Who's There?--Community of the Question

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres?

Elizabeth Bishop, "Questions of Travel"¹

It used to be, in the clamorous sixties, when with all the enchantments of dissidence we were shattering language, abandoning texts, and going for broke with the body, or extolling body language, that dance was preferred to theatre, or at least the bourgeois theatre, burdened as it was with words—or the words, words, words that are, in their Hamletic disposition, an impediment to action. But if dance and theatre were sometimes merged or conflated, as in the tradition of Martha Graham, we have now seen a generation of choreographers, like Alain Platel in Belgium or Jéróme Bel in France, who merge them too, but with street arts or social action, or with a high-tech guerrilla strategy, on rooftops with satellite disks, as if in some radicalized extension of that other tradition, from the Judson Memorial Church, with its offbeat anti-aesthetic, during the years of the counterculture. The Judson was not especially political, and there were trained dancers there, like Yvonne Rainer or Trisha Brown, but in renouncing virtuosity, mere dance, in favor of "found" movement or task-directed events, there was another kind of activism, which might change the site of performance or the spectator's relation to it—and sometimes in public spaces, where if there was anything like a public, they'd have sure been surprised to see it. Thus, if in the church itself they might have performers upside down on a ceiling or, in autistic slow motion, crawling on a floor, they might elsewhere in the city have them in a spidery web (with rather tenuous ropes) coming down from the top of a building. In their affinities, meanwhile, with new music, Cage's silence, Rauschenberg's collage, and the interplay of performance with all the visual arts, the Judson choreographers initiated still other ideas: exploring everyday movement, the gestures of eating or dressing, with barely a humming sound; and in the relation of movement and time, testing the viewer's endurance, as in a matrix of no-time, monotonic at long duration, with the boredom as conceptual; or, breathtaking, breath-catching, the sonic propelling motion, as if danced on the vocal tract. Such ideas were taken up by or inseparable from alternative modes of theatre that, with rock music and blue jeans, soon came over to Europe—along with the Living's rabid politics which disrupted the vacationing public at the Avignon Festival.

But here there was a difference, with a certain resonance still. While Judson dance had, inarguably, a major formative impact on companies abroad, especially in France, there was a minimalist/conceptualist side to it, about which—whenever a politics surfaced, long after May '68—there were unavoidably mixed feelings, and then renunciation, to the degree it remained abstract. So it was in Great Britain, with Lloyd Newson's choreography for the DV8 Physical Theatre, which (in its deviations) abjures abstract movement in favor of the narrativizing body, because of its presumed necessity for the engagement of social issues, as well as those on the margin ignored by established culture. Meanwhile, if there's been a return to narrative, there is still, with degrees of vocalization, the dubious status of words. And taking that on as an issue—as we've seen recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, by way of the National Theatre in London—there is the choreography of that latecomer to dance, given to storytelling, the outspoken Matthew Bourne. Or perhaps I should say bespoken, for his Play without Words—a retelling of Harold Pinter's script for Joseph Losey's movie The Servant—is not only an East End cockney's view of oppressive class distinctions, but impelled by the notion that dance is what the politics of deconstruction used to say of the theatre, with its dramaturgical dialogue or familiar garrulous plots, that it is elitist and hierarchical, reproducing bourgeois value and its system of representation.

If that has become something of a litany in theory, the fact...