Rudi Laermans - Moving Together

Sociologist and dance critic Rudi Laermans clarifies the multiple stakes of contemporary dance through a combination of dance studies and sociology. Detailed analyses of seminal dance works by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Meg Stuart and many others inspire the book’s first, theoretically-oriented part. The second part of the book focuses on artistic collaboration and co-creation, based on extensive dialogues with choreographers from the thriving Brussels dance scene. 

Laermans defines ‘the choreographic’ as “the virtual space in which in principle repeatable (series of) movements or non-movements are both recorded and rationalised.” 

Further in the book, there’s a brief section in which he elaborates on this definition. These highlights are from p.89-92. 

Through choreography, dance participates in the modern scriptural economy that is a fundamental cornerstone of the various forms of rationalization, or calculated goal-directed action, within the domains of the economy, science, politics, education, and so on. 'What is writing, then?', Michel de Certeau asks in The Practice of Everyday Life, and he answers: 'I designate as "writing" the concrete activity that consists in constructing, on its own, blank space (un espace propre) - the page - a text that has power over the exteriority from which it has first been isolated. ... The scriptural enterprise transforms or retains within itself what it receives from its outside and creates internally the instruments for an appropriation of the external space. It stocks up what it sifts out and gives itself the means to expand. (...)

Choreography is rationalizing, or selecting and fixing the most efficient means in view of an overall objective, which may y from visual beauty and bodily grace (the ballet tradition), er emotional and narrative expressivity (modern dance), to the questioning of the established parameters defining the danceable (contemporary reflexive dance). 'The choreographic delineates precisely the writing space in which movements and non-movements simultaneously fixed and rationalized, meticulously recorded andd efficiently ordered. Within the process of choreographing, both operations condition each other. (...)

Indeed, a written sign, whatever its nature and however unique, is a mark that is structurally characterized by the possibility of being used again, of being reiterable in principle. 'This power, this being able, this possibility is always inscribed, hence necessarily inscribed as possibility in the functioning or the functional nature of the mark. ... Inasmuch as it is essential and structural, this possibility is always at work marking all the facts, all the events, even those that appear to disguise it. Just as iterability, which is not iteration, can be recognized even in a mark that in fact seems to have occurred only once. I say seems, because this one time is itself divided or multiplied in advance by its structure of repeatability', argues Jacques Derrida in Limited Inc. The choreographic again and again opens up a writing space that positions ephemeral 'movement events' as re-citable, or as actions - including the action of not-acting - that can principally be made anew in an undefined time still to come. This peculiar type of blank space allows concrete operations of fixing and rationalizing because it records whatever kind of observed action as being a priori repeatable. In sum,  'the choreographic' explicitly re-articulates the medium of dance according to the principle of iterability that defines writing in general. (...)

Laermans, R. (2015) Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance. Amsterdam: Valiz.  

For all my highlights in the book, see https://docs.google.com/document/d/162JMsgbnltwr_wbP_dzzgvzNhtmDQMY-KewcgqZZsWA/edit?usp=sharing