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32. Rates of Exchange
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[32] rates of Exchange Movement (R)evolution conference, University of Florida, Spring 2004. on January 18, 2004, my father died. i begin this essay by evoking his death, not in order to gain sympathy, nor even to create a personal and rhetorical bridge to the question of burial in Antigone, but rather to provoke a reflection on the limits of visibility. As anyone who has ever lost an important figure in their life knows, the shock of someone’s absence draws out the ironic reiteration of that person’s presence. We mourn the physical loss at the same time that we sense an invisible companionship. We bury the dead, and create a myth of their life, weaving the traces of their existence into an epic tapestry of influence and inspiration such that he who is no longer visible lives on in us. Corporeality also exceeds the visible. Dancers know this. Although we base our work in the material conditions of the body, we are not limited by them. Expressivity requires an engagement beyond the pedestrian and with the ephemeral. From the skin into the soul. our willingness to work at the edge of what Marcia Siegel called “the vanishing point” gives us an interesting perspective on the temporality of existence. And identity. Movement quickly becomes a metaphor for everything that does not stand still, including life itself. Perhaps, this is why death calls forth dancing—it leads us beyond the visible world. Contemporary dancing, because it carries the intriguing possibility of being both very abstract and literal, can frame a dancer’s cultural identity differently. if we look at examples from a variety of choreographers, we can document the libratory possibilities of movement forms in which the lived body slips in and out of cultural stereotypes. Some contemporary choreography (such as Bill T. Jones’s latest formal work) focuses the audience’s attention on the highly kinetic physicality of dancing bodies, minimizing the cultural differences between dancers by highlighting their common physical technique and ability to complete the often strenuous movement tasks. other dances (such as those by the all-female troupe Urban Bush Women) foreground the social markings of identity on the body, using movement and text to comment on the cultural meanings of those bodily markers. By foregrounding the way that identity is figured corporeally, by challenging which bodies are allowed which identities, and by fracturing the voyeuristic 322 occasional pieces relationship between audience and performer, contemporary dance can help us see bodies differently. in 1993, Mathilde Monnier made a dance about death and loss, about social repression and individual agency. She chose a cast of five African dancers and five Anglo-European dancers, inaugurating another chapter in the ongoing saga of colonial exchange. With the myth of Antigone as the meeting place for two very different movement styles, two very different cultures , and two very different kinds of resources and access, Monnier made a dance. The story of this coming together is told by one of the dancers, Seydou Boro in his documentary 2004 film, La Rencontre. But the implication of this retelling calls up very different meanings than did the live performance as i first witnessed it in 1999. This essay, then, reviews these discrepancies between the performance and the film order to try and flesh out what is made visible and what is left unseen in this contemporary vision of intercultural sharing. i realize, of course, the irony of beginning a talk about the limits of the visible immediately following a film that seeks precisely to make visible an encounter between artists from different cultures. Although they were once referred to as “moving pictures,” let us not forget that films have radically different agendas than dances. Movement eludes the gaze of the camera, rendering meaning more fluid. By virtue of the editorial selection, film tends to stabilize meaning, in/stilling a dominant narrative. La Rencontre is framed by two questions and their answers. These questions —Does contemporary dance have any meaning in Africa? is there a future for contemporary dance on a continent where dance still has so many religious and secular connotations?—are voiced over an image of a long, thin shadow moving slowly through a variety of giacometti-like poses. The figure, we later realize, is Mathilde Monnier, and it is her work in Africa that references the definition of “contemporary” used throughout the film. The core of the film charts the creation and remounting of Pour Antigone. in long and medium shots...