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Incalculable Choreographies In thefall of 10,0,1, Canadian dancer Mane Chomnard came to Oberhn with her company toperform and teach. While I had seen herperform and had interviewed her about her worl^, this was my first opportunity actually to dance with her. The experience of taking her workshop inspired me to try to include another—more bodily—source of writing within this chapter on her solo choreography. Scattered throughout this discussion of sexual difference in writing and dancing are italicized passages of personal writing that are meant to wash over the readers, releasing them momentarily from the academicproseof my intellectual arguments. Yet this whispering voice—which evokesmy physical responses to dancing, to writing, to my pregnant body, as well asthe moments ofChouinard's performances that haunted my imagination—engages the same issues of writing, desire, and the body, albeit in a different manner. Although the sudden appearance of thesepassages may strike the reader as ratherquixotic, this other voiceenactsmany of the theoreticalmoves I make in this chapter. By partnering Chouinard's dances with the performative writings ofHelene Cixous and Jacques Derrida, I bring dancing and writing face toface. Then too, I ask you, what kind of a dance would there be, or would there be one at all, if the sexes were not exchanged according to rhythms that vary considerably? In a quite rigorous sense, the exchange alone could not suffice either, however,because the desire to escape the combinatory itself, to invent incalculable choreographies, would remain. —Jacques Derrida 94 C H O R E O G R A P H I N G D I F F E R E N C E And then if I spoke about a person whom I met and who shook me up, herself being moved and I moved to see her moved, and she, feeling me moved, being moved in turn, and whether this person is a she and a he and a he and a she and a shehe and a heshe, I want to be able not to lie, I don't want to stop her if she trances, I want him, I want her, I will follow her. —HeleneCixous As a dancer and feminist scholar, I am intrigued by these two visions of writing in which sexual identity takes on a certain fluidity of movement. By weaving the language of movement and referencesto dance throughout their discussions of sexual difference and identity,Jacques Dernda and Helcne Cixous point to the theoretical possibilities of a form of communication predicated on the instabilityof the body and the resultant displacement of meaning. In this chapter, I want to extend the implicationsof Dernda's and Cixous's interest in movement and writing by including another kind of text—that written by and on the live dancing body of contemporary Canadian performer Marie Chouinard.' For live performance, because it comes through the body, but is not only of the body, can problematize theories of meaning and sexual difference in powerful ways. Learning how to read that body in an attempt to understand all the conflicting layers of meaning in physicalmotion is a complex task that requires an awareness of the kinesthetic as well as the visual and intellectual implications of dance. I am placing Chouinard's physical choreography (specifically Marie Chien Noir, S.T.A.B., and La Faune) in the midst of Cixous's and Dernda's theoretical "dances" in order to address what I feel isfrequently absent from contemporary theory—an awareness of the material consequences of the live performing body. This desire to consider the physical body does not stem from a naive belief in a "natural" or even a "biological" body—quite the contrary. Clearly cultural values resonate throughout the bodies that constitute them, and often these structures are physically internalized and thus rendered as "essential" elements of human nature. Dancers, however, can consciouslyengage in a physical training that seeks to resist oppressive ideologies concerning women and their bodies in performance, effectively challenging the terms of their own representation. Because dance is at once social and personal, internal and external , a dancer can both embody and explode gendered images of the body— simultaneously registering, creating, and subverting cultural conventions. When Marie Chouinard literally (by taking on the phallus) and figuratively appropriates Nijinsky's body in her interpretation of his dancing, for instance, she opens the question of what it means to be a man by refusing to stay in the role of a woman. By making us aware of her...

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