Poetics of Contemporary Dance (review)

Sally Gardner's translation of Laurence Louppe's Poétique de la Danse Contemporaine (Louppe 1997) is a welcome addition to Louppe's papers (also translated by Gardner) in the Australian journal, Writings on Dance.¹ This book adds an important new voice to the modest list of works on contemporary dance composition in English.

Louppe is quick to acknowledge "an immense foundation of work (travail)," citing (as well as recuperating and critiquing) texts by Laban and his followers, Humphrey, Horst, Shawn, Martin, and Foster, along with the writings of other choreographer-theorists such as Wigman, Graham, Hawkins, Nikolais, Cunningham (and dancers), and Rainer, and French artists such as Odile Duboc, Dominique Dupuy, and Dominique Bagouet. The work of Trisha Brown is an important benchmark across the book. This field of past research provides both the historical context and conceptual frameworks for Louppe's monograph, which draws French dance of the 1980s and 1990s rather belatedly into English discourse on the subject. And with its generous references to major players in French dance theory (Isabelle Ginot, Michèle Febvre, Daniel Dobbels, Bernard Rémy, and Odile Roquet, particularly in the journals Marsyas and Nouvelles de Danse), it is a treasure trove for non-French speakers.

The dazzling terms of reference Louppe sets up as she proceeds go a long way toward repositioning the creative practice of contemporary dance within the humanities, providing evidence that "its originality and autonomy are profound" (9). Louppe's use of contemporary as an umbrella for the still debatable use of the terms modern and postmodern in dance is strategic in placing the art form within the broader and interdisciplinary field of contemporary arts: "For me, contemporary dance only exists from the moment that the idea of a 'non-transmitted' movement language first appeared at the beginning of the century" (17). The art form is pitched as "one of the major artistic phenomena of the twentieth century," which "in the space of several decades . . . has become an exemplary force for integrating and expressing the consciousness of our time" (xx-xxi). And this is not empty rhetoric; Louppe goes on to demonstrate the ways in which dance "reveals the powerful source of the imaginary" (55), how the "corporeal signature" demonstrates ideology and history through its unfolding in movement (92), and how contemporary dance challenged narrative and central conflict as structuring models by refusing "perspective and linear logic" (168). Along with voices directly related to the field of modern and contemporary dance, which Louppe deftly scatters across the book in support of her major themes, is a refreshingly eclectic approach to theory that ranges across philosophers of the twentieth century—Deleuze, Valéry, Foucault, Kristeva, and Agamben—among many others. Her field of reference also ranges much further, to biomechanics, gestural theory, and aesthetic theory, particularly from the visual arts and cinema. This is the network of phenomena, activities, and ideas within which Louppe positions contemporary dance as a major force.

In support of this disciplinary assertion, across the book Louppe pitches a convincing case regarding the characteristics and accompanying compositional processes specific to the discipline of dance, jettisoning terms from other art forms that dominate the majority of dance composition texts from Horst and Humphrey through Smith-Autard. She even shrugs off ballet as a major precedent with liberating swagger, citing the imagined but not-yet-existent dances pined for by Dalcroze, Nietzsche, and Wagner: "At the beginning there was no relation, no conflict: simply another place.. . . [Modern dance] did not grow out of dance but from an absence of dance" (25-6). At the center of her understanding of the project of contemporary dance is the assertion that "action is the consciousness of a subject in the world" (23), which is echoed by Vivian Sobchack: "Intentionality (in life as in dance) is motility" (Sobchack 2005, 57). The central characteristic of dance then, for Louppe, is the explicit rejection of the mind/ body divide—a rejection realized through other characteristics: a...