Are We Human, or Are We Dancer?

The Extent to Which, co-conceived by Daria Fain and Robert Kocik, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, New York, December 9–December 14, 2008.

Inheritance is already being forced to respond to our works. May poetry determine phenotype! Poetry doesn’t ask why two white rabbits don’t produce a red rabbit but why two white rabbits don’t produce a putto.

Robert Kocik, Overcoming Fitness

The first image I remember of Daria Fain and Robert Kocik’s work is from their 2005 collaboration, Germ. It is of a series of bodies hunched over on a floor, undulating together, becoming something other than mere human bodies—mere mortals. In a sense, all successful dance attains the non-human. More than any other art, with perhaps the exception of poetry, dance seeks a transcendental condition of the human body within immanence. As Kocik’s 2001 book, Overcoming Fitness, recognized, notions of the non-human and/or immortal have become complicated by the discovery of the human genome, a discovery that threatens to essentialize (pro)creativity, and in turn gives way to a host of ethical and metaphysical problems about how life should be determined, as well as who should determine it.

For Fain and Kocik, the right to determine genetic material should be left to poets, artists, and other sensitive, creative people. As such, they are the unacknowledged geneticists of the world. In Germ, Fain and Kocik continued their attacks upon a genetic essentialism which not only discriminates among human beings (and therefore upholds various bad isms of our culture), but also human, animal, and (in)organic life as they depend on one another. The germ becomes that which, via mutation, can leap over whole species in a single bound, therefore acting as a kind of wild card among the larger phylum. But the real germ of Fain’s and Kocik’s collaborative work of course is the aesthetic itself, as aesthetic phenomena may shape and alter genetic material. As Kocik pronounces in Overcoming Fitness, “May poetry determine phenotype!” By determining phenotype, poetry and art determine life itself; “nature” and “nurture” (pseudonyms for the real and the imaginary) are no longer mutually exclusive, but contingent upon one another.

Opposed to genetic or creative essentialism (an essentialism of potentia in Aristotle’s sense of this term), Fain and Kocik appropriate cross-cultural practices that may (re)activate creative energies. Near the end of Germ, for one example, the dancers recite a choral “round.” In the course of this recitation, one feels both an accumulative and incantatory effect of language, as well as the sense the language is changing—mutating, if you will. While the form of the round originates in thirteen-century Gregorian chant, and is distant from our present as such (at least chronologically), the round becomes appropriate through Fain’s and Kocik’s work, which seeks to effect phenotypic alteration and transmission through the inheritance and invention of forms.

More recent works by the two proceed in a similar fashion, appropriating given cultural forms towards invention and transformation. In the summer of 2007 they traveled through the Greek countryside in search of Asklepions, ancient spas where patients once slept and told their dreams to priest-physicians upon waking in order to obtain diagnoses for what ailed them. Since their pilgrimage, Fain and Kocik have proposed building a series of Asklepions for the purpose of therapy and healing. Additionally, this past spring, the collaborators set up shop in the basement of a Wall Street bank, where they constructed an abbaton—a chamber also of ancient Greek origins where one can withdraw in order to rest, sleep, and attend to inner states. During the hours I spent in their Abbaton last spring, I felt intense sensations of timelessness and a greater attention to my circulatory system; I also experienced a series of eidetic images, those formed without external stimulus, by the brain alone.

Fain and Kocik’s latest project, The Extent To Which, issues from an ongoing collaborative project called The Prosodic Body. The name “Prosodic Body” originates from the belief of the two artists that all activity extends...