Dance in the light of Badiou's event

[Alan Sondheim]

Dance in the light of Badiou's event


A night-dictation event.

Dance events in the sense of being unprecedented, unaccountable, un- 
called-for. Its arrival is then allied in this sense to the digital, its 
appearance, its evanescence, simultaneously that of the analogic, its carrying 
out, its production within the body as the analogic. Just as the dance is 
simultaneously analogic, incapable of reproduction, incapable of recuperation 
(of the reproduction of the real). Just as the dance is that, it is also of the 
digital, in the sense of the body pressed against a second body, or the body 
pressed against the pull of gravity as an other body, or an other body, the 
dance is a dialectic between the two of them, but reduced or scraped in a sense 
by these two barriers which remain on the literal scale, irrepressible, so that 
a dance exists _there,_ within _that_ - simultaneous lewdness and 
de/production. Cohen's set theory of the continuum hypothesis accompanies this, 
1 in the choice of hypothesis - any way decided - a decision somewhere being 
made - neither true nor false - can't be reproduced to that - but on the other 
hand a digital situation, choice or no choice - all of this is in relation with 
the Schroedinger cat paradox - in the sense of a collapse to a choice - 
although re: the cat, the choice is simply by virtue of the collapse - in dance 
the choice is by virtue of the choice - nonetheless a kind of forcing into one 
or another position - in a sense you can say with the continuum hypothesis - 
the continuum is produced as an alterity, an other order of things - or 
absorbed within the former order - within one or another order - in one case it 
produces itself as a horizon and in another case it is literally itself part of 
a spectrum of possibilities - perhaps in both cases part of a spectrum of 
possibilities. So we relate this to the dance - consider set theory in this 
sense as a allegiance to dance or dance as an allegiance to set theory.

In its inertness, in its inertness, the dance remains sexualized. In this I 
disagree presumably with Badiou - it is always already sexualized - the body 
that is dancing is not the neutral body of Cunningham, but is a sexual body 
from which Cunningham creates a state of lassitude or with- drawal, decathexis 
- an almost=neurasthenic state of neutrality which only exists in relation to 
the sexuality of the body within the dance, within the Cunningham-dance. 
Furthermore the sexed body may not be a divisive body, that is it need not be 
that which is binary or divided to one and an other, by calling it polymorphic, 
not polymorphic-perverse but polymorph- ic-heterological, a whole spectrum of 
sexualizations, desires, always already plurality, which may not be specified 
according to one or another anatomical distress, one or another positioning of 
the anatomical.

Initially one might say that dance is the interiority of the metaphysical, and 
if we pursue this, we can speak of dance as an interiority - of which the 
audience is only a (secondary) residue (just as the style of the dance is a 
secondary narcissistic panoply) - the audience is already an institu- 
tionalization, already a production by capital, by the organization of labor. 
The dance however is something else - the injury of the dancer - the injured 
dancer - guarantees that something else that dance is.

One might consider the dance as a projection or reproduction within the 
audience. Thus for example if one plays guitar there is a sort of mimesis 
within, listening to another play. So the body of the dancer is within the body 
of the audience because both of them are involved in movement which only 
becomes itself. There is also the issue of accomplishment. In watching the 
dance, one is always watching accomplishment, that is, a certain level, regime, 
of preparation is necessary for any sort of production - that the regime or 
preparation for the external audience is one that always emphasizes an external 
perfection. In other words the limbs continuously arranged and rearranged in 
such-and-such a way according to the exigencies of the dancer generally in 
dialectic with the choreography. However even in situations like these, one 
might say that dance succeeds only by virtue of the interiority of the dancing, 
only by virtue of desire, desire bifurcated into sexuality, desire to produce, 
to perform, to twist the body in such a way, or desire which becomes muted, 
mitigated, by a kind of meditation in which the body even for the dancer 
becomes something else which is the dancer, and which transports him or her, 
accordingly.

What is irritating, elsewhere, to critique, is the muteness of the dance in 
relation to all of this which gets back to all of this, to the beginning, to 
the inconceivabiity of recuperation, reproduction, for dance is mute, stet, 
shtut, nonsense, in a sense, as if that's all, as if nothing more. The most 
primary of arts, the body itself within the body, and the most secondary of 
arts, that it is dependent upon the body, that it exists in such-and-such a 
form only as long as such-and-such a body exists, the body of that particular 
dancer in relationship to that partic- ular choreography, that particular 
moment in time.

So not only injury inhabits dance, but death as well, the two inextricably 
intertwined, one without the other is unthinkable, and both within the dance 
remain unthought.