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  • Performance Geometries—A Primer
  • Ryan Anthony Hatch (bio)
Crossing the Line Festival, presented by the French Institute Alliance Française, New York City, September 14-October 14, 2012.

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Habit, conceived and directed by David Levine. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. Courtesy French Institute Alliance Française.

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The stage is the line which stands across the path of the optic pencil, tracing at once the point at which it is brought to a stop and, as it were, the threshold of its ramification.

Roland Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein"

I: Lines

With a name like Crossing the Line, it should come as little surprise that the annual performance festival presented by the French Institute Alliance Française (fi:af) is committed above all to interdisciplinarity. Its name invokes a decidedly subversive vision of contemporary performance as transgressing boundaries of form, medium, and institution. These lines are drawn as laws begging to be broken, and the act of crossing them is tacitly held up not only as the key to aesthetic novelty, but also as part of what the curatorial team behind CTL considers the "vital role artists play as critical thinkers and catalysts for social evolution." But considering how widespread it has become, it is no longer clear whether interdisciplinarity as such is subversive in any real sense. Behold: today, theatre's mise-en-scène is often saturated with screens and structured via the language of cinema, as in Hot Box, Brian Rogers's claustrophobic, seductive video/performance piece. In dance, the Tanztheater aesthetic continues to dominate the field—a fact to which Raimund Hoghe's Pas de Deux, Jack Ferver's Mon Ma Mes, and Faustin Linyekula's Le Cargo, all bear dramatic witness. And in the gallery art world, immaterial happenings that engage the beholder in immersive experiences and leave little or no trace are pushing visual art to the outer limit of theatrical ephemerality, a limit point on which David Levine has staked the better part of his career. Even a cursory survey demonstrates that mixing media and blurring distinctions has for some time now been the order of the day. The problem one now faces is thus how, barring a plainly and simply conservative retreat to the old categorical divisions, to provoke an actually novel disruption within what Jacques Rancière has termed "the regime of the sensible," at a time when "cross the line!" has come to sound like the kind of conventional [End Page 54] injunction it was initially intended to undermine.

Across the board, and in a variety of ways, this year's festival registered this dilemma. Notably, many of the works it presented bore witness to an exhaustion with interdisciplinarity's supposed subversive power, suggesting this approach may be nearing a serious, if not terminal, impasse. Where it was not just taken for granted, line-crossing tended to work best as an oblique way to examine the qualities and capacities specific to a given medium. In Danza Permanente, for example, Brooklyn- and Paris-based choreographer DD Dorvillier, in collaboration with composer Zeena Parkins, set a dance piece not to Beethoven's late string quartet Opus 132 in A minor, but rather as it. That is, Dorvillier took Beethoven's score, rather than a performance of it, and built a choreographic language on the basis of its sequence of notations.

What is remarkable about this experiment is linked to the fact that the transposition didn't actually work, in the sense that the austere, complex dance I saw before me failed to convey the musicality of the quartet. In Dorvillier's work, one hears as much of Beethoven's music as Beethoven did. But this is not at all to say that the piece failed as dance. On the contrary (pace Alastair Macaulay's misguided Times review), Danza Permanente's construction via a "foreign language" generated a singular, idiosyncratic approach to the geometrics of choreography. Its attempt and failure to "be" music had the purifying effect of freeing it from the relation of interpretive servitude to music to which nearly all dance is still bound. This made for a particularly instructive (and beautiful) meditation on what...

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