The time of reception in contemporary dance sets a duration of the bodily co-presence, a materialisation of the physical relationship between the viewer and the viewed. This direct body-contact is abstracted as a movement, through the context in which it is placed and through its updated references, comes to signify much more than it indicates, to give the visibility of the body a deep content. The regime for the representation in contemporary dance after 1990 enhanced the ideology of the everyday, the identity of an aesthetic of the common, non-stylized gesture, recognizable in everyday existence. The most important innovation brought by dance in this period was the radicalization of the body-movement unit, which was fractured. The movement is suspended, interrupted, deferred. According to André Lepecki in Exhausting Dance, we are witnessing a range of recent choreographic strategies in which the dance relation to movement is exhausted.
 |
 |
The new body in contemporary dance sets an ontological reorganization of the system of movement, a rethinking of the critical status of movement. The existence of the body in dance is, conventionally, a continuum of movement. Contemporary choreographers La Ribot, Vera Mantero, Jérôme Bel, etc... cause a fracture, an interrupted breath in this continuum, a gap in the representation order, which marks interrogations on the ellipse of a constant, that is to say, movement. Thus is generated a syntax that no longer favours the organization of the body through a succession of stream-movements, but through their suspension. We are witnessing a state of syncope, of motive hiccup, as Anna Kisselkoff, quoted by Lepecki, calles the direction to be noted with in a number of contemporary choreographers. Reading Kisselkof, one of the major critics of the current dance phenomenon, Lepecki points out the essential characteristic of the aforementioned group of choreographers: the betrayal of the relation between body and movement[1].
Questioning the paradigm of current and recurrent movement, the body becomes a model of resistance, both cultural and political. It opposes the flow of information - the cultural market which legitimizes itself by producing cloned images - and sets up a present time that no longer has recourse to the added agitation capital. The continual-on condition of the movement market is converted into a condition of stand-by.
[1] André Lepecki Exhausting Dance. Performance and the Politics of Movement, Routledge, New York, 2006, p.9
