During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the term “conceptual dance” began to filter throughout the dance world. As a young dancer in New York City during this period, I sensed that this act of naming contributed to defining a certain degree of distance (geographic, historical) and difference (aesthetic, cultural) between the North American and Western European scenes. While employed predominately by curators and presenters (less so by the artists themselves), the invention of conceptual dance has created an enduring aesthetic umbrella. A performative assertion, “conceptual dance” maps choreography along the historically significant yet potentially obscure sightlines of the “contemporary.” The contemporary can be interpreted as twofold: a fluid term, affirming that every age experiences its own version of the contemporary, or, alternately, strictly historical, demarcating movements following modernism and situated post-1989, which includes the aesthetic, political effects following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of globalization. Across this temporally specific lens, questions persist about what factors constitute the aesthetic, political, or philosophical markers of contemporary dance (Alberro Reference Alberro2009, 55; see also Harvey Reference Harvey2003, Reference Harvey2005; Hochmuth, Kruschkova, and Schöllhammer Reference Hochmuth, Kruschkova, Schöllhammer, Hochmuth, Kruschkova and Schöllhammer2006; Meyer Reference Meyer2013). This is where performance theorist, maker, and dramaturg Bojana Cvejić’s Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance begins, offering a critical examination of contemporary European choreography at the turn of the twenty-first century, and articulating its philosophical impact through the work of a select group of choreographers deemed pivotal in what has loosely and debatably been designated as “conceptual dance.”

Also referred to as “non-dance” or “anti-dance,” the “conceptual” choreographic turn has been associated with 1960s conceptual and minimalist art movements’ investments in the dematerialization of the art object, implicit self-reflexivity, and a critique of representation. But this assessment proves tricky, as those once deemed “minimalist,” the artists most often associated with the movement (such as Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, La Ribot, and Vera Mantero), are not responsible for instigating the widespread use of this term. Their work spans a broad aesthetic, methodological, and theatrical territory that defies neat placement into a single rubric (see Lepecki Reference Lepecki2006). At the risk of reductionism, this “conceptual” turn infers an avid intellectualism, implying a dissolution of dance's physicality, bodily labor, and “performative presence,” polarizing thought and action and re-enforcing oppositions between theory and practice (Burt Reference Burt2004).

As a point of entry, Cvejić is not invested in a recuperation of this supposed “turn.” Arguing against the formal content of these associations, she directs us toward philosophy, exploding this historically confusing term through her theorization of “expressive concepts,” delving into Gilles Deleuze and his writings on Baruch Spinoza, whose contributions remain essential to dance and performance as a philosophy grounded in the body. Deleuze's writings on Spinoza have greatly impacted the work of performance and dance makers. Quoting Spinoza, this oft-repeated statement, “we do not even know what a body can do,” invariably opens up a space for questions, experimentation, and radicality (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1988, 17–18). Shifting from art historical to philosophical canons, Cvejić critically engages Deleuze's philosophy of problems, ideas, and concepts (also read through the writings of Henri Bergson) and, with a virtuosic dramaturgical move, positions Western philosophic thought into alignment with this moment in Western European choreography and performance. Through detailed description, Cvejić provides insight into seven significant works made between the years 1998 and 2007: Self Unfinished and Untitled by Xavier Le Roy, Weak Dance Strong Questions by Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema, éâtre-elévision by Boris Charmatz, Nvsbl by Eszter Salamon, 50/50 by Mette Ingvartsen, and It's in the Air by Ingvartsen and Jefta van Dinther. Illustrating how these pieces “merit philosophical attention,” she demonstrates how they break with conventions of modern and postmodern dance through their distinct “method of creation by way of problem-posing” that temporally unfold within and across the event of performance (2). Published as part of Palgrave's newly founded “Performance and Philosophy” series, Choreographing Problems makes substantial contributions this exciting, interdisciplinary field.

Cvejić voices concerns regarding dance usurped by philosophy (citing Alain Badiou) or choreographers taking up philosophy (i.e., Ritsema's Deleuzian positioning in Weak Dance Strong Questions). These critiques are scattered in moments throughout the text, articulating divides between scholar and practitioner through demarcated terrains of access with respect to language and experience. As both a scholar and an artist, Cvejić is also working out how to navigate this delicate positioning. A project that evolved out of a dissertation in philosophy, Choreographing Problems confers with Deleuze in that philosophy must seek its non-philosophical outsides. Positioning the fields of performance and philosophy side by side, Cvejić writes against the notion that “philosophical thought creates its own object,” instead prioritizing parallelism between thought and practical experiment—a key methodological ingredient to these “problem-posing” choreographies. Nonetheless, at times Cvejić’s explications seem to prioritize the historical and intellectual weight of philosophical thought as a means by which to destabilize her sites. Although, she argues that these seven choreographies are exemplary by not simply putting thought into practice, along the lines of performance as research, but are acts of philosophical inquiry themselves enacted through inventions of the body, movement, duration, affect, and the mise en scène. Ultimately, hers is an argument for dance that does not precede language, but is deeply invested, critical, and acts with “agencement”—a combine of agency and assemblage—within its lengthy history of representational, discursive, and theatrical conditions.

Central to Cvejić’s thesis is the capacity for these seven choreographies to create a “theater of problems,” which, after Deleuze leaves intact “neither the identity of the thing represented, nor author, nor spectator, nor character, nor […] object of the production of knowledge or final recognition” (Deleuze quoted in Cvejić, 33). A daunting task, this is where Cvejić’s theoretical acrobatics come into play. Throughout the course of the text she works fastidiously to illustrate how these artists untether two historical, persistent binds in Western concert dance: the causal relationship between the body and movement and the implicit agreements between performer and audience within the context of theatrical venues. The bind between the body and movement is further elucidated along two distinct poles that “happily” align with the choreo-aesthetic principles of modern dance, where the body serves as a source of self-expression and “movement springs form the body's urge to express its inner (emotive) experience,” and postmodern dance, where corporeality is conceived as “an instrument of physical articulation,” devoid of identifications beyond its strictly material, object-like presence (73). By engaging the choreographic as a mode of problem-posing, these works escape essentialist legacies, successfully perform desubjectification and deobjectification in movement–body relationships, and detach prescribed relationships between performer, maker, and spectator, which dismantles expectations, continuities of recognition, and stagings of and by “danse d'auteur” within the theatrical apparatus (66).

But how exactly is this accomplished? Here lies the import of Cvejić’s “expressive concepts” and almost forensic examination of these seven choreographic works, where “concept,” rather than corresponding to interpretation, “is expressed from the viewpoint of problem” (55). In this sense, expression, instigated by disjunctions within the binds between the body and movement or perceptual, causal structures of relation between making, performing, and attending, is at once substantial and differential, opening up to a multiplicity of modes in which in which a work manifests, or is, and becomes known through affections (42–45). For Cvejić, each work radicalizes these relations as independently expressive concepts insofar that they inspire sensing and thinking “in a minor key” (41). Consistent with Deleuzian terminology, and its potential hermeticism, each dance bears signals of philosophy and dance's potentially parallelist communion: part-bodies, part-machines, movement-sensations, head-box, wired assemblings, stutterances, power-motion, crisis-motion, cut-ending, and resonance. Untethering the body-movement bind is performed through stillness, slowness, imperceptible movement, blurred agency, and relations with objects.

Cvejić’s rich descriptions of these works provide access to individual performances, a group of artists, and their body of work, substantially contributing record to the archive of this geographic, cultural, aesthetic, and temporal specific movement in contemporary dance. Nonetheless, throughout the densely theoretically text, her analyses remain tirelessly loyal to a project consistent with philosophy's objective, analytic approach, which threatens to narrow its reach with respect to such contexts. For example, in Chapter Four's “Exhausting Improvisation: Stutterances,” she embarks upon an extensive discussion of Burrows’ and Ritsema's improvisational duet Weak Dance Strong Questions, an important work centered on the choreographic prompt: “how can one ask a question by moving?” Posing the problem, Burrows and Ritsema continue, “This is impossible” (28–33). Setting the scene, Cvejić aligns dance improvisation with 1960s and 1970s New York–based postmodern choreographers, iterating a narrative that credits them with developing the form. Cvejić argues improvisation's epistemological lack of rigor due to its reliance on the practitioner's experience within the frame of the ineffable, citing two strands of improvisation that uphold the body and movement bind of modern and postmodern dance, both of which fold into a historical narrative of “improvisation dance as an ideological precept of the embodiment of freedom.” These two strands include the modern, on one hand: “self-expression as an embodiment of a particular self where the subject coincides with her body”; and, postmodern, on the other: “the body subordinates itself as an instrument” (137).

Lost in Cvejić’s premise is important scholarship that has contributed to this insufficient narrative, notably addressed by performance scholar Danielle Goldman, which leaves out possible influences by, traversals across, and affiliations with African American artistic practices, embedding improvisation dance and performance practices with the aesthetic legacies of African and African-American diaspora. Theorizing the “tight spaces” of constraint in relation to improvisational dance's frequent alignment with discourses of freedom, Goldman critically engages conditions of identity, race, privilege, and mobility across vastly divergent experiences and contexts. Here, improvisation might offer a different critical, artistic strategy of resistance and counter modern dance's reliance on unencumbered, expansive, obstacle-free spaces for movement, what Cvejić refers to as the “internalistic” strands of improvisation (137). One is asked to wonder, does arguing against identity in a philosophical, anti-representational context necessarily derail attending to the complicated, multiplicitous, shifting realities of identity in this day and age? How can these “minor keys” be written into dance's master narrative? Cvejić’s elisions stand out.

Another moment in the text that lends itself to this dilemma occurs in the description of Mette Ingvartsen's 50/50 in Chapter Five's “A Critical Departure from Emotionalism: Sensations and Affects in the Mode of Performing,” a piece that “appropriates” multiple strands of theatrical spectacle, from opera to rock concert. She writes of the intensive, rhythmic movements of the female performer's naked buttocks as they visually attune to the sonic accompaniment of a drum, relating this image to Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of “faciality” (188). In this sense, “faciality” de-individuates zones of the body through the notion that the signification and subjectification of the face might act upon/as any region of the body: “Although the face is produced in social culture and is a part of every regime of signs, an instrument of power that reinforces every discursive practice with gestures, expressions, and gazes that company verbal enunciations, the face isn't human” (188). Cvejić writes, “While the drumroll clearly comes from the rock concert, it is more difficult to identify the genre from which the movement of shaking and vibrating naked buttocks is acquired” (175). For Cvejić, this descriptive image of the “pulsating” buttocks offers a means by which to articulate a disjunction between choreographic action and affect, elaborating on Ingvartsen's interest in “reducing” and investigating an autonomy of affect, related to yet separate from these exercised upon us by mass, pop, and consumer culture. This choreographic reading assumes the possibility of Ingvartsen performing, while nude, a neutral body, whose movements might allow her to go “through many bodies at the same time.” But, one might ask, what does it mean to propose this image, performed by a young, white, successful Danish choreographer, a neutral body? A quick return to Brenda Dixon Gottschild's seminal The Black Dancing Body (2005) and its extensive, critical analysis of African diasporic aesthetics as they mapped across the territories of the body throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century performance culture, including a lengthy subsection titled “Butt,” immediately raises the stakes of this suggestion. In discussing early twentieth-century popular African American dances, Gottschild also discusses the “fast and furious” isolation of the buttocks in contrast to the face's “detached, still life ‘mask of the cool’” (Gottschild Reference Gottschild2005, 159). Indeed, there is a plethora of cultural and popular dance forms that involve the performance of complex rhythms focused on the pelvis and buttocks—twerking currently dominates this technical prowess—which cannot be thought distinct to the techniques, aesthetics, and choreographic practices of contemporary dance. How might these moments of extreme embodied movements invite a complex web of references within this movement's choreography's problem-posing capacities? Might the disjunctions between subjectivity- and objectivity-motivated body and movement and their reception be expressed within these other culturally specific forms in such a way that expands Cvejić’s dance historical narratives? Or, how might such inclusions put pressure upon or “queer” the methodological orientations upheld by Western philosophy? Can choreography's problem-posing within this contemporary, and necessarily global, context provide an exemplary means by which to further attend to cultural, aesthetic underpinnings that truly have historically participated in a minor key?

In her brief, though inspired, conclusion, “A Post Hoc Conclusion: An Expanse of Choreography,” Cvejić invokes other artists whose work extends this problem-posing choreography beyond dance's conventional binds, embarking into the realm of the digital, text or object-based, installation, the museum, and immaterial systems of labor and participation. This departing gesture is significant, opening up the scope of her analyses toward the sociopolitical potential of artistic knowledge produced through a problem-posing choreographic methodology, where “inorganic regimes of dance and choreography might help us formulate, and attempt to solve, if only temporarily, problems which socially and politically structure everyday life” (231). On this note, and with her text in hand, we might move toward such possibilities and respond to the call of her contemporary theater of problems, whose expressive concepts are manifested not only by choreographer, dancer, or even the convening public, but by the agential “thought of the performance” itself (16).