Notes on Politicality of Contemporary Dance Ana Vujanović (2010) The theme of the symposium focused on the links between politics and dance appears as one of the hot topics in the performing arts today. Therefore, before I try to answer the theme, I will think this very phenomenon, introducing some epistemic and social frameworks within which we speak and can speak about politics when speak about contemporary performance and art in general. Then I will continue with the characteristic modalities of politicality that I register on the actual international dance scene. At the very beginning I want to emphasize that my focus here won’t be a particular politics of contemporary dance, but the politicality as the aspect of an artwork or art practice that addresses the ways it acts and intervenes in public sphere, in regard to discussions and conflicts around: the subjects and objects that perform in it; the arrangement of positions and powers among them; the “distribution of the sensible”; and the ideological discourses that shape a common symbolic and sensorial order of society, which affects its material structure and partitions. Therefore, I aim here neither to advocate political art, nor to divide dance performances to socio-politically engaged and l’art-pour-l’art-istic ones. Instead, I would stress an urge to reflect a broad and complex raster of politicality as an aspect that characterizes each and every performance – be it political or apolitical, resistant or complicit, transformative or servile – as a social event that is practiced in public. I. Why is there such a preoccupation with the political in art today? Taking into consideration historically marginal place of art in society and its more and more limited visibility in public during the 20th century – especially thanks to the development of mass media who have taken over a part of the role of art and to an overall aestheticization of life that have deprived art from its almost exclusive right to the aesthetical – the question of why the consideration of the political of dance and performance would be of any importance today, requires a broader rethinking of both politics and art as social practices. Trying to think this question beyond metaphorical terms and metaphysical verifications, I will straightforwardly – and thus to a certain extent schematically – introduce some critical theses on relocation and disappearance of politics and on politicization of art in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. According to Hannah Arendt, See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University Of Chicago Press, 1998); and also further reflections in On Revolution (Penguin, 1991) the politics in modern Western society, since the French revolution has been more and more preoccupied with social questions and care about material goods and resources, which has brought it close to economy and private interests. For Arendt, the socialization and economic concern mean the end of the politics in its pure sense, as her view relies on the Greek legacy of political activity and thought – on the Athenian democracy and Aristotle’s writing, first of all – where politics was a type of human activity called praxis. In its original sense, praxis is not orientated toward existential needs (like ordinary human labor), nor (in opposite to poieses, production, work, making) it results in material objects as contributions to civilization, but is realized and exhausted in itself, affecting actual social relations. Therefore, politics as a praxis is the voluntary public activity – action and speech – motivated neither by an existential necessity nor by an interest for material goods, but by the concern of free human being as political being – the Athenian citizen – with defining relationships between humans. From this standpoint, economic and the other private interests belong to the household and should stay located there, because when they enter the public sphere they instrumentalize politics, which leads to its end. This far-reaching critique of politics in the modern Western capitalist societies has several widely discussed blind-spots, and what is important here is that it lacks a more careful consideration of the relationships between the economic and the political, that today obviously inter-relate from the start. At the same time, Arendt’s insight challenges the entire paradigm of artistic production based on poiesis by the concept of performance as a potential artistic praxis. An elaborated critical answers to this challenge could be found in the work of the Austrian group WochenKlausur; see: http://www.wochenklausur.at/, especially “From the Object to the Concrete Intervention“, http://www.wochenklausur.at/kunst.php?lang=en (26 March 2011) For instance, in her book Between Past and Future she explains: ...[In] the performing arts (as distinguished from the creative art of making), the accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in an end product which outlasts the activity that brought it into existence and becomes independent of it. [...] The performing arts, on the contrary, have indeed a strong affinity with politics. Performing artists – dancers, play-actors, musicians and the like – need an audience to show their virtuosity, just as acting men need the presence of others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly organized space for their ‘work’, and both depend upon others for the performance itself. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future; Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: The Viking Press, 1961): pp. 153-154 However, being consistent in itself, this elaboration again lacks more careful consideration of the changed notions of poiesis, praxis, and art, and their new relations. For further elaborations on this see: Giorgio Agamben, “Poiesis and Praxis”, “Privation Is Like a Face”, in The Man Without Content (Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 68-94, 59-68. As the Agamben’s theses would be a digression on my main topic here, I would only mention that they show that a return to praxis today won’t re-politicize art, as the practice is not that what it was in the Ancient Greece, but is – already from the 19th century – conceived as an expression of individual human will and creative forces; see also: Ana Vujanović, “What do we actually do when... make art”, Maska 127-130 & Amfiteatar 2 (2010) Here, I would like to introduce the theses proposed by the Italian post-Operaist thinkers, like Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and the others, who change the focus and explain the disappearance of politics differently. As this theory centers on the concept of immaterial labour, they depart just from the fact of blurring the borders of politics and economy, or of praxis and poiesis today. And that is actually how they answer the question that left unanswered with Arendt: how do we practice politics and where is it located today, after it ceased to be a specific social activity? According to them, Western post-industrial post-Fordist production already integrates elements of political practice; hence the disappearance of politics actually means that the political activity is now subsumed under other social activities, from economy to culture and art. E.g. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour”, http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm (30 March 2011); “Le renouvellement du concept de production et ses sémiotiques“ (Chapter 1), http://www.howtodothingsbytheory.info/2010/06/22/public-editing-3-reference-text_1-le-renouvellement-du-concept-de-production-et-ses-semiotiques/ (30 March 2011); Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000); Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e), 2004) Virno wrote: I believe that in today's forms of life one has a direct perception of the fact that the coupling of the terms public-private, as well as the coupling of the terms collective-individual, can no longer stand up on their own, that they are gasping for air, burning themselves out. This is just like what is happening in the world of contemporary production, provided that production – loaded as it is with ethos, culture, linguistic interaction – not give itself over to econometric analysis, but rather be understood as a broad-based experience of the world. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 26  Lazzarato explained in his text “Immaterial Labour” that the core of contemporary capitalist production based on immaterial labour was not the production of the commodity but the production of cultural-informational content of this commodity. Therefore, the central questions of economy or, in a wider sense, production are the questions of the configuration of the social situation: communication and collaboration, whose principal content is the “production of subjectivity”. These theses are often taken as promising for politicality, especially in the progressive cultural-artistic field, as they seem to note a simple equation: art is political insofar as it belongs to the domain of immaterial work that comprises politics. However, I would rather say that the theses are at least deeply annoying as they note that this configuration of the social is almost entirely capitalized, simulating the political rather than opening up new space for political discussion. The third important view to the problematics could be found in Jacques Rancière’s considerations of politics and aesthetics. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (Continuum, 2004); and Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) As we know, his understanding of the politics as the distribution of the sensible (le partage du sensible) addresses framing or reframing public space as a common space, where there are bodies that have part and bodies without a part, where certain images and voices can be seen and heard and the others cannot. Hence the politics is about shaping and about a conflict about shaping the sphere of common sensorial experience – to say: “common sensorium”, or of what is sensed as common for certain social community. And Rancière’s concept of the politics of aesthetics comes from this standpoint, without referring to Walter Benjamin’s well-known observation on aestheticization of politics and politicization of art. For Rancière, there is the aesthetic at the very core of politics as (re)distribution of the sensible; likewise art always has a political dimension, since: “Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.” Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 13 However, this does not mean that art is politics, but means that departing from this point we could and should differentiate in concrete cases if its politicality is carried out as policy / police or politics, namely as a contribution to the existing distribution of the sensible or a critical intervention into it. Thus we have arrived to the zero degree of thinking the issue of art-and-politics and its reasons of being today. Although the viewpoints briefly introduced above are divergent, what we could conclude from them all is that today the relation of art to politics, as something outside the art, more and more collapses. We could rather say that art becomes itself embedded with the politic, and thus one of the training grounds or battlegrounds of political practice of the Western society. II. Modalities of politicality of contemporary dance Now I will continue in this methodological tone, and focus on how the political is practiced by and in dance today. I would like to draw your attention to three dominant modalities, which could be seen both as the perspectives of interpretation and the artistic strategies or tactics. In any case, I would stress that they are rarely employed in pure forms or separated from each other; and especially because of this, the grid I am going to develop cannot be used for classification of performances, but only to broaden and sharpen our assessment of their politicality. Political content and the concept of “engaged performance” This modality is based on the idea that dance as art is a specific type of social discourse, and as such it has a capacity to speak about social subjects, mostly critical issues like: inequality, intolerance, militarism, misogyny, dictatorship, fascism, racism, etc. In that sense, the role of the (political) performance is to raise public awareness and be a critical commentary to a particular social problem. Accordingly, the medium of performance is not deemed as an important factor of its politicality. Moreover, it is considered as a formal aspect of the dance piece, which is neutral and in itself relieved from political messages, or capable of conveying different messages. This modality is not a new one. In the early decades of the 20th century politicality in performing arts in general was considered primarily in terms of their contents, themes, or subjects. The conception features basically in modernism – including also some segments of historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde in the ‘60s – and, on the other hand, in Socialist realism, the political and workers’ theatre. See an explicit confrontation of the Brecht and Piscator’s political theatre with Dadaist formal experiments around the question of politicality of performance in Erwin Piscator, “The Proletarian Theatre: Its Fundamental Principles and its Tasks” (1920), in Ludwig Hoffmann ed., Erwin Piscator: Political Theatre, 1920-1966, exhibition catalogue (London: Arts Council, 1971), pp. 41-44 This inherently divergent scope seems paradoxical, but is not. Crucial idea here is the one of the representational character of art, together with its exceptional status against society. Consequently, from the perspective of this mode of politicality, dance could be divided into politically engaged and l’art pour l’art categories. And, while engaged dance deals directly with social-political issues, the latter understands or further elaborates the dance discipline as an autonomous field of human creativity, individual expression, and emancipation of the individual body. In any case, a politically critical remark is that both categories are bound to the idea of the privileged, transcendental status of dance as art, which is from this outside position able to speak about society and politics or to “prefer not to”. What is neglected here is that art is given the exceptional status only by virtue of social authority. Therefore, art here takes its status for granted and in this way it limits its political potential, never contesting itself as (such) a social practice. An illustrative example of this modality and its shortcomings are numerous contemporary dance works that speak critically about either the structure of contemporary dance institution or relations between the First world and the rest of the world, the EU and the rest of Europe, while at the same time are touring through the EU supported by the dance institution. However, this political modality has some advantages that are worth mentioning. I would remark that some historical forms of dance: mime, pantomime, and choreo-drama have been just a solution for how to speak critically or subversively about certain social issues when the (verbal) speech about these issues was forbidden or censored. For instance, first choreo-dramas appeared in Rome in 1806-08 during Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. They were created by Gaetano Gioia, as short dance pieces smuggled in the breaks between opera acts, which spoke about burning social-political themes. Also the popularity of pantomime in France after the Revolution was directly conditioned by the rigorous censorship of the theater. In fact, pantomime was practiced and became popular as a form of public criticism without the risk of openly using political text. So we could see that at the times when it was forbidden to speak about certain social issues, this modality of politicality was useful because dance could express these issues in a language that the police supposedly didn’t understand, and hence, dance could smuggle them into public discourse. Politicality of the performance medium: its materiality and discursive dispositifs This modality focuses elaboration of statements on politicality of the very medium of dance performance: its materiality, form, and organization. It also has a long history, but was articulated in nowadays terms mostly in the 1960s and ‘70s, referring to the new, currently emerging theoretical platform in social sciences and humanities: (post-) structuralism in general. The foundational concepts here are the concept of writing (écriture) and critique of logocentrism (Derrida, Barthes), materiality of the signifier and signifying practice (Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan), inter-textuality (Kristeva), discursive practice (Foucault), ideological interpellation and inter-discourse (Althusser, Pêcheux), concept of expression (Deleuze, Guattari), etc. The statement on politicality of performance’s medium denies reflection on the signifier as the neutral mediator, vehicle of any meaning, content, or message pertaining to the performance. It indicates that discourse is itself a social materiality, that on one hand by its signifying practice intervenes into its content – idealistically meant realm of the signified – and, on the other, in a Foucauldian tradition, shapes our bodies, behavior, and social relations. See a consistent analysis of the socio-political practice of the artistic signifiers in: Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Rastko Močnik, Danijel Levski, Jure Mikuž, “Umetnost, družba/tekst” (“Art, Society/Text”), Problemi-Razprave 3-5 (1975) Therefore, medium of performance is not and cannot be politically neutral, regardless of its content-wise contributions to arranging the public sphere. Moreover, the performance may not disclose any particular political content and still maintain a political potency if its medium can contest legitimized signifiers’ productions and orders and common perception/reception, or even introduce new ones. It is especially important modality for dance, since it reveals that the very body images, positions, shapes, movements, and relations on the stage could oppose and subvert the dominant ideological interpellations by offering critical alternatives to them. In a word, for this modality of politicality the question of how is more important than what (is said), meaning: who is speaking / acting, in which context, from which position, in which relation to the object, how the speech and action are organized, etc. This framework provides us with a strong tool for thinking politicality of dance even in the cases traditionally seen as politically indifferent or apolitical. Speaking historically, we could see for instance that (post-)minimal dance of the Judson Church Dance Company (Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, etc.) practiced an emancipatory politics without saying a word on the political themes. See also in Ramsay Burt, “Dance, History, and Political Relevance”, Maska 82-83 (2003) It was clearly engaged in democratization, individual liberation, and emancipation in the spirit of the ‘60s by problematization of inherited images of dance body and techniques, and by offering critical alternatives to them, by introducing for example pedestrian body and dance, which were inclusive and anti-virtuosic. Today, from this perspective we could approach the choreographies by Xavier Le Roy, Jérôme Bel, Bad.co and Nikolina Bujas Pristaš, Bojana Mladenović, Juan Dominguez, Vera Mantero, Mette Ingvartsen, Eduard Gabia, Eszter Salomon, Ivo Dimčev, and many others who interrupt the “flow of movement”, with for instance “still-acts” or “discursive materiality of body”, according to André Lepecki. See André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the politics of movement (Routledge, 2006) This particular betrayal is worth mentioning here as it challenges the modern dance paradigm of movement, which obtains political dimension by the fact that it is the very paradigm of modernity and modern subjectivity of the Western world. The question is whether it makes (political) sense in a post-socialist Europe that was excluded from the post-war Western modernism; and if so, which one. This would require an extensive discussion, so, instead, I would only briefly note that through these lens we could read the boom of contemporary dance in the East during 1990s and 2000s – again, regardless the content and theme of a particular dance piece – as a post-socialist celebration of the individual body and its (neo-)liberty, which comes after the long-term training of anonymous mass discipline and collectivism, and whose political proposal is neo-liberal individualism. Politicality of modes of work / production This mode of dance’s politicality in its current terms comes from an intersection of post-Operaist theories and bio-politics, and cultural-activist initiatives connected to digital technologies, particularly Internet. In these frameworks the problematics of work becomes one of the crucial political questions of the contemporary Western society. And, as it is the society of growing domination of post-industrial economy and immaterial labour, as I already mentioned, art, culture, and creative industry become central theoretical concerns, being (mis)recognized as the avant-garde or the places of “silent revolution” of the society. See Lazzarato’s own re-thinking in “Conversation with Maurizio Lazzarato”, TkH 17 & le Journal des Laboratoires: “Exhausting Immaterial Labour in Performance” (2010): pp. 12-17 Furthermore, digital and Internet culture generates many new-leftist practices – from free software and open source through hactivism to copy left and creative commons licenses – that invite artists to pay political attention to conditions, protocols, and procedures of their working processes. Hence, in the contemporary performing arts – whose paradigm today is dance with its new infrastructure – current reference points pertaining to politicality comprise the questions of property and licensing, technology of authorship, principles of sharing, position of performance in the exchange economy and market, production and distribution of knowledge, organization of artistic collectives, mechanisms of decision making, collaboration, networking, etc. The questions are not new at all, but what this new perspective brings to us is that we now see these questions as exactly political and not only as pure production-wise questions. Moreover, in those terms, modes of dance production acquire an almost higher political priority than either its content or form, as they are inevitably inscribed in performance, articulating its acting in public and even re-reading the political of its content or form. On the grounds of such an understanding of politicality, we could for instance criticize the guru-system of organization of the alternative neo-avant-garde performance groups, otherwise (reading content-wise) considered revolutionary and liberating from hierarchies and authority bondages. From this perspective, we could radicalize Virno’s thesis that many of these, once disobedient, practices have easily found their place in post-Fordist company. And we could see that they mainly replaced obedience to official authorities with a kind of voluntary, internalized obedience – which is exactly what post-Fordist management tries to achieve today. On the other hand, we could see that several recent dance works and projects – like Everybodys platform, Collect-if by Emil Hrvatin, Bojana Cvejic, et al., Steal this dance! by Lucky Plush production, Mette Ingvartsen’s The making of the making of, or Tino Sehgal’s actions of selling his performances – are driven by the critical consideration of the questions of sharing methodologies, structure of collaboration, intellectual property and value of dance, research methods, and negotiations with the normal-and-normative cycles of production and consumption of dance pieces and choreographies. However, when we speak about their politicality in these terms we need to distinguish individual economic interests of those involved in the “immaterial civil war” in the contemporary cultural production Matteo Pasquinelli, “Immaterial Civil War; Prototypes of Conflict within Cognitive Capitalism”, 2006, http://eipcp.net/policies/cci/pasquinelli/en (30 March 2011) from the concerns for intervention in given working conditions and their mechanisms of production subjectivity. Speaking from a macro-perspective, I would remark that the contemporary international dance scene mostly works according to the principles of the third sector of neo-liberal capitalism, as a training ground of post-industrial economy. Recently it has been often discussed, See Mårten Spångberg, “Overwhelming, The Doing of Research“, in The Adventure (Vienna: ImpulsTanz, 2006), pp. 33-47; Bojana Cvejić. “Collectivity? You Mean Collaboration?”, 2005, http://republicart.net/disc/aap/cvejic01_en.htm (30 March 2011); Bojana Kunst, “Prognosis on Collaboration”, Marko Kostanić, “Art and Labour”, TkH 17 & Journal des Laboratoires: pp. 20-30, 36-40 so I would only sum up the discussions here, emphasizing that the celebration of the new modes of production – including nomadism, flexibility, multi-tasking personalities, collaboration, and endless networking – by dance practitioners is paradoxical, as these modes are just what makes the artists more and more precarious. Moreover, the celebration makes them – from the view I am developing here, even more important – politically opportunistic. Believing in progressiveness of their modes of work, dance practitioners become complicit with neo-liberal ideology whose investment is post-industrial capitalist economy that simulates public discussions on the public. *** I find this polemical comment adequate for closing down this methodological framing of the topic and for opening up space for further elaborations, as the comment indicates that when one deals with the political of art s/he must consider precisely its relationships to a given social context, comprising the ruling polices, dominant public discourses and their agencies, and current discussions. Without these specifications, political labels such as: leftist – rightist, communist – capitalist, democratic, nationalist, liberal, etc. really don’t mean too much nor they can mean more. This seems particularly important for the issue of politicality of performing arts, which I find both potential and elusive, since performance and politics are ambiguously close to each other in sharing the same actuality and self-exhaustion in public. PAGE 1