The Choreographic by Jenn Joy (review)

Choosing “The Choreographic” as a title for a book published in the field of Dance and Performance Studies is, nowadays, a very courageous decision as well as an ambitious commitment, especially when the book does not provide us with a more specific subtitle. Transforming an adjective into a noun always implies a series of complex conceptual operations, even when the linguistic part of the transformation remains very simple. In the context of contemporary choreographic creation, extracting a substantivized notion—“the choreographic”—out of the various uses of the adjective “choreographic” engages at least two questions: (1) What can be qualified as specifically “choreographic” inside the field of dance works and dance practices (the operation of writing, the creation processes, the spatialization of thought), being admitted that all that is dance is not necessarily “choreographic”? (2) Depending on the answer given to the previous question, what can be qualified as “choreographic” outside the dance field itself, for instance, in visual arts, music, or even literature? These questions are not merely logical or abstract; they are directly and urgently worked out through contemporary creation: what is “the choreographic” beyond, or even without, the dancing body? What could be recognizable in other fields than dance as belonging to “the choreographic”?

Let us say directly that Jenn Joy’s book never addresses these kinds of questions and that, in this regard, her title is deceptive and misleading. Nevertheless, the author seems to sketch a similar conceptual program in her introduction: “Rather than attempt another dance history or read dance only in terms of the visual, I am interested in extracting a concept of the choreographic out of this larger discursive field that has come to be called choreography and to linger in [sic] its corporeal paradoxes and vibrations” (20, my emphasis). The reader can only agree with such a sensible program. Unfortunately, the conceptual extraction announced here never appears anywhere in the book. One insight or anticipation of this extraction, given at the end of the Introduction, is once again disappointing: “[I] argue that the choreographic is not only a critical discursive force, but always already explicitly social, historical and political” (24); does anyone ever have a doubt about that? More importantly, the Introduction itself, which should have been the place to construct the problems and to expose the concepts and the method, is nothing more than an erratic collage of some usual sacred cows of (more or less) contemporary continental philosophy: Didi-Huberman’s critique of Panofsky, Badiou’s “Dance as Metaphor for Thought,” Derrida’s dialogue with Christie McDonald, “Foucault’s exquisite dramaturgies of flesh and intellect that chafe against techniques of body and of power” (20–21). After such a whirlpool of theoretical references (none of which, in my opinion, being really relevant to dance or choreography), the author concludes her Introduction with a very appropriate sentence: “Come. Dance with me. Let’s get lost” (24); once slightly transformed, this sentence will become the leitmotiv of the first chapter: “Come. Walk with me. Let’s get lost” (25, 29, 32, 39, 43, 46, 51, 61, 66). I am not sure that the reader at this point still wants to dance or to walk with Joy, but I am sure that she/he is already completely lost.

The four chapters of the book seem to be designed as subjective walks through artistic and theoretical works rather than as true conceptual and historical argumentations. The first one, entitled “Precarious Rapture. Lessons from the Landscape,” is devoted to the place of history within our experience of the landscape; it associates (or rather has “dance together,” 24) artists and theoreticians as various as Giorgio Agamben, Francis Alÿs, Pina Bausch, Walter Benjamin, Tacita Dean, James Foster, Kant, Rosalind Krauss Ursula LeGuin, Fionn Meade, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald, Robert Smithson, Meg Stuart, etc. I am not sure of being able to follow Joy on this vertiginous walk through landscape and history seen by a choreographic eye. Nevertheless, one...