Dancing the Animal to Open the Human: For a New Poetics of Locomotion

Photo 1.

Dancers: Michael Cole (center front) and members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in “Beach Birds” (1991). Photo by Michael O’Neill.

Animals have provided a theme and a model for movements in dance from time immemorial. But what image of man do danced animal portrayals reflect? What questions of human identity and crisis do they reveal? Do the bodies of animals provide symbolic material for the ethical, political, and aesthetic questions raised by man’s mastery of nature?

The exploration of the boundary between man and animal—in myths and sagas, in the earliest records of ritual and art, and in the history of knowledge—is part of the great nature-versus-nurture debate. In the Bible the relationship is clear: Adam, made in the image of God, gives the animals in Paradise their names. In this way he rules over them—but Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on this biblical text makes clear that the act of naming animals in Paradise is a step toward man’s experiential self-discovery. Since then the hierarchy seems to be beyond doubt. Homo sapien, as the animal significans, is distinguished from other animals by his ability to speak, his upright gait, the use of his hands, and the capacity to use instruments and media—man as what Sigmund Freud called the “prosthetic god” (1966, 44). Philosophers and scientists explore the differences and the similarities between man and animal in order to determine what is specifically human. According to Hegel, man is the animal that knows it is an animal and is consequently able to transcend the animal sphere (1967, 706). Idealist philosophers have used this metaphor to describe man’s self-reflection and knowledge of his own finiteness. For their part, scientists and artists are interested in the manifestations of the relationship between animal and man: on the one hand, in the human in the animal—in the countless images and myths of anthropomorphic animals and hybrids that are half-animal, half-human; and on the other, in the animal in man—the consequent humbling of human arrogance by Darwin, since whom behavioral research and genetic biology have reduced in equal measure the gulf between man and animal in evolutionary history (99 percent of the genomes of humans and chimpanzees are identical). Our Inner Ape is the title of a recent book by behavioral scientist Frans de Waal (2005), who engages in primate research.

The current topical debate on animals and the limits of the human is of importance as much to the theory of knowledge as for its political, ethical, or critical implications. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben sees in it a “fundamental metaphysico-political operation in which alone something like ‘man’ can be decided upon and produced” (2004, 21), since the decisive conflict in our Western culture is the human-animal divide. It is a conflict that drives the management and utilization of life by means of biopolitical strategies. Through his engagement with Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, Agamben inquires into the “human element” in view of the caesura between man and animal, between body and soul and logos in the tradition of Western thought:

What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work in these divisions, to ask in what way—within man—has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on socalled human rights and values.

(2004, 16)

An opposite perspective is adopted by historians of science who see the boundary between man and animal not as determined by man’s arrogance and power over animals but rather, in the terms of Arnold Gehlen’s anthropological view of homo sapiens, as a homo inermis (inermis defined as unarmed, defenseless)—that is, a being that makes use of cultural and media techniques to compensate for what nature has denied him. Thus, science looks at...