The Dancing Body, Detached
The idea that dance exemplifies a gesture of detachment of the body draws on a remark made by the contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy.1 Dance, he said, is a “gesture detached from its purpose, and hence a gesture of a body that goes nowhere apart from itself. . . . Dance is detachment much before and after being movement and a body in movement” (Ibid., p. 55). In dance, even before the body is engaged in movement, it is detached. Detached from what? Nancy appears to be qualifying detachment in the a priori terms of what the dancing body is to itself. At this juncture, being to itself, the dancing body is given as dissociated from any principle of unity (i.e., unity of a purpose, of a person, of an object).
Just as the idea of experiencing the dancing body according to a priori conditions seems to counter our intuitions regarding the immediacy of bodies, so the claim made by Nancy sounds radical in the sense that it runs counter to intuition. A dancing body is likely to be described as always already moving and as already associated with a composition, purpose, and meaning. This is a common intuition regarding dance even when the dance addresses a body disengaging itself from the purpose or meaning of dance. An exemplary case is Bye, by Mats Ek for the occasion of Sylvie Guillem’s retirement from the stage, a choreography dedicated to the dancing body disengaging from the dancer’s person, and from the aims of dance, thereby allowing the dancer, Guillem, to say “Bye” to the world of dance.2 Counter to such holistic suppositions attached to the body in dance, Nancy claims the opposite: that prior to the way a body is seen dancing, it is already a dancing-body and hence detached from all these unifying attributes: the dancing body is always already not a personal body, it is not unified by a purpose or meaning—it is, rather, to itself Detachment conditions the way the dancing body is experienced in its own terms, even if in the dance, in the final work, the body is engaged in a purposeful movement and participates in a dance composition.
Nancy’s suggestion here points at the condition of experiencing a dancing body at a moment prior to the actual composition, prior to the body’s involvement in the choreography. The philosopher here aims to define how the dancing body is actually given to us in the dance in terms prior to what usually directs our understanding of dance. The transformation of the body into a dancing body neither originates in the observer’s way of looking nor in the dancer’s competence or in the choreographical composition; rather the body is in its mode of dancing prior to the way it presents itself to the molding of the choreographer or to the consciousness of the observer, as will be explained in what follows.
If the dancing body is primarily given as detached, it exceeds or disrupts other ways of looking at moving bodies. While we are trained to associate bodies in movement to an organizing principle, whether in terms of the body itself (generally, the body has its own anatomical coherence), in terms of a semi-bodily principle (like identity), or in terms of a non-bodily principle (the unity of thought, the motivation to achieve a purpose, and so on), in dance the body is fundamentally disengaged from such considerations. The body in dance undergoes a primary shift of order that enables its particular movement. To start to grasp the meaning of the dancing body’s detachment, let us look at the classical piece of contemporary dance by William Forsythe: Solo.1, This piece, filmed in black and white, begins with the camera focusing on the moving feet of Forsythe dancing, and then moves on to the upper parts of the dancer’s body; soon afterwards the dancer moves outside the illuminated ring into the darkness to reappear with his body again in a lighted zone of visibility, and so forth. Forsythe dances, and the question is what qualifies his body as a dancing body, rather than as a body generally engaged in movement. The detachment of the dancing body can be clarified by considering the series of fragmenting gestures Forsythe employs and their striking effect on the viewer. The idea of detachment means that these gestures of fragmenting the body, by the camera and by the movement inside and outside the lighted ring, are not experienced in relation to a complete body. Rather, the parts or separate organs of the body in dance, or the body which disappears from the stage, are unconditioned by a prior completeness of the body. Forsythe’s body is fragmented and experienced as such, a fragmentation conditioned by the dancing body being detached from an image of a unified, complete body. The dancing body is a priori given as detached from any complete image of a body, from uninterrupted bodily presence, from the idea of the unity of a body (even if it may be—or not be—made complete by later movements of dance or the overall composition).
Detachment lies between the body itself and the spectacle (or image) of dance, as a condition for constituting the dancing body, thus allowing us to watch the dancer without assuming that his body is fundamentally complete yet dispersed by light and movement.
So the condition for experiencing a dancing body detaches it from a prior purpose, meaning or concept in terms of which a body is unified. And yet this detachment is not a negative principle. It does not simply negate certain criteria of coherence and unification. Detachment is a positive principle asserting the terms of visibility of a dancing body, terms that are simply different from those enacted when we observe a character on the stage of theater, or a person in our everyday surroundings or a body in an athletic competition. In Ohad Naharin’s Last 1'IPrk, the female dancer running at the background is dancing rather than jogging, even if she performs with the exceptional physical abilities demanded of an athlete doing long runs. Even if both dancer and athlete share body abilities, summoning up these abilities is a prior condition of unity that only defines the body of the athlete. When watching Naharin, however, the spectator assumes no athletic body abilities and may in fact be constantly anxious regarding the incessant run (will the dancer collapse? stop running? start dancing?). Hence the athlete’s body is a priori unified and is bound to perform this unity when high-jumping, or running; no such condition of unity or purpose holds for the dancing body.
Let us schematize this notion of detachment regarding the dancing body (Figure 4.1):
Figure 4.1 Detachment Splits the Dancing Body from the Body Itself
This scheme demonstrates that detachment is a prior condition mediating between the body in itself and the dancing body as we experience it. The dancing body as image, as spectacle of dance, is produced by what the body encounters as condition for becoming a dancing body, and this condition is detachment. Detachment mediates between the body in itself and the dancing body. To clarify this point, let us look at another classic example: Loie Fuller’s serpentine dance* In what sense does Fuller, with her inventive veil dances, present the dancing body as detached?
The veil is not only an artifice that enables one to imitate all sorts of forms. It also displays the potential of a body by hiding it. . . . The novelty of Loie Fuller’s art is not the simple charm of the sinuous. It is the invention of a new body.
(Ranciere, 2013, p. 96)
This description of Fuller’s art by the contemporary philosopher Jacques Ranciere appears in the context of his reference to aesthetic occurrences that blur the distinction between forms of life and forms of art. These are instances of what Ranciere has named the aesthetic regime. Fuller’s dance is part of an aesthetic regime (and pertains to Ranciere’s investigation of the notion of “aesthesis” in philosophical thought) because she exemplifies how art creates a new form which is transformative of reality itself (a transformation typical of the aesthetic regime). A transformation of reality is suggested by Fuller’s use of veils in her dance, veils that do not function as props wrapping or disguising a pre-given body form. Rather, Fuller’s dancing body is composed, even made, of veils and is not a body to which the forms created by veils are added. The dancing body put forward in Fuller’s dance is already a veiled body, and it has thus changed its function and form and has been transformed into a new body, a dancing serpentine body made of veils. The spirals and swirls with which Fuller’s veils create curved lines constitute a new body to which the organic, naturally shaped human form is no longer relevant. Fuller’s dancing body is hence detached from the regular shape of a body, and this detachment is what enables Fuller to create a serpentine-like body shaped by veils as a new art form.
There is hence a condition that mediates between the body in itself and the dancing body, the latter being the result, the effect of detachment from a body’s regular forms and functions.5 Fuller presents a dancing body experienced as unconstrained by its physiological borders: her dancing body, detached from ordinary body forms, can construct its own limits through dancing. Experiencing the body of veils is conditioned by the absence of a prior idea of unity, which is what detachment amounts to: a condition imposed on the dancing body prior to its movement in dance and determining its modes of visibility.
Detachment can further explain on what grounds Alain Badiou can claim, regarding the dancing body, that it “does not express any kind of interiority ... it is itself inferiority” (Badiou, 2005, p. 64). The body in dance is anonymous, claims Badiou, it is never the body of a someone, it resists the idea of particular identity. Badiou articulates here in a similar manner (although for different purposes) the idea that the dancing body is not subject to the confines, but also to the coherence, of a person’s identity. Even if the dancer appears with his/her idiosyncratic, singular way of performing, his/her dancing body is yet given as disengaged from any prior correlation with an inner world, a personal purpose, identity, or intention. The singularity of the dancing body is uncorrelated with an interiority, and this is, according to Badiou, a way of describing the status necessary for the body to participate in dance.
