Choreography as Apparatus of Capture

Shifting between critical theory and the dancing body, philosophies of movement and choreographic motion, this series asks how the mutual interrogation of dance and philosophy might affect or recompose another agency for both disciplines. (From left) Juliette Mapp, Miguel Gutierrez, and Jeanine Durning in Deborah Hay's O, O, St. Mark's Church, New York City, January 2006.

(from the video by Peter Richards)

The first two essays published in this second installment of TDR's "Dance and Philosophy" series have in common the philosophical probing of the deep relationship between dance and time. This relationship could be said to be constitutive of Western theatrical dance—that is to say, of a dance that, by the end of the 16th century, starts moving increasingly within the mechanisms of something called the choreographic. Indeed, as dance falls prey to that true "apparatus of capture" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:424-73) known as choreography, its questions become: How does one create a body that may answer adequately—both kinetically and perceptively—to movement, if movement is, in itself, the imperceptible? If movement-as-the-imperceptible is what leads the dancing body into becoming an endless series of formal dissolutions, how can one account for that which endures in dance? How does one make dance stay around, or create an economy of perception aimed specifically at its passing away?

The choreographic is already the field defined by all of these questions. And this field makes choreography not only a discipline or technology of the body, not only a mode of composition, not only a register, or archive—but an apparatus. To conceive choreography as an apparatus is to see it as a mechanism that simultaneously distributes and organizes dance's relationship to perception and signification. For it is precisely this kind of organization of the perceptive-linguistic field that apparatuses perform. As Gilles Deleuze explains Michel Foucault's major contribution to a political theory of signification, the concept of apparatus is one that foregrounds perception as always tied to modes of power that distribute and assign to things visibility or invisibility, significance or insignificance. According to Deleuze, Foucault's discovery is that "each apparatus has its regimen of light, the way it falls, softens and spreads, distributing the visible and the invisible, generating or eliminating an object, which cannot exist without it" (2006:339).

To see choreography as an apparatus—moreover, to see it as an apparatus that captures dance only to distribute its significations and mobilizations, its gestures and affects, within fields of light and fields of words that are strictly codified—is to delimit those hegemonic modes of aesthetically perceiving and theoretically accounting for dance's evolutions in time. The casting of dance as ephemeral, and the casting of that ephemerality as problematic, is already the temporal enframing of dance by the choreographic.

Two vectors open up at this point. We could think of dance's relationship to temporality on an immanent level—and thus our research would take us to an exploration "from within" of what would be the "time of the dance." Or, we could think of how dance relates to an experience of time that is extrinsic to it—and thus, our research would take us toward an investigation of how dance enters into relation with other modes of temporality with which it is also contemporaneous.

In a way, the following essays by Frédéric Pouillaude and Paula Caspão each follow one of these vectors. Caspão's "Stroboscopic Stutter: on the not-yet-captured ontological condition of limit-attractions" probes dance's relationship to temporality by engaging in a deep critique of "the trope of dance and its performance as vanishing present bodies" (142). As for Pouillaude's "Scène and Contemporaneity," the interrogation is about knowing how the term "contemporary," understood as a trope, already sets up a "scène" (perceptual, linguistic, theoretical, even choreographic) where dance rehearses and performs particular modes of appearing-to-belong to "our" time. Thus, in very different ways, both essays propose the need to create, or at least map out, escape...