04/01/2019

 

I went to Portugal from the U.K. and watched a piece called Venezuela by an Israeli company.  Meanwhile, a few concepts from new historicism came to my mind. First, even before entering the theatre, I compared that moment to when I watched this same company (Batsheva Dance Company) presenting the piece Deca Dance at Sadler’s Wells in 2012. That time, the theatre was surrounded by pro-Palestine protesters, resulting in a thorough security check before anyone entered the theatre. This atmosphere moulded the way I witnessed the performance from the beginning, creating a tense ambience that amplified any slightly dramatic event, either on or offstage. One of the moments that marked that evening was when one of the protesters managed to smuggle a Palestinian flag and opened it during the performance while screaming ‘Stop killing Palestinians!’.

 

This time (Lisbon 2018), there was no trace of any political manifestation. The surroundings of CCB (Belém Cultural Centre) accused nothing but a normal dance filled evening. On this occasion, the Palestinian flag was not smuggled in the theatre, but introduced in the piece on stage. White pieces of fabric appeared in the first half of the piece, and in the second half, these appeared once again, but with the colours of the Palestinian flag, signifying how the two people exist separately, but in this moment (through dance), they are together. It is worth adding that this piece was not presented at Sadler’s Wells.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

The yet to be Venezuelan flags

 

These memories and reflexions made me question various things: what other contextual elements might have changed in this time? Was the Palestinian protest movement as strong in Portugal at the time of the first performance in London? Is the situation in Israel and Palestine the same in 2018 as it was in 2012? Although I raise these questions, they will be left opened, since my narrative will move away from the political facts and will concentrate on the comparisons between these experiences and certain concepts present in new historicism.

 

Once acknowledging these vicissitudes between the political and the artistic contexts, one notices that “There is not […] a sort of ideal discourse that is both ultimate and timeless” (Foucault, 1972, p.55).  Indeed, history may be described “[…] as traversed by jumps that make any causal or continuous explanation of events impossible” (Aliaga, 2018, p.33). All of these thoughts crossed my mind and I had not even sat in the audience. These are still only brief descriptions of the surrounding socio-cultural aspects of these two performances, but these events reminded me that the “[…] body’s characteristic ways of moving […]” are affected by “[…] aesthetic and political values” (Foster, 1998, p.182) as well. These happenings enabled me to experience how historical accounts are narratives (Tyson, 2006) on a personal level. Actually, these narratives are my points of view, meaning that they are always biased (Tyson, 2006).

 

The performance started while the house lights were still on, creating a rupture in the way the audience is usually aware that something is about to start.  Without voice announcements, the fading out of the house lights and perhaps the introduction of music before any action is taken on stage, this visual disruption and fracture on social conducts reminded me of a historical parallel in Foucauldian ideas and how: “The use of concepts of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation present all historical analysis not only with questions of procedure, but with theoretical problems” (Foucault, 1972, p.15). Michel Foucault mentions historical discourse as being “[…] snatched from the law of development and established in a discontinuous atemporality” (Foucault, 1972, p.127) and immobilized “[…] in fragments: precarious splinter of eternity” (Foucault, 1972, p.127), and dance is a form of discourse. Furthermore, history and dance as discourses have “[…] several eternities succeeding one another, a play of fixed images disappearing in turn, do not constitute either movement, time, or history” (Foucault, 1972, p.127).

So, the piece started within perhaps a philosophical and historical frame, and from my biased point of view, this continued to unroll throughout the performance. Ohad Naharin[1] divided the dancers into two groups in the piece Venezuela, giving the audience two versions of the same piece interpreted by different dancers (Efrati, 2017). These two parts have different atmospheres and as I watched them, I thought, once again, of how new historicism views historical accounts as narratives, depending on who witnessed history (Tyson, 2006). This view allows various narratives, and that was what I saw in Venezuela: two different interpretations of the same piece. These different interpretations were also enhanced by the lighting design (Efrati, 2017). The first part was well lit, whereas the second was quite dark, including moments of complete darkness (Efrati, 2017).  Besides telling us two different stories, this introduces a sense of rupture, by changing the lighting in abrupt ways from light to darkness in an unexpected way.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPG1QL1vJc – This link for a video of Naharin discussing Gaga movement is a rupture in this text, visually and in terms of content flow.

 

Watching this repetition on stage made me question my own memory – did the previous dancer do that same step? Did the first dancer travel as much as the second? Can I trust my memory?  Actually, it is possible to draw a parallel with how truth and meaning are questioned in history and how this piece made me question what was true from what I remembered. In history, these questions depend on how sources are represented “[…] and how the form of that representation directly affects what we think those sources ‘really’ or ‘most probably’ mean” (Munslow & Rosenstone, 2004, p.7).   Once this is recognised, “[…] our everyday concept of truth gets much more messy” (Munslow & Rosenstone, 2004, p.7). Indeed, humans have the tendency to forget and tame the past and “[…] in this way the artistic impulse itself expresses its drive for justice, but not its drive for truth” (Nietzsche, 1874, p.23). This dilemma between history and the truth brings me back to the idea of discontinuity. Some historians have erased discontinuity by omitting certain events that contradicted their underlying idea of continuity (Aliaga, 2018), finding “[…] an internal logic that runs from one period necessarily to the next” (Aliaga, 2018, p.38).

 

While remembering and analysing this piece, I have been wondering if Naharin does history and philosophy by using choreography as his medium. I questioned the degree of his consciousness while doing it, believing this might be at least partly true. In order to further explore this question, I speculate on how philosophers and historians may do philosophy and history. Until Friedrich Nietzsche said otherwise, philosophers thought detached from their physical body and they viewed thinking as something that should happen in a disembodied space (Böhler, 2017). In contrast, Nietzsche viewed the performance of thinking as the condition a philosopher’s body is instinctively yearning for in the performance of life (Böhler, 2017). Additionally, Foucault perceives that when contemplating the fundamental finitude of man “[…] we perceive that his anthropological situation never ceases its progressive dramatization of his History […]” (Foucault, 1989, p.56).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPa5lmaTKWg – Link for Lou Marinoff's stand up philosophy as a closing speech to an audience of philosophers, at the 10th International Conference on Philosophical Practice (Leusden, The Netherlands, 2010). This is an example of a non-traditional way of doing philosophy which I was unaware of and stumbled upon while navigating the internet.

When thinking about more traditional historians, one must be reminded that those historians have a body (Foster, 1998), as Naharin has a body. In a choreographer’s case their body decides what other bodies will do, what their discourse will be like, and in a historian’s case, their “[…] body wants to consort with dead bodies, wants to know from them […], wants to inhabit these vanished bodies for specific reasons” (Foster, 1998, p.183). Also, one may suggest that both bodies (historian’s and choreographer’s) long to know where, either alive bodies or dead ones, stand, how they got there and what options for moving might exist (Foster, 1998). This idea of working with either alive or dead bodies, may be connected to how experimental history “[…] exists in the fissures between what once was and what it can mean now” (Munslow & Rosenstone, 2004, p.11).  Choreographers choreograph their performance, while “[…] historians historiograph theirs” (Munslow & Rosenstone, 2004, p.11), meaning that history is as much about the historian’s performance “[…] as it is about the past itself” (Munslow & Rosenstone, 2004, p.11).

Finally, I suggest that Naharin’s choreographic work in Venezuela (the introduction of history and philosophy by using art as a medium) may be further developed when this choice is conscious and deliberated. In a festival called Philosophy On Stage, lectures, performances, interventions and readings take place encouraging collaborations between philosophers and artists “[…] in order of generating arts-based images of thought supposed to give back to philosophy its corporeality, materiality and sensibility” (Böhler, 2017, p.581). Through these collaborations, bodies gained importance for the philosophers. Bodies have always been relevant for artists, and through this process, bodies became necessarily indispensable for the artist-philosophers (I may add: historians) to exist (Böhler, 2017).

https://homepage.univie.ac.at/arno.boehler/php/?p=9130 – Link for one of those experiments.

​

References

Texts:

Aliaga, O. (2018). “The discontinuity in the continuity”. Michel Foucault and the archaeological period. Topologik, issue n.23.

 

Böhler, A. (2017). “Immanence: A Life… Friedrich Nietzsche” Performance Philosophy. Vol. 3, pp. 576–603.

 

Efrati, Y. (2017). From the performance program, originally published in Time Out Israel 16 May.

 

Foster, S.  (1998). ‘Choreographing history’, pp. 180 – 1991 in A. Carter (Ed.), The Routledge Dance Studies Reader. London: Routledge.

 

Foucault, M.  (1989). The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. London; New York: Routledge.

 

Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications.

 

Munslow, A. & Rosenstone, R. (2004). Experiments in Rethinking History. New York: Routledge.

 

Nietzsche, F. (1874). On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Untimely Meditations.

Translated by Ian C. Johnston (Text amended in part by The Nietzsche Channel). Available: http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEENietzscheAbuseTableAll.pdf.

 

Tyson, L. (2006). New historical and cultural criticism, pp. 281 – 315, in L, Tyson (Ed.), Critical theory today: a user-friendly guide. New York: Taylor & Francis.

 

Images:

https://www.dansesaveclaplume.com/en-scene/1000292-la-batsheva-danse-company-tous-gaga-a-chaillot (accessed 20/12/2018).

​

[1] Ohad Naharin, besides being the resident choreographer of Batsheva Dance Company, is also the creator of the ‘Gaga’ movement language/technique, which raises awareness, improves instinct movement and allows an experience of freedom and pleasure.