Dance as a Metaphor for Thought - Michael Klien & Steve Valk

from the choreograph[dot]net archive [originally published in Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change (Jeffrey Gormly, Ed.), Daghdha Dance Company]

Dance is the forming of certain configurations of thought, expressed in manifold ways by the birth of ideas or the shivering body. That is why evolution, animals and nation states are said to be dancing at times, because certain conditions are met allowing a system to be flexible and its emerging dancing body to be naked, anonymous and selfless. This is what constitutes dance.

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A Dream

Last night, in sleep I took part in a profound and massive demonstration against humanity … against the insanity and intrinsic contradictions in individuals and within society as a whole. I was amongst a throng of tens of thousands of people gathered … each holding a candle in their hand. There was a profound sense of urgency made most noticeable by a deathly and wordless silence that arose because no one there had any idea what to do, what to say, or what action to take. Finally, for no apparent reason … some people started to raise their candles slightly, soon everyone followed.

“Look”, I whispered to my girlfriend… “They are finally doing something!!!”

Michael Klien, 12.02.07

A Poem

These nymphs, I wish to perpetuate them.

Stephane Mallarme, Improvisation of a Faun (1)

A Calculation

Since curvature describes gravitation, we might say that as we approach the singularity, the gravitational interaction will grow to infinity. Neither space nor time retain the form we are accustomed to.

Harald Fritsch, The Curvature of Spacetime: Newton, Einstein and Gravitation

Emergence Becomes Visible when the Outline of the Pattern Can Be Seen

STEVE VALK: In the 1930s the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson went to the island of Bali and made a film of the Barong, a 6 hour-long dance/theatre ritual in which the whole village participates (2). This ceremonial “play” is only performed when there is a trouble or disharmony, when the dead are seen walking through the village at night, etc. The costumes are lavish, the various roles are meticulously rehearsed, the choreographies are precise and are taught at an early age. What is fascinating about the film is that suddenly, in the middle of the performance, some of the young dancers go into a trance – they fall over, shake violently, etc. The trance then seems to spread like wildfire overtaking other performers and even a few audience members. Some male dancers take their knives and try to stab themselves. Concerned audience members immediately jump on top of them to prevent self-inflicted injury. At this point, the film narrator explains that this state of disruption is precisely what the Barong is meant to induce. The enactment of the ritual ceremony or “performance“is all in preparation for the moment when it will break down and fall apart.

For it is in this state of emotional and situational conflagration that “the Gods have arrived”. In the midst of the mayhem, this outburst of chaos, the village priest or shaman sets up his ceremonial apparatus and begins to commune, to burn offerings, to address the village troubles.

Indigenous Psychologies of the Self

Cultures that emphasize firm boundaries and high personal control tend to view the self as exclusionary or “self-contained”. Fluid boundary, strong field-control cultures view the self as “ensembled”, meaning that the self is inclusive of other individuals.

E. Martin Walker, Experiences in Social Dreaming

MICHAEL KLIEN: What I would say about the Balinese dance ceremony is that “a psychic structure” would seem to be the prime mover of the piece and that the bodies themselves are not discreet units but they become “caught up in” another kind of structuring process. Of course these bodies correspond or overlap with what we would call “individual selves”, but during the course of the ceremony, these very same bodies are drawn into a different organizing pattern or constellation. The unknowing participants become enmeshed in a wider communicational field or “psychic structure”.

Strange currents of a situation

On the subject of mind / body relations, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson has a profound and revolutionary theory. He describes six formative steps, that I won’t go into at this point, that lead to the creation of what he calls “Mind” (3). Mind, according to Bateson’s understanding, is a certain constellation of a system that is able to retain information. Therefore, a Mind could consist of non-living elements, like a traffic system, or be composed of many organisms, like a school of fish.

It may function for brief, as well as extended, periods of time and is not necessarily defined by a fixed or firm boundary like skin. If a Mind should have consciousness, then this consciousness is always only partial. Bradford Keeney, a psychologist and admirer of Bateson, has called the mind a “conversational pattern” and bodies “the participants in the conversation” (4). Each of these kinds of “bodies” also functions as a Mind, in the Batesonian sense, and is engaged in larger conversational patterns with other bodies, which in turn constitute larger aggregates of Mind.

Non-Symmetric States of Stable Equilibrium

STEVE VALK: So one cannot escape the fact that, at least in systems-theoretical terms, there is no distinction between mind and body. Across all fields, all levels are linked. The formal, highly-ritualized Balinese performance reaches a critical state at which point a kind of rupture of the symbolic order takes place. At the point where “the Gods arrive” there is a radical almost brutal moment of perceptual re-patterning.

Bateson associates this phenomenon with something he calls “kinesthetic socialization”, a means by which individuals are prepared for altered states of consciousness, for a “temporary escape from the ego-organized world” (5). The Balinese ritual performance could be seen then as an enactment of Mind, an example of the organism called “village” and its capacity to process and respond to information in a self-corrective way.  After the chaos, the psychic hurricane, a recalibrated “rejuvenated” pscho-social configuration emerges.

In the science of morphology, physico-chemical processes are detected and analysed. Their ultimate origin and the relationship of all such separate processes are, according to assumption, buried in unfathomable complexity. Thus, organic life is conceived of as a set of centers where the coordination of causal chains is totally lost in complexity. These active centers are what we call organisms.

Now this assumption makes for a radical difference from an idea that has always been successful in inorganic science… that complex systems can be successfully studied by breaking them down into simples which are easier to analyse. Such a scheme was first described by Descartes in 1637 and is known as the “Cartesian Method”. If we accept the concept of an organism as just stated (vague as it still is), we can say that “biology is a non-Cartesian science”.  Since theoretical parts of all past natural science have been Cartesian in this sense we may conclude that biology is fundamentally and qualitatively different from physical science.

Walter M. Elsasser, Reflections on a Theory of Organisms

MICHAEL KLIEN: I have always had a sense that a thought is a physical act and I have always been discontent with people in the dance world who want to get over the Cartesian split by just talking about the body. This is a bizarre notion. You propagate the same idea, just from the other side. You actually widen the gap. How can you only talk about the body when you want to address the whole thing.

Conversational patterns are thoughts, they are not just up there (points to his head). Thought can be everywhere. Thoughts are between us. For things to come into being it is a matter of thought.

STEVE VALK: Like this plastic water bottle I am holding... this is a “thought object”. With a sculptural aesthetic, computerized bar codes, with a position in recycling systems. Theoretically, it could be blessed and used as container for holy water etc.

MICHAEL KLIEN: Gregory Bateson is one of the founders of this kind of thinking. In the 1960s he was part of an LSD experiment. During the testing he was shown a rose and his comment was, “It is amazing how much thought went into this rose for it to become a rose.” (6)

We are closing in on our theme right now, what we mean by “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought”. We are not saying that “thought is dance”, but we are talking about a certain figure or “vision of dance”, whereby the constellations are loose enough to actually reach a state of excitement or play without falling apart, without losing identity. A system such as a society or a state can be dancing, unlike our present-day situation where the structures are too tightly constrained by what the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler calls “the dogmatic slumber of reductionist thinking”. In his book The Man Without Qualities,  Robert Musil describes how a nation state can be in flux. “Kakania” is a place where things become possible and great ideas are born, where priceless, timeless artefacts are realized, because the conditions are right for the whole system, which in this case is a nation state, to dance. So the notion of dance has to be applied to all systems rather than applying it exclusively to the physical body.

STEVE VALK:

Why does dance dawn on Nietzsche as a compulsory metaphor for thought? It is because dance is what opposes itself to Nietzsche’s great enemy, an enemy he designates as the “Spirit of Gravity”. Dance is, first and foremost, the image of thought subtracted from every spirit of heaviness.

Alain Badiou, The Handbook of Inaesthetics

MICHAEL KLIEN: In Western societies dance has developed along the lines of what Nietzsche maintains is the opposite of dance, what he calls “obedience and long legs” (7). For Nietzsche, dance is about a lightness which opposes itself to the “Spirit of Gravity” which he associates with the military parade, “obedience and long legs” etc,. Strangely enough, when one looks at the development of western dance in the 20^th century, one sees primarily that, “obedience and long legs”. One sees the dancing body subjected to choreography. For some reason a kind of perversion has taken place. People have tried to construct performative architectures to attain a state of dance, whether it be Martha Graham or 20^th century ballet technique. But along the way, the map has been mistaken for the territory, the architecture for the experience. Maybe that’s where it has all gone wrong. The structures are not the dance, they are perceptual orientations for getting there. In ballet for instance, the subjective range of movement is very limited, so only the best people can actually attain a state of dance. Most performers are simply executing movement within precisely defined limitations.

A Persistence

I believe thought must take a step back. A step toward what Mallarme and the pre-Islamic ode have in common, to wit : the desert, the ocean, the bare place, the void. We must recompose, for our time, a thinking of truth that would be articulated onto the void without passing through the figure of the master: Neither through the master sacrificed nor through the master invoked.

Alain Badiou, The Handbook of Inaesthetics

STEVE VALK: I would like to go back to the story of the Balinese dance/theatre which only realizes its aims when everything falls apart ... to look at the certain vision of dance we have been describing ... this notion of a void, of everything falling apart … in Time Magazine I read an article about the Irish rock band U2. Their manager described the torturous creative process the group goes through every time they are at work on a new album. “For them to come up with a great song,” the manager said, “God has to walk through the room.”

This is the point for me, in regards to the notion of “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought”, where we reach a kind of event horizon, this place where things fall apart, when “the gods arrive” or “when God walks through the room”, etc. At this point, there emerges for me a deeper awareness of the certain “vision of dance” we have been talking about. Not of dance thought on its own terms, on the basis of its history and technique, but of dance as it is given welcome and shelter by the wider fields of human understanding.

Dance is a metaphor for thought precisely inasmuch as it indicates, by means of the body, that a thought, in the form of its evental surge, is subtracted from every pre-existence of knowledge. How does dance point to this subtraction? Precisely in the manner that the “true” dancer must never appear to “know” the dance she dances. Her knowledge (which is technical, immense, and painfully acquired) is traversed, as null, by the pure emergence of her gesture. “The dancer does not dance” means that what one sees is at no point the realization of a pre-existing knowledge, even though knowledge is, through and through, its matter or support. The dancer is the miraculous forgetting of her own knowledge of dance.

Alain Badiou, The Handbook of Inaesthetics

Decoherence and its Implications in Quantum Computation

By contrast, classical theories, as understood here, consider their primary object of investigation as, at least in principle (it may not be possible in practice), available to conceptualization and, often, to direct or, at least sufficiently approximate, representation by means of such theories – in short, as knowable.

This is “the knowable “ of my title. Classical thinking does not deny that there are things that are, in practice or even in principle, beyond theory or any knowledge. In contrast to non-classical theories, however, classical theories are not concerned with the irreducibly unknowable or its effects upon the knowable. The irreducibly unknowable, if allowed, is placed strictly outside their limits, rather than is seen, as it would be in non-classical theories, as a constitutive part of knowledge.

Thus, most classical physics, such as classical, Newtonian mechanics, can be and customarily is seen as classical theory in this sense, in contrast to quantum mechanics in Bohr’s or other nonclassical interpretations.

Arkady Plotnitsky, The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Non-Classical Thought and the “Two Cultures”

Personal Threshold Experience

I remember a performance of As a Garden In A Setting in Paris where Jone San Martin was dancing in her first piece for Ballett Frankfurt. That evening, I witnessed one of the best dance performances I have ever seen. It was stupendous, raw and brilliantly danced by everyone. There really was a feeling of all the performers on stage being in a kind of trance. At one point though, I noticed that Jone seemed to slip and fall flat on her back. She got up immediately and continued dancing. After the show, I went backstage and found her embarrassed and upset about having fallen. She could not explain what happened ... just that in the middle of the duet ... she had looked at her partner and had been overcome by the feeling that if she were to suddenly throw herself backwards, he would be there to catch her. This is what she did and unfortunately for her all that was there was the hard wooden stage floor.

MICHAEL KLIEN: 

A Statement

Dance allows the thought body to show itself, it is the showing of the body in thought, independent of what constitutes such a body, whether its boundaries are made of skin or by constitutions played out in laws. Dance is the forming of certain configurations of thought, expressed in manifold ways by the birth of ideas or the shivering body. That is why evolution, animals and nation states are said to be dancing at times, because certain conditions are met allowing a system to be flexible and its emerging dancing body to be naked, anonymous and selfless. This is what constitutes dance.

Hence dance is a matter of thought pointing towards the possibility of change as inscribed in the body. For the spectator to perceive dance, it is an exercise in trust, demanding the audience’s absolute gaze, oblivious to representational decor and fully focused on the underlying nakedness of a flexible body in thought.

Our civilization has been turning dance into a perversion of itself, applying to and onto it everything that will prohibit its existence in the form of predetermined rigid time, space and action. It might be a symptomatic need to resist mortality´s grip. Maybe the reasons are to be found in the dominant muddle of language, which in Bateson´s words ”stops us from thinking straight” and from dancing in general (8). To govern dance is in itself a misleading conception, a seemingly vain attempt to fence off its mortal nature, putting shackles on that which cannot be tamed without turning it into an empty shell, a sign pointing towards something other than what it is. To choreograph dance conventionally which sets movement into stone, is a self-deluding act ... a brand of misguided creativity. Dance is Dance and cannot be tampered with, just as Bateson reminds us that “God cannot be mocked” (9). Dance has been crippled by conventional choreography for centuries. It is time to release choreography’s hold on dance and let it simply be.

Parallel Process : The Seeing of Sleep

Sleep is compact fidelity, tenacity and continuity. This last fidelity is the very act of the subject as it has now become. It is “of words vacant” because it no longer needs to experiment with hypotheses. And it posseses a “body grown heavier” because it no longer has any need for the agitation of desire ... The subject of poetic truth is neither soul nor body, neither language nor desire. It is both act and place, an anonymous obstinacy that finds its metaphor in sleep.

Alain Badiou, The Handbook of Inaesthetics

STEVE VALK: When I present the results of dramaturgical research for original dance or theatre work, it almost always involves the creation of a kind of presentational container, a perceptual aesthetic space for these ideas. Rooms are hung from floor to ceiling with photocopies, texts and drawings; strewn and overgrown with cut-out figures, writings etc. These spaces or “thought jungles “ are criss-crossed and hung with found objects. To engage with the material, with this research, it is necessary to weed and wander through: to walk, duck, spy, sometimes to hunt. Embedded in this complex matrix of associations, you may find objects or ideas of interest or they may find you. There is a term in psychology and anthropology called “total field awareness” which accurately describes the sensibility or quality of perception that is evoked in this kind of transitional space between dramaturgical research and dance or performance creation.

The Communication of Meaningful Vision

A second important quality or characteristic of these dramaturgical thought-spaces involves the particular “awareness” with which the materials are gathered and selected. The starting point and guiding sensibility for research of this kind, for the assembling of material and the creation of the perceptual space of its presentation, is rooted in a profound and seemingly paradoxical sense of “not-knowing”. It is difficult to describe how primary, how rudimentary, this underlying quality of undecidability is for the process of exploration and research. There is a kind of “elusive awareness”, a “strange understanding” in my experience, which guides the process of conceptual work on new dance, theater or opera creation.

The Anonymous I

Badiou equates this “not-knowing” with “a subject of poetic truth”, “an anonymous obstinacy that finds its metaphor in sleep”. In a recent interview, William Forsythe, with whom I collaborated for twelve years, referred to the Buddhist concept of “no-mind” having an important place in his work (10). Dramaturgical process which emanates from this undecided state of consciousness produces a perceptual terrain, an interactive, unfolding field of thought where engagement itself becomes a dance of meaning creation.

The sensitivity to dance possessed by each and everyone of us comes from the fact that dance answers, after its own fashion, Spinoza’s question: What is a body capable of ? It is capable of art, that is, it can be exhibited as native thought. How can we name this emotion that seizes us at this point? .... I will name this emotion ... an exact vertigo.

Alain Badiou, The Handbook of Inaesthetics

STEVE VALK: The notion of the void, of nothing, “of the nakedness of concepts”, smacking your body on the floor, etc, this sense of dance has been the underlying and defining current of my work and why I have repeatedly been drawn into the vicinity of this art form. 

MICHAEL KLIEN: Maybe it is because dance is always pointing towards the possibility of change ... towards the unknown, “silently rewriting your vision”, as Badiou says (11). It never lets you get comfortable.

The Twilight Zone That Surrounds the Hypothetical Unfathomable Center of Living Organisms

MICHAEL KLIEN: There is an illusive and mysterious quality or resonance which dance seems to manifest which seems to play an active role in the creation and maintenance of living systems such as a Balinese village or an arts organization in Limerick. After a few days at Daghdha (12) I begin to feel the continual presence of the dancing that happens there, like an invisible fabric that touches and envelopes everyone and everything we do. Nietzsche said that dance could be “a new name given to the earth”(13). For the French philosopher Alain Badiou it is the embodiment of the principle of “an exact vertigo”. This state between finite and infinite, place and non-place, integration and disintegration seems to be an elemental, regenerative i.e. “healthy” mode of being in the world.

The principle of “incompleteness” gives Batesonian holism its real power, turning what is a weakness in conventional science into a source of strength. It says, in a nutshell, that mind is not Mind, nor, in principle, can it ever be so. It argues that by definition, tacit knowing can never be rationally expressed. But we can recognize its existence, we can work with it in our attempt to know the world, and in fact we must do so because circuitry, in the cybernetic sense, is the way reality is structured.

Rodney Donaldson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind

STEVE VALK: Daghdha Dance Company has tried to cultivate something like a new ecology of the arts: to see a cultural institution, like a dance company, as the locus and initiator of living processes which begin within the company itself, its internal workings, its everyday life etc and then extend into the relationships with its own immediate and not so immediate surroundings. The “vision of dance” we have been referring to in this discussion and the role that “dancing” and “the dance” play at Daghdha is one of a constituting principle. Dance within the ecology of Daghdha is an active power which generates an undercurrent of corporeal and environmental interconnectivity. It instils a rich and multi-levelled awareness which informs and challenges both the company’s everyday affairs and its engagement with its own emerging future.

REFERENCES

1) Quoted in Badiou (2005) Handbook of Inaesthetics

2) Bateson & Mead (1952) Trance and Dance in Bali

3) Bateson (2002) Mind and Nature

4) Keeney (2005) Circular Epistemology and the Bushman Shamans

5) Donaldson (1991) A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind

6) Bateson (2002) Mind and Nature

7) Quoted in Badiou (2005) Handbook of Inaesthetics

8) Bateson (1970) Esalon Audio Lectures: On Epistemology

9) Bateson (1988) Angels Fear

10) Forsythe, (2003) http://www.ballet.co.uk, Interview, BBC Radio

11) Badiou (2005) Handbook of Inaesthetics

12) Daghdha Dance Co, Limerick City 2004-2011

13) Badiou (2005) Handbook of Inaesthetics

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