-
5 ONLY WHEN I LOSE MYSELF IN SOMEONE ELSE Desire, Mimesis, and Transcendence
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
134) Attali's comments get at the perceived underlying Utopian promise of improvised social dancing in queer clubs. It also expresses the promise 126 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE and power of queer lifeworlds. For improvised social dancing in queer clubs as queer world-making promised a form of social exchange based on improvised composition, rather than the reproduction of a commodity : self-invention, "inventing new codes, inventing the message at the same time as the language. Playing for one's own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication .. . ," this is the praxis on the dance floor of Teresa de Lauretis' (1991, iv) theoretical promise of queerness, "to recast or reinvent the terms of our sexualities, to construct another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual." The very ephemerality of social improvised dancing composed in the moment of performance held this promise. Dancing in a queer club was both a suspension and escape from the normativity of everyday life and yet brought movement from it to construct or rehearse the possibilities for everyday life. These practices constructed lifeworlds as a production in the moment of a space of possibilities , which remained fluid and moving by means of the dancing body, as it improvised from moment to moment. The suspension of everyday life did not trivialize the practices; rather, as Richard Schechner (1985, 6) writes, [performance consciousness] activates alternatives: "this" and "that" are both operative simultaneously. In ordinary life people live out destinies. [. . .] But performance consciousness is subjunctive, full of alternatives and potentiality. During rehearsals especially, alternatives are kept alive, the work is intentionally unsettled. The celebration of contingency—a true, if temporary, triumph over death and destiny—describes even ritual performances. This was an opportunity, never a certainty. But improvised social dancing in a queer club offered this opportunity in the face of its seeming impossibility in other spaces. If the opportunity was realized, or at least the desire for realization experienced, this rehearsed a political imagination by providing a template for knowledge of the self and community with others . Why might this have particular urgency for queers? Stephen Mullaney has historically identified the term "rehearsal" as being almost synonymous with "performance" except in one particular instance: when performing in front of the embodied representatives of the law for the purposes of censorship (Mullaney 1988). Queers knowingly perform in this larger theater of power, but rather than being its objects, they make themselves the subjects of this power. These club spaces and practices [44.223.31.148] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:40 GMT) Only When I Lose Myself in Someone Else <« 127 were of performance, of theater, precisely because they fulfilled the meaning of these terms in Schechner's sense of being "laboratories" in which "what if" was the defining principle. Small wonder then, that participants described their club experience in utopie terms. While challenging the idea that dancing in a queer club was simply for its own sake, the Utopian vision of the ideal relationship with your own body and with others around you and its potential for affecting everyday life was not always fulfilled. The order or relationship may be dystopic. The relationship or order of the body and community may also be of alienation or of the commodity to its consumer. But whether with another person or with one's multiple subjectivities and bodies, whether a social or personal ideal was achieved, desire was articulated by all informants. These were visions of what could be. Social improvised dancing in a queer club did not only mobilize the past, it expressed the future. ...