Play Dead: Dance, Museums, and the “Time-Based Arts”

A “Musée de la danse/Dancing museum,” announced by Boris Charmatz in 2009 as the new identity of the Rennes National Choreography Center he was about to direct, sent a signal both to the institutional world and to dance culture. A museum by artists: this is how one might sum up this movement in favor of a program of artistic transmission that also calls itself a conceptual project, that is able to understand dance within “a historical space.” What the choreographer expresses is a desire for an end to cultural compartmentalization as regards both practice and references, a spirit of experimentation, and a fierce resistance to frameworks of preconceived institutional ideas. The vigorous statements of Charmatz’s “Manifesto for a Dancing Museum,” which are often quoted, evoke various commonplaces so as to demolish them. “We are at a time in history where a museum in no way excludes precarious movements, nor nomadic, ephemeral, instantaneous ones. We are at a time in history where a museum can modify BOTH preconceived ideas about museums AND one’s ideas about dance” (Charmatz 2009, 3). Indeed, to suggest that dance in the present day should erupt into a silent, static museum would be mere rhetoric. If galleries of modern and contemporary art have for the last decade done much for the inclusion of dance in major exhibitions and are even starting to think of it in terms of collection, this opening up, above all, brings about a different paradigm of movement. With the notions of “time-based media” and “time-based arts,” in recent years there has been an appreciable overhauling of museum culture. The increasing space given in the last two decades to film, video, and sound, whether as works or as documents, has brought with it an unprecedented modification of the temporal experience in museum space. In this regard, the historian Giuliana Bruno (2007) has maintained that the spread of screens in museum spaces shows the relationship this has had from the very beginning with the temporal organization of film narrative: a sequence which, whether fluid or uneven in nature, shapes perceptual duration by the particular mental and physical use of the space that the spectator passes through. As was recently demonstrated to the extreme by the artist Philippe Parreno, who fine-tuned the authority of the time taken to project a film over the time spent by the visitor to the exhibition,¹ the fixed lengths of time introduced by “time-based” media actually bring about a real redefinition of modes of attention.

It is significant that the majority of historical exhibitions that have attempted to achieve an organic relation to dance have adopted configurations that were completely open, uncompartmentalized, and conspicuously contrary to the notion of the linear route which a viewer slips along, following a narrative from room to room. Among such exhibitions one can mention in particular Move! Choreographing You (London and Vienna, 2010–2011), curated by Stephanie Rosenthal; Moments: A History of Performance in Ten Acts (Karlsruhe, 2012), curated by Boris Charmatz, Sigrid Gareis, and Georg Schöllhammer; “Rétrospective” by Xavier Le Roy (created in Madrid in 2012 and now on tour), a project designed by Xavier Le Roy. However, there is also a piece whose format escapes the traditional material criteria of an exhibition: 20 Dancers for the XXth Century (2012), staged by Boris Charmatz in autumn 2013 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

To invite into a museum “precarious movements,” those that are “nomadic,” “ephemeral,” and “instantaneous,” would seem to suggest a dual challenge addressed to museums. On the one hand it means exploring how and to what extent the performing character of dance is capable of upsetting, on various levels, the processes of conservation by which museums create the history of art. On the other hand, what may perhaps be brought into question by dance is the predominance of a particular formatting of the spectator’s temporal experience, which is dictated by his or her journey through the museum. If we return to the words...