Choreography from the Outside: Dance Experiments in Thinking, Perception, and Language after 1960.

摘要

This dissertation advances a definition of choreography as "future writing" and advocates that the perspective of motion—a condition of ongoing change, multiplicity, and experimentation—casts the dancer as choreographer of new futures written and lived out. By suspending known outcomes, moving bodies exceed themselves and dance is carried forward into new territory. Each chapter advances my theory of choreography as future writing by addressing the affective qualities of certain "postmodern" dance artists' performances and practices. I look closely at the post-60s approaches of Trisha Brown, Deborah Hay, and Akira Kasai, addressing how thinking, perception, and language are deployed to disrupt coherent authorship, producing what Gilles Deleuze calls "bodies of sensation"—connective and generative processes that intensify the present moment. Posed is a temporality that bypasses the primacy of human expression to instead favor sensations that connect bodies and sites in productive ways, a view I use to critique dance studies' use of the "postmodern" as applied to Judson and butoh. I articulate my understanding of choreography's future writing by integrating two perspectives: affect—feeling's performative qualities beyond the personal, and somatics—embodied knowledge by which sensations are experienced by human bodies who give them relevance in the material world. In the first case, I draw heavily on Deleuze's theories, his writings with Félix Guattari and after Henri Bergson, and those influenced by them such as Elizabeth Grosz, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, and José Gil. In the second, I turn to F. M Alexander's work, Zen Buddhism, Asian and Western phenomenologies, and Rudolph Steiner's Eurythmy. Choreography from the outside suggests the unknown ways that choreography can and does open to "what is alien, other, different from or beyond it" by thinking past individual selfhood. However, importantly I have also been called to question ethical choices and responsible action in and by human bodies. Anxiety regarding the future so prevalent in the 60s is also present today, with renewed urgency toward sustaining the health of the planet, our lives, and the lives of others. How can dance teach different ways of living and experiencing life? This question is one that circulates throughout my entire project.