Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance by Bojana Cvejić (review)

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the term “conceptual dance” began to filter throughout the dance world. As a young dancer in New York City during this period, I sensed that this act of naming contributed to defining a certain degree of distance (geographic, historical) and difference (aesthetic, cultural) between the North American and Western European scenes. While employed predominately by curators and presenters (less so by the artists themselves), the invention of conceptual dance has created an enduring aesthetic umbrella. A performative assertion, “conceptual dance” maps choreography along the historically significant yet potentially obscure sightlines of the “contemporary.” The contemporary can be interpreted as twofold: a fluid term, affirming that every age experiences its own version of the contemporary, or, alternately, strictly historical, demarcating movements following modernism and situated post-1989, which includes the aesthetic, political effects following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of globalization. Across this temporally specific lens, questions persist about what factors constitute the aesthetic, political, or philosophical markers of contemporary dance (Alberro 2009, 55; see also Harvey 2003, 2005; Hochmuth, Kruschkova, and Schöllhammer 2006; Meyer 2013). This is where performance theorist, maker, and dramaturg Bojana Cvejić’s Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance begins, offering a critical examination of contemporary European choreography at the turn of the twenty-first century, and articulating its philosophical impact through the work of a select group of choreographers deemed pivotal in what has loosely and debatably been designated as “conceptual dance.”

Also referred to as “non-dance” or “anti-dance,” the “conceptual” choreographic turn has been associated with 1960s conceptual and minimalist art movements’ investments in the dematerialization of the art object, implicit self-reflexivity, and a critique of representation. But this assessment proves tricky, as those once deemed “minimalist,” the artists most often associated with the movement (such as Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, La Ribot, and Vera Mantero), are not responsible for instigating the widespread use of this term. Their work spans a broad aesthetic, methodological, and theatrical territory that defies neat placement into a single rubric (see Lepecki 2006). At the risk of reductionism, this “conceptual” turn infers an avid intellectualism, implying a dissolution of dance’s physicality, bodily labor, and “performative presence,” polarizing thought and action and re-enforcing oppositions between theory and practice (Burt 2004).

As a point of entry, Cvejić is not invested in a recuperation of this supposed “turn.” Arguing against the formal content of these associations, she directs us toward philosophy, exploding this historically confusing term through her theorization of “expressive concepts,” delving into Gilles Deleuze and his writings on Baruch Spinoza, whose contributions remain essential to dance and performance as a philosophy grounded in the body. Deleuze’s writings on Spinoza have greatly impacted the work of performance and dance makers. Quoting Spinoza, this oft-repeated statement, “we do not even know what a body can do,” invariably opens up a space for questions, experimentation, and radicality (Deleuze 1988, 17–18). Shifting from art historical to philosophical canons, Cvejić critically engages Deleuze’s philosophy of problems, ideas, and concepts (also read through the writings of Henri Bergson) and, with a virtuosic dramaturgical move, positions Western philosophic thought into alignment with this moment in Western European choreography and performance. Through detailed description, Cvejić provides insight into seven significant works made between the years 1998 and 2007: Self Unfinished and Untitled by Xavier Le Roy, Weak Dance Strong Questions by Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema, éâtre-elévision by Boris Charmatz, Nvsbl by Eszter Salamon, 50/50 by Mette Ingvartsen, and It’s in the Air by Ingvartsen and Jefta van Dinther. Illustrating how these pieces “merit philosophical attention,” she demonstrates how they break with conventions of modern and postmodern dance through their distinct “method of creation by way of problem-posing” that temporally unfold within and across the...