Contemporary body is convulsive movement and fall out of motion; the disruption of the movement, temporary escape from its area, an abandonment of motion.
It is a rhythmic bomb and perfect calm. It is excess of power, ideology of the artificial, social intervention in the genuine daily living and sublimation of impotence.
It is saturation of visibility and a crisis of the visibility; a pact with the epidermal explosion in public space and withdrawal from everything that means a surplus of presence; a hyper-multiplied image and an exemplary model.
one mysterious thing said i.i.cummings
It is present time and the memory of history layers deposited in every fibre, in every muscle. It is a neurosis of perfection is (obsession for the pattern forms) and poetics of deformity; ideal fragmentation and unity. Contemporary dance violently and vulnerably places the body in the centre of its representation paradigm. The most important movements and conceptual directions in contemporary dance were manifestoes of the body representation. Whether it was about the geometry of improvisation put forward by the Cunningham-Cage couple, about denial of the theatrical convention rigidity and the performance outdoing - Yvonne Rainer (No Manifesto), about the confrontational action and the tense-repetitiveness gestural Pina Baushs dance-theatre, about the bodily-acoustic installations created by Sasha Waltz, to mention only a few of the choreographers that left a mark on the contemporary dance semiotics during the past fifty years.
The Manifesto drawn up by Yvonne Rainer in 1965 was the basis for the contemporary dance semiotics, through its active reflection contribution on the means of production, re-production and reception of the performance.
No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.
The body has become political discourse, a space for the sedimentation of social collision, brittle content of the world it expresses in the overdoing aggression or in the revolt against this aggression.
Jérôme Bel
Vera Mantero, La Ribot Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy oppose to the motive vertigo the regression to the stage of eliminating motion, of combustion of any kinetic exposure. Without moving, the body of these artists questions and publicly debates a fundamental problem, with influences in anthropology, sociology and visual arts: What is the contemporary body? What is contemporary dance? Is it legitimized by additional movement or a rupture within the movement, by a challenging of motion that ends up by questioning the entire system of emission and understanding it? How do we define the specifics of contemporary dance? Do we need to clearly define it when performances becoming more and more flexible with regards to relating to this specificity? Do statements like this is not dance inhibit the evolution of a phenomenon that is becoming more and more rigid before such verdicts? What does a body move when it is not moving? All these questions stand for the complexity of a phenomenon with a recent history that saw major transformations, mutations of the fundamental system of thought.
As Alain Corbin, Jean-Georges Courtine and Jacques Vigarello say in History of the Body[1], the explorations of corporality in contemporary dance concern stratification and changes of perspective: 'While some dancers are looking in digital technique the mean of a hybridization of the senses, which would lead to a post-human horizon of the cyber-body, another part of contemporary dance focuses its research on refining perception, starting from the unique resources of the presence. Silence, slowness, and apparent immobility are frequently mentioned. From Myriam Gourflink to Meg Stuart and Xavier le Roy, visiting Vera Mantero, these choreographers don't seem to be seeking to set out a new kinetic range, but to create awareness in the viewer, upon his own perceptual activity, a genuine fictional stance.
[1] Alain Corbin, Jean-Jeacques Courtine, Georges Vigarello, History of the Body, Vol. III, ART Publishing, Bucharest 2009, pp.257
