Choreography as a Medium of Protest

A man stands alone on a square. Unmoving, his gaze is fixed on a building. Beside him is his backpack, which he has put down as if he is waiting for something that sometimes takes a while. Passersby look briefly around or do not even notice that something is going on here. But is anything actually going on? This seems unclear, even for the police, who appear on the scene after a while, because there is something suspicious to them about a man standing on the spot, not moving, apparently not doing anything. The police officers—all male—look at the unmoving man, touch him, look in his backpack, and don’t quite know what they should do now. Eventually, they move away again empty-handed. The man remains standing, unmoving, looking in one direction.

The situation described is probably easily recognizable as performer Erdem Gündüz’s Duran Adam (Standing Man) on Istanbul’s Taksim Square (June 2013). The reason for this act of standing, during which he looked toward the Atatürk Cultural Center, was the preceding political protests, occupations, and demonstrations surrounding the threatened Gezi Park, which was to be destroyed to make way for a shopping center. The police responded heavy-handedly and a ban on public gatherings was announced, including any kind of movement as part of a demonstration. Gündüz’s reaction was to organize the act of standing on the square. Because it was not forbidden for an individual to do this, his action undermined police regulations. Those whose job it was to enforce these regulations did not know how to deal appropriately with an act that was so fundamentally ordinary.

This raises the particular question of from when, or in which moment, a movement—in this case an everyday gesture, namely, standing and waiting—becomes political. Several clues may be drawn from this act. First, there is the length of the action, which exceeds that of a usual waiting situation, and yet, how long can a person wait while still functioning within the social framework of everyday gestures? How long is needed to convert an ordinary event in a public space into an unusual one? The question of temporality is therefore connected to that of space and, in this instance particularly, to the alternative use of public space as signified by the length of time for which it is used. Erdem Gündüz is, as already mentioned, a performer and choreographer, trained among other things in the methods of contemporary dance movement.¹ Here, I would suggest that artistic practice is migrating into temporary forms of political protest. Gündüz’s act could therefore be described as artistic, perhaps through the idea of the slowing or the stilling of movement, or the use of public space as a place of portrayal, as site-specific performance, if you will. The aspects of physical action and its production and performance in an urban place consequently denote and realize three over-lapping spheres: the artistic, the public everyday life, and the political. How and when these fields stray into the boundaries of the others is the subject of the following discussion.

Acts of Slowing Down

As a performer and choreographer, Gündüz principally makes use of established methods of contemporary dance, one being the process of deceleration, which for Gündüz ends in maintaining an almost motionless position in the location. André Lepecki sees not only the act of standing (apparently) still but also the mode of deceleration as a practice of contemporary dance that is bound up with a critique of representation. Using the example of choreographer Jérôme Bel, Lepecki formulates a “slower ontology” that is externally expressed through the stilling of movement (Lepecki 2006, 45, 57). A “deflation of movement” does not, however, represent a denial of dance as movement, placing this instead within the internal structure of the body itself, as in the piece Jérôme Bel (1995): “[Bel] deploys stillness and slowness to propose how movement is not only a question of kinetics, but also one of intensities, of generating...