- First published: Maska, Ljubljana, 132 – 134, 2010.
- First presented as lecture: Performance Matters, London, UK,  5 October 2010.
- Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1iVyi-1y

On 17 November 2007, in one of their Ballettika Internettikka guerrilla actions intervening into various spaces by means of miniature mechanical devices and broadcasting these events online, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman illegally brought a robot to the top of the Lippo Centre in Hong Kong. On the other side of the world, at an equally eminent avant-garde venue, the Hellerau Festival House in Dresden (Germany), the audience was waiting for the broadcast of this illegal guerrilla ballet action, which was scheduled for 10 PM CET. Every minute of the steps leading up to the action was meticulously planned, in accordance with the illegal nature of the event. Temporality came second to the strategic effect of taking over the space and synchronicity served the realization of the planned event. First, through a series of short electronic messages from the two authors, the audience was notified about all the details of the action during the ascent of the Hong Kong skyscraper, on top of which Ballettikka Internetikka Stattikka: Almost Static but Still Transitive Net Ballet was supposed to take place. At 10 PM, giant projections began in the hall at Hellerau. On its walls, ceiling and floor, the image of the robot appeared. With two red lights as eyes, the robot was situated on a concrete edge made of white ceramic tiles, as though it were just about to take a new step. Behind it, we could see the glittering and rhythmically pulsating lights of the Hong Kong metropolis, a night without proper darkness. There was a sound as though one or several people were continually changing the local radio stations. The length of the transmission was determined in advance: 35 minutes. After the first two minutes, however, the head technician, in charge of the transmission to the Dresden hall, Skyped a message to the two authors atop the Hong Kong skyscraper: “Hey, is everything ok? There’s nothing happening here yet.”¹ The authors replied that everything was fine. After 35 minutes of transmission, a meticulously scheduled and synchronised descent took place, followed by securing the equipment. The level of risk involved in the action was assessed as the maximum by the two authors.

“When are things going to start?” This question of the technician was not that of a person technically skilled but “uninformed” in the field of contemporary art. It actually mirrored the increasingly uncomfortable atmosphere in the hall; after a few minutes, people began to fidget, walk around and many actually left the hall. The artistic director of the festival, Johannes Birringer, later described the various reactions of the audience in his blog. While some people were enthusiastically following the authors’ project, others almost meditatively yielded themselves to the transmission on the screens, and still others felt a deep frustration, perhaps even anger, and left the hall in protest. After the performance, Birringer’s blog also featured a discussion between the authors and some members of the audience. The findings could be summed up in two points: a) that not much happened; and b) that, if the audience had been more informed about the context of the performance, they might have reacted differently to this “lack of goings-on”. The reaction of the audience testifies to the fact that duration can be problematic, especially in a technological context: if duration becomes independent, it needs a context. It needs to be filled with something before its slowness begins to get to us – we simply need to know why things have stopped.

Ballettikka Stattikka could be classified as a networked performance, i.e., a performance that broadcasts a real time and space event over the Internet, which, in Ballettikka’s case, featured a robot as a main performer. For these reasons, the performance opens quite a few issues related to the relationship between duration and barely perceptible movement. Ballettikka was part of Tele-Plateaus, a programme that, by means of broadcasts from various parts of the world, attempted to open up a platform for experimentation with synhronous temporalities and reflect on new concepts for events established by the relations between technology and performance.² One might expect that duration, the expansion of the event, cannot intrigue an audience too much that is used to performances where the time dimension is heavily experimented with (the perception of time by the audience, etc.). In Ballettika Stattikka, however, something paradoxical takes place. The connection works and the broadcast is successful, but it seems as though something went wrong; there is duration, but it comes across like a failure; there is slowness, but it seems to result from some sort of technical malfunction.

Placed on the white-tiled edge with the city view behind it, the robot/toy is not moving, but it is transmitting. In this way, it embodies the very title of the performance – static ballet. Although the event is broadcast, it seems as though things were not working, and we can quickly begin to feel that this is wasting and appropriating our time. When something does not function (the body, a machine, a car, a computer, a vending machine), the duration literally intervenes into the subject that witnesses this halt. It appropriates the subject’s inner feeling of time; the subject feels that he has been dispossessed, that he needs to slow down and wait. This slowing down and waiting is frequently felt in our culture when the apparatus (dispositif) that regulates and organizes our flexible subjectivities no longer works: for example, the means of transport through the city, social networks, airports, motorways, mobile phones. Most of us feel agitated within several seconds when a desired computer programme does not open; we feel like giving the computer a smack, just like we used to with the old televisions when the image was flickering and unstable. These kinds of halts in motion or slowings down have a direct influence on the body as they appropriate the temporality of the subject, organized as endless flexibility, simultaneity and adaptability. In moments like this, we say that we are stuck, with little else to do but hang in there and become powerless observers of our own chronological time, who can only ‘[feel] the time flying by without being left with any of it, and always miss [our]selves’.³ All the apparatuses we use to establish ourselves as subjects today promise speed and effectiveness. The greater the speed promised by the apparatuses, the less our tolerance (and the more affective our responses) when something remains stationary instead of working. When something is stopped, it seems as though our subjectivity will be disabled, as though it will be dispossessed.⁴ Duration becomes apparent when something does not work, stops or hardly moves. Perhaps the affective response is the consequence of the fact that it is the duration that shows that we ourselves are actually not moving, but are being moved, that our inner perception of time (the time of someone who freely and flexibly projects their own subjectivity) is, in fact, heavily, socially and economically conditioned.

Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman in many of their projects purposefully contrast mutually exclusive temporalities. On the one hand, the preparation of the event (which is not documented with footage, but can only be followed through short online messages) is almost dramaturgically structured through the constant acceleration and division of time. On the other hand, the broadcast of the event is purposefully far from the anticipated effect. They contrast two exclusive temporalities which can also be understood as inner temporal qualities of the contemporary flexible subject. On the one hand, the subject today is subjugated to accelerated time, organized through the precise time management of actions and movement; everything (including our potentiality and emotions) is organized into a sequence that leads to a certain effect. On the other hand, however, there is a lot of redundancy, slowness, motionlessness, ineffectiveness, stasis and non-functioning in the way in which we experience subjectivity. In this way, Ballettikka Stattikka is mirroring the specific dynamic at work in the contemporary experience of temporality, where action constantly interchanges with fatigue. At the very moment when the clock begins to tick and the hall is illuminated on the other side of the planet, the investment of the two authors in the event (on the concrete and phantasmatic level, which makes the audience eager in its expectations) is flattened into something static, the image of the movement which has stopped, a still image. The investment, the entire preparation for the event, becomes consumption without an effect; the energy and actions produce an effect that is too slow, a lesser effect, so to speak. There is a specific incapability at work in the relation to the expectation of what could happen in Ballettikka, a specific exhaustion of the event itself. This dynamic of action and fatigue could also be compared to the economic relationship between the time of the investment and the time of the consumption. The time of the investment, although flexible and multilayered, is at the same time homogenous. The subject continuously structures his time in a project-like manner: to achieve an effect and to realize future goals. This directly contributes to the acceleration of his time. However, on the other side, consumption of investment is becoming increasingly redundant. Not only does it have harmful effects on the habitat (the natural or social one), destroying it with its insatiable desire, but it is also assisting in the experience of subjectivity as redundancy, where consumption goes hand in hand with dissatisfaction, always insufficient gains, a phantasmatic spending of energy and resources that brings exhaustion instead of affirmation of subjectivity. The subject’s crisis also appears to come from the excessive dynamic of investment and consumption, where the body is very often taken over by fatigue, stillness which comes directly from speed: in our culture, speed and slowness seem to be in a direct and traumatic opposition. In all of its formations, especially those dealing with breaking in and illegality, Ballettikka plays with these feelings of time organization through expectation and the consumption of time – with the expectation of the event and its actual realisation.

II.

Similar feelings are triggered by NVSBL (2007), a dance performance by Eszter Salamon. This is just one of a number of dance performances in recent years where movement has been reduced to a minimum; it is barely perceptible and has analogous qualities to the unsuccessful movement of the robot in the Ballettikka video. It is true that in this performance we are dealing with the barely perceptible movements of bodies and not artificial bodies as in Ballettikka; however, there is something comparable in the way in which the bodies are slowed down inside a decelerated image, as they would be if recorded in slow motion. The title of the performance is deliberately without consonants; the word itself resembles the missing links in the movement of the four dancers – as imperceptible as it may be. Very slowly, four dancers appear from the background, motionless and yet moving. Their bodies seem to slide from one flickering image to another, but cannot be actually retained in the memory. A comparison can be drawn with a broadcast where the image is being continuously delayed and the transmission is not functioning properly. The performance, which is difficult to describe with language without reducing that language to the logic of the events, has been captured by the philosopher Cristina Demaria in the following way:

“On stage we watch the imperceptible and therefore invisible movements of four dancers who emerge very slowly from a dark background: with their bodies, and with a miraculous play of lights, they are not so much composing figures as being figures, apparently motionless but actually changing. Figures that become channels of a ‘logic of sensation’ (Deleuze), at times also laboriously alienating for a public accustomed to seeing and therefore judging what it manages to interpret (‘But nothing’s happening here,’ said a woman in front of me, fidgeting nervously in her seat). It is however a logic capable of restoring our thought of the body as a force at once precise and devastating and also, quite simply, beautiful, like the beauty associated with certain paintings that continually come to mind as we try to watch NVSBL. The power of this thought is demonstrated by such a reduction of movement in space as to render the very reality of the bodies inaccessible, because it deprives us of control over our own perception and consequently of presumed control over bodies which our vision believed it could frame and interpret with its own memory models.”

This description is quite close to what I would define as the potentiality of duration: the reduction and absence of movement are so radical that they shatter the reality of the bodies and, at the same time, dispossess our perception. Time becomes independent when it does not allow us to fill the emptiness with meaning. In this performance, the images are structured in such a way that they do not allow us to focus on anything, to rely on our memory; time is so redundant that it takes control over our perception. The consequence of such redundancy of time is the dispossession of our subjective inner feeling of time, where our attention is not empowering our subjective experience, but exactly the opposite: we are stuck, duration disables us, it takes over. When we are overwhelmed with a redundancy of time, duration does not stimulate our attention, making our awareness more intense. Attention becomes rather impersonal, as described by Blanchot: “It is not the self that is attentive in attention; rather, with an extreme delicacy and through insensible, constant contacts, attention has always already detached me from myself, freeing me for the attention that I for an instant become.”⁵ This is why duration does not activate us and make us more sensitive and open – more self-aware. Duration has nothing to do with tension and intensity, quite the opposite: during the redundant time that is passing, we are somehow emptied out, jammed, trapped in waiting.

III.

Only when we approach duration as something that is related to the dispossession of subjectivity, can duration be discussed as a potentially critical concept in contemporary culture. The two aforementioned works help us gain an insight into the current cultural and political dimensions of duration, which have different properties than the experiments with duration and temporality in the second half of the 20^th century. In contemporary performance, the stretching of time has for a long time been at the forefront. For example, Lehmann writes that, in contemporary theatre, we often no longer speak of the representation of the timeline, but about the presentation in its own temporality. Duration in theatre does not portray duration; in other words, when the performance slows down, the slowness on stage does not refer to the slowness of the fictitious universe, which is supposed to fuse with our own experiential world. Temporality becomes an immanent, ‘conscious’ element of the performance, by means of which theatre refers to its own process. The experience of time expansion and, consequently, the various strategies for organizing the spectator’s diffused perception are common characteristics of contemporary performance. Performance very often takes place in the gap between its fictitious time and the time of the audience.⁶ Instead of representing homogenous time (dramatic time, the time of the subject, the time of the event, etc.), contemporary performance takes place as a heterogeneity of temporalities, where a coherent temporality no longer exists. The performances begin to experiment with time and the attention of the spectator; they break the sequence and coherence of the events, experiment with memories that are yet to come, with repetition, with phenomenological experience, etc. In this way, performance has frequently been understood as an artistic field that defies the strict rationalization and effectiveness of homogenous time in contemporary capitalist society (where time is an economic value). It was often believed that performance enables the parallel and heterogeneous experience of attention and reveals the incoherence of the subject (cf. Lehmann). It seems that when the temporal experience of the subject cannot be embraced as a coherent unit, but as a flexible, heterogeneous and contradictory one, the subject cannot subjugated by the social organizational structures of production and the subject’s experience of time is not subdued into being merely effectiveness. In this way, contemporary performance seems to offer resistance to the social division of time and the understanding of time as a means of economic effectiveness. As Adrian Heathfield writes, in one of the crucial texts on duration, the theatre experiments of the early 1970s that introduce duration by means of various procedures (repetition, the expansion of the performance beyond the cultural convention, improvisation, coincidence and the non-materiality of the event) establish a critical understanding of time as a commodity and create inassimilable values that cannot be subjugated by the existing social and cultural construction of time, where time is closely connected to the effectiveness and rationalization of the social systems.⁷

However, it was also at the beginning of the 1970s when, in the wider social and cultural sphere, changes began to take place in the manner of subjectivisation that can be connected with the emerging post-industrial society. The changes were connected with what was discussed by the Italian operaists (Virno, Negri), who detected deep changes in social organization. The difference between work and free time is disappearing, the communicative and linguistic dimension is at the forefront; human potentiality is at the core of production. The power of production becomes what establishes us as human beings, as potent beings. This shift causes important changes in the social organization and cultural concepts of time. Experimenting with time (simultaneousness, heterogeneity, synchronicity) becomes an important part of contemporary production, accompanied by the continuous exchange of time compression, crisis and release (both on the personal and social levels). Experimenting with time serves to enhance the effectiveness and production value of the subject, as well as the value of virtual predictions and projections (not only in the financial market, but also in social structures). As contradictory as it may sound, experimenting with time is what contributes to the subduing and disciplining of the contemporary flexible subject of today. Time experimentation is an essential condition for the value of work.

Let’s try to find evidence for that argument in the contemporary artistic and cultural production. Most of the producers in that field are involved with projecting and realizing projects. The time dimension is therefore already contained in the very term ‘project’: actions in the future, the realization of possibilities, etc. Despite the fact that experimenting and constant movement is at their core, projects are simultaneously part of a homogenous temporality, which we increasingly feel as an intense acceleration of the personal, intimate and social time. The heterogeneous character of projects, which involves exceptional human abilities, paradoxically belongs to an all-embracing homogenous temporality, which does not enable a different social model of organization even though, paradoxically, it needs to constantly reflect upon it in order for the project to succeed.

My question would therefore be as follows: what is the critical value of duration in the post-industrial situation, where the inner feeling of the subject increasingly fuses with the value of his productivity and where the heterogeneity of temporality is at the core of shaping contemporary subjectivity? What is the critical value of duration if the heterogeneity of time is part of the subduing of the subject, the appropriation of the subject’s worth by production economy?

A few decades ago, duration could be understood as a sort of critical autonomy of the process (immediacy, failure, coincidence, redundancy, reversibility), and a way to manage the attention of the spectator and her/his sensibility. In the second half of the 20^th century, duration is also closely connected to the entry of work procedures into performance (e.g., that of improvisation in dance, where decisions are taken in the present and the work is not hidden behind the dancing body). Interestingly, this visibility of the work processes in performing runs parallel to the new methods of post-industrial production, where work is no longer Fordist as a rule, but also takes on more and more the characteristics of virtuosity (Virno). It takes place before the audience and acquires more and more communicative features. Today, however, due to changes in the inner perception of time, which is so closely connected with the apparatuses enabling the flexibility and simultaneity of subjectivity, I feel that we need to think in the direction of duration and dispossession, duration which overwhelms us with non- functioning and non-operativity. In order for the subject to last, he needs to literally be dispossessed, desubjectivised, almost forget himself as subject.⁸ This is why even short time non-operative units can have a very long duration today. Due to the accelerated and project-like character of our inner time, the subject finds himself in a no man’s land (that is very often a non-place, as defined by Marc Auge) if something does not function or if nothing goes on; he feels as though the duration intrudes upon him and, paradoxically, steals his most intimate time (which is actually heavily managed by the contemporary apparatuses). The duration, however, gives nothing in return; it does not sharpen our senses nor do we acquire a different sensibility by yielding to it. The duration does not activate us; it only dispossesses us and fails to catch our attention. In many contemporary performances, including those I have discussed today, duration does not cause sublime effects; if the performances do not irritate us so much that we leave straight away, we are stuck, lodged in the event. We sit there and do not surrender to the flow of the performance, but try to get through it as though it were an obstacle, actually having to move through it step by step. Our attention waits “without precipitation, leaving empty what is empty and keeping our haste, our impatient desire, and, even more, our horror of emptiness from prematurely filling it up. Attention is the emptiness of thought oriented by a gentle force and maintained in an accord with the empty intimacy of time.”⁹

Culturally, duration can be deeply subversive; but not because it contrasts the experience of slowness with the experience of speed (after all, slow movement is a privilege of the rich and inevitable for the hungry). Duration irritates us because it reveals how deeply our most intimate perception of time (i.e., the feeling that we are active beings constantly on the move) is socially constructed and economically conditioned. The time we suddenly have on our hands needs to dispossess us in order for us to be able to last. In contemporary life, the subject needs to be constantly actualized, however duration does not enable actualization. It throws us into pure potentiality, into what could happen.

IV.

By experimenting with duration and movement, the aforementioned performances open up the problematics of dispossession and non-operativity, not because nothing is happening, but because the redundant time generated interferes heavily with the inner processes of subjectivisation: we are suddenly left with time, which means that being is potentially possible without self-actualization. This description also has concrete political and cultural implications. Slow observation that does not concentrate upon the actual effect, the dispossession in which we create something before it actually happens, frequently characterises the manner of working on contemporary performance. This is especially true if performance is understood as the field of experimenting with and critically addressing the social and economic contexts in which we live and work. Duration also directly sabotages the organization of the social protocols of flexibility and mobility, especially when we are speaking of duration as a specific relation to movement. Contrastingly, continuous and accelerated movement (described by Sloterdijk as kinetic modernity), expels any kind of potency from the actualisation of the subject: professions need to be changed quickly, everything needs to be made usable, the future needs to be organized into a projection. Movement, however, does not only belong to the activity of the subject; we only begin to last when moved by others – when we have been placed into the world.

Finally, let me illustrate the concept of duration with one more image, a personal one from my home city. It is an image of the view from my window at home. I live near an old people’s home, whose residents take walks in a small circular park, where one can do little else but repeat the path over and over. Whenever I look at the park through my window (ironically, during cigarette breaks, which shorten my own chronological duration), I feel that something has changed in my perception of time. In the loudness of the city, a movement is revealed that cannot be looked at without a kinaesthetic feeling being triggered in my body (even if only for a moment – it is always possible to leave the space, to look away or to not see). The duration of the people’s walks shows as the slowness of the body no longer capable of the continuous and invisible transition of the city inhabitant, harmonised with the omnipresent rhythm. The walks the old people take always confirm to me that movement is not only getting from point A to point B. Movement is not a unity of quantitative differences that can be endlessly multiplied, as Deleuze warned. Movement is not only a transient movement in space, but it should also be understood as change, as quantitative differentiation. For example, Deleuze refers to the eminent philosophical parable of the fearless runner Achilles; despite his youth and strength, his movement resembles that of the old people in the park, who would represent the turtle in this parable. It is not about equal speed, but about an equal mode of duration. Achilles’ movement can be quantitatively divided into steps; with every step, however, the movement changes in a qualitative manner. Deleuze says: “What seems from the outside to be a numerical part, a component of the run, turns out to be, experienced from the inside, an obstacle avoided.”¹⁰ The inner perception of movement is therefore quantitative and enables change, precisely because movement concerns us from the outside. Movement is a relation. It constantly dispossesses us by means of obstacles that we cannot react to if we wish to move. This might be the interesting thing about these old bodies taking walks: that the inner experience of movement as qualitative change shows on the surface of the body. One of the basic illusions of the contemporary subject is namely that we only move because of our inner feeling of time. This illusion namely serves as a basis for constantly subduing contemporary subjectivity to numerous apparatuses which promise even greater mobility to defeat our ontological slowness.

The time of the subject is therefore not a homogenous projecting time, a possibility that constantly needs to be realised. Rather, it is constantly avoiding obstacles, involuntary movement, a slowness in which the time is running out. The German anthropologist and philosopher Odo Marquard writes that the obsession with speed in contemporary culture can also be understood as an incessant acceleration of the speed of life, a response to the ontological fact of the shortness of human life. However, Marquard claims that, in comparison to death, all human life is fundamentally slow. Only in this way can we bear the shortness of human life in comparison to the world around it, the fact that we are but a “niche in time”.¹¹ Human beings need to have a sense of slowness because this is the only way to differentiate those changes that are desired and possible. Suddenly, it is possible to see and feel that which could happen. And maybe that’s why the relation between duration and movement is so important: since it enables a waiting in which we look at something which is not there.

__________

Filed under: Essays ]]> http://kunstbody.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/how-time-can-dispossess-on-duration-and-movement-in-contemporary-performance/feed/ 0 kunstbody http://kunstbody.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/the-economy-of-proximity-dramaturgical-work-in-contemporary-dance/ http://kunstbody.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/the-economy-of-proximity-dramaturgical-work-in-contemporary-dance/#comments Sun, 20 Sep 2009 09:06:40 +0000 Bojana Kunst http://kunstbody.wordpress.com/?p=108 ]]> Bojana Kunst

- First published in Performance Research, UK, 14 (3), pp. 80 – 87, 2009.
- Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1iVyi-1K

Introduction

“I know what I do, but I do not know how to name it,” said André Lepecki in the early 1990s about his role in Vera Mantero’s work. “You are a dramaturg,” was the reply of Bruno Verbegt, a producer. (Lepecki, “Dance” 28) In this essay, I wish to show that the reasons why dramaturgy has entered contemporary dance over the last two decades have not only been due to the aesthetic and formal changes in contemporary dance, but also because of a profound shift in our understanding of the manners of working in contemporary dance and of the ways of its production and presentation. It is a known fact that the dramaturg enters contemporary dance simultaneously with the changes in European contemporary dance that have been taking place from the 1980s onwards. This is when contemporary dance – by means of interdisciplinary approaches – begins to shatter the stability of the categories that define choreographic and dance roles, and also raises the question: what is dance? At first sight, dramaturgical work in dance seems to reflect the increasing need for theory and reflection, which re-questions the a priori truths and self-evidence of dance (e.g., that dance equals movement, or that there is a neutral dance body), and thus brings a self-reflective dimension into dance, an awareness of the cultural, historical and economic context of the contemporary dance genre. However, if the entry of dramaturgy is only understood as a consequence of aesthetic changes, we are in danger of labelling dramaturgy as a new doxa. According to this new doxa the dramaturg is someone who is trained in the poststructuralist critical manner and familiar with the postdramatic expansion of performance practice; she is a guarantor of interdisciplinarity. At the same time, her work corresponds to the curatorial concepts of festivals and increasingly contextually-oriented production scopes. This kind of understanding of dramaturgy often works as a guarantee for the quality of performance, and is contained (albeit not always consciously) in the abovementioned dramaturgical coaching schemes.

Closely reading how dramaturgs themselves describe their work in contemporary dance, we can observe that many of them emphasize the need for the proximity of the work processes, for their inclusion, and point out the affective and embodied aspects of their work. Dramaturgical work has been described as embodied (Lepecki), as the management of different dramaturgical energies (Imschoot), as making the material richer in terms of dynamics and meaning (Fabio). (Turner and Behrndt 2008) Often, such descriptions reject the notion of the dramaturg as an observer, the one who is in the know, someone who spends most of the time sitting in the darkness of the stalls with a critical perspective from a distance. These descriptions aim to transcend the role of the dramaturg as a guarantor of objective knowledge. Dramaturgical collaboration is therefore characterized by a demand for proximity, which not only springs from the instability of epistemological categories or the fact that dramaturgs collaborate in dance performances with bodies and not texts. It also describes the topography of the work process, the division of roles and activities – we can also talk about certain characteristics of dramaturgical ‘labour’.¹ I remember Meg Stuart describing a bodily automatism as a consequence of the proximity of her collaboration with her former dramaturg Bettina Masoch, who allegedly always sat very close to her and to whom the artist always turned to during the process by putting her hands on her shoulders: “I used to continue doing that for a while, even when she was no longer beside me.”² This anecdotal automatism of work proximity (which, of course, can enter a variety of topographical images) speaks of a specific embodied aspect of dramaturgical work which is often in the foreground when we discuss the dramaturgy of a dance performance. What does this need for proximity suggest and where does it come from?

I. Paradox of public proximity

One of the answers can be found in focussing upon more “process-oriented methods of work, where the meaning, purpose, form and substance of work come from the work process and not from a meaning given in advance that needs to be dug out.” (Kerkhoven 18-20) Van Kerkhoven thus points out the shift toward more research-oriented, open and interdisciplinary ways of creating dance performance. In her essays from two decades ago, this manner of working is connected with a postmodern understanding of art, which refuses to accept truths and meanings set in advance. Nevertheless, it is possible to claim from today’s perspective that, in addition to the aesthetic characteristics of some specific style or art period, this kind of focus upon process-oriented methods of working is connected with the wider economic and cultural contexts of work processes, with immaterial labour in general. In the foreground of many productions and presentations of contemporary dance over the last two decades has been the multilogue and pluralist orientation of the very process of artistic work, its affective, linguistic and cognitive dimensions, which importantly contribute to and shape the contexts of presentation and institutionalization of dance (as well as that of dance education, research, etc.). The work process in contemporary dance is also closely connected with the temporary community modes of collaboration. This is proved by the phenomenon of the appearance and disappearance of dance centres (Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris), or temporary production initiatives whose additional value is precisely that of a constant exchange of immaterial work (information, knowledge, affection, emotion, proximity, criticalness, belonging).³ The proximity often found in descriptions of dramaturgical work in dance is then not only a consequence of the dramaturg’s work with bodies, or her awareness that there is no external guarantor of truth. This kind of demand for proximity is closely connected with the disappearance of the differences between individual manners of human experience, between labour, action, and intellect. Paolo Virno analyses the disappearance of the differences between labour (work oriented towards an organic exchange with nature) and action (political activity) in the contemporary post-Fordian world of labour, a world where labour is becoming increasingly similar to political, public action – the kind of action which finds its own fulfilment in itself. At the same time, intellect, too, is no longer an isolated reflexive activity but, according to Virno, becomes the basic score of post-Fordian labour (at the forefront of production are human cognitive abilities). Labour therefore becomes public, a virtuoso practice which always takes place in front of others. (Virno 2004)

It is no coincidence that contemporary dance (along with other contemporary art forms) is created and presented through many production contexts which encourage and develop artistic work in front of the public: we watch works-in-progress, research processes, open rehearsals, workshops, festivals with curatorial and contextual orientations, results of research processes, etc. “In the new landscape, the choreographer claims a theoretical voice, the critic emerges as producer, the agent writes dance reviews, the philosopher tries some steps, the audience is invited to join as both student and practitioner.” (Lepecki, “Dramaturgija” 27) In the first part of his text, Lepecki connects this kind of disappearance of differences with an emerging epistemological uncertainty about the critical discourse of dance. At the same time, he points out that this kind of disappearance should be studied from the perspective of the economy and capital which are influencing contemporary modes of production in performance. The disappearance of the differences between various categories of work and practices results from a shift in the understanding of the materiality of the artistic process of work itself, which profoundly influences the current ways in which dance is performed.

It could be argued that the need for proximity and embodiment of dramaturgical work in performance stems from the paradoxical fact that the methods of work, and labour processes in general, have become visible or public. The work that goes into creating a performance takes on a performative dimension – it is a process in itself and therefore demands an audience. The need for proximity is therefore actually the other side of the public character of the processes of artistic work. The performance of the work process is closely connected with the need for the inclusion of participants.

It is well known that 20^th-century art calls attention to visibility, perception, and the materiality of the creative processes. Art is performed as a specific practice which finds its own fulfilment in itself. As Agamben states, contemporary art has experienced a gradual disappearance of the distinction between poiesis and praxis, the two dimensions of human work which Aristotle had formulated as separate.⁴ The disappearance of a difference between work whose fulfilment lies outside of itself (poiesis) and work which finds its fulfilment in itself (praxis) has influenced many aesthetic shifts in art, such as the emancipatory aspects of the avant-garde, the relation between life and art, open work concepts, as well as the conceptual and collaborative artistic processes.

In contemporary dance, however, we are faced with an interesting problem which at this point can only be briefly outlined. Since its beginnings, contemporary dance has been viewed as a unique praxis, as a movement which finds its own fulfilment in itself, as a unique metakinesis where there is no difference between poiesis and praxis. The contemporary dance movements which, over the last 20 years, have again put into the foreground the praxis of dance, and engaged in the proximity of the spectator within that praxis, are therefore not a digression from production-oriented contemporary dance which might understand itself as a unique poiesis. I would also claim that, in this case, it is not so much about a clash of ideologies or statements over what dance is supposed to be, which is why the frequent description of the dance movements of the last two decades as conceptual dance misses the point. What really takes place is a change in the manner of practice, in the production of dance itself, in the way dance is made, all of which is closely connected to choreographic work in the wider sense of the word. The proximity and collapse of the distance between various work processes and professions is closely connected with changes in contemporary capitalism, where, according to Virno, fundamental abilities of the human being come into prominence. At the forefront of production are language, thought, self-reflection, and the ability to learn. Contemporary production consists of sharing linguistic and cognitive habits, and it is this affective and intellectual exchange of knowledge that constitutes post-Fordist labour production. “All the workers enter into the production as much as they are speaking-thinking. This has nothing to do, mind you, with ‘professionality’ or with the ancient concepts of ‘skill’ or ‘craftsmanship’: to speak/to think are generic habits of the human animal, the opposite of any sort of specialisation.” (Virno 41) For Virno, this can be described as preliminary sharing, which is itself the basis of contemporary production. In his view, sharing is opposed to the traditional division of labour. There are no longer objective technical criteria that regulate the shared working conditions or define the responsibility of each worker in his or her own specialised sphere. As Virno writes, “the segmentation of duties no longer answers on the objective ‘technical’ criteria, but is, instead, explicitly arbitrary, reversible, changeable.” (41) In this context, the manner of artistic production no longer differs from other manners of production; as a matter of fact, contemporary capitalism has accepted some of the basic characteristics of artistic work such as creativity, autonomy and innovation. Interdisciplinarity, dance as a field of knowledge, research, open work, work in progress, embodied dramaturgy – all these categories are to be rethought and positioned in relation to cognitive capitalism, which places embodied language relations and events at the foreground of production processes. In this sense, the eventness of dance itself, its relationality, and the affectiveness of work processes are emphasized and become part of the production and performance of contemporary dance.

It would also be possible to set a hypothesis which we will not be able to reflect on in depth at this point. Having developed through the 20^th century in connection with the principles of Fordism (endless motion, speed, oscillation between order and chaos, the regulated and the coincidental), the development of contemporary dance over the last two decades has reflected the deep changes brought about by post-Fordian modes of labour (cognitive and affective virtuosity, multilayered temporality, proximity, collaboration processes, openness of work, etc.). In this sense, different choreographic practices should not be understood only as aesthetic practices, but also as wider social processes of distributing bodies in time and space. These kinds of practices no longer emerge from the speed and autonomy of the industrial movement. What unfolds before us is the perceptive embodiment of the body, the intermediation of the body, the cognitive and biogenetic potentiality of movement. There has been a shift from the autonomy and dynamism of movement to the broader social and cultural distribution of bodies, with heteronomy and proximity emerging as main characteristics of contemporary cultural and economic relations.

II. The Profession of the Dramaturg

A major reason for the entry of dramaturgy into dance can be found in the changing contexts of artistic practice and social labour. The entry of the dramaturg into dance could be read as a consequence of the changes in the political economy of labour, where the production of language, contexts, and human cognitive and affective abilities now dominates. These changes are not only a consequence of artistic self-reflexivity and cannot be considered as isolated events in the (supposedly autonomous) sphere of art, but a reflection of the onset of cognitive capitalism and the altered modes of production associated with it. This is why the dramaturg’s work is strongly characterized by flexibility; as a participant in the process, the dramaturg can occupy a variety of roles – those of practical dramaturg, producer, festival director, stage manager, writer, journalist, teacher, workshop leader, coach, lecturer, academic, artist, dancer, production network member, cultural politics advisor, mentor, friend, compass, memory, fellow traveller, mediator, psychologist. The complexity of the dramaturg’s profession – the affective ability to move between theoretical reflection and practical knowledge, to be an external eye and an involved participant at the same time – is often too hastily reduced to a sort of ‘aesthetic’ elusiveness. On the contrary, the flexibility of the dramaturg’s work is connected to the contemporary production of events and relations, and the dramaturg often becomes a facilitator of the contemporary exchange of concepts, senses, attention, and perception. Flexibility, which is part of the political economy of the dramaturg’s work/labour, enables them to continuously deal with various possibilities of artistic production. These production possibilities are closely connected with new institutions, which are not based so much on the stable architecture and representative power of production houses, but rather on a model of constantly changing, critical and creative platforms for events and meetings. In this sense, contemporary dramaturgy differs from the modern project of audience cultivation and critical discourse formation, which has shaped audience taste and collective identification. As Eda Čufer writes, the function of the dramaturg according to the traditional enlightenment model is especially to establish fluidity and transition between various autonomous systems or spheres.⁵ Precisely because of its ability to transgress, the work of traditional dramaturgy is marked by a sense of objectivity, with the dramaturg identifying and categorizing the audience that visits the artistic institution. Today, however, when the differences between diverse ways of human experience (labour, action, intellect) are blurred and the differences between autonomous systems discussed by Čufer are disappearing as well, notions of objectivity and externality seem anachronistic. Proximity therefore corresponds to the contemporary tendency towards audience fragmentation and individualization, as well as to the ideals of mobility and flexibility embraced by contemporary artistic institutions. Rather than adopting a perspective of objective distance, the professional dramaturg today embodies a kind of affective proximity, which, at the same time, is also at the forefront of understanding contemporary creative processes, models of contemporary institutions, and ways of disseminating artistic work.

Very often the role of the dramaturg has been defined by the simple fact that a performance always takes place before an audience. The dramaturg is continuously denoted as the first spectator, or someone who translates between the process and the product presented; someone who establishes the context of presenting and mediates between the various dissemination processes of artistic work. In all of these descriptions, the dramaturg adopts an outside perspective, whereas the audience is presented as a sort of anonymous multitude whose identification is also constructed by the dramaturg. Not only does the dramaturg represent the taste of the audience, but she is also capable of transforming attitudes by means of interpreting meaning. Contemporary dramaturgy radically digresses from this representational function of the dramaturg, not least because contemporary audiences can no longer be defined as a multitude characterized by a communal ways of identification. As the developments of the performing arts in the 20^th century have shown, the modes of audience perception and reception have become fragmentary. Contemporary audiences are a lot more unstable, dynamic and singular; spectators become aware of their own viewing positions and perspectives and experience proximity and distance in embodied ways. Such individualized ways of looking, however, raise an interesting problem that places the anonymous contemporary spectator (anonymous because a priori they do not belong to a defined group, nation, class, gender, etc.) in proximity to the event. The spectator becomes a participant who is actively and critically involved in what takes place. This economy of proximity is characteristic of the production contexts within which contemporary art is presented and produced. Inclusion, participation, relationality, engagement, emotional and intellectual involvement, affective temporality, expectation – all of these modes are embraced in contemporary dance dramaturgy.

Conclusion

One of my most unusual dramaturgical experiences began on a Monday morning in 2007, when a kind organizer of a contemporary dance production house gave me the list of participants of a one-week session in dramaturgical coaching. As a dramaturg, I was to meet three authors or groups per day, with three hours in the studio available for our ‘séance’. The intention was to work on their upcoming performances, address questions generated by the authors during the work process, analyse created materials, question the relation to the audience, etc. It soon turned out that the authors came from a variety of backgrounds and with quite diverse motivations. Some had open questions that arose in the middle of the work on their performances; some wanted to share ideas from the beginning stages of their work; some came with finished performances. Like many of the authors, I felt at the beginning of each three-hour ‘séance’ as if going to a blind date and jumping into a precipice to boot; as befits dates of this kind, some of the meetings were unforgettable and some were failures from the very start. It was precisely due to the endless diversity of these meetings and the elusive materiality of our exchanges that I obsessively began to search for a common denominator with which I could connect and ‘ground’ our meetings. At the end of the week I noticed that, for the purposes of note-taking, we all used the currently very trendy Moleskine notebook, commercially successful and sold along with the romantic experience of its first user, Bruce Chatwin.

Compared to other more intensive and more research-oriented formats, this singular adventure of one-week dramaturgical coaching could be brushed off as not a very good idea on the part of the production house. Nevertheless, I think the very fact that there is a need for the artist (choreographer, director, dancer, etc.) to be dramaturgically trained, needs consideration. In the case described above, the artists involved are prepared to pay for this meeting; an economic exchange takes place between the artist and the dramaturgical ‘coach’ with the aid of an intermediary / producer. At the same time, such workshops are not the domain of result-driven production houses but are generally sought after by arts organizations which are interested in open ways of working rather than in products. Prior to the adventure described, I had the opportunity to participate in workshops held by more research-oriented organizations. There was no payment required from the artists and the coach’s fee was much lower as well. There was, however, more emphasis placed on the symbolic value of the exchange because it enables artists to acquire new knowledge, as well as providing an opportunity to socialize and practice contemporary forms of dance and theatre art. Considering that coaching always aims at improving a certain ability, increasing the quality of performing a certain task and perfecting a certain discipline, what could be the aim of dramaturgical coaching? Which quality should be enhanced by means of it? How should the object of this exchange be articulated? What ability is coached? What can change or shift by means of such a meeting? One could get away with the answer that it is simply about a dialogue between two parties, about a proximity that opens the path toward the possibility of exchanging knowledge and approaches. Why is it, however, that this dialogue is given a material value, in concrete financial or symbolic terms? And why is it that this kind of proximity is dependent upon the intermediation by a third party (who marks this proximity with their own indelible stamp)?

I think that these questions can only be answered by analysing the cultural and economic contexts that have influenced the emergence of dramaturgy in contemporary dance over the last two decades, especially since the 1990s. It is only in this way that the phenomenon of dramaturgical coaching will not be moralistically read as excess or an example of bad practice, one testifying to the production/market appropriation of research-oriented, open and interdisciplinary ways of working. Quite the opposite, coaching is only the other, extreme side of ‘good practice’, of the so-called elusiveness of dramaturgical practice, its frequently anecdotal inability of naming, its visible invisibility, and its ability to combine theory and practice. It is this openness of the dramaturgical practice in contemporary dance that can take up many different roles, oscillating between “reflection and creativity; detail and overview” (Behrndt 96). It is interdisciplinary, opens possibilities for production, and represents an ability that is difficult to define.

“That was just a very good dialogue between me, as dramaturge, and them, as the artists … I’m probably rather a curator, but in both cases the important thing is that they – that the artists have a partner to give them a kind of faith that is welcome – that it’s kind of accepted, that it’s understood. That’s probably the most important thing, that it’s understood.” (Thomas Frank in Turner and Behrndt 112) This is how Thomas Frank (a dramaturg and the current joint artistic director of BRUT theatre in Vienna) describes his work with the UK Company Lone Twin. Emphasizing the notion of proximity, Frank describes the dramaturg as someone who calms you down, offers emotional support and even faith. What is accepted (or not) as a result of the proximity of the dramaturg? What exactly is calming about the dramaturg’s presence? These questions are meant to supplement the introductory questions pertaining to the difficulty of articulating the processes of dramaturgical coaching. If we wish to at least approximately answer those questions, we need to immerse ourselves in the complex core of immaterial knowledge – an elusive ability and potentiality which is part of dramaturgical work. The appearance of this knowledge/ability can be explained by using Marx’s famous description of the changes in the 19^th century: “All that is solid melts into air.” As we well know, it is dematerialization that guarantees surplus value, or better put, the fictitiousness of value (whose material consequences we are facing in the present economic crisis). In this immaterial process, articulated through various ways of proximity and collaboration, cognitive and embodied knowledge become frequently appropriated, organized and embodied through the intermediation of the market and capital. Furthermore, this knowledge is at the core of contemporary production. The questions that I consider essential are: How can one place dramaturgical work in relation to politics and capital? The most interesting problem here is the question about the political potentiality of proximity itself. What is the potentiality of working with a dramaturg? On the one hand, proximity often veils the appropriation of the processual character of work and gives priority to a critical, but non-antagonistic understanding of performance work and audience reception. According to this perspective the dramaturg becomes that fellow conversationalist who calms our fears about contemporary life by ensuring that a certain practice can be shown on the market. On the other hand, we have to examine whether the entry of the dramaturg into contemporary dance nevertheless testifies to a certain radical change of artistic practice, which has the power to intervene socially and disclose artistic work as an antagonistic political space.

From this perspective, proximity does not spring from the intermediation of a third party which enables us to write our thoughts down into the same trendy notebooks, but results from an encounter of different ways of working together, which only enables (or fails to enable) changes and establishes future forms of being. The placing of cognitive knowledge into the centre of the production process can thus open new ways of being and also profoundly question the nature of dance and its supposedly self-evident relation to contemporary life.

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References:

Bauer, Eleanor. “Becoming Room, Becoming Mac: New Artistic Identity in the Transnational Brussels Dance Community.” Maska 107-108 (2007): 58-67.

Behrndt, Synne K. “The dramaturg as collaborator: process and proximity.” conference paper, conference Dramaturgy as Applied Knowledge: From Theory to Pactice and Back, The Department of Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv University, http://expandeddramaturgies.com/?cat=10. 25. 3. 2007.

Čufer Eda. “Petnajst lepih tez o dramaturgiji.” Maska 1-2 (2001): 23.

Kerkhoven, Marianne van. “Introduction”. On Dramaturg, Theaterschrift, 5-6. (1994): 18-20.

Lepecki, André. “Dramaturgija na pragu.” Maska 1-2 (2001b): 26-29.

Lepecki, André. “Dance without Distance.” Ballet International/Tanz Aktuel [English ed.]. (2001a): 29-31.

Turner, Cathy, and Synne K. Behrndt. Dramaturgy and Performance. Theatre and performance practices. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an analysis of contemporary forms of life

Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext(e). 2004.

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- First published in: Prognosen über Bewegungen, ed. Gabriele Branstetter, Kai van Eikels, Sybille Peters, B-Books, Berlin, 2009.
- Published also in French and Serbian language in: Exhausting Immaterial Labour in Performance, Joint issue of Le Journal des Laboratoires and TKH Journal for Performing Arts Theory (No. 17), October 2010, pp. 23 – 29.
- Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1iVyi-21

“The absolutely desperate current state of affairs fills me with hope”
(Karl Marx)

On the time left to live

In 2007, Carnegie Mellon University organised a series of lectures entitled Last lecture, for which several professors were asked to talk about what was really on their minds. If they had had to deliver the last lecture of their lives, what would that have been like and on what subject? The invitation from the university with the rhetorical implications of determinacy was clearly intended to challenge the lecturers and prompt their imagination to yield some additional value. The challenge got a totally different twist to it in September 2007, however, in the lecture given by Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science, entitled Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. After stating that he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and only had half a year left to live, he began to talk in an optimistic and humorous way about his childhood dreams, giving insights into computer science and also giving advice on creating multi-disciplinary collaborations, group work and interaction with other people. All that was accompanied by enchanting life lessons and even push-ups on stage. His lecture immediately received media attention. The lecture video became an online hit at social networking sites such as YouTube, Google Video, etc., and within a few days, the promise of him publishing a book with his lecture was worth 6 to 7 million dollars.¹ His story led to unavoidable spectacle, where the empathy and compassion grew simultaneously with the market value. It contained all the necessary elements of tragedy – a good-looking man, a successful professor in his 40ies with three young children, is confronted with the evaporation of the time ahead of him. The reason that I’m starting my prognosis paper with this particular story is not out of empathy (with the unbearable heaviness of mortality), but due to some coincidences in the story which can reveal to us the intriguing relations between the contemporary experience of time and collaboration. A real attention-grabbing surplus of this story happened at the time when professor Pausch was already fighting his terminate illness as a celebrity. In the middle of the buzz in which collective identification was growing along with the anticipated profit from his works, Pausch agreed to give another lecture at Columbia University, in which he talked about time management. He talked about the most efficient ways of making use of time, of how to create manageable plans, multiple schedules, efficient meetings and of how to go to bed with an empty inbox. This was something Pausch was an expert on in his lifetime, but of course acquired a completely different, much more metaphysical dimension when he accepted the invitation. The philosopher Renata Salecl who wrote about that story in a newspaper column, describes the obsession with time management as a desperate attempt to look behind the unbearable mask of death. There is no mystery behind the determinate fact of death or – whatever our strategy may be – behind the obsessive time management or refusal of all time plans; all strategies are equally unproductive.² Pausch fought his illness bravely and died in July 2008, one month after this text first appeared as a lecture within the scope of the Prognosis conference. The last period of his life is intriguingly commemorated by the book The Last Lecture, which besides providing optimistic guidelines for living, dealt also with subject of collaboration and ways of working together in research and time management. Strange combination of issues being put together with the fact of unavoidable prognosis about life, did not result from some publishing strategy, nor it is merely coincidental. It can also be understood as a peculiar symptom which discloses the strange relation between time and working together, a relation which is a necessity nowadays: in contemporary society, working together cannot be conceived of separately from time management.

I would like to argue that there are important economic, political and philosophical reasons nowadays for the fact that collaboration is understood as a timely constellation, one that calls for perfected time management, organisation and division. From the perspective of contemporary political economy, collaborative work processes are inextricably connected with time planning since contemporary capital is not only understood as a measure, but also as progress: contemporary political economy has an innovative element in itself. As Toni Negri said, we live in the ‘time of administration’, where »progress is the representation of a process that proceeds by leaps forward, in which all factors can be referred back to a proportion. Difference is then only only quantitative and the unity of the project is always already before its articulation.«³ In other words, we all continuously behave as if being in a determinate race (with many deadlines to cross), where the abstract goal defines the present time of the process, its temporal dynamics, the ways in which the process is articulated, implemented, measured. In that sense, the collective identification with the definiteness of the time left for us to live is even more understandable: it springs from the sudden and absolutely desperate impossibility of proportion, from the terrible experience of the desperate impotency in the administration of our life.

»What is time, then? I know very well what time is if not asked about it, but if somebody asks me what time is and I want to explain, I become confused.«⁴ In this statement, St. Augustine relates the difficulty of articulation to the ontological understanding of time, with time closely related in his theological thought to the mystery of divinity. If we approach his statement from a contemporary perspective, we find that, today, this unspeakable ontological understanding of time is replaced with the maneuverable and explainable notion of time. That means that the contemporary experience of time is contained within our knowledge of what time is (or ‘what the time is’). This experience of time can also be related to the frequent sentence: sorry, don’t have the time – which, of course, is but another description of our general experience of time. The contemporary acceleration of time, which results from the industrial, economic and scientific processes of the last two centuries, has not only dissolved the spatial coordinates of work processes, their immobile and static territoriality, but also changed the modes of individuation of contemporary subjects. Jameson argues that contemporary temporality is a schizophrenic one; it is a temporality of the present, which lacks any phenomenological connections to be able to hold on to the past and anticipate the future.⁵ However, the experience of the contemporary subject and the individuation of the human being is achieved through the multilayered and parallel present time experiences, which, regardless of the possibility of openness and liberation, have to be carefully planned throughout and have a particular, effective time structure. Their chaotic and multilayered experience has to be rationalised with the operative and effective procedures which necessarily subjugate subjective experiences to the common goal.

This argument can also be also be supported by the important maxim of immaterial labour of the last decades: that of ‘working together’. As Florian Schneider writes, working together or ‘teamwork’ has been a key notion in the changed political and economical atmosphere of the last decade, and collaboration is very frequently used as a synonym for co-operation. Based on the comprehension of the management theory that, in teamwork environment, people are supposed to understand and believe that thinking, planning, decisions and actions are better when done in co-operation with others, teamwork served as a key notion for success, following the famous maxim of Andrew Carnegie from the beginning of 20th century: “Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision, the ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.”⁶ However, teamwork, as Schneider writes, also represents the subjugation of workers “to an omnipresent and individualized control regime. The concept of group replaced the classical one of “foremanship” as the disciplining force. Rather than through repression, cost efficiency was increased by means of peer-pressure and the collective identification of relatively small groups of multi-skilled co-workers.”⁷ Teamwork is therefore part of the obsessive administration of the neoliberal subject, who, paradoxically, has to be free from their inner constraints, creative, innovative and virtuous. A subject who, at least since the late 1960ies onwards, has been able to reveal their subconscious desires and free themselves from the permanent feeling of mortality. At the same time, this creative and value-generating subject is free from the restrains of society, the difficulties posed by differences and otherness. Not only can he/she freely work with others, but the otherness becomes value in co-operation. In this obsessive administration of the subject’s self, refusal is only allowed from time to time; from time to time, it is possible to escape, maybe on holiday, into drugs or, unfortunately, to hospital. As Guattari argues, the human being is today confronted with a brutal intensification of the processes of individuation, where old forms of life become obsolete even before we are able to absorb them. In this way, the molecular dispersion of time has set free the finite, subconscious subjectivity, implemented in the endless existential paradoxes. At the same time, however, one is compelled to live in a constant state of tension, on the verge of exasperation, and it is this state that gives rise to the power of invention. “Moreover, the process is intensified even further by the fact that this aggravated tension and speeded-up power of invention not only nourish capital but actually constitute its principal source of value, its most profitable investment.”⁸ The paradox is that immaterial work force, into which so much hope for collaboration has been invested over the last decade, is, as Matteo Pasquinelli ironically puts it, in a kind of ’immaterial civil war’ and not a struggle against new forms of exploitation: “It is the well known rivalry within academia and the art world, the economy of references, the deadline race, the competition for festivals, the envy and suspicion among activists. Cooperation is structurally difficult among creative workers, where a prestige economy operates the same way as in any star system (not to mention political philosophers!), and where new ideas have to confront each other, often involving their creators in a fight.”⁹ Can we then imagine a different mode of collaboration which would not necessarily end in having no time at all, precisely at the point when we actually begin to collaborate? Can we also collaborate with no revolutionary, corporative, metaphysical deadlines on the horizon? As Schneider argues, the question is how new dimensions of working together could be reflected on, conceived of and at the same time distanced from the “free wheeling and well-meaning strategies of anti-authoritarianism on one side or the brutal force of coercing cooperation on the other”.¹⁰ So what then makes collaboration transformative and how do collaborative subjects really inflict change?

On time left to work

Today, it is so difficult to think about the collaboration as a transformative process precisely because there is a certain excess of collaboration in our daily lives: we mostly become visible when collaborating. Collaboration is a key issue, not only in politics (which is somehow cynical, given the other meaning of ‘collaboration’, connected with treason), but also in contemporary economy and culture. Collaboration is closely related to the mobility in flexibility of contemporary labour and even seems to be inscribed into the value of labour as based on the constant production and exchange of communication, relations, signs, and languages. Collaboration places people into the present (time); it is only through collaboration, on the constantly changing map of places, that people can actually become visible in the present time, where they constantly add to the contemporary flow of money, capital and signs. Interestingly, the other can most of the time be encountered exactly in the same work community that enables this contemporary mobility: more and more “non-collaborative or non-belonging” people or groups move in the invisible and deadly channels of illegality, poverty, invisibility and escape. We can say that collaboration, communication and connection belong to the most fetishized fields of the present day. As Paolo Virno writes, fundamental abilities of a human being are now at the forefront of production, with language, thought, self-reflection and ability to learn as principal characteristics of contemporary public labour. Contemporary production consists of sharing linguistic and cognitive habits (i.e. if affective and intellectual exchange of knowledge); it is the constitutive element of post-Fordist production of labour. “All the workers enter into the production as much as they are speaking-thinking. This has nothing to do, mind you, with ‘professionality’ or with the ancient concepts of ‘skill’ or ‘craftsmanship’: to speak/to think are generic habits of the human animal, the opposite of any sort of specialisation.”¹¹ For Virno, this can be described as preliminary sharing, which is itself the basis of contemporary production. In his view, sharing is opposed to the traditional division of labour. There are no longer objective technical criteria to regulate the working together, to define the responsibility of each worker in its own specialised sphere. Or, as Virno writes, “the segmentation of criteria is instead of that, explicitly arbitrary, reversible, changeable.”¹² Along these lines, the interesting notion of the process of sharing can also be interpreted as a specific understanding of collaboration as an exchange of differences, creations and innovations and no longer as a hierarchical division of tasks. The problem for Virno arises, however, when such sharing has no political effect, and does not affect change within a political community. “The public character of the intellect, when it does not take place in a public sphere, translates into the unchecked proliferation of hierarchies, groundless as they are thriving.”¹³ This influences the ruthless mode of individuation in terms of complete subjugation of the worker’s self or, in Virno’s words, results in ‘personal dependence’, which I already discussed in the previous chapter. The fetishized status of collaboration can also tell us something about what Virno terms the ‘non-public public sphere’, which reflects the one-dimensional character of global networks and communication channels. “Because this sphere is not a political sphere, the non-public public sphere thus created can produce the most devastating consequences: collective hallucinations of fear, occult form of superstition and general paranoia.”¹⁴ Or, if we apply this to the notion of collaboration: when collaboration fails to not inflict change within the public sphere, it is not part of res publica and can produce unrestrained forms of oppression.

It namely seems that there is something in our daily rhythm, in the way we experience this sharing of language and thought, which puts us into a state of constant mobility, flexibility and precariousness, where nothing is stable but the deadline of working together, and where space is generated as a consequence of mobility. In 2006 Eleanor Bauer, an American choreographer and dancer based in Brussels, completed her research on the Brussels dance community. In her text she humorously tackles the notion of mobility of contemporary performance artists, the changed status of this flexible and disembodied labour, and the value of the community which has resulted from such collaborative mobility of artists. Besides offering picturesque descriptions of the mobility of the contemporary performer, with an obligatory Mac computer and multiple toothbrushes, one of the last paragraphs of her research describes the contemporary performing artist in the following way: “The performing artist him/herself is a resource, a located node of activity and hub for information that processes and produces within the interstices of culture and community. In a neo-collective or post-collective model, the artists that remain pro-community engagement, must maintain very individual-oriented strength and productivity while remaining connected to the world and to each other, each highly differentiated while in constant collaboration with a larger network of other creative, productive, individuals that support and engage in each other’s interests. This description is ambitious considering what it requires in terms of time and energy, and generosity of course, as we are not paid for keeping in touch even when our work depends on it.”¹⁵ Let us ask ourselves, however, where this accurate description of the highly ambitious performance artist actually comes from? Could this not be precisely the description of the contemporary collaborative worker, equipped for continuous high performance? That of the always critical and active labourer, whose subjectivity is totally subjected to the modes of contemporary capitalistic production? The fact that he/she has some generosity and even collaborates free of charge doesn’t save him or her from the contemporary forms of exploitation. Quite the opposite: this generosity becomes the extra value of belonging to the discoursive and productive cultural community.¹⁶ The generosity puts him/her into the core of the contemporary mode of individuation, where what is demanded from the subject is precisely their extra time and energy. Could that description not be read also as a description of an artist who is desperately struggling with an excess of collaboration, with the publicity of their work which, at the same time, is not public at all (except maybe within a small specialistic operative circle which delegate value to each other)?

Over the last decade, collaboration has become a key issue in the vocabulary of dancers, choreographers, and other performing artists. There are many performances dealing with collaboration as well as conferences and lectures on that issue. The word appears, as Myriam Van Imschoot writes in one of her letters on collaboration in contemporary dance, “more often than one count: it gained a currency of a catch phrase.” However, “do we speak more about collaboration because dance makers collaborate more than they used to, say, a decade ago?”¹⁷ The enforced interest in collaboration could of course have been related to the changes in the understanding of artistic subjectivity. The subjectivity of the artist has no longer been understood as a singular, self-centred subjectivity. The process of artistic creation is now much more oriented towards research-related, transdisciplinary and performative aspects of work. This can be also related to the disappearance of professional divisions, as discussed by André Lepecki. For some time already, the divisions between choreographers, dancers, critics, producers and dramaturges are disappearing. Thus, each of those professions have on disposal theoretical and practical knowledge from other fields – another factor which reinforces collaboration and makes it visible in contemporary artistic policies. Lepecki relates this disappearance to the dissolving of the stable epistemological categories of ‘what dance is’, which has also caused changes in the position of an artist, critic and producer.¹⁸ Such changes have resulted in different models of collaborative work and also become part of contemporary cultural politics and economies of production. However, as Imschoot writes, this reorientation on the artistic scene may explain why the collaboration label circulates more frequently, but “it does not explain why it does so with so much emphasis, to the point of sheer over-determination and a compulsive repetition of the term. It seems as if collaboration functions as uncritical marker or signifier, an honorific that must signal more than it actually performs.”¹⁹ There is a certain crisis in the notion itself; its high frequency of use, as Imschoot continues by drawing on Foucault, reveals that there is some sort of anxiety at work in the very use of the collaboration term. This anxiety springs from “the sheer dominance of the pure movement, mobility for its own sake, a being on the move for the pleasure of the speed”.²⁰ I would agree with Imschoot that there is something very problematic at work in the compulsive repetition of this term. This repetitive use is tightly linked to the changed notion of labour, where language and the thinking being are at the forefront of contemporary production. The anxiety springs from the inability to really inflict change, to make the processes of collaboration part of res publica, to open up one’s political and transformative potentiality. What Imschoot detects in this obsessive use and practice of collaboration is that, ultimately, we have no time at all. An anxiety of subjugation, an unbearable attempt to look behind the mask of the determinate race, whereby, at the same time, we just won’t admit that we are already intensely participating in that very race.

On time being left to collaborate

What is collaboration all about in that case, and what kind of prognosis can be made about it? It is well-known that, from the second half of the 20th century, we witnessed a lot of research being done on the nature of artistic collaborative processes. When analysing those processes in the visual arts, the art historian Charles Green showed that those processes came from a particular crisis of the singular artistic subject; they were a result of the crisis of authorship as such. However, the outcome of those collaborative processes was not necessarily more democratic and didn’t result in a more dispersed process of working. As Green noticed, authorship was reinforced in most cases; collaboration therefore gave extra value to the contemporary artist’s self.²¹ The visibility of collaboration processes is therefore tightly linked to the development of the cultural production and economical processes in the contemporary culture of the second half of the 20th century. As I wrote earlier on, this visibility was even reinforced by language and creativity coming to the forefront of contemporary production. With new communicative possibilities, collaborations became multiple and simultaneous: “People meet and work together under circumstances where their efficiency, performance and labour power cannot be singled out and individually measured; everyone’s work points to someone else’s. Making and maintaining connections seems more important than trying to capture and store ideas. One’s own production is very peculiar yet it is generated and often multiplied in networks composed of countless distinct dependencies and constituted by the power to affect and be affected. At no point in the process can this be arrested and ascertained, for it gains its power by not having explicit points of entry or exit as a normative work scenario might.”²² Today, this arrest in the excess of collaboration makes the artist ‘contemporary’ in the sense that he or she belongs to the present time, but at the same time, does not radically alter his/her position as such: in that arrest, there is no potentiality, only actuality.

Collaboration then seems to be a symptom of the diagnosis of the present time; and the prognosis about it could then only be a negative one, and perhaps even makes us wonder whether collaboration should be part of the vocabulary of the future at all. Nevertheless, the excess of collaboration could also be read as a peculiar reminder, one which is also discussed in Imschoot’s letter. She explicitly writes that perhaps the notion of collaboration is also a cover for its antidote, “genuine exchange.” But what is genuine exchange? Can we talk about the difference between collaboration as procedure (for its own sake) and true collaboration? The problem is that such a caesura springs from a remedial but naïve hope that there is always something which is more real than the relations in which we are already continuously participating in reality. This is a complex problem and can also become a kind of trap which leads to nostalgic utopian longing for proper encounter, which has disappeared. At the same time, this problem of ‘genuine exchange’ is extremely challenging. I could relate it to a statement of Badiou which Slavoj Žižek also cites at the end of his book On Violence: “It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognises as existent”.²³ In this book, Žižek analyses the problem of violence and discusses it in connection with the harsh critique of participation and constant demand for political activity. After several examples, Žižek ends the book with a refusal of taking action; paradoxically, however, this stance comes at the end of the book, when the book has already been written. The demand for refusal of action therefore comes at the end of very agile activity, and this should not only be understood as a playful paradox but as something which is reinforcing the power of critical analysis. It discloses the potentiality of critical articulation, which has been active because of the urgency of the refusal.

The demand for ‘genuine exchange’ can thus be such a reminder, a trigger which can help us talk about the potential of collaboration as an agent of change. We have to think about the future of collaboration in the rupture between the impossibility of the refusal of the collaborative processes in which we are already implemented, and the possibility of genuine exchange, which has yet to happen. The future is namely not related to actuality as a realisation of its ‘becoming’ but finds itself in a rupture between something which has not happened and something which has yet to happen. In this sense, the imaginative potential of collaboration can actively be put into practice and can open to the wide and unpredictable practice of working together. But to enable that, we have to deal with the excess of collaboration, with the fact that the prognosis is being done in the moment of its very crisis. This crisis is deeply affecting the way how do we think about the future of collaboration and relate it to the potentiality. “The absolutely desperate current state of affairs fills me with hope«. Marx ‘s remarque is not only disclosing the idea of the proximity of cure to the posion, but also special relation to time and historicity, which, as Leland Delandurantaye writes, we can also find later in Benjamin’s and Agamben’s work.²⁴ Benjamin talks about the vision of the drawning man, and Agamben is developing a concept of radical potentiality which disloses critical reversibility of the moment, of the very present time itself. Giorgio Agamben writes about an an inevitable paradox of this peculiar philosophical concept of potentiality. One can namely become aware of his or her potential to exist, create and spring forth from oneself only when this potential is not realised. Potentiality is then a temporal constellation, which is divided from the action itself, it is not translated into the action at all. Potentiality can come to light only when not being actualised: when the potential of a thing or a person is not realised. A certain failure, an impossibility of actualisation, is then an intrinsic part of potentiality. At the same time, only when the potential is not being actualised, one is opened to one’s being in time, to one’s eventness. In this openness one experiences the plurality of ways that life comes into being and is exposed to the plurality of possible actions.²⁵ The crisis today is coming excatly from a permanent and ruthless actualisation of the potentiality , where the form, temporality itself (the way that the human becomes a human) is totally conditioned by its finalisation. The actualisation of potential has become a primary force of the value on the contemporary cultural, artistic and economic market. To put it differently: with the rise of immaterial work, human language, imagination and creativity have become primary capitalistic sources of value. That transition has happened in many different ways and it can be very clearly seen by example in the constant re-questioning of the conditions to produce which produce new conditions to produce. The present time of permanent actualisation is also deeply changing the ways that we perceive and experience collaboration. The problem is that such exploatation of human potentiality structured collaboration as a specific time mode where collaboration equals actualisation, an obssesion with present time.

The future of collaboration would necessarily have to encroach upon this collaborative excess and radically rethink the exclusivity of the present time, which is what brings people to work together. This is only possible if collaboration is freed from the arrest of the present time: from the arrest of deadlines, speed, simultaneous connections, the illusion of mobility, the hypocrisy of difference, the illusion of eternity, constant actualisation. Today, it is namely very difficult (but perhaps easier with the huge crisis on the horizon, which has proved so many prognoses wrong so far), to persist in the potentiality, to open the path for material conditioning of our acts and doings together, to anticipate the future events independently of the already given scenario. How should we open the working together not only to unexpected paths of transformation and also inflict change? It’s time to come back to the question of time and its relation to the collaboration in artistic process or in the creation of performance. If collaboration means working together, the nature of the encounter which enables our work together, i.e. the quality of time, will be of crucial importance. Encounter is something that renders life possible (or impossible); this is the goal of encounters, both in life and thinking, as Agamben said when describing his meeting with his philosophical teachers like Benjamin.²⁶ Through collaboration, we condition our future lives together, which of course means that, in order to open up the time, we have to take time out of the obsession with presence and participate in the time what has yet to happen. Working together is a time constellation which opens a spatial potentiality for proximity, something which appears as a neighbouring space, a space that is added. Agamben writes about an example of such constellation, which he terms ‘ease’ (peace, contemplation, delight). He writes that ease is a semantic constellation where spatial proximity always borders a convenient time: if the time is not convenient, there is no topos which enables the encounter.²⁷ That means that ‘genuine exchange’ has something to do with potentiality: with the ways we condition our future together. No future would be disclosed if we we did not condition ourselves alternatively. We couldn’t act towards the future by not simultaneously changing our way of life, the material protocols of life itself, the way we move time and experience it. Collaboration is belonging to another temporal concept – potentiality. This is a temporal concept of “time’s darkness, the hushed shadows massing about the stage of what happens.”²⁸

Post scriptum

The first idea for this text came form the desire to do a prognosis on collaboration in a collaborative way, together with Ivana Muller. However strongly we wanted to do that, we failed because of the lack of time. When I was preparing for the conference I realised our failure was not only the result of the lack of time, but we failed because we wanted to invent and make visible yet another protocol of collaboration, to add something more to its excess. We didn’t take into account that we were already collaborating, encountering and challenging each other through many situations, conditioning our future together, with no visibility required. I would like to end with the letter I received from her one day before the conference, when I was already in Berlin preparing to talk on the crisis of collaboration inspired with the challenge of our impossible meeting. This letter was read on stage at the end of the lecture and it posed another challenge to the writing process of the present text.

“Dear Bojana,
I am not there but I see us working. You are not here but I see you responding.
I am anticipating our next meeting, the one that will happen in Berlin, in some days, in the context of a conference on future.
I see you reading this text.
Here and now, in Berlin.
I am anticipating that moment, days before it really happens, here and now at home in Paris. I can only imagine the event. I can imagine you standing there, in the light, reading this email aloud.
It is like theatre.
When we make theatre, we prepare ourselves for the moment of the meeting with the spectator; that moment in the future that will become our mutual here and now. Days and days in advance … trying to imagine how it is all going to be. Rehearsing that moment over and over again. Rehearsing its potentiality, its accuracy, its power, even, absurdely, its
Authenticity. So in fact, a big part of working in theatre is conditioning our future together.

In here and now I am again in this situation that the two of us like to put ourselves into: the situation of no time, of dead line long
time crossed of the future that is not future any more, but some how increesingly becoming present. Once again the limitations are so extreme that only this stange mix of intuition and believe can be the right way to think, act and create. It almost becomes our methodology.
And once again, just like always when work together,we are reanimating that “dead” line, making it not die, making it active and
performative, making it be our friend.

And now Bojana, here we are. We are in the future.
This is the moment in which the crowd is coming in and there is no more space to imagine it, as we look at them right infront of us.
now. we look at them. me standing next to you, on your right… also wearing black.
we are now together in the future.
me imagining it
you performing it!
strongly, to the point and with an extremely good timing!

and I am looking at you, together with everybody else in the audience.
as we meet in this future here and now

yours
ivana”

__________

- First published in: Frakcija, Zagreb, 2009.
- Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1iVyi-1V

I. Introduction

In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan tells the legend of St. Christine of Tyre, who refused to yield to her father’s demands and venerate pagan idols. For this reason, her father had her tongue cut out after many torments, but this did not stop St. Christine from »speaking more and more clearly of divine matters« (Pizan, 1999, 287). When hearing her speak, her father reproached the executioners for not having cut out her tongue enough. “So they pulled at her tongue and cut it out at the very root but Christine threw the tongue into the tyrant’s face and gorged out one of his eyes. Then, she said to him more clearly than ever before: ‘What good is it to you, tyrant, to have my tongue cut out in order for me to bless the Lord no more, for my soul will bless him forever and yours will forever be damned! You are rightly blinded by my tongue because you did not believe my words’” (Pizan, 1999, 287). St. Christine’s is one of a number of stories where the birth of a woman’s voice coincides with her having her tongue cut out (Philomel, Lavinia). As Carla Mazzio finds, classical literature usually depicts the loss of man’s tongue as the loss of his ego whereas women are also able to speak without their tongues because, oftentimes, a voice speaks through them (Mazzio, 1997, 53–80). The female body seems to resist the concept that various functions or actions should be located in individual, static parts of the body. This is why the female body is able to talk even without the tongue. On the one hand, this brings up the old phantasm of the uncontrollable fluidity of woman’s body, of the displacement of her body as characterized by incapturability and fluidity. On the other hand, the moment when St. Christine speaks out also testifies to her voice being subordinate to the power of the Other. Her voice is namely that of witness, who, moments before her death, testifies to the power of the One she represents – that of God, in whom she believes. Therefore, the voice of her insides represents both autonomous power and pure automatism; it stands for the power of the resisting body and at the same time, for the “recorded” voice of the Other. The philosopher Mladen Dolar claims that every birth of voice is marked by ambivalence because “the one who transmits the voice is not only the ruler, but as a transmitter, also a serf/subject”.¹ According to Dolar, not only does the voice influence the insides of the listener (St. Christine literally blinds her father) but also itself comes from the insides of the body and exposes those insides to the Other. The Self actually yields to the Other and gives him power over him/herself (before her death, St. Christine speaks only as a witness of history; the power of her voice testifies to the power of the One she believes in).

It is not coincidental that our reflection on the relationship between the dancing body and its voice is prefaced by the legend of woman speaking with her voice without her tongue. The discovery of the voice of the body and the listening to the insides of the body, which is no longer in harmonious relationship to the regulated and textually placed hierarchy, represents one of the essential discoveries of 20th century contemporary dance. It is at the very centre of the forming of this new artistic genre and its breaking up with the traditional ballet conventions of the dancing body. As we know, one of the most important conventions of the ballet body is its dancing voicelessly, gliding along and challenging the limitations of gravity without any sound. The breathing of the body must be silent, its physical efforts inaudible. The body dances as if it did not produce any sounds at all, gliding along the dance floor, flying in the air and touching its dance partner in silence. This kind of absence of voice, the paradoxical silence of the active body, is not only a consequence of the strict disciplining of the body, but is also forms part of the complex technique of subjectivisation and establishment of the early modern body. In ballet, the dancing body suppresses its chaotic and unforeseeable voice in order to be able to become speech. As is well-known, it is precisely through the dancing body of ballet that the material power and rule of language (speech) is established – in other words, the rule of the (speaking) authority and the (linguistic) visibility of the modern subject.² Paradoxically, when dancing as language – that is, articulate and civilized language – the body actually goes silent. It no longer listnes but becomes sheer obedience; it becomes alive because it is woken to life by the vocality of language. To put it differently: when ballet dance establishes itself as speech, the body shuts its mouth. More even, the absence of spoken text or its fragments and essential components (e.g. breathing, sighs, the sound of the words), becomes the main code of the representation of the dancing body. The body goes silent because it is hit by the sound of language from the outside. It is language that represents the basic dispositif through which the dancing body is observed, and is also the basic matrix of reading the body. It is not coincidental that many early modern ballet textbooks describe the birth of the body as the awakening, revival of the inactive body, where the chaos of nature gives way to the spiritual nature of listening. This revival or awakening is connected with the voice that comes from the outside – the voice of the sonorous power of language, which literally ‘sets the subject straight’ and furnishes it with the strength and self-discipline necessary for the cultivated, civilized and obedient life of the modern subject.³

II.

20th century dance breaks up with the aforementioned convention of the silent body, i.e. that of the body dancing quietly and without sound. It seems that 20th century body discovers that other side of St. Christine’s voice and sonority, the true power of the voice coming from within, regardless that the body may no longer possess the actual speech organ (deteritorialisation of the body). Not only is this kind of voice connected with the fact that the dancing body opens its mouth (and speaks out), but especially with the abolishment of the kinaesthetic hierarchy of movement, which stands for a different temporality and autonomy of the moving body. “1900. I could stand completely still for hours on end, with my arms folded on my chest, covering the solar plexus (…) I have searched for and finally found the central source of all movement.”⁴ This is how Isadora Duncan describes her discovery of the body (along with the discovery of the new century). This is a discovery that greatly differs from the early modern image of the inactive body, which needs to be revived through dance. In this new image, the dispositif through which the dancing body is observed, gets profoundly changed: the sonority of the body concerns the body from within. The body listens to its own self (and at the same time, stands still rather than dances). We can set the hypothesis that the modernity/contemporarity of dance can be found precisely in the resistance against understanding dance as listening and against the obedience associated with that notion. Now, movement as the basic substance of dance resists against receiving its initial impulse from language. It resists against the sonority of language being the trigger of movement, i.e. against the body getting its auftakt in this way, against the sonorous command received through the ear to put the body in motion. But this does not mean that the listening disappears; quite the contrary, the ear of the dancing body gets directed towards the inside. It is the discovery of the voice of the body, its embodied insides which establish themselves and are revealed through the process of the body’s movement, rhythm, breathing, sounds, arrhythmic and complex perception structures that cut into the convention of the ballet body so deeply that the new contemporary dance genre is established as a fully autonomous discipline (also educationally and institutionally separated).

It is precisely within this relationship between the body and the voice that we need to seek the core of the new artistic body discipline which gets established at the beginning of the 20th century, or the core of the body dispositif that divorces the body from language. The invisible insides of the body seem to get externalized; only in this way are they exposed to the Other and its gaze. The resistance against language, the listening to one’s own self and the establishment of the autonomy of movement also cut deeply into the traditional relationship with the observer as well as into the relationships of power in the dispositif of dance. The sonority of language, in turn, is no longer a command from the outside but is strongly connected with the insides of the voice. The discovery of the inner sonority of the body, of the autonomy and transmission of its voice seems to me that more intriguing. It is namely not only about an aesthetic strategy but can also be read in a wider sense – as a demand for the acquisition of voice, as an articulation of the body’s audibility, or as a disclosure of the voice of a different corporeality. (And it is not a coincidence that contemporary dance in its beginnings was exclusively in the domain of female dancers). The audibility of the body in contemporary dance and art is namely closely connected with the emancipatory stance towards the body and subjectivity and also extends to the field of the political. The discovery of voice can thus be connected with what Rancière, in his philosophy of politics, calls the difference between speech and noise. At the beginning of his book Disagreement, Rancière defines his understanding of the political as “a conflict regarding the existence of the common scene, as a conflict regarding the existence and status of those present on it…Politics exists because those who do not have the right of counting as speaking beings achieve to be counted as such…”⁵ Politics takes place precisely in the field of the division of the sensible (partage du sensible), where continuous conflicts and negotiations take place between those »who can be seen and those who can not be seen«.⁶ For Rancière, however, visibility is neither intelligible, rational visibility nor territorial visibility in terms of placing bodies into space; visibility is actually the consequence of audibility, the way of listening which ultimately turns noise into speech (in public). The division of the sensible thus takes place as the division between and reallocation of those who truly speak and those whose voice only imitates articulate voice in order to express pain or pleasure. For Rancière, political activity is therefore an activity which “transfers the body from the place it has been assigned, or changes the purpose of the space (…) it is an activity causing what has previously only been heard as noise to be understood as speech.”⁷ This relationship between speech and noise can also be connected with the discovery of the voice of the contemporary dancing body: what was previously only noise is now heard as speech. The emancipatory discovery of the voice of the body is therefore tightly connected with how political and cultural visibility is entered into by the body, a body which is no longer an object of the inscription of language power, or an object of civilizing and reallocation of social power relations. When dancing, the contemporary body is no longer silenced by the overwhelming power of the language of the Other. It is now a noisy, gravitational, heavy, loud and also fluid and elusive open body. The body acquires a voice of its own; it no longer imitates the articulate voice (in Rancière’s terms), but demands a voice in order to truly speak out.⁸ The body finds a voice of its own because it reveals itself as a multitude of possibilities and virtualities of action, separated from the power of language and divorced from objectivization. The dancing body breaks up with the harmonious relationship between the body and subjectivity and, in this way, also reveals the determinations of the inside such as soul, spirit and thought as an arbitrary multitude of autonomous decisions of the body. Or, as the American choreographer Trisha Brown describes it quite aptly – The Mind is a Muscle. Affects, events of the body, the memories of its muscles and skeleton are no longer recognized just as noises through which the pain or struggle of the body shows, but as speech that can be heard. More even, it becomes the representative speech of the new artistic genre and at the same time, profoundly changes the ways in which the body enters 20th century performing art.

III.

Nevertheless, the emancipatory power of voice, as can already be shown by St. Christine’s story, is actually deeply dubious. By ‘getting voice’, St. Christine gets enormous power, but at the same time, speaks out as pure automatism – ‘something speaks out of her’. Immediately on becoming audible, the voice tips the stability of the transmitter; something breaks and opens in the image of that person; something most intimate turns into something alien – in Lacan’s terms, extimate. We all know how the experience of us listening to our own voices (e.g. to recordings on answering machines, on the radio, etc.), can be something quite disturbing and unpleasant. Our own voices seem unusual to us; it is hard for us to believe that they are truly ours. Our voices return to us as something alien and strange, which is reflected by the Slovenian dancer and choreographer Irena Tomažin in her performance Caprice (Re)lapse (2006):

You need my voice – need my voice – because you can no longer hear your own – you can no longer hear your voice – you can hear yourselves no longer – you would like to hear– you would even more like to be heard – most of all you would like to be heard out – you can no longer hear yourselves because you are too umumumum obedient (gerhorsam) – you are too obedient – oooo – you will be heard out by my voice – which is only oooooh – a mirror of your voice – my voice will always be too much or too little for you – it will be better for you – it will be easier for you if you are deaf.⁹

In repetitive staccato speech, Irena Tomažin recites these words in the course of her performance Caprice (Re)lapse (2006)¹⁰. Then, she sits on one of the big white cubes placed on the set. A voice is heard over the speakers and, after a while, the author stands up and starts shouting:

I do not like my performance, I don’t like my performance, can’t stand it, it’s ugly to me, this is my solo, this should be my dance debut and I should not be singing and playing around, with this, with this voice, which is totally bezerk, totally bezerk, this should be a dance performance.

And then, as if something came over her from the outside, as if she were struck by something, she sings with a high voice: “my voice is so yooours, my voice is so yooours”, then again shouts: “This set is ugly, too big for me, I hate this set, it’s ugly,” and starts throwing parts of the scenery over the stage. Caprice (Re)lapse is conceived as a dialogue with Irena Tomažin’s solo dance debut, Caprice (2005), and takes place on three different sound levels. It combines the sound materials discarded in her first performance (created in collaboration with Mitja Reichenberg), the Dictaphone materials recorded by Tomažin herself (including the creative process notes from her first performance), and her live stage voice and speech. Through the discovery of voice, the dancing body shatters in its foundations, reveals itself and ventures into the unknown. The voice gets emancipated and radically opens the medium of dance itself; dance as such no longer exists. Who is actually Irena Tomažin? A dancer? A singer? A choreographer? And what is it that we are witnessing? A dance performance? An opera? A theatre performance? A concert? The artist prepared her dance debut, which should inaugurate and present her within the contemporary dance genre; however, instead of dancing in this piece as expected, she sings throughout. “I should be dancing” – which is why she shouts angrily in Caprice (Re)lapse, conceived as a unique dialogue and confrontation with her debut – “rather than playing around with my voice”. She is, however, caught in her own desire as well as the spectator’s; immediately afterwards, she is namely interrupted by the voice. She become some sort of automatism put into the dance mode), saying: “my voice is so yours – my voice is so yours”.

The performance by Irena Tomažin very intriguingly points out the ambivalence of the voice, which, in her case, refers to the audibility / obedience of her own artistic voice. Through the disclosure of her voice, dance reveals itself on the one hand as a complex process of desubjectivisation and disembodiment, and on the other hand, as an affirmation of the demand for a name and body. Tomažin’s own voice not only returns into her as something alien but also as something that comes from the deepest insides of the body but nevertheless depends on the desire of the Other (in Tomažin’s case, the spectator). With the disclosed voice of the insides, the subject fundamentally exposes itself to the Other, yields to it, opens the entrance for its desire and phantasm. The voice of the insides of the body is therefore the ambivalent emancipatory power, which, when becoming speech, simultaneously shatters the fundamental of the speech subject itself. It literally takes away its name (am I still a dancer if I sing?), medium (is this still dance?), body (I am only led by a torn voice), work (I hate this performance). The case of Irena Tomažin is not so much about requestioning the dance medium through the self-reflective critique of performing (like in a great majority of contemporary dance performances of the late 1990s), but about requestioning the problematic autonomy of the intimate position, the possibility of an intimate act and the consequences of the disclosure of the insides.

IV.

Intriguingly, the voice in the body only gets heard after dance actually gets divorced from language. It is heard at the moment when language loses the status of the reigning materiality and the moving body refuses to be speech. Therefore, the voice is not something that calms the body down and leads it towards a harmonic discovery of the insides or the Self (what may still seem to be the case in the utopian and pioneering attempts of early contemporary dance), but as something that mercilessly places the dancing body into the gap between movement itself and what the movement represents (denotes). With the discovery of voice, the dancing body shatters the harmonious relationship between its presence and representation. There is no more harmony between the inside and the outside of the body; the body becomes visible and audible precisely within this gap, when the harmonious relationship between the movement of the body and the spectacle of its subjectivity has broken down. When the veil of the harmoniousness and magic of listening to the body’s insides (which many utopian and emancipatory early 20th century dance events have been surrounded by) is removed, then what speaks out inside the body is actually something most alienated from the body – its innermost and also its outermost. The voice coming from the body might as well be that of a ventriloquist; it makes the speaker uncanny and at the same time, takes away that person’s power and authority. The one who speaks with his stomach stands for power and a clown at the same time. The voice coming from the body namely always takes us by surprise; although located in the body’s insides, it is in conflict with the body – disclosing, weakening and doubling it. The doubled voice of the body is strongly inscribed into the ontology and presence of the contemporary dance body, and at the same time, brings to mind numerous cases of cultural and social bodies which likewise testify to the instability of the body representation precisely at the moment when the discovery of the voice is made.¹¹ Also, the innermost voice of the body expels the body as something unstable, abject even. In the process of listening to the invisible insides, the movement of the body occurs which, interestingly, frequently resembles the description of the movement of the body found in Freud’s descriptions of the uncanny.¹² Freud connects the feeling of the uncanny inside of him with maladapted, sudden, surprising gestures of the body and says that the feeling of the uncanny is a consequence of the movement that occurs where it should not occur. The body, which should be still, is suddenly seized by movement, in inappropriate rhythm, with strange intensities and at inappropriate times. Freud’s short essay abounds in cases of movement that cut through the established dynamics of the body and, as such, resist reading, classification and systematization. What is uncanny about the movement is precisely its resistance to purpose, i.e. the fact that something happens because of movement itself. Although, at first sight, Freud’s understanding of the uncanny seems close to that first treatise on ballet, where the dead, inactive body is animated, it is actually a lot closer to ‘movement for movement itself’, which is at the centre of divorcing the dance body from language in the 20th century. This is the way that the core of the new dance phenomenon is described by the first contemporary dance critic and theorist, John Martin, in his famous 1934 essay: “the discovery of the actual substance of dance, which modern dance has found in movement”¹³. The uncanny is namely not so much a consequence of the reanimated spirit of the dead body, but especially that of the deadliness of the living body. The body is interrupted in its flow, in its aliveness. Something that is alive stops for a moment; the body seems dead, which means that it is only its reflection, and what seems present to us shows itself as absent. In movement for movement itself, there is a fundamental change in the way meaning is constituted. The body can no longer be ‘read’, pinned down to language grammar, it can no longer be seen and arranged into a structured text. Meaning enters the body accidentally; in other words, it is the body that shapes the meaning, which is always arbitrary and always accidentally appears on the borderline between the inside and the outside of the body. Meaning takes us by surprise, stops our gaze; it moves or begins where there should be stillness, and is still or quiet where movement is supposed to be. It is therefore not about the concept that, by means of listening, dance would be entered by the psychological body as the narrative insides which bring dance closer to theatre (in other words, that the modern soul would be revealed through movement), or about the fact that the dance body would be expressing something. What happens is exactly the opposite: every inside, soul, becomes fully dependent on coincidence, on the coincidental, visible, and at the same time, elusive activity of the body. Created between the inside and the outside of language is language as an arbitrary sequence of body gestures and movements, something that is inexpressible and iconic at the same time. Meaning is therefore not constituted as transfer, as reshaping of the inside into the outside, but as trace of signs, as inability and arbitrary coincidence. The rise of meaning is therefore a consequence of the complex juxtaposition of the body and its voice, which never fuse into a unified frame.

In other words: the dancing body resists listening because it no longer wants to be represented through the command of language. At the same time, however, this resistance to listening and the redirection of the listening towards the outside reveals the body as a complex site of instability, duration in time, the arbitrariness of meaning. We could say that, in this way, voice also shatters the stability of dance itself as a dynamic and kinaesthetic phenomenon of modernity.

V.

The expulsion of the body into something uncanny, abject, into something that has its foundations shattered by means of voice, is also interesting from another important perspective. When finding voice, the body fails to successfully deal with the unheimlich dimension of the voice. Having voice is only the beginning of a difficult and conflicting political process of how to get from noise to speech. This perspective is also interesting for the history of contemporary dance, which was a woman’s domain in its beginnings. Many female artists seem to have found contemporary dance the emancipatory field through which they have been able to open different modes of body being, problematize the issue of their own identity and connect it with the issues of presence and representation. At this point, let me briefly concentrate on the Slovenian contemporary dance history, which actually shares the fate of many similar histories outside the institutional visibility of contemporary dance. Politically, it is about countries of former Eastern Europe, where the history of contemporary dance exists as a multitude of fragments, private and individualized practices – predominantly of female artists, their private dance schools, often operating in private apartments. Affective histories of teachers and their students, emotive histories of survival, vision and idealism, affective interchange and development of their political voice and constant conflict with the audibility of that voice in public. In contrast to the belief that the history of contemporary dance does not actually exist in the East, most of the artists there have created a very special contemporary dance history – on the margin of cultural and political visibility, without institutional support, as a kind of permanent resistance of the body, which has only been recognized in public as noise. The history of contemporary dance in the East of Europe is a history of the ways the dance artists, in Rancière’s terms, have not been allowed to participate in speech. The Slovenian choreographer and dancer Maja Delak reflects on the invisible or inaudible status of female dance artists in her performance Expensive Darlings, pointing out the current status of female representatives of contemporary dance, whose (economic, cultural, social) position has not only been marginalized, but increasingly dependent on the flexibility of contemporary manner of working, which has encroached on the material practice of their lives in a very specific way.¹⁴ There is also a very thorough and critical requestioning of the emancipatory potential of the voice of the body, especially in relation to the changed cultural and economic circumstances, in which contemporary dance artists create. The insides, solipsism, a different history, the body not equalling subjectivity – all these articulations which can be connected with the discovery of the inner voice, are also closely connected with the economic marginality of such arts practices. In her text written about the process of work for the performance Expensive Darlings Maja Delak writes (with the help of Jean Baudrillard and his text Ecliptics of the Sex), that the danger for the conteporary dance in slovenia can be compared with the danger of sexual revolution for women. The problem is that this political process is to often closed to the only structure, in which it is condemned to the negative discrimination, when the structure is powerfull, or to the minor succes when the structure is strong. What Maja Delak is writing about is a difficult political process of subjectivisation, of taking the place in the speech. The problem is profound, since the institutionalisation and visibility of the voice in the contemporary world of possibilities and numerous political actualisations today can to often come as a kind of automatism, however subjecting the one who finally speaks to the margin of cultural and political importance.

The emancipatory demand for voice needs rethinking precisely because, today, our own voices all too frequently strike us as automatisms; we have taken the aliveness of our own voices as an indisputable fact, like that of putting the ballot into the ballot box. It is important to disclose how the fragile intimacy of our own voices and their relationship to language (voice always brings the experiential dimension into language) is connected with the joint space of imagination, as well as with the listening to the fragile voices of others. It may now be the time to reconsider at least two emancipatory syntagms of the visibility of dancing (woman’s), which both touch upon the territory of the inside: famous (territorial) Virginia Wolf’s demand for a room of her own should also be added a temporal auditory dimension – that of having a voice of her own.

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- First published in: Ungerufen. Tanz und Performance der Zukunft / Uncalled. Dance and Performance of the Future; Sigrid Gareis & Krassimira Kruschkova (hg.,ed.) ; unter der mitarbeit von, with the collaboration of Martina Ruhsam (2009).
- Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1iVyi-1Q

The future is not related to the past as an actualisation of its becoming, but finds itself in a rupture between something which has not happened and something which has yet to happen. This is a temporal rupture which is intrinsic to the mode of potentiality, to the revealing of the ways that life comes into being. When reflecting upon potentiality we have to be aware of the paradox that for Giorgio Agamben is an inevitable consequence of this peculiar philosophical concept. One can become aware of his or her potential to exist, create and spring forth from oneself only when this potential is not realised. Potentiality is then a temporal constellation, which is divided from the action itself, it is not translated into the action at all. Potentiality can come to light only when not being actualised: when the potential of a thing or a person is not realised. A certain failure, an impossibility of actualisation, is then an intrinsic part of potentiality. At the same time, only when the potential is not being actualised, one is opened to one’s being in time, to one’s eventness. In this openness one experiences the plurality of ways that life comes into being and is exposed to the plurality of possible actions.ⁱ

To clarify this paradox inherent to that temporal concept, I will help myself with three different examples.

I.

The first example comes from my private recollection of a short discussion, which I coincidentally heard some years ago. It happened in a Manhattan subway, at rush hour, when I was squeezed among many ‘business professionals’ going home from work. Listening to people talking and chatting, I overheard the following discussion between two young employees. It sounded as if they were talking about an unsuccessful candidature for a new job, and the one who applied for the position said in one moment to the other: “It seems that they just didn’t realise my potential.” His colleague answered him: “Don’t be sad, you just have to show it more, one day for sure they will.” If the young businessman were to use the word ‘potential’ in Agamben’s sense of potentiality, the employers would never realise it. Nevertheless that doesn’t mean that the guy would stay forever undiscovered and would not get the job, either. What they were talking about was not potentiality, but possibility, something which is offered for exchange, a process of transaction. The potential cannot be disclosed in the process of transaction, it is not the goal to be discovered, shown, recognised and actualised. Otherwise our existence would be only understood as a permanent and ruthless actualisation of our present, where the form, temporality itself (the way that the human becomes a human) would be totally conditioned by its finalisation.

II.

I would like to present now a second example, which can help us to understand potentiality as a concept which is deeply related to the human dimension of temporality – how the human comes into being. The second example comes from an old book, written by Al-Jahiz, an Arabian scholar from the 8th century. In the tradition of great Arabian philosophers, he wrote a monumental tome in which he wanted to explain the essence of all living beings called Book of Living Things. Besides being a philosopher, Al-Jahiz was a great admirer of animals and he dedicated many chapters of his book to the comparison between animals and humans. Animals are glorified as beings of perfection, with perfect physical capabilities. In relation to other animals, human animals can become highly educated, they can train, they can discipline themselves, they can achieve many skills, but irrespective of their discipline and despite all the education – for Al-Jahiz – humans are still unable to accomplish spontaneously what other animals achieve naturally. For Al-Jahiz and for his interpreter, philosopher Daniel Heller-Roazen, in whose text I found the reference of this old treatise, humans therefore remain the lesser animal among living beings. In his treatise, doing less is brought into the discussion with the intention that it would trigger us to think about it, so that doing less would mean a distinctive capability of a human, the essence of a human being in the relation to the animal. Or as Al-Jahiz said, “man is made in such a way that when he accomplishes an act that is difficult to carry out, he has the ability to do one that is less difficult.”ⁱⁱ

Heller Roazen explains that the capability to do less as the description of the essence of a human being lies in this possibility of reduction. However small or great, the human being owes its consistency to its capacity to be less then itself. “To grasp a human action as such, one must look to the shadows of the more minor acts it inevitably projects around it: to those unaccomplished acts that are less than it and that could always have been performed in its stead, or, alternately, to those unaccomplished acts with respect to which it itself is less than it could have been.”ⁱⁱⁱ That not only means that every actualisation of the human being is always in relation to other unaccomplished acts, or that every actualisation of the human being is related to the potentiality of unaccomplished acts. It also means that actualisation of a human being is always less than it could have been. There is always a kind of rupture in the ways that the human being becomes oneself. Actuality namely always surpasses itself; there are always some moves left that weren’t realised. The conclusion, then, could be that, wherever we have actuality, we also find potentiality. The example of Al-Jahiz should not be read as a celebration of human failure or an affirmation of one’s freedom of doing less; at the same time this is also not a confirmation of one’s idleness. If this were so, then human failure would be actualised as a perfect act for itself and the relation between humans and animals would be reduced to a simple difference between the perfection of nature and human freedom to fail. The consequence of Al-Jahiz’s definition of the human being is more profound. Since there is no human act that is not at the same time less than it could be, we cannot understand any work of man on its own, but every work of man can be followed in relation to the other unaccomplished acts. The consequence that comes out of being a lesser animal is connected to the temporal dimension of a human being, where human acts are always intertwined with other human acts, operating in the mode of what has not happened yet. Doing less opens the human being to one’s historical being, to the time itself, where actuality is always surpassed, never fulfilled. However the time of the human being is the time of ruins and fragments, something that has not yet been accomplished. The essence of the human act is deeply entangled with something that has not happened, has not been accomplished and completed, something that has not been fully actualised. In this sense, “doing less” is another description of the paradox of potentiality, which can come to light only when potential has not been realised, when man is understood as a lesser animal. The acts of man reveal the temporal dimension of the human being, the historical constellation of the human being. The human being is opened to the continuity of acts, made from the remains of that which has not yet been accomplished.

III.

The Al-Jahiz example, especially the intrinsic relation of unaccomplished acts and potentiality, which reveal the human being as a historical one (a being in time), brings us close to the philosopher Walter Benjamin. His reflection on history, as can be read in his fragments On the Concept of History, written in 1940, is of great importance to understanding the concept of potentiality. He wrote these fragments when he was already experiencing and anticipating the horrible events of the Second World War. Written shortly after his release from an internment camp and before his tragic attempt to flee Europe, Benjamin wrote about the revolutionary experience of time and history. In his reflections he introduces a messianic approach, where historical materialism works hand in hand with theology, as presented in his famous example of a chess player machine. Benjamin argues that traditional historians wish to relive an era, aspire to “blot out everything they know about the later course of history” and they want to empathetically re-experience the past as it unfolded. Benjamin rejects this hermeneutical desire to bracket off the present, regarding it as the “heaviness of heart, the acedia, which despairs of mastering the genuine historical image which so fleetingly flashes by.”^iv Instead of that clinging approach, Benjamin proposes a materialistic historical approach to the past, which is described in the well known fourth fragment:

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognise ‘how it really was’. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it.^v

This part is related to what Slavoj Zizek describes as one of the key theoretical insights of Benjamin. With Benjamin’s proposition of historical materialism, the present, not the past, is relativised and remains open for future rewriting. As Zizek argues:

What the proper historical stance (as opposed to historicism) relativises is not the past (always distorted by our present point of view) but, paradoxically, the present itself – our present can be conceived only as the outcome (not of what actually happened in the past, but also) of the crushed potentials for the future that were contained in the past.^vi

To take control of the memory, which flashes in the moment of danger, can disclose for us those crushed potentials for the future from the past. Benjamin writes that the present explodes the continuum of history, and maybe this explosion of continuity is related to the fragments of those lesser and unaccomplished acts, about which Al-Jahiz is meditating in his old treatise. In the moment of danger, the remains of what has not yet happened are disclosed with all their potentiality. The potential is then relativising our present exactly because it was not actualised and always stayed as an act that was less than itself. Russian philosopher Artiom Magun also describes potential as something that happened in the past. Benjamin’s demand that we have to look back in order to see the future is related to that which hasn’t happened yet. Magun writes that his understanding of potentiality is different from Alain Badiou’s approach from the past, where the event of the past is a positive event. Badiou’s proposal is that we find something important in the past and move on from there. For Benjamin, the event of the past is the event of the now.^vii The event or rather the eventness of the human being is namely happening right now and it is only reawakened as something that has not happened yet, it is a present reawakened as a remain of time: “The true picture of the past whizzes by”.^viii

IV.

The paradox of potentiality springs from the intriguing relation between refusal and urgency of actualisation, which are both part of the temporal dimension of the human being. Even if the potentiality can only come to light when not being actualised, the non-fulfilled attempt to act is continuously opening human being to time and history. The disclosure of potentiality is somehow enabled with the urgency of our present time, or as Benjamin would say, with the moment of danger in which we can take control of our memory. How can we then relate this demand for actualisation with the fragile disclosure of ‘what it could become’? The disclosure of the potentiality is always enabled with the urgency of our present time, which can be personal, collective, communal, etc. The time of the present comes still (stillstellen) to reveal the past, or as Benjamin wrote: “in every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it”.^ix So the disclosure of potentiality is tightly linked to the moment of present stillness, to a certain urgency conditioned by danger. What is that moment of danger today in which the past only whizzes by, but nevertheless can hit the present as an explosion? It is clear that for Benjamin this was the outbreak of the Second World War and the horrifying blindness of the Left, which didn’t realise what had already arrived. The urgency of the present moment is then tightly related to the present moment of co-existence, cohabitation and collaborative modes of human action, to the cohabitative moment of contemporaneity. The moment of danger reveals itself for Benjamin when the dominant modes of actualisation are closing down human potentiality to the totalitarian exclusion of all other modes of human becoming.

V.

How can we relate that moment of danger to our present time, in which we would like to formulate our thoughts about the future? I would describe this danger of today as a ruthless appropriation and exploitation of human potentiality. Our present time is experienced through the actualisation of all potentials, where human beings are continuously – as our two young professionals from the first example – displaying their potential. The actualisation of potential has become a primary force of value on the contemporary cultural, artistic and economic market. To put it differently: with the rise of immaterial work, human language, imagination and creativity have become primary capitalistic sources of value. That transition has happened in many different ways and it can be very clearly seen by example in the constant re-questioning of the conditions to produce which produce new conditions to produce. The present time of permanent actualisation is also deeply changing the ways that we perceive and experience time, where the present is perceived as the only (more and more contracted) time we have, the past is transferred into the nostalgia of remembering and the future deprived of its imaginative potentiality.

Performance itself has to refuse the contemporary processes of actualisation and not participate in the exploitation of the totality of experience. In that sense the performance in the future has to resist the actualisation of experience, the experience without remains, which was one of the key aesthetic and political notions of contemporary performance in the 20th century (resulting in more or less radical aesthetics). Even if performance is most of the time experienced as an event in present time, where the co-presence of dancers/actors/performers and the audience is of essential importance, that doesn’t mean that performance is fully about actualisation of the present moment. Performance practitioners know very well how strong the work on performance is related to the paradox of potentiality, how much it has to deal with actuality, which always surpasses itself and with anticipation of what has yet to come. The moment of our present danger reveals itself exactly through the violence of constant actualisation, where the process of actualisation is tightly related to the notion of contemporariness, of making the work in present time, a contemporary work. Therefore I imagine the performance as a field of potentiality, a certain rupture in time, and another time frame where there is no difference between the possible and the impossible event. To imagine something like that doesn’t mean that I suppose such a practice doesn’t exist already. However, I don’t want to actualise this practice, I don’t want to reveal it as the only finality of the present practice of performance, a so-called ‘contemporary practice’. Quite the opposite; to allow ourselves to imagine a potentiality of performance we have to first erase the notion of the contemporary. We should stand strongly against its affective and emotional implications which are also infiltrating our own collaborative practice. We have to invent and give a voice to our ongoing practice, which would not conform to the affirmative exclusivity of our own time in which we live and create. It is important to recognise and analyse the anxiety and crisis implied in the common notion of the contemporary. This notion implies the ruthless exploitation of the creative potentiality of our own present time, as it implies and appropriates the ways of becoming and working together. Instead of opening up the collaborative and creative processes as potentialities, our inventive collaborative forces have been constantly actualised and appropriated as economic and cultural processes of producing and adding value to the market.

In the core of a performance there is a resistance to actualisation, a kind of working together which resists the presupposed ‘now’ of performance. A performance is a result of a creative process that is interrelated around what it could be and tracing what has yet to come. A performance deals with the rupture between that which has yet to come and that which has not yet happened, a kind of exposure of time of another becoming. I imagine a performance then as a kind of experiential and inventive field of working together, which paradoxically can come to light with all its transformative power when it is not actualised. It is a continuation and disclosure of lesser acts, acts which don’t end in their own finalisation, a kind of active present that is intertwined with the unrealised thought of the real. I can then imagine a performance as a kind of a perceptive state, with no total experience and burning out. A performance that would enable a bodily state of intensities, but would also give us the licence to daydream. A performance which could be an experiential field of affective and perceptive modes of becoming. An event which would also allow itself not to happen, which would be always, interrupted in mid-sentence.

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