Extract from a discussion of Vera Mantero’s a mysterious Thing, said e.e. cummings
Author(s):Isabelle Ginot
First published on Sarma, written 2004
"Those various ’solutions’ to the solo would all reframe it within a narrative (political or identity narrative; autobiographical narrative or biographical – from Baker’s point of view etc.). By occulting the performance of non-signification, analysis would reify the solo to install it in the market of signification, and sustain the critic’s status and production. Signification becomes the circulating goods of an actual market (we write papers, get recognition, possibly fees, and finally positions…).
As rewards for such intellectual production that is actually based on the labor, experiences and expertise of others (often free), academics get tenure, promotions and royalties from books, article reprints, access to special grant monies for scholars… Seldom is such work transformed into active political or cultural strategies.
Flow, and particularly free flow, might have turned into ideology (free trade of capitals, goods, meaning…). From a movement point of view, I see the development of ‘dance literacy’ and ’dance fluency’ as founded on a construction of non-conflict relationship between dances and discourses on dances. That construction relies on belief in the homogeneity of both; but if this strategy has allowed dance into the market of knowledge (scholarship, universities, ‘high criticism’), it might be time to look at its political counter-effects. The remarkable absence of dance performances analysis in dance studies, might be related to this constructed homogeneity. It might be that an actual focus on the dances themselves, their specific operations and functionality, would threaten the power of discourse and language by introducing otherness and heterogeneity in the flow of signification. My point here is not to suggest that dance is beyond language, in a return-of-the-repressed movement of criticism, neither to plead an ‘Against interpretation’ of the 2000s, but rather to consider it from the point of view of ‘forces’ and of its impact in terms of circulation in this market of signification. In other words, my argument is not so much about excluding signification from dance, but rather, about criticising the hegemony of language and signification – in the field of dance as in other fields. If the concept of ‘dance as beyond language’ has had as a political consequence to deny dance and dancer any access to (discursive) power, then the reduction of dance to language, as a consequence, denies dance and dancers as power. And it may also maintain the same dualities - language/movement, theory/practice, thinking/experiencing - that dance studies have been trying to fight."
Author(s):Isabelle Ginot
First published on Sarma, written 2004
"Those various ’solutions’ to the solo would all reframe it within a narrative (political or identity narrative; autobiographical narrative or biographical – from Baker’s point of view etc.). By occulting the performance of non-signification, analysis would reify the solo to install it in the market of signification, and sustain the critic’s status and production. Signification becomes the circulating goods of an actual market (we write papers, get recognition, possibly fees, and finally positions…).
As rewards for such intellectual production that is actually based on the labor, experiences and expertise of others (often free), academics get tenure, promotions and royalties from books, article reprints, access to special grant monies for scholars… Seldom is such work transformed into active political or cultural strategies.
Flow, and particularly free flow, might have turned into ideology (free trade of capitals, goods, meaning…). From a movement point of view, I see the development of ‘dance literacy’ and ’dance fluency’ as founded on a construction of non-conflict relationship between dances and discourses on dances. That construction relies on belief in the homogeneity of both; but if this strategy has allowed dance into the market of knowledge (scholarship, universities, ‘high criticism’), it might be time to look at its political counter-effects. The remarkable absence of dance performances analysis in dance studies, might be related to this constructed homogeneity. It might be that an actual focus on the dances themselves, their specific operations and functionality, would threaten the power of discourse and language by introducing otherness and heterogeneity in the flow of signification. My point here is not to suggest that dance is beyond language, in a return-of-the-repressed movement of criticism, neither to plead an ‘Against interpretation’ of the 2000s, but rather to consider it from the point of view of ‘forces’ and of its impact in terms of circulation in this market of signification. In other words, my argument is not so much about excluding signification from dance, but rather, about criticising the hegemony of language and signification – in the field of dance as in other fields. If the concept of ‘dance as beyond language’ has had as a political consequence to deny dance and dancer any access to (discursive) power, then the reduction of dance to language, as a consequence, denies dance and dancers as power. And it may also maintain the same dualities - language/movement, theory/practice, thinking/experiencing - that dance studies have been trying to fight."
