Avoiding Capture

In the search for new structures of knowledge and alternative ways of thinking and relating with others, the way that some recent dance pieces radically rework the spatial relation between audience and performer deserves serious attention. The kinds of work I am thinking of here are ones that are either performed outside conventional theater spaces or rear-range a theater space in an unconventional way. In particular I’m concerned with how reconfigurations of the relationship between dancer and audience member can open up new ways of experiencing this relationship. Valerie Briginshaw has written about the social construction of the space of dance performance and the mutual construction of dancing bodies and spaces (2001, 20). Citing Henri Lefebvre, she discusses spatial practices that open up particular ways of experiencing space while at the same time limiting imagination and closing down possibilities for creating meanings (13). Choreography that troubles or disrupts these constructions of bodies and spaces and, in Lefebvre’s terms, diverts “homogenized space to their own purposes” (Lefebvre 1991, 391) can create potentials for eluding normative expectations about dance performance. This essay examines the extent to which these kinds of disruptive spatial practices can produce new kinds of affective relations between performer and audience member. The makers of such dance works, I will suggest, are not just using experimental approaches for the sake of it but are searching for new structures of knowledge and ways of thinking in order to evade capture by the apparatuses that reinforce normative ideologies and maintain hegemony.

The concept of an apparatus of capture (appareil de capture)¹ was proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1988). It has been taken up by some scholars writing about contemporary dance to describe choreography. Bojana Cvejić uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept to examine the way that the body and movement are captured “in a composition of variable relations that transform them without mutually identifying them” (2015, 86). For André Lepecki (2007, 2016), choreography is an apparatus of capture that “simultaneously distributes and organizes dance’s relationship to perception and signification” (2007, 120). Rudi Laermans argues that what he calls “choreography in general” is “the art of capturing and modulating the audience’s sensory attention” (2015, 236). Whereas these scholars focus largely on aesthetic concerns, Deleuze and Guattari were theorizing the political uses of apparatuses by the state. There are, they propose, two kinds of political sovereignty that capture, one that does so through the imposition of power and charisma, and one that does so strategically through treaties, pacts, laws, and contracts (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 424). My concern in this article is with the way that state apparatuses use both power and strategy to produce spaces that capture dance performance.

Finding oneself captured in some way is an increasingly familiar feature of twenty-first-century experience. In the networked, consumer societies of developed countries, where the pressures of daily life are increasingly complex, it is only too easy to follow others and move in the same direction as them. It is easier, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben puts it, for a citizen to “leave his [sic] everyday gestures and his health, his amusements and his occupations, his diet and his desires, to be commanded and controlled in the smallest detail by apparatuses” (2009, 22–3). What Agamben is describing here is capture by the apparatuses that the state uses to manage and govern its citizens in the interests of corporations, as these develop and maintain consumer demand.

Dancers, like other artists, are also targets of the apparatuses of twenty-first-century capitalism. Neo-liberal policies have restructured the economy of the creative industries through insistence that all aspects of social life that have not previously been commercial, should be marketized. Pascal Gielen and Paul de Bruyne have pointed out that the creative industries are central to the new business economy (2009, 8), while the artist Andrea Fraser sardonically notes “the mythologies of volunteerist freedom and creative omnipotence that have made art and artists such attractive emblems for neo-liberal entrepreneurial, ‘ownership-society’ optimism” (2005, 283). Jeremy Rifkin notes that “culture—shared...