Training Remembering

I would like to start with an anecdote. When my daughter was five weeks old, she had a stiff neck, and almost couldn’t turn her head at all to her left. So, my wife and I went to see an osteopath. The doctor’s practice was a family business: father and son—both of them neurologists and chiropractors—work on scores of bodies day by day, manipulating and treating them. The father is also an osteopath; the son is still learning to become one. We saw the son. He treated our daughter who screamed and turned red and in turn got her back straightened, but not quite as straight as it should have been. So, the son got his father, who showed him another trick or two, explained them to his son and to us, and left again. Our daughter was now really aligned, and the son said: “Well, this is how it goes. I am still learning. While I push and pull and push and pull, my father just needs one grip and the work is done.” Our daughter sneezed. “Do we need to come back?” we asked. “No, one time is sufficient. Good-bye,” he replied and left for his next patient.

Our daughter was completely transformed. She had more freedom in all of her movements, and her gaze seemed to go further out into the world. She wouldn’t stop looking, which in turn made her very hungry. The period of time for her after the visit at the osteopath’s seemed to be one big exchange between visual and food intake. I got very excited. Something had happened here that interests me deeply: Knowledge and skill, that is to say technique, was handed down from one generation to the next. The history of osteopathy and of medicine had contracted into one moment in order to leap from father to son and, even more strikingly, to affect healing through the touch between doctors and our daughter. It was as if this corporeal touch had remembered the whole knowledge of a healing method in a single instant.

Such a moment needs practice and study just like a touching or a moving moment in theater or dance needs practice and study—that is to say technique. But, what kind of technique is needed in dance? What does such a technique do? What does it include? What does it exclude?

In her remarkable book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, Elizabeth Grosz (2008) describes the earth as chaos. It is chaos in the sense that it is the milieu of all milieus and thus contains everything, not in an absence of order, but in a presence of everything at once, a plethora of possibilities. Art’s task is to claim something from this plethora, namely heightened perception and sensation. This is achieved through framing parts of the chaos and thus bringing out particular qualities of the base material, forming them and bringing them to the senses. Following Grosz’ argument, art’s first gesture is therefore an architectural one: the construction of a frame. Through the making of a floor, for example, particular qualities of the earth are framed and brought out, such as gravity and thrust, which let dance emerge. I argue that on the floor that is now a dance floor, the body has so many possibilities that it becomes chaotic itself. On the dance floor, the body needs to be framed as well.

Photo 1.

Martin Nachbar in “Remembering” from his Urheben Aufheben. Photo: Gerhard Ludwig.

The kinds of framing of the body and of the body on the floor are techniques that can be transmitted, studied, remembered, appropriated, and changed. The first half of the twentieth century showed us, as Steve Paxton has pointed out, that individual choreographers developed dance techniques that comprised the vocabulary of entire choreographic repertories: Martha Graham was the outstanding example of this. But also her former students and dancers Erick Hawkins and...