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  • Incessant Daily NegotiationsBill T. Jones's Floating the Tongue
  • Barbara Browning (bio)

When Jacques Derrida died a couple of months ago, I thought I'd like to reflect on what that particular loss might mean to both dance practitioners and scholars. Wondering if others were asking the same question, I Googled "derrida dance." Several sites popped up announcing that someone or another was "dancing on Derrida's grave." I suspect that there's nothing he'd like better than to have his death marked with a dance, but unfortunately the reason for all that dancing was somewhat more insidious. In the days following his passing, there was a nearly audible sigh of relief from some corners, including the New York Times obituary, which chose to highlight the much-vaunted "difficulty" of his writing, ostensibly to the detriment of his engagement with the realpolitik (Kandell 2004:1). It seemed that this relief was based on the assumption that, with Derrida gone, we would no longer have to deal with a world sometimes disconcertingly complex and self-contradictory. Derrida was a subtle textual and political dancer who understood the movement in stillness, and the significance of microscopic shifts and tremors. Dancing this dance didn't mean complacency or political disengagement, but helped us to see the grace in gestures of care and attention—as well as in self-scrutiny.

Dancers love to cite an interview published in 1982 under the title "Choreographies" which opens with a citation from Emma Goldman:"If I cannot dance, I will not be part of your revolution" (66). Derrida plumbs the statement for insight not only into the revolutionary possibilities of Goldman's free-spirited resistance to any restrictive choreography of her gender and sexuality within her struggle for political enfranchisement, but further, for a strategy for what he calls the "incessant, daily negotiation—individual or not—sometimes microscopic, sometimes punctuated by a poker-like gamble, always deprived of insurance, whether it be in private life or institutions" (1982:66). Goldman's dance with politics provides a model for Derrida's own textual dance in his philosophical writings, where he, too, improvises incessant, subtle negotiations. Part of that dance entailed recognizing that simple binaristic oppositions—whether between text and body, man and woman, or good and evil—are never as simple as they seem. I need hardly point out that in the political moment in which we find ourselves it is both challenging and urgent to insist on such a resistant choreography.

If Derrida helped us to understand the dance in the text, Bill T. Jones has correspondingly helped us to see the text in the dancing body. Jones has inscribed, through dance, some of the most indelible traces of a belief in the creative, politicized [End Page 87] gesture toward caring and nonviolence. He also came to this choreography through attentiveness to subtle negotiations.


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Bill T. Jones's Floating the Tongue, performed by Leah Cox at the Kitchen in September 2003.The piece was originally performed in 1978 by Jones for the Kent School for Boys. (Photo © Julieta Cervantes; courtesy of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company)

Despite the eloquence of his own published texts and interviews, Jones has long been ambivalent about writing. He often articulates this ambivalence in relation to critical writing about his work. The notorious Croce article certainly manifested the extreme, violent potential of such writing, but even positive responses have provoked in him an anxiety that threatened to become paralyzing. In Last Night on Earth, Jones remembers telling his sister's partner, a writer, "that I wasn't interested in writing because too much had already been written, that library shelves were overburdened with dusty unread books" (1995:151). This memory is followed by the glum admission that as he and Arnie Zane began to attract critical attention, they found themselves, despite themselves, desiring to be written about. Yet even documentation nettled Jones:"They were writing our dance down, transferring it to microfilm, discussing it on panels, thumbs up, thumbs down" (150).

But more interesting are Jones's reflections on the role...

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