To Remake and Renew the World, Step by Step

The staccato movements in which limbs appear to take leave of the torso, flailing and unarrested, challenge the kinesthetic unity of the body, its proprioceptive flow. In the place of that unity, the body becomes a field of movements, willed and unwilled, reactive, defiant, and exhausted. These dance movements make graphic what it means to move when the one has come apart, targeted or violated by intimate and political forms of subjugation and dehumanization. There is no comfortable position for the audience in which the space of art is firmly separated from the violence of this world. The powers that enforce that very separation practice forms of denial, imagining that the body that appears is separable from the body on stage that has undergone all that it has in life. The body is precisely the vector of social powers, persistent desires, and the traces of loss and mourning. The body carries its own trauma onto the stage where it encounters the trauma of others in the form of an electric attention. That shared condition is difficult and painful, but also the occasion of a new kind of collaboration, a way of making something happen and shifting the very terms of what counts as truth within society.

My first thought after seeing L’Étang was that no one makes a dance about incest, and yet here it is. What was I assuming? That there is too much shame in presenting incestuous violation and rape on stage? Was I partially gripped by the sensation that it was not a “proper” subject matter for dance? I was afraid for the dancers since they had broken a taboo, not the taboo against incest, but the taboo against speaking about it and, surely, making art about it. But I was also relieved, excited, and grateful: a choreographer had broken through the barrier of shame to expose the scene in which the rapist’s rage, entitlement, and dehumanization are embodied and exposed, the body at once manifesting the traumatic memory and delivering the indictment. For all the anxiety that accompanied my encounter with this unprecedented performance, I felt it to be no less than revolutionary—and I was grateful, not just for myself, but for the class of women, including young women, and all those whose “punishment” for existing is rape.

My own senses were engaged and altered. And the dance was restructuring me as I watched. Sexual violence is an act, a repeated set of acts, a set of acts that belong to a social structure whose dominance is formed and sustained by repetition until it arguably becomes structural to social reality as we know it. But sexual violence also resides in an atmosphere, a way of sensing danger on the part of the vulnerable, a way of navigating space, entering into posture and gait, the very way one “holds oneself.” Feeling alerted, endangered, implicated, and exhilarated, as if on the brink of revolution, one comes to recognize that the senses are formed and deformed through political realities. Those realities enter the air we breathe, the steps we take, the distance we take from others, the way we can touch or be touched, prompting the question of what remains willed and unwilled in the domain of sexuality. It was surely not a Stalinist re-education to which I was subjected, but a subtle, wise, and effective intervention that allowed my own way of seeing the world to become a public matter of ethical and political concern. I felt liberated from a cage I did not know I was in. Was it the cage of theater that is supposed to protect us from such pain and outrage? Was it the cage of shame that we feel not just about ourselves, but for anyone who dares to make sexual violation public? Is it the cage of being barred from language and movement by traumatic effects that take shape as the norms that tell us what dance can and cannot be?

I felt released, but into what world was I liberated? That cage was not mine alone, and that insight facilitated the liberation into collective recognition. One feels a sense of interconnectedness not only with the performance, but with a vast potential audience. It was not that something was “realistically” represented that I suddenly “saw,” but that a truth broke through the carceral apparatus of denial. Why, we might ask, are victims so often imprisoned in shame when persecutors are kept out of jail? No one pedantically argued for interconnectedness as an ethical virtue, and only fragments of a story were told or, rather, shown. What happened on stage relied on images, light, and sound, but also required movements, a formal experimentation with bodies broken into parts that foreground the breakage itself. 

At a theoretical level, the interconnectedness of art practices with the spheres of economy, society, and domestic life still requires a fuller demonstration, since in the neoliberal world of “sectors,” the cultural sphere remains separated from the political. But even within the lingering modernist conceit that art is for art’s sake, the denial of interconnectedness is fundamental. Nothing detracts from this dance as dance as it insists upon such interconnections. The zones of war, violence, exploitation and subjugation can be communicated without simple or grandiose forms of realism. Aesthetics is thus indispensable for knowing what a social structure is. For we cannot approach the question of how social structures are registered, lived, and sensed, at the level of bodily movement, without bodily movement that manifests and communicates this very experience. Although a philosophical question—how do we come to know a set of violent social structures—it implicates political psychology as well: how do we come to acknowledge a historically sedimented and reiterated form of violence? To know, to pursue truth, requires working through the denial of both violence and shame, and this task belongs to the phenomenological psychology of embodied social life. At the same time, it is also a specifically choreographical question that enters into, and tears apart, the apolitical aspirations of some experimental artistic practices. 

None of these everyday passages or movements can be taken for granted. Every doorway assumes something about the human who passes through its infrastructural opening, either facilitating or debilitating the ease with which the body makes such passages. The habits are understood as sedimented over time, reiterated in a way that takes for granted the freedom of passage, and its ease. But when the body is under surveillance or fears the repetition of violence, that passage is immersed in a set of anxious expectations, including the dismal certainties of dread. In Gisèle Vienne’s dance work, the pre-conscious expectations of smooth movements through space are interrupted, and those expectations are exposed as broken habits: a woman’s walk through the streets at night, or her return to her home where violence waits, a person’s passage through the border, or confrontation with sudden arrest or abduction, a child’s effort to go to bed peacefully interrupted by an incestuous assault. The realities are stark, and no one watching can relax into the continuity of the scene. The continuity is cut, again and again, not predictably, but often enough that the reiterated and cumulative dimension of violent social structures start to make themselves felt for those watching, implicated in what they see.

In social theory, one refers to the “structures” of society, but every structure has to be re-instated to remain a structure, to become a structure that is regularly re-established through time. After a while, social theorists come to talk about a structure as if it were an entity, congealed and enduring like a natural substance immune to erosion. But no social structure persists—patriarchy, racism—without its repetition. And every instance of its repetition is the occasion for a small, but potent, rupture. That rupture takes form within Vienne’s dance movements as moments of intensity that asks the dancer and the audience to endure the sense of riveting discomfort and high alert. There is no way to maintain the forms of insensitivity to social suffering that allows that suffering to repeat in its nearly mechanical destructiveness. 

Perhaps few of us have a clear idea of how numb we have become to the horrific violence that happens daily. But when its component moments are broken down and brought forth, the senses come alive in spite of a drifting or panicked inclination to flee the scene. It is the scene that holds us in place. And as we, in the audience, find ourselves able to feel again, sensing patriarchy’s ambient horror or its shameless forms of self-entitled violence, we find ourselves unable to return to our usual place in the complicit camaraderie of collective dissociation. The scene is traumatic, aesthetic, and political. For those who assumed that they would be spectators to the scene, they are asked to perceive a violence at once singular and everyday. But for that, they must learn how to perceive. The German term “wahrnehmung” means perception, but it contains within it the practice of “taking truth.” In English, to take the truth means to bear what someone else is saying, to abide by a truth that is difficult to take, if not unbearable to acknowledge. 

The point is to shock, yes, but not for its own sake. It is meant, rather, to wake the senses from social somnambulance. How deeply are we shut down, looking away, insensate to the world around us, both its horror and its potential for joy? The performance asks us to know the horror of violation and oppression, and to create the space for play and for joy in the wake of trauma; to work, step by step, to diffuse the ambience of violence we breathe. For Vienne, the work cannot finish with its ending; it must continue, for its ultimate task is to produce a new dispositif, a shift in the epistemic choreography of people and things, to expand what might be called collaborative joy in ways that link the exercise of agency with the ideal of a radical social equality free of violence.

Toni Morrison writes about dolls in The Bluest Eye (1970), the fact that so many of the gifts given to Black children during the period of segregation in the US were white. Indeed, people were taken to court when they started to produce Black dolls as well as white ones (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954). Morrison writes about the “Aryan” character of the dolls received as toys: “good” hair, small noses, blue eyes. In The Bluest Eye, the young Black girl who receives such a doll cannot play with it; cannot enter into the imaginary it offered. She has only one desire: to dismember and destroy the doll. The doll communicates an ideal of (white) perfection that no Black girl can ever achieve. But in dismantling the doll, the ideal is rejected, and another form of beauty stands a chance of emerging into the world.

In the world of performance offered by Gisèle Vienne, amputation, the physical dissociation of the movement or limbs, the impenetrable silence and vanquishing of speech, all put into play the muteness of women’s and children’s lives, especially the ongoing history of their violation. There is no possibility to suture the body back into a flowing and unified center of movement and speech. The autonomous subject in the Kantian vein is no longer possible. But what Kant called “will” or what others call “freedom” is refigured in Vienne’s work as the collaborative movement of bodies in electric atmospheres, fractured by their traumatic injuries and which, in turn, fracture time and space until we come face to face with the pervasive way that such violations structure social life. The amputated limb amputates our sense of the everyday, and that is both an act of agency and a way of creating a world that connects aesthetics and politics through the serious play of collaborative courage.

The body no longer holds together. Its movements are separated from one another as its gestures seem to work in autonomous directions. And yet, this loosening of the joints becomes the occasion for a re-articulation of the world, a new kind of making, experimental and cooperative, that mobilizes all the injured parts as animate objects that persist, resist, and remake the world. The disjointed movements, les mouvements saccadés, are ways of linking the past to the present and one body to another. It is the emblem and the work of re-articulation, a connection between things and people that has not always been known. But as Gramsci was right to tell us, every articulation must be reproduced, and in Vienne’s work the repetition of the movement is the making and renewal of such connections, building and displaying a new perception of the world, a renewal of the world itself.