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  • Citational Poetics in Dance: . . . of a faun (fragments) by the Albrecht Knust Quartet, before and after 2000
  • Isabelle Launay (bio)
    Translated by Allegra Barlow and Mark Franko

How does one come to terms with the “already said” or the “already danced”? I ask this in light of the many instances where contemporary dance has insistently undertaken—as a condition of its own renewal—a critique of past works that have been transmitted through the oral tradition. This undoing of the oral tradition’s dominance has instantiated a new relation to the past in contemporary dance. Hannah Arendt throws some light on this process when she quotes Walter Benjamin, for whom modernity required that we find a different way of connecting with the past—one that would replace transmission with citationality. To cite, in speech act theory, as in dance, presupposes that the authority of the past be replaced with that disquieting ability of the past to infiltrate the present in a disembodied way (Arendt 1974, 291). The challenge of citation to the prestige of oral person-to-person transmission of a dance has introduced a new way for contemporary artists to relate to and re-embody past works.

The return to an earlier choreographic work in the French dance world of the early 1990s inevitably meant a head-on confrontation with modernist dogma: citation was formally forbidden. In the German Ausdruckstanz tradition, which has been highly influential on the contemporary field in France, dance was experienced and composed based on the idea of possession, so that revivals were impossible if the work was not an outright incarnation of a quasimagical nature. Mary Wigman, for instance, refused to teach others her solos. She lived and conceived her dancing as part of her vision of possession, according to which a movement could only be performed once (Launay 2009). Alive and active, a danced movement could not survive its original execution, and could only be “incarnated” by a single dancer. “Did the reason for this fear [stage fright each time she danced Dreh-Monotonie] lie in the realization that I would again surrender to dying one of those peculiarly unreal deaths which a work of art created by the dancing body demands of its performer?” (Wigman 1966, 38). Imaginary forces set in motion by dance possessed [End Page 49] the expressionist dancer, whether those forces originated in the power of the genius-as-creator or in ancestral, archaic sphere. At the beginning of the twentieth century, modern dance in Europe and the United States alike aligned itself with the modern regime of artistic and intellectual property, which played out on two levels: asserting (not without some difficulty) the same recognition and rights as other artists, while at the same time affirming the quasisacred dimension of their practices. In the mode of secular possession, the “presence” of the dancer was essentially a godless possession.

The identity of the work itself was hence ambivalent for modern dancers: if the danced experience was inseparable from, indeed, exiled in the body that had produced it through its own firsthand experience, the work could nevertheless never be entirely possessed by subjective consciousness. Had this been the case, it would not have been able to circulate, to be danced on different stages, to be transmitted to others, thus acquiring an exchange value. We remember how the American modern dancers were trailblazers—teaching, initiating, and recruiting dancers able to interpret their work. But outside of those closely guarded circuits, it was almost impossible for dancers to work with other companies. Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, José Limón, and even Merce Cunningham all created institutions that allowed them to ensure the production and distribution of their works. There were strict limitations on how their works could be shared.

We Are Dancing One Another1

The possibility of citing or quoting a dance did not first come about with the emergence of modern or postmodern dance; it was actually a vital aspect of nineteenth and twentieth century ballet. Ballet is doubtless the quintessential “intertextual” danced genre, to borrow a concept from literary studies. Interchoreographic games (using known compositional models, variations, outright plagiarism, and pastiche, but also a montage of citations...

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