invisible dances…in a body of text

 

On the 20th March 2003, the official first day of the war on Iraq, British and US troops began the shock and awe attack, a theatrical intervention whose televised dead continue to be transmitted around the world by a variety of technologies. Many bodies have since disappeared, decayed, and yet their digitised images remain and are repeatedly called to account and bear witness. Also on this day Frank Bock and Simon Vincenzi entered a darkened theatre in the West End of London to stage an encounter with a whirl of ghosts and disappearing bodies. The piece was called invisible dances…from afar: a show that will not be shown, the fourteenth block of research in their ongoing invisible dances…project, and it is the starting point of this text but I cannot promise to relay it to you, nor transmit a fully consumable image of the dancing bodies that occupied that stage at that time. It is a performance which confounds any attempt to write according to any conventional understanding of a review or critique. I did not, indeed could not, see this show – as the title claims it was a piece which could not be seen; accessible only through Fiona Templeton’s audio-description, it was first channelled down the telephone wire a month and a half after the ‘live’ event as part of Nott Dance 2003. Throughout May therefore I made several phone calls which connected back across time and repeatedly heard a voice ask in a whisper ‘Is anybody there?’ The crackle and hiss of the voice relayed broken descriptions of movement, a stammering and exhausted audio response to a piece which I, as audience, could not visualise. Straining to see with my ears a piece which was cut off from me by a dismembered and dislocated telephone voice I had to try to let go of my spectatorial desire in order to listen to the voice and follow its often unfathomable instructions. On several calls I seemed to connect to the action at the same point as my previous eavesdropping, caught in a loop where the voice was cut off from its body, trapped in a theatre to intone the same lines night after night (with no day in between) to an audience in absentia. The calls left me baffled, clutching at images that verbally resonated with previous showings of invisible dances…I have watched (I heard ‘terrible fingers’ and saw the clutching clawing hands of Nanette Kincaid without knowing if she was ‘really’ there at all). I had to take up the responsibility, and the difficulty, of reconstructing the invisible dances… through a mnemonic negotiation of the non-spaces and traces of absent bodies.

 

This show took the ‘audience’ back to the very root of the word (from Latin audientia, from audire ‘hear’). Hamlet says “come friends - we’ll hear a play tomorrow” (Act II Scene II) and, as theatre history has it, an audience traditionally assembled principally for an oration rather than a visual spectacle. But to hear a dance? Although theatres occasionally employ audio-description to enable visually-impaired people to engage with the action of a play (and listening to these was part of the research material for this block) dance is primarily organised for spectators rather than an audience; most (if not all) contemporary dance performances are largely inaccessible to the blind. Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull has argued that, in contrast to the visual display of ballet, some non-Western forms of dance are primarily concerned with an auditory relationship with music (she focuses on Ghanaian dance culture) but these forms have a strong participatory simultaneity, rather than the delays and spacings of a recorded telephone message.

 

So, on the one hand this performance opened up dance to a different sensorial involvement, but on the other it was not a talking-book or a narrated-choreography and did not promise a complete (or even edited) version of a dance but delivered something entirely other. Assembling the spatial dislocation, the temporal loops and delays of all the work so far this show ‘presented’ something which escaped the vision of its lone spectator and purposely confounded its unseen/unseeing audience. The voice did not conjure up a whole piece but recorded the overwhelming impossibility of documenting the present moment of a performance that was already ruptured by the host of past bodies on stage and the iteration of their future disappearance.

 

Also in Hamlet, Horatio charges the ghost of the King to speak and Hamlet himself assembles with the watchmen to hear a very different kind of performance, that of spectres. After this meeting with the ghost, the return of his dead father, Hamlet observes “The time is out of joint” (Act I Scene V), a phrase borrowed by Jacques Derrida to explore the spectral effects of a ‘new world order’, the hegemonic violence of which raises many ghosts – it “interrupts time, disarticulates it, dislodges it, displaces it out of its natural lodging: ‘out of joint’”. Collecting together all the invisible dances… research up to this point to produce a two hour piece, divided into two acts each with eighteen scenes, the time of this event was ‘out of joint’ in many ways, moving backwards, forwards and beyond the three years of work. This was compounded by the untimely feeling of a war; a war which was watched ‘live’ across the globe as a closely stage-managed technological performance. Bock & Vincenzi invited James Brown, a medium, whose transcribed text accompanies this one, and he documented many ghosts turning up to watch invisible dancing but also describes witnessing hosts of men who seemed to be called to die again as war returns, repeats and reinscribes its presence on those attempting to live in the ‘live’ moment.

 

Disappearing acts and repeat performances

The show which was not shown was the result of five years of investigation around of ideas of ‘nothingness’. The ideas and concepts within the telephone piece developed out of the previous thirteen blocks of invisible dances…, and indeed some have their origins further back in Bock & Vincenzi’s collaborative history. Memory, communication, a divided self and disappearance were all explored in Forest Dances, their series of pieces from 1995-1998. The first three Forest Dances were duets for Frank Bock and a boy, a young man and an older man. Dark, mysterious and melancholy, these dances evoked the uncanny trees of Grimm Tales and shuddered with the terrible secrets of the woods across Northern Europe. Miniature firs, a mattress bleeding loam, and a circle of ash around a light box transformed the stage for Bock’s encounters with an altered double image, his partners suggesting mirrored echoes of past, present or future selves. The fourth Forest Dance, Being Barely There I Saw You Too, gathered together four performers to dance the sobs of keening to the strange melodies of saw playing and to endure disturbing dances of self-amputation in front of a shimmering silver curtain. The Forest Dance series was beautifully theatrical, combining intensely visceral expressive dance on the edges of make-believe and nightmare with rich and strange evocative design. This powerful visual and theatrical language was also elaborated in Breaktaking (2000-2001), a piece produced for three to seven year olds in which the performers danced at the edges of sleep, moving between the playful wish to stay awake and the alluring magic of dreams. Although some themes, and some collaborations, have been continued from this previous work, the attention in invisible dances… has been on process and formal experimentation rather than on producing theatrical pieces and this has allowed the outcomes of Bock & Vincenzi’s investigations to dictate the structure of following research blocks. Although many journeys of various kinds, through various cities, have featured prominently within the research, these are neither linear nor teleological as they disrupt, delay, repeat and reinscribe the physicality of walking and the spatial and temporal experience of traveling. Each step of the research has opened up possibilities and multiplied the potential directions of the next step (backwards and sidewards as well as forwards).

 

Simon Vincenzi has stated that the invisible dances . . . investigation focuses on two key points of dance performance – the dance is always happening in some way that you can’t see and what you can see will disturb your attempt to perceive it as a whole. Often dance pieces, and dance writing, will try to suture these disturbing absences with promises of a dancer’s presence, a body fully available to the gaze through translucent choreography. By resisting the demand to fully express the dancer’s presence, indeed highlighting the impossibility of that expression, the phases of invisible dances . . . have explicitly placed the availability of any performance under question. They also suggest that both a dancer’s and an audience member’s engagement with dancing is always marked by the elisions and traces inherent in the acts of representation. Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence focuses precisely on the trace and the supplement and in particular his engagement with the notions of expression and communication are useful when considering both the processes of invisible dances… and the act of writing about it. In Signature Event Context (1972), Derrida explores the concept of performativity and examines the iterability of writing, arguing that any mark is made intelligible through the possibility of its repeat – in order for it to function it cannot be tied either to the writer or the person being addressed. He argues that ‘writing’ (which he does not restrict to alphabetical marks on a page) therefore necessarily functions in the absence of both an author and a reader.

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And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence, it is a rupture in presence, “death,” or the possibility of the “death” of the receiver, inscribed in the structure of the mark…To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine that is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and to be rewritten.

 

This absence renders the notion of ‘expression’ problematic since any system of marks (literary, philosophical, choreographic) cannot fully deliver a present which is not in some ways ruptured by both a past and a future in which the author of the mark is absent. In the 1990s Derrida’s writing has turned increasingly to an elaboration of the figure of the specter which appears through repetition, like the mark of writing, and is neither self-present nor absent but enacts the deconstruction of this metaphysical opposition. Derrida proposes a notion of a specter as a repeat, a return, and the English version of Derrida’s text leaves untranslated his use of revenant which means not only a ghost but also “that which comes back”. The event of a haunting is therefore a return, often of something expelled from discourse, but one in which the temporal order of past, present and future is challenged by the manifestation of the specter; “Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost . . . Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time makes of it also a last time. Altogether other.” The ghost appears in order to disappear. Indeed the appearance is conditioned by both its past disappearance and its future disappearance.

 

What is the time and what is the history of the specter? Is there a present of the specter? Are its comings and goings ordered according to the linear succession of a before and an after, between a present-past, a present-present, and a present-future, between a “realtime” and a “deferred time”? If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt this reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the actual or present reality of the present, and everything that can be opposed to it: absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality, or even the simulacrum in general, and so forth.

 

Proposing a ‘spectropoetics’, Derrida argues that the very contemporaniety of ‘contemporary’ life is disrupted by various hauntings wherein various bodies pronounced dead (he examines the death of Marxism, amongst others) are repeatedly invoked in order to exorcise their troubling spectral effects. This notion of a deconstructive spectrality is useful, I suggest, when considering Bock & Vincenzi’s work because ghosts of various kinds, in various shapes and at various times, have populated invisible dances… and many bodies, physicalities and choreographies have returned to dance in their research. Their work to date has visited a spectropoetics upon the making of performance and the theatrical experience, disrupting any ordering of presents, and it is this I hope to engage with here.

 

Much writing about performance of the past decade has focused on disappearance and ghostliness . André Lepecki has argued that dance is marked out by dematerialising bodies and he attends to the ‘in between’ space in dance performance; “the space of apparitions, of ghosts, of illusion in representation.” He goes on to argue, “The choreographic play of invisibilities challenges the critical fetishism of thinking, writing and seeing dance as that which pertains only to the visual.” Peggy Phelan has made a similar argument, proposing that performance is intrinsically ghostly, navigating moments of corporeal-incorporeality.

 

Performance and theatre make manifest something both more than and less than “the body.” And yet the acts made visible in theatre and performance are acts that we attribute over and over again to bodies, often immaterial and phantasmatic ones…The enactment of invocation and disappearance undertaken by performance and theatre is precisely the drama of corporeality itself. At once a consolidated fleshly form and an eroding, decomposing formlessness, the body beckons us and resists our attempts to remake it. This resistant beckoning was the lure for this writing, a writing toward and against bodies who die.

 

Both Lepecki and Phelan are therefore suggesting that all performance is spectral (whether it acknowledges this spectrality or not), involving for the spectator the negotiation of disappearing bodies and the invocation and momentary re-coporealisation of other, absent bodies. The challenge both writers raise for texts about performance is that absence, death and disappearance should not be sutured by a false promise of full presence. In writing toward and against bodies who die (in whatever way you understand this ‘death’, either metaphorically or literally, or indeed as a deconstruction of this opposition) then the writer needs to acknowledge their own death and yet somehow communicate in a whirl of ghost voices. Lepecki suggests that when we write about dance we performatively set it again in motion to watch “a spectre of what we think it was, probably there on the stage once; just now, last night, a year ago”. Julian Wolfreys has argued that scholarship per se is always haunted because writing always involves the citation of others, so much so that any text “disrupts the authority of identity and of origin, being always already in motion”. The moment of writing can therefore be said to exist through reconstructions and internal spacings so that the full presence of ‘I’ as the author is not communicated but rather a performative choreographic animation of specters marks the page.

 

Already inhabited by the voices and bodies of others this essay encounters the invisible dances . . . but does not attempt to arrest their dis/appearance, to resolve their difficulty or to make manifest their spectrality. Instead it acknowledges that writing, like dancing, negotiates memory, the traces of bodies, and the movements between blankness. It is itself a kind of invisible dancing with elisions, theoretical loops, and mnemonic traces – writing the invisible not to bring it to present account nor to exorcise its ghosts but to engage with the challenges it sets us.

 

Revisitations and tele-specters

The out-of-joint event of invisible dances…from afar: a show which will never be shown is multiplied by its existence as a telephone piece – it will be replayed again this year (2004) when again an ‘audience’ will call back to another space and another time and be faced with the responsibility of reanimating invisible bodies. One of the major threads throughout invisible dances… has been the exploration of various technologies to archive the disappearing traces of dance. These archives are then subjected to further translation, manipulation and reediting. Whether audio-describing pedestrian’s journeys in the streets, capturing dance on video in the studio or using infra-red technology to stage dance which lights itself, the research has used electronic recording devices to expand the live moment, not to notate or ‘save’ images which might otherwise disappear but, conversely, to bring this disappearance to bear on any ‘present’. Using loops, relays and delays and avowing the glitches and fall-outs of any document, invisible dances…is/was/will be temporally dislocated. Derrida suggests that what he names ‘teletechnologies’ which include photography, television, digitised imagery and the internet, are inherently spectral and their intervention into the ‘liveness’ of any moment forces a re-examination of our notions of philosophy, history and the body;

 

As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates a night light…we are already in night, as soon as we are captured by optical instruments which don’t even need the light of day. We are already specters of a ‘televised.’ In the nocturnal space in which this image of us, this picture we are in the process of having ‘taken,’ is described, it is already night. Furthermore, because we know that, once it has been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are haunted by this future, which brings our death. Our disappearance is already here.

 

These televised night bodies have increasingly been called upon to dance as many artists explore the theatrical potentials of digital recording and transmission. Where Bock & Vincenzi depart from much of this technochoreography is in their attention to the absence opened up by night visibility and the incursion of disappearance into a seemingly ‘captured’ or ‘preserved’ image. A dance performed by Navraj Sidhu in the very first block of research in 1999, tracing an internal collapse whilst listening to a score of ‘internal’ noises composed by Luke Stoneham, was videoed and has repeatedly come back as a key part of the invisible dances… repertoire. It has not become a perfectly choreographed sequence but has been dissected to examine the spaces and elisions of the televised body; the unique event of Sidhu’s first performance exceeds itself precisely through being captured and replayed, iterated without his body present, exisiting then, now and in the future but always in excess of any full apprehension. Derrida has suggested that the metaphysics of presence, reliant on such binaries as internal and external, disavow the trace, that which resists representation and separates the present moment from itself. This trace needs to be denied to construct the illusion of a self-present moment but it will disrupt any attempt at metaphysical closure. Mark Franko has engaged with Derridean theory to suggest, “the disappearing presence of the trace – unrepeatable but not for that reason culturally irrecuperable – is the “being” of performance, its “once” as memorable.” For Franko the trace enables an understanding of dancing as an impermanent enactment or re-marking of space which is not brought to full presence but is meaningful in its absence. Bock & Vincenzi’s research engages and invokes that which haunts performance as the inability to fully present itself, that which is disavowed in any attempt to fully express a body in time and space. The tracing, private performances, together with the other phases of invisible dances … engage with memory and repetition to interrogate the self-present moment and the absences inherent in performance.

 

Several performers have worked with Sidhu’s dance to reconstruct it, which Bock & Vincenzi remember as being a torturous process, complicated to the point of impossibility by both those elements of performance that remain invisible to the eye of the camera and the unrepeatable in-between spaces of performance. Reworking the ‘internal’ focus of Sidhu’s performance into studied observation of recordings and attempted recitation further abstracted the dancing from the certainty of full-presentation and reinforced Vincenzi’s assertion that dance is always happening in some way that you can’t see.

 

Frank “Trying to reconstruct something like that from the outside inevitably feels impossible. But also there was excitement about the challenge, the idea of working on this one impossible task for three years that involves something just over two minutes long. How would that be?”

 

The footage has also been digitally manipulated to alter the duration, and across several blocks of research Nanette Kincaid, a frequent collaborator, has been given the challenge of learning and performing it. The two minutes of the original performance is speeded up to thirty seconds or slowed down to eleven minutes. In September 2002 I attended a work-in-progress sharing which featured this reconstruction in a complex spiral of loops, revenants and feedback. The show was part of block 12 which returned to the very beginning of invisible dances…; three and a half years after Bock & Vincenzi had started their journey they looped back to the studio at The Place where they first started with their exploration of tracing dances. A small monitor played the footage of their 1999 work as a score for various manipulated reconstructions. When Kincaid performed the Navraj Sidhu dance (which had been first performed in the same studio), the slow version caused her to repeatedly heave her entire body, arms outstretched seemingly in a prolonged act of ecstatic devotion or mourning, and the fast version was a violent, shaking and shuddering collapse. Although it appears ‘expressive’ Bock & Vincenzi have said that this intervention into their own archive, via the documentation and reiteration of the Navraj dance, is another approach to investigating the impossibility of perfect repetition and a large part of their interest is in the technicality demanded by the revisitation. Rather than refuse the notion of repertoire this radically addresses how the live moment of re-enactment opens up any learnt material to its undoing, not through failure or technical inaptitude but precisely because of the unrepeatable traces and the in-between spaces of dance. Martha Fleming has suggested that this reconstruction is an experiment in physics and phenomenology in a kind of minimalist focus on how the detailed precision of repetition (rather than improvisation for example) can open up to a difference “that registers in another ‘possible world’ which we might only be able to see or perceive as a different time frame or a different spatial construct, or even a different dimension.”

 

Collecting ghosts, writing the invisible

Theo Cowley, a frequent collaborator with Bock & Vincenzi, was involved in the theft of pedestrian’s journeys in Leeds and Nottingham. He documented his experience of undercover video recording and recognised a shift in his approach from when he had orally dictated their movements – with the camera he found himself looking for people and projected stories onto their particular physicalities.

 

It has become about finding characters for me. Obviously there are still the steps and gestures of the journeys but they take care of themselves and the work in the studio which is about a certain unselfconsciousness, an internal journey, a letting go and a movement quality, feeds the work I am doing outside, which weirdly and paradoxically seems to be about finding almost theatrical characters. I certainly didn’t think it would go that way. After a while, filming and wandering the streets is very alienating, where do I fit into this – ‘not too close’ says the human camera. My body is forgotten.

 

Cowley’s experience elaborates upon earlier experiments where the space of the city was reinscribed in the studio – here he suggests that the studio strangely invades the streets and his own wanderings are circumscribed by their future reconstruction. Correspondingly, he states that he actively sought people who were dislocated from their surroundings, out of place, out of joint – future televised ghosts who were already restless and uncanny. When he returned to the studio these archived characters were fragmented, their various parts annotated and then their journeys were reconstituted in various other bodies. Being fed the top half through one ear, the legs through the other the dancers have to reanimate these cannibalised journeys before digesting them, like strange sewn-together zombies. Again Bock & Vincenzi are interested in the difficulty of this task, in fact its near-impossible technicality, which results in an interesting urgency to the performance, as the dancers have to abandon themselves to instruction rather than self-expression.

 

Frank – “It keeps a safe distance on what the dancer is doing, keeping him or her ‘doing’ someone else’s acts, rather than ‘being’ someone else, or ‘becoming’ someone else. In a way it makes it easier, scientific, sort of surgical, distancing…It really helps with precision because you are always just following instruction, you have to focus separate parts of your body on separate instructions…you know that, for example, this set of instructions is from someone with a small upper body, and this set is from the woman who went shopping with no socks and all her weight on her toes with her heavy bags. For me there was something pleasurable about the virtuosity of that skill that you need to effect that kind of separation of the different members of the body.”

 

These journeys of reconstituted dismemberment, as rewritten compressed spatial poems, are strangely unnerving to watch. At a work-in-progress showing in Nottingham I saw dancers with lines attached to their waist tying them to a wall, they closed their eyes to focus on the directions coming through their headphones and then pulled, bobbed and swung at the end of their ropes, occasionally uttering barely audible words (“Its fine, its fine, its fine”), to traverse spaces wholly other than those occupied by the assembled spectators. We were then shown footage of these journeys put back into the streets, the dancers tethered at night to railings or streetlamps performing with an immobilised mobility. This nocturnal video compounded the complex superimpositions of studio and city, of times and bodies, in a reconstruction of the past, technologically severed from the present for future reconstruction.

 

Like Cowley’s video documentation, in my tracings here of invisible dances… I feel I have had to seek out and follow ghosts. These are not only the traces of other absent bodies which have dematerialised and slipped through my fingers (and again out of my fingers onto the page) but also I’ve had to engage with the conjuring effects of writing which repeatedly calls specters and yet can never predict which will answer and which will come unbidden. “Everyone reads, acts, writes with his or her ghosts, even when one goes after the ghosts of the other”. Although it could be argued that my response to invisible dances… from afar is haunted by ‘academic’ or ‘theoretical’ specters rather than the spirits recorded in James Brown’s text, I want to defer any clear differentation between the present-absent bodies of dance writing, and those specters called back to spectate or repeat their futile deaths. In my address to the ghosts of invisible dances…I have relied upon video archives, written notes, recordings of interviews, other texts and my reconstructed memories of disappearances. In 2001 I first wrote: “What space or time the final performance of invisible dances… will occupy, or vacate, is still uncertain but it seems it will be in the spectral light between darknesses, across the metaphysics of dis/appearance, calling us on a journey to negotiate invisibility and to rethink both our critical response and our sensory participation in performance practice”. I want to return to this and repeat it here because the unheimlich effect of revisiting past pieces of writing invokes and acknowledges my own present/future disappearance. This text which is both mine and yet preceeds and exceeds this moment of writing, can serve as an untimely conclusion. Although the invisible dances… project will eventually come to a close, the questions it poses about the temporal and spatial locations of a ‘live’ event (be it dance or writing), and the ‘deaths’ which attend it, will remain open, welcoming to specters and hospitable to future rewritings by absent bodies.

 

Martin Hargreaves