NOTES ON SEEING, OR WHAT DO WE DO WITH DANCE?

Anishaa Tavag

I.

I have recently taken to pondering a rather banal matter: why dance? I suppose I know as well as you do why I would get up and shake a leg when I hear a good beat; perhaps I can also tell you why I go to dance class. Depending on who you are, we can also rehash stereotypes about why human beings dance—to imagine and create community experiences (if you’re some kind of academic); to express ideas and find new modes of embodiment (you’re a contemporary choreographer); to uphold tradition and culture (you must be part of a culture ministry somewhere); or because it’s fun, silly (you are right). Perhaps what I wonder is not only why we dance, but also why we see dance. And so I ask you to fill the space in between the words ‘why dance’.

There is a question within this question that keeps me awake at night. As a ‘contemporary dancer’ myself, I am wont to defend contemporary dance and argue for its potency as an art form, a practice, and a cultural artefact. I mean no irony when I say that the contemporary dance ecology allows for new embodied and intellectual pathways, or that contemporary techniques enable the practitioner to make great ontological shifts in theirs perceptions of their bodies; I am also sincere when I argue that the emergence of contemporary dance in the landscape of art and culture has opened up all sorts of debates around performance aesthetics, the body, tradition, identity, and so on. And yet there is an irony, if not a gaping hole, implicit in the question about why we see dance. Literary theory continues to debate the meaning and methods of reading; film theory also furthers the question of what seeing really could be. To put it simply, we read books, watch movies, and listen to music; we also see plays and dances. But of course we are postmodern and pastiche, and so we also read bodies and dance histories. And here lies the question underneath: what do we really do when we ‘see’ dance? Is seeing all that we do? 

One possibility came to me as I cautiously made my way through Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, a compelling treatise on space, time, and everyday life. In a chapter titled “Seen from the Window”, he puts forth a brave idea that is simultaneously critique and proposition:

The passage from subject to object requires neither a leap over an abyss, nor the crossing of a desert. Rhythms always need a reference; the initial moment persists through other perceived givens. The philosophical tradition has raised half-real, half-fictitious, problems that are badly resolved by remaining within speculative ambiguity. Observation […] and meditation follow the lines of force that come from the past, from the present and from the possible, and which rejoin one another in the observer, simultaneously centre and periphery. (Lefebvre 46)

I read the words ‘the past’, ‘the present’, and ‘the possible’ with some excitement, happy to think of a window or balcony as a space with immense opportunities for spectatorship and even participation. As I stand in my own balcony on a Sunday afternoon, sipping tea and enjoying the quiet outside (save for the sound of passing trains that I try to romanticise into being tolerable), I am as much a creation of my own micro-rhythms—thought, respiration, the metabolism of caffeine—as of the larger rhythms outside, like the less frequent trains and the stillness, both indicators and consequences of a Sunday, which itself is the point in the cycle at which the big machine rests. Sunday is not just a day in the Christian calendar—it is a state of being. The ‘initial moment’ when Henri Lefebvre looks out of his window at a bustling Parisian square persists through the present moment, placing us in a continuum of complex rhythms. I don’t just see in this situation; I become both giver and receiver of rhythm. 

Now it is obvious that dance-watching has something to do with rhythm; for instance, take bharatanatyam or ballet. Both forms invite me in because I can tap my foot to a predictable beat or feel the surprise of a shift in time signature. Similarly, while watching hip-hop, I am flushed with excitement when a dancer plays with my expectations by switching tempo or abandoning the beat entirely. However, there is one difference—if I am witness to a cypher, I am not in the luxury of a reclining auditorium seat, smiling my appreciation of the dancer’s grace and beauty. I am part of a circle of spectators, bobbing up and down to the music as one breaker (or break dancer) occupies the centre of the circle and the opponent—who could even be me— watches from its periphery. The battle is all about spontaneity and wit; any obscenity in the body is deliberate, intended to insult the opponent and even threaten the social order that the ‘OG’ (original gangster) hip-hop generation is believed to have been fighting. In this scenario, perhaps seeing can also be a kind of mediation; we are back in the balcony, giving and taking rhythmic information as the ‘lines of force’ stemming from the ‘mythology’ of the Bronx crisscross into the present moment (Banes 14). 

II.

If I become absorbed in the experiences of rhythm, space, and time, do I lose sight of the thing or event before me? I can also turn this thought around and wonder, as I do, if a choreographer works from the technicalities of form and rhythm to discover their politics or enters the process of creation with pre-set imagery that holds a specific aesthetic and politics. I saw an ensemble work titled Time Takes the Time Time Takes whose unfolding was so alive that it caused the gentle lines between thought and action to simply vaporise. But I will dwell on this piece a little later, pausing for now to think about this unfolding and the what of seeing dance.    

In its exposition, contemporary dance becomes an immersive theatre in which all experiences and oppressions are turned inwards, ‘towards the self-experience and experiencing self’. The religious experience and artistic experience get merged to the extent that one can easily replace the other. This results in the aestheticisation of religion and the mystification of artworks. Such a merger is dangerous in a nation which has already been facing the problem of religious fanaticism. As the spectators become participatory, experiencing the self and self-experience become the ultimate rasa of art production. This self-experience makes it perfect material for neoliberalism, which proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedom and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets and free trade. […] it questions everything but it does not question the means of production behind the scenes. What is at stake here is political participation and thus the failure of politics. (Prakash 140) 

I first read Brahma Prakash’s essay, “The Contingent of Contemporaneity: the ‘Failure’ of Contemporary Dance to become ‘Political’” at a moment when my life was forking into two roads: one leading further down academia, and the other into dance practice. I happened to take the latter path. The piece has often crept back into my thoughts since, underlining that persistent question (“why dance?”) and troubling my conviction in the form itself. Often, an evening of contemporary dance leads to the inevitable worry: so what? It is, after all, perfect “neoliberal material”: the evening is a pause in the weekly grind, a moment when the (semi-)elite come together to enjoy a performance and then have a cosy dinner before returning home to their private preoccupations. This is exactly what Brahma Prakash argues: that the spectator becomes a private category and the artwork a commodity in a free market. Shanti Pillai echoes his concern when she writes: “Since a world in which the possibilities for art to operate autonomously from its status as a commodity are shrinking, the relationship between performance and activism needs to be rethought. […] The ‘professionalised’ worlds of contemporary performance are largely confined to spaces of bourgeois consumption.” 

Even though it would be rather a stretch to conclude that watching dance equals shopping, Brahma Prakash’s arguments on the political failure of contemporary dance are as candid as my vindication of the form is sincere. While he attributes this failure to the disappearance of the “difference between actors and spectators”, which leads to a quasi-mystical experience and dangerous inward, indulgent experience, I wonder if the collapse happens elsewhere. I have come across many a programme note that has reproduced journalistic information about a ‘social issue’ that the performance I am about to watch deals with; the performance itself ends up being an (undeniably skillful) presentation of the dance phrases that the performer has likely to have taught their students in a technique class. The claim is tall: this is a political piece. The performance is dully familiar: this is trendy movement material that I am telling you represents a political position. I am interested in hard questions about the position of the artwork in relation to its purported politics; I am also interested in skill, rhythm, and fun; and I do not think the two are mutually exclusive. I am also certain that dance does not need to represent, or be metaphorical of, anything else, lest it lose its unique vitality. As I grapple with these thoughts, intent on believing that the aesthetic can be political, that an aesthetic pursuit is important, I come across another of Pillai’s questions: “Whether one believes that resistance must be recognised by dominant interests or not, what is the value of a work that functions solely at the level of spectacle?”       

III. 

I cannot not ask—does a collective audience hold an inherent capacity for political action? After all, any audience is a “collective”, if only in the sense that it is a large group of people. Brahma Prakash talks about a kind of contemporary dance that inverts the performer-spectator relationship—so let us once again consider what and how contemporary dance in India seems to think about seeing. 

Two of the country’s largest contemporary dance events tend to remain on the proscenium stage, where performer and spectator are clearly separated—the Attakkalari India Biennial and the Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards. At the Biennial in 2017, I saw a spectacular performance that also eschewed the trap of spectacle: Time Takes the Time Time Takes, choreographed by Guy Nader and Maria Campos. Despite the immensity of each performer’s skill, the performance itself did not occupy the position of a showcase. Instead, it became a highly abstract, highly dramatic experience of time unfolding. The dancers were on a stage and I was seated in the gallery, but that separation itself was neither proof of the audience’s passivity nor its capacity to be mobilised into political action. The dancers began with clear, simple gestures that magnified gradually with repetition. The dance seemed to just come out of them, bringing the fact of their choreography into the present moment, as though it had never existed before and would cease to exist in an instant. Their movements were set; they were not improvising. Yet they took real risks, leaping off each other’s shoulders, diving headlong into the floor, or even simply taking a moment to be still; and we came close to becoming spectators of a sport as we breathed with and silently rooted for them. The space in the auditorium seemed to tighten; the tension between the performers and the making and unmaking of each performed event became everyone’s business. There was a knot in my stomach; I was sure my cheeks had gone pink. The theatre was filled with sharp intakes of breath and sighs of relief as each risk was taken and resolved. Yet we knew that the piece was indeed choreographed, that each performer knew what was to come. Here was a performance that became a pure moment of possibility; there was no past, no future, and definitely no intellectual debate around form. It left us no choice but to see with the entirety of the senses. Despite the seemingly traditional, proscenium setup, this piece immersed its audience, inviting and moving us to respond rather than ‘sit back and enjoy’.

In recent years, India has also seen several independent pieces designed for showings in studio spaces, art galleries, and old bungalows, but the sheer skill of most dancers—unlike actors, whose chops reside in their ability to embody the pedestrian—makes it difficult to completely invert the actor-spectator relationship. I watched Mandeep Raikhy’s Queen-size, a piece featuring two men and a khaat (a string bed), thrice, aware each time that I was watching performers tease me into believing that I was a voyeur in their bedroom. Along with seven others, I performed Diya Naidu’s Rorschach Touch, running amok among an audience who were asked to sit absolutely anywhere they liked; it was their responsibility to get out of our way at a second’s notice, or else inch closer to see two performers exchange the minutest of glances, the gentlest of caresses. Here are two pieces, both immersive in a spatial sense, both driven by an interest in the body itself, and yet it would be an exaggeration to argue that the difference between actors and spectators disappears altogether in either case. Queen-size places its performers in the centre and gives us access to them from all around. We see other viewers seeing; I myself was hyperaware that I was seeing. Rorschach Touch disperses its performers through the audience, which also changes shape and direction as the action progresses and spectators stand up, walk about, or simply turn around and sit facing another direction. On a pleasant Bangalore evening, I saw Preethi Athreya’s Conditions of Carriage in the football field of St. Joseph’s College of Commerce. We sat around a hollow ‘stage’ (something like a rectangular donut) atop which a large group of performers, lit by halogen lights and wearing sports shoes and track pants jumped, ran, and stood still; several times they even jumped clean off, standing instead on the ground bounded by the ‘stage’ itself. I found myself clutching my knees while watching them jump over and over and over again. Did I see this performance the same way I saw Queen-size? This time I was hardly interested in the people I was watching; mostly I wanted feel the satisfaction of watching this assortment of bodies jump. 

Each of these performances pays attention to the question of seeing; if I had to go into the merits of each one’s method, I would write a separate essay. But I hesitate to accept that the performer-spectator relationship has been inverted. Yet, Brahma Prakash drives home when he speaks of a ‘private’ audience and ‘self-experience’. The thought that contemporary dance—and contemporary art itself—furthers the larger project of privatisation is a scary one; it suggests the demise of a potent, revolutionary site of art-making and viewing and the onset of a kind of technocratised, zombie regime of urban art. However, I find it difficult to run with the idea that an art form or genre can innately, by virtue of its formal construction, hold the key to oppression or emancipation. That choice, my reading of French thinker Jacques Ranciere has had me believe, rests with you—the spectator.       

IV.

When discussing reading, we talk of an author and, more recently, of the author function. In film discourse, this question is troubled by the collaborative nature of the craft itself. When it comes to dance, the most obvious answer is that the choreographer is the author. But what about the dancers? After all, in film, actors appear as part of the cinematic landscape and can be ‘read’ as characters; in dance, however, the separation of choreography and performance become impossible; every performance is a re-writing, or re-choreographing, of the body in space. This is not to say that re-reading is not a re-writing—just that the dialogue is then between you and the words (the author is dead!). It is meaningless if a writer reveals in a press conference years after her books have been published that a character was actually always gay; copyright laws have never been able to contain imagination, which oozes through legal clauses with every reader’s every reading. And so JK Rowling’s Dumbledore is who his diegetic world suggests that he is; perhaps she herself did not understand several details about him. You can go back to the Harry Potter series and try to pick out signs that he is indeed gay—and you might find them! But if you do not, you are under no more compulsion to believe the writer herself; indeed, there might be a piece of fanfiction on the internet that draws from the diegetic universe to provide you with far more compelling ‘facts’ about Dumbledore or any other character. As long as you read, and maybe even re-read, you know for yourself. But you cannot rewind or pause performance; you also cannot pick it out of the shelf and turn to page 394 to re-read that one sentence that eluded you the first time. Still, what you saw is your ‘reading’; the choreographer (or performer) can explain their vision to you, but their words have no grip on what you have already seen and felt. If I have been moved by a work of contemporary dance, I have found myself carrying a residue that has little to do with the cleverness of choreography, virtuosity of movement, or profundity of a post-performance Q and A.

V. 

“… I couldn’t breathe!” said a friend and colleague, describing how he felt while watching a performance at a festival in Canada. His experience of viewing, he said, took him close to what a female orgasm feels like. “It just didn’t stop!”  That’s what I want when I see dance, I told him—the feeling of breath and breathlessness. Then I had to ask myself: what is that ‘feeling’? It can create sensation and make a dent in time, opening up new possibilities or, to quote Ranciere in his brief discussion on the politics of literature as a segue to a conversation on aesthetic experience, it “triggers new passions” (Ranciere 72). He talks about the politics of literature as something that is “not the politics of writers”, but an inherent dialectic within the art of writing itself. I see it as a kind of subatomic action, a tension within the matter that escapes authorial “intention” or even scholarly speculation. Once an ardent believer in the post-performance Q and A session, I now retreat into a corner or leave the performance space, choosing instead to stay in the realm of affect; the choreographer cannot tell me any more about the performance than the performance itself could. The residue is fun to take home: sometimes I want to get rid of it and watch TV or eat a hearty meal; sometimes I want to let it swim around inside until it leaves or transforms into something else—like an essay on why we dance. 

The more you study matter, the more you see; this is why the physicist’s perception of space and time is further along than that of the high school student. Similarly, the more we watch dance, the more we see; the inherent tension in a work shows itself to the keen observer, to Lefebvre’s mediator, but continues to operate beyond their conclusions. Ranciere leads me to the thought that the potency of the artwork is neither in the politics of its maker, nor in its ability to mobilise viewers into political action. Art does not solve issues, but its inherent politics can free its own elements, inviting the viewer to forge new relations between them. 

If we think of contemporary dance as a play of relations in space and time, it can afford the viewer a role in this play (all puns intended, but who cares what the author intends?). Far from Brahma Prakash’s assertion that the performer-spectator relation is inverted, I am merely imagining the aesthetic experience as something that the viewer can participate in even from their seats in the audience, as I feel I did in Time Takes the Time Time Takes. These relations, if we think back to Lefebvre, already exist—your palm to your back, the crown of your head to the ceiling, that corner of the room to the placement of the shoe rack, the wiggle room between the stove and the spices, the tightly packed hour before work in the morning, traffic, the slow-motion battle against sleep after lunch, and the feeble unravelling of the evening… As we move through space and time everyday, we participate in these crisscrossing, spiraling, halting instances of play, sometimes sweeping and sometimes being swept along. The dancing body can draw these lines or curves with intention and make evident these relations; it can also call into question our current perceptions of them.

Chloe Chotrani in Talking Third Circle at Indent 2018, photo courtesy Sharan Devkar Shankar

At a dance symposium in New Delhi last year, I saw a short performance—a ‘work-in-progress sharing’, to put it in trending performance-world parlance—that brought into my perception an assemblage of relations within and without my body. Perhaps this ‘becoming aware’ is what Ranciere refers to as the sensible. Chloe Chotrani’s Talking Third Circle, a solo performance of softness and soil, unfolded in a room where the audience was scattered, some on the floor, others on chairs, and still others standing up. For the first two minutes, our attention was focussed on her radiating back. Then she began to move through the room, drawing circles on the floor with soil from a bag that she carried with her, making soft clicking sounds with her tongue as she worked. Occasionally, she stopped to whisper in people’s ears. At other times, she stood up and did small dances, the stomping of her feet building the rhythm she had established with her tongue. I had the sense that I had stumbled into a little world where this play of sound, soil, and a soft body took place regularly. She made music as she worked, as one might hum to oneself during household chores, but more interestingly, I felt, because performing is also working; the mechanisms behind the “magic” were laid bare, skipping the need for any kind of exposition and instead leading us right into this particular configuration of elements. The texture of her movement was earthy, so the soil was spared the burden of representation. It was instead free to transform into something else and inscribe itself on the floor, adding another dimension to the moment. I was witnessing a kind of wordless, meaning-less writing (or should I call it talking?), only it existed in a space bereft of, and without the need for, semantics. It was a kaleidoscope, all shapes and relationalities dependent entirely on how I chose to tilt my head or close my eyes; but the metaphor only runs this far, because I wasn’t just watching, all of my being concentrated in the two lenses attached to front of my face. No, this was something else—I felt my own back become wider; I found myself wanting to get up and dance, but dance how? This was not a popular, club-thumping, 120-bpm pop song. It was an invitation to enter, smell, touch, hear, see, and know; it shared a sensory kind of knowing in the manner of oral narratives and lived experience. I can recognise Sunday by the stillness around me and the slowness inside me—the feeling of a full stomach is allowed, for once, to lull me into drowsiness. You can recognise the evening by the sound of birds, the smell of brewing tea—or, in most cases, the cacophony of homebound traffic. Each scenario carries a subtext; it is ours to read. In this scenario, the performer created a particular experience of the contemporary moment. The present was rendered through a web of entities: soil, floor, indoor, outdoor, secrets, public space, dance, music, femininity, masculinity, connective tissue, physical strength, and the choice to reign in virtuosity. Just as we need to read, I have come to wonder if we also have a particular need for the experience of viewing dance. I am reminded (rather wildly) of Francis Bacon’s “Of Studies” and the legacy of texts on reading, of which Terry Eagleton’s “What is Literature?” is another grounding, if more recent, meditation. I imagine that the present moment demands such an engagement with still more mediums of expression. Perhaps it is ironic that while dance has existed for arguably longer than literature, we still borrow literary models to discuss it when we use clichés like ‘poetry in motion’ or ‘storytelling with a touch of grace’ or ‘meaningful movement’.  The more we see, the more we can see; and so perhaps the more we see dance—or this play of relations in space and time—the more it will yield to us.    

REFERENCES

Banes, Sally. "Breaking." That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004).

Barthes, Roland, et al. The Death of the Author. 1977.

Prakash, Brahma. “The Contingent of Contemporaneity: the ‘Failure’ of Contemporary Dance to Become ‘Political.’” Tilt Pause Shift: Dance Ecologies in India, Tulika Books, 2016.

Rancière Jacques, and Gabriel Rockhill. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Rancière Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Verso, 2011.

Pillai, Shanti. “Reflecting on Resistance: Definitions and Dissonances - Indent: The Body & The Performative.” Indent: The Body and The Performative, Gati Dance Forum, 19 Nov. 2018, https://www.indent.in/issue-1/reflecting-on-resistance.

Anishaa Tavag is an independent dancer and editor based in Bangalore. She holds an MA in Arts and Aesthetics from JNU, New Delhi, and is interested in the links between writing and the performing arts.