Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (review)

What can philosophy do for dance? In broad strokes, Western philosophy seeks to universalize experience, to encourage rumination from one author's perspective that might offer insights of use to many. Dance, though, hopes to explore the particular gesture, the particular release of energy, the particular moment of possibility without desire for broad appeal. Odd bedfellows, philosophy and dance have spawned a tiny literature concerned with aspects of Western theatrical dance, explored in large part by men (Sparshott 1988 and 1995; Fancher and Myers 1981) and phenomenological approaches to body knowledge, largely offered up by women (Foster et al. 2005; Fraleigh 1996 and 2004; Sheets-Johnston 1966). Although a palpable line of gender divides the discussion, this constant emerges: Philosophy tends to push conversations around dance away from physical movement toward a space of contemplation, where bodies can become interchangeable, and, in many ways, irrelevant.

Theorist André Lepecki's project, crystallized in Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement and extended in recent TDR articles,¹ involves centering current European philosophical trends on analyses of Europeanist dance theatre artistry. Here, as in previous philosophical explorations of dance, readers will immediately note the dominant Europeanist tendency to universalize "the politics of movement" through a blankly heterosexualized masculine whiteness. Politics, in this volume, involves the recovery of poststructuralist analysis for the field of dance, such that the individuated spectator's position may be privileged above other possibilities, which might include group communion, spiritual wellness, holistic expression, or social justice, to name a few politically progressive lenses of analysis and practices absent from this study. Here, readers will encounter an enthusiastic embrace of the current cadre of philosophers writ large for performance studies scholars concerned with bodies as texts-Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan. Be warned: Lepecki offers no summary overviews of these various writers or their methodologies, and if you haven't read their work recently, you will not find your way through this volume. Following the lead set by most English-language translations of Martin Heidegger, the book trades in an aggressive resistance to literary clarity, one that requires several careful perusals in order to comprehend the perspective at hand. Simultaneously intriguing and confounding, this small book predicts the rise of Europeanist ideologies for dance studies in the United States, a bourgeois retreat into travel to dance festivals and art galleries as a standard of dance research,² and a displacement of progressive minoritarian performance practices for the sake of a new canon of (unmarked) white dance artistry.³

The book intrigues in its historical analysis of the terms of motion within modernity. An introductory chapter proposes that Western conceptions of choreography emerged as "a peculiar invention of early modernity, as a technology that creates a body disciplined to move according to the commands of writing" (6). Lepecki then rethinks how stillness in dance offers a way to foreground being in performance, a way to resist contemporary proclivities for constant motion effectively bound up with concepts of subjection and self-imprisonment. A goal in these analyses, then, might be to reopen a space for the consideration of modernity's ends; to consider how a body onstage in stillness could enable unexpected subjectivities in an open field of the future where bodies do something beside engage the melancholic.

In eight case-study analyses, Lepecki deploys divergent conceptual frames. A chapter "Masculinity, Solipsism, Choreography: Bruce Nauman, Juan Dominguez, Xavier Le Roy" explores white male creativity in terms of haunting and the "idiot," defined by Lepecki as "the isolated, self-contained one fantasizing subjectivity as an autonomously self-moving being" (33). In critiquing idiotic solipsism within the work of these artists, Lepecki reifies it as a valuable source of inspiration for contemporary choreographies: "Through the particular kind of intensely formless solipsism performed by Le Roy the dismantling of modernity's idiotic body and its replacement by a relational body renews choreography as practice for...