The Romance of Monsters: Theorizing the Virtuoso Body

When ideals turn out to fail as objects of belief and models of legitimation, the demands of cathexis are not disarmed; they take as their object the manner of representing those ideals.

--J. F. Lyotard, Postmodern Fables (235)

Problems of rendering dance discursive are both legion and the object of intense theorizing in performance studies. ¹ As Susan Leigh Foster observes in her introduction to Choreographing History:

How to write a history of this bodily writing, this body we can only know through its writing. How to discover what it has done and then describe its actions in words. Impossible. Too wild, too chaotic, too insignificant. Vanished, disappeared, evaporated into thinnest air, the body's habits and idiosyncrasies, even the practices that codify and regiment it, leave only the most disparate residual traces. (original italics and boldface 4)

In part, this essay addresses what I call this "difference, presence, absence" problem. But I am also concerned with a very specific representational issue, one made all the more salient by my nearly ten-year involvement with the dancers about whom I write.

In the summer of 1988, my first in Los Angeles, I took classes in Body Weather movement from Roxanne Steinberg and her colleague Melinda Ring. ² Intrigued by the movement vocabulary and choreography, I extended this experience into a decade-long ethnographic relationship. When Steinberg married Naoyuki Oguri, I followed the work of all three as an ethnographer and critic. ³ Eventually, Ring, and Steinberg and Oguri, went their separate ways, in part, because Oguri, unlike Ring, was interested in forming a company of dancers from the group who had regularly attended the Body Weather Laboratory. Founded in 1993, the new company Renzoku ("Continuum") included Boaz Barkan, Jamie Burris, Dona Leonard, and Steinberg. The company, housed in La Boca/The Sunshine Mission, now performs regularly in a wide range of venues in Los Angeles and internationally.

Steinberg has told me that she and Oguri formed the company out of what they called a strange obligation, an unpeaceful obligation, because they took it seriously when a member of their audience told them that she never came in with a problem their dances couldn't solve. I find this ironic because I never came in with a discursive, representational solution that their ensemble dances couldn't make problematic.

The issue is this: Oguri overwhelms the ensemble. His body, his movement vocabulary, his ethos are almost excessively present. He is always almost too much there and not, or not only, because of the choreography or mise-en-scène. Whatever the other dancers onstage are doing, I can't look at them, only at Oguri. He becomes Renzoku redux, the central synecdoche at the heart of every performance. Without any intention on his part, indeed despite his work to the contrary, he is the Nureyev; with the exception of Steinberg who is nearer his equal, the other company members are the corps. He is just--better. How is he better, and what is it he is better at, and how can I represent how and why? And in the search for these representational strategies, I lost him.

I lost Oguri discursively in the transposition of "the moved" to "the written" (Foster 9) because the standard vocabularies used to capture his difference are no longer trustworthy. These standard yet untrustworthy vocabularies "provide us with a way of identifying the typical 'plots' which histories of bodies are destined to inhabit" (White 230). In cases of exceptional performing bodies, these plots include heroism, mastery, talent--all those tales of autonomous artistic prowess that, though no longer credible or persuasive, seem at least useful, at least more useful than embracing the absence of the performer's body. Other critics who write about Oguri's work have certainly found them so. In local reviews of his work, they both identify his qualitative difference from other members of the company and supply what White might call the "typical 'plot'" to...