Re-Centering Dance

This quote from Yvonne Rainer articulates the apparent accepted wisdom regarding the condition of dance in its relationships with the other arts in the mid- to late-1960s when Rainer was writing. According to this position, theater dance was isolated from contemporaneous arts practices until it began to “reflect” and “correspond” with developments in the visual arts in mid-century America. The language Rainer uses here is ambiguous (“reflect” suggests a subsidiary role for dance while “correspond” suggests equality), as is her writing on the traffic of ideas across art and dance at this time. The impression that dance co-opted developments pioneered in other art forms, primarily Minimalist sculpture, was fed by Rainer's own writing where she compares “aspects of so-called minimal sculpture and recent dancing,” and has had a lasting effect on accounts of the relationship between dance and the gallery (Rainer Reference Rainer1974, 63).Footnote ⁷ (As seen in the last 20 years, this power relation has returned to some degree in comparisons between Conceptual Art and Conceptual Dance.Footnote ⁸) Recently, in correspondence with dance theorist André Lepecki, Rainer has recalled that it is likely she wrote her article comparing the two art forms (from which the above quote is taken [published 1968]), “at the same time Morris was working on his ‘Notes … [on Sculpture – published 1966]’,” with Lepecki adding that Rainer's essay “reveals the deep artistic interlocution between Rainer and Robert Morris at the time” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 103). However, an impression persists that postmodern dance followed Minimalism in sculpture, and this view negates the numerous ways in which dance contributed to major, cross-disciplinary aesthetic shifts through its own knowledges, conditions, research processes, and compositional methods.

So this article is partly a response to the increasing tendency, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, to “think” contemporary dance through various relationships with contemporary visual arts. This has given rise to territorial comments such as the following from art theorist/curator Yvane Chapuis in a recent dance studies anthology: “… the visual arts territory does not constitute an asylum for artists known as choreographers. This is a fact that should cut short any tendency to believe that an undisciplined movement is currently being (re)enacted in the dance scene, a movement that consists in leaving the stage” (Chapuis Reference Chapuis and Solomon2014, 136). In Australia—in Sydney at least—this tendency has led to increasing opportunities for dance artists who are consciously aligning their work with gallery-based practices. This can be seen as part of a shift that, first, views visual arts–aligned dance as more innovative than other work, and second, that considers visual artists as being able to turn their hand to choreography with no former experience in/with dance. As an example, a choreographic prize newly established in 2014—the first of its kind in Australia—was open to artists with a reputation outside the discipline but with a “choreographic idea,” and one visual artist was supported through the scheme.Footnote ⁹ The inclusion of non-choreographers in the competition, and other similar cases, led local dance artist and theorist Julie-Anne Long to describe an “underrepresentation of dance-in-dance” that suggests a lack of faith in expertise from within the discipline (Reference Long2014, 24).Footnote ¹⁰

Beyond local politics, it is a story I have heard anecdotally from Spanish-, American-, and French-based artists throughout my research, and the opening quote to this article from Jérôme Bel describes a directive coming from the galleries that may “curate” the form beyond the artists' chosen aesthetic trajectories. Dance scholar Noémie Solomon comments on the commodification of dance suggested in this move and the challenge this presents to both dance and the gallery or museum: “As witnessed recently, one space that dance has ventured toward is that of the museum, functioning in turn as the newest desirable art object, or engaging in practices that re-imagine how things and bodies are assessed around thresholds of visibility and knowledge in such institutions” (2014, 20). What models of “choreography” are circulating in this most recent, and often institution-driven, relationship of dance with the visual arts? The genuine intermedial exchange that occurred in mid-century America is echoed in many similar communities at a grass-roots level, such as in the work of Justene Williams in Sydney and the partnerships of other Australian artists such as Brooke Stamp and Agatha Gothe-Snape, or Helen Grogan and Shelley Lasica, or Jennifer Lacey and Nadia Lauro in Paris.Footnote ¹¹ But in calling dance into the gallery context and, by extension, thinking dance through a visual arts lens, how do the disciplinary skills of the art form figure among the strategies, techniques, and paradigms of the visual arts? Does this movement signal a loss of confidence in the art form to develop, curate, and represent itself? What does dance and the gallery gain from this new affiliation? And perhaps most pointedly—is there any reason to discuss disciplinary specificity anymore?

French curator Alexandra Baudelot takes up an extreme position on this last point in her discussion of Lacey's collaboration with Lauro:

This statement suggests there is a “new” model of dance that acknowledges choreographic research as a collaborative project involving multiple, contributing disciplines, and that this departs from choreographic “conventions” and “institutions.” The old model of dance described by Rainer as an “isolated” art form is evoked here, and seems to contradict more than a century of interdisciplinary choreographic practice. What does seem to be new is the idea that all the arts can “do” choreography (and this would be true if the definition is as broad as Baudelot's—“dance is first and foremost a question of the body, languages and frames” [2014, 182]), and that there is little of value in the traditional, discipline-specific knowledges of choreography.

Barbara Formis recently uncovered the pathway to this situation “where any clear difference between visual and performing arts is considered out of date” (Reference Formis, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 65).Footnote ¹³ In her article, “Performance Here and Then,” Formis suggests that there has been a recent conflation of performance art and dance, a pattern that recurs in recent writing on French “conceptual” dance.Footnote ¹⁴ She cites the work of Belgian art theorist Thierry De Duve (who follows the logic of Michael Fried) on the element of presence as the distinguishing characteristic of this broader notion of performance defined, as it is, in relation to the visual arts: “Performance is an art of the here and now. … Presence can be said to be a pertinent trait in the appearance of the performance phenomenon, as it comes from the practice of painters and sculptors” (DeDuve quoted in Copeland and Pellegrin, 58). Formis states, “De Duve explains the paradox of presence through this historical background which shows that while performance shares essential characteristics with theatre, it actually derives from the visual arts, more precisely, minimal art” (Reference Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 58). This folding of dance into performance, which is distinguished from theater by its affiliations with visual arts, has had the effect of framing the development of contemporary dance in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first century within a visual arts context. This is reiterated in another account of the situation by dance academic Céline Roux, who elaborates on what she calls “the unframing of the choreographic” through a collusion with “performative practices” (Reference Roux and Solomon2014, 261).Footnote ¹⁵

The distinction that has been lost—as pointed out by Formis to some extent—is that many performance art practices have emerged from the visual arts, and this has been well documented, beginning with artists who extended their practice into performance such as Marcel Duchamp, and then Allan Kaprow, Ana Mendieta, Robert Rauschenberg, Red Grooms, Carolee Schneeman et al., followed by Abramovic and her generation. In contrast, dance artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Trisha Brown identified first and foremost as dancers, and the practices they undertook have their genealogy primarily in the work of Merce Cunningham and Anna Halprin, and through them, Delsarte and the other foundational figures.Footnote ¹⁶ The notion that contemporary dance has its roots in Minimalism in the visual arts is one premise that needs to be critiqued. I would rather follow Chantal Pontbriand's position as she discusses the expanded field of choreography in relation to how “contemporary dance allows us to see beyond dance and the body” (Reference Pontbriand and Solomon2014, 285), and I will draw out this distinction in my critical orientation.

In the mid-century American scene, new approaches to making art were formulated interdisciplinarily, as encapsulated in this quote from New York critic Jill Johnston, whose writing was so important during the period: “Artists made dances. Dancers made music. Composers made poetry. Poets made events. People at large performed in all these things, including critics, wives and children. Dogs, chickens and turtles made it, too. One result of the notion that anyone could do it was an orgy of Intermedia” (Reference Johnston and Hapgood1994, 93).Footnote ¹⁷ In this context, artists like Simone Forti undertook choreographically informed projects that were grounded in dance-based knowledges, but realized what could be described as “undisciplined” creative outcomes: art works that defy discrete medium-based categories.Footnote ¹⁸ In my current research project, Dance and the Contemporary Arts, I argue for this undisciplined status of dance in the mid-century period and beyond in relation to how choreographic knowledges were introduced by dance artists to other disciplines (by Forti, Rainer, and Brown et al.) or introduced by dancers to artists working in other fields who then incorporated dance practices and methods into their work (Cage, Rauschenberg, Nauman, Brecht, etc.). This is in opposition to “the choreographic” as a concept and practice that, in Baudelot's view, can be taken up by any of the arts or, in De Duve's view, is colonized by the fields of performance and visual arts.

The current critical perspectives on the dance–visual arts nexus are quick to recognize the provenance of debates in the work of these mid-century pioneers. Anna Chave's writing, particularly her article “Minimalism and Biography,” written in Reference Chave2000, is important here and has been given little attention to date. Chave reconsiders the origins, trajectories, and beneficiaries of Minimalist creative practices across dance and the visual arts. Other theorists of the period who have described the contribution of dance to the broader aesthetic developments are Ramsay Burt (Reference Burt2006), Nick Kaye (Reference Kaye2000), Hal Foster (Reference Foster1996), and Henry Sayre (Reference Sayre2012), along with overviews by Barbara Haskell (Reference Haskell1984) and Thomas Crow (Reference Crow1996).

Another field of research that has written the contributions of dance into this artistic milieu since 2008 is the curatorial work that has focused on the dance–visual arts interface. Internationally renowned curator and theorist Corinne Diserens has recently described a “désir désespéré du musée pour la danse,” and this has resulted in a broad range of approaches to presenting dance within the gallery context.Footnote ¹⁹ While this has tested the parameters of the form as outlined above, the work of certain writers and curators seeks to reinstate dance as a leader in, and generator of, the micro- and macro-ecologies that shaped creative practice in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Diserens, Dance, and Decentralized Perception

Curatorial research in this field in recent years was re-ignited by French curator and theorist Corinne Diserens at the Museion, Bolzano, Italy, in 2008 with her exhibition that re-opened the venue, Peripheral Vision and Collective Body. Broad ranging, this exhibition was built around the themes of a sensual, decentralized perception, interdisciplinarity, experimentation, and the relevance of the historic avant-garde to contemporaneity, performance, and collectivity (Diserens Reference Diserens2008).Footnote ²⁰ It included performance works by choreographer-artists Latifa Laâbissi, Xavier Le Roy, and Jérôme Bel; films of work by the German modernist dancers along with Rainer's feature film Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980); and drawings by choreographer Trisha Brown. In the leading catalogue essay by architectural theorist Yehuda E. Safran—which draws together the exhibition content of music, dance, and architecture—he states, “Often spatial conceptions during the last century were first rehearsed in the dance studios” (Reference Safran2008, 16). He cites Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–1943), the Cage/Cunningham collaborations, and Adolphe Appia's architecture for Émile Jacques-Dalcroze as exemplifying the transfer of knowledges from dance to the other arts (Safran Reference Safran2008).Footnote ²¹ Safran writes of “a completely new imperative in the field of sound and rhythm” post the industrial revolution, in which “the very elasticity of internal time consciousness was discovered” via Henri Bergson and others. Following Deleuze, he concludes, “in its different forms, dance became the arena in which such potential was discovered and expressed” (Safran Reference Safran2008, 17).

Other essays by dance theorists Christophe Wavelet and Hubert Godard focus on comparisons between processes in choreography and the visual arts. Wavelet interviews Xavier Le Roy and Jérôme Bel (Reference Wavelet, Bel and Roy2008), two French dance artists whose open references to Continental philosophy and conceptual-based art have made them popular with theorists and the visual arts scene. Wavelet and Le Roy agree that the main difference between dance and the visual arts—specifically in training and the creative process—is that the visual arts promotes the singularity of the artist while “choreographies suppose a certain communion: of bodies, of movements, of their capacities, and their way of offering all of these a visibility” (Wavelet et al. Reference Wavelet, Bel and Roy2008, 116). These interviews, and particularly the one with Bel, support a perception that dance as a discipline has become something of an embarrassment in the early twenty-first century, and that those artists who have distanced themselves from its methods (“there was no question of rehearsals, of dance classes or training sessions … there was no way I was going to be a ‘lactic acid addict’” as Bel puts it) find favor in the broader contemporary arts scene more readily (Wavelet et al. Reference Wavelet, Bel and Roy2008, 89).

In contrast, Godard's discussion with interviewer Suely Rolnik, “Blindsight,” talks specifically about the relevance of corporeal knowledges and processes—that are fully realized in dance practices—to the radical visual arts practices of Lygia Clark (Godard and Rolnik Reference Godard and Rolnik2008).Footnote ²² Godard describes specific sensorial aspects of both the production of, and encounter with, a work of art that elaborates possibilities for participatory and non-vision-centric experiences that owe much to his important work in dance and movement research and analysis. In this sense, Godard is important in this survey in contributing dance-specific knowledges that provide some robust rationale for dance's currency in the contemporary arts scene. That the interview with Godard—Dean of Dance and Movement Research at the University of Paris 8—is so rigorous and is given so much page-space here, speaks of the recognition of dance knowledges present throughout Diserens's exhibition. Drawing on his knowledge of kinesiology, biomechanics, and physical rehabilitation, Godard explains subjective vision—as opposed to objective vision—as “subcortical,” where “the person blends into the context. There is no longer a subject and an object, but a participation in a general context” (Godard and Rolnik Reference Godard and Rolnik2008, 178). This vision is not related to time, gravity, history of the subject, or interpretation, but is “more of the order of ‘geographic’ vision” informed as the subject moves in space-time. He refers to this type of vision as “blindsight” and describes not being able to see the chair directly in front of you but still being able to negotiate around it indirectly (Godard and Rolnik Reference Godard and Rolnik2008, 180–3). This begins to sound less like vision and more like a network of sensorial exchanges that shapes our experience of being and moving in the physical world. He refers to this as “intersensorial plasticity” or “plurisensoriality” (Godard and Rolnik Reference Godard and Rolnik2008, 204).

Godard goes on to discuss movement development in contemporary dance in relation to this nexus between perception and movement production; if my perception is expanded through engaging blindsight or plurisensoriality, then my experience of space and movement potential is expanded, and with this, the possible “movement of thought” (Godard and Rolnik Reference Godard and Rolnik2008, 201)Footnote ²³:

He applies this to the dance practice of contact improvisation, which he posits as beyond vision, “to try to be face-to-face with the other as weight, as contour, as colour, as a gesture, and to be in the urgency of these primal things—a kind of incredible vigilance … it is a peripheral, panoramic sight … which is the blindspot” (Godard and Rolnik Reference Godard and Rolnik2008, 196–8).Footnote ²⁴ Godard thus outlines a model of participation in the art event that is informed by dance practice and clinical knowledge and which offers an alternative to the static, ocular-centric regime of the direct gaze of the art spectator. Given the title of Diserens's exhibition, the influence of these dance-based knowledges on her curatorial vision is clear.

Curating as Choreography

Another important exhibition that was held in the same year as Peripheral Visions was A Choreographed Exhibition (2008) at the Kunst Halle in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and at the Centre d'art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson, France, where curator Mathieu Copeland presented

Those artists who contributed scores and instructions were Roman Ondák (visual artist), Jennifer Lacey (choreographer), Jonah Bokaer (visual artist and choreographer), Philipp Egli (choreographer), Karl Holmqvist (visual artist and poet), Michael Parsons (composer), Fia Backstrom (visual artist), and Michael Portnoy (“director of behavior”). This exhibition replaced the art object in the gallery space with the dancing body in a unique project that asked the following question: what is choreography in relation to gallery practices and processes? For Copeland,

Scored-improvised movement as art in a gallery space is, for Copeland, a political choice—an opposition to the culture of the art object and an importation of dance knowledges from the dance studio or stage to the gallery.

The accompanying publication for A Choreographed Exhibition edited by Copeland and Julie Pellegrin features essays by and interviews with artists, commentators, and theorists such as Myriam Van Imschoot, André Lepecki, Barbara Formis (whose essay has already been referred to), and Boris Charmatz (director of Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne). The inclusion of these voices indicates an engagement by Copeland with dance theory—particularly around scoring and time. Time haunts the dance–gallery relationship, with the time of dance (warm-up, rehearsal/development, performance) coming up against the opening hours of the public institution.Footnote ²⁷

But importantly here, Copeland ventures a definition of “exhibition” in relation to “choreography:” “A proposition for a definition: Exhibition … noun—a material, textual, textural, visceral, visual … choreographed polyphony” (Copeland Reference Copeland, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 19).Footnote ²⁸ In this definition, choreography is equated to the exhibited result of curating and organizing materials, bodies, space, temporal frameworks, and potential for subjective feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and memories that constitute the phenomena of the gallery exhibition. So Copeland takes the role of “choreographer,” and choreography is a process of control and constraint across a multiplicity of physical and intangible variables, echoing Lepecki. In Copeland's particular experiment in 2008, objects are rejected in favor of “the ephemeral and the (un)physical, or the (im)material again—may these be through the absence or the void, the voice and the works, the gesture and the movement, and their inherent choreography.” (Copeland Reference Copeland, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 49).

In relation to the “choreographed polyphony,” or in this description multisensorial dimension, of any exhibition it is aptly the corporeal mode of composition (choreography) that is called upon to define such an event. What is missing here is an understanding of the labor of “choreography” and “dancing.” For Copeland, choreography is something that can happen “everywhere, at all times, with and for everyone,” so that its ephemeral status results in “an exhibition that inhabits nothing other than the ‘inner self’ … the spectator becomes the host, and the whole, of this plural environment” (Copeland Reference Copeland, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 23). The methods and practices of choreography—as it is understood in the discipline of dance—are lost here, and the term stands for a much broader concept of a composition for living bodies that is scored by choreographers, visual artists, and composers as discrete “pieces.” In the exhibition, these pieces are set back-to-back across the gallery's opening hours, and there is little mention in the catalogue of the actual scores, techniques, or the names and background of the dancers in the two manifestations of the exhibition.Footnote ²⁹ There is, rather, an emphasis on the curatorial gestures that brought them into being.

In Copeland's interview with Lacey, the choreographer takes him to task on his use of dancers from a repertory company with the Tanzcompagnie Theater in the St. Gallen iteration of the exhibition “as the neutral material of the thing. This is such an old idea in dance, that of course still exists, but it is extraordinarily dated” (Lacey Reference Lacey, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 123). There is some account in Lacey's interview of how she approached a score for the dancers based on duration, the transitions between the total of eight artists' scores, and the fact that they would be performing to no one or each other for large chunks of time.Footnote ³⁰ Lacey brings a choreographer's perspective to bear on the dancers' experience and the composition of the whole for both them and their audiences, acknowledging the problems for the dancer as interpreter/medium in the gallery context. So while Copeland's Choreographing Exhibitions confronts, head-on, the place of dancing in the gallery as the content of an exhibition, it underlines the tensions between curatorially driven arts practices and the more complex condition of “authorship” in contemporary dance practices, and some of the practical problems for dancers around duration, spectatorship and physical space which are given voice in the (marginalized) writing of the dancers.

Dance and Objects

Central to the attraction of dance for museums and galleries is the challenge the art form presents to institutions and associated economies that are based on the circulation of material objects. Three different relationships between dance and the object have been formulated in relation to choreography and the gallery. One suggests that dance offers an escape from object-centric museum practices. Another proposes that dance offers new models for engaging with objects in a museum context that promotes co-existence. And yet another sees dance approaching the status of object—or more precisely “thing”—as central to the dance–art encounter.

In 2010, Move. Choreographing You: Art and Dance Since the 1960s, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, was presented at the Hayward Gallery in London and toured to Munich and Dusseldorf into Reference Rosenthal2011. Answering Bel's opening quote regarding the call of the gallery and the problem of what to exhibit, the exhibition comprised remounted and commissioned installations (some participatory), artworks, and live performances (mostly reenactments). There was a large video database of documentations and films that could be viewed at private computer stations, and a sense of “performances ongoing all the time” (Move 2010). Re-performances included works by Rainer, Forti, Brown, Halprin, and Kaprow, and there were exhibited works by their peers Morris, Nauman, Clark, and Graham. Other artists commissioned to create work for the gallery space included Thomas Lehman, Xavier Le Roy, Mårten Spångberg, Wayne McGregor, Boris Charmatz, Tino Sehgal, and La Ribot. This particular group is representative of the dance artists who are most often invited into gallery-based projects, with some inclusions from the visual/performance arts such as Tania Bruguera, Joao Penalva (an ex-Pina Bausch dancer), Pablo Bronstein, and Janine Antoni.

André Lepecki and Peggy Phelan's essays for the catalogue are a part of each theorists' broader interest in dance and the visual arts (Lepecki Reference Lepecki and Rosenthal2011; Phelan Reference Phelan and Rosenthal2011). Phelan's writing—particularly on Rainer—has been important in placing dance as central to both the critique of performance and spectatorship, and the separation of form from content, which are at the heart of the mid-century revolution in the arts.

André Lepecki co-curated the interactive digital archive in the exhibition, “Dance and Visual Arts Since the 1960s,” and his interest in dance and the visual arts makes his recent research very relevant. His essay for the Rosenthal catalogue begins with a discussion of the Gutai Group from Japan, who extended the logic of Jackson Pollock's action paintings into performance art, and Allan Kaprow's use of scores—which Kaprow refers to as “choreographic” scores—in his Happenings. Lepecki argues that, together, they mark the beginning of a new age of complicity between dance and the visual arts in the mid- to late-1960s (Reference Lepecki and Rosenthal2011, 155). He brings this up to date with Bel, Seghal, and others and writes:

Here, and elsewhere, Lepecki describes both what he sees dance offering the visual arts (re-formulating social and political possibilities for art via the presence of the body and the choreographic critique of our gestural sphere, as well as muddling the object/subject divisions of visual culture), and how the visual arts has helped dance “reinvent” itself (as distinct from what he sees as the “modernist” imperative to move, and towards a relationship with the art object or “thing”).Footnote ³² He also makes it clear that the relationship between dance and the visual arts frames his definition of “experimental dance” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2012, 75).Footnote ³³

For Lepecki, the object is the link between dance and the visual arts, beginning with Morris, Forti, and Rainer: “If there is a distinguishing trait of recent experimental dance, it is the noticeable presence of objects as main performative elements. … Indeed, it is the history of this presence that has shaped the vivid dialogue between dance and the visual arts over the past century, most significantly after World War II” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2012, 75–6).Footnote ³⁴ This is interesting in comparison to Copeland's view of dance as a release from the tyranny of the object in art in the gallery—a view extended in curator Catherine Wood's essay, “People and Things in Museums” in Copeland's catalogue. Wood critiques the museum's desire for dance and performance as a pursuit of “the mirage-like end-point of radical non-object art,” citing the work of Seghal as exemplary of this desire (but for her also problematic) (Wood Reference Wood, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 118). She suggests that it is a linear logic that drives a perceived progression from object through sculpture to the potential of performance. This progression is well articulated by visual artist Gordon Matta-Clark in 1978 as being at the heart of his and others' research in the 1960s and 1970s: “a progression from line to plane, to various kinds of planes to volumes to something beyond the volume, which is a sort of ‘dynamic volume’” (quoted in Blancsubé and Espinosa Reference Blancsubé and Natalie2014, 193).Footnote ³⁵ In critiquing this linear movement (and consequently the current rush to include choreography and performance in the gallery), Wood is arguing for the value of objects as they circulate with bodies in the museum and the “complex ecology in which objects and actions are imperfectly co-existent,” evoking Bruno Latour's network theory. In citing Mike Kelley, Mark Leckley, Clementine Deliss, and Boris Charmatz, she provides examples where objects from the museum archive and the subject comingle to produce new works of art that are time-based and performative.

In contrast, Lepecki posits the way objects are used in the dance practices he discusses as reducing them to a “thing,” disconnected from utility and functionality through defamiliarization: “A thing is less an object than a mode of actioning the absolutely unforeseen. Unexpected, unrecognizable, yet clearly there, it is expressive of its extraneousness. It is determinate vagueness” (Reference Lepecki, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 99). In his reading, experimental contemporary dance is characterized by its inclusion of objects within the choreographic dispositif, and his theory of proximal aesthetics propounds “a dissolution: of things and bodies, of subjectivities and objectivities” in a way that brings the body closer to “thingness” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 100).Footnote ³⁶ He cites Le Roy, La Ribot, Ibrahim Quaishi, Christian Rizzo, Vera Mantero, Trajal Harrell, Yingmei Duan, Joao Fiadeiro, Aitana Cordero, and Lehmen, among others (crossing dance, performance, and visual artists), as being “invested in a concern with being alongside things” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 100) and/or “how to move as thing and how to become-thing” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2012, 78). His reading can be situated within the new philosophical paradigms of Graham Harman, Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett, which model an object or tool-oriented approach known as “speculative realism” or “vital materialism.”

Across Lepecki's writing, it takes time to find what is specifically “choreographic” about the “critique of the object” he is interested in in this work (Reference Lepecki2012, 90). He speaks of a mediating force between “objecthood and subjectivity” and seems to be setting up traditional choreography as a “system of command” (a very traditional concept of choreography) in opposition to the “alongsideness” he observes in this “experimental dance” where subjects and objects begin to blur (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2012, 90). His analysis of Oiticica's use of the social dance form samba in his work of the 1960s, however, comes very close to Godard and Rolnik's (Reference Godard and Rolnik2008) discussion of Lygia Clark's work (who was an artistic colleague of Oiticica), both of which are intense forms of participatory art that approximate dance in their troubling of the aesthetic object as being ontologically discrete from the viewer.Footnote ³⁷ Lepecki writes:

This connects with Godard's comments on the expansion of the visual arts field toward a “‘disobjectivization’ of the art object” through Clark's dance-like privileging of perceptions peripheral to vision. By this, Godard means “a dereification of vision … an attempt to modify the position of vision, to become reimmersed in subjective vision” which is an “intersensorial” mode of perception (Reference Godard and Rolnik2008, 183, 204).Footnote ³⁸ Lepecki and Godard's interest here is in the contribution of dance to the visual arts' critique of the subject/object division and the social and political forces this unleashes, along with a destabilization of the object as the primary model for the work of art, and finally the reactivation of an intersensorial mode of spectatorship in our encounters with art.

Helen Molesworth's Dance/Draw at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2011–2012 is structured as a parallel to Kaprow's path that led the New York art scene from Abstract Expressionism into performance. Molesworth states, “I grew increasingly interested in and drawn to artworks that were derived from, or were about, the gestures, marks, and effects produced by the body moving and performing in space” (Reference Molesworth and Molesworth2011, 11). The works included drawings, paintings, installations/sculptures, videos/films, and photographs that depicted body parts, suggested movement or trajectories, recorded choreographed movement, or which functioned as real or imaginary notations. Babette Mangolte's films of Brown and others, Forsythe's instructional videos, and Brown's own drawings were included. Carrie Lambert-Beatty's (Reference Lambert-Beatty and Molesworth2011) essay in the catalogue is a part of her important writing associated with this curatorial thread.Footnote ³⁹ She reiterates the key concerns for dance in its new relationship with the gallery when she states, “In a post-medium, interdisciplinary condition, does it matter if the articulate body in art is shifted into this particular categorical container [of dance]? What is at stake when art goes dancing?” (Lambert-Beatty Reference Lambert-Beatty and Molesworth2011, 27). This quote gets to the heart of the disciplinary-interdisciplinary tensions at stake here.

In her other writing, Lambert-Beatty spotlights Rainer's identification of the resistance of dance to perception “as an artistic problem” and the associated spectator-performer or subject-object complications, digging deep into the critique of ocular-centricity inherent in dance as an art form (Reference Lambert-Beatty2008, 1, 4). Lambert-Beatty's Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s is important in the clarity of her intention to write the Judson group's aesthetic project back “into social histories of the period” (Reference Lambert-Beatty2008, 72).Footnote ⁴⁰ What Lambert-Beatty does brilliantly is identify compositional strategies that unsettle conventional habits of perception, thus highlighting specifically what dance and choreography achieved and contributed to the most progressive aesthetic concerns of this creative, and internationally influential, milieu. She cites how the following Judson strategies progressed the development of concepts of performance and spectatorship via the key dance fundamentals of presence, motility, and improvisation: “heterogeneity [or inclusiveness], stillness, slow motion,” “indeterminacy, and other techniques of spontaneity,” the use and abuse of the composition standard “repetition and variation,” and nonhierarchical or “paratactic” movement (Lambert-Beatty Reference Lambert-Beatty2008, 41, 51, 55, 140).

Molesworth's exhibition followed MoMA's On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century in 2010–2011, curated by Catherine de Zegher and Cornelia Butler. Echoing Matta-Clark's statement on the progression from line to plane to volume and performance, this exhibition followed the development of line-based art works from paper into three-dimensional and performance work and included dance “represented by film and documentation,” and live performances—mostly choreographed by Brown, De Keersmaeker, Ralph Lemon, and Le Roy (MoMA 2010).

Collectively, these exhibitions—from Diserens to Molesworth—draw in high relief the kind of programming spear-headed in New York at RoseLee Goldberg's Performa festival and curator Sabine Breitweiser's work at MoMA, which, according to Molesworth, “have framed performance and dance as crucial to understanding twentieth-century art and culture” (2010, 11).Footnote ⁴¹ They place mid-century “Minimalist,” intermedial work at the center of the discussion and in direct conversation with recent “Conceptual” intermedial work. They also redefine choreography through an orientation to the visual arts and the associated themes of time, presence, and perception, and in doing so, magnify some important questions for dance-as-a-discipline. The following section draws some conclusions about the status of dance as it is viewed within this very current framework and very particular critical lens.

Body as Archive

Movement scores, notation, and the dance archive are also pivotal to discussions about dance and the gallery or museum, the latter being the traditional gate-keepers of our cultural heritage. This is the material part of dance that the institution understands, and the exhibitions mentioned above included many methods for collecting and exhibiting the ephemera that surround the choreographic event. However, the e-mails between Bel and Charmatz—from which the opening quote for this article is taken—turn to the body as archive: “the dancer's experience of movement” as it exists and persists in the body, which has largely eluded the capture of dance history (Brun et al. Reference Brun and Solomon2014, 37).Footnote ⁴² I would like to turn to the body as archive—and the mind/body activity of the dancer associated with this—as a foundational characteristic of dance, and identify it as an alternative “key” to the dance/art “liaison,” as an alternative to the interest in objects identified by Lepecki.Footnote ⁴³

A superficial observation might state that an orientation toward the object in dance constitutes a movement toward the conditions of object-based creative production and presentation associated with the gallery/museum, while the dancing body and its resources as a creative producer, participant, and body-archive are what the museum desires, as we have seen.Footnote ⁴⁴ This explains how the art form figures for the museum as both desirable and resistant. While visual artists could mobilize the object-oriented experiments of Simone Forti and import them into gallery spaces almost wholesale, the aspects of choreographic research that challenged the very conditions of aesthetic production such as experiments with the effects of gravity, an attention to the perception–action interface within the body, an exploration of the provenance of gestural production, the unpacking of physical presence as both process and product, and the epoch-defining effacement of a divide between art and life, would inform and dialogue with visual arts practices as a slow-drip feed, and at the same time, resist the complete colonization of dance by the gallery or museum.Footnote ⁴⁵ As Charmatz understands, dance requires—or initiates—an entirely new model of the museum, and this is what he approaches in his work.

In his e-mail exchanges with Bel and elsewhere, Charmatz unpacks his idea of the Musée de la Danse. A proposition of his dramaturg colleague Angèle Le Grand, it offers an intervention into the National Choreographic Centres set up by the French government since 1980. He speaks of the Musée de la Danse as “a research project into institutional friction … where the barriers between the visual arts and dance can be moved.” It asks, “In what way is dance more of a performing art than writing or the visual arts” in order to “affirm an existing institutional construction”? (Charmatz and Copeland Reference Charmatz and Mathieu2013, 106).Footnote ⁴⁶ His project, among the recent self-reflective, critically oriented dance work, confronts head-on the disciplinary crisis that intermedial migrations have fueled. His playful approach brings the terms “dance” and “museum” together against the broad range of approaches to presenting dance within the gallery context and all of the archival issues that accompany this shift.

Musée de la Danse has had many iterations, but Charmatz discusses Musée de la Danse: Expo Zéro at New York's Performa festival in 2011, which connects with Copeland and Le Roy's models already mentioned: “This is an exhibition project with no works. … But artists, areas occupied by gestures, projects, bodies, stories, dances that everyone can imagine as they like. Ten personalities (artists, architects, archivists, researchers) will be hosted in residence …” (Charmatz in Bel and Charmatz Reference Bel, Charmatz and Solomon2014, 236–7). In opposition to the “perennial, lasting, static” qualities of the museum, dance is for Charmatz “alive,” inclusive, accessible, non-copyright-able, and “permeable” (Charmatz in Bel and Charmatz Reference Bel, Charmatz and Solomon2014, 236–7). Mark Franko's essay, “Museum Artifact Act,” supports the idea that dance offers the museum what it itself does not have; dance creates its own museum in each instant in dancing bodies, thus constituting an “emancipatory procedure” when relocated to the museum: “The wealth of museum collections is productive of extreme poverty whereas the poverty of dance is productive of extreme wealth” (Reference Franko and Solomon2014, 254–5). This optimistic tone from Charmatz and Franko is a celebration of the qualities of dance that have been the envy of the visual arts since Rauschenberg put on his skates. The power play between the robust gallery and transient dance is clearly articulated in Bel's opening quote, in which he suggests that the gallery as an institution bestows worth on dance as an art form: “dance is starting to be recognized as art. In the end it's as if you had to enter the museum to be legitimized!” (Bel and Charmatz Reference Bel, Charmatz and Solomon2014, 246). And Franko's use of economic terms points emphatically to the power relations inherent in the dance–gallery interface. This begs the question: is there anything for dance to lose in this exchange?

The curatorial discourse surrounding the 13 Rooms exhibition claimed that the works exhibited were not “performance” but “art.” This assured potential “buyers” that the work was “not temporary, not impermanent” (like performances and bodies) but could become part of a “collection” (Obrist and Biesenbach 2013). As curator Catherine Wood says, Sehgal's “introduction of conceptual choreography to the art exhibition space” is “purging aesthetic experience of stuff, things, clutter in favor of pure doing, being and saying” (Reference Wood, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 114). You can thus buy and own a piece of conceptual choreography. Successfully bringing the conditions of contemporary dance into line with the sellable gallery commodity has been at the expense of the dancer-protagonists' agency, reducing them to a kind of exchangeable media. As confirmed by a participant, Sehgal's work resides in the bodies of “interpreters” who carry the score to be enacted—for the cost of a performance—at the request of the owner. (This wouldn't necessarily stop them from giving Seghal's away for free!) In this way, Sehgal and the 13 Rooms curators have managed a rent in the visual arts that until recently would have seemed impossible: distinguishing between art and its medium. Unlike the action scores of Brecht or Kaprow that were written down and circulated to be deployed by anyone whatsoever, containing within the typed document the possibility of performance whether imagined or realized, Sehgal's work is entirely dependent on specific body-archives that hold the otherwise unrecorded score in their mind-bodies and yet who are paid by the hour and, so, are effectively replaceable/exchangeable.

This is perhaps a cynical challenge to Chamatz's assertion of the impossibility of a museum of dance based on the body-archive: “The whole interest in the Musée de la Danse is that it can't exist. The body ages and movement disappears.” So, despite documentations of various kinds, “there's an ‘immaterial’ part of the collection [of Musée de la Danse]” that will always resist its conditions (Charmatz and Copeland Reference Charmatz and Mathieu2013, 109). But for Seghal, Obrist, and Biesenbach (and some of the artists curated in Sydney), the body-archive is replaceable or interchangeable, despite containing the wealth of corporeal knowledges described by Charmatz and Franko. Wood pinpoints a return here to the choreographer–dancer dynamic that contemporary dance has been keen to rid itself of when she writes, “His interpreters … are, arguably, commodified themselves in their capacities as his creative, malleable ‘human resource’” (Reference Wood, Copeland and Pellegrin2013, 115).

In the 13 Rooms curator's talk, Obrist and Biesenbach (2013) described Xavier Le Roy's position in the exhibition program as “an exception.” They described how they had tried to lure him into the gallery for some time but that he had resisted—probably, one imagines, in the spirit of Bel. Le Roy's piece, Untitled [2012], features one dancer and a mannequin in dark gray moving in a small blacked-out room shared by the audience who can see less than they can hear and feel. This gives us a heightened sense of physical presence by suppressing visibility; a choreographic fundamental that is subsumed elsewhere in the exhibition into the body as an art object or, in the curator's words, “living sculpture.” By denying the visual, Le Roy effects a powerful critique of the ocular-centric regime of the gallery by stalling the objectification of the dancers through the gaze, instead giving agency to the dancers (Rebecca Hilton, Jonathan Sinatra, and Aimar Perez Gali) who occupy the space with their own improvised response to Le Roy's scores. The dancers also invite the audience into the space as they rotate their role as a facilitator. In turn, the audience members are “activated” in a way that exceeds their “choreographed” manipulations in the other rooms as they peer, probe, and feel their way into a relationship and situation that puts them, in many ways, on equal terms with the black-clad “protagonists.” This is not dissimilar to Le Roy's approach (with Mårten Spångberg) to the Move. Choreographing You exhibition, where he had dancers working on choreographic movement in process in the gallery space, answering audience members' questions. Le Roy was also present at the Sydney exhibition and “choreographed” the work in person with dance artists who toured with the work.

Reading about Rauschenberg during 13 Rooms, I was also struck by the divergences between this curated exhibition and the artist-led programs that Rauschenberg produced. The curator as a commanding “choreographer” is here very apparent. Rare, however, is the ease with which Rauschenberg, Forti, and Morris moved between the worlds of art and performance. As stated above, these types of grass-roots exchanges do still occur naturally: communities of artists who share methods, collaborate, and “try on” other disciplines in collectives where authorship is suppressed in favor of experimentation and its companion, failure. This egalitarian model, exemplified in the Judson Dance Theatre as Thomas Crow points out, seems in direct opposition to the curator- or institution-led migrations that can result in awkward moments such as the presentations of Cunningham's choreography at the Barbican's Dancing Around the Bride exhibition, and the cringe-worthy piece by Pablo Bronstein in Move, “Magnificent Triumphal Arch in Pompeian Colours,” where “a dancer addresses said arch, while performing ornate, courtly steps” (Crompton Reference Crompton2010). These seem to be the product of something forced rather than organic.

Choreographers such as Xavier Le Roy and Tino Sehgal who have moved into the gallery context clearly owe much to Forti, and artists employing choreographic strategies in gallery spaces are indebted to Nauman et al. While the works of key writers on dance and the visual arts—Chave, Lambert-Beatty, Godard, Charmatz, Wood, Franko, and Lepecki—focus primarily on choreographers (with the exception of Clark and Oiticica), my continuing research project in Dance and the Contemporary Arts reverses the perspective to understand what the desire was and is for visual artists approaching dance—to better understand its potency within the broader creative milieu of the past 150 years as a unique site of innovation and experimentation that is grounded in our corporeality. Here, I have attempted to survey the current scene through key, gallery-based exhibitions, drawing out common themes and paradigms from the programs' curatorial rationale. I have also highlighted discipline-specific responses to that primarily visual arts-based programming in the corporeally grounded work of Godard, rigorous ambiguity of Charmatz, and choreographic sensibility of Le Roy and Lacey. I anticipate that the authors of the next important moves in the current dance–gallery frisson will take much from the work described here and elsewhere, and progress the critical engagement that is testing the very parameters of the two art forms.