Dancing in Place: Exhaustion, Embodiment, and Perec

I stand facing the mirror that covers one of the long walls of the dance studio. It is what we call the Merce Cunningham Studio, though in fact, the “real” Cunningham Studio is gone. That beloved space, perhaps the most beautiful dance venue in New York City for forty years—a great swath of pale-floored, high-ceilinged openness, eleven flights up, two walls lined with windows situating us within the vast and undisciplined architectural landscape of downtown Manhattan and flooding us with sunlight, one short wall mirrored to reflect dancers’ images, Merce’s barre in the corner—has been lost to a tangle of real estate, politics, and grief.¹ We are mere (and admittedly grateful) tenants now, one among many, in this windowless studio at City Center, in the wrong neighborhood, its floors too hard, its lighting harsh, its scheduling of classes subject to the landlord’s calendar.

So in this space that is not really what we call it, I stand toward the back, positioned to face my reflection in the mirror, fifth panel from the left, my most slender double, the shape of my body already narrowed by my perpetual black costume and a lifetime of dance techniques designed to produce a body that not only does particular things but has the visual appearance announcing that it can. We have not yet begun to move, the pianist has not yet begun to play, the teacher has not yet arrived at his or her position, center front, signaling us to get in place, as it were: to choose a spot in the room and line up the parts of our bodies according to the ballet-derived, vertically organized script: head floating atop the long neck, chin lowered a bit, chest open, energy going up and down through the torso, weight down through the legs and feet, tailbone dropped, hips over knees over toes, arms ever-so-slightly rounded. We have begun the minutely detailed and endless cataloguing of our bodies’ components, in movement and stillness, in this moment of prelude—this moment that is, of course, only seemingly still—and that continues, consciously and otherwise, throughout the class and throughout our dancing lives.²

As a choreographer, dancer, teacher, and writer, I am typically immersed—that is, I immerse myself—in movement: doing it, seeing it, experiencing it, exploring it, and reflecting on or otherwise discursively articulating—“coming to terms with”—it. My own dance life has historically been an idiosyncratically integrated mix of formalism and everything outside it, equally informed by Cunningham’s movement and choreography and a range of (M)ovement (R)esearch–based and somatic practices³; by dances derived from scores and structures and from intuition,⁴ image, and impulse; by the presence of expression in abstract or formalist, as well as theatrical or worldly, dance; by autobiography in performance; and by the role of embodied experience—joining movement itself to the material circumstances in which it is produced—as a way of knowing.⁵

I consider here these elements of dance in the context of the work of Georges Perec, the experimental French writer of the mid- to late twentieth century. Perec is known for his committed attention to the quotidian, his ingenious interventions into personal and collective experience, his dexterous interactions with the formal materials (letters, words, sentences) of his art, his poetic clarity of presence, and his adroit and artful inquiries into memory and history, especially his own life as it had been shaped by the Holocaust. I was first drawn to his writing for the simple reason that as a choreographer as well as a “civilian,” I love lists, games, puzzles, and grids, all of which figure prominently in Perec’s work. I have stayed with the work not only for those pleasures, but for its depth and beauty, for the ways that Perec’s literary strategies, even at their most radical, extend beyond cleverness and even brilliance to produce texts evocative of the inexhaustible complexity of human lives.

Perec is not, of course, the only...