Sara Regina Fonseca

STOCKHOLMS UNIVERSITET
Teater och dansvetenskap

PARTNERING LANGUAGE AT THE POLITICAL SITE OF

THEATRE
A comparative analysis of contemporary dance in Sweden and
Colombia

Masteruppsats
Spring 2011
Handläggare: Lena Hammergren

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 Sara Regina Fonseca

Abstract

What does the political potential of contemporary dance consist in? Broadly put,
this is the question that motivated the writing of this paper. Issues like the Western
philosophical tendencies of the 21st century, the retrospective views of the revolutions of
the 60's and 70's and the global concerns about extremist Muslim movements put art
into interesting and complex political grounds. From here, the need to encourage dance
artists to assume critical positions towards their own work, so that this remains relevant
within the local and global dynamics of society. This essay provides a comparative
analysis and a critical discussion of the practices and discourses on contemporary dance
in two contrasting socio-political contexts: Sweden and Colombia. The purpose of the
analysis is to detect common and particular aesthetic tendencies, as well as the
theoretical backgrounds that validate these tendencies as forms of political resistance.
The critical discussion aims to problematize current attitudes towards contemporary
dance, especially in relation to the political implications of language, representation and
identity. Using the work of authors like Judith Butler and Jacques Ranciére, I develop a
thesis which maintains that a conceptual and practical re-appropriation of theatricality in
contemporary dance might unlock this art form's potential to reconfigure and resignify
reality.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
Motivation 1
Purpose 1
Background and Justification 1
Argumentation 3
Theoretical Frame 3
Disposition 4

CHAPTER II: THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION 5

DanzAzul: Mujeres Invisibles 5
Alien Dance: Jag, Du och Hon 8
Danza Común: Bogotá Cuerpo Preparado and Campo Muerto 12
Weld: Happy to Be Here and 8.66 16
Framing Representation and Non-Representation 19

CHAPTER III: THEATRICÀLITY AND THE RESISTANT FORM 21

Politics of the Resistant Form: A Configuration of Democracy or Domination? 21
Theatricality and Real Presence: Two Phenomenological Modes 23
Theatricality and the Politics of Performativity
25
Performativity, Real Presence and the Resistant Form 27
Theatricality and the Desire for Real Presence 28
The Theatrical Resistant Form
30

CHAPTER IV: THE POLITICS OF PRESENCE 31

A Dance Aesthetics of Presence 31
A Dance Aesthetics of the Political Third 36

CHAPTER V: THE POLITICS OF THEATRICALITY 40

Theatricality and Language 40
Translation and the Third Referent of Ranciére 42
Theatricality as a Disclosure of Performativity 47

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CHAPTER VI: REINTERPRETING THE THEATRICAL 50

Charlotta Öfverhölm: Pas de deux sans toi 50
Malin Hellkvist Sellén: En Kristen Kväll 52

CHAPTER VII: DISCOURSING ABOUT DANCE 54

INPEX and The Swedish Dance History 54
CEC and The History of Contemporary Dance in Colombia 60
HDCC: First Generation 62
HDCC: Second Generation 70
HDCC: Third Generation 75

CHAPTER VII: CONCLUSION 80

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 Sara Regina Fonseca

PARTNERING LANGUAGE AT THE POLITICAL SITE OF THEATRE

A comparative analysis of contemporary dance in Sweden and Colombia

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

Motivation
The motivation for this essay can be seen as an overlapping of interests. Firstly, a
personal fascination for the aesthetic workings of theatrical dance 1, as well for its potential to
affect individuals and society. Secondly, the urgency to understand the specific concerns and
intentions underlining contemporary performance in my second land Sweden, which in turn has
led me to adopt a critical attitude towards contemporary performance in my homeland,
Colombia. All this has clearly shaped my choice of subject and my way of approaching it.

Purpose
The general purpose of this essay is to provide some perspectives that can mobilize and
challenge existing reflections on contemporary theatrical dance as a political force or as a force
of social transformation within the contexts of Sweden and Colombia. The comparison between
the contrasting socio-political contexts of these countries is meant to help discerning local and
global dynamics, which are currently shaping political attitudes towards theatrical dance. A
focus on this specific art form has been chosen in order to elucidate and revise specific attitudes
towards language and representation, including its political implications and power to affect the
world outside the theatrical space.

Background and Justification

On the 11th of December of 2010 a couple of bombs exploded in the centre of Stockholm,
and the Swedish newspapers revealed that the event might have been an attack from extremist
Muslims who have publicly condemned the presence of Swedish troops in Afghanistan and the
caricatures of Swedish artist Lars Vilks depicting prophet Mohammad as a dog. Significantly,
Sweden is internationally known as being an open society with high respect for diversity,
democracy and freedom of speech. This news hit me as one more instance of a particular
tension that seems to pervade contemporary globalizing societies at different levels. Pushed to
some virtual extremes, this can be described as a tension between a world conception tending to

1
By 'thetrical dance' I mean dance that is considered to be an art form and is performed for an audience
in some kind of scenic space, usually a theatre.
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give 'truth', 'language' and 'identity' absolute and transcendental values, and a worldview tending
to give the same notions relative, fluctuating and historically specific values. At the midst of it
all, art appears as a mirror and as a potentially powerful catalyst. Certainly, contemporary
terrorism is a brutal illustration of this tension, which can otherwise be manifested in much
subtler and even positive ways. However, the example does make an important point quite
clear: language and representation have serious implications, even when they are seen as art.
Not surprisingly, the issue of language has been a favourite subject of philosophical
inquiring and critical theory, most notoriously in Western Europe and North America during the
second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. Preceded by philosophers
such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and represented by philosophers such as Michael Foucault,
Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze among others, the focus on language resulted into what is
known as the linguistic turn of the 20th century. The linguistic turn linguistic turn is manifested
in various philosophical currents sharing an important characteristic: the belief that language is
not a transparent representation of an absolute reality, but rather the way in which humans
create reality. This also implies that the very notion of language is understood in a broad sense,
where virtually anything can be analysed and studied as a text; that is, as a way of constructing
reality. French poststructuralism and theories of postmodernism are part of this new focus, and
have had a great influence in the development of contemporary philosophy and art, not only in
Europe but also in Asia and the Americas. Now, for good and bad, the linguistic turn has made
the issue of language not only more visible but also very complicated.
As it is known, questioning the authority and transparency of language implies
questioning the very notion of truth, which taken to the extreme implies a radical relativism.
The phenomenon of globalization adds to the discussion, given that an increasing amount of
linguistic products flows in a speed and extension that subject their texts to inconceivable
numbers of translations, recontextualisations and reinterpretations. At a global level, controlling
the use of language and maintaining its capacity to describe a presumed reality proves to be
practically impossible. Some of the responses of Western theatrical dance to these issues are
quite apparent: Movement is often seen as a malleable material for creation rather than as a tool
to portray pre-existing realities. Moreover, creative processes and multiplicity of readings have
been favoured over static results and the authority of original intentions. The assumption of the
fluidity of language is reflected in the fusion of genres, aesthetics and categories such as art and
entertainment or content and form. In this context, the political potential of dance has also
acquired nuances concerning the implications of representation.
Now, in the midst of what would seem to be a philosophical and artistic embrace of this
linguistic turn, the screaming counter voice of a bomb attack reminds us that language has not
lost its authority, that representation in art can have political impact and that notions such as
cultural identity, origin and truth remain relevant, alas not uncontested, in our global,
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postmodern world. It is mainly under the light of these tensions that I find it important to revise
and critically analyse the existing assumptions about the political potential of theatrical dance,
so that this art form continues to be not only a reflection but also an active player in the current
processes of social resignification.

Argumentation
Partly as a logical consequence of my academic and historical backgrounds and partly as
a conscious choice, I will adopt a poststructural perspective and claim that because of its power
to determine reality, language is a crucial issue for any human activity that is meant to affect
society in a significant way. Dance as an art form is not the exception, and the way dancers
approach language in their work determines to a great extent their political attitudes. In this
scenario, my contention is that dance as an art form can be politically potentialized by exploring
the workings of representation and interpretation; that is, by exploring its theatrical aspect for
the sake of critical reflection. From here, my contention follows that a politics of dance based
on a radical rejection to representative language and theatricality has little potential to affect the
power structures that underline authoritarian conceptions of reality.

Theoretical Frame
I will use poststructuralism both as a tool for critical analysis and as one of the most important
theoretical contexts of contemporary theatrical dance in Colombia and Sweden. Mainly, I will
use the idea that the processes of meaning construction and interpretation are permeated by
contradictions, suppression and traces of meanings that defy the essentiality of any concept, as
well as the transparency of linguistic representation. Consequently, pretending that language
represents an unquestionable reality amounts to hiding the oppressions that are inherent in any
process of linguistic classification and definition.
I will refer to politics as an act of emancipation that transforms to certain extent the
predominant hierarchies of society. For this, I will mainly use the work of Judith Butler and
Jacques Ranciére in the following way. From Butler, I will use the conception of the political
act as an introduction of new subjects into the realm of legitimate reality. In a poststructural
vein, I will discuss Butler's arguments about the political implications of 'performativity',
particularly the way in which she develops J.L.Austin's concept of speech act in order to discuss
the possibility to 'resignify hate speech'. I will also use Butler's ideas about the political
potential of 'mourning' as a visualization of humans' ineluctable interdependence and
vulnerability. Finally, Butler's radical conception of the body as a social construction will be a
constant theoretical support for the critical analysis of theatrical dance. From Ranciére I will use
his definition of politics as the 'assumption of equality', which necessary requires a process of
‘declassification’ where those who are oppressed reject the 'slot' that society has given to them. I
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will also use Ranciére's application of his political thoughts to the aesthetic realm, in which he
describes the politics of aesthetics as a 'reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible'.
According to this concept, theatrical dance would be political as far as it visualizes new subjects
that have been invisible in common sensible realm. Finally, I will use Ranciére's thoughts about
pedagogy, where he introduces the concept of the 'third referent' as an external element, which
several individuals can use in order to confront different interpretations or 'translations'.
Together with representation and performativity, the concept of 'theatricality' will be
extensively discussed. I will adopt the theoretical discussions of William Egginton, where he
conceives theatricality as the mode of perception that characterizes society since the beginning
of modernity. I will adopt Egginton's theories in order to develop my arguments about the
potential that theatrical dance can have for a critical reconsideration of reality. In general, I will
make use of critical theory in order to identify power structures in the practices and discourses
related to contemporary theatrical dance within the socio-political contexts of Colombia and
Sweden. This means that my analysis will involve an effort to detect oppressive dynamics. With
this aim, basic premises of Marxism, postcolonialism and feminism will occasionally be used.

Disposition
In Chapter II, I will discuss the political implications of representation. Within that frame, I will
introduce the Colombian and Swedish dance scenarios thereby analysing one example of
students' feministic performance and one example of a professional contemporary dance
projects in each country. In Chapter III, I will introduce Ranciére's notion of the 'resistant form',
Egginton's notions of 'theatricality' and 'real presence', and Butler's notion of 'performativity'.
The purpose is to confront these concepts and develop some arguments about the role they
might play in the political potential of performance. In Chapter IV, I will analyse further the
scenario of contemporary dance in Sweden, particularly the approaches and discourses about the
works of four representative choreographers based in Stockholm. For this, I will use two
categories that I will call 'a dance aesthetics of presence' and 'a dance aesthetics of the political
third'. The former will be related to the notions of 'real presence' and the 'resistant form', whilst
the latter will be related to Ranciére's notion of the 'political third', which will be introduced
then. In Chapter V, I will connect the notions of theatricality, representation and language, and
then introduce Ranciére's concept of 'translation'. The purpose of these connections is to prepare
a theoretical frame for the articulation of my contention about 'theatricality as a disclosure of
performativity' or the political potential of theatrical approaches to performance. In Chapter VI,
I will use the arguments developed above in order to make a brief analysis of the work of two
Swedish dancers-choreographers who have theatrical approaches to dance. In Chapter VII, I
will look at the way Swedish and Colombian dancers approach the notions of 'cultural identity',
'nationality' and 'history'. For this, I will compare two projects, which concentrate on 'the history
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of contemporary dance' in each context. This chapter will include an extensive analysis of the
scene of contemporary dance in Colombia, where I will comment mainly on three dancers-
choreographers from three generations, ranging from the 80's until today. Chapter VIII will
consist of my conclusion, where I hope to draw some differences and similarities between the
two contexts analysed, as well synthetize my own position towards the politics of contemporary
dance.

CHAPTER II: THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

The creative act is not on the order of communication (…) on the transmission
and propagation of information (...) on a set of imperatives,
Slogans, directions—order-words. When you are informed, you are told what you are
Supposed to believe. (Gilles Deleuze) 2

The metaphysics of presence or the belief in the existence of a metaphysical dimension

that is superior to the physical dimension can be said to be one of the most problematized
notions in contemporary philosophy, especially within poststructuralist approaches to language.
The argument goes that the assumption of the superiority of the metaphysical entails a
validation of absolute truths and consequently, a validation of authoritarianism, repression,
moralism and so on. In the worst of the cases, the metaphysics of presence conceives the
physical dimension as mere representation of the truth that lies in the metaphysical world.
Within this paradigm, we attain truth by means of reason and the logical procedures of science
and language, where language's main attribute is to communicate or convey messages. At this
point, the political agency of contemporary philosophy consists in challenging what is taken for
granted, disclosing contradictions and defying the prevalent power structures that are
legitimated by the assumed objectivity of language. In this way, the notion of ‘representation’
and art as a means to 'communicate' is problematically placed at the centre of discussions about
the political agency of art. As far as art is treated as a representation of certain reality or
absolute truth, it is destined to serve the strategies of authoritarianism and oppression.
Alternatively, the argument goes that by challenging representation, art can challenge
authoritarianism. Let me now proceed to the analysis of the first two cases in Colombia and
Sweden, paying especial attention to the role that representation, or non-representation, plays in
the political approach of their works.

DanzAzul: Mujeres Invisibles

2
Deleuze, Gilles (2006). Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995,
edited by David Lapoujade. New York: Semiotext(e). p.320.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

DanzAzul is the name of a private dance academy initiated and directed in Bucaramanga by
Adriana Ordóñez. In June 2010, I saw Mujeres Invisibles, Invisible Women in English, being
performed by DanzAzul students at the Museum of Modern Art of Bucaramanga. The dancers
were four young women and one young man. The scenery consisted of several objects related to
the household, and a tube with hanging clothes from where the dancers took their costumes
between the scenes. There was a good deal of group choreography where the women danced,
sometimes in unison, sometimes echoing each other, and sometimes moving in harmonic
interaction. In one scene, the women rearrange some objects into four miniature buildings from
where they whisper to each other at the same time. In another scene, three women make a
choreography representing the action of cleaning, whilst the fourth woman and the man perform
a duet. This duet portrays a couple, where the woman is repeatedly maltreated by her male
partner. There is a solo of a woman performing a traditional Afro-Colombian dance, a duet
portraying a lesbian love affair and a solo of a woman who presents herself as a modernized
version of the girl in the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. At the end of the work, the four
women stand still in front of the audience, wearing white t-shirts on which they had written the
following texts: 'Women and indigenous children have least access to education', 'In Colombia,
every 72 hours a woman is maltreated', 'Each hour hundreds of children are sexually abused in
Latin America', and one more text that I cannot recall'3, . The man intervenes in the work only a
couple of times, portraying a lonely, arrogant and violent character. He is not part of the
beginning, nor is he part of the end of the performance.
So, this is how I interpret what I saw. First of all, there is a clear polarization between 'the
good' and 'the bad', which is identified with the polarization between the women and the man.
Second, the way in which Mujeres Invisibles portrays women romanticizes, with few
exceptions, the feminine stereotypes in Colombia and Latin America in general. These
stereotypes are both aesthetic and moral. Thus, the women with dresses and long hair show
themselves as being sympathetic and affective with each other, loving to the evil man and ready
to suffer in silence for the good of the community. They clean, gossip, and take care of each
other. Moreover, the identification of the women with Afro-Colombian folk suggests a link of
the feminine to the traditional and, in a circular manner, of the traditional to 'the good'. Such a
stereotypation and idealization of femininity is, from a political point of view, problematic. In
my opinion, the aestheticization and moral appeal of the female victims are likely to produce a
strong contestation of desires in women, both performers and spectators. On the one hand, it can
arouse in them a desire for emancipation in the face of men's blatant aggression towards
women. On the other hand, it can strengthen women's desire to be idealized by society, which
requires of them to continue playing the role of victims. What I find most problematic in
Mujeres Invisibles is that the characters portrayed in this work reaffirm an already normalized
3
My translation from Spanish.
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conception of women, which, for the reasons presented above, plays a fundamental role in the
maintenance of patriarchy in Colombia and Latin America.
I would now like to call attention to the fact that Mujeres Invisibles does not only
denounce the injustices done to women, but also the injustice done to the ethnical minorities and
the low social classes of Colombia. This is at least how I understand the inclusion of traditional
Afro-Colombian dance, as well as the representation of women cleaning, a domestic job usually
done by the lowest social classes in Colombia. Such an integration of struggles is confirmed in
the last scene where the texts written on the t-shirts refer to the factual discrimination of
indigenous people. The approach of this work can be seen in relation to what researcher Doris
Lamus Canavae describes as a tendency towards a struggle coalition strategy in the history of
Latin American feminism, which to a great extent can be explained by the turbulent political
context of the region. Referring to Colombia, Lamus Canavae asserts that feminism has been
actively involved in social movements against the oppression of workers, farmers, ethnical
minorities and other victims of systematic violence:

The women's movement grew and developed in countries undergoing authoritarian regimes /.../or
that lived severe internal alterations of the public order, like in Colombia. Women‘s mobilization
contributed to question and reconceptualise democracy and conceptions derived from it for the political
culture of the end of XX century.4

One the one hand, one could think that this strategy gives strength to feminist
movements, giving them a broader socio-political awareness and the possibility to identify
causal connections to other problems of the country. On the other hand, linking women's
oppression to class and ethnical discrimination might dissolve the feminist struggle into the
juxtaposed movements against racism and economical exploitation. In this way, a great portion
of society might be excluded from feminist struggle; namely, white, middle class and upper
class women. Moreover, focusing on the issues of race and class might prevent feminist struggle
from critically addressing other key issues such as religion and tradition.
In particular relation to performance, this historical affiliation of struggles might be said
to feed white and middle class women's tendency to represent the exploitation of women whose
reality looks very different from their own5. Ranciére, for whom reclaiming the equality of
others is an attitude that strengthens a presupposition of inequality, points out the risk of this
choice6. In this case, the inequality consists in assuming that the 'victims' of injustice are
4
Lamus Canavae, Doris (2009) 'Geohistoric locations of Latin American Feminisms' in Polis Revista
Académica Universidad Bolivariana. Bucaramanga. http://www.revistapolis.cl/polis
%20final/english/24e/lamus.htm
5
'White people' in Colombia refers to non-indigenous and non-Afrocolombians. Hence, the notion
includes mixed descendants of Spanish and indigenous, as well as mixed descendants of Spanish and
Africans.
6
May, Todd. (2008) Political Thought of Jacques Ranciére: Creating Equality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

incapable of reclaiming their own equality thereby creating a better reality for themselves. In
Colombia, it is obvious that many women do not believe themselves to be equal, and accept the
misogynistic reality that the performers try to denounce in Mujeres Invisibles. In this sense, the
piece hinders its political potential, since the audience, composed mostly by non-indigenous,
non Afro-Colombians and non-poor people, can do little to stop such an acceptance of
inequality. As Todd May puts it in his analysis of Ranciére's political theories
The /... / struggle for equality...can never be merely a demand upon the other, nor a pressure put
upon him, but always simultaneously a proof given to oneself. This is what 'emancipation' means.7

Having said all this, I would like to mention a couple of aspects that I find relevant for the
feministic purpose of the work. One of these elements is the allusion to Little Red Riding Hood,
whose intertextuality suggests interesting nuances between 'the good' and 'the bad'. Within the
context of Mujeres Invisibles, the character of the girl is most likely to be interpreted as a
symbol for the innocence and good heartedness of women, and the only man in the work is
likely to be connected to the cruel wolf that eats the girl in the fairy tale. The sexual abuse of
women might come rapidly to the mind. However, Little Red Riding Hood has a history of
alternative interpretations, some of which present the girl as being sexually attractive and
attracted to the wolf. Some versions of the fairy tale even suggest that the girl wants to be eaten
by the wolf, and that for this reason she pretends not to understand what is happening.8 As I see
it, the intertextual connotations of Little Red Riding Hood have the potential to problematize the
issues of victimization and desire in Mujeres Invisibles. The work, however, does not quite
seems to do so. The other element, which I find even more effective, is the portrayal of the
lesbian affair. As a contrast to the otherwise dominating reinforcement of female stereotypes in
Mujeres Invisibles, this scene challenges female heterosexual normativity in a context where
homosexuality, bisexuality and transexuality have a dubious place in people's notion of reality.
It is important to keep in mind here that as a contrast to Sweden, Colombia does not have a long
tradition of queer performance and activism. Finally, the political potential of this scene is
enhanced by the particular way in which it is performed. A kind of subtlety and naturalness
made something usually seen as deviant appear to be normal. In this way, it could be argued that
Mujeres Invisibles managed to introduce a new subject into the realm of the accepted reality.

Alien Dance: Jag, Du och Hon

Alien Dance Company was created in 2009 by second year students of Balettakademien,
a school offering professional dance education in Stockholm. Elina Elerstrand, the company's
director, describes the motivation of Alien Dance as
7
May, Todd. (2008) Political Thought of Jacques Ranciére: Creating Equality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press. P. 70
8
An example of an alternative interpretation is Angela Carter's fairy tale “The Company of Wolves”
1979, where the story is presented as the sexual awakening of Little Red Riding Hood.
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The hunger to interpret feelings, expressions and messages with the body, through the language of
dance. To show with the body, what you can´t say with words (...) To speak up. 9

The work that inaugurated the company is called Jag, Du och Hon, which I saw being
performed at the House of Culture of Stockholm in March 2009. The work starts with projected
images of magazines portraying women in bikini. The dancers, all of them women, start
crossing the stage, tensing their shoulders and arms, looking now and then at the projected
images and comparing them with their own bodies. The anger grows and the movements change
from explosion to containment, from mechanical movements imitating dolls to expressions of
frustration and allusions to the action of vomiting. There are solos in which the girls tell first-
person narratives about feeling discomfort with the body and having fear of not being liked.
The stories include submissions to plastic surgeries and obsessive diets. Towards the end of the
work, all the girls take their clothes off and walk away in underclothes whilst a recorded voice
says 'We are good just as we are'- 'Vi räcker som vi är' in Swedish.
In this work there is also a polarization, which identifies clearly a victim and an
aggressor. Nevertheless, the aggressor is this time identified as a discourse rather than a gender.
The guilty for the suffering of women are not men, but the consumerist society whose
commercialization of the female body has made women slaves of a fixed ideal of beauty. In this
way, the protest of the performance can be also understood as an indirect protest against the
political system that supports consumerist society. There is, however, another difference
between the protest performed in Mujeres Invisibles and the protest performed in Jag, Du och
Hon. In contrast to the former work, the latter work contains an autobiographical touch, as well
as an intended revindication of women as being capable of freeing themselves from the harming
ideal of beauty sold by the mass media. The apparent closeness between the social reality of the
performers and that of the women they portray suggests that the stories that are told might be
personal. They are stories about young women whose life has become a painful struggle to
satisfy the feminine model imposed by society. The performers might indeed be denouncing
their own suffering. The verbal use of ‘we’ towards the end of the performance is significant.
Apart from talking about themselves, the performers open a grammatical possibility for the
inclusion of spectators. Thus, the statement 'we are good just as we are', works as their own
revindication, or as their own assumption of equality to put it in Ranciére's terms. Looking at it
in this way, Jag, Du och Hon can be said to have an emancipative power for the performers, as
well as it can be said to transfer a message of emancipation to the audience.
I would also like to emphasise the way in which this performance uses the body to
comment on itself. The overwhelming projections of 'perfect' bodies juxtaposed by the
apologetic attitudes of the performers' bodies unambiguously introduce what is at stake. The
9
Alien Dance Facebook Profile: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=190308211116
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

bodies speak about themselves. Interestingly, this focus on the body, as well as the
autobiographical approach mentioned earlier are identified by researcher Tiina Rosenberg as
aspects that characterize current tendencies in Swedish contemporary feminist performance:

Performance art and theatrical performance by young Swedish feminist performing artists in the
2000s display two distinct traits that link them to the preceding feminist tradition. The first is the strong
autobiographical element, and the second is the way in which this autobiographical element nearly always
relates to the body.10

Furthermore, Rosenberg points out that

This fundamental desire for identification is contradictory to performance as a genre, and to our
contemporary theoretical framework, which is so critical of identification. There appears to be a need,
however, for these autobiographical narratives, since they are so prevalent and popular. Thus, the identity
political dimension has remained strong in feminist performing arts. Autobiography has been a means of
politicizing and portraying the anger and frustration felt by many feminists11.

First of all, I would like to claim that Rosenberg's understanding of performance in this
quote seems to dismiss the multiple transformations that the definition of this genre has suffered
since its early emergence during the 60's. Indeed, performance has played an important role in
the development of identity politics, and the autobiographical element identified by Rosenberg
has been a notorious characteristic of it during more than 25 years now12. In her article,
Rosenberg is not clear with what she means by 'our contemporary theoretical framework', but it
can be deduced that she is referring to a typically poststructural critic of essentialism and the
political implications of identity. The history of Marxist, feminist and postcolonial movements
shows that identity can be used both as a strategy of domination and as a strategy of resistance.
This paradoxical character of identity politics is exemplified in a classical dilemma of feminist
movements, which fluctuate between the vindication of an assumed feminine way of dealing
with the world as a political option, and the liberation of women from the socially constructed
notion of femininity. The problematization of identity is well connected to the problematization
of representation. Following the example, representing femininity might enhance normalized
notions that have done much harm to women, as well as it can frustrate women's capacity to re-
invent themselves.
As I see it, this paradox can be disentangled, at least theoretically, with help of a specific
distinction that Ranciére makes between 'identity' and 'entity'. On the one hand, Ranciére
conceives 'identity' as a 'slot' or a social classification that policy, as opposed to politics,
allocates to individuals in order to control them. Such is the notion of identity that

10
Tiina Rosenberg (2009) 'On Feminist Activist Aesthetics'. Journal for Aesthetics and Culture. Vol 1.
http://journals.sfu.ca/coaction/index.php/jac/article/viewArticle/4619/5063#NOTE0001
11
Ibid.
12
Marvin, Carlson (2004) Performance. A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.
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poststructuralist thinkers usually connect to domination. One the other hand, Ranciére refers to
'entity' as a 'community of equals' that deny classification, or as

/.../an insubstantial community of individuals engaged in the ongoing creating of equality.13

'Entity' is 'unsubstantial' because it cannot be materialized, fixed or categorized. Because the
commonality of its individuals consists in assuming a kind of equality that necessarily creates a
dynamics of dissensus rather than one of consensus. In this way, 'entity' and 'identity' can be
understood as two opposite concepts, where the former emerges as a political strategy to
eliminate the latter. As Todd May explains in his analysis of Ranciére's political thought,

Politics is/.../ a process of declassification. It is a process of abandoning the identity one has been
given.14

Let me use this conceptual distinction to analyse the element of identification in Jag, Du
och Hon. The way in which this work defies or protests against the identity sold to young
women by the mass media can be seen as an expression of a declassificatory process, which
does not necessarily create a new identity. Indeed, the final message of Jag, Hon och Du is 'we
are good just as we are', but this message does not make any statements about 'how we are or
should be'. Each person, or each young woman in this case, is free to answer that question
herself. Granted, the personal stories might enhance a picture of young women as being victims
of normative 'feminine identity', and as I have argued earlier, victimization can be problematic.
However, I would still argue that this virtual community of young women corresponds to an
'entity' rather than an 'identity', in the Rancierian sense. Surely, Jag, Hon och Du does not deal
with issues that are typical of contemporary performance art, such as the fragmentation of the
self or the insubstantiality of the subject; but it does, from the beginning to the end, reject a
socially constructed image of the female body. In this way, the work enacts a refusal to accept a
given 'identity', thereby joining the poststructuralist fight against oppressive identification.
Finally, I would like to argue that whilst the performers manage to express their rage
against a specific case of classification -one 'imposed' by the mass media-, they might fail in
doing what Ranciére considers to be the ultimate political power of art; namely, to 'redistribute
the sensible', or materialize an alternative reality for spectators and performers altogether. This
is, as I see it, a common problem of denunciatory or critical art. Most often, spectators are
shown 'what reality is but should not be' or 'what reality should be, but it is not'. It is rather
seldom that spectators are shown unsuspected possibilities of 'what reality might be', without the
authoritative implication of the 'should'. Indeed, Jag, Du och Hon reminded me of something
13
Ranciére, Jacques, quoted in May, Todd (2008) The Political Thought of Jacques Ranciére: Creating
Equality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. P. 71
14
May, Todd (2008) The Political Thought of Jacques Ranciére: Creating Equality. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press. P. 50
15
 Sara Regina Fonseca

that is 'wrong' in our society, but after the performance I saw society in the same way that I had
seen it before. As a viewer, I maybe felt identified with the cause enacted by the performers, but
the work did not reconfigure my sensible experience of the world, the notion of beauty or the
possibilities of the female body. Jag, Du och Hon did not have, in this sense, a transformative
effect on me as a spectator.

Danza Común: Bogotá Cuerpo Preparado and Campo Muerto

Danza Común was created in 1992 by students of the Universidad Nacional of Bogotá,
with the purpose of providing continuous training and artistic education in contemporary dance
to university students from different departments. In 2002 Danza Común became a foundation
independent from the university, and it got support from different governmental institutions in
order to develop a continuous program of artistic and pedagogic exchanges within the field of
contemporary dance. The current artistic directors are Bella Luz Gutiérrez, Sofía Mejía and
Zoitsa Noriega. The works are seen as a collective creation under the direction of these three
artists. Nowadays, Fundación Danza Común drives one of the most dynamic centres of dance
training, seminars and performance events in Bogotá, led by the members of Danza Común as
well as national and international guests.
Danza Común belongs to a second generation of dancers that followed the movement of
the 70's and 80's in Colombia. During these decades, Venezuela enjoyed an economical oil
boom, which affected positively the governmental investment in arts. This country became an
important point of encounter between dance artists from the whole continent, a good number of
whom came from neighbour Colombia and from the United States. During this time, Colombian
dance training was influenced by postmodern dance techniques like release, flying low and
contact improvisation. I consider this to be relevant, in the sense that postmodern dance
techniques, as well as most dance techniques, imply certain approach to the artistic creation, the
relationship between art and society and the political implications of representation. Indeed,
American postmodern dance as represented by pioneers such as Yvonne Rainer, is known for its
anti-representative search, often implying a rejection to expression of emotions and to
conventional aesthetic parameters. The result is usually a body in motion, going through
different dynamics produced by its conscious interaction with time, space and gravity.
Similarly, postmodern dance techniques prepare performers to increase the consciousness of the
materiality of their bodies and privilege the physical action over any narrative or realistic
depiction of the world.
Besides this postmodern legacy and the legacy of modern dance techniques such as
Graham and Limón, the dancers of Danza Común share with most Colombian contemporary
dancers certain knowledge and interest about Colombian folk music and dance. In fact, an
interest about cultural identity and the socio-political situation of the country has been a
16
 Sara Regina Fonseca

constant element in the landscape of theatrical dance from its modern pioneers in the 80's to the
actual generation of contemporary dancers. Furthermore, the official recognition of Afro-
Colombian and Indigenous minorities in the Constitutional Reform of 1992 has gradually
increased governmental support to the investigation and reinterpretation of cultural traditions
that are different from those belonging to the European cultural legacy. As I will argue towards
the end of this essay, Colombian contemporary dance might be described as a theoretical
hybrid, where a postmodern understanding of dance redefines and is redefined by a persistent
preoccupation for identity, origin and the treatment of specific social themes.
Let us now have a closer look at two of Danza Común's productions. The first example is
Bogotá Cuerpo Preparado, created in (2008)15. Danza Común writes:

This work presents the city as a living being in constant movement, which is vulnerable to our
influences and which witnesses our own changes. It recreates the spaces of Bogotá in its physical,
emotional and poetic dimensions. (My trans.)16

Hence, the work attempts to present subjective and personal perspectives of the city, in which
the referent to reality is Bogotá and the emotional memories of the performers. In this sense,
one could say that there is a degree of representation, alas one that magnifies its subjectivity and
therefore minimizes its authority. Since each performer is presenting his/her personal
experience, it is unlikely to perceive in this work any kind of denunciation or political
standpoint. Concerning the movement material, it could be said that its precision, its
minimalistic aesthetic and the emotional detachment of the performers make it hard for the
audience to perceive the work as a cathartic self-expression. In Bogotá Cuerpo Preparado there
is no commentary, nor is there sentimentalism, moralism or authoritarianism. Instead, it could
be said that Bogotá Cuerpo Preparado is a formalized presentation of subjective perceptions of
the city of Bogotá, where the formalized presentation is a non-realistic re-presentation, and the
referent is the subjective reality of each performer.
In my opinion, the second example is more complex. The case in point is Campo Muerto,
which was created in (2008)17 and whose thematic is described by Danza Común as follows

The abrupt irruption of violence in everyday life, in the same way that it occurs in the internal war
that our country is suffering, is a painful and unquestionable fact of each day. The fragility and strength of
human nature is exposed to the violent act, to the forced silence, the threat, the selective murder. All of
these are symbols of a collective tragedy, which is immersed in the abyss of indifference and amnesia.
The marks of maltreatment and extreme violence that settle down in the memory of the victims, the
common people who are not related to the war and the abrupt destruction of their spaces and territory, are
the emotional and creative force of this work. (My trans.)18
15
Fragments of Bogotá Cuerpo Preparado is available in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=y_YG6Te60-Y&feature=related
16
Danza Común webpage: http://www.danzacomun.com/danzaComun.html
17
Fragments of Campo Muerto available in: http://il.youtube.com/watch?
v=j9Yl94Rj1bQ&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IYPWt2sEko&feature=related
18
Danza Común webpage: http://www.danzacomun.com/danzaComun.html
17
 Sara Regina Fonseca

When I saw this work in rehearsal in Bogotá 2008, I commented that I liked how the
characters were born out of physical situations. Juan Mosquera, one of the performers, said to
me that he would not really refer to 'characters' but rather to 'intensities'.19 This comment stuck
to my mind, because it gave me a key into the philosophical wondering of these performers, as
well as into their phenomenological approach to the creative process. Indeed, the generation of
young contemporary dancers in Colombia, as in Sweden and many other countries around the
world, share what could be called transnational philosophical references that affect the ways in
which these artists relate to their local contexts. In the case of Campo Muerto, a deconstructive
approach to unifying identities such as 'characters' goes hand in hand with the exploration of
socio-political topics. The creative process of Campo Muerto included an almost journalistic
research on the situation of the 'desplazados' or internal refugees in the country, and the
references to this situation are not only visible in the performance but also explicit in the way
Danza Común presents the work.
During our meeting after the rehearsal, the performers explained that their intention was
not so much to denounce or represent the pain of the 'desplazados', but rather to explore how the
violence of the country marks the bodies of Colombian people in their everyday life. Regardless
of the performers' specific intentions and their explorative processes, one can take the
perspective of the viewer and claim that, in Campo Muerto, these embodied marks of violence
are not deconstructed to the level of pure bodily sensations that can be perceived as abstract
movement. Instead, the physical situations and 'intensities' embodied by the performers in
Campo Muerto are an integral part of a dramaturgical text full of socio-cultural specific
references. The costumes of the performers are second hand clothes that do not quite fit the
dancers. The scenery includes objects like a mattress, a table, a window, chairs, a plant, blankets
and lamps; all of which the dancers move from place to place in one of the most hectic moments
of the work. In one scene, the dancers write and delete names of people on the floor. In another,
a performer collects little by little everybody's shoes. In another, everyone fights for the last
object left on stage, and so on. The work is clearly not made for a purely aesthetic or sensorial
perception. It portrays persons who mistreat and are mistreated, who share joy and pain.
Moreover, when shown in a Colombian context, the dramaturgical elements of Campo Muerto
and its general atmosphere of anxiety and despair can hardly avoid being interpreted as an
allusion to the life situation of Colombian internal refugees.

19
In this context, 'intensity' refers to Gilles Deleuze's understanding of this concept, which is described
as 'a form of ontological difference that gives rise to 'actual' or perceived entities'. Deleuze, Gilles
(1994). Difference and Repetition ( trans. Paul Patton) New York: Columbia University Press. p.246.
In this sense, the notion of 'character' could be understood as an entity that the performers deconstruct
into its 'intensities'; that is, into its perceptible and fluctuating qualities of movement.
18
 Sara Regina Fonseca

Now, where does the political potential of Campo Muerto lie? At this point, I would like
to relate to Butler's ideas about the political potential of mourning, which can be understood as
another way of conceiving the notion of equality. Butler argues that

Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies - as a
site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and
vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted.20

From this perspective, I would say that Campo Muerto's political potential lies in its
visualization of the common vulnerability and interdependence of people. More, I would argue
that despite the performers' comments, such a visualisation does imply a certain degree of
representation, in the sense that it refers to things that are not materially present: homes, stories,
persons, reflections and so on. This, however, does not exclude the possibility of a
representation that is approached by embodying dynamics instead of miming situations, or by
performing intensities instead of playing characters. The visualization I am talking about is
clearly exemplified in a scene of ritual mourning. The group carries a woman who looks dead,
whilst singing traditional funeral songs from the Pacific region of Colombia. Certainly, this
ritual could be read from the problematic perspective of cultural identity and its links to
nationalism and exotization. I will duly discuss these important issues later on. However, I
would like to suggest another reading here. I see this ritual as a culturally specific reference to
pain, given that a great number of Colombian internal refugees are Afro-descendants coming
from the Pacific region. Later on, the mourning scene turns into a cathartic celebration, which
for me has a metaphoric value. As in the lives of so many Colombians, pain vanishes here in the
midst of a normalized struggle for survival, leaving no apparent memories, marks or
consequences..
Undoubtedly, 'grief' is one of the aspects explored in Campo Muerto, and the political
dimension of this aspect is explained by Butler as follows,

Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that
sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it
does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing
fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility.21

In this sense, it could be argued that Campo Muerto's political potential consists in exploring,
embodying and communicating a shared vulnerability to violence, which makes internal
refugees and every other Colombian citizen part of the same community. By doing this, Campo
Muerto blurs the distinction between victim and perpetrator, as well as the distinction between
those who are involved in the war and those who are not. What Campo Muerto seems to state is
20
Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso P.20.
21
Ibid, p. 22.
19
 Sara Regina Fonseca

that we are all equal in the face of violence, because every 'body' is exposed to it, and every
'body' is responsible for it.

Weld: Happy to Be Here and 8.66

Weld is a project created and directed by choreographer and dancer Anna Koch in 2006,
with the aim of developing the dance medium by means of experimentation, cross-disciplinary
exchanges and critical perspectives towards the definition of art. The space offers residencies
and a scene for national and international artists, as well as forums and seminars about dance
related subjects. Weld co-produces projects whose purposes are in line with Weld's interest on
experimental scenic art. About Weld, Koch says that:

We gather impulses and ideas; we combine and break them down; we re-think them while aspiring
to define ourselves as something not quite tangible22

In my view, Weld's search is well tuned with official discourses on theatrical dance,
which tend to encourage the values of innovation and openness to global influences. Such an
attitude is visible in Contemporary Dance in Sweden, a book published by the Swedish Institute,
and written by critic Bodil Persson, who argues that

The very new dance in Sweden is both European and American, both Asian and African- it
borrows from every point of the compass-23

In general, one could say that the identity of Swedish theatrical dance seems to be based on a
postmodern attitude, which emphasises internationalization rather than tradition and cultural
roots. Nonetheless, let me provide a brief historical context. One should perhaps mention that
classical ballet has a long tradition, good institutional support and a strong influence in the
training of Swedish contemporary dancers. Also, there are few communities interested in
Swedish folk music and dance, but these traditions are far from playing a significant role in the
development of theatrical dance. An interesting phenomenon was the Ballet Suedois, which was
directed by Rolf de Maré and functioned in Paris from 1920 until 1925. The company produced
a great amount of works distinguished by their multidisciplinary collaborations between
Swedish and French avant-garde artists. Finally, the most important references for
contemporary dance are probably Birgit Cullberg and Birgit Åkesson, who pioneered modern
dance in Sweden during the 60's and 70's. In 1967, Cullberg founded the internationally
renowned Cullberg Baletten, and she is remembered for her narrative and highly theatrical
approach to dance. In 1963, Åkesson co-founded what is today one of the most influential
institutions of dance in Sweden, the University of Dance and Circus. In contrast to Cullberg,

22
Weld Website: http://www.weld.se/page/about-weld/eng/
23
Persson, Bodil (2003) Contemporary Dance in Sweden. Stockholm: The Swedish Institute. P.2
20
 Sara Regina Fonseca

Åkesson's work is usually described as abstract and minimalistic, and her aesthetic approach has
certainly had more influence in today's experimental dance than Cullberg’s theatrical legacy.
Let me now analyse two works choreographed by Koch. The first is Happy to be Here,
which was created in Weld and premiered in the House of Dance of Stockholm. Since I did not
have the opportunity to see the work live, I will rely on some pictures, the choreographer’s
comments and several press reviews, all of which are published inWeld's website. Thomas
Olsson writes in Nummer.se that:

Anna Koch explores dance's fundaments or the very act of dance's creation...Together with the
other dancers, she allows patterns and ideas emerge and take form before the audience. This results in
energized bodies which constantly find themselves into their movement, even when they take occasional
rests; the bodies are all the time fully present as a fundamental assumption of their existence on stage...All
the encounters and movements which take place are equally important, not in the sense of bearing some
meaning, but in the sense that the smallest movement and every detail is treated as being an absolutely
necessary part of the whole. (My trans.)24

Anna Ångström writes in Svenska Dagbladet that:

The choreography seems to be built of rests, rhythms and irrational tracks that are processed and
recycled. The music is just as subtle...only a public ovation is heard, ironically too early. Anna Koch
breaks the pretentiousness with soft humour, like when the classical ballet shines in a pax de deux and
Dragana Zarevska whistles triumphally when she is lifted in front of the public. Using the black
sidewings, the performers play with the classical theatre scene, where the actors do their entrances and
exits, or observe the whole thing from certain distance. Anna Koch and her ensemble not only explore the
expansion of dance possibilities, but also awake human, existential questions about our ways of relating
to each other. (Translated by Weld)25

Journalist Örjan Abrahamsson writes in Dagens Nyheter that:

The happiness of being here is a kind of artistic credo. How can one give form to the flittering
present? How can one avoid getting stuck in a form? The answer is, as usual during the 2000's: one does
it in the very act of creation. You know, the journey is the purpose...Happy to be Here offers a concealed,
somehow secretly organized chaos...The audience does not need to decipher codes or see the structure
behind the form, since the purpose is the journey, the on-going creative process, the actors on stage now
and here. (Translated by Weld) 26

Journalist Lena Andrén writes in Dansportalen that:

What is shown on stage, are short fragments of human existence. The short scenes are sketched
enough to let the spectators create their personal interpretation of what is going on onstage (Translated by
Weld) 27.

Lena Andrén continues her text describing the particular characteristics of each performer and
defining the work as an encounter of subjective individuals. Then she adds that:
24
Weld Website: http://www.weld.se/program/happy-to-be-here-7-maj-umea-9-10-weld/sv/
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
21
 Sara Regina Fonseca

Even when Koch is guest at Dansens Hus /.../ it feels that the performance is a Weld's work. This
means that its format feels made for the exquisite studio instead of the more conventional dance stage in
Dansens Hus. The conclusion is 'that one can take the choreography away from the place, but cannot take
the place away from the choreography' -Anna Koch quoted. (Translated by Weld). 28

Finally, says Koch says herself that

Happy to be here – is a “dance-existential” premise, a soft, beautiful landscape where bastards

come to life. In this context ‘dance-existential’ refers to both the dance’s existing space as a phenomena
on stage as well as the existence of those dancing and those observing...
Happy to be here is a struggle of aspirations and desires. Ingredients of different origins are
processed and form a strange yet familiar entity...A dance-historic something, becomes present and states:
the monster, the old form of choreography, is talking and living. It’s alive, it’s alive, I saw it with my
very own eyes. In what way can we tease this monster? (Translated by Weld) 29

From all these quotes, I would like to underline some aspects that seem to characterize
Happy to be here and, in my opinion, much of the experimental dance production in Sweden.
These aspects are: Exploration of the dance medium, focus on motion and the presence of the
body, disclosure of the creative process, meta-criticism of theatrical dance and its staging
conventions, irony towards traditions within the dance art medium and enhancement of each
performer's individuality. Clearly, the goal of this work can be described as being self-
referential, where representation and direct references to an external reality are discarded.
Spectators do seem to make connections with their own lives, but the resulting reflections are
likely to be of a philosophical or 'existential', rather than a socio-political kind.
The second example is 8.66, a duet performed by Anna Koch and Gunilla Hammar, a
former dancer of the Cullberg Ballet. I had the opportunity of seeing this performance live in
Weld in 2010. The scene was empty and the two dancers were dressed in black trousers and
white shirts, no make up. At the beginning they were standing at each side of the stage each,
until Koch said: Shall we start, and Hammar assented. They came into the stage casually,
showing themselves dubitative and thoughtful. Then they started going through a choreographic
sketch standing in front of the audience and letting a small plastic bag fall. They had short
dialogues now and then, started all over, corrected each other, asked each other questions about
what they were supposed to do, and assumed body postures that created an atmosphere of
intimacy rather than one of theatrical projection. We, the audience, understood that the feeling
of rehearsal was meant. At some point the dancers went behind the black backdrop and moved
hectically. We did not see them, but heard the sounds their bodies and breath made. At some
point, Hammer tried to teach Koch how to stay for a long while in a dance second position.
Koch desisted and Hammer stayed in the position with no signs of tiredness. Without moving
she says: 'We call this the Cullberg's genital attack'30. The spectators, most of whom were

28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
Original text in Swedish: 'Vi kallar det här för Cullbergkönet anfaller'.
22
 Sara Regina Fonseca

dancers or dance academics who knew Koch and Hammar, laughed at that point. It was a joke
made for local dance experts. The work developed without a clear climax, and ended as one
would end a rehearsal. They walked away in a casual way.
Self-referentiality seems to characterize this work as well, returning to aspects such as
disclosure of process, meta-criticism of the dance medium and focus on particular individuals.
The question that should be asked now is whether this approach to dance can be political or not,
and how. As I mentioned earlier, one possible answer is that by avoiding representation, the
artist is searching for a more democratic encounter with the spectators. The viewers should
decide by themselves what to look at, what to interpret and what to feel. The opposite is falling
into authoritarianism. For a contemporary approach to this modernistic argument, I will refer
once more to Ranciére and his thoughts about the politics of aesthetics. The author states that

Art is not, in the first instance, political because of the messages and sentiments it conveys
concerning the state of the world. Neither is it political because of the manner in which it might choose to
represent society's structures, or social groups, their conflicts of identities. It is political because of the
very distance it takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it
institutes 31

Later on, Ranciére claims that 'The politics of art consists in suspending the normal coordinates
of sensory experience'32. The art that achieves this distance is defined by Ranciére as the
'resistant form', whose potential is described as being 'apolitically political'. According to this, it
is only by keeping its autonomy from the non-aesthetic world that art can resist the social
classifications, categories and identities that constitute the hierarchical order of society. I would
say that the political potential of Weld's production and many other contemporary dance works
in Sweden might be conveniently analysed under these arguments. I will take on this task in the
next chapter.

Framing Representation and Non-Representation

In this section I would like to make some comments on the importance of taking into
account the extrinsic aspects that frame the intrinsic aspects of a dance work or performance. If
a single performance is understood as a signifying system, the apparent intrinsic meanings of
such a signifying system will necessarily be permeated and altered by other signifying systems.
This is perhaps a very simple way of understanding what is called intertextuality within
poststructuralism. Given my concern about politics, I would like to focus here on the way in
which competing signifying systems generate a confrontation of different power discourses.
Let me bring up an example from Colombia. In 2010, this country celebrated the
Bicentenario, or national celebration of 200 years of independence from Spain. During the days

31
Ranciére, Jacques (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents Cambridge: Polity Press. P.23.
32
Ibid.P. 25.
23
 Sara Regina Fonseca

of this celebration I happened to be in Socorro, a small village that was declared official centre
of the Bicentenario, due to its historical importance as the nest of the revolution that preceded
the national liberation campaign of the 19th century. Officially, the Bicentenario is constructed
as a signifying system standing for nationalism and its discourses on sovereignty, democracy
and multiculturalism. The events, or signs of this system, included a military parade, the speech
of the president, dramatizations of the official history of national liberation and performances of
folk dance and music from different regions. Now, competing with this very institutional frame,
there were also a good number of contemporary dance, theatre and music performances that
contained a more or less direct criticism to the current social order of the country.
All these events were well subsidised by the Gobernación de Santander, the regional
administrative authority. Notably, one theatre piece staged a family situation in 1810, 1910 and
2010, showing how the national history is infected with violence and oppression, and how we,
Colombians, continue to be blinded by the nationalistic discourse of freedom. In a less
representative way, a music performance worked with symbols of war, revolution and
institutional power, which were deconstructed and chaotically staged together into an
apocalyptic confusion of images and sounds. One could see, for example, a man wearing a pink
rebel hood, smoking a cigar and muttering unintelligible sounds that resembled the tones and
rhythms of a typical speech by a typical politician.
In this way, one could say that the Bicentenario contained a contestation of significations,
which can have different results. One might be that the nationalist discourse of power swallows
the discourses of resistance contained in some performances. In fact, the governor of Santander
received lots of grateful words from the artists financed by the region and one can imagine that,
to some extent, the critical content of the works was conditioned by the artists' economical
dependence from governmental support. However, the case might also be that the very
nationalist discourse framing the Bicentenario makes any manifestations of inconformity even
more visible and confrontative. Indeed, most people travelled to Socorro to celebrate the nation
state and its official discourses of power. During my three days stay in Socorro, I could witness
how some people felt very uncomfortable with the performances that contained some kind of
political criticism.
A similar logic can be applied to performances that fit better into the Ranciérian notion of
the apolitically political or the resistant form. Even if these performances might create sensorial
configurations that are free from the authoritarian classifications of normative society, they
might also be framed by art institutions, which have their own discourses to legitimize or
delegitimize dance. In fact, I would say that the conception of experimental dance as a non-
representative and non-theatrical self-reflective signifying system might in some cases become
an authoritarian classification within the artistic realm. As I will argue later, this might be the
case with experimental dance in Stockholm. Weld's strive for being 'something not quite
24
 Sara Regina Fonseca

tangible' might have a theoretically well grounded purpose of resisting conventional

classifications, but it might also lead to having selection criteria that are equally intangible and
therefore impossible to confront and challenge.
In this case, it is up to Koch's intuition to decide which works fit into Weld's experimental
profile. It could be argued that this is perfectly coherent with art's necessity to keep its
autonomy from other aspects of society, and therefore, to keep its distance from ethical
discourses about democracy and inclusion. I could agree with this, but then I would point out
that, in such a case, art's autonomy cannot be justified on the grounds of democracy and non-
domination. Moreover, I would add that if art's autonomy is to be carried out fully thereby
freeing artists from any specific commitment to society, art should also consider its economical
autonomy. As for most centres for experimental art, Weld depends to a great extent on
governmental financial support; namely, from taxpayer's money. In this sense, I find Ranciére's
arguments about the politics of art to be highly problematic. I will dedicate a good part of the
next chapters to discuss this issue.

CHAPTER III: THEATRICALITY AND THE RESISTANT FORM

In Chapter II, I used some examples in order to introduce a discussion about the
apparently opposite notions of representation and the resistant form. Having initiated a
comparison between contemporary theatrical dance in Colombia and Sweden, I have suggested
that representation might be more present in the former, whilst the resistant form might be more
present in the latter. I will develop this comparative aspect in the sixth chapter. In the next
sections, I will concentrate on discussing further the political potential of the resistant form, and
I will introduce the notions of theatricality and performativity in order to develop a theoretical
discussion about the political potential of theatrical dance in general.

Politics of the Resistant Form: A Configuration of Democracy or Domination?

In contemporary discourses on performing arts, 'theatricality' is often contrasted to
'performance', pairing this opposition with one between 'representation' and 'presentation'.
Hence, the artificial imitation of reality that characterizes more representative and narrative
approaches to scenic arts has often been related to the notion of theatricality. In turn, the
opponents to such a theatrical approach have advocated for scenic arts where reality is not
represented but 'presented'; where meanings are not pre-determined, but they are created during
the very disclosure of the actions performed. In the context of modernism and art's autonomy,
anti-representative aesthetics stood for the belief in art's capacity to speak its own truths by its
own means, which in turn led to the artists' commitment to explore the potential of each specific

25
 Sara Regina Fonseca

art form. Hence, modernistic dance, which in dance history is often identified as postmodern
dance, would only speak about its own doings. It would speak about the body in relation to time
and space, about the materiality of the body in motion. As I mentioned earlier, Ranciére
discusses the political potential of art’s autonomy through the concepts of the apolitically
political and the resistant form. The author claims that

Aesthetic autonomy is not that autonomy of 'artistic making' celebrated by modernism. It is the
autonomy of a form of sensory experience. And it is that experience which appears as the germ of a new
humanity, of a new form of individual and collective life...The idea of a revolution of the forms of
sensible existence as opposed to a revolution of state forms.33

In this context, the autonomy of sensory experience might contain, but is not reduced to
the artist's freedom to create. In a radical conception, art's autonomy works as a 'revolt against
culture', aiming to keep the separation between art and all other aspects of society, including
politics, economics and even the philosophical discourses that define and legitimize art.
Moreover, the autonomy of art seems to imply its independence from the spectator's background
and his or her possible will to interpret art in connection to life outside the aesthetic realm.
Granted, the resistant form is not intended to impose a specific view of society, a specific story
or a specific message, but its definition does depend on the assumption that by creating an
autonomous sensorial experience, the artwork can manipulate the spectators' mode of
perception. The resistant form intends to take the viewers into a new sensorial configuration
thereby blocking their tendency to interpretation. Indeed, the paradigm of autonomous art is
supported on a long history of positive negations. Ranciére, places the beginnings of this
aesthetic regime in the 18th century's Schillerian concept of 'free play', explaining that

Minimally defined, play is any activity that has no end other than itself, that does not intend to
gain any effective power over things or persons34.

Moreover, he continues,

The 'free play' of the faculties – intellectual and sensible- is not only an activity without goal; it is
an activity that is equal to inactivity...The 'player' stands and does nothing before the goddess, who
herself does nothing, and the sculptor's work becomes absorbed within this circle of an inactive activity.35

Notice that in this context, 'the player' accounts for the viewer and the 'the goddess' for
the artwork. Now, my argument is that whilst this 'inactive activity' can be seen as a non-
33
Ranciére, Jacques (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents.Cambridge: Polity Press. P. 22-23.
34
Ibid. P.30.
35
Ibid. The scene that Ranciére is referring to here is an invented exhibition scenario described by
Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Here, the readers imagine that they stand in
front of the Greek statue known as the Juno Ludovisi, whose divinity consists in her ''idleness' or
'indiferency'. The godess is so because she does not want anything, she materializes the absence of
volition and, in turn, she invites the spectator to enter in a similar state , a state in which he or she can
be freed from her or his own will.
26
 Sara Regina Fonseca

imposition of meaning, ideas or feelings, it might also be seen as an imposition of intellectual

passivity that counteracts art's political potential. Thus, instead of being experienced as a
possible way of perceiving the world, as Ranciére would argue, arts' autonomous sensorial
configuration might be experienced as being so foreign and unattainable that it could hardly
engender a 'new form of individual and collective life'. I would like to suggest that Schiller's
ideal 'player' is substituted by a player who actively strives to find meaning in the goddess, who
in turn strives to lead the player into meaninglessness. In such a situation, the 'free play' of art
would fail to cancel the spectator's volition to make sense out of things, and what we would
have is a kind of battle between the spectator's will to interpret and the goddess' intention to
frustrate the player's desire to create meaning. What this scenario shows is that the autonomous
form can be viewed as a configuration of domination, rather than one of democracy. The
feasibility of a player who defies the resistant form will be discussed in the next section.

Theatricality and Real Presence: Two phenomenological modes

From a phenomenological perspective, we can understand the resistant form of dance as
the spatio-temporal consciousness of the bodies existing in the performance space, free from
any operations of signification. This is perhaps what many critics and artists tend to describe as
the full presence of performers36. Theatricality can also be understood from a phenomenological
perspective. This is the intellectual adventure of Egginton, who claims that theatricality is the
mode in which the western world experiences spatiality since the initiation of the modern era in
the 16th century. In order to discuss theatricality Egginton contrasts it with a mode of spatial
perception which he calls real presence, and which he claims to have reigned during the Middle
Ages. The author describes the real presence mode as follows:

The middle ages experienced space in a fundamentally different way: as fully impressionable and
substantial, whose dimensions existed relative to its observers, and specifically to its participants, as
opposed to being empty and independent of them.37

This mode of real presence, I suggest, shares some key aspects with the
phenomenological approach to dance that is characterized by the full and material presence of
the bodies engaged in movement; this is, bodies creating a common time and space where
performers and spectators exist together. According to Egginton, this mode of presence is not
the mode of existence that characterizes our epoch. Rather, our modern spatial perception is a
theatrical one, where space is empty as opposed to being 'impressionable and substantial'. Here,
36
Notice that Happy to Be Here is often described in terms of presence: 'the bodies are all the time fully
present as a fundamental assumption of their existence on stage', or 'The audience does not need to
decipher codes or see the structure behind the form, since the purpose is the journey, the ongoing
creative process, the actors on stage now and here', or 'One can take the choreography away from the
place, but cannot take the place away from the choreography'.
37
Egginton, William (2003) How the World became a Stage. Albany: State University of New York
Press. p. 37
27
 Sara Regina Fonseca

the relation between the objects existing in space depends on certain elements that can connect
them. At different points, Egginton suggests that 'ether' and 'faith' are elements that have
fulfilled the requirement. My suggestion is that language constitutes such a connecting element.
I will not discuss Egginton's historical placement of the paradigms of presence and theatricality
in the medieval times and in the modern era, respectively. However, I will suggest that we do
live in a paradigm in which the logics of signification and causality are the elements with which
we tend to connect things, and that this is the reason why 'the player', in my counter-reading of
Schiller's scene, is condemned to strive for meaningfulness. In the face of the paradigms of real
presence and theatricality, it might be interesting to discuss whether art's political potential
consists in redeeming the player from her/his apparent condemnation to language, or in
exploring the player's capacity to signify in a politically constructive way. I will distinguish the
former option as the politics of the resistant form and the latter option as the politics of
theatricality.
As a phenomenological analysis would have it, our spatial perception is fundamental in
the way we understand the big and small issues of the world. According to Egginton,

Most of the ways in which individuals interact with one another and with the institutions forming
the basic structures of our societies depend on this theatricality, from our systems of political
representation and social control to our experiences of aesthetic enjoyment to our interpersonal
relations38.

Certainly, a theatrical mode of perception implies capabilities as much as it implies difficulties.

Whilst the insubstantiality of space demands from us to create mediums and languages that
connect things, it also enables us to understand what Egginton calls a 'potential for infinitude'.
Thus, we are capable of understanding and experiencing the existence of simultaneous spatial
dimensions. Moreover, whilst we experience a finite number of spatial dimensions, we
understand that the number of potential spatial dimensions is infinite. We can conceive, for
example, the parallelity of the material dimension of our bodies, the symbolic dimension of our
existence in language and the virtual dimension of our profile in the social networks. At the
same time, we can conceive the infinite potential that these dimensions have for multiplication.
This is why we can conceive, for instance, the potential infinitude of 'the theatre within the
theatre within the theatre…’ or that of 'the network of networks of networks…'
One could then argue that theatricality's 'potential for infinitude' involves as a
multiplicative tendency that pervades our way of understanding language, that virtual element
that connects the things existing in space. Such a multiplicative tendency is familiar to
poststructuralists who argue that language does not consist in fixed and dual relationships
between signifiers and signifieds, but rather in networks where relationships between signifiers

38
Egginton, William (2003) How the World became a Stage. Albany: State University of New York
Press. P.29
28
 Sara Regina Fonseca

are in constant movement. Signs have; so to say, a rhyzomatic configuration with no fixed
centres, no absolute truths. As it has been discussed earlier, representation can be a form of
domination when it stands for a fixed conception of reality, when it pursues a faithful imitation
of what is and should be. However, in the contemporary context of theatricality and the
poststructural understanding of language, representation's rigid configuration has turned into a
multiple configuration that emphasizes the gap that it sometime tried to dissimulate. This is, the
gap between the representation of reality and reality itself. This gap, as we will discuss, has
interesting political implications.

Theatricality and the Politics of Performativity

The political dimension of the relation between representation of reality and reality has
been critically explored in contemporary theories about performativity. The common reference
of these theories is usually J.L. Austin's theory of speech act39, according to which speech has a
performative power; that is, it is an act in itself and not only a description of reality. Austin
distinguishes three levels in which speech act can be analysed: the locutionary, the illocutionary
and the perlocutionary. The locutionary act consists in the production of a meaningful linguistic
expression. The illocutionary act refers to the action that is intended in the uttering of a
linguistic expression. An illocutionary act is ‘felicitous’ provided that it is contextualized by the
right conventions and it manages to perform what it utters at the very moment of the utterance.
The perlocutionary act includes the effects that the speech act causes after the utterance.
As I have suggested earlier, representation in performance can be understood within the
logic of language. Namely, it establishes different kinds of relationships between the symbolic
and the real. The great controversy about representation is underlined by disagreements about
the way in which these two realms relate to each other, and even disagreements about the
fundamental separation between the symbolic and the real. The significance of Austin's speech
act theory is that it detects language's power to create the reality that it is supposed to describe.
So, what Austin does with his theory of speech act is assigning a performative power to
language; and this power, I add, can serve domination as much as liberation. One of the most
common examples of speech's power of enacting domination is what is known as hate speech40,
where speech is considered to perform violence, rather than simply represent it. Rephrasing
Mari Matsunda's 41 formulation of hate speech performativity, Butler writes that

39
Austin, J.L. (1975) How To do Things with Words. Harvard: President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
40
In Law, 'hate speech' refers to an illegal use of speech or other way of communication, which is
considered to discriminate and intimidate groups of people on the basis of their sex, race, ethnicity,
religios preference or the like.
41
Mari Matsunda is an American lawyer, activist, and law professor.
29
 Sara Regina Fonseca

Speech does not merely reflect a relation of social domination; speech enacts domination,
becoming the vehicle through which that social structure is reinstated.42

Now, in this conception of performativity operates a reduction, if not a cancellation, of

the gap between the symbolic and the real. Hate speech would be, in Austin's terms, an
illocutionary speech, which does what it says. From a legislative point of view, the cancellation
of this gap has implied a criminalization of communications that would otherwise be seen as
mere expressions of points of view, perfectly protected by the universally proclaimed freedom
of speech. The recognition of hate speech's power to enact domination provides a theoretical
support for the legal protection of the people addressed by hate speech. In this case, the
criminalization of hate speech necessarily creates the status of hate speech's victims.
The crucial question is whether the cancellation of this gap serves liberation or
domination. In a critical reconsideration of Matsunda's position, Butler suggests that the
cancellation of the gap might actually frustrate liberation. Concerning this, Butler writes

What hate speech does then, is to constitute the subject in a subordinate position. But what gives
hate speech the power to constitute the subject with such efficacy? Is hate speech as felicitous as it
appears in this account?43

Evidently, the answer implied in this question is 'no', and in this answer, Butler finds a political
potential for liberation. According to her, recognizing the gap between what is said and what is
done opens space for agency. Conversely, cancelling this gap renders the addressees of hate
speech passive, at the same token as it renders them victims. What is empowering about the
restoration of the gap is the possibility it gives for an operation of resignification. This is, an
operation in which the destructive can be turned into constructive. Thus, Butler sustains that

The possibility for a speech act to resignify a prior context depends, in part, upon the gap between
the originating context or intention by which an utterance is animated and the effects it produces. For the
threat, for instance, to have a future it never intended, for it to be returned to its speaker in a different
form, and defused through that return, the meanings the speech act acquires, and the effects it performs
must exceed those by which it was intended, and the contexts it assumes must not be quite the same as the
ones in which it originates (if such an origin is to be found)44

This gap between origin and effect can be compared to the gap between the artist' view of
reality, which is intentionally or unintentionally represented through the artwork, and the
spectator's own interpretation of the artwork, which will be necessarily conditioned by his/her
previous world's view. As long as one refers to a 'gap between', one is recognizing that there is
something at the extremes of this gap; namely, the reality of the artist and the reality of the
spectator. From this perspective, the gap between artist and spectator is not cancelled or fused

42
Butler, Judith (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge. P.18.
43
Ibid. P.20.
44
Ibid. P.15
30
 Sara Regina Fonseca

into a shared experience of spatiality. Instead, this gap is enhanced with the purpose of
mobilizing the relationship between the two. This is how I would like to apply Butler's notion of
resignification to the production and perception of theatrical dance. In this case, the possibility
of resignification would require people's capacity and will to imaginatively connect what is
present on stage to what is absent from it; that is, to treat performance as a representation which
can be reinterpreted over and over again. As I will argue later, the recognition of this gap occurs
in a theatrical mode rather than in a mode of real presence. Before I develop this argument, let
me discuss further the notions of real presence and performativity.

Performativity, Real Presence and the Resistant Form

As I explained earlier, performativity is a theoretical notion that derives from Austin's
claim that language is not only constative but also performative; that is, that language does not
just inform us about the state of the world but that it actually has the power to create the world.
Notwithstanding this general understanding of performativity, the notion does have its nuances
and different interpretations. Just to give an example, Austin's theory specifies some conditions
that are needed for a performative speech to be 'felicitous' or succeed in doing what it says.
These conditions include, among others, the conventions that validate the performative power of
speech, the entitlement of the person who utters the speech and the congruence between the
utterance, the speaker's intentions and the intentions of the other participants of the speech act.
In this way, Austin puts speech in a context, analysing it as an event composed of
different aspects in interaction. If the event does not fulfil the right conditions, the performative
speech will be 'infelicitous'. That is, it will not manage to do what it says. In order to avoid
theoretical confusions, it is important to notice that in Austin's speech theory there is a
significant difference between 'infelicitous' and 'false'. The possibility of 'infelicituousness'
depends on a gap between what is intended with an utterance and what is actually performed,
whilst the possibility of 'falseness' depends on a gap between what is said about reality and an
assumed reality. The question of 'felicituousness' is then, not one of truth but one of effectivity,
and it does not belong to a constative, but rather to a performative conception of language.
Keeping this annotation in mind, I would like to focus on what seems like a common
generalization of Austin's illocutionary act. Referring to performativity, James Loxley says that

There is no separation, and therefore relation for us to asses, between utterance and situation. The
utterance is not setting out to describe a situation, an event or an action: it is and event or an action45.

This understanding of performativity tends to cancel the gap between what is meant in the
saying and what is done with it, as well as between certain view of reality and its representation

45
Loxley, James (2007). Performaivity: the New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge. P.8.
31
 Sara Regina Fonseca

through language. Furthermore, I would say that this conception of performativity tends to erase
the gap between the original intentions of the speaker and the speech itself. In this operation,
language ends up containing intentions and effects altogether in the unity of the speech act.
At this point, I would like to make a parallel between this generalization of the
illocutionary act, Egginton's notion of real presence and Ranciére's concept of the resistant form
applied to dance. According to Egginton, real presence depends on a space that is substantial
and impressionable, where, as in the illocutionary act, there is no separation between action and
effect. In this kind of space, there is no place for representation and its related dichotomy of
language and meaning. Instead, there is a space in which reality is presented in the very moment
of disclosure. This resonates in the self-reflexive credo of some currents of modernistic,
postmodern and contemporary dance, which sustain that dance is about movement and that it
means nothing but itself. In other words, that dance means what it does, does what it means and,
that by this virtue; dance can exist independently from linguistic representation.

Theatricality and the Desire for Real Presence

In this section, I would like to use Egginton's theories on theatricality in order to discuss
the political potential of the autonomous form and the performative mode presence. Having said
earlier that Egginton explains theatricality in contrast to the notion of real presence, it is
important to clarify that in his theory, real presence is contained in theatricality. According to
Egginton, 'presence is concealed everywhere in theatrical spatiality', disrupting the 'normalcy'46
of the theatrical mode we live in. In his argumentation, Egginton relates the psychoanalytical
notion of drive with his phenomenological notion of presence, and the psychoanalytical notion
of desire with his phenomenological notion of theatricality. Within this frame, theatricality is
characterized by a desire for the lost mode of real presence. In the same way that patients in
psychoanalysis try to get in contact with that which is previous to the repression of their original
drives and due entrance into the symbolic order of society; we are in a constant desire for an
elusive mode of presence which preceded our modern theatrical era. Egginton states that

...the normal workings of both desire and theatricality depend on their incorporation of drive and
presence: with desire we seek the directness of a contact with the world that we believe we have lost with
the primary repression of our drives. In theatricality we search endlessly for the little pieces of the real
that constitute our only experience of presence.47

First of all, I would like to suggest that what Egginton describes as irruptions of real
presence within the prevalent theatrical paradigm might work as what Ranciére sees as a crucial
characteristic of the politics of aesthetics; namely, a 'suspension of the normal coordinates of

46
Egginton, William (2003) How the World Became a Stage. New York: State University of New York
Press. P.28
47
Ibid.
32
 Sara Regina Fonseca

sensory experience '48. Here, the normal way of sensing the world is replaced by other
alternatives, or other 'configurations of the sensible'. By tracing this similarity, I am certainly
implying that there is a political potential in the mode of real presence, to the extent that this
way of perception 'suspends' the otherwise normalized mode of theatricality. Second, I would
like to point out that, in this case, the political potential of the irruption of real presence depends
on a dialectical force, where neither theatricality nor real presence are absolute concepts. In
Egginton's reasoning, the multi-dimensionality of theatrical perception is in constant interplay,
if not in constant tension, with the substantiality of real presence. This observation leads me to a
third point, which is the problematization of the political effectivity of the autonomous form and
the possibility of achieving absolute real presence during a performance event.
In his aesthetic theories, Ranciére uses the idea of a 'suspension of the normal
coordinates of sensory experience' as a way of explaining the political potential of the
autonomous form, whose pursuit is to become an alternative to the normal workings of society
thereby maintaining its independence from it. In this context, the ideal autonomous form is
totally free from the social mediations of language and signification. It is in this way that I see
the notion of autonomous form as tending towards a kind of absolutism, which does not allow
for the internal dialectics suggested in Egginton's theatricality. The same logic can be applied to
performances that strive for the maximum enhancement of presence and, with this purpose,
strongly rejects the workings of representation and interpretation. Granted, it can be argued that
a dialectical dynamics might happen between the reality of the performance and the reality of
society. However, I discard this option in the believe that enhancing the disconnection between
life in performance and life in society might reinforce the isolation of each dimension, instead
of encouraging their confrontation and the eventual political act of social reconfiguration.
Furthermore, I would like to argue that if one adopts Egginton's theory, which I am
suggesting to do, the mode of real presence in performance might not only be politically
ineffective, but also utopian. As I have explained earlier, Egginton's contention is that we, in the
Western world, live in a theatrical mode or perception, which means that we are virtually
incapable of the active inactivity proposed in the aesthetic politics of Schiller's free play. From
this perspective, achieving real presence during a performance event should be impossible,
taking into consideration that every performer's and every spectator' tendency towards
metaphysical interpretation would need to be totally cancelled. This, as it should be clear by
now, is not possible within the theatrical paradigm of our time. Finally, I would like to suggest
that performance which strives for presence might be better understood in a less absolutist way,
which comes closer to Egginton's notion of theatricality and its desire for real presence. As I
mentioned above, the author uses psychoanalytical concepts in order to explain the desire for
presence in the theatrical paradigm. In Egginton's psychoanalytical reading, 'we' long for a
48
Ranciére, Jacques (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents.Cambridge: Polity Press. P.25
33
 Sara Regina Fonseca

mode of real presence which existed sometime in history, but which we lost as we entered the
theatrical paradigm. Following his logic, one might argue that performance's endeavour 'to
present rather than represent' accounts for a similar longing or desire, where desire implies the
absence of that which is being striven for; namely, an absolute mode of presence. In this sense,
the predicament of presence in performance can be understood as a physical manifestation of
the desire that Egginton believes to be constituent of theatricality.

The Theatrical Resistant Form

Given that a politics of the resistant form and a politics of theatricality have been treated
as opposites in this analysis, I would like to provide an overview of the term 'theatricality',
which might show how a non-realistic theatrical form and a non absolutist resistant form might
be materialized in the same artwork. Within the canonical history of theatre, theatricality has
had a shifting journey. Sometimes it has been related to the imitative character of realistic
theatre, which attempts to dissimulate the gap between representation and reality. Other times,
theatricality has been related to non-realistic theatre, which celebrates the gap between reality
and its representations. The gap, however, has always been recognized in theatricality. It is
precisely because we know that a painted apple is not the real apple that we can admire the
resemblance between the two in realistic painting.
In non-realistic art, however, there are other things to be appreciated. Among these, one
could name the revelation of uncommon points of view, the emotional perception of reality, the
imaginative relationship between incongruous elements, the challenge to social conventions of
good behaviour and morals, and the unveiling of social taboos and prejudices about reality, just
to name a few. This last connotation of theatricality is better aligned with the arguments
developed in this paper, and with Egginton's particular understanding of this concept. In fact,
the celebration of the gap implied in this connotation of theatricality might bring the theatrical
forms closer to the resistant forms. This is because the celebration of the gap usually
materializes in an aesthetics of artificiality, which distorts 'reality' to the extent that theatrical
representations turn to be non-realistic and eventually work as resistant forms. Considering this,
movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Expressionism produced works that could well be
perceived as being both theatrical and resistant forms.
Perhaps, the most significant aspect shared by the politics of theatricality and the politics
of the resistant form, is an underlying warning about the 'normalcy of reality' as we see it. One
could say that theatricality enacts this warning thereby deconstructing and emphasizing the
artificiality of what we see as real, whilst the resistant form does it thereby refusing to enhance
or reproduce what we understand as the real. Reality, understood as that which is socially
legitimized as being normal and unchangeable, is denied or challenged in both cases. Before I

34
 Sara Regina Fonseca

return to theatricality in Chapter V, I will discuss further the politics of presence within the
context of Swedish contemporary dance.

CHAPTER IV: THE POLITICS OF PRESENCE

Whilst observing different practices and discourses of experimental dance in Stockholm, I

detected two tendencies that seemed to me to prevail in representative scenes like Weld and
Moderna Dansteatern, as well in dance reviews of important newspapers such as Svenska
Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter. In order to analyse these tendencies, I have decided to identify
them as 'a dance aesthetics of presence' and 'a dance aesthetics of the political third'.

A Dance Aesthetics of Presence

By 'a dance aesthetics of presence', I refer to a particularly radical dance approach to
Ranciére's resistant form, where the focus lies on the presence of the performers and the very
physicality of their movement. I will analyse this tendency with the help of some specific cases.
Since it would be too inaccurate to put a single label on individual artists who most probably
keep transforming their approach to dance, I will try to refer to specific works, hoping to reduce
the unavoidable inaccuracies that result from generalizations.
My first example is Marie Fahlin's Satin Stitch, which I saw in its premier at Weld in
December 2009. Five dancers appeared in a naked stage, wearing grey trousers and tops. Their
faces looked neutral, if not highly concentrated on the execution of movements that seemed to
obey certain structures of interaction between bodies, gravity and space. The soundtrack helped
to create a thick atmosphere, and the lights were more or less plain. There were no hints to any
narrative or reference to the world outside the stage, nor was there a pretension of easiness or
virtuosism that could hide the actual physical experience of the performer; that is, an enhanced
perception of their bodies' anatomy in motion. As a spectator, I understood the work as an
invitation to focus on the physical existence of the performers' bodies in the here and now.
Like me, most of Weld's visitors were well educated in the discourses of artistic contemporary
dance. Anna Ångström writes in Svenska Dagbladet that:

Marie Fahlin's new work Satin stitch shows the choreographer's need for sharp dancers... a quintet
of seismographs who supply movements from inside. There is here a relaxed flow within each body and
among them. The choreography is built on repetitions and displacements in different tempos. The eye
follows the supple spines, the ornamental arms and the variations in the space. It is almost a meditative
experience to see the forms emerge and fade away without ever becoming static -dance, just as it is,
powerful in itself. (My trans.) 49.

49
Original text in Swedish: http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/scen/olika-erfarenheter-ger-spannande-
brytning_3928801.svd?voted=1261038985701
35
 Sara Regina Fonseca

My second example is Helena Franzén's Trigger Point50, which was premiered at

Moderna Dansteatern in March 2010, and of which I have only seen fragments on video.
Trigger Point has been praised for the precision and dynamic nuances with which its skilled
performers execute the movement material. The audience seems to be invited to have a pleasant
aesthetic experience thereby focusing on the intrinsic qualities of an elaborated dance.
Significantly, Franzén introduces her 'flashsite' with the following slogan: 'the poetry of the
articulated body'51. Resembling her comments on other works with similar searches, Ångström
underlines Trigger Point’s exploration of space, rhythm and the interaction between the bodies.
After describing the work as being 'clear as crystal', Ångström adds that

Franzén's body tilts and spirals, change angles with increased intensity where one point leads to
another one...Ori Flomin performs her vocabulary with precision. Shoulders and feet rotate...There
emerges rhythm and a graphic mirror game among the elegant black dressed performers. (My trans.)52

Finally, and against my attempt to mention single works rather than single artists, I must
mention Cristina Caprioli. The reason is that Caprioli has a rather specific research going on,
and her core questions are quite consistent. Moreover, her influence in the Swedish dance scene
is proved by the facts that Caprioli occupies a post as professor of choreography at the
University of Dance and Circus, and she deserved a life-long grant to develop her work. Instead
of describing particular works, I will provide some comments about her general approach to
dance. The University of Dance and Circus says of Caprioli that

Her interest lies in structure and disorder... To unfold potentiality but also resist habit, to unleash
meaning and avoid preconceived form...Cristina sees dance as critical discourse. Her work demands, but
also generates concentration and commitment, participation.53

The choreographer herself says of her work that:

I am intrigued by the dancing body as a limit, an obstacle, as contaminated form, carrier of

meaning, space for abstraction and re-representation.54

One of her former collaborators, Anna Grip, writes that:

Cristina Caprioli brings out movement as form with substance of its own in which meaning and
message, politics and aesthetics are integral, and are carried on by the very form. Beyond the human,
beyond the theatrical and psychological space, she envisions a dance able to create its own dimensions,
visually understandable and yet imaginative where the body becomes its own movement, tangible but
evasive, real and poetic, captured intuitively and yet controlled, as act of resistance, at every moment
present and yet fleeting.55

50
A trailer is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VijdkBar8Gw&feature=related
51
Helena Franzén Website: http://www.helenafranzen.se/helena_content.html
52
Original text in Swedish: http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/scen/trigger-point-underbar-present-till-
danspubliken_4478335.svd
53
Dans och Cirkushögskolan Website: http://www.doch.se/web/Caprioli_Cristina.aspx
54
http://www.culturebase.net/artist.php?690
55
Ibid.
36
 Sara Regina Fonseca

Caprioli's project CCAP publishes the following text about the choreographer:

The training builds upon logic and meta-logic and leads up to a ”controlled unconsciousness”, a state of
presence in the dance in which organic, technical clarity go hand in hand with risk and
abandonment...Method, concepts and theorems are carefully blended and then again questioned and
thrown over at the next moment. All for the purpose of being transformed into the next synthesis.
Dialectics of dance.56

The intellectual sharpness of Caprioli's dancers seems to consist in a capacity to

continuously analyse-perceive the ways in which their bodies transform. Interestingly, the
choreographer introduces concepts such as 're representations' and 'theorems', both of which
allude to language. Similarly, Caprioli refers to 'contaminated forms' as opposed to pure forms,
and she talks of movements as 'carriers of meaning', as opposed to abstract. Clearly, Caprioli's
discourse takes some distance from the modernistic paradigm of autonomous dance and this
might explain why she is often identified as a post postmodern choreographer.
I will not deepen here into Caprioli's complex theoretical work, as this is in itself an
expansive subject that would deviate us from the main purpose of this paper. However, I should
point out that Caprioli's discourses on dance are visibly influenced by French poststructural
currents of thought, and by notions such as Derrida's deconstruction and Deleuze's body without
organs -BWO-. Indeed, these references can complicate my conception of Caprioli's work as
belonging to an aesthetics of presence, given that deconstruction and BwO are notions that defy
presence as a desired origin, as a pure state, or as a self-containing form. In contrast to this,
these notions describe the openness and ever-evolving state of the body, an unorganized process
of constant becoming. In this context, movement is supposed to happen at the crossroad of
multiple dimensions rather than in the discretion of a substantial, one-dimensional space.
Moreover, Caprioli seem to search for a kind of participation and commitment from the
audience and performers, instead of searching for an autonomous form characterized by
'inactive activity'. Whatever her practice becomes, Caprioli and her close collaborators seem to
consider the work as an 'act of resistance'.
Notwithstanding the observations above, I would like to point out some characteristics
that connect Caprioli's work to the works of Fahlin and Franzén, as well as to Ranciére's
autonomous form. What the work of all these three choreographers have in common is their
pursuit for an enhanced bodily consciousness, which in the case of Caprioli is conceived as a
'controlled unconsciousness'. The dancers are required to get beyond the known and still keep
an analytical eye on themselves. Caprioli claims that the process of dancing is a 'dialectic'
process, but I believe this dialectics is different from a dialectics that would confront social
normativity with its alternative representations in performance. What Caprioli proposes is rather
an internal dialectics of dance, where logical confrontation occurs at the level of the bodies in
motion, leaving aside their social connotations. In this sense, it can be argued that, in Caprioli´s
56
Ibid.
37
 Sara Regina Fonseca

conception of dance, movement folds into itself thereby keeping its independence from the
linguistic categorizations of society. Dance functions, in other words, as an autonomous
resistant form, where dance is 'able to create its own dimensions'.
Sadly, it is beyond my possibilities at the moment to provide an analysis of audience
reception, which would certainly be of great relevance for this discussion. In the lack of this, I
can only provide my own experience as a viewer; as well as some perceptions articulated by
cultural journalists in their dance reviews. Ångström, for example, highlights the non-narrative
character of Caprioli's On Points (only), praising its focus on the 'essence of dance', as well as
the way in which it generates 'a sense of presence'57. I myself remember seeing Too Late at
Moderna Dansteatern in 2005. My overall experience was that the performers, brilliant as I
knew them to be, had trained to wash out any traces of emotions, personality or technical
refinements which would jeopardize the transparency of the physical tasks they were carrying
out. Their movements appeared to me as being very functional: I remember them playing with
their balances and exploring the movement possibilities of their joints. Personally, I found it
difficult to approach the dance as a signifying system, as well as I found it difficult to keep an
interest in a movement material that did not seem to be made to please, provoke or move in any
significant way. In this sense, my experience was similar to that of watching Satin Stitch.
However, there were some elements in Too Late that somehow prevented me from totally
shutting down my will to interpret. One of these elements was an over sized desk projected on a
wall, and the other was a scene in which the two female dancers changed clothes on a shadowy
corner of the stage. The former element suggested that the dancers were in a house where social
beings, instead of abstract bodies, inhabited. The latter element, as I experienced it, interrupted
the overall sense of functionality and neutrality with the sensual image of female nudity, which
I could not perceive as just another functional action of the 'bodies'. In general, I remember
feeling certain frustration for not knowing how to approach perception. I could not really play
with interpretation, but I could not either dive into the realm of abstract movement, even when
that seemed to be what the work was asking from me. Such a sense of frustration reminds me of
the scene where Schiller's player looks at a goddess that both suggests and denies signification,
thereby leaving the player in a state of powerless inactivity.
Now, What can be the political potential of this dance aesthetics that strives to elude
signification? Let me go back to Schiller. His political formulation of art is perhaps easier to
understand if we remember that Schiller's social context was highly defined by the on-going
French revolution, with which he strongly disagreed. Schiller conceived art as a way to resist
the domination of logos, rationality, form and other values that established

57
Ångström's review of Cristina Caprioli's On Points (only). Original text in Swedish
http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/scen/sammansvetsade-i-punkter_34823.svd
38
 Sara Regina Fonseca

... the power of the class of intelligence over the class of sensation, of men of culture over men of
nature58.

It is not clear to me what kinds of values are being resisted in the cases to which I have
referred above. One possibility is that the work of these artists are part of a long fight against the
predominance of rational language over the sensorial and material existence of the body, which
underlines the historical privilege that theatre has been given over dance, at least within the art
context of Western Europe since the late 19th century. However, as the example of Caprioli
clearly shows, these dance works can also be seen as embodying a highly rational discourse.
Explaining dance's political potential as a fight against rationality does not seem to hold here.
Perhaps it might be more sensible to argue that in Caprioli's case, the resignification of the body
consists in its very rationalization. The subjects that emerge in this case can be described as
hyper intelligent movers who are only too aware of their simultaneous roles as 'objects and
subjects of dance'. Now, how can the creation of such subjects work as a 'resistant act'? What
kind of equality is being assumed? One possible answer is that by converting itself into a
rational discourse, dance and dancers can claim an equal place within normative society. From
this perspective, one can argue that what the 'dance aesthetics of presence' does is to convert the
body into an appropriate subject of a predominantly rational society. Moreover, one can argue
that by doing this, the resignification of the body fails to challenge the predominant values of
rationality, control, logic and so on.
Having said this, the possibility remains that the political potential of 'a dance aesthetics
of presence' might consist in its resistance to metaphysical or linguistic signification. But as I
have argued earlier and as I will elaborate later on, the tendency or will to signify is not in itself
an act of subjection or domination. From here, it follows that resisting signification is not
necessarily a relevant political aim. Furthermore, I would like to argue that this resistance to
signification might have become the status quo of contemporary dance in Sweden, and that
many dancers might actually have practical reasons to fulfil the professional task of focusing on
'presence'. As I have tried to show, 'presence' is often connected to the 'essence of dance' in the
prevalent discourses on contemporary dance in Stockholm. As a consequence, 'the aesthetics of
presence' might be experienced as a familiar tendency, rather than as a way of enacting political
resistance against the domination of language. Now, by no means am I implying that all dancers
are simply functioning for an art machinery without questioning why they do what they do,
even if this might well be the case for many of them. Neither do I mean that dancers might not
enjoy and feel personally fulfilled by their dance explorations. What I am suggesting here is
rather that the political aspect of what I have called 'a dance aesthetics of presence' might not be
plausible. Indeed, I believe that there is a good reason why Ångström often uses the adjective
'meditative' to describe the works of choreographers such as Fahlin, Franzén and Caprioli. In my
58
Ranciére, Jacques (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents.Cambridge: Polity Press. P.31.
39
 Sara Regina Fonseca

opinion, this adjective suits the works better than adjectives such as 'political' or 'apolitically
political'.

A Dance Aesthetics of the Political Third

I have decided to appropriate Ranciére's notion of the 'political third' in order to describe the
second tendency, which seems to be predominant in contemporary Swedish choreography. In
his analysis of the contemporary tendencies of the politics of aesthetics, Ranciére claims that

If there is a political question in contemporary art, it will not be grasped in terms of a

modern/postmodern opposition. It will be grasped through an analysis of the metamorphoses of the
political 'third', the politics founded on the play of exchanges and displacements between the art world
and that of non-art.59

The political third to which Ranciére refers above is an approach that lies between two
extreme politics of aesthetics, which the authors identifies as being crucial to the aesthetic
regime that conforms the definitions of art in our times. On one extreme there are the radical
forms of autonomous art, whose politics consists in resisting art's relation to what is non-art, and
where non-art can be read as society. On the other extreme there are the forms of art becoming-
life, which in order to be politically effective must cancel themselves as art. The 'dance
aesthetics of presence' would fall into the former category, placing itself closer to the resistant
form that Ranciére relates to modernistic art. The second category is best related to what has
been defined by critic Nicolas Bourriaud as 'relational aesthetics', where

...a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole
of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.60

In this context, what 'a dance aesthetics of the political third' has in common with 'a dance
aesthetics of presence' is the interest in exploring the dance medium's intrinsic possibilities.
What is new in the 'dance aesthetics of the political third’ is that this embraces all references to
individuals; that is, to persons engaged in every day human relations. However, the resulting
works of this aesthetics are framed within a scenic space that secures their artistic identity.
More, the 'dance aesthetics of the political third' differs from the postmodern tendency to
compose choreographies with pedestrian movements: Whilst the latter enhances the physical
mechanics and aesthetics of every day movements, the former uses everyday movements in
order to portray or 'present' individuals on stage. Hence, 'the dance aesthetics of the political
third' functions as a peculiar integration of pure movement and human subjectivity.
I came across with this definition when trying to decipher the purpose of works like
Happy to be Here and 8.66. Given that these works have been discussed earlier, I will only add
59
Ranciére, Jacques (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents.Cambridge: Polity Press. p.51
60
Bourriaud, Nicolas (1998) Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presse Du Reel. p.113
40
 Sara Regina Fonseca

some comments to what I have already argued. First of all, it seems to me clear that the choice
of casual aesthetics -casual clothes, casual use of the voice, casual ways of walking, casual
language and so on- are meant to demystify art and blur the separation between the individuals
standing on stage and those sitting at the audience. Moreover, the subtle humour of these works
seems to undermine the idea that artists are geniuses or that art is magic. Thus, performers
appear to be presenting themselves, instead of representing characters. This is clear in 8.55,
where Gunilla Hammar, who is known among Swedish dance spectators as an elite dancer,
appears on stage as a common human being, in a common working day. Another aspect of this
aesthetics is its focus on the intrincicacies of dance, which is not only manifested in the open
exposition of movement explorations, but also in the explicit comments about the dance
medium. A self-referential operation is constantly going on, where the dancers reveal for the
audience the not so magical creative process, and the not so magical conventions that
persistently threaten the creative freedom of the artists. This is well expressed in Koch's own
presentation of Happy to Be Here:

A dance-historic something, becomes present and states: the monster, the old form of
choreography, is talking and living. It’s alive, it’s alive, I saw it with my very own eyes. In what way can
we tease this monster? 61

It is clear that such a self-critical aspect is meant to enact a resistance against the
conventions of the dance medium. What seems less obvious to me is the reason why art should
dedicate itself to share with the audience the on-going construction and deconstruction of its
own myths. Considering the Western European attitude towards the utopian visions of the 60's
and 70's, it occurs to me that this self-critical aspect might reflect a generalized feeling of
political impotence; a recognized incapacity to eradicate the domination of the 'old forms' of art
and, as an extension, the old forms of society. This attitude seems to me to be apparent in many
young Swedish choreographers and choreography students. A good example is the members of
'mychoreography', consisting of students and some teachers of the Master in Choreography at
the University of Dance and Circus. Significantly, 'mychoreography' is presented as follows:

mychoreography rocks on, new people in the band, new instruments to tune, new freakin'
everything and excessive resonance. We take ourselves far too serious and have no time to agree. Why
wait, when we can have the apocalypse today.62

I saw a performance of The Warrior's Roar Holler Across the Sky, one of the works
produced by mychoreography, and presented at Weld in January 2010. Several individuals
filled the stage during the whole performance, sometimes executing particular movements in a

61
Weld website: http://www.weld.se/program/happy-to-be-here-7-maj-umea-9-10-weld/sv/
62
Mychoreography, facebook profile: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=38192932094#
41
 Sara Regina Fonseca

repetitive and increasingly desperate manner, other times constructing a sculptural crowd that
clearly alluded to collective movements of revolution. The stage was framed by stones and
bottles, and each spectator was given a whistle which could be used during the black outs.
Mårten Spångberg, performer and head of the Master programme, concluded the performance
by saying: 'you can leave the stones here. We need them for another revolution tomorrow'. The
humoristic cynism towards the political impotence of activist performance seems only too clear.
So, what can the political potential of this kind of aesthetics be about? Let me return to
Ranciére's political third. In this aesthetic form, the relative closeness of art to life aims to make
spectators and artists feel part of the same community. According to Ranciére, this aspect of the
political third corresponds to a search for a reconfiguration of new democratic spaces, where

...micro-situations, which vary only slightly from ordinary life and are presented in an ironic and
playful vein rather than a critical and denunciatory one, aim to create or re-create bonds between
individuals, to give rise to new modes of confrontation and participation.63

Certainly, it is not hard to recognize 'micro-situations', 'irony' and 'playfulness' in Koch's works,
which is partly why I have used these choreographies as examples in this section. However, I
am doubtful about the way in which these elements might 'rise new modes of confrontation and
participation'. In fact, my experience as a spectator of 8.66 was that the work was too
comfortable for me to have any strong reaction, apart from the provocation that I did feel when
questioning the actual relevance of the work. Moreover, I would claim that in the case that 8.66
do manage to 're-create certain bonds', it is likely that it will be bonds among local dancers or, in
the best of the cases, bonds among spectators with a very specific interest on dance. To a greater
or lesser extent, this might be the risk run by all works that focus too much on commenting on
dance, the dancers and their creative process.
Now, I would like to claim that by aiming to present performers as 'themselves' instead of
'characters', the 'dance aesthetics of the political third' maintains the virtual dichotomy of
performance/presentation versus theatre/representation; a dichotomy I would like to deconstruct
here. As I have mentioned earlier, I believe that theatricality might be more pervasive than some
performers seem to wish. Let me illustrate what I mean. When Koch stands by one side of the
stage and says to Hammar, with an intimate tone and volume: 'Shall we start’? she is obviously
acting. When I say 'obviously', I mean that the fact that she is acting is quite obvious for those
who have paid the entrance and expect to be rewarded with a well-prepared work. When I say
'acting', I mean using the artificial strategies of 'theatricality' instead of just being 'natural'. One
could say that what looks like a spontaneous presentation of a creative process is, as all
spectators know, a premeditated, if not theatrical, act. Or perhaps, it would be better to say that
what might be a spontaneous presentation of a creative process will look like a premeditated or

63
Ranciére, Jacques (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents.Cambridge. Polity Press.p.21
42
 Sara Regina Fonseca

theatrical act to the spectators. As Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait argue 'artificiality
exists not merely in the act but in the perception of it'.64 And this 'perception' amounts to a
general consciousness of viewing, instead of amounting to a specific theatrical mode of
perception that treats everything as a sign of absent meanings.
In this way, it could be argued that in the 'dance aesthetics of the political third',
theatricality absorbs presence, where presence is understood in its absolute sense. Thus,
whatever might look 'natural' or ‘real’ is framed by the theatrical situation that tends to turn
subjects into characters and presentation into representation. At the end of the day, theatricality
is fundamentally connected to the consciousness of viewing and been viewed, which is in turn a
basic condition of the scenic space. As Davis and Postlewait explain,

Binary awareness is crucial to theatricality, which is understood as “ a process that has to do

with a ‘gaze’ that postulates and creates a distinct, virtual space belonging to the other, from which
friction can emerge” (Féral 2002)65.

Hence, my contention is that the 'dance aesthetics of the political third' is caught in what I
would like to call a 'paradox of representational presence', where representation is dissimulated
by the adoption of the available material of everyday life. As I see it, the choice of this material
goes hand in hand with the refusal of an over-stylization that might reveal theatricality. In fact,
when theatrical stylization is actually displayed in the aesthetics I am analysing here, its
function seems to be that of supporting meta-theatrical reflections on the very artificiality of
theatre. At this point, Ångström's comments about Happy to be Here illustrate the case:

'...only a public ovation is heard, ironically too early. Anna Koch breaks the pretentiousness with
soft humour, like when the classical ballet shines in a pax de deux and Dragana Zarevska whistles
triumphally when she is lifted in front of the public'.66

The 'paradox of representational presence' is a paradox that virtually characterizes all

theatrical events, or all kind of encounters between performers and spectators. The paradox can
be related to what is known as the 'paradox of the actor', which was described in the 18th century
by Denis Diderot, and which sustains that in order to appear real, the actor needs to be artificial.
Hence, the scenic presentation of 'the spontaneous' can only be created by artificial means. In
the case of 8.66, the uncertain movements of the performers, their working clothes and their
'everyday' body postures are necessarily premeditated. Indeed, those of us who have met Koch

64
Davis, Tracy D. and Postlewait, Thomas. Theatricality: Theatre and Performance Theory. (2003).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p.20
65
Josset Féral quoted in Davis, Tracy D. and Postlewait, Thomas. Theatricality: Theatre and
Performance Theory. (2003). Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. p. 28
66
Original text in Swedish. Weld website: http://www.weld.se/program/happy-to-be-here-7-maj-umea-
9-10-weld/sv/
43
 Sara Regina Fonseca

and Hammar outside the stage could argue that in their 'everyday' life, these women do not
exactly look like they do in their spontaneous-like acting.
Finally, I would like to argue that the 'paradox of representational presence' is
conditioned by the duality, or rather the multiplicity that intervenes the 'presence' of the
performers. Let me return to 8.66. It could be argued that in this work the performers represent
the social categorizations that identify 'real persons'; namely, 'women', 'adults', 'Swedish
citizens', 'professional dancers' and so on. Furthermore, the same performers can be said to
perform a theatrical representation of 'two dancers at work'. The fact that the theatrical
characters and social categorizations of the performers intersect in this case makes the
appearance of spontaneity all the most effective. It makes the actions of the performers look
'real' and it makes their representation appear as a straight presentation. Besides all this, I would
argue that the same performers are conditioned by a multiplicity of the kind described by
Egginton in his concept of theatricality. Here, the performers do not only represent a finite
number of categorizations and characters that can be occasionally uncovered by the irruptions of
presence. Quite differently, the performers are conditioned by theatricality, in the sense that
they have a potential for an infinitude of characters that always promise, but never fulfil the
absolute presence of the ultimate self. This very potential makes the presentation of reality only
possible as a representation of presence, or as a paradoxical dynamic in which the illusion of
spontaneity is constantly threatened by the theatrical situation of the performance event, if not
by the theatrical paradigm of our epoch.

CHAPTER V: THE POLITICS OF THEATRICALITY

Theatricality and Language

Earlier on, I have explained theatricality in terms of insubstantiality and virtual gaps. I
have introduced Egginton's conception of theatricality as a spatial perception which allows us to
conceive an infinite potential of dimensions, but which also requires us to connect those
dimensions through some kind of medium. More, I have suggested that such a medium is
language, or the systematized way of signification, which is the main subject of semiotics. As
the work of early semioticians such as C.S. Pierce and F. Saussure had it, language works by
means of signs, which bind a signifier or material appearance to a signified or immaterial
concept in the mind of the reader. What Austin, then Derrida, Butler and other poststructural
philosophers of the 20th century add to this basic premise, is that the function of the signifier is
not to describe and already existing signified, but rather to create it. Now, as it is known, this
approach to language champions the political task of questioning the very notion of truth.
In this context, the gap that is mediated by the linguistic sign is not only flexible, but also
multiple and potentially infinite, as in Egginton's theatricality. Let me explain how. As Saussure
44
 Sara Regina Fonseca

pointed out, the production of meaning is determined by certain gaps among signs. Thus, rather
than being defined by what they mean, signs are defined by what they do not mean:

In the language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact that
although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between which the difference holds, in
language there are only differences, and no positive terms. Whether we take the signification or the
signal, the language includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only
conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system. In a sign, what matters more than any idea
or sound associated with it is what other sounds surround it (Course in General Linguistics 166)67.

In other words, language bases its categorizations on exclusions; that is, on the concept of
'the other' which is different from, or does not belong to the category being defined. For
poststructuralist thinkers, language operates as an on-going reconfiguration of power, where
exclusions can be constantly renegotiated. Now, such a reconfiguration is possible thanks to the
assumption of a gap between signifier and signified, as well as the gaps among signs. There is,
in this context, an infinite potential for simultaneous dimensions, categories, meta-categories
and subcategories; all of which are connected by the differentiating operations of language.
Furthermore, since the potential is infinite both in the 'meta' and the 'sub' directions, the idea of
a fixed origin or truth is theoretically dissolved into this dynamic ramification of language.
In other sections, I have mentioned the problems of assuming language as a literal
representation of absolute truths. This approach is known as the metaphysics of language,
whose authoritarian character is the main target of the politics of anti-representative aesthetics
and of much poststructural theories, including those that conceive language as being
'performative' rather than 'constantive'. However, and in line with my previous arguments, one
could claim that not only the metaphysical, but also the performative approach to language can
be authoritarian thereby reducing or even cancelling the mobility in the relationship between
language and reality. In the metaphysical perspective, language is bound to a pre-existing
reality, which the former is supposed to describe. In the performative perspective, language runs
the risk of being bound to a future reality, which the former is supposed to create. The
difference between these perspectives can be seen in terms of a different placement of reality.
The metaphysical approach places it a priori, whilst the performative approach places it a
posteriori. The temporal axis is language.
As I understand it, this is what Butler detects in her critic of the performative conception
of 'hate speech', which I have discussed in Chapter III. The gap, which Butler advocates for is a
gap that allows for reinterpretation or resignification, a gap that is equally neglected in radical
perspectives of metaphysical and performative language. Indeed, this could be another way of
explaining how the 'dance aesthetics of presence' can be as authoritative as the
realistic/representational aesthetics that it attempts to counteract. Both aesthetic forms can be
said to be intolerant towards semiotic interpretation and, in this sense, both impose a static
67
Semiotics of Law International Roundtable: http://semioticsoflaw.com/site/derrida.php
45
 Sara Regina Fonseca

version of reality: a metaphysical reality in the case of the realistic/representational aesthetics,

and a performative/presentational reality in the case of the 'dance aesthetics of presence'. Based
on these arguments, I would like to advocate for a reconsideration of theatricality and
signification as political strategy within performance.

Translation and the Third Referent of Ranciére

There is nothing beyond the text, except the will to express, that is, to translate.68

In The Ignorant School Master, Ranciére tells a story about Jean Joseph Jacotot, a French
teacher who developed an educational method of 'intellectual emancipation' during his exile in
Holland at the beginning of the 19th century. Being forced to teach French to Dutch students,
and not speaking Flemish himself, Jacotot had to recur to the bilingual magazine Télémanque,
which the students would use to relate the new language to their mother language. Thereby
studying the translations of the French-Flemish magazine, the students would learn the
workings of the French language and would be able to produce their own texts in French. The
great results of the exercise led Jacotot to the conclusion that the students had the capacity of
learning by means of translation, and that they could dispense with the teacher's explications.
From this experiment, Jacotot also concluded that 'explication' is a myth that maintains
the power of the 'knowledgeable' over the 'ignorant', that hierarchy which justifies the necessity
of the master and gives faith of his/her superiority. This mythical inequality or 'stultification' is
challenged by Jacotot, when he assumes that all humans possess an equal intellectual capacity
that enables them to build knowledge by means of translation, or the basic operations of:
observing, comparing, combining and noticing how all this has been done. According to Jacotot,
these are the basis of universal learning, which all children experience when they learn to speak
their mother tongue without the need of grammatical explanations from a teacher. What makes
children's learning so effective is their strong will to interact in equal terms with those persons
speaking to them. Remarkably, the children do this 'under the sign of equality'69, and not under
the assumption of ignorance or intellectual inferiority. This assumption of equal intelligence or
equal capacity of translation is what Jocotot calls emancipation, and it is opposed to the old
pedagogical process of stultification.
Following these ideas, Ranciére argues that an emancipated spectator is the one which
translates the performance before her/him in the same way that the artists have done it; that is,
with an equal capacity to observe, relate the known with the unknown and reflect upon this
process to build new knowledge. Such an emancipated spectator has no need of surpassing
68
Ranciére, Jacques (2004) The Emancipated Spectator.Frankfurt.
http://digital.mica.edu/departmental/gradphoto/public/Upload/200811/Ranciere%20%20spectator.pdf
69
Ibid.
46
 Sara Regina Fonseca

his/her own ignorance by learning certain truth that the artists might be trying to teach him/her,
as it is often assumed in critical art. Neither is the emancipated spectator in need of overcoming
her/his presumed passivity thereby becoming performer and eliminating his/her role of
spectator, as it works in participative and relational aesthetics. Instead, the emancipated
spectator creates his/her own knowledge by means of translation, in the same way that anybody
creates knowledge according to her/his personal background and his/her individual will. What
Ranciére and Jocotot believe to prevent such an emancipation is a 'stultifying' assumption of a
distance between the knowledge of the artists and the ignorance of the spectators. Moreover, the
spectator's emancipation is counteracted by artists' well-intentioned attempt to eliminate such a
distance thereby transferring their knowledge to the spectators or creating a common space
where social bonds are supposed to be regenerated. In both cases, the free process of translation
is disturbed. Ranciére put it this way:

Why not think...it is precisely the

attempt at suppressing the distance which constitutes the distance itself? Emancipation starts from
the opposite principle, the principle of equality. It begins
when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the
distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and
subjection. It starts when we realize that looking also is an action which confirms or
modifies that distribution, and that “interpreting the world” is already a means of
transforming it, of reconfiguring it.70

Spontaneously, one can think that the resistant forms I have discussed earlier should
encourage the emancipation of spectators. At least they do not try to transfer any message from
artists to spectators, so that the latter are free to interpret what they want. However, this thought
can be refuted in different ways. One argument could be that the performative ‘presence’ is
usually understood as a phenomenological knowledge that spectators are supposed to obtain or
recover, thereby entering the communal space created by the performers' intelligent bodies'.
Furthermore, one can say that the radical notion of the resistant form is fundamentally anti-
theatrical; that is, against representation and consequently against translation. Its non-
representative approach is manifested as an attempt to eliminate, as much as possible, all
references to the 'known reality' that exists outside the performance space or the aesthetic field.
By eliminating these references, the resistant form tries to eliminate what Ranciére considers to
be the basis of the learning process: that which we know. From this perspective, it could be
claimed that when the resistant form succeeds aesthetically -when the viewer's attitude
resembles that of Schiller's player- it necessarily fails politically. The equation works the other
way around too. When the viewer's drive to translate prevails, the viewer emancipates herself to
the cost of the aesthetic success of the resistant form.

70
Ibid.
47
 Sara Regina Fonseca

In theatrical approaches where spectators are more likely to enter into an interpretative
mode of perception, the question is perhaps whether or not spectators challenge their usual way
of combining the known and unknown elements in order create new knowledge; that is, new
subjects in to their registers of reality. Some artists fear that theatrical representation runs the
risk of manipulating interpretation thereby making performance appear as a literal portrayal of
the world. As it is known, this is the risk of realistic, documentary and much of critical theatre.
The framing of the performance as a theatrical event is not always enough for spectators to keep
their awareness that what they witness is a subjective view of reality, which can be critically
interpreted. Theatre revolutionary Bertolt Brecht understood this, and the solution he provided
was to emphasise the strangeness of theatricality by means of his 'alienation technique', which
can be seen as a kind of 'frame within the frame' strategy. Refreshing spectators' awareness of
the strangeness of theatre -and the strangeness of life by extension- would presumably stimulate
their freedom to see theatre and reality with a critical eye. For this, Brecht endeavoured to re-
establish or visualize the gap between reality and representation, thereby eliminating what is
known as the 'suspension of disbelief' in realistic theatre71.
So far, Brecht and all the advocates of a politics of theatrical distanciation would seem to
support the aim of intellectual emancipation presented by Jacotot and Ranciére. However,
Ranciére emphasizes that the distance or gap necessary for emancipation is not a gap between
the knowledgeable artist and the ignorant spectator, where the knowledgeable artist knows how
to turn the otherwise passive spectator into an active one.72 In fact, Ranciére criticizes Brecht's
political theatre on the same basis that he criticizes Marxism, claiming that a strong intellectual
hierarchy underlines their critical theories. At the top are the group of artists and thinkers who
can see the exploitation enacted by the prevalent power structures of society. At the bottom
there are the workers of citizens/spectators who do not understand that they are being exploited
and are therefore passive. According to Ranciére, this supposition of intellectual inequality,
opposes the fundamental requirement for emancipation; namely, the assumption of equality. In
the same vein, Ranciére criticizes the usual conception that the act of viewing is passive and the
act of performing is active, claiming that the emancipatory activity of 'reconfiguring the world'
occurs in the very act of translation, to which viewers and performers are equally entitled.
Instead of emphasizing the distance between reality and representation, Ranciére
advocates for another kind of distance; namely an equal distance between that which is
presented on stage, and both the artists and the spectators who endeavour to supress distance by
means of translation. Put in another way, the emancipating distance lies between the unknown
signs constituting theatrical representation and the known signs constituting the knowledge of
71
Brecht, Bertolt (1964). Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John
Willett. New York: Hill and Wang.
72
Ranciére, Jacques (2004) The Emancipated Spectator.Frankfurt.
http://digital.mica.edu/departmental/gradphoto/public/Upload/200811/Ranciere%20%20spectator.pdf
48
 Sara Regina Fonseca

artists and spectators. From this follows that each artist and each spectator overcomes such a
distance in the same way: thereby relating the known signs with unknown signs. In this sense,
the distance between the known and the unknown is that which stimulates every human being to
translate and build knowledge. Concerning this, Ranciére maintains that

Distance is not an evil that should be abolished. It is the normal condition of any communication73

But if the knowledge of the artist is not required in order to eliminate or provide the
distance required for translation, what is required then? According to Ranciére, what is required
is a 'third element' that works as a referent against which artists and spectators can try and
confront their translations. In Jacotot's pedagogy, the third referent is materialized by the book.
In Ranciére's theories of performance spectatorship, the third element corresponds to the
spectacle that stands between artists and spectators. What is important for the emancipative act
of translation is that the third element is somehow material and independent from its translators:

A material thing is first of all the only bridge of communication between two minds. The bridge is
a passage, but is also a distance maintained. The materiality of the book keeps two minds at an equal
distance, whilst explication is the annihilation of one mind by another.74

Hence, a crucial aspect of emancipated spectorship consists in seeing performance as an

independent signifying system that is vulnerable to all kinds of translations, instead of seeing it
as a discrete signifying system whose only function is to transfer knowledge from artists to
spectators. The mediation of the book/spectacle prevents stultification.
Moreover, Ranciére argues that the emancipation he refers to is in strong contrast with
the kind of emancipation that is often searched by reformist theatre with

...the idea
of emancipation as the re-appropriation of a self which had been lost in a process of
separation75.

As it will be guessed, my contention is that this 're-appropriation of the self' is equivalent to the
search for presence that characterizes many contemporary dance performances, and that the
assumption of the spectacle as a 'third referent' is only possible within a theatrical approach to
dance. From this perspective, theatricality is what allows the emancipated spectator to assume a
number of fundamental gaps: the gap between representation and reality, the gap between
reality and absolute truth, the gap between spectator and spectacle and the gap between artists
and spectacle, among others. These gaps, Ranciére explains, do not amount to an inequality

73
Ibid
74
Ibid.
75
Ibid
49
 Sara Regina Fonseca

between artists' and spectators' intelligence or to some kind of social hierarchy. Instead, they are
gaps that count equally for all human beings in their on-going process of interpreting the world.
I believe that the gap that Ranciére assumes between artists and the spectacle is often
dismissed, in the sense that artists are usually thought to know the true meaning of their
performance. Ranciére's gap, on the contrary, implies that the spectacle contains signs that are
unknown to the artist, thereby defying the artist's power to control the overall meaning of
his/her work. In a general sense, this gap can be seen as a distance between the cause and effect
of performance, or a distance between the intention of the artist and the translation of the
spectator. Furthermore, such a dissociation of cause and effect in performance can be said to be
equivalent to the dissociation of speech's original intentions and its consequence, which Butler
sees as being crucial for an emancipating resignification of 'hate speech'. In this context,
'resignification' and 'translation' can be understood as analogous concepts and the emancipatory
theories of Butler and Ranciére could be connected.
In her critical re-examination of performativity, Butler campaigns for an active and
conscious resgnification of speech, where the harming intentions of speakers can be altered and
the legitimacy of 'the excluded' can be reinstated. In this context, language seems to go through
a double operation: First, it challenges the performativity of 'hate speech' thereby altering
speech's original and negative meaning. Second, it returns the altered or resignified speech in an
utterance that is meant to be performative; that is, to re-create the world that it resignifies. Put
in another way, language first opens the gap between cause and effect and then it intends to
close it. This, as Butler surely knows, can be problematic for the political effectivity of speech.
To the extent that language is infinitely reinterpreted, its performative power might be
weakened and language's power to create and transform the world might therefore be frustrated.
I will return to the problematic of the prolific interpretation of language soon. But, for the
moment, I would like to point out that whilst Butler is precise about the political agenda of her
notion of resignification, Ranciére might provide clearer strategies to visualize the emancipating
dynamics of resignification through his concepts of translation and the third referent. As I
mentioned above, 'the third referent' places artists and spectators at an equal distance in respect
to the performance. In this situation of equality, the emancipative process of 'translation' can
take place: each translator observes the 'third referent', connects the known with the unknown
and then reflects on the process. According to Jacotot's experience, translation allowed the
students to discover for themselves the rules of the new language. Put into a more political
context, one could see this process not only as a way of making sense out of theatrical
representation, but also as a way of bracketing what one knows, thereby detecting the habits,
prejudices and exclusions on which one necessarily bases the creation of new knowledge.
Considering this, my contention is 'translation' can be a good strategy to question and perhaps

50
 Sara Regina Fonseca

'resgnify' one's perception of reality. I would like to call this operation a 'disclosure of
performativity'.

Theatricality as a Disclosure of Performativity

Assuming that politics is about reconfiguring the sensible or resignifying speech, as
Ranciére and Butler suggest respectively, any fixed conception of 'the real' can be considered to
be depoliticizing. As I have suggested earlier, a fixed conception of reality can be assumed in
both theatrical/representational and non-theatrical/presentational events, and the authoritative
views of reality have been counter-acted within each approach in different ways. In theatrical
representation of the most known strategies is the effect of strangement, of which Brecht's
'alienation technique', is emblematic. Here, theatrical representation is shown as being faked,
non-real and therefore open to critical interpretation. However, this strategy can be problematic
in the sense that something can only be seen as 'non-real' if it is put against an assumed 'reality'.
Using the example of transvesticity, Butler illustrates the situation as follows:

If one thinks that one sees a man dressed as a woman or a woman dressed as a man, then one takes
the first term of each of those perceptions as the “reality”, and is taken to constitute an illusory
appearance. In such perception in which an ostensible reality is coupled with an unreality, we think we
know what the reality is, and take the secondary appearance of gender to be mere artifice, play, falsehood
and illusion.76

At the end of the day, one could say that what is politically significant is what one thinks
about what one sees -one of Jacotot's favourite questions. Moreover, theatricality's possible
implication of an absent 'reality' does not solely depend on the way artists decide to represent or
problematize 'reality' on stage. Rather than this, the possible assumption of an absent and fixed
reality depends to a great extent on each individual's interpretation of the performance. It
depends on how each artist and spectator relates to the dance work, making his/her own
translations based on his/her previous knowledge or assumptions about reality. Interestingly, it
is those 'assumptions about reality’, which are the targets of critical theories like Marxism, or
poststructural feminism and postcolonialism. In the case of Butler, for example, these
assumptions are related to gender and sexual identities. Where people claim that women have a
natural gender or a natural sex, Butler argues that women certainly acquire and embody a
gender and a sex, but that rather than being natural aspects, these are social constructions that
become normalized by virtue of performativity77.
Such a questioning of 'reality' is what seems to me to lack in Ranciére's theories of the
emancipated spectator. Whilst the spectator makes her/his own translations without the need of

76
Butler, Judith (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York. Routledge.
P. Xxiii
77
Ibid.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

the artists' explanations or instructions, this process does not necessarily require that the
spectator reconfigures his/her understanding of reality in a contundent way. Arguably, the act of
translation can be emancipating, but it is not in itself an effective political act. As Butler put it,

...no political revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the
real.78

Thus, instead of asking how reality can be questioned in the very deliverance of
performance, I suggest that one changes the focus and asks: How can spectators and artists
confront the very basis of their translations? First of all, it seems to me crucial to follow
Ranciére's suggestion of treating performances as a 'third objects'. If a performance is assumed
as a symbol which stands at an equal distance from artists and spectators, each person can freely
make her/his own translations departing from her/his particular background and perspective –
even if all performers and viewers are equal in their ability to translate, they will approach the
performance from different perspectives and build their translations based on their different
views of reality. The question I posed above aims to remove political agency from the
performance alone, the artists alone, or the spectators alone. The case might be that in the
scenario of a theatrical event, a radical reconfiguration of reality has more possibilities to emerge
in the confrontation of diverse translations, where each person might find out and perhaps
challenge his or her own prejudices about reality. Recontextualizing Jacotot's question within the
theatrical event, it could be suggested that artists and spectators ask themselves and each other
what they perceive in certain performance, and, most importantly, how.
As Butler points out, language acquires its performative power by means of conventional
repetition or 'iterability'. Things become natural or real for us as far as we are part or witnesses
of their reiterative enactment. Conversely, things look theatrical or artificial to us when we have
not been part or witnesses of the reiterative enactments that created them. In Butler's words

Performativity is thus not a singular ‘act’, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or a set of norms,
and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the
conventions of which it is a repetition. Moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical; indeed its apparent
theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated (and, conversely, its
theatricality gains a certain inevitability given the impossibility of a full disclosure of its historicity)79

Certainly, Butler's and many other engaged poststructuralist scholars' search has consisted in
disclosing the historicity of social categories thereby visualizing the artificiality of what is
considered to be natural and normal. According to the quote above, theatricality is a way of
perception in which the conventions that make things normal is ignored. Even if this notion of

78
Ibid.
79
Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge.
P.12.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

theatricality differs greatly from Egginton's, I would say that both of them are based in some
kind of insubstantiality. What appears 'theatrical' is understood in isolation from the otherwise
'coherent reality'. The theatrical is the strange, the awkward which exists parallely to the
'normal'. Concerning this, I would like to claim that an effective political act, is not the process
by which the awkward takes the space that society has designated for the awkward, but rather
the process by which the awkward challenges and reconfigures the frame of the normal. In other
words, a political act can be understood as a an elimination of the very notion of 'the awkward'.
In this sense, it could be claimed that theatrical events risk suffering from a performative
impotence given that 'the awkward' is enacted in the place socially designated for 'the awkward';
namely, the theatre. In fact, Austin claimed in his theory of Speech Act that language in theatre
fell into a category of exception that the writer defined as 'etiolations of language'. In this
category, speech loses its performative power, given that 'the actor's words are not to be taken
seriously'.80 Hereby, Austin states in a simple way a classical challenge of political theatre that
strives to affect the normality of life from the exceptionality of the theatrical event. In response
to Austin's arguments, poststructuralist thinkers like Derrida have answered that there is no
difference between the nature of language at, for example, the theatre and the nature of language
in its normal use. His argument is that in all cases, language is characterized by the artificiality
of conventional repetition, and that language is always contaminated by residual meanings,
which makes it fundamentally polysemic and never just literal, reliable or 'serious'.81 What
seems to me relevant here is the possibility of using theatricality in order to reveal the
performative operations through which language creates what we see as 'normal' and 'abnormal';
that is, to expose the theatricality of the serious. As I suggested earlier, my contention is that
this can be done thereby conceiving theatrical performance as a 'third referent' against which
certain number of translators might consciously and wilfully help each other to disclose their
prejudices about reality. In this case, the exceptionality of the theatrical situation is not
necessarily a problem, as long as it serves as a stimulus to create and exchange interpretations.
Surely, most of the constructive confrontations of interpretations occur in the form of
informal chats among viewers, who somehow impersonate Ranciére's emancipated spectators
who do not need the explanations of the artist in order to make their own readings. Conversely, I
belief that a constructive confrontation of interpretations might be spoiled by the patronizing
attitude that characterizes many of the public after-talks organized in connection to the
performances. The problem of these after-talks is often that performance and artists are blended
into one and the same entity. All too often spectators and moderators ask the artists about the
meaning of the works and about the experience of creating and performing them, somehow

80
Austin, J.L.(1975) How to do Things with Words. Harvard: President and Fellows of Harvard College.
P.22
81
Derrida, Jacques (1988) Limited Inc. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

assuming that the artists posses the ultimate knowledge about the performance in question.
Besides this, it seems to me that all too seldom artists show real interest in the spectators'
particular perceptions. Contemporary dance works are often said to be open to different
interpretations, but in most of the cases these interpretations are seemingly uninteresting for the
artists. This attitude, which I do not find too unusual, seems to me to strengthen the hierarchy
that Ranciére warns us about: the supposition that links artists to knowledge and spectators to
ignorance, and favours the act of performing over the act of viewing. In general, I would like to
emphasize Ranciére's point that the translations made by the performers of a work and those
made by the viewers of it differ in their perspectives rather than in their validity or closeness to
truth. The confrontation of these translations and the questioning of the basis on which they are
made, I add, are crucial for the theatrical experience to acquire an effective political dimension.

CHAPTER VI: REINTERPRETING THE THEATRICAL

As I have tried to argue earlier, experimental dance in Stockholm tends to focus on the
research of movement possibilities and the maintenance of artistic autonomy, which prevents
dance from getting involved into social or political commentaries that might threaten the
virtually free zone of art. This assumption is confirmed by the way in which dance critics tend
to base their comments on discourses that conceive dance as the enhanced presence of the body
in motion. Having said this, it would be unfair to ignore that there are actually several
established or semi-established choreographers in Stockholm who do produce works that deal
critically with social issues. Among them are Anna Vnuk, Malin Hellkvist Sellén and Charlotta
Öfverholm. I have chosen to discuss the cases of Helkvist and Öfverholm, given that I have had
the opportunity to see some of their works and read some of the critics written about them.

Charlotta Öfverholm: Pas de deux sans toi

I saw Pas de Deux sans Toi at Moderna Dansteatern in September 2010. Let me provide a
very general and short description of the situation portrayed by this work. Öfverholm and her
partner Lindy Larsson characterize the stereotypes of a man and a woman, interacting in a
clearly machist relationship. When the woman is alone on stage, she appears strong and reveals
her subjectivity thereby speaking to the audience about her fears. When the man comes into the
stage, she returns to her role of a woman who desperately strives to satisfy her pathetically
misogynistic partner. As I see it, Pas de deux sans toi provides good conditions to be treated as
a 'third referent'. This, in the sense that it provides representative elements that help connecting
the work with 'reality', as well as it provides theatrical elements that help maintaining the
emotional distance that is presumably needed for a more disattached perception. These

54
 Sara Regina Fonseca

theatrical elements include the highly stylized use of the body, the episodic dramaturgy, the
lights, the music and some meta-comments of the work, among others. As it normally happens,
spectators create their own interpretations, which they might share with other spectators after
the performance. So far, we have the emancipated spectator of Ranciére.
Now, as I suggested in the previous section, it seems to me that these interpretations
could acquire a more political potential if they were confronted with Jacotot's crucial question
about the way in which 'the known' and 'the unknown' are connected. In my translation of
Jacotot, the question is rephrased like this: Which are the prejudices that allow one to interpret
the work the way one does? And in the specific case of Pas de deux sans toi: How does one
recognize and judge issues such as love, gender, submission, fear, empowerment and sexual
oppression? Sharing and confronting several answers to these questions might allow not only
the spectators but also the artists to see their own prejudices, and the way in which these
prejudices might be enhancing the female oppression that Ofverhölm problematizes in her work.
Such an approach to interpretation could be encouraged through different strategies, some
of which could surely be included in the performance itself. As an example, I see an opportunity
to push for these wondering in the scene where Öfverholm tells and asks the audience about
love and fear. Conventional strategies such as after-talks, complementary debates and dance
critiques could also be used, if only they could shift the focus towards a more equal sharing of
translations. In the case of Pax de deux sans toi there were not public after-talks or debates, but
there was a review by Ångström. The journalist titles her text Shattered Scenic Energy -Scenisk
Energi som Splittras in Swedish. The title is explained when the journalist claims that

...well balanced, Öfverholm's force is a fantastic asset, but it can also strike as being too
much...Female sexuality and faltering confidence are interesting points of departure, but they remain
being an approach. The problem is that everything is supposed to take place in this short act: questions
addressed to the audience (...) songs, associative music, rope, irony and seriousness. When Öfverholm
challenges technician Tobbe to change the music at the end of the piece, this pretentious gesture stays
hanging in a shattered atmosphere (My trans.)82

Concerning this critique I would like to point out a few things. First of all, I interpret
Ångström's comments as a rejection of excess and incoherency, which in my opinion are two
aspects that contribute to the political function of disclosing performativity or visualizing the
artificiality of reality. Second, the fact that the critic wishes Öfverholm to have balanced her
energy better and kept the unity of style, tone and theatrical perspective; makes me think that
Ångström approaches Pas de deux sans toi with a mode of perception that might fit a ' dance
aesthetics of presence' better than this overtly theatrical dance work. Third, using my application
of Jacotot's question, I would say that what Ångström sees as a lack of harmony and unity
amounts to an attitude that favours harmony over excess and unity over incoherency, which is in

82
Original text in Swedish. http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/scen/scenisk-energi-som-
splittras_5400197.svd?voted=1285658519286
55
 Sara Regina Fonseca

itself an attitude that could be challenged or discussed from a political perspective. Considering
all this, I would claim that the political potential of a work that deals with 'female sexuality and
faltering confidence' could be maximized if is was criticized in its own terms; that is, not only in
terms of its intrinsic aesthetic elements but also in terms of how these elements relate to the
strong theme that the work deals with. In this case, a feminist perspective that questions the way
in which femaleness and maleness are represented and criticized in Pas de deux sans toi could
bring to light problematic assumptions implicit in the work. For example, applying the same
logic that was used to analyse Mujeres Invisibles and Du, Jag och Hon; one could say that the
traditional identification of women with the role of victims and men with the role of perpetrators
is far too simple for the contemporary scenario of Swedish society. From here, one could
proceed to discuss why such a polarization might be too simple, as well as what kind of
dominations might be more relevant than the ones portrayed in Pas de deux sans toi.
Let me now reflect upon my own perceptions. I can start by saying that as a contrast to
Ångström, Öfverhölm's energy did not strike me as being 'too much', perhaps because my
personal expectations of theatrical dance are better fulfilled by this kind of 'excessive' energy
than by the 'measured' energy that characterizes much of the 'dance aesthetics of presence'. In
spite of this, I must admit that the work did not have a strong emotional impact on me, most
probably because I did not identify myself with the characters or their situations. But what I find
most interesting, is that I felt more confronted by Ångström's interpretation of Pas de deux sans
toi than by the performance itself.83 Interestingly enough, that which generated in me the most
transformative reflections and emotions was the interpretations of somebody else instead of my
own experience of the work.

Malin Hellkvist Sellén: En Kristen Kväll

I saw En Kristen Kväll at the College of Dance and Circus in February 2008. Briefly
described, this work portrays three girls who struggle with the contradictions implied in
Christian discourses about the body, which both incite and castigate desire. When interviewed,
Hellkvist Sellén is usually very clear with the political agenda of her work, which she describes
as a 'never ending fight' that stands for the conviction that neither the body, sex, sexuality or
movement/dance exist in static conditions, but are in a continuous process of change.84 Her
coherency with this agenda is surely the reason why journalists tend to comment on the critical
themes of Helkvist's works and on how their dramaturgical elements contribute to communicate
the choreographer's political views. Svenska Dagbladet's reviewer Birgitta Johansson writes:

83
I have written a critique about Ångström's critique of Pas de deux sans toi:
http://triambulo.blogspot.com/2010/09/about-swedish-dance-criticism.html
84
http://www.danstidningen.se/index.php?pageId=11&subId=74
56
 Sara Regina Fonseca

The almost identical dancers, dressed in pale blue tights and discrete long white chemises have something
androgynous in them. They are at once virtuous women and shapes of Jesus. When they change to
Burgundy training clothes as costumes, the image alludes to the Swedish Folk Movement. The theme is
portrayed through bouncing movements. Rhythmical claps contribute to emphasize the strict demand for
conformity. (My trans.) 85

What I find particularly interesting about Hellkvist Sellén is that, apart from her
politicized aesthetics, the artist has occasionally created conditions for debate, where she
exposes her critical view on heterosexual normativity to direct and verbal criticism. Sometime
during the creative process of En Kristen Kväll, Helkvist organized an open discussion about the
Christian approach to the female body. Some Swedish priests were invited to share their views
with queer and feminist enthusiasts. Sadly enough, this confrontation of ideas, believes and
prejudices had virtually no resonance in the media, and no apparent continuation in the
choreographer's work. In general, one could say that En Kristen Kväll is an embodiment of
Hellkvist Sellén's critical stand, which is in turn connected to Swedish queer movement. The
work functions as the artist's way to criticize society, and one can expect that the thoughts
visualized in the piece are the result of several confrontations of interpretations and prejudices
during Hellkvist Sellén's fight against heterosexual normativity.
Certainly, the artistic process of En Kristen Kväll is political and emancipating, in the
sense that it is part of the artist's confrontation with a great part of Swedish society which still
has a conservative view of gender, sex, sexuality and the dancing body. As usual, what happens
during the theatrical event which includes the audience is perhaps more uncertain. My own
experience as a spectator was very affected by my personal relation to Christian religion.
Indeed, the strong impact En Kristen Kväll made on me is proved by the fact that two years later
I am still concerned about this work. By the time I saw the performance I was creating a dance
piece about Catholic religion, based on the concepts of sacrifice and fear. I am not longer a
believer and do not longer go to church. Moreover, I am strongly critical to the discourses and
practices of the church. So, in theory, I should have found En Kristen Kväll interesting, relevant
and easy to identify myself with. However, this was not my experience. When watching it, the
work seemed to me carelessly cold and offensive, and I had to make a big effort in order to stay
in the theatre and tolerate what I perceived as a pathetic portrayal of Christian believers. My
first reflection was that the work missed what I considered to be two of the most important
aspects of religion: the sublime power of its poetry and the comfort people find in it when life is
tough. A criticism that focuses on Christianity’s oppressive and contradictory discourses on the
body but which does not consider the reasons why so many people accept such a discourse,
seemed to me to be too flat. As opposed to Helllkvist Sellén, I have an emotional connection

85
Original text in Swedish: http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/scen/sjalvklart-om-kropp-och-sjal_895529.svd
57
 Sara Regina Fonseca

with Christianity, given that I had my upbringing within a very Catholic family and in a very
Catholic country.
As time passed, interpreting my first negative reaction towards En Kristen Kväll made me
understand that my intellectual capability to criticize Christianity has gone quicker than my
emotional disattachment from it. Nowadays, the work feels less offensive, especially when I
consider that Hellkvist Sellén was dealing with the Swedish context and the Swedish church,
both of which differ greatly from the context I was interpreting the work against; namely, the
Catholic church in Colombia. In this way, En Kristen Kväll has worked for me as a 'third
referent' against which I could build a chain of reflections and reinterpretations departing from
my first reaction towards the performance. Moreover, tracking back these reinterpretations is for
me a way of visualizing how I have slowly reconfigured my views and feelings about Christian
religion during the last couple of years. Once more, the point I am trying to make here is that a
radical and conscious reconfiguration of reality occurs by means of interpretation, or more
precisely, by means of interpretation of interpretations where performativity or the historicity of
our assumptions can be partly disclosed, and the foundations of our perceptions reconsidered.

CHAPTER VII: DISCOURSING ABOUT DANCE

Up to this point I have focused on the politics of theatricality and presence as two
contrasting approaches to dance performance. In this chapter I will discuss the politics of
discourses on dance, particularly in relation to history and national identity. For this purpose, I
have chosen two cases: The Swedish Dance History and The History of Contemporary Dance in
Colombia -La Historia de la Danza Contemporánea en Colombia.

INPEX and The Swedish Dance History

In 2007, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee started the International Performance
Exchange organization– INPEX, with the main purpose of strengthening the international
networks of Swedish dance practitioners. The main strategy of INPEX is the creation of
different formats for international encounters around the thematic of dance theory and practice.
INPEX consists of 11 dance practitioners86 who are in charge of organizing and producing
different kinds of events that are open for anybody who wants to participate. These events
include workshop, seminars, performances and frames for the publishing and distribution of
information. The Swedish Dance History -SDH from now- falls into the last category.

86
The members of INPEX are Marcus Doverud, Malin Elgan, Moa Hanssen, Anders Jacobson, Emma
Kim Hagdahl, Anna Koch, Tor Lindstrand, Mårten Spångberg, Johan Thelander, Jessyka Watson-
Galbraith, Josefine Wikström.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

SDH is a project that consists in collecting and printing in one day a great number of texts
provided by dance practitioners from any place in the world. All texts that are submitted before
the dead line are published in a book nicknamed The Silver Bible. The release party of the first
edition, which was promoted as a 'Beyoncé Battle', took place on the 28th of May 2009 in a
luxurious shopping mall of Stockholm called PUB. The second edition was released in August
2010, first within the frame of ImpulsTanz festival in Wien, and then within the frame of the
Gothenburg dance and theatre festival in Sweden. The book is presented as follows:

The Swedish Dance History is not recording history and has nothing to do with Sweden. It is a
machine creating history right now, right here: across nations, styles and cultural policies. The Swedish
Dance History is a book, a document of a future to come, and a power tool – something you can hit
people with, hold on to when life turns its darker side – but most of all it is an empowering aggregate that
connects all of us that does and creates dance. There are no lonely choreographers any more; every dance
is a collective movement. The Swedish Dance History is here to stay, and it is not up for excuses.87

From a political point of view, there are several interesting elements in this project, the
most obvious one being the ironic defiance of two meta-narratives: 'History' and 'Nation'. The
people invited to contribute with texts are dance practitioners instead of dance historians, and
they can have any nationality. Moreover, some details like doing the release party at a mall
centre, using the concept of a 'Beyoncé Battle' to promote the event, calling the book 'The Silver
Bible', are all gestures that somehow challenge authority and tradition. These gestures can be
said to enact a deconstruction of certain hierarchical oppositions such as theory over practice,
experts over ignorants, high art versus commercial entertainment, serious writing over non-
serious writing, reflection over spontaneity and content over form, among others. By doing this,
the project aims to provide a frame for the emancipation of dancers, enacted by their
participation in the writing of the history of their own practice. Significantly, such an
emancipation consists in the very act of contributing with a text rather than in the content of
such a text. The Silver Bible is insistently prised by its producers for its good looking or 'sexy'
appearance, as well as for the one-day marathonic time of its production. The book is packed
with texts and illustrations, and there is no index or list of contents guiding or suggesting certain
logical arrangement. Clearly, this format and particular mode of production constitute the
political aspect of the project, rather than the unpredictable content of the resulting book. As I
see it, SDH is conceived by INPEX's members as a catalyser of common actions and encounters
among dance practitioners in the whole world.
Similarly to the emancipated spectator of Ranciére, the book's contributors are invited to
assume their capability to publish their visions of dance without the permission or explanations
of academic institutions. In this way, the project aims to empower a virtual entity of dance
practitioners who are willing to take over a space from where they might feel excluded; namely,

87
http://www.mer-opinion.se/release-of-the-swedish-dance-history-friday-16-30-22-30/
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

the space of dance history writing. As the initiators of the project put it, SDH 'brings history
back to its makers and doers'.88 This slightly Marxist statement implies that virtually all dancers
are entitled to publish material, granted that they get to know about the project and send their
contributions on time. Eventually, the concept of SDH is meant to be adopted by dance
practitioners in different parts of the planet, so that more dancers in the world join this
reappropiation of dance history in an act that proudly ignores national borders.
Clearly, the Silver Bible strives to visualize the incoherence of the notion of
'Swedishness' as a concept of national purity. For example, some of the texts provided by the
Swedish contributors were not written by Swedish people, and certainly not all the texts were
about Swedish dance. In fact, the content of the book gives proof of a significant influence of
German and French authors in the consciousness of Swedish contemporary dance practitioners.
There were also contributions sent from other countries, including one sent from Colombia,
which was a text about a Colombian performer, written by a Colombian dancer. As in many of
the texts sent by Swedish dance practitioners, this text has clear references to European
poststructural philosophy and its manifestations in contemporary performance. In this sense, the
book manages to visualize a transnational community constituted by individuals who have
different nationalities but share similar theoretical backgrounds.
The deconstruction of the monolithic notion of 'History' seems to me to be equally
effective in the book. The contributors sent, quite spontaneously, texts that they found relevant
for their dance practice. Apart from the concept of dance practice, there was no other thematic,
question or issue that contributors were forced to relate to. Thus, the book ends up recording
what is somehow latent in the minds of dance practitioners right now. For a reader who wants to
know what is going on in Swedish dance -still, most contributors are Swedish- this book is
certainly a good reference. It provides a sort of picture that catches its subjects at certain
particular moment. Now, this picture can be interpreted from many different perspectives, and
that is the choice of the reader. In this way, the non-linear, non-selected and non-organized
content of the book allows for a visualization of significant nuances, which would be impossible
to register in a more conventional book such as Contemporary Dance in Sweden89. Considering
all this, it can be said that SDH reconfigures or resignifies the dominant notion of History and
that, by doing this; the project also enacts an effective political act.
I would now like to shift my perspective and problematize the deconstruction of the
notion of 'Swedishness', which the SDH endeavours. In order to do this, I will once more recur
to my experiences, this time blowing up their notorious subjectivity. Let me take the first release
party of the book at PUB, of which I could take part, and where I acquired a copy of The Silver
Bible for free. SDH release event was indeed a party, with friends, music, dance and wine

88
Ibid.
89
Persson, Bodil (2003) Contemporary Dance in Sweden. Stockholm: The Swedish Institute.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

included. I could take the role of an observer, thanks to my special position of having almost no
history in the Swedish dance context. At the centre of the room, ex-students from the Royal
Ballet School and students from the University of Dance and Circus danced together to
Beyoncé’s hits. Their attitude looked to me like the mixture of joy and irony with which elite
dancers can move to commercial music without bad consciousness. In one corner, the directors
of two important Swedish dance institutions talked, most probably about work. There were
isolated small groups of less definable characters, some of whom were probably less successful
dancers. I was in one of such small groups, talking to a Swedish professional in political
sciences and to my Swedish boyfriend who is an engineer interested in cultural politics. Some
members of the INPEX team were mingling around, trying to say hello to all the guests. The
SDH was briefly introduced in a manner that confirmed the irony of its title. A short
performance was presented by the collective Diggapony, which by that time was having a
residency at The House of Dance in Stockholm. Three dancers stood on a table and, with a
deliberately unpretentious attitude, sung Beyoncé’s song If I was a Boy, remaking the original
lyrics into a text about the book: 'If I was a book...'. Shortly after this, I left the place with a
feeling of indignation that I have been trying to analyse and articulate for a couple of years.
Most of the guests I met at PUB were people who were born or that grew up in Sweden.
There were some non-Swedish Nordic people, and few persons from continental Europe. I did
not see people that seemed to have a non-European cultural background, apart from myself and
one Latin-American guy who was related to one of Digappony's dancers. In fact, this
composition of nationalities is not so surprising. Compared to other European countries such as
England or France, Sweden is not a very internationalized country, neither it is the Swedish
dance environment. But, the way I see it, there are other reasons for the little representation of
non-Swedish dancers at the book's release party: Dancers who come to Sweden as adults and do
not have connections within the Swedish dance context will probably have a difficult time
ending up in social clusters such as those surrounding INPEX. Most likely, these foreign
dancers will have to make their 'way up' from doing all kind of non-dance jobs, to teaching
hobby dance courses in small dance academies or in adult educational association, which in
Sweden are called 'studieförbund'. The networks that these persons create often consist of other
artists in the same situation. Furthermore, if these dancers come from non-European lands, they
might be most welcome to teach their 'national' dances, or make performances related to their
cultures in the frame of multicultural festivals or ethnological museums. My personal
experience is that these artists might actually be quite happy to do so, given a common
phenomenon in which people's need to strengthen their cultural identity tends to blossom when
they move abroad. Considering such a scenario, it might take three or more years for these non-
Swedish dancers to find themselves in the middle of an event such as SDH's release party.

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 Sara Regina Fonseca

From this perspective, it seems to me that the problematized defiance of the notion
'Swedishness' is quite naive in SDH. For many foreigners, and particularly for many foreign
freelance dancers living in Sweden, the notion of Sweden does exist, simply because this notion
has consequences. It exists because it matters for a person not to be part of the history of dance
in Sweden, not to be a reference for anybody, and not to understand the language of the Sweeds.
Now, by language, I mean much more than the Swedish verbal language. By language, I mean
the undertones of communication. I mean, for instance, the element of irony that underlines the
title of the book, its promotion, its look and its release event.
In some paradoxical way, neglecting the notion of 'Swedishness' is ignoring the fact that
SDH emerged from certain conditions and needs that are quite contextual, and perhaps even
nationally contextual. It could even be argued that challenging 'national identity' is a politically
correct attitude in contemporary Sweden. Such an attitude might have something to do with the
West-European moral responsibility of counter-acting anything that might look like a
renaissance of fascism. As opposed to Latin America, for example, the notion of 'race' is a taboo
in Western Europe, and the notion of 'national identity' is at least looked at with certain
scepticism by many West-European contemporary artists. The political parties, which declare
themselves to be pro-nationalists, are usually connected with anti-immigration politics, and they
are morally condemned by the public opinion. This was well illustrated during the last
campaigns for parliamentarian elections in Sweden 2010, in which the nationalist party of the
Swedish Democrats provoked strong opposition in a good percentage of Swedish citizens and
media. One could argue that the controversial growth of the Swedish Democratic nationalistic
party and the emergence of an anti-nationalistic project such as SDH are contrasting reactions
towards the same socio-political context and its constituent conditions, where the notion of
'Swedishness' is indeed an issue. I would dare to claim that this phenomenon would hardly
emerge in a country like Colombia, where contemporary artists tend to join the struggle against
neo-colonialist forces that maintain the social wounds created during the Spanish colonization
that occurred over 500 years ago.
Let me now discuss the issues of language. As it is known, the problematization of
'identity' is closely connected to deconstructivist approaches to language, and understanding
language's power has been most useful for political and cultural resistance of movements such
as feminism and postcolonialism. Problematizing existing concepts such as 'nation' and 'history'
is to problematize power. More generally, denying the authority of language is to problematize
the categorizations enacted by language's power. As I see it, such is the function of irony in the
case of SDH. The irony implied in the title of the book and its description can be said to be in
line with the irony implied in the use of Beyoncé as the theme for the release party, as well as
with the apologetic and non-elaborated performance presented by Digappony's professional
dancers, who most of the guests have seen dancing before in clearly non-apologetic and well
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elaborated performances. Irony seems to be the underlying linguistic trope that pervades the
different layers of this project. The way in which irony creates a confusion between the serious
and non-serious makes the point.
As I have pointed out, the political aspect of SDH consists in the openness of its format
rather than in its deliberately unselected and unorganized content. The result of such an
emphasis is a book that contains a great number of texts and images, where the only common
reference is the relevance that each contribution is supposed to have for the dance practitioner
who provides the material. The diversity of the content includes, for example, academic essays
about art and politics, personal anecdotes of dancers, reflections about choreographic processes,
interviews of performers, personal diaries, art manifestos, e-mails, letters, descriptions of how to
play a game, make a piñata or make a bubble, feministic texts, comics and the record of a twitter
account activity during an hour. These multiplicity of voices co-exist in the common and non-
hierarchical space of this Silver Bible. Such a coexistence, however, does not imply a direct
confrontation of views or a shared act of reflection. Each text or image stands there, next to each
other, multiplying all possible gaps among contributors, realities, representations, readers,
authors, causes, consequences, and so on. The owners of the book, mostly dance practitioners,
can make their own interpretations of the texts and images contained in the 1037 pages, or they
can keep the book as an object that symbolizes the emancipating act of writing 'history'.
In general, it seems to me that SDH challenges the authority of language thereby opening
the possibility for a potentially infinite number of redefinitions of the notions of 'dance', 'history'
and 'Swedishenss'. By doing this, I believe that SDH also neglects the very existence of these
notions and, therefore, the possibility of resignifying the negative implications that these notions
might endorse. Whilst I have suggested earlier that the reconfiguration of reality is enabled by
the exercising of linguistic interpretations, I also see the risk of exercising interpretation to the
extent that the minimum common references required for participative confrontations might be
cancelled. For good and bad, the performativity of language seems to depend on certain balance
between its capacity to recreate the world, and its capacity to maintain its referential
classifications. As categories such as 'dance', 'politics', 'art', 'entertainment', 'Sweden', 'History'
and others are deconstructed; I perceive in SDH a risk of falling into a depoliticizing
proliferation of linguistic interpretations. Such a scenery seems to me to be what Ranciére refers
to when he states that

Here again, the politics of the resistant form accomplishes itself at the exact moment that it is
cancelled out. It does so, no longer as part of a metapolitics of revolution of the sensory world, but by
identifying the work of art with the ethical task of bearing witness, cancelling out both art and politics.
This ethical dissolution of aesthetic heterogeneity goes hand in hand with a whole current of
contemporary thought in which political dissensuality is dissolved into an archipolitics of the exception

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and in which all forms of domination, or of emancipation, are reduced to the global nature of an
ontological catastrophe from which only God can save us. 90

Having said this, I insist that there must be some good reasons that motivate SDH's attempt to
eradicate certain ontological categories, particularly those of 'History' and 'Swedishness'. Apart
from my hypotheses of the West-European post-war moral responsibility and the recent
integration of Sweden into the European Union; it seems to me likely that a society which
consists of a rather small and homogeneous population, and which has enjoyed political stability
for over 200 years might feel the need to challenge its underlying foundations in order to
embrace the heterogeneity of an increasingly globalized world.

CEC and The History of Contemporary Dance in Colombia

In 2003, Fundación Danza Común created in Bogotá the Centre for Choreographic
Experimentation CEC, as a response to the necessity to have spaces assigned to local exchanges
of theoretical and practical knowledge about artistic creation in contemporary dance. The
Institute of Culture and Tourism of Bogotá supported the initiative, and the project started with
seven members who had different professions and relations to dance.91 Since then, CEC
organizes different events, including lectures, workshops, seminars and performances. The
events are open for all dance practitioners, and the local community is often invited to take part
of the discussions. The CEC writes annual reports or memories, which are added to an archive
of common reflections aimed to support the further development of dance in Colombia.
In 2007 Danza Común invited choreographers and writers Margarita Roa and Andrés
Lagos to contribute to the program of CEC with a lecture which would be called Historia de la
Danza Contemporánea Colombiana -HDCC from now-. In the face of the scarcity of
bibliography about the subject, Roa and Lagos proposed to replace the lectures for a series of
workshops in which the participants, who were mostly young dancers, would start a research
together. Roa and Lagos write that the purpose of the project is

...to determine each generation of contemporary dance in Colombia, its influences, topics,
differences and problems at organizational and administrative levels. (My trans.)92

For such a purpose, the research would create 'a chronological tree of the protagonists of
contemporary dance in Colombia', starting with the pioneers of dance in the 70's and concluding
with today's generation of dancers, including the members of CEC.

90
Ranciére, Jacques (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents(2009). Cambridge: Polity Press. P.p 43-44
91
The members of CEC in 2003 were Eduardo Ruiz, Diana León, Ángel Ávila, Beatriz Helena Gil,
Natalia Orozco, Soraya Vargas y Juliana Rodríguez.
92
Roa, Margarita and Lagos, Andrés together with the CEC (2007). Historia de la Danza
Contemporánea Colombiana. Bogotá: unpublished -There are not page numbers in the original text
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Roa and Lagos designed the methodology of this participative research. Each participant
had the task of interviewing a 'protagonist of dance', who the participant considered to be
relevant for the history of contemporary dance in Colombia. The questions were defined
collectively during the workshops, and the aim was that each person interviewed would give his
or her own perspective of the history of contemporary dance, including the artistic and socio-
political situations that contextualized their generations in the past. The main questions were

What is dance for you? If we assume that we are the protagonists of this history, what are we
doing and how are we doing it? How to acquire a body for Colombian contemporary dance? How much
can dance transform and individual? How to start a creation in dance? How are the systems of training
and creation related? (My trans.) 93

Each participant could add a couple of questions that they found particularly relevant.
Apart from typing the answers, the participants were asked to write down a reflection about the
interview, and finish their document thereby answering the question 'What is dance for me?'
Similar to the SDH, HDCC can be considered to be emancipatory for the dance practitioners
who assumed their active place in the making and writing of history. However, in the case of
HDCC, this emancipatory act is explicitly driven by an ethics of responsibility with the past and
the future of dance in the country. Referring to the final part of the document, Lagos says:

The members of CEC responded to this question from their most intimate being...in order to
understand themselves and acquire a commitment to the on-going construction of contemporary dance in
Colombia. (My trans.) 94

As I will argue later, this ethics of responsibility with the country constitutes what I find
politically most interesting and problematic in this project. As a contrast to its Swedish
counterpart, HDCC departed from an acceptance of 'history', 'nation' and other notions such as
'protagonist' and 'origin'; all of which would be considered to be authoritative within a critical
poststructuralist approach. Quite openly, HDCC aims to track, categorize and record the paths
of contemporary dance within the geographical limits of the country. As Lagos assures, this

...responds to a need that the contemporary generation of researchers, creators and dancers have of
recognizing the origin and the patterns that might clarify their doings. (My trans.)95

Moreover, Lagos adds that

...all human beings are looking for answers not only whilst they walk forwards, but also when they
look back and hope to understand the reasons for their decisions and actions. (My trans.) 96

93
Ibid.
94
Ibid.
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid.
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As I see it, HDCC fulfils a function of revindication, which is not only a revindication of
the dance practitioners in history writing, but also a revindication of the past in the present, and
of an assumed Colombian identity in the global scenery of dance. As a contrast to SDH, HDCC
is not presented as a revolutionary project, nor is it presented as an innovative format or a
challenge to meta-narrative concepts. Moreover, the 'academy' and 'the past' are not seen here as
oppressors who prevent dance practitioners from taking over the writing of their own doings.
Rather than this, the participation of scholars and veterans of dance were crucial in HDCC. The
experiences of the pioneers of modern dance in the 70's were the main sources of knowledge for
the research, including not only the stories they told during the interviews but also their
embodied knowledge. Some of these veteran dancers were present during the workshops and
gave master classes to the participants. Concerning the 'academy', it might suffice to mention
that Lagos, one of the leaders of the project, is a professional dancer and historian. He, together
with Roa, were in charge of writing the final document using the material collected during the
participative workshops and treating it according to the conventional procedures of academic
research. Hence, dancers and academics shared a strong belief in the importance of recording
'The History of Colombian Contemporary Dance', trying to make sense of the past as a base to
understand their present and take responsibility for the future.
In order to discuss the political dimension of HDCC I will focus on the texts that conform
the content of one of the first documents resulting from the participative research. More
specifically, I will focus on one aspect: The text's references to 'cultural identity' and its relation
to the socio-political situation of the country. I have chosen this aspect not only because it
contrast the approach of the Swedish artists analysed earlier, but also because it is an aspect that
returns as an important concern for the different generations of Colombian dancers. One can say
that the ways in which cultural identity has been dealt with by dance practitioners respond to the
fluctuating and unresolved question of postcolonial resistance, which a great deal of Colombian
dance artists feel committed to. Thus, whilst the aesthetic resistant form and a theoretical
suspicion about identity seem to me to characterize much of contemporary dance practice in
Sweden, socio-political topics and the exploration of cultural identity seem to me to characterize
much of contemporary dance practice in Colombia. Now, similar to the approaches that reject
the concept of cultural identity and advocate for an 'apolitically political' dance, the approaches
that focus on cultural identity and social commitment have their own dynamics of resistance and
domination. I will try to analyse these dynamics in the next sections. The document I was
provided with includes thirteen interviews of the same number of 'protagonists of dance', who
were chosen by the participants on the basis of their experience and significance for the
development of contemporary dance in Colombia. The organization of the information and the
questions included in the interviews were made so that one could identify at least three

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generations of dancers. I will divide my analysis in a similar way, referring to those

'protagonists' who have made direct comments on the issues I want to focus on.

HDCC: First Generation

From the first generation, I will introduce and discuss the work of Carlos Jaramillo, Peter
Palacios and Alvaro Restrepo; all of whom come from the Caribbean coast of Colombia, studied
dance in the United States and have had great influence in the development of contemporary
dance in the country. Carlos Jaramillo created Triknia Khábelioz in 1981, which is said to be the
first school and company of contemporary dance in Colombia. The name of this school alludes
to the 'three ethnicities’ that constitute Colombian people -the Spanish, the Amerindian and the
African- as well as to the African prince Ben Koz who was a leader of the slave liberation
movement in the country. Jaramillo obtained a Master in literature with a thesis on the novel El
coronel no tiene quién le escriba by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, which served
the choreographer as a point of departure to create a work that deserved a price in Barcelona.
The choreographer showed always a strong interest on the dance traditions of Colombia, and the
Department of Culture of Bogotá supported Jaramillo to create 'works about Latin America and
ethnicity'97 in Hamburg. One of this works, Antropía, portrays figures that are half man and half
animal. These figures narrate their resentment towards the carnivalesque image which humans
have created of them, ignoring the 'real, ritual and historical'98 meaning of these characters.
My second example, Peter Palacio, created the company Danza Concierto in 1990. The
choreographer tells that his first work, Los Hijos del Sol

...deals with the question of who we are, where we come from, what we are doing and what the
situation of the country is. (My trans.)99

Then he adds that

I saw all this from outside, a concern about the identity at the midst of modernity. Thus, I decided
to turn the attention to us, and it is then when I find the concept of Trietnia, based on the fact that the
blood of three ethnicities runs through our veins. (My trans.)100

Palacio has created a great number of works based on the conquest of America, the encounter of
the three ethnicities and the historical revolutions against the Spanish crown. Even if Palacio is
considered a pioneer and veteran of dance, he is still producing works that are important
references within the Colombian contemporary dance scene today. Eduardo Oramas, who is he
an anthropologist, performer and performance researcher asserts that

97
Ibid. (My trans.)
98
Ibid. (My trans.)
99
Ibid.
100
Ibid.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

Peter Palacio shows us the need to return the focus towards ourselves, as the most fertile option to
construct a contemporary dance movement characteristic of Colombia...An approach to the notion of
Colombian contemporary dance would imply to move in the space that is created by two aspects. On the
one hand, the definition of contemporary dance as something that is apparently resistant to precise
classification or definition and which is open to suffer continuous transformations and blends. On the
other hand, the specificity of being Colombian. Something identifiable although hybrid and multiple. A
call from the local within the globalizing tendency we live in. (My trans.)101

Moreover, Oramas argues that the search for a Colombian contemporary dance should focus on
the particular ways in which Colombians move their bodies, and that Colombian folk dance and
music are in this case an 'obligatory reference'. Oramas adds that

The rhythmical basis of folk music would need to be studied by dancers and choreographers and
the dance folk steps would need to be deconstructed into their physical principles such as the balances
and shifts of weight, as well as the accents going with or against gravity...All this can then be reorganized
and reinterpreted as movement principles and as guidelines for improvisations which can give origin to
the movement material characteristic of each work. Diving into our Colombian identity reveals the need
for an interdisciplinary group, which can expand and complement the perspectives of dancers and
choreographers, inscribing the problem of dance within the very process of feeling and becoming
Colombian. (My trans.)102

From the examples introduced above one can deduce that there is since the 80's a
significant presence of dancers from the Caribbean coast, as well as a strong interest among
Caribbean and non-Caribbean dancers in the exploration of new interpretations of traditional
dances. Referring to the complex and multiple constitution of Colombian identity as a result of
the blending of three 'races' or 'ethnicities' is common within the first generation's discourses on
contemporary dance. Similarly, a certain assumption of biological determination seems to
underline comments such as 'the blood of three ethnicities which run through our veins'. As the
case of Jaramillo illustrates it, these interests and beliefs are shared by cultural institutions,
which support innovative explorations of traditional dances thereby adding contemporary dance
to the discourses of national identity. It is also quite evident that the presence of Afro-
Colombian dance and music in the Colombian contemporary art scene is part of a space that
Afro-Colombian culture has gradually gained along more than three decades now. Many of the
icons of Colombian culture are indeed products of the Caribbean region, among others the
literary genre of magic realism represented by Gabriel García Márquez and the traditional dance
and music called Cumbia, which is considered to be a symbol of the syncretic character of
Colombian identity. Surely, this strong interest on Afro-Colombian culture has been enabled by
a variety of conditions. The three most obvious reasons are perhaps the national politics Afro-
Colombian revindication, the development of the touristic industry in Colombia, and the
traditionally reinforced identification of the Caribbean with a living African heritage, mostly
manifested in a rich variety of dances, music, beliefs, ritual ceremonies and historical

101
Ibid.
102
Ibid.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

movements of black resistance. Thus, a great number of cultural forms are at hand in the
Caribbean region, and artists like Jaramillo and Palacio have seen the opportunity and the
relevance of making these forms into the main subject of their aesthetic search. In this way,
these Caribbean dancers joined the global tendencies of art, whilst also joining the black
movements, which by the 80's had already gained important international recognition.
Let me now talk about the possible implications of this interest on Afro-Colombian
culture and the role that this interest plays in the discourse of national identity. In contrast to the
Swedish context, the concept of nation in Colombia acquires ambiguous political implications,
as it seems to symbolize at once liberation and oppression. On the one hand, the concept of the
Colombian Nation maintains and is maintained by the dominant political and social classes of
the country, which are to a great degree responsible for perpetuating the oppression of the old
victims of colonialism, that is, the Colombian indigenous and Afro-descendants. On the other
hand, Colombia as a sovereign nation state resulted from the liberation campaigns that won over
the Spanish colonial power. Thus, whilst the philosophical ideas of the modern states and the
modern liberalism were imported from Europe, 'nation' became a conceptual identity under
which thousands of people joined in order to fight a common colonial enemy. For many
Colombians, 'Nation' continues to resonate as a symbol of freedom, even if the political
significance of the independence from Spain can easily be questioned on the grounds that the
liberation campaign was led by an upper class of American born citizens with Spanish
descendants, who soon became the new elite of the country. Regarding the present situation of
the country, the association between 'national identity' and 'freedom' seems to me to gain some
relevance in the face of a threatening expansion of the commercial and military control of the
United States over Colombia.
In this context, it seems to me that using the concept of Colombian identity to resist neo-
colonialism is a contradictory and confusing strategy. When Palacio claims that in order to
create a Colombian contemporary dance it is necessary to focus on the Afro-Colombian
heritage, the choreographer is in a way taking the party of those who have been historically
oppressed. He is, in other words, exposing a postcolonial agenda based on the revindication of
the colonized. However, fusing Afro-Colombian dance identity with a Colombian dance identity
is a conceptually equivocal move. As many Colombians know, the Colombian State has
historically been a silent perpetrator of a systematic violence committed against Afro-
Colombian people. For this reason, supporting the discourse of nationalism, which is the
discourse of the State, means supporting the neo-colonialist politics of the government. This
equivocation becomes more evident if one asks: Who decided from the beginning that
indigenous and Afro-descendants are Colombians? Certainly not the heads of the diverse
indigenous tribes and civilizations that used to inhabit the geographical space of contemporary
Colombia, and certainly not the African people who were forcedly brought to this space as
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slaves. Admittedly, there are in Colombia strong movements against the colonialist politics of
nationalism, especially among strongly politicized indigenous organizations claiming the right
to live according to their values, which are visibly alien to the modern capitalistic values of the
nation state. Having said this, it would be equivocal to claim that all contemporary indigenous
and Afro-descendants prefer not to belong to the conceptual identity of the Colombian nation
and culture. Actually, many indigenous and Afro-Colombian descendants find possibilities for
economical development and cultural revindication in the adoption of the national identity
concept. Therefore, they prefer to join the nationalistic discourse and the touristic industry, as
they see in this a chance to finally acquire the economic and social equality that has been
negated to them for over 500 years.
Let me now analyse Oramas' comments on Palacio. In his case, there is an explicit
concern about how to solve the apparent opposition between identity and contemporaneity. The
notion and political implications of 'national identity' are hardly problematized in the document.
Nor is the notion of contemporaneity and its granted relation to globalization discussed in depth.
Instead, Oramas points out the need to create a characteristic contemporary Colombian dance,
suggesting that the way to do it is through a formal deconstruction and reinterpretation of
Colombian folkloric music and dance. Such a suggestion can be problematized in various ways.
First of all, one can argue that the notion of 'folklore' in Colombia is tightly linked to the
discourse of national identity and cultural diversity, which is used by the state in order to brand
the Nation of Colombia with strategy that is not exempt from exoticism. This strategy would
perhaps not be so problematic if only those people who are assigned to preserve and symbolize
Colombian folklore -peasants, Afro-Colombian an lately indigenous people- were not at the
same time the very targets of social discrimination and economic inequality.
Moreover, 'folklore', understood in connection with 'the exotic', tends to recur into a
classical problem which is well articulated in Edward Said's theory about Orientalism103: it
reinforces prejudices about 'the other' -those related to 'folklore' in this case- as being traditional,
wild, naive, esoteric, under-developed and so on. In this sense, the notion of 'folklore' somehow
maintains the dichotomy of 'civilized versus non-civilized'. At a global level, one could say that
‘third world’ countries like Colombia fulfil the role of the non-civilized; and that this role is
partly reinforced by official discourses on folklore and cultural diversity. At a national level, at
least in Colombia, the role of the non-civilized is clearly fulfilled by poor farmers, indigenous
and Afro-descendants. From this critical point of view, it can be claimed that the official
campaign to preserve the 'authentic sources of folklore' is perversely linked to a historical and
systematic segregation of the non-civilized 'other'. In this sense, the inclusion of Afro-
Colombian folklore into the discourses of national identity can be seen as a neo-colonialist
strategy of the Colombian State. Having said this, it is important to point out that there are other
103
Said, Edward (1979). Orientalism. Cambridge: Vintage Books
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perspectives of 'folklore', from where this concept is viewed as a cultural production of

historically colonized communities, and therefore as a force of political resistance and auto-
decolonization104. I will consider this perspective later on. For the moment, I just want to bring
attention to the need of approaching the notions of 'tradition', 'folklore' and 'national identity'
with a critical attitude that outlines issues such as exotization, exploitation and segregation.
Another difficulty I find in Oramas' contribution is his suggestion that folkloric music
and dance should be reinterpreted by means of formalistic analysis and reconstruction. Breaking
down a piece of dance or music into its formal features and pretending that in that way one
catches the essential significance of that piece, appears to me as one of the crucial beliefs of the
20th century European paradigm of Modernistic Art. From a postcolonial perspective, one can
detect here another classical problem: a system of cultural appropriation by means of
decontextualization, deprivation of meaning, formalistic reduction and commercial
reproduction; all of which tends to benefit those who appropriate ‘the other’s cultural products’
rather than those whose cultural product are appropriated by the first group. Arguably, Western
European adoption of West-African cultural products has benefited West European Art much
more than it has benefited their West African counter-parts. The benefits I am referring to
include not only the economical but also the symbolic and cultural capital resulting from this
appropriation. Granted, strategies of cultural interaction, instead of cultural exploitation, can
exist and do exist between historically privileged and historically unprivileged groups of people.
However, such an interaction can hardly occur if the economical and conceptual conditions are
defined and controlled by only one of the parts, generally the privileged one. In the case we are
analysing here, these parts could be defined as follows. On the one hand, there is the
interdisciplinary team of professional anthropologists, folklorists and composers among others,
in which persons like Oramas are obviously included. This group necessarily consists of people
who have enough economical or social capital in order to solve the financiation of travels,
research time, production and distribution of the resulting work. On the other hand, there are
those who might lack professional education, but whose knowledge is embodied in their cultural
practices. Indigenous, farmers and Afro-Colombians with low income and without formal
education would be included in this group.
Certainly, the classification I am suggesting here can be criticised for reinforcing the
opposition 'colonizer versus colonized', which implicitly defines the latter as lacking political
agency. Moreover, the case might well be that, in the actual practice, Orama's strategy becomes
a positive interaction where the roles are much more flexible, ignoring the dichotomy I
mentioned above, and establishing conditions in which all the participants can assume their

104
A nuanced and well informed discussion on the role of 'folklore' and 'tradition' in Latinamerica can be
found in the work of Peruvian anthropoligist Zoila S. Mendoza, whose books include Shaping Society
Through Dance ( 2000) and Creating our own: folklore, performance and identity in Cuzco, Peru (2008).
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equal potential to affect and be affected. Nevertheless, I would still claim that, at least at a
theoretical level, Orama's suggestion is based on an implicit dichotomy that separates the
'authentic owners of folklore' from the 'educated elite'. Inevitably, Oramas is part of the
educated elite, and as I see it, his words reveal an uncritical imposition of West-European
aesthetic values on cultural products that are uncritically assumed to contain the essence of
Colombian national identity.
My last example from the 'first generation' is Alvaro Restrepo, professional philosopher
and dancer who created El Colegio del Cuerpo -The College of the Body, eCdC from now. This
project is a pedagogical institution founded in 1997 with the purpose of offering professional
dance education to low-income young people from the city of Cartagena. ECdC is directed by
Restrepo and co-directed by French pedagogue and choreographer Marie France Delieuvin. The
first promotion of professional dancers constitutes nowadays La Compañía -The Company- that
is based in Cartagena and tours its repertory regularly around the world. Restrepo claims that

In a country like Colombia, subsumed in a bloody crisis of values, the human body has lost its
sacred dimension: everyday we see it tortured, mutilated, murdered. The spiritual body does not longer
exist: we only perceive its material dimension, which being perishable, has also turned into being
perversely “disposable”, murderable. The creation of this new pedagogy, leading towards what we call a
new ethics of the body, has in our tormented country an incontestable pertinence. Self-knowledge and
self-respect must be understood as essential conditions to achieve respect for the other. (My trans.) 105

Concerning eCdC, Restrepo explains that

Through the experimental language of Contemporary Dance as a medullar pedagogical

strategy...eCdC educates artists of international level and with a great sense of social responsibility, who
are also leaders, multipliers and driving forces in the city, the country and the world. EcdC is a model of
pacific coexistence trough the recognition of the talent and human engagement of its members. (My
trans.)106

Clearly, what is most interesting with eCdC is the social and artistic impact it has
achieved. Whilst La Compañía has become a relatively stable entity, which is internationally
recognized for its artistic work, the dancers have found in eCdC a life project that has notably
increased their economical, social, symbolic and cultural capital. In my opinion, Restrepo's
philosophical relation to 'tradition' and 'identity' keeps some coherency with the political agenda
of empowering those who are systematically oppressed and vulnerable to take part in the
dynamics of violence that affect most of the country. Even if Restrepo's discourse is somehow
underlined by the romantization of 'tradition' which characterizes the discourses of the 'first
generation', it seems to me that this artist is much more precise in his conception of the
relevance of tradition for the cultural and socio-political reality of contemporary Colombia.
When Restrepo refers to a 'lost dimension of the sacred body' and the need to recover it, this is

105
Original text in Spanish. EcdC Website, http://www.elcolegiodelcuerpo.org/
106
Ibid.
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justified by the urge to counterweight the violence of the country with a pedagogical project that
encourages a different understanding of the human body.
'Tradition', in this sense, is not good for its own sake, nor is it relevant for the supposed
fact that it carries the essence of cultural identity. I interpret Restrepo's view of tradition as a
culturally determined source of values, which can provide crucial elements to resist other values
that are destructive in society. ECdC's approach to tradition could even be described in rather
pragmatic terms. The project focuses on a very specific aspect of Afro-Colombian tradition,
which is the sacred dimension of the body and its expression through dance. The purpose with
this focus is to fight the banalization of the human body, which is arguably connected to the
normalization of extreme violence inflicted on the bodies of Colombian people. Certainly,
Restrepo's uncritical assumption that sacredness is an implicit value of Afro-Colombian
tradition can be questioned for being too general, as well as naive and romantic. Similarly, the
idea that the violence witnessed by Colombian people is due to an apparently unjustified lost of
respect for the human body can be criticized for being too simple, if not politically and
historically unaware. To be fair, the extreme violence in Colombia extends its roots along a
history of economical exploitation, social inequality, impunity and power abuse; all of which
permeates society at all its levels, even transcending the borders of the Colombian State. Having
said this, it is important to notice that in its practical realization, eCdC does interfere in some of
the aspects mentioned above, thereby offering the young dancers concrete opportunities to
overcome their conditions of extreme poverty and social segregation. As a result, the dancers
reduce the risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of other forms of violence.
Finally, I would like to return to Ranciére's argument that speaking in behalf of the
oppressed is a strategy that frustrates any real act of emancipation. Since this argument has been
discussed earlier, I will be brief this time. Indeed, the artistic exploration of traditional Afro-
Colombian elements is strongly guided by Restrepo and Delieuvin, whose aesthetic values are
greatly affected by their earlier professional education in the U.S.A and France. The directors of
eCdC, so to say, cannot be properly said to be oppressed, and they are well aware of this.
However, the individuals who embody and visualize the final work in different stages of the
world are underprivileged Afro-Colombian children and young people, for whom the traditional
elements explored in the artistic process are mostly familiar. Analysing the degree of
empowerment and participation of the pupils would certainly require a close observation of the
pedagogical and artistic processes which support the dance performances. However, the fact
that the same individuals are to a great extent the objects and subjects of exploration seems to
me to reduce the risk of turning projects that are aimed at empowering the oppressed into
projects which exploit the oppressed. Such an undesired situation occurs when a chain of three
separate groups is created in the process: first, the group of people who provide the sources of
'tradition' and the 'reality' of social oppression; second, the group of artists and academics who
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explore, interpret and visualize these 'traditions and social realities'; and third, the group of
people who are ready to consume the result of the work made by the second group, and who in
most cases can do little to improve the life conditions of the first group of this chain.
At this point, Mujeres Invisibles comes to my mind as an unfortunate example. In the
case of eCdC, however, I would dare to say that the separation between these three groups is
partly blurred. Those who are seen by society as 'the oppressed' assume their equality and, given
the conditions of the project, they effectively manage to increase their economical, symbolic
and cultural capital. A couple of privileged people have the initiative and make eCdC into their
life project. The audience includes hundreds of people who are considered to be oppressed, as
well as hundreds of people who are considered to be privileged in Colombia and abroad.
Finally, eCdC' s artistic works are not based on denunciation, but they are conceived as highly
poetic expressions of certain ethic and aesthetic values. Thus, more than provoking pity or rage,
the dance works tend to awaken admiration and, in this way, it seems to me that eCdC succeeds
in resignifying the very image of 'the oppressed'.

HDCC: The Second Generation

From 'the second generation', I have chosen to talk about Carlos Latorre, Leila Castillo
and Raúl Parra. Latorre, as well as Restrepo, studied philosophy before he started dancing. His
thesis 'Myth and Contemporaneity' is a consistent point of reference in the artistic search of this
choreographer. For over 15 years, Latorre has been working around the theme of the indigenous
and the urban, dealing with the relations between the millenary world vision of the Amerindians
and the condition of the contemporary Latin American citizen. According to Latorre, dance is
an act through which the dancer 'transforms the cosmic energy' into the aesthetic expression of a
body that has acquired 'more refined states of consciousness'. The choreographer explains that
this view of the dancing body is 'magical' and 'esoteric'.107 In this sense, the dancer is a kind of
urban shaman, whose task is

...to remember, predict, visualize and communicate with dimensions which we cannot perceive
with our five senses; but which have existed from the origins of the world. (My trans.)108

Latorre sees this return to the mythical contact with the cosmic as a way of giving a new
positive meaning to the contemporary urban man. By suggesting theatrical dance as the form in
which contemporaneity and myth fuse; Latorre gives art a sacred dimension, claiming that 'in
contemporaneity the aesthetic and the religious are homologous'. His view of an essential Latin-
American identity is revealed when Latorre claims that

107
Original text in Spanish. Om-Tri webpage:
http://www.danzaomtri.com/Articulos/SHAMANISMO.htm
108
Ibid.
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Latin-American contemporaneity still posses contact with its natural and ancestral forces in its
collective unconscious. It is fed by the ludic of its origins, and therefore represents a natural and human
reserve for the present societies. The contemporary individual with a memory, an experience of his
origins and an appropriation of a clear and defined identity, possesses more possibilities as a human being
to act within the group, with more efficiency for the evolution of the contemporary tribe. (My trans.) 109

Latorre's outspoken belief in a return to the origins is reconciled here with a belief in the
evolution of contemporary man towards a higher state of development, where the ultimate
future and the ultimate past seem to marry. Latorre talks of the body as being 'magical',
'mysterious', 'esoteric' and 'spreading towards all directions' with 'plural signification'.
Furthermore, he advocates for the abstract nature of contemporary art, arguing that

The mind and the mental discourses are abstract, like cotemporary art. I believe a lot in abstract
language...giving people things that they understand is decadent for human beings. (My trans.)110

What I find most distinctive about Latorre's approach is his fusion of apparently
contradictory concepts: He advocates for 'cultural identity, 'return to the origins' and 'spirituality'
in the same move that he advocates for 'evolution, 'development', 'enlightenment', 'abstraction',
'plurisignification and contemporaneity'. Using the references to West-European history of
philosophy -the only philosophical references I have access to- this fusion of concepts stroke me
as being illegible. In general, one could argue that Latorre's discourse merges quite confusingly
pre-modern, modern and postmodern paradigms, which makes his political stance and
postcolonial agenda utterly unclear and ineffective. Nonetheless, a further analysis of these
apparent oppositions might help us understanding what the political and philosophical stand of
Latorre might be about. At an aesthetic level, the fusion of modernity and postmodernity is
perhaps not too problematic, if we agree with Ranciére’s argument that these two epochs define
Art on the criteria of its autonomy or capacity to create an alternative to the common experience
of everyday life. Similarly, the concepts of spirituality and transcendentalist can be said to have
room within the poststructural scepticism towards the logic of language and the ultimate power
of human reason. Hence, Latorre's allusion to 'plural signification' and 'transcendentality' in the
same paragraph might be less incoherent that it seems, even if poststructural transcendentality
should be more affine to polytheism than to the meta-narrative of monotheism. In this sense,
Latorre's recurrent reference to 'GOD' seems again to be confusing.
Now, concerning the figure of the dancer-shaman, I see in Latorre's approach an
identification with certain aspects of Western post-secular societies, where an increased
awareness of the materiality and finitude of the human condition sometimes provokes an
anxious desire for the infinite and the incomprehensible. This tendency can be instantiated by

109
Ibid.
110
Ibid.
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Jean Francois Lyotard's revival of the concept of 'the sublime'111 and its inclusion in the
postmodern discourse. Considering all this, it makes sense that dance, with its dependence on
the materiality of the body, should become the site of transcendental search. In an intellectually
less sophisticated way, this post-secular tendency can be identified in New Age movements'
fascination for the ancestral heritages of traditional cultures in Asia and the Americas.
From a political point of view, Latorre's fusion of ideologies still seems to me quite
problematic. His happy synthesis of the primitive-civilized dialectical pair seems to me to be
stagnated in the dubious symbol of the shaman-dancer. In my opinion, Latorre's romantization
of the shaman and the artist fails to enact a radical resignification of the existing social order. In
his attempt to create and maintain a postcolonial stance in the midst of the inevitable and
precarious Latin-American modernity, Latorre presents a body that represents mythical
Amerindian figures, using a vocabulary that is clearly grounded on Western theatrical dance
aesthetics. By saying this, I am no advocating for a more 'authentic' return to an assumed origin
that preceded the Latin-American colonial tragedy. What I am trying to do here is rather to point
out the difficulty of reconstructing a postcolonial identity on the basis of essences and origins.
Moreover, I would like to claim that this difficulty returns us to the problem that I
discussed earlier in my analysis of Swedish artists such as Koch, Fahlin and Caprioli: the
problem of achieving a mode of pure presence in theatrical spaces. The mode of real presence,
as Egginton describes it, presupposes a non-mediated connection between spectators and
performers; a substantial space deprived from the authoritarian intrusion of language and
representation. From here, Latorre's outspoken preference for abstract art. Granted, Latorre's
work differs from its Swedish counterparts in that it searches transcendentality; that is, the
creation of a spatiotemporal unity that reaches the infinite. The ritualistic dance event is aimed
to connect performers and viewers in a time extended to the mythical origins of creation, and in
a space extended to the cosmic scale. But the substantiality of this spatiotemporal unity can be
considered to be similar to the substantiality of the finite theatrical spatiotemporal unity created
in, for example, Fahlin's work. Here, performers and spectators are supposed to share an
enhanced awareness of the very materiality of their bodies existing in a particular time and
space, transcendentality discarded.
However, in the cases of both Latorre and Fahlin, the intrusion of linguistic signification
is displaced by a phenomenological mode of real presence. As I argued earlier, this mode might
be difficult to reach when our everyday reality occurs mostly in what Egginton calls a theatrical
mode; a mode that arguably characterizes Western modernity, and without which the very
definition of Art would not exist. Certainly, this artistic search to create a phenomenological
experience of presence can be understood in different ways. One way is to see it as a reflection
of a desire of the epoch, a desperate longing for something that humans believe to have lost in
111
Lyotard, Francois (1991 ) Lesons sur l'analityque du sublime. France: Editions Galilée.
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their process of modernization, with its domination of language and representation over the
direct experience of the living body. Another option is to see this search as an act of resistance,
an attempt to 'redistribute the sensible' or shake the basis of the prevalent social order, which is
arguably submitted to the authority of rationality and its expression in language. In any case, the
difficulty of achieving presence remains. In Latorre's case, this difficulty consists in presenting
a ritualistic act in a theatrical format; or put in another way, in recreating a mode of presence
within a space that is historically emblematic of the theatrical mode of modern societies.
The choreographer resolves the mythical-urban contradiction through the symbol of the
shaman-dancer, and the question is left open whether dancers and viewers experience this figure
as a real shaman with magical powers, or as a theatrical representation of a shaman. Returning
to Egginton's theory of theatricality, it could be argued that whilst theatricality might not be
completely abolished, sporadic irruptions of real presence might occur in the theatrical space.
Therefore, one could claim that it is precisely that irruptive dynamic which constitutes the
political potential of Latorre's work. In this sense, Latorre could also be discussed as a case of a
'dance politics of presence'. Finally, and taking into account the reasoning exposed above, I
would like to suggest that Latorre's work responds to a necessity of our time, which philosopher
Creston Davis illustrates in his contention that:

The return to the theological in our time may be a call, once again, to strike a balance between
reason and myth, between belief and faith, between political struggle and the secular state, and between
the divine and the human. But the attempt to strike such a balance between reason and faith has proved a
very difficult business. How does one proceed? The question of striking balance is always a question of
mediation -it is, as Hegel reminds us, always a question of relation. We must therefore seek a way of
relating two terms that were for centuries posed in opposition to each other. 112

My second example is Leyla Castillo, a dancer with a Master in Literature that led her to
develop a frame to 'read the body in the narrative'. In line with her interest for literature, Castillo
has been working with companies that use narratives as points of departure for their artistic
creation. In this sense, this artist illustrates a quite different dance tendency in Colombia. One of
the companies she has danced with has an outspoken international profile, including dancers
from Spain, Sweden, Poland and Colombia. The company is called L'Explose and its director,
Tino Fernández, is from Spain. The works of this company are often related to the European
aesthetics of dance theatre, and the themes they deal with are often related to the emotional
journeys of individuals dealing with human relations. Nonetheless, L'Explose has not been the
exception, and the violence in Colombia has more than once been the main referent of their
productions. But in spite of this 'internationalizing' professional experience, Castillo has a
conception of dance that reveals close links to her predecessors. When asked about her present
artistic concerns, Castillo says
112
Zizek, Slavoj; Milbank, John and Davis, Creston (2009). The monstrosity of Christ: paradox or
dialectic?. Massachusetts: Massachussetts Institute of Technology Press. P.p. 5,6
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This is a more of an ethical reflection about our dance. Not a Colombian dance, but a dance from
the body we are, from the techniques that that body would develop, from the cultural knowledge that
would deserve a place. (My trans.)113

Castillo is involved in a project with the Ministry of Culture, which offers dance diploma
courses in the Afro-Colombian regions. The idea is to give an academic recognition to the
cultural knowledge existing in those regions, and to develop a research about Afro-
contemporary dance techniques. Castillo has been pedagogue for many years, and she expresses
the importance of dance as follows

Thinking in a culture like the one of this country...by constructing new values of the body we can
become better human beings, especially in a country where the first target of violence is the body: we
rape, we mutilate, we kidnap (...) The important is not to educate in dance, but to educate from dance. I
like working from dance in the Universities...I wonder what dance has to contribute to education and the
human being. (My trans)114

Castillo's belief in a pedagogy which focuses on the revaluation of the body as a way
towards social transformation connects her with Restrepo, and her engagement in the research,
academic acknowledgement and development of Afro-Colombian dance connects her with all
the pioneers of the 'first generation'. As a contrast to them, however, this artists points out the
need to construct a dance identity that differs from the nationalistic discourse that supports the
notion of Colombia -alas, it is very unclear who are supposed to be included when she says 'the
body we are'. Practically, Castillo seems to come to a familiar conclusion: whatever it is meant
by 'Colombian identity' or the like, the Afro-Colombian culture must be a crucial element of it.
Once again, the persisting concern for cultural identity has postcolonial undertones, but it seems
to me that the unproblematic identification of Colombian identity with Afro-Colombianity
reflects certain stagnation in the postcolonial discourse of Colombian dancers. Finally, arguing
that the devaluation the body is a cause rather than a consequence of the serious political
problems of the country seems to me to be painfully blind. The difficult question that arises at
this point is: if dancers do not deal directly with political issues, can they still be political with
their practice? My tempting answer is 'yes', and even if I find Castillo's discourse politically
weak, I do not underestimate the transformative power that her pedagogical approach might
have as way to resignify through the practice of dance.
Raul Parra is my last example from the 'second generation'. After having danced in
Colombia for many years, Parra went to Paris and studied movements analysis, dance history
and composition. At the moment, Parra is working at the Superior Academy of Arts of Bogotá.
Interestingly enough, Parra does not see folklore, cultural identity or Colombia's social crisis as
a central aspect of his artistic search. Moreover, when asked if he thinks that there is a
113
Roa, Margarita and Lagos, Andrés together with the CEC (2007). Historia de la Danza
Contemporánea Colombiana. Bogotá: unpublished.
114
Ibid.
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Colombian style of contemporary dance, Parra answers negatively. As I see it, Parra has a
typically deconstructivist approach to his artistic process. Rather than departing from meaning
or content, he plays with different ways of structuring movement, letting any possible meaning
derive from it. Significantly, Parra has introduced in Colombia the use of the choreography
computer program Lifeforms, which was designed by Merce Cunningham during his
postmodern artistic adventures. In general, Parra seems to me to take distance from the aesthetic
and ethic concerns of Restrepo, Latorre, Castillo and most of the 'dance pioneers' of HDCC.
Now, what I find most intriguing in Parra's case is that, despite his overtly postmodern
attitude towards dance, this artist is leading a research called Body Memories: Masters of Dance
in Colombia. The research is an initiative of the Colombian Ministry of Culture, and it focuses
on six pioneers of dance. The central issues of investigation are their socio-cultural contexts,
their work and the way in which their legacy is inscribed and transformed in the bodies of the
dancers of today. In this way, Parra returns to the recurring concern about history and cultural
memory. At this point, it is inevitable for me to start thinking that it is hardly possible for
Colombian contemporary dancers to avoid relating their work to cultural identity. As the case of
Parra suggests, this can be partly explained by the fact that from the times of Jaramillo, the
Ministry of Culture has been supporting artistic research revolving around this issue. From here,
one can wonder whether such a concern for memory and cultural identity serves the power
discourse of nationalism or the political concerns of postcolonial resistance. Alternatively, one
can deduce that nationalistic and postcolonial interests tend to melt into the discourses of most
contemporary dancers in Colombia, running the risk of generating theoretical confusion and
perhaps a politically ineffective artistic production. Finally, and in spite of the observations
above, Parra seems to me to mark a transition from a strong believe in the transcendentality of
dance and in the body as a site of ethical values, towards a postmodern view of dance that is
tightly connected to the globalizing currents of European poststructuralism.

HDCC: The Third Generation

In order to discuss the ‘third generation’, I will return to Danza Común
and introduce Cortocinesis. Bella Luz Gutiérrez, co-founder and member of
Danza Común, summarizes the group's approach to training roughly like
this: it started with modern techniques taught by the pioneers of the first
and second generations, continued with a modern ballet technique taught
by a Swiss teacher, and consists today of postmodern techniques, mainly
improvisational approaches to training and creation. When asked about the
difference between these styles, Gutiérrez says

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An important difference is that Graham and modern ballet focus on the body;
all the attention is directed towards the development of body skills. The new dance,
as I see it, has a vision of the body that goes beyond its physical structure. The
body is seen as one more element of dance, and when you are training you cannot
only pay attention to your own body. You need to pay attention to the space, to the
other bodies. There are ways of training that focus on the activation of the senses
so that the body can react, be affected...other elements apart from the body can
generate new dance experiences. (My trans.)115

Gutiérrez sees in improvisation and ' the new dance' a way for the
individual to acquire a collective consciousness, which in turn can generate
a new way of existing as an individual. In my view, this redefinition of
individuality and dance within a collective experience might be the aspect
with most political potential in Danza Común. The concern for collectivity
pervades not only Danza Común's internal policies, creative processes and
activities, but to a certain extent it also pervades the life style and political
opinions of its members. Talking about Campo Muerto, Gutiérrez explains
that the collective research about the violence in Colombia: 'was very
interesting because it put us all in the same 'emotional frequency'116. From
that collective state, the performers improvised and the themes emerged
from the 'affected bodies'. When asked to mention a particular aspect that
characterizes Danza Común's works, Gutiérrez says that

Something characteristic... is that we like the bodies to be on stage as they

are in everyday life...we do not want dance to portray the role of the dancer, we
want to show ourselves...Perhaps it is interesting to be transformed on stage but
from myself, not in a theatrical manner. (My trans.)117

Considering this comment, Danza Común's works could be analysed as

cases of 'a dance aesthetics of the political third'. Indeed, it seems logical to
claim that by presenting dancers as 'normal' people instead of theatrical
characters, Danza Común's works aim to create a space of equality where
viewers and performers can feel part of the same community. In this case,
one important difference between Danza Común and its Swedish
counterparts would probably be that the former's productions tend to
revolve around rather specific topics, which following their predecessors,
include direct allusions to ' cultural identity' and current social issues.
Finally, I would say that Danza Común has its greatest political potential in
its conception of collectivity as the core of their work. Returning to Butler's

115
Ibid.
116
Ibid. (My trans.)
117
Ibid.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

thoughts about the political implications of grieving118, I would say that if

Danza Común's members took their approach with certain radicalism, their
work could lead to a forceful resignification of the 'I', and a political
revaluation of the human condition of interdependency and vulnerability.
My last case is Cortosinesis, a company founded in Bogotá 2002 by Angela Bello, Olga
Bello and Vladimir Rodríquez. When referring to the group's purpose, A. Bello states that

We do not want to tell anything or talk about anything specific. Obviously, we

are surrounded by a context, and this makes that what is produced talks by itself.
(My trans.)119

A. Bello emphasises that

Some press reviews have commented on... Cortocinesis' physical and

kinaesthetic intelligence... through the interaction and connection among dancers...
generating hidden networks...(My trans.)120

Then she adds that one aspect that identifies the group is its research on training, which has
given birth to a technique that they call Piso Móvil -Mobile Floor in English- and which is

...a search on the tangible of movement and with this, the return to body itself...its motricity, its
joints, its blood circulation, its muscles, etc. (y trans.)121

O. Bello complements

...from the body it emerges a diversity of knowledge, which after having been executed, one has to
analyse, always. It is this coming and going from body to word and from word to body, this analysis of
the action, where we have found what we have found. (My trans.)122

Concerning the creative process, A.Bello claims

We always use improvisation based on very physical tasks...no so conceptual...giving more

relevance to the movement, from where there can emerge emotions...dramaturgy comes later and by
chance...dramaturgy and narrative are never points of departure. (My trans.)123

O. Bello studied traditional dances from the Andes with dance pioneer Jacinto Jaramillo,
who was one of the first in Colombia to integrate folkloric dances and the new languages of
modern dance. O.Bello claims that Jaramillo’s' technique has influenced her teaching at the
Superior Academy of Arts. A.Bello says that Cortocinesis has done research on Break Dance in

118
Butler, Judit (2004) Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso
119
Roa, Margarita and Lagos, Andrés and the CEC (2007).
120
Ibid.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid.
123
Ibid.
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 Sara Regina Fonseca

Colombia, and that the group has a special interest in this form. Asked about Cortocinesis'
political approach, O.Bello says that

In this historical moment, the ways to present your political position are not like they were in other
times. Break Dance does not need a script, because it is in itself a natural political act. Then,
contemporary dance should learn a lot from these political acts expressed in an open and natural way.
This is what we lack, because in Colombia we think about the political act as a pamphlet. I think this is a
problem. (My trans.)124

Concerning the same question O. Bello adds

Why should not it be political enough the fact of altering the order of the factors, so that it is not
the emotions that which give rise to the choreographic but it is the movement itself? The master, the one
who knows and leads the spirit of the work is no longer the choreographer. It is the whole
collective...Everyone contributes with their ideas. This is the biggest political act. (My trans.)125

Finally, asked about the task of the dancers, O.Bello reflects

There is responsibility from the practitioners /.../ it is to inform themselves, question themselves,
search for new languages. There is a question, which is latent: Why does one see that there are groups
doing their contemporary practices with pre-modern methodologies? To which extent are we being
contemporary? (My trans.)126

Let me make some observations. The third generation of Colombian contemporary

dancers, which are represented here by Danza Común and Cortocinesis, conceive collective
creation and improvisation as core aspects of their work. These aspects do not only define the
artistic research of these groups, but they also define an ethical position. Within their social
circles, Danza Común and Cortocinesis implement a sense of collectivity based on a non-
authoritarian and highly participative interaction between individuals. More, as the quotes above
show, some of the dancers see their collective way of working as a political act. Given the
comparative character of this essay, I should mention here that this explicit belief in collectivity
as a political statement characterizes several groups belonging to the Swedish contemporary
dance generation that would be equivalent to the third generation in Colombia. Live-Konst
Kollektive Melo, Diggapony Collaborations and Öfa Kollektivet are examples of this tendency.
From a global perspective, Cortocinesis' focus on the materiality of the body, its
movement possibilities and its relations to time, space and other bodies can be seen as a sign of
the group's inscription into the poststructural currents of though that deny any original truth
existing beyond the workings of language. It is not by chance that Swedish reviewers refer to
Koch's work as 'offering concealed, secretly organized chaos', at the same time as Colombian
reviewers refer to Cortocinesis' work as 'generating hidden networks'. Neither is it by chance
that theatricality and narrative are seen with certain suspicion by the same generation of
contemporary dancers in both countries. Now, all this places the Colombian third generation of
124
Ibid.
125
Ibid.
126
Ibid.
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dancers at a distance from their predecessors' attempt to return to the transcendentality of the
sacred body as a strategy to transform the prevalent social values that legitimate violence.
There are, however, some difference between Danza Común and Cortocinesis. Whilst
Gutiérrez emphasises the concept of the affected body, O.Bello emphasises the body's
physicality as a point of departure. In Danza Común, the performer's body is consciously
prepared to be affected not only by the immediate physical space, but also, and perhaps most
importantly, by the socio-cultural context. This is how the memories of the city of Bogotá and
the memories of the massacres in Colombia can work as a sort of partners that affect and are
affected by the performer's bodies. As a result, the body is conceived as the site where history is
inscribed, and also as a site where a conscious revision of that history can be experienced. In
other words, the body is seen as both a receptor and a generator of history. In the case of
Cortosinesis, it is assumed that the body is influenced by the surrounding context, but the group
does not consciously take this influence into consideration.
It seems to me that Cortocinesis sees the physicality of the body as a kind of original
place where one should want to return, emphasising that there is a political act in altering the
traditional order where emotion comes first and movement comes after, and where emotions are
favoured over the body's physical reality. It is not clear to me why altering these factors can be a
political act in itself, apart from the very general argument that focusing on the materiality of
movement supports the well known battle against the 'metaphysics of presence'. In my opinion,
Bello assumes unproblematically a kind of purity in the materiality of the body and its
movement. When she says that 'Break Dance does not need a script, because it is in itself a
natural political act', she seems to me to fall into several contradictions. The most obvious one is
the theoretical contradiction implicit in the notion of a 'natural political act'. As it is known
within critical theory, the notion of nature is at odds with the notion of political agency; in the
sense that what is determined by nature cannot be transformed by human beings. Butler has
pushed this argument further than many other scholars when asserting that sex, as well as
gender, is culturally constructed.127 In this sense, the 'very materiality of the body' is always
inscribed by power relations; it is always a cultural product that should be looked at critically.
From this perspective, it seems difficult to understand how the way break dancers move
can be 'natural'. It might be the case that what Bello means is that the resistance of break
dancers is spontaneously embodied instead of being intellectualized and verbalized, which is a
dubious statement. Moreover, it is obvious that Hip-Hop culture has become a global symbol of
political resistance and political denounce, a form that Bello explicitly condemns. Now,
believing that break dance is a 'natural political act' has led Cortocinesis to use break dance
movements in their work, assuming that these movements will spontaneously enact a political
act when being executed by the company's performers. The important transformations that occur
127
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge
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in the transference from the streets to the theatre are dismissed. Added to this, Cortocinesis does
not seem to regard the fact that Hip-Hop culture is by now virtually devoured by the massive
industry of entertainment. In general, I believe that the conviction that the body's physicality can
be a natural political act renders Cortocinesis' approach perfectly apolitical.
Let me now make some comments on the issue of theatricality. When Bello says that
'Break dance does not need a script', she uses 'script' as a metonymy of theatricality and the
toxic intervention of language and representation; an intervention that Cortocinesis' members, as
well as most of the dancers discussed in this essay, seemingly want to avoid. Once more, I am
surprised by the way in which this rejection to theatricality permeates most of the discourses of
experimental dancers, even when in practice the same dancers continue to use theatrical frames
and even conventional theatrical devices. In the case of Cortocinesis, the explicit rejection to
theatricality is disturbingly confusing, taking into consideration that the costumes, texts, scenery
and even the very physical actions used in the productions refer rather often to what could be
perceived as an absurd or deconstructed reality128. Surely, departing from physicality rather
than from emotions, stories or concepts might transform the creative process and open
possibilities for greater exploration. The same procedure, however, does not guarantee that
physicality is originally independent from linguistic representation, or that the audience will
experience the event without recurring at all to the mediation of language.
At this point, I would like to reiterate my contention that encouraging a dynamic and
confrontative interpretation of representations might have more political potential than
attempting to avoid representation at all. This, to the extent that only a continuous practice of
critical interpretation can allow us to identify the hidden workings of power, which by means of
performativity shape what we see as being natural, casual, spontaneous, neutral and so on.
Therefore, my political position consists in advocating for theatricality in the scenic arts, where
performativity is acknowledged both as a power which society exerts on the body, and as a
power that the body can exert on society by means of linguistic resignification. Finally, I would
like to add that in the case of Colombia and its apparent need for a postcolonial position, the
notion of 'contemporaneity' should be considered with critical scepticism. Judging by her words,
Bello seems to conceive contemporaneity in dance as a series of choreographic methodologies
belonging to the postmodern artistic paradigm that succeeded the modern and pre-modern
paradigms of art. The danger I see here is that Colombian artists validate their work on the
premises that it follows the West European and North American cannons of art and dance.
As I see it, the question, 'Are we being contemporary?' is misleading. Instead, I would
suggest that Colombian artists try to clarify certain theoretical confusions thereby asking
questions such as: Whom do we mean by ‘we’? What are the workings of power in our society?,

128
Look for example at the work Papayanoquieroserpapaya using the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVIPt1Y8yDY&feature=related
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What do we want to change, reclaim or signify?, and What is the place of the body in all this?
Ironically, the strategy I have tried to suggest is succinctly articulated by Bello, when she
describes the creative process as 'coming and going from body to word and from word to body'.

CHAPTER VIII: CONCLUSION

In this essay, I have tried to trace some tendencies and approaches in the contemporary
dance scenes of Sweden and Colombia, focusing on the political potential of their practices and
their discourses on issues such as language, aesthetics, politics, identity and history in relation to
dance. With the exception of two student performances, I have chosen examples which are
somehow equivalent representatives of professional dance practice in each national context, and
which are considered to be at the front of experimentation within the field of artistic dance.
Needless to say, my choices exclude a great number of cases, some of which could certainly
problematize my generalizations and give new input for more analyses and counter-arguments.
In this sense, I believe that this document can serve as a point of departure for further
discussions.
From my comparative analysis, I have drawn the following conclusions:
- Student’s feministic performance in Sweden and Colombia make use of denunciation.
In Sweden this denunciation is mostly related to a general social conception of female beauty,
whilst in Colombia it is connected to segregation in connections to ethnicity and class.
-Professional experimental dance in Sweden tends to favour non-representative and non-
theatrical approaches to dance, both in their discourses and practices.
− Discourses on experimental dance in Colombia emphasize the body's physicality and its
sensorial receptivity as the core of dance. Theatricality and representation are dismissed.
− With some important exceptions, experimental dance in Sweden does not refer to
specific social issues, but it focus on the exploration of the intrinsic aspects of performance.
− In most cases, contemporary dance practices and discourses in Colombia refer to the
socio-political situation of the country and to the issue of cultural identity. In this sense, the
outspoken anti-theatrical approach is somehow compromised as the works attempt to re-create
situations, memories, persons, emotions and even stories that exist outside the scenic space.
Concerning the politics or dance in Sweden and Colombia these are my conclusions:
− In Sweden, the politics of a modernistic autonomous form prevails in the discourses and
practices of theatrical dance, where the resistance consists in rejecting the logics of language
and, thereby, the logics of society.

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− In Colombia, the postmodern discourses and aesthetics of dance are fused with
postcolonial interests, as well as with concerns about social commitment and cultural identity.
− Among Swedish dancers, the notions of 'nationality' and 'history' are approached with a
critical perspective, and the political potential of art is seen with ironical suspicion.
− In Colombia, the notions of cultural and national identity are treated as relevant issues
in the more or less implicit postcolonial struggle, and the relevance of dance for the positive
transformation of society is a recurrent belief among dancers.
My own arguments about these political approaches can be summarized as follows:
− First of all, I believe that the anti-theatrical approaches of both Swedish and Colombian
dancers are problematic, in the face of the difficulty of annulling the spectator's tendency and
will to interpret, as well as the historical connotations of the theatrical space. Moreover, I am
sceptical towards the political potential of these approaches, particularly when a deliberate
isolation from 'society' is pursued, like it is the case in much Swedish contemporary dance. As I
have tried to show, the aesthetic realm and the autonomy of its forms are already dependent on
the social structures and logics within which they are produced. Ignoring this fact renders these
aesthetic forms perfectly apolitical.
− Second, the dance approaches that do refer to social issues, and particularly to cultural
identity have their own troubles. In the case of Colombian contemporary dance, these
approaches run the risk of uncritically assuming notions such as 'origin', 'tradition' and 'folklore',
thereby rendering their postcolonial discourses somehow superfluous and ineffective. Moreover,
my analysis of the history of Colombian contemporary dance leads me to conclude that there is
a confusing fusion of discourses on national identity, cultural diversity and postcolonial
struggle; which makes it difficult to determine whether these discourses serve the power of the
State or the postcolonial resistance with which many dancers feel sympathetic.
− Third, I see a political potential in a seemingly growing interest for 'collectivity' among
Colombian and Swedish dancers. I believe that a more radical and critical approach to
collectivity could lead towards a political appropriation of the notions of 'individual/subject',
'society' and 'interdependency'.
− Finally, my contention is that the anti-theatrical attitude revealed in the discourses of
most contemporary dancers in both countries misses an important point: The potential that a
critical and participative approach to interpretation has, in the process of disclosing
performativity, or the way in which our assumptions about reality inevitable imply certain
exclusions and oppressions. In the face of the power of language, which most experimental
dancers are aware of, it seems to me that the most effective political option consists in
consciously dealing with this power, rather than in denying its pervasive operations of
domination. On these bases, I advocate for an approach to performance that maximizes the

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political potential of theatricality, thereby encouraging artists and spectators to articulate their
interpretations and participate in a constructive confrontation of readings that can lead to
eventual resignifications of reality. From this political perspective, I believe that rather than
treating it as a common phenomenological experience or as an authoritative deliverer of values;
the performance or dance event could be treated as what Ranciére calls 'a third referent'; that is,
as an external element against which dancers and spectators can equally try and share their
different interpretations.

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 Sara Regina Fonseca

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Zizek, Slavoj; Milbank, John and Davis, Creston (2009). The monstrosity of Christ: paradox or
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Danstidningen: http://www.danstidningen.se/index.php?pageId=11&subId=74

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Web Social Networks

Alien Dance Company Facebook Profile: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?

gid=190308211116

DanzAzul in Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXk7KcNS7Kw

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Unpublished Documents

Roa, Margarita and Lagos, Andrés together with the CEC (2007). Historia de la Danza
Contemporánea Colombiana. Bogotá: unpublished.

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