Mutant Enunciations

Abstract

The articles in this first installment of a series on choreography that considers the relationship between philosophy and dance interrogate conceptions of the body, movement, and language. Translated for the first time into English, the selection by José Gil reads the dancing body as paradoxical through the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; and the chapter by Peter Sloterdijk examines modernity's impulse toward movement and posits a critical theory of mobilization. An interview with choreographer Hooman Sharifi accompanies a meditation on his recent performance.

Shifting between critical theory and the dancing body, philosophies of movement and choreographic motion, this series asks how the mutual interrogation of dance and philosophy might affect or re-compose another agency for both disciplines. Anne Mousselet in the film version of Rosas danst Rosas (1997), directed by Thierry De Mey, with choreography by Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker. (©1997 Rosas; courtesy of Rosas Press and Promotion)

With this issue, we begin a series dedicated to contemporary dance and critical dance studies. Through three installments, this dance-focused series will feature: a review of a recent work by a young choreographer; an interview with each of the reviewed choreographers; and two theoretical essays written by non-U.S.-based authors. Behind this format lies the desire to place emerging artistic creators side by side with new critical voices, while framing both within the many theoretical and critical debates on performance featured in TDR. But there is also another desire behind this project: introducing to the vastly U.S.-dominated field of dance studies other voices and theoretical perspectives on dance—voices and perspectives coming from countries and traditions with little or no exposure in the U.S. (or in the Anglophone world)—and particularly with little or no exposure in the current canon of dance studies in the U.S. (or Anglophone) academy. The desire is to openly promote an intercultural, interdisciplinary, international exchange of dance theories.

While the choice of the interviewed choreographers, of their reviewed choreographic pieces, and of their reviewers will be somewhat dependent upon the serendipities of the performance calendar, the theoretical essays are concerned with a very determined privileging of authors working specifically at the intersection between dance and philosophy. But why the privileging of philosophy—such a suspiciously apathetic discipline—when discussing dance? What does philosophy have to do with dance? And how does the intimate entanglement of dance and philosophy, two disciplines attempting to reverse perceptions and accusations of disengagement, propose a politics of movement through their dialogic relationship?

In a way, I am hoping that the two essays that open the series answer (if only provisionally) these questions. The reader will notice that they are very different essays, and that each frames dance in a very different way. I am not even sure that the essays "complement" each other (although I do think that they create productive dissonances when placed side by side). But I am certain that both allow for a generative recasting of dance as a cultural, political, and artistic practice at two major levels: the level of "the body" (José Gil's "Paradoxical Body") and the level of "movement" (Peter Sloterdijk's "Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of Self-Intensification").

What does each essay do when setting forth its arguments? And particularly, what does each essay do for dance studies, when setting forth its arguments?

Without wanting to narrow the immense possibilities or readings within each essay, I would like to retain two major notions from each. From José Gil's essay, I would like to retain the notion of a practical philosophy—a notion that the Portuguese philosopher draws from his close contact with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and his close contact with the contemporary European dance scene. What would be a practical philosophy for dancers? For Gil, the answer lies in the mystery he identifies as one left by the two French philosophers and collaborators in their joint work A Thousand Plateaus ([1980] 1987). In a famous chapter of this book titled "How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs," Deleuze and...