The Dancing Body, Anamorphosized

We have now seen that an image of the body is always the product of distortion. Whether the image presents a harmonious correlation between body and interior mind, a disturbed association between body and person (Kleist), or an alienation between body and thought (Nietzsche), the image of the body is always anamorphosized, distorted by a condition of visibility. Again, while conventions (of culture, of an art) affect the way a condition of visibility is enacted, we have come across attempts to name the very condition itself, as in Nietzsche and the philosophical body (the philosopher’s body is evacuated from the philosopher’s mind), or in Kleist and the body given to aesthetic contemplation (a body harmonized/ controlled by a person).

In attempting to articulate the fundamental givenness of the dancing body, the notion of detachment was suggested after Nancy to name the condition of visibility of the body in dance. The dancing body is given as detached from any principle of unity (in terms of person, purpose or meaning), as body-to-itself, whatever the choreography aims to achieve. When watching Forsythe’s Solo, the body is given as detached from any notion of completeness, which is why we experience its visual fragmentation differently than we would experience the shadow of a body or the sight of just mincing steps on the stage of a theater.

Let us return to the notion of detachment and attempt to develop further its affirmative dimension. Detachment may seem counterintuitive to dance experts, since, as mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, we tend to approach the dancing body as having a kind of immediacy. Especially in what pertains to certain trends in contemporary dance, the dancing body appears to be specifically unmediated by symbolic and social meanings, resistant to mythologies and conventions, a body the observer encounters in its unmediated, even abstract being. We must therefore go a step further in articulating the anamorphic condition of the body given to-itself, and reconcile the alleged detachment of the dancing body with the idea of immediacy.

The history of dance delineates a gradual movement outside thematized forms and symbolic patterns and toward a growing immediacy and direct presence of the dancing body. The dancing body per se appears to move to the foreground, as described by Nancy regarding the revolutionary presence of Nijinski on the scene of modern dance:

[A] body finds itself there knotted to itself and torn from itself, thrown, flung in a frenzy . . . where it will touch at the same time at its most intimate possibility and at its limit, its disarticulation or its dispossession as a body complete, integrated, present and reacting.

(Monnicr & Nancy, 2005, p. 70)

Nijinski’s dance, according to Nancy, exposes and touches the most intimate place of the being of a body, a place where there is nothing but body (which is the reason why the solo dance is considered “an emblem of modernity in dance” [Ibid.]). Nancy, even if as a philosopher and not as an expert of dance, acknowledges the center or central place on stage which the body has come to occupy with Nijinski: as a body knotted to nothing other than itself, Nijinski dances solos that mark a moment in the course of emancipating dance from ballet, where by this emancipation the dancer can find new grounds for reviving fantastic mythologies and replay cult scenes.

But how should we understand the place of immediacy where the body has turned into an intimate presence? Does modern dance enable the spectator to directly encounter the dancing body’s drives and its impulse to perform, as exemplified in the body’s spasmatic movement? Is a dancing body, when uninterrupted by symbolic and social meanings, given directly to the spectator’s gaze? Following the logic of our investigation, this is evidently not a convincing option,⁹ but how can we reconcile detachment with the idea of an immediate encounter with the body?

The solution that follows from our approach is that experiencing the body at its most intimate place, is itself a condition of visibility set up by modernism in dance. Immediacy, in other words, is a mode of conditioning, of anamorphosizing the body as given. In fact, Nancy’s account of Nijinski clearly resembles what we have defined as the prior condition on the visibility of any dancing body: a singular body, knotted to itself, a body alone, moving toward its intimacy, yet devoid of a pre-given unity, completeness, or integration: it is to be made complete by dancing.

Granted that modern dance, at certain phases of its development, aims to touch the kernel of the body’s intimacy, we can further say that modernist solos enact the very condition of the dancing body’s visibility. The solo dance of a Forsythe is hence the exemplary demonstration of detachment: it produces a spectacle of a body denuded of concrete signification, a body immediately present as imposing an utmost bodily intimacy. The modernist agenda indeed introduces a way of implementing the condition of detachment already given in every dancing body (the body in dance is a body that “goes nowhere apart from itself”, as Nancy in the quotation opening this chapter, states). In other words, the immediacy of a body-to-itself substantiates the condition of detachment from principles of unity, such as the unity of a person, a detachment which we have come to associate with the dancing body in general.

To conclude, in the context of modernism, the solo dance, says Nancy, has taken the challenge of dance, “concentrating on a single body (un seul corps'} and on a body alone (un corps seul)—at the limit, without music—on a body delivered unto itself, unto its wordless nudity, a charging of a meaningless sense, of a spasm of sense” (Monnier & Nancy, 2005, p. 71). While outside dance the body is anamorphised as an image of unity (of person, meaning, or purpose), in dance the body is detached from unity and is given as image of a body-to-itself. The solo dance exposes this originary condition for experiencing the dancing body as a body-to-itself, devoid of unifying principles, similarly to the way Kleist’s young

Figure 4.2 Detachment Produces a Body-to-Itsclf

boy alienated from his body exposes the originary condition for experiencing the body as an image of one’s self, of one’s person. The dancing body in modernist solos is experienced as a body-to-itself, detached from conventions, symbolism, coherent themes, that have nourished dance for many centuries. These have also camouflaged, for long periods in the history of dance, the dancing body’s givenness and its particular modes of transforming/ distorting the body.

The dancing body, detached from principles of unity and coherence, appears as anonymous, resistant to the idea of person or to its unifying force, and also resistant to being characterized through personal difference (as being of a certain sex, class, and so on). The intimately present body, encountered in the modernist solo dance as a body-to-itself, hence exposes the detachment through which any dancing body is given, a detachment that always mediates the body in itself with the spectacle of the body. We can now reconcile the dancing body’s givenness as detached, with the singularity of its intimate and immediate presence as a (solo) dancing body (Figure 4.2).

NOTES

• 1. In conversations held electronically between himself and the choreographer Mathilde Monnier during 2003-2004 that were later published in book form. All translations from this collection are mine.
• 2. For a short excerpt, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cH_rUklsY0.
• 3. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDTu7jF_EwY
• 4. wrvw.youtube.com/watch?v=8zkXb4aWVZs.
• 5. Similar ideas regarding the detachment of the dancing body from the regular body shape and body unity are performed and articulated widely in the dance world. I came across a very similar idea to the one enacted by Fuller in a program dedicated to the Nederlands Dans Theater and the choreographer Medhi Walerski. The choreographer gave the following instructions to his dancers: “You must tease the music, move with it, play with it, reach the limit of music. Because in dance, what youfeel is the air in between the dancers” [my transcript and emphasis].

Here is another expression of the idea that the limit of the dancing body is not the one given by physiology, by the body in itself, but these limits are reconstituted in dance where the body is mediated by detachment.

• 6. In Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, Marion describes Anamorphosis as an essential characteristic of givenness. See p. 123IT.
• 7. https://rvww.youtube.com/watch?v=NOTjyCM3Ou4.
• 8. See Marion (2004, p. 12).

9. In order to illustrate the paradox of immediacy involved here, we can mention in this context Jérôme Bel’s work Shirtology, which presents the dancer removing an absurd number of shirts off his body, one after another, to appear eventually with the “shirt” of his naked torso (a shirt with a pattern of its own), which is a way of demonstrating the irreality of the idea of immediate encounter with a body. www. youtubc.com/watch?v=wJErLyEGj8E.

REFERENCES

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Marion, J. L. (2004). The crossing of the visible (J. K. A. Smith, Trans.). Stanford, GA: Stanford University Press.

Monnier, M., & Nancy, J. L. (2005). Allitérations: Conversations sur la danse. Paris: Editions Galilée.

Nietzsche, E (1974). The gay science (VV. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Random House.

Rancière,J. (2013). Aesthesis scenes from the aesthetic regime of art (Z. Paul, Trans.). London and New York: Verso.

Schopenhauer, A. (1969). The world as will and representation (E. E J. Payne, Trans., Vol. 1). New York: Dover Publications.