Bojana Cvejic

To end with judgment by way of clarification...

The debate about conceptual dance in the recent issues of Etcetera coincides with a panel within the conference "INVENTORY: Dance and Performance Congress / Live Act / Intervention / Publication", 3 - 5 March 2005, Tanzquartier Wien. At the invitation of Tanzquartier to curate a panel under the title "Research and Laboratory", Xavier Le Roy decided to hold a public discussion between Gerald Siegmund, Christophe Wavelet, Mårten Spå ngberg, Bojana Cvejic and himself, as well as a vigorously joining-in audience, on the questions of the terminology "conceptual dance", "research" and "laboratory". Here we produce an excerpt from the conference proceedings by Bojana Cvejic and Xavier Le Roy.

LE ROY: Because we cannot escape this terminology any longer what is your understanding of conceptual dance? What is it in relationship to dance? In relationship to conceptual art?
When have you read, heard the terms "Conceptual Dance" "non dance" or "anti dance" for the first time?
How do you think these terms are understood in the field of choreographic art? in other fields?
What is your understanding of these terms? Or why do you think they where chosen?

CVEJIC: The term 'conceptual dance' has never been theorized, introduced in a programmatic way by the makers, i.e. the choreographers who are attributed the label, nor has it been elaborated theoretically in the European or American discourses of performing arts who would be following the so-called conceptual dance practices today.

So far I have been convinced that the term is so inappropriate that it should be dismissed, its usage being more harmful than supportive of the development of these practices. But as the term stubbornly recurs, and more and more with the negative intention of closing a paradigm down, perhaps it is important to use this panel as the last opportunity for contesting the grounds on which the denomination "conceptual dance" in regards to Conceptual art has been made. I would very systematically and concisely divide arguments in two: what makes the content of the concept "conceptual art" the grounds for 'yes' (which are definitely not the reasons why the term conceptual dance was coined, because the usage of the term shows that it isn't informed by knowledge about Conceptual art), and the grounds for 'no'

YES

1. Conceptual art developed the new aesthetic of the speech act in the late 60s. The artist representative of minimal sculpture, Donald Judd best exemplified it with the statement: "This is a work of art if I say so". Indeed if some recent dance practices use the performative of "this is choreography, this is, this could be dance" to constitute their novel propositions on dance, they nevertheless move away from the aesthetic of declaration and intention. The proposition "this is choreography" is never neutral and arbitrary, for it is devised to meet the resistance of Dance in singular, the dominant essential views on dance, the institutional resistance to not only proposing other propositions, but to the form of proposition as such.
2. When a work of dance or choreography is considered a kind of proposition presented in the context of dance it issues a comment on dance. Here we have to reconsider how the proposition "this is choreography" relates to Joseph Kosuth's definition of artwork as an analytic proposition. In dance there has never been a determination of analytic critical conceptualism of the kind of Kosuth, which would analyse the types of propositions using positivist logic, or linguistic or semiotic models and replace the matter of performance with a metalinguistic discourse on the nature and concept of dance. However, the propositional form of the so-called conceptual dance practices shares with Conceptual art self-reflexiveness, much less discursive or epistemological and much more perceptual/antiessentialist, thereby working mainly with the materiality of dance and the perceptual experience and interpretation of the spectator. Self-reflexivity in conceptual dance is directed towards the dispositif of theatre, the conditions, roles and procedures whereby a spectator is presented something as dance, which becomes the object of its own performance. Such a reorientation promotes a radical stance: if dance tries to tell us something about the world it is bound to fail... it can only represent representation, in other words, its means, mechanisms and ideologies of producing meaning and status in contemporary culture.
3. The self-reflexiveness should better be replaced by spectatorship, when it addresses the frame of perception, and in some rare cases, receivership, when it requires that the spectator discursively engages in the understanding of what the work proposes as choreography. Meaning is created in structural relationships between the work and the field of dance and choreography, the conditions and roles of the author and the spectator.
4. Does conceptual dance share with Conceptual art the institutional critique? only in respect of critiquing the ideological fetishism of the status of object and commodity status. Nevertheless the so-called conceptual dance participates in the institutional distribution; there is a necessary collaboration between the programmer and the choreographer to a certain degree; some programmers strive to co-create concepts or rather contexts of festivals which will support the propositions of the conceptual dance

NO

1. The work of the so-called conceptual dance isn't based in the withdrawal of the perceptual. It doesn't map the linguistic onto the perceptual, even if it is influenced by the so-called Duchamp effect, the word does not prevail over the movement. There is no dogmatic prohibition of physicality (like it was the case in Conceptual art that the art object was replaced by the theoretical object). On the contrary, the practices are based in configuring other materialities of movement and body expressivity, which would no longer rest on the Romantic notions of the ineffable and unfathomable, the speechless anonymity of the body etc (I'll return to these notions in regards to Dance in singular). The fear of the ugly words "tautology" and "self-referentiality" associated with Conceptual art and used against the so-called conceptual dance comes from relying on the entrenched hope in Western culture that dance would be the event of thought before it acquires name. This is where Western philosophers like Alain Badiou, theorists and intellectuals take pleasure in dance, and become complicit with dance practitioners who aim to preserve dance as a medium-specific practice of the sublime and ephemeral self-expression of a free individual. Badiou confirms Mallarmé's definition that dance is poetry emancipated from the writing tools. The practices called "conceptual dance" approach dance as writing in Derridean sense, which doesn't and cannot reiterate the writing of a text in the domain of theory.
2. No utopia: conceptual dance cannot be seen as part of the historical project of Modernism, as it was the case with Conceptual art. It doesn't belong to the same lineage of abstraction which would make it the last instance of abstraction (Merce Cunningham - Yvonne Rainer - Xavier Le Roy, Jérôme Bel or Tino Sehgal; Marcel Duchamp - Donald Judd - Joseph Kosuth) or reductionism and self-reflection, where the use of language substituting for movement would be a form of dematerializing the object and the commodity dance. There is no goal in transforming the format of presentation (theatre performance of dance), audiences or institutional market. These practices operate from within the institutions, emphasizing a critical use of the theatre dispositif.
3. However, the practices bundled under "conceptual dance" propose a plurality of configurations of movement, body, subjectivity, cultures, beyond self-referentiality and homogeneity that could be associated with rational self-reflection from only within the medium. We couldn't speak of an artistic movement or formation, we would even have difficulty to make one paradigm, which would include Bel, Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Vera Mantero. This proves two things: the heterogeneity points to a hybridity of different influences, strands, disciplines, media and genres (hybridity against the purity of the pure modernist dance) and an openness of differences, many not only concepts, but conceptualizations of dance beyond Modernism.

The next step in this discussion would be to consider how a concept is formed: how it emerges, starts to regulate a practice, projects itself onto a practice. My thesis is that conceptual dance was so ill-named for it proposed an open, unbounded concept of Dance as Choreography, which contradicted or showed that choreography was used as a closed concept of Dance. I will explain the difference in the following paragraph.

LE ROY: Do you think, and if yes, then why dance always needs to be defined in a binary mode. There used to be Ballet/Modern, Modernist/Post-modern or Postmodernist, or Modern/Dance theatre. Or was it Ballet/dance theatre [Tanztheater], and how is it now: conceptual/pure dance?
Is binary logic specific for dance? Do you think that it can have something to do with the fact that choreographic art is not a well-established or recognized art practice in comparison with visual art or music for example?

CVEJIC: Until the 90s, one could go away with talking dance performances by way of asking what kind of object 'dance' a performance is: what is its dancing 'matter', body-instrument-technique-style, and then, perhaps, some subject matter, what the performance speaks by way of a metaphor. In the 90s, this question was no longer sufficient, and another approach settled in. Not what kind of object a dance performance is, but what kind of concept of dance is performed, or put forth in the performance. This entailed that the new practices could not be defined essentially, by grasping and reasserting the same properties or distinctive traits, which constitute the work. The work of, say, Vera Mantero and Jérôme Bel, or Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy, can never make a perfect community of aesthetic properties, but can belong to a family of resemblances, properties which appear similar but in fact configure the work of each one differently. An example. We can speak of transparency or clarity of procedures in the case of Bel and Le Roy. In the case of the former the clarity of procedures comes from linguistic operations and speech acts (cf. Le dernier spectacle, Shirtology, The Show Must Go On I & II), and with the latter, it is the means to provide a direct access to the body materiality, a posthumanist vision of what a body can do (cf. Self-Unfinished, Giszelle). The wrong conclusion to draw is to make this feature (transparency) essential, to treat as an aesthetic ideal.

What was so different in the works of the aforementioned choreographers is how they conceived concept for each performance. Now, concept has become either an overrated or an inflated term: hated by those practitioners, critics or programmers whose ethic of work implies a non-reflexive studio craftsmanship or degraded by those proposals and applications for subsidy where a certain theoretical or political agenda is expected in the written proposal (not always making it to the work). This only shows that concept is a poorly understood term in dance.

Every work of dance has a concept, of course, because it is founded on a conceptual order of ideas, beliefs, values, procedures and meanings even when they are generated by intuition. However, from the 90s on, concepts are being thematized, and discussed for every choreographic work of the new practices. So it was no longer understood that the choreographer - her style, language, technique, represented themes - is sufficient to stand for her object dance with her concept of it. Choreographers began to conceptualize choreography as the object of work. In other words, they don't treat it any longer as a self-evident notion, a concept that is closed. A close concept defines choreography as composition, and identifies composition with inscribing a form or structure, but in any case a notion of a whole, by bodily movement in time and space. Inscription of movement in time/space is rather a vague, empty signifier, but vagueness is exactly how regulative concepts function. They fulfill a normative function, especially because their content is elusive. So such a closed concept of choreography rests on an agreement ("whatever your composition is, it necessarily has to pertain to bodily movement and parameters of space and time"), and a hierarchical apparatus of production (choreographer transferring knowledge to dancers by show-copy model or material molding).

The choreographers in the 90s contested the idea that choreography is the writing that follows, resembles, represents the speech of dance, like the written following the spoken word. They insisted on the separation between dancing and choreographing, so that writing may precede dancing. Writing isn't only language for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience and affectivity; it is all that, but also the totality of what makes it possible, in other words, it can include a deconstruction of the assumptions, rules and values which guide writing.
To claim that choreography is an open concept implies that the notion of choreography (composition) be expanded and modified. Choreographic practices start using other tools than the so-called immanent, but actually inherited beautiful forms of eternal value, to derive itself. The new tools have been so far: language and theory, history and historicity, sign communication, visual arts, secondary effects of other media like film (cinematic technologies), music, digital medium, then the theatre dispositif in relation to popular culture, the spectacle in both senses of the society of spectacular commodities and the spectacle of performance.

So when we speak of the concept as unbounded as a language game (Wittgenstein), it implies that a performance sets serviceable rules given for the present case. An open concept of choreography accounts for an unforeseen situation to arise and lead us to modify the understanding of it. This is not an academic sterilization of the process of concept formation. If we behaved according to the politics of this argument, then the simplifications of what conceptual dance is and why we should disregard it would not stand a chance.

One more charge to consider. We too often hear that the practices under the name conceptual dance are the result of a belated influence of the Judson group of choreographers in Europe, mediated not so much via Steve Paxton or Trisha Brown, but more indirectly via Yvonne Rainer who has stopped choreographic work already in the early 70s. Sitting in this panel here with Christophe Wavelet and Xavier Le Roy who worked on reinterpreting works of the Judson choreographers within the project "Quatuor Albrecht Knust", of course, we cannot deny this influence. However, we have to be careful when pronouncing the judgment that European dance only now experiences the influence of the American so-called post-modern dance and therefore, is somehow a bastard child of the 60s.

There is something more to understand here about the open, unbounded concept and its temporality. Prior to the point at which we would say a concept has emerged, it might be that many if not all the threads of what becomes the content of the concept already exist. This is why new appears as much continuous as it is discontinuous with the old. So it is a case of transformation, and not repetition. Continuity is crucial to the functioning of open concepts, weaving through a living and changing practice. Modification, continuity and expansion suppose that we cannot make paradigm examples, which we would treat as ideal types for an aesthetic, and we have to give up the so-called "monster-barring" (excluding difficult borderline examples), because all cases become more or less monsterous, connecting unreproducible connections. What does Thomas Plischke have to do with Juan Dominguez, Christine De Smedt with Alice Chauchat, Mette Ingvartsen with Antonia Baehr? Not much, except that their work stands outside of a closed concept Dance. In other words, it betrays an essentialist view that has been dominating dance since Classical Ballet to the still Modernist established practices of the choreographers who emerged in the 80s and who are desperately clutching to the idea of Dance as the invention of body. And to illustrate this view I will quote an excerpt from the infamous essay "Dance as a Metaphor of Thought" by Alain Badiou. It offers a philosophical sublimation of what is the doxa haunting contemporary dance: "It is a new beginning, because the dancing movement has to be such that it finds its own beginning again. Dance is innocence because it is a body that didn't exist before dance. It is oblivion in so far as it is the body which forgets its own force, its weight. Dance is also a play which liberates from every social mimicry, every seriousness and every appropriateness. Dance radiates the disappearance of the negative shameful body."

This view favors two notions:

1. presence: The meaning of being, captured by the interiority of the subject; by virtue of hearing oneself speak, by virtue of feeling oneself dance, the subject affects itself and is related to itself in the element of ideality. The frequently asked question about how one experiences one's own dance solo
2. the ineffable sublime: Dance shares the same cultural destiny as music. The ideal music was for art and its culture in the XIX century is dance in the end of the XX century and today. The ineffable, inexpressible, universal, infinite in the finite form, transfigure in the values (Romantic illusion) that dance promises in the age of liberal capitalism. Defying these assumptions is what connects the non-similar practices of these choreographers. Calling them conceptualist choreographers means subtracting dance out of their practices for the simple mistake of overlooking that their procedures only target the body, the materiality of performance calling for sensation inasmuch, or inextricable from communication. In other words, their work isn't conceptual because it doesn't dematerialize the concept from its object.

LE ROY: How and why at the same time that the terminology concept dance, non-dance, anti-dance etc. appeared we could observe focuses on other terms such as: "process", "laboratory" and "research"?

If you agree with this when did you notice that in your environment?
Would you relate this to the word or questions about collaboration?
What is Research?

CVEJIC: Investigation is a set of procedures of discovering, developing, describing, explaining and interpreting the functions, methods, values and sense of art. This term was introduced by Giulio Carlo Argan for Neoconstructivism in the 50s, but it also applied to a branch of Conceptual art that focused on addressing the question: what is an artwork, how is it being made and how does it function in the art world.
Art as research presupposes the following:

1. that art has a cognitive power - to produce knowledge, specific to that art; and a power to theorize, to produce a problematic and resolve it
2. that art based in research doesn't find its purpose in the artwork as the final result of the process of making or producing, but in the process of investigation. The result of research need not be achieved, or isn't worthwhile mentioning or is overcome the moment it has been achieved. The process of research shows itself as a thinking model, a model of working and behavior of the artist.
3. that there need not be any homology between the scientific methods and the methods of producing an aesthetic object
   
   But what is the specificity of research in dance, especially in regards to the currency of research, process, laboratory or collaboration nowadays?
   
   
4. Here I would give an opinion, or an estimation. It seems that work came to be represented (not necessarily conceived so) as research in the 90s with the growing number of the so-called independent arists. Entertaining that development, a new model of venue emerged, where the programmer undertook the role of a patron of research, not always of a curator. With patronage I mean parenthood, the programmer authorizes a work as a process of research: (s)he first invites artists who (s)he thinks need the support of a so-called independent venue, then (s)he talks to them in order to find out whether their topic, concept of work or model of thinking smells like searching for something (not that it has to pertain to a particular area of research that the programmer is curating), and finally (s)he decides on the format of presentation, which often needs a festival or another kind of special manifestation: "opening-doors." When a parent-patron, the programmer takes the responsibility of the shown process or product (usually, it is presented as a work-in-process, promising and postponing the final result). As the presentation likens the performance, it doesn't offer an insight into its research methodology nor its objectives of research, or to anything that would make it different from product. It differs from a performance-product only in the degree of completeness. The work seems to finish the process of making when it acquires the satisfying looks of searching for something. Ethics of research, experiment and critique transfigures into an aesthetic of indie-work, foreclosing further development when the outlook of research is achieved.

However, there is an entirely different usage of the term research and laboratory, much less specific and contemporary than what I outlined here, but maybe more general and common for contemporary dance practices in Western Europe. Research is understood as the process of inner necessity of the dancer searching for her proper authentic body movement and language in self-expression. Studio seems an indispensable site of the reinvention of the human body through dance. This shows that the ideology of Expressionism has been negotiated into a kind of hidden matrix, or mode of production in dance, similarly to what happened to the conversion of Romanticist XIX century music into pop music or XIX century opera to Hollywood film production. But to say that dance specifically requires a search for the original, authentic movement of an individual body is to romanticize the basic definition of poetics as the principles of making which always entails a process of searching for something. The condition of art since and after Modernism presupposes that artist searches whenever she makes work.

If we consider the concept of art as research as introduced in the visual art theory by Argan and explained above, the common use of research in dance as we know it is inappropriate. We still may need to discover which practices in contemporary dance have developped problematics, methods and techniques in the mode of investigation and not poetic search for the means of expression.

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