian movements which has been produced and/or done by others. Randomly selected videos taken from the Internet, containing, amongst other, choreographies, music-videos, promotions for horror-films and brief elements of rock-concerts, have been translated into written signs, using the choreological strategies of Rudolf Laban. Choreology [chore; relating to dance from the Greek derivation, -ology; a science of knowledge], a sort of syntax within the context of movement language, introduces certain basic movement principle to which, according to Laban, all existing matter correspond. Laban’s “eight basic effort actions” (Newlove, 1993) and “body actions” (Preston-Dunlop, 1998) was employed as the video images where translated into signs, enabling dancers not previously familiar with notation to translate, incorporate and stage them. The choice was made of a considerably more wide-ranging system of signs, rather than for instance a notation system including specific signs corresponding with particular body-parts or steps (such as Labanotation), 23

precisely to enable dancers who had no knowledge of reading these established notation systems to make use of it. Yet An-Other follows on from Butler’s performative utterance, which asserts that what we write or say is always imbedded in the realm of repetition entailing that we would not be able to identify or understand words and sentences we could not repeat, and which “does not bring something into being for the first time and does not imply one single and definitive citation; rather it is part of a continuing process of reiteration and re-inscription” (Harris, 1999: 68). The signs in this notation, these marks or repetitive traces, which in many ways lies as the foundation for theatre as an art-form and are brought to the foreground in this piece, are in this process presented as performative themselves. Also the video documents in the piece are positioned as incomplete, a document of event-s which have happened, are happening and will continue happening. The document is not treated preciously with the intent to preserve, but is itself functioning within an open ended succession of relocating differences. Neither is it situated in a fixed place but in a position of relentless intervention that can not be brought to a close. There were three video documents at display throughout the performance, surrounding the two dancers who were presenting their interpretations live, each of the documents showing one of the different reproductions made from the notation.1 The live element was in the piece arranged as a representation always in relation to other versions of itself and thus situated as part of a technological and linguistic realm of reproduction. It was located as (yet another) reproducible piece of material, and demonstrated a similar mistrust together with Auslander as he states; “I doubt very strongly that any cultural discourse can actually stand outside the ideologies of… reproduction” (Auslander,

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1999: 40). The live and the reproducible can not be treated as ontologically apart from each other.

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Conclusion.

In the discussion above on how Bel’s piece from 1998 suggested a moving away from a clogged, subordinate bond to a single, exclusive, transcendental choreographic original, it (both the discussion above and Bel’s piece) displayed a disruption of the author function;

[The last performance] seems to have contributed towards releasing the performer from the normative meanings inherent in the expressive qualities of the movement performed, and allowed… a freedom from the disciplinary and controlling structures of repressive, representational regimes. (Burt, 2003: 39)

But does this piece not merely suggest and demonstrate this relationship and in fact preserve a somewhat naive connection to the original, working against its own critical potential? The dancers’, in The last performance, revealing of the dance’s relationship to its originator, Linke, strengthens the latter’s authenticity, and thus not simply fail to be loyal to an original as Burt argues, but rather the contrary;

It [The last performance] presents a difficulty in the sense that the work, on the one hand propose itself as, I believe, critical, but on the other… run the risk to actually counteract itself as a critical proposal and rather fulfill modernist, or even romantic notions of art… [It] can be interpreted as strongly idealistic, or even as a proposal of an authentic body… [and] actually consolidates an assumed authenticity of the body. (Spångberg, n.d.)

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Bel’s piece turns towards the origin and thus tries to avoid the (inevitable) play of difference. When standing on his shoulders the urge to kick away (from) the authority of the original emerges, a wish to not enable the establishment of a meta-author as in the case with The last performance. As Yet An-Other functions as an organized production of differences where an originator is not to be found, one locates an endeavour to make impossible a solidification and consolidation of an assumed authenticity of the body, and where “[t]he pointing to a ground which never recovered becomes authority’s groundless ground” (Butler cited Harris, 1999: 68). What one discovers is pure-ly differences. What one finds is a rupture in the presence of an originating intention. What one comes across is a performative employment of quoted citations. This thesis follows this line of thought. This thesis is composed by a stranger who is the writer, through unfamiliar and erratic signs, letting them on their part compose a writer who is the stranger. This thesis is personal. But personal only in the way that the choice has been made to repeat these below stated references rather than any other, and through the writing’s recontextualization of signs. This thesis is actively and willingly signed in my name because I can not not take my own name.

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Appendix – Evaluation of the presentation of Yet An-Other. The presentation of Yet An-Other, shown at Laban, Studio 4, 25/9 2008, was, although overall an accomplished piece of work, not presented in its full potential. The spectator was in a position of not being able to grasp the depth of the elements of live and documentation, nor the broader appreciation of the aspects of original and reproduction. This due mostly to the element of space; the audience’s mobility was limited, not being able to see the four different reproductions. By reason of space and technical demands on the Studio Theatre Yet An-Other could not be presented there but had to be re-placed, with my approval, to Studio 4. The setup originally decided did not work as efficiently in the latter space as in the former due to their different sizes. One thing that could have got around the problem would have been to make the performance space for the dancers slightly smaller, facilitating the movement of the spectators. Another could have been to have had a smaller amount of spectators attending the presentation. But the most crucial aspect why the spectators could not take in its potentiality was because the usher (letting the audience in) simply forgot to say to the spectators before entering that they could move around freely in space, rather than being in a fixed place. The other, less significant, aspect that resulted in the piece not presenting itself in its complete potential was the lighting. The light hit the edges of the projection which made the projected image slightly less clear, and lit up some of the audience space which ran the risk of restricting the spectator’s view as walking around. This problem would not have occurred in the Studio Theatre with its lighting rigs in the ceiling providing the ability to frame the space in a different, more sufficient way. But this technical hitch could also have been solved via an improved light setup in Studio 4. Due to these elements, especially the spacing and lack of spectators’ mobility, the documents got fixed in their position as supplements, as something less significant in 28

the performance. Something that the spectator could have been without for the experience of the performance. This spatial limitation confined the spectator’s choice to compare the different (and the difference in between the) copies and to discover its cracks and apertures. The documents clearly could have done more. The spectator was in the position to grasp “the open ended succession of relocating differences” to some extent as s/he could see at least two or three different reproductions and comparing their discrepancies. But, again, due to the performance not being presented in its full potential, s/he could not see all the reproductions and thus not appreciate the quantity that is the quality of the realm of reproduction.

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Appendix – The notation Flick right arm Travel Press right arm Head down (sustained) Step right foot Step left foot Head turn left (sudden) Bend left arm (sustained) Extend right arm (sustained) Turn Jump Travel in circle (sudden) Hands placed on hips Turn Still Press right arm Travel Still Turn right (sustained) Travel Turn Open right body-half Travel forward (sustained) Tilt upper body Travel (sudden) Extend both arms 30

Bend both knees Thrust left arm Off balance, regain equilibrium Travel backwards (sudden) Turn Bend both arms Open right body-half Travel (sudden) Close right body-half Right hand on chest Palm of right hand away from body Reach right hand up Two steps forward Glide left foot Right knee up (sudden) Glide right foot Left foot kick back Two turns Travel Three turns Off balance Travel Jump Bend both arms Hands on face Flick shoulders Travel (sudden) 31

Three steps back Left knee up (sudden) Still Travel Extend both arms Down to floor (sustained) Move both wrists (sustained) Head turn right Slash both arms Flick right arm Extend right arm Up from floor Flick right hand Left foot back Bend both knees (sudden) Two turns (sudden) Circle both arms Travel Jump Half turn Down to floor (catch with both hands) Bend upper body forward Upper body up Extend both arms Travel Close right arm (sudden) Open right arm (sudden) 32

Extend right arm Head down Extend left arm Bend left arm and both legs Extend left arm Turn Flick head from side to side Extend both index fingers Travel (sustained) Up from floor Bend both knees Turn Flick right arm Tilt right Circle hips Press chest forward Put hands together (sudden) Circle left arm Travel (floating) Still Extend left arm up Slash right arm Run (direct) Still Travel (sustained) Float right hand Travel backwards 33

Turn Jump Turn right (sustained) Travel while jumping Run Thrust both arms Thrust right arm Lift right leg Lift left arm Travel (sudden) Still Extend left arm Dab left arm three times Wring left arm Travel Fall to floor Turn (sustained) Get up from floor Tilt forward Jump Slash right arm Still Extend right arm Circle right arm twice Turn (sudden) Flick from side to side Right arm forward (sustained) 34

Travel (sudden) Turn Shake head Tilt forward Dab right arm Circle both lower arms Bend both legs Bend right arm Off balance Circle left leg Still Shift weight to right leg Shake head Bend left leg Bend left arm Tilt upper body forward Hands on knees Flick left arm Turn right Off balance Lift left leg Twist body Flick right hand Circle both lower arms Flick right arm Tilt upper body forward Hands on knees 35

Two small steps to the right Run Still Slash right arm Lift both arms (sudden) Extend both arms Bend right arm Two turns Travel Shift weight to left leg Turn right Flick left hand Flick left elbow Lift right arm (sudden) Extend right arm Slash right hand

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1

Reproduction No 1 performed by Genevieve Giron and Anne-Gaelle Thiriot, was presented two times at two different locations 31/7 2008 at Internationella Gatuteater Festivalen in Halmstad, Sweden. Reproduction No 2 by Lisen Gustafsson and Alexander Valencia 6/9 2008 at Kulturnatten in Halmstad, Sweden. Reproduction No 3 by Anne-Gaelle Thiriot and Dominika Willinek 15/9 2008 at DHRA, Cambridge University in Cambridge, UK. Yet An-Other (which this thesis places in context) by Lena Röttgers and Dominika Willinek 25/9 2008 at Laban in London, UK.

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