Dance ReMade and RePresented

Within the field of dance, people talk of the revival of past works, they speak of reproduction (from film/video/dvd), of reconstruction/reconstitution, of recreation (using the original music and idea), of restaging and of reworking (Hutchinson–Guest 2000, 65-66). These terms may be used loosely or with great precision. Angela Kane, for example, distinguishes between the revival of works by American choreographer Paul Taylor for his own group of dancers and the restaging of the same works for other dance companies (Kane 2000,72). Within dance (1), the term 'remake' does not enjoy the same currency as in film studies, which seems to have appropriated it and given it a peculiarly cinematic twist (Verevis 2004). The 'remake' in relation to film usually implies a deviation from the 'original', sometimes with the implicit charge of being a poor copy.

However, the term 'remake' would seem to be a useful one, when talking of dance, not only as a broader umbrella term for all the reconstruction activities mentioned above but also, more narrowly, as a term to refer specifically to the outcome of a choreographer’s creative reworking of his own work. The postmodern practice of re-presenting ballet classics, such as Swan Lake or Giselle, is often described as 'reworking', its purpose being that of enabling a different take on these well-known dances. In this sense, the 'reworking' overlaps with the 'remaking', though 'reworking' retains the subversive sense of ironic inversion of the source.

In its broader sense, the remaking of a dance performance can be, and undoubtedly most of the time is, an outcome of its process of documentation and recording. Or, likewise, as some people would prefer to say, the the remking can be the 'reconstruction' or the 'recreation' of a more or less distant 'original', identified with the live performance of a first version of the work, to be accomplished through interpreting the performance record. Thus the relationship of the remake with the work that has been remade seems to be cast, unambiguously, in terms of an 'original' and its 'copy' even when people are discussing dance, rather than films.

It is indeed the case that within the field of dance, any discussion of reconstruction, revival etc. is underpinned by “assumptions (implicit and explicit) regarding authenticity, reproducibility and interpretivity” (Thomas 2004,39). Achieving faithfulness of reproduction in constructing a dance heritage and assigning a fixed identity to choreographic works (and dance forms) in an effort to preserve their authenticity, often through projects of suture, is as aleatory a concern as ever and one which the radical dance reworkings/remakings of the past couple of decades have indeed questioned and troubled. But these assumptions are widespread and affect the re-presentation process.

A dance remake is underpinned by the notions of 'memory' and its 'traces', but this is not the same as saying that there is an 'original' which is being reproduced, with an assumption of greater or lesser faithfulness to it. A remake need not be judged solely in terms of its relationship of faithfulness to an 'original', invoking the creator’s aura while bestowing the hallmark of authenticity of reproduction to the 'copy' (cfr. Thomas 2004, 129; Benjamin 1989). A dance performance remake stands in its own right as the primary means of performance re-presentation, regardless of how faithfully the remaking relates to any documented and archived previous version – leaving aside any consideration of what achieving this 'faithfulness' might imply.

My intention, in the foregoing discussion and the one which follows, is to highlight the significance that accrues to the remaking of a dance, for a better understanding of the process of representation and re-presentation of a choreographic work. The case study presented in this chapter is framed by these concerns and is a complex instantiation of the artefactual trace of the referents the work evokes. Throughout its discussion I will use the term 'remake' in its narrower acception of dance work re-choreographed by its maker. The work under scrutiny was created by the same choreographer who, in citing an earlier work of his, represented and re-presented it, working with memory - his own embodied one but also the visual memory of the audience - and working with the notion of trace (of movements, of choreographic ideas etc) and its suggestive power, which he consciously manipulated while creating his new work.

In some ways, this chapter is a companion to my essay “Rock Corridor: Buddhism with a contemporary Javanese inflection through a site specific performance in Tokyo” (Lopez y Royo 2005), in which I problematise the relationship between a site specific performance at the Sogetsu Kaikan and its mediatization, through a video-recording. That work, together with the ones discussed in this chapter, Plastic Jungle 1983 and 2004, is by Sardono W. Kusumo. In Rock Corridor I dealt with the issue of 'translation' of a choreography across cultural boundaries and through a different medium, the recording; here I intend to look at a remake of a work first presented in 1983 and re-choreographed in 2004, looking at the lingering traces of the older version, overwritten by the newer one, like a palimpsest, in audiences’memories and expectations, and critics’evaluation.

Sardono W. Kusumo and dance performance in Indonesia

It will be useful to give some background to both works and their maker.

Sardono W. Kusumo is one of the major choreographers of contemporary Indonesian dance (2) . This statement alone may conjure up images of spurious fusion work to those who believe that contemporary dance work in Asia is a western import, consisting of second-rate imitative forms. Yet this could not be further from the truth.

Born in Solo in 1945, Sardono trained in the alusan (refined) style of Solonese court dance. In an article he wrote in 2001 (3), he recalls that his initiation into dance occurred via pencak silat, an Indonesian martial art. I am here quoting Sardono at some length to convey his wit and humour:

When I was eight years old, the age known in Javanese as windu, my father invited one of his friends, called Raden Ngabehi Kridosoekatgo. He was an expert in the traditional martial art known as silat, who was in service at the Surakarta kraton or palace, and had been asked to teach me silat . . . Three years after I first started to learn silat, my teacher told me it would be a good idea for me to learn dance, as in his opinion "dance is a higher form of silat . . ." The words uttered by my silat teacher are truly poetic. "If you learn silat, you will be able to paralyze the attack of the enemy. But with dance, you can paralyze your aggressive intentions before the attack has chanced to appear." The aim of dance movements subsequently is to soften or refine the feelings. …when I went to the late Raden Ngabehi Atmokesowo at that time, he at once set limits, that I may only dance the refined dance style, alusan, or the refined dance characters from the Mahabarata and Ramayana epics. (Sardono 2002)

But life was to prove that Sardono’s career path was not that of an alusan dancer:

In 1961, when the Ramayana Prambanan was first proclaimed, my teacher Kusumo Kesowo was once again given the honour of acting as the central figure in the creative process. During the preparations and rehearsals, everyone in Solo, including the princes, was sure that I would be given the role of Rama as I was the only young alusan dancer in Kusumo Kesowo's school. Throughout the city of Solo, I was the only person known as an alusan dancer, apart from S. Maridi, who was already senior and for that reason was no longer appropriate as a dancer. However, outside everyone's expectations, the Ramayana committee had another candidate, someone who had not long been studying dance, especially for a role of alus dance . . . There is one special event I will never forget, when one evening my teacher Kusumo Kesowo summoned me to his house. What was unusual was he called me very late at night, around 1.30 in the morning, and what was also unusual was that he called me to his bedroom and asked me to sit cross-legged face to face with him on the bed. After a long time of quiet, almost as if meditating, he began to speak: "As usual, for important or serious (wigati) matters in the process of creating a dance, I always consult with my elders and especially, (he paused quite some time) sampeyan ndalem kaping sedoso (meaning Paku Buwono X, who was long deceased). In this spiritual encounter, I was told that the person appropriate for dancing Hanuman is none other than yourself." . . . The night felt even lonelier when my teacher finished talking and closed his eyes once again . . . My teacher, who had always forbidden me to dance gagah or kasar dance, and had created me so as never to come into contact with the world of dance outside his own school, had suddenly thrown me into a strange situation . . . I, who had already become a prima donna, had to go back to being a beginner.

Photo: A palace dance practice in Solo, in the female refined mode of dancing

Thrown into this almost impossible situation, what did Sardono do? He continues:

From the point of view of dance technique, the Solo style monkey dance is very poor. The son of Kusumo Kesowo, who was known only as a teacher for junior and senior school children, taught me a number of movements which, due to the lack of variety in the Solo monkey dance, he combined with a few Yogya style movements. Of course because I had already experienced the perfection and intensity of alusan style, the movements of this new style felt perfunctory and easy. But no-one cared at the time, as the main focus was how to transfer the srimpi and bedhaya (4) styles to become a large ensemble on a spectacular stage measuring 40 x 13 meters, or to transfer the Bondoyudo to become a huge dance with a large ensemble of monkeys. These feelings of loneliness and indifference encouraged me in a strange place without a master, without norms and without format. The result of this was that there was no Hanuman dance, only Sardono. (Sardono 2002).

And so the journey began. A few years later, in 1965, Sardono went to New York and witnessed American modern dance. When he returned to Jakarta he began his work in earnest, through workshops at Taman Ismail Marzuki Art Centre. He did not teach any western dance technique but allowed participants to work with their own, drawn from a variety of Indonesian dances. In his choreographic work he began to extend the limits of existing conventions, incorporating for example, bedhaya, langendriyan and wayang wong in one work, and retaining a narrative line. He also began experimenting with movement:

In 1969 my first work Samgita was thought by Solo society to be so controversial that the audience threw rotten eggs onto the stage. The work was inspired by the Prambanan reliefs. They got angry because I had asked the female dancers to raise their legs as high as in the reliefs (5).

In 1972 Sardono went to Bali, with a group of Javanese dancers and began to work with the low-caste village community of Teges Kanginan, in Peliatan, exploring the potential of kecak dancing (6). Kecak is a form of Balinese dance, created by Walter Spies (7) in the 1930s, but based on older ritual practices. It involves a chorus of men rhythmically chanting kecak, cak, cak while a central person in a state of trance communicates with a god or ancestor through dance (Dibia 1996).

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Viewkecak.mp4 Kecak, Bali Arts Centre, August 2002 * MP4 File 4.5mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)

The local authorities,however, banned the performance of Sardono’s kecak as they felt it went “against Balinese religion.” But in 1974 following his very successful performance at the festival of Nancy in France, Sardono returned to Bali and created The Sorceress of Dirah, later made into a film, which combines Javanese and Balinese theatre with music, dance and shadow play.

In the late 1970s Sardono began to work with the Dayak tribes of East Kalimantan and in Irian Jaya, among the Asmat and the Dani. He writes:

When dancing, the Asmat people produce more expression from their own voices than from the musical instruments. I spent the first few days intensively imitating their singing. But later I became more interested in how they produced the volume and connection with movement, and the type of sound produced rather than the melody . . . In my boredom, I continually trained my voice, wailing in the quietness of the forest. This wailing reminded me of the way in which wolves or wild dogs wail long and soft, as if the sound is coming from their stomachs. The Asmat people not only wail when they are dancing but also sometimes while they sleep . . . What is clear is that it is not simply a way of singing to express feelings or emotions but more an instinct for survival. It is closer to the need to breathe in a different way. Maybe there are ways of breathing that are important for survival and are realized in a way of producing sound. Or, this way of producing sound determines the method of breathing. The method of breathing ultimately determines the method and meaning of body movements. (Sardono 2002)

Out of his experience in the tropical rainforest and the friendship he built with the Dayaks, three works, Meta Ecology (1976), Plastic Jungle (1983) and Lamenting Forest (1987) were born. Meta Ecology was performed outdoors at the Jakarta Arts Festival. Dancers waded through mud, to create an awareness of earth and water, whereas in Plastic Jungle plastic tubes were used as pillars and the stage space was filled with plastic debris. Here the Dayaks performed. The message about pollution could not be ignored. In the third piece of this trilogy, Lamenting Forest, the Dayaks talked on stage about their forests being burnt and destroyed.

In the following decade Sardono reappraised Javanese dancing, bringing to it his outer islands experience:

I consciously learned and developed a variety of art traditions from other islands in Indonesia, including the Dayak tribe in Kalimantan tropical forest and the Asmat and Dani in the Papua Highland. Because of the movement styles of these men of the jungle, I have begun to focus on the human body as the basic material of body art which is not only rich in movement but is also a source for sound. I pay more attention to the intrinsic movement flowing in the body than to the relation between the body and objective space embodied in a geometric style. I have been teaching the dancers to create movement and sound from their own bodies simultaneously (8).

His work, already known internationally, began to be acclaimed. Mahabhuta (1988), Ramayana-ku (1990), Passage through the Gong (1993) and Opera Diponegoro (1995, reworked in 2002 to reflect more contemporary political concerns), are among his major productions of the last decade and a half.

The Sardono Dance Theatre was founded in 1973. The work of this group reflects Sardono’s ideas of what constitutes a theatrical experience:

Each of Sardono’s dance productions presents a particular set of circumstances affecting the human condition: a series of questions to address and problems to investigate. The dancers' movements therefore amount to a discourse, a special language meant to communicate ideas (9).

Sardono’s famous ‘studio’ in Kemlayan, Solo (10), is a rectangular, open sided pavilion (pendhapa) in a large compound, an old Solonese house with a beautiful garden. At the back there is a space inside a small circular building where he and his dancers practise their sound production. Most of Sardono’s choreographies have been conceived in an environment such that of his ‘studio’or even outdoors, in the nearby hills, and the movements are practised in these surroundings. When they are transferred onto a proscenium stage they still bring with them this sense of environmental awareness, of being born out of a deep and dynamic interaction with the land and landscape, involving body and sound. To Sardono the choreographic process is even more important than the outcome. Site – specificity remains a quality of his work, even when performed for several days on the proscenium stage. Each performance remains a unique event, and no performance is ever the same: the changes may be subtle, but they are noticeable.

Photo: The Kemlayan studio

The site, as a metaphor, is central to Sardono’s approach. “Site-specificity”, writes Kaye, “should be associated with an underlying concept of “site” rather than any given or particular kind of place or formal approach to site… Site-specific practices are identified here with a working over of the production, definition and performance of ‘place’ ” (Kaye 2000,3). Pearson and Shanks add: “ Site-specific performances are conceived for, mounted within and conditioned by the particulars of found spaces, existing social situations or locations, both used and disused. . . performance recontextualizes such sites… interpenetrating narratives jostle to create meanings. The multiple meanings and readings of performance and site intermingle, amending and compromising one another” (Pearson and Shanks 2001, 23).

What Sardono does matches such descriptions. Yet he goes beyond them. He disrupts and recontextualizes 'site' and 'location'; subverts and breaks boundaries; expands the range of his dancers’ bodies by asking them to take their movements to their limit and work with their body sound; grafts explicitly subversive social and political commentary onto his dance narratives; creates new metaphors, drawing from a wealth of visual stimuli and injects a contemporary meaning in the poetry of the ancients; engages his audiences intellectually and aesthetically; and does all this starting from, and returning to, the Javanese concept of dance as a way to “control fluctuating emotions, so that what appears gives an impression of a continuous flow, calm, without ripples or erratic movements or even explosions” (Sardono 2002)

Plastic Jungle 1983 and 2004

Plastic Jungle (Hutan Plastik) was choreographed in 1983 as a commentary on the forest fire in East Kalimantan (East Borneo) in the same year which destroyed 3,500,000 acres of land and threatened the lives of the Tauw Kenyah Dayaks, destroying their eco-system. Sardono had an ongoing relationship with the Tauw Kenyah. He had stayed with them in 1978, learning about their way of interacting with their environment. In 1982 he went to Tanjungmanis, in East Kalimantan with director Gotot Prakosa and journalist Seno Gumira Ajidarma to do some research on the Tauw Kenyah migration from the interior of central Borneo to Tanjungmanis, which had taken place in the 1970s. During the trip Sardono and his friends tried to retrace the Tauw’s migration route but their canoe capsized and they lost all their equipment. They returned to Jakarta and in early 1983 the forest fire broke out, caused by the logging companies and their uncontrolled tree cutting (Murgiyanto1991,319-320). Sardono has recounted the events of the trip and the shock of the fire in his autobiography of 2004.

The name given to the work, Plastic Jungle, refers to the attitude of the timber companies to whom the forest is nothing but plastic, which can be traded (Murgiyanto 1991, 401). Plastic Jungle was presented at Jakarta Arts Centre, over five days, in April 1983. The performance began with the stage in total darkness. Recorded voices of Dayak children and women working and playing by the river were then heard. Suddenly the audience was jerked into a scene of complete chaos, with women and children screaming, as the soft rains turned into thunder and a red glow enveloped the stage. A mass of plastic slowly appeared, becoming more and more visible while a dancer suggested the everyday activities of the Dayaks through his actions. The plastic began to move and soon its monstrous head became visible. Scenes from Meta Ecology were projected, showing dancers struggling to free themselves from the mud. Dayaks were seen running across the stage. The plastic, however, seemed to have a life of its own and submerged everyone, stilling the dancers. Meanwhile plastic balloons were thrown at the audience. The piece ended in complete silence (Review, Asiaweek, 24 June 1983). The piece was descriptive, but the message about ecological destruction was clearly put across. The same theme was explored through the following work made by Sardono, Lamenting Forest, prompted by the new bout of fires in 1987.

Plastic Jungle 2004 , had as its subtitle Episode I: Upaya Bersahabat Alam, which can be rendered as “ An effort to befriend nature” – a reference to the fact that this may be the beginning of a series of works, a tongue in cheek comment on what is shown in the work or the hope that what is about to be seen will urge the audience to rethink in more positive terms its relationship to the natural world. It is a reprise of the theme explored through the Meta Ecology, Plastic Jungle and Lamenting Forest trilogy but clearly transformed. It is no longer about the Dayaks and the unbalancing of their ecosystem. It is about the complete artificiality of our contemporary lives in polluted cities, and our exploitative attitudes towards the natural world. The city is the jungle, the jungle is the city. The plastic on stage is a metaphor for everything that is artificial and violates nature, and Sardono seems to suggest that this artificiality also permeates the way we think. The work has a musical score provided by Spanish based Indonesian pianist Ananda Sukarlan, who plays his own compositions but also classical pieces such as Shostakovich’s Prelude in C, op.87,n.1.

Photo: Sardono and Ananda Sukarlan

Sukarlan’s music has been carefully chosen in order to provide further nuances of artifice, in keeping with the general theme of the choreography. There are also recorded natural sounds, and a vocalisation provided by the dancers, among whom is Bambang Besur Suryono, a longstanding member of Sardono Dance Theatre and a choreographer in his own right.

Photo: Bambang Besur Suryono in his own choreography, Bedhaya Layar Cheng-Ho (2004)

Plastic, like in the 1983 version, covers the stage, lifted and moved around by the dancers, ostensibly choking them. Two characters, a man, with a costume which turns him into a tree-like being, and a woman, also completely disguised as to become an abstraction, engage in a duet which is vocal as well as danced. Their sounds are piercing. Two other characters, reminiscent of dogs, their semi-naked body covered with intricate designs, move around the piano and, at some point, one of them hangs from the piano, his legs wrapped around one of the piano legs, while the musician, dressed in a military uniform, oblivious to all, carries on playing. Images drawn from the natural world, but somehow distorted, are seen in quick succession, conjured up by the dancers’ movements and sustained by the accompanying music. Towards the end, a group of transvestites, recruited form the streets of Jakarta, join the dancers on stage, standing by the piano, dressed in their finery. Then, plastic balloons, as in the 1983 version, are thrown at the audience.

(Plastic Jungle 2004 was performed at TIM on 23rd October of the same year. The videoclips attached show scenes from a rehearsal in the month of August, while the work was still in progress. At that point in time there was no 'dog' but only an unspecified beast, and there was only one beast rather than a pair. Sardono was still working on the structure of the piece, soon after finalising the choice of music with Sukarlan. The idea of inviting transvestites to join in the performance came much later. Somewhat controversially - insensitively perhaps - Sardono used them as symbols of artificiality)

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Viewrehearsal1.mp4 Sardono and dancers in rehearsal, Plastic Jungle, August 2004 * MP4 File 3.3mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)

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Viewrehearsal2.mp4 Sardono and dancers in rehearsal, Plastic Jungle, August 2004 * MP4 File 4.1 mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)

Photo: The plastic and the piano

Photo: Dog (Courtesy: Make up artist Bernadetta "Kinting" Sri Hanjati)

Photo: Sukarlan and Dog (Courtesy: Make up artist Bernadetta "Kinting" Sri Hanjati)

Photos: Transvestites by the piano (Courtesy: Seni Solo)

The two works are undoubtedly different and can be treated as two perfectly self contained, unrelated performances. Plastic Jungle 2004 seems to be as distant as could be from its purported 'original': it is a mature work, conceived at a later phase in Sardono’s career and articulating broader socio-political concerns; yet it retains a conscious relationship with Plastic Jungle 1983, evident in the name, in the props used, in the reiteration of certain choreographic devices and in the amplification and transformation of its central idea, the plastic jungle. The reduplication, not just of the title – yet transformed by the addition of the subtitle – but also of the structure, revolving around the tubular plastic prop, which the dancers manipulate and appear to be overwhelmed by, and of specific actions, such as the audience being hit by large, inflatable balls, suggest that the 2004 work is a remake of the 1983 choreography, which allows it to continue to exist within it. The meaning of the earlier content is expanded and renewed in the later one, without being overridden, and the two experiences are reconnected. Plastic Jungle 2004 overwrites Plastic Jungle 1983 and palimpsest-like, it reveals the traces of the older version.

Plastic Jungle 2004 is thus equivalent to a literary re-write, a revision or recontextualization of a text by its author (cfr . Ben-Porat 2003,4-5) (11) . The motivation for the re-choreographing - the re-write – is not to achieve an improvement of the first choreography nor does the audience need, necessarily, to be familiar with Plastic Jungle 1983 in order to understand and appreciate the work. But Plastic Jungle 1983, whether previously seen or unseen by the audience of Plastic Jungle 2004 remains a reference point, a liminal trace in the collective memory of the spectators – and the constant references to it in critics’ writings is symptomatic of this condition. Memories of the earlier choreography are evoked in the viewer by traces, so that as one watches Plastic Jungle 2004, one also privately re-imagines, in fragments, Plastic Jungle 1983, regardless of how intimately that earlier work is known.

The two works stand as in a haibun/haiku (12) relationship to one another – not an inappropriate simile, as Sardono has had a long standing work relationship with Japanese artists. The 1983 work is a concise descriptive and meaningful account of the journey into Dayak land; the 2004 version, like a haiku, moves poetically beyond it and yet reiterates it. Plastic Jungle 2004 is positioned in what Eco calls an 'intertextual dialogue' with Plastic Jungle 1983 (and in fact, with all the three works of the trilogy). Sardono puts the trilogy and the 2004 work in a dialogic relationship with each other and engages in a parallel dialogue with his past audiences and the audiences of today. The re-presentation of the earlier work is achieved through its representation (accomplished through the citations) and recontextualisation in the newer one. It is a representation which, as Crimp notes, takes place in the absence of its original (Crimp in Kaye 2000,6).

Documenting, reMaking, rePresenting

Without wishing to state the obvious, I would suggest that the kind of dance remaking just described is to be inscribed in the broader dance remaking project, which covers all range of remaking, from reconstitution to recreation to revival, restaging, reworking and re-choreographing: all these activities are constitutive of the process of dance re-presentation.

Leaving to one side Sardono’s work, discussed because it exemplifies the slippery negotiations of a remaking and of a re-presentation process, I would now like to retrace my steps, and refocus on the issue of re-presentation alone.

The ongoing debate about dance performance documentation and archiving is overall concerned with how to capture the dance experience and make it available to posterity through recording it, but those who are leading the various performance recording and documentation initiatives do not really seem to have engaged fully with the re-presentation itself (13). Aside from conceding that dance remaking, in its broader sense, is largely dependent on the documentation process, the process of remaking as such is rarely discussed any further in the context of debates on documentation. Dance remaking, as already indicated, remains trapped in a dance performance reconstruction discourse, which stands separate and apart and which is overburdened by considerations of authenticity and faithfulness to an original (14) .

The very issue of performance documentation is complex and raises an array of questions pertaining to the documentation process. What does it really mean to document dance performance? How can dance performance be documented? What is the relationship of the 'performance record', the document, to the live performance? Can the live performance be fully experienced through its recording? Can a Levinasian “face-to face” encounter occur through a mediatized performance?

These very questions were raised at the already mentioned research workshop at SOAS entitled The Impossibility of Representation? Performance, Practice and Media which took as its starting point the notion that representation involves a process of transformation of what is represented – and this transformation is to be acknowledged and celebrated, rather than decried. In relation to performance practice it is its documentation - the performance record - which is often regarded as the thing itself, through a process of reification that has the effect of mystifying the mediatization. What we have in lieu of the performance is artefacts of the process of representation. Such artefacts are, by and large, digital recordings of a performance, and synecdochically represent it.

What happens to the 'presence' of the performer in this process of mediatization? I Wayan Dibia, at the workshop, talked about the Balinese concept of taksu which could roughly be equated with 'presence' and also, to some extent, to 'charisma'. In Bali it is believed to be a spiritual power which some performers have, investing the whole performance with it, and which others lack, regardless of their virtuosity (Dibia 2005). Can such a thing as taksu still be experienced through a recording? Does documenting through filming (and archiving) imply a loss of presence? Can presence be evoked by the document, in whatever medium the document may be – this may be applicable, for example, to still photography (15)?

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Viewtaksu .mp4 Discussion about taksu between Dibia and a member of the audience * MP4 File 29.1mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)

Questions such as these are very relevant to the debate in British academia surrounding (performance) practice as research, through PARIP (Practice as Research in Performance) and similar research initiatives. The debate has sparked off a number of discussions on the archaeology of the performance process and the study of the performance document. The document, usually a high tech recording, to be accompanied by a more or less mandatory written report which explicates it, is what funding bodies require as evidence of the research, the performance itself being too ephemeral (cfr. Rye 2005). A hierarchy is thus implicitly established between performing and academic writing, by identifying the written word as an essential component which validates the performance research process (cfr. Melrose 2003; 2005).

This has far reaching consequences with tangible effects on the accessibility and availability of funding for performance research and its sustainability. It is also evident that the relationship between performance and its mediatization is cast in oppositional terms. Here it is the mediatization (the recording) that is privileged over the performance, thus effectively denying its very own performativity and its potential for creatively enriching the performance event itself.

Auslander, invoking Baudrillard’s definition of the real as that which “can be given an equivalent reproduction” remarks that live performance is “live” because it can be recorded, and critiques the damaging assumption of “an ontological opposition” between the two:

thinking about the relationship between live and mediatized forms in terms of ontological oppositions is not especially productive, because there are few grounds on which to make significant ontological distinctions. Like live performance, electronic and photographic media can be described meaningfully as partaking of the ontology of disappearance ascribed to live performance, and can be used to provide an experience of evanescence. Like film and television, theatre can be used as a mass medium…to understand the relationship between live and mediatized forms, it is necessary to investigate that relationship as historical and contingent, not as ontologically given or technologically determined (Auslander 1997, Archives)

Discussion of such issues continues but meanwhile digital performance archives are being created, and online data bases constituted, presenting a cross-section of digitally captured live performances and creative use of digital media in performance – this was, for example, the brief of the UK based Digital Performance Archive, active from 1999 to 2000, whereas in the US the Performance Archive and Retrieval Working Group of Internet2/Coalition for Networked Information has been set up with the aim to “propose standards and best practices for documenting, archiving, and retrieving the recordings of performances such as live theatre, musical compositions, dance etc.” (Internet2, 2006). Guides and 'how to' documents are also being produced, to help capturing live performance events and “managing digital assets”, in other words, retrieving the recordings. One of the problems raised by such initiatives is, however, that the retrieval in question is of the performance artefact, which uncritically seems to be accepted as standing for the performance event. It seems fair to say that the creative potential of performance mediatization as a transforming tool, is being skirted even by its most fervent supporters, emphasising instead its 'true record' function. It is this very transformation of performance, undergirding its representation and re-presentation, and achieved through mediatization, which needs to be addressed and positively embraced, abandoning any illusion that contemporary technologically advances can re-present performance as it unfolds, without changing it (16).

The disembodied digital recording is a representation of the dance experience and a creative transformation of it, but clearly only a partial re-presentation. Far from wishing to endorse the live/mediatized opposition condemned by Auslander, I remain convinced, however, that body memory, the embodiment process, body movement and bodily interaction are crucial to the act of dancing, embedded in corporeality, etched in the present, thus a dance performance retrieval cannot be identified solely with a retrieval of its disembodied recording – a retrieval of one, among many, of its representations (17).

It seems to me that not recognizing that the retrieval of a dance performance does not consist solely in recovering its archived digital record is misleading and a pitfall to be avoided. A full retrieval can only be accomplished through the agency and materiality of a dancing body, acknowledged as a cultural and political producer, in other words, through an embodied re-presentation, fully inscribed in the present location of its dancer/choreographer, whatever form that re-presentation may take: a reconstruction, a reconstitution, a recreation, a restaging, a revival, a reworking and/or a remake, of one’s own work or, why not?, of other people’s too, copyright protection vagaries notwithstanding.

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Forward to: 7. RePresenting dance: archaeology and dance photography

Return to: 5. Dance and site: choreographing Prambanan

Endnotes