Kendall Thomas

ABSTRACT Yoko Ando in Human Writes. Photo: Dominik Mentzos. The following is a transcription of the presentation by Kendall Thomas, co-creator with William Forsythe of the performance installation Human Writes, followed by a discussion with Thomas Keenan and Mark Franko. Kendall Thomas’s talk was given simultaneously with a screening of a silent video documentation of the work. (The reader can find moving images of Human Writes at <http://www.art-tv.ch/human_writes.html>).1 The panel “Rights to Move: Choreographing the Human Rights Struggle,” of which this discussion was a part, also included the participation of Leah Cox, dancer of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The event was curated and moderated by Mark Franko and produced by Alan Pally, and it took place at the Bruno Walter Auditorium of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, on October 12, 2009. I just want to mention before we start that Naomi Jackson, who could not be with us today, has co-edited (with Toni Shapiro-Phim) a collection called Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice in 2008. It is one of the first anthologies, to my knowledge, to consider the relationship of dance to human rights issues.2 I regret that Naomi couldn’t be here with us today. It might be useful to mention, however, that in her introduction she outlines four areas in which one could think of dance in relation to human rights. They are Regulation and exploitation of dance activity and dancers by governments and other groups with authority, as well as abusive treatment of dancers within the dance profession; 2) choreography involving human rights as a central theme; 3) the engagement of dance as means of healing victims of trauma, societal exclusion, and human rights abuses; 4) broad-scale social/political movements and smaller-scale local practices in which dance plays a powerful role in providing people agency in fighting oppression. The film documentation of Human Writes begins Good afternoon everyone. I’d like to thank Mark Franko for organizing this event and for inviting me to be a part of it. What you’re watching are images from the debut performances of Human Writes, which William Forsythe and I called a performance installation for reasons, which I think will become apparent as you continue watching the documentation of the piece. You’re going to be seeing clips from rehearsals as well as clips of performances. I’ll tell you when we’ve switched over from rehearsal clips to performance clips. The original idea for this collaboration came from Dr. Gary Smith, who is the executive director of American Academy in Berlin, Germany, an institution with which both Forsythe and I have fairly longstanding connections. Bill Forsythe and I met first in Berlin and then over the course of a couple of years in lots of other different places: my apartment, various restaurants in New York, but also at Sadler’s Wells in London; in Berlin, where I saw the work of the company, which I had seen, but didn’t know as well as I wanted to. During the course of these discussions we talked about our interests, and I told Bill about some of the work that I do in law. I suppose the best way to describe what my intellectual vocation as a law professor has been, is that I’m interested in the cultural study of law. I’m interested in law as a cultural form, not just as an institution or a social practice for regulating human behavior, but as a social practice that generates meanings; as a cultural form that is not merely about resolving disputes or regulating conduct, but about generating (as I said earlier) meaning for individuals alone and in relationship with one another. So this discussion, this series of discussions that I had with Forsythe, focused not just on human rights as a body of law, but on human rights as what might be called a discourse on human rights as a language, human rights as a social practice of which law...