The Aftermath of Research: When history becomes writing
by Franz Anton Cramer
How do new subjects come into being? What is necessary for thought to find new objects, to deviate from that which is already established, to call common convictions into question? And – as the question is being posited, I might as well go one step further and extend it to the field of art – how do new issues, new forms, come into being? How does creativity install itself? By what means can things change?
Such questioning may seem pretentious and superficial. Why draw a line between different “levels” of research? Why presume that not every effort to know implies newness, originality, creativity? Why discern artistic from scholarly knowledge production? Is not South-African / British scholar Sarat Maharaj (to name one example) Professor of Visual Art and Knowledge Systems at a Swedish university? Are not avant-garde exponents of contemporary art and culture constantly insisting that there is no such thing as stable knowledge anyway and that whatever we take for granted is only in effect because we make it work and happen?
There even is a term for this: performativity.
So maybe the question is less superficial than it seemed?
But what about “pretentious”? For who would be the one to acknowledge the newness or the originality? By what means to measure them? And what to do with the “non-newness” of intellectual or artistic work? Is only that which is utterly new worthwhile? Dialectically, this cannot make sense – not morally, ethically, or intellectually.
The problem, then, remains – in all its acuity – (unsolved, hardly even formulated): How does it happen that we find new topics of research, new interests, new ways of exposing the existing elements, and drawing new intellectual, historical, aesthetic, or factual insight?
Generally, the path of knowledge and research is simple: you study what is in place and then you find dark or blind spots which you focus on in order to explain what is in them and why they have been blinded so far. It is the classical méthode: dissect the problem or the matter, which is too complex in its entirety, so as to produce smaller problems that you can go about resolving by applying what you already know. Once the particular problems are resolved, you recombine the elements, and you have answered the issue as a whole. Starting with a given set of knowledge, you end up knowing more, but only within the frame of the given. You accumulate, but you don’t enlarge, as it were. (That’s why Trisha Brown's “Accumulation” (1971 ff.) is a formidable example: not only because of its name, but also because of its conscious stance to start from the ordinary, from the unquestioned matter in order to build up something new [“Postmodern dance”] and not new [“pedestrian movement”] at the same time.)
Modern science, just as modern art, has made a point of refusing this comfort of method. They have installed a claim for the "unheard-of" – for the rupture, for the distanciation. Creating distance is, in fact, one of the main strategies in modernity’s path. (That’s maybe because contemporary concerns seem to tend more towards instances of cohesion.)
However, this distanciation is manifold, and also, in itself, invested with certain paradoxes. For instance, the claim for the separation of art work and artist – as when Brecht called for a separation of the actor and from their role, or when Duchamp called for a separation from the idea and the artwork, or Einstein suggesting the separation of categories of matter, etc. – has ended up creating a taboo of expressionism as it were. It is almost unacceptable today to deal with emotions on a direct level. Likewise, one cannot refer to certain categories or concepts without inferring that they have no worth in themselves – that they need to be criticised, critiqued, and deconstructed. All “positivity” (in the sense of Hegelian philosophy and the term of Positivität he employs) is ill-regarded, for fear of being traditional, retrograde, or intellectually dismissive.
However … (I have to start making sure that this will not appear as a piece of conservative writing claiming for new essentialisms!) … these forms of contemporary paradoxes and methodological dead ends have a built-in strategy to re-posit matters and substances; they invoke attitudes of action that, in themselves, may be authoritative, but nonetheless “make us do”. They make us create, make us develop new thoughts, or perspectives, or interests; in short, they make us contemporary.
The experience I am referring to is much less generalist than my lengthy introductory section might imply. For I have conducted a research project concerning the history of dance in Europe, especially Western Europe. It was an aspect of French history of dance, to be quite precise, with some topics relating to Germany sprinkled on top.
This topic – which really just happened to become mine (I was invited to do this work for several reasons, but mostly it was a pure coincidence that I was available and called upon) – this topic started to reshuffle my understanding of some master-elements in the construction of dance history. It had always been made very clear by basically all the books written on the subject (that I had read so far) that dance had a longstanding general cultural history. It was, in fact, an anthropological given. In the last 250 years or so, specific manifestations informed by given civilizations evolved and had transformed dance into an art form (which it was not before, see for instance the seminal study Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes by German emigrant Curt Sachs, published in 1933 shortly after the Nazi takeover, published in English as World History of Dance in 1937). This art form thereafter rapidly evolved – in a purely linear process – to modernity and was establishing itself as a “modern art form” independently in the United States of America and in Germany (by extension: In Central Europe). After the Second World War, dance became more aesthetically varied, but remained essentially a Western construct and stronghold; once more, the USA (post-modern dance), Germany (Tanztheater), and also France (nouvelle danse française) were at the forefront. Of course there was Butoh, there was performance art, and there were a lot of regional and structural sub-histories, but the guideline was already set – especially so in the German context. After Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, Oskar Schlemmer and all the others had set the path, it was for Pina Bausch to fully liberate dance’s theatrical and cultural potential by inventing Tanztheater. The triad of Ausdruckstanz, Bauhaus and Tanztheater is, to this day, the Holy Trinity of German (and, to a large extent, international) historiography. What struck me most, though, was the fact that even – or maybe especially so – in France, dance history was (and still is) conceived of in these terms. My encounter with a “genuine” history of dance and dance appreciation in France was all the more troublesome and intriguing as it helped me to better define my discontent with the mechanics of dance history and aesthetic preconditioning. It was also the time when, in Germany, new forms of dance and performance started to be violently attacked by critics and programmers for the sake of “safeguarding dance’s true values”.
So my interest was double: Why would one talk about dance’s "true values"? And how were they to be translated into official histories? The first part of my research project was commissioned: I was to collect documentary material on persons and institutions active in France during the 1930s around the Archives Inernationales de la Danse (A.I.D.) The idea had been to prepare an exhibition on the subject, but for technical and financial reasons, this show was never realised. However, I had discovered names, biographies, thoughts, and perspectives that shook my entire intellectual and knowledge system. Because in the aftermath of this initial research I discovered a discursive activity that was creating a scientific, intellectual, and theoretical context about and around dance that had nothing or very little to do with what I hitherto had learned about dance history, the names of Laban, Wigman or Böhme were all of a sudden marginal. Their positions were acknowledged, but not particularly appreciated, and were sometimes even contested. In short, the points of reference were totally “other”. Dance was conceptualized in a way not relying on “Germanisms”. At the same time, dance and movement practices appeared in radically different contexts, which for reasons of convenience and brevity I call "democratic ", as opposed to essentializing, totalitarian, and racist (as was the case in Germany). In fact, the very same artists and their very same choreographic works were interpreted and considered with completely opposite tools.
So I found out about ethical, essentialist, and politicizing appropriations of dance, and it was with great awe and surprise that I literally witnessed how dance and the making of its history could be read in a totally different way than I had been accustomed to. The point of paradox, which maybe is most explanatory of this turn, was my encounter with one of the finest collections on early modern dance that I know of: the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra National de Paris, the library department of The Paris Opera, which is part of the BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France or French National Library)’s, Department of Music. It is to this institution that the printed and archival materials of the A.I.D. were donated in 1952. The A.I.D. not only constituted the major collecting point for all aspects of dance in the period between the two World Wars, it was also run by one of the most advanced thinkers of dance studies, Pierre Tugal. The A.I.D. thus had assembled an almost exhaustive fund of contemporary and scholarly literature on dance – equalled in its time maybe only by the endeavours of Friderica Derra de Moroda in London and, later on, in Salzburg. (Derra de Moroda may have had more of an inclination towards dance literature concerning the 16th to 19th centuries, whereas the A.I.D. were wholeheartedly committed to contemporary, i.e. modern, dance as well as folklore and ethnography). The A.I.D.s collection has been untouched since its inception, and remains accessible in its entirety at one of the strongholds of dance aesthetic conservatism and indeed academism: the Paris Opera, the direct heir to the very first Academy of Dance founded by Louis XIV in 1661.
Already, this historic circumstance holds its meanings, but what was particularly striking for my own project was the wealth of literature in the library, that had been completely unheard of in Germany. This absence existed for two reasons: the first was linguistic (French is no longer a predominant language in academic contexts, and books in French are therefore poorly represented in Germanic institutions, unless translated to German), the second, more informative, reason was political. Because France was the declared enemy of Germany, especially in the period I was working on (1930 to 1950), French publications were not acquired by German libraries, especially not those dealing with dance (some exceptions notwithstanding). Nor has French dance literature been translated. So it is by this double mechanism of exclusion and ostracism that French discourse on dance is virtually non-existent in a German speaking context. This has dramatic consequences. For the predominance of Germanic names (Laban, Wigman, Jooss, later Bausch, Hoffmann, Linke) not only falsifies the complexity of historic developments, it also eclipses all the intellectual endeavours undertaken to give dance a broader and more scientific basis of discourse and to methodically include other styles of dance into the canon of references.
Finally, another consequence of this narrowed vision of dance history concerns the situation in France herself; the “explosion” of choreographic expression which came about since the 1970s and then gained international acclaim in the 1980s (after public policy had decided to include dance in the programme of national cultural development), lead to yet another oversight. For the roots of this creative boost were eventually detected – justly or unjustly, this is not my question – in German modern dance. What I would call the “ideologies of historical dance development”, strictly based in their main strongholds (Paris VIII university; Laban movement analysis and notation as taught at the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse, CNSMD) on “movement hermeneutics” procedures, claim to this day that it was in Germany that modern dance was “invented”. Brilliant in her methodological considerations on dance historiography, Isabelle Launay nevertheless gave her seminal 1997 study the speaking title À la recherche d’une danse moderne: Mary Wigman, Rudolf Laban (The Quest for Modern Dance: Mary Wigman, Rudolf Laban).
The interesting (and, given my nationality, even flattering) point is not that German artists are invested with all the auctorial power for a new dance form; the interesting point is that the newness of Launay’s thesis partakes in neglecting an entire part of the very modernity she sets out to define – the period happening in France between 1930 and 1950. Just as I myself was discovering the wealth of authors, theories, concerns, aesthetics and intellectual adventures at stake, seeking finally for a solid way out of the Germanic restrictions imposed on dance history and discourse, French scholars were happily fleeing the self-centred vision of a French genius (impersonated by Dominique Bagouet – on which Launay’s colleague, Isabelle Ginot, finished a significant study that same year) that would have called upon the creative power of several generations of choreographers and dancers. It is true that a working public structure to sustain independent dance had been set up in France long before it happened in any other place in the world – Germany included – but the historical aspects of this development remained in silence. So it was almost unavoidable for Launay to publish her study in order to bring a historic dimension to dance appreciation. (It was, similarly, necessary to learn about the other face of Launay’s hagiographic project. In almost that same year, French scholar Laure Guilbert finished (1996) her research on Wigman and Laban’s involvement with Nazi Germany authorities; published in 2000, Guilbert’s book caused a furor which largely bespeaks the ideological investments that go with the “quest for modern dance”).
To come back to the initial topic, the fact that new questions emerge and new strategies of research come about has much less to do with a specific creativity of an authorial mind and more to do with changing perspectives and “loyalties”. The change of paradigms in scientific convictions has much to do with affiliations, bindings, and personal relationships making it difficult to turn to other questions or perspectives. Research, just as “art-making”, has a lot to do with models, prior knowledge, and openness towards the material at hand. It is in this sense, too, that Véronique Fabbri rethinks dance and philosophy as two practices that are based on “construction work”; without permanent readjustment of its own material, without a constant “appareillage” of the individual elements so as to strip them bare of their “habitual significations and meanings” (i.e. to get rid of their mimetic, expressive, and anecdotic aspects), no actual realization would be possible. It is only by deferring from the matters that be, that the new experience is possible – beyond mere composition or rearticulation.
How to apply all this to the question of how “new” ideas can come into being – ideas and perspectives that work on a given material (a corpus of matter, substance, sources, narratives…) without being guided only by their inherent logic? One might say that there would be no such thing as a point zero in the interdependence of certain (fundamental) questions and the answers that are possible “from within” the questioned issues. While this relativity of sorts may come as no news, Fabbri points at quite a consequential reversal. Quoting Deleuze’s reading of Nijinsky’s Jeux, Fabbri says, “Le fonctionnement et l’agencement des discours et des corps constituent une machine abstraite que la danse comme l’écriture mettent au jour, tel est le présupposé de l’analyse.” It is the subtle and always manifold interactions between “the bodies” (of text, of matter, of flesh and blood, of dance, of history) and “the writing” (of narrative, of thought, of choreography, of consistence …) – and of course the writing creates a body, just as a body always creates writing – that make “new” things happen. Not for the sake of newness (this would only be a merchandising effect), but for the sake of history – especially in dance.
Franz Anton Cramer, writer, researcher, and critic, is a professor at the Inter-University Dance Education Centre (HZT) in Berlin and a fellow at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. He has recently published a book In aller Freiheit. Tanzkultur in Frankreich zwischen 1930 and 1950 (Total Freedom. Dance Culture in France between 1930 and 1950; Parodos, Berlin 2008). He lives and works in Paris and Berlin.
See Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif? [What is a dispositif?] Payot & Rivages, Paris 2007.
See Inge Baxmann, (Ed.) Körperwissen als Kulturgeschichte. Die Archives Internationales de la Danse 1931 bis 1952 [Body Knowledge as Cultural History. The international Dance Archive 1931 to 1952], Kieser (= Wissenskulturen im Umbruch Bd. 2), München 2008; and Inge Baxmann, Claire Rousier & Patrizia Veroli (Eds.), Les Archives Internationales de la Danse 1931 – 1952, Centre national de la danse, Pantin 2006.
Mathias Auclair, “Chronik des Übergangs: Die Schenkung der Bestände des Internationalen Tanzarchivs (A.I.D.) an die Bibliothèque nationale de France 1950 bis 1964“ [A chronicle of transition: The donation of the A.I.D. collections to the French National Library 1950 to 1964], in: Inge Baxmann, (Ed.) Körperwissen als Kulturgeschichte. Die Archives Internationales de la Danse 1931 bis 1952, Kieser (= Wissenskulturen im Umbruch Bd. 2) München 2008, pp. 139–151.
For the encyclopaedic aspect of the A.I.D.’s scientific policy see Franz Anton Cramer, “Die Archives Internationales de la Danse (A.I.D.) und das Projekt einer enzyklopädischen Erfassung des Tanzes am Beispiel der conférences-démonstrations“ [The international dance archive and their project of an encyclopaedic approach to dance: the example of the conférences-démonstrations.], in: Baxmann (Ed.), 2008, pp. 64-87.
Isabelle Launauy, À la recherche d'une danse moderne: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman [The quest for modern dance: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman],Chiron Paris 1997.
Isabelle Ginot, (1997): Dominique Bagouet, un labyrinthe dansé: essai d'analyse de l'oeuvre chorégraphique. [Dominique Bagouet, a labyrnth of dance: Essay on the analysis of choreographic work]
Isabelle Ginot, Dominique Bagouet, un labyrinthe dansé [Dominqiue Bagouet, a labyrinth of dance], Centre national de la danse, Pantin1999.
Laure Guilbert, Danser avec le IIIe Reich. Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme [Dancing with the Third Reich. Modern dancers under the Nazis], Complexe, Bruxelles 2000.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn, Die "http://stabikat.sbb.spk-berlin.de:80/DB=1/SET=2/TTL=50/MAT=/NOMAT=T/CLK?IKT=1016&TRM=Struktur", Struktur wissenschaftlicher "http://stabikat.sbb.spk-berlin.de:80/DB=1/SET=2/TTL=50/MAT=/NOMAT=T/CLK?IKT=1016&TRM=Revolutionen" Revolutionen, Suhrkamp Frankfurt 1967. First published as The structure of scientific revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1962.
Fabbri, Véronique,
Danse et philosophie. Une pensée en construction [Dance and philosophy. A thought under construction], L’Harmattan, Paris 2007.
The functioning and the agency of discourse and body form an abstract machinery which both dance and writing bring to the light, such is the analytical basis. Fabbri, op. cit., p. 100.
This essay can be found on OBSCENA #20.
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