Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance by Rudi Laermans (review)

In Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance, Rudi Laermans offers a definition of contemporary dance, and analyzes how it's made. The book gives a discerning account of "dance beyond ballet" made in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, between 1982 and 2006. Laermans highlights circumstances that fostered the "Flemish wave," and that currently sustain Brussels as a principal center of dance in Europe and the international circuit. These circumstances include substantial governmental funding; theatres such as Kaaitheater in Brussels and Vooruit in Ghent; the biennial Klapstuk (now operating as STUK), which began presenting both Flemish and international artists in 1983; and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's establishment of P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in 1995, which continues to populate the Flemish scene with graduates who become esteemed dancers and choreographers.

Moving Together has three main subjects of study: dances made between 1982 and 2006; a collaborative dance-making process led by De Keersmaeker with her company, Rosas, in 1995; and conversations and interviews conducted between 2008 and 2011 with dance artists involved in the transnational Brussels dance community. Laermans is a sociologist whose perspectives on dances, the field of dance, and the activities of dance-making are informed by German social theorist Niklas Luhmann and his systems theory, which holds that social systems, such as the world of contemporary dance, are systems of communication. This influence is evident throughout Laermans's analysis and in statements such as: "Viewed through a sociological lens, one never is a tremendous choreographer but one endlessly becomes one through repeatedly being named as such by a plethora of individual actors" (77). Laermans also engages theories from Giorgio Agamben, Roland Barthes, Howard Becker, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and Michel de Certeau. He includes voices from dance studies, such as Sally Banes, Ramsay Burt, Susan Foster, and chiefly André Lepecki. Additionally, he frequently references modern and postmodern dance artists, especially the Judson Dance Theatre, and he occasionally discusses the history of contemporary dance in relation to that of the visual arts. At over 400 pages, the book allows Laermans to consider contemporary dance, particular dances, and the dance-making process through multiple lenses.

The book is divided into two parts. In part 1, Laermans describes, historicizes, and theorizes contemporary dance and specific works presented in Flanders, and, in part 2, he analyzes a contemporary choreographic process, focusing on a "semi-directive mode of participative collaboration" (294). Each part contains sections that are divided into a "First Movement" and "Second Movement." Inserted at various points throughout this structure are intermezzi, where Laermans develops lines of thinking about various topics, such as "The Temporalities of Dance," "Reconsidering Conceptual Art," and "Defining 'The Choreographic,'" a term he conceives (without reference to Jenn Joy's project [2014]) as "the space in which dance is written" (195). Beginning in the first section's First Movement, Laermans frames much of his thinking in terms of opposites, paradoxes, and "unity of differences," such as when he posits, "the medium of dance is a merely virtual potential consisting of all possible movements and nonmovements" (53). Also in this first section, Laermans discusses Jérôme Bel's Le Denier Spectacle (1998) in order to introduce a main assertion of the book: what distinguishes contemporary dance from modern dance, "pure dance," or theatre dance is its reflexivity. Contemporary dance is a critical practice that meditates on and questions dance's material elements and discourses (46–50, 208–12).

Throughout part 1, Laermans offers a "thick description" of and theorizes pieces by reflexive dance makers, including Bel, De Keersmaeker, Vincent Dunoyer, Jan Fabre, Etienne Guilloteau, and Meg Stuart, with full sections devoted to work by De Keersmaeker and Stuart. Laermans argues that De Keersmaeker and the Rosas company complicate minimalist and "pure" dance by permitting performers' individuality and agency in their recitation of repetitive phrases, and through gestures that lay bare cultural conditions of spectatorship. Regarding Stuart's work...