Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

History, Memory, and the Virtual in Current European Dance Practice

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01472520903276800

1532-4257

Ramsay Burt,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

Abstract Focusing on current European dance, this essay identifies two recent phenomena among virtual dance pieces: calling upon beholders to use their imagination and evoking histories and memories. Such works have the potential to transform society by creating time for a belief in the impossible. This account of virtual dance draws from Susanne Langer's dance theory and Henry Bergson's ideas about memory and the virtual, particularly as developed by Gilles Deleuze. The theoretical matrix that results allows lucid readings of works by New Art Club, Raimund Hoghe, and Janez Janša. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following individuals for their help with this essay at various stages: Valerie Briginshaw, Bojana Kunst, Eleanor Walker, Pete Shenton, Raimund Hoghe, Janez Janša, Joellen Meglin, and the anonymous readers. Notes 1. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 2. 2. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (London: RKP, 1953), 175–76. 3. Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007), 2. 4. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 70. 5. Yvonne Rainer, Work 1961–73 (Halifax, N.S.: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 67. 6. Langer Feeling and Form, 109–10. 7. Ibid., 180. 8. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 106. 9. Gilles Deleuze, "The actual and the virtual," in Dialogues II (London: Continuum, 2006), 112. 10. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), 81. 11. Ibid. 12. See Ian Palmer, "Sarah Warsop, Sally Doughty, and Colin Poole," http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_06/aug06/ip_rev_sarah_warsop_sally_doughty_colin_poole_0706.htm (accessed February 13, 2009) and Sally Doughty, "Une danse pour la radio," in Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars: Thirtieth Annual Conference Co-Sponsored with CORD, Centre national de la danse, Paris, France, ed. Dena Davida (Birmingham, A.L.: Society of Dance History Scholars, 2007). 13. See also Maaike Bleeker, "Thinking through theatre," in Deleuze and Performance, ed. Laura Cull (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 147–60. 14. Paul Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 119. 15. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 22. 16. Raimund Hoghe, quoted by Dominic Johnson, "The poised disturbances of Raimund Hoghe," Dance Theatre Journal, vol. 21, no. 2 (2005): 40. 17. Raimund Hoghe, public lecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London, October 15, 2008. 18. Hoghe, public lecture. 19. Hoghe, cited in Stephanie Jordan, Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions across a Century (Alton, Eng.: Dance Books, 2007), 494. Jordan describes Hoghe's presentation as "a ritual without the presence of gods" (p. 493). 20. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 106. 21. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 23. 22. Ibid., 31. 23. Hoghe, cited in Jordan, Stravinsky Dances, 493. 24. Deleuze, "The actual and the virtual," 112. 25. Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2007), 206. 26. Manning, Politics of Touch, 53. 27. Ibid., 54. 28. William Forsythe, Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye (Karlsruhe: ZKM Karlsruhe, 1999). 29. Emil Hrvatin, interview by author, November 18, 2008. 30. See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2003). 31. See Ramsay Burt, "Steve Paxton's Goldberg Variations and the Angel of History," The Drama Review, vol. 46, no. 4 (T-176, Winter 2002): 46–64. 32. On canons, see Mark Franko, "Period Plots, Canonical Stages, and Post-Metanarrative in American Modern Dance," in The Returns of Alwin Nikolais: Bodies, Boundaries and the Dance Canon, ed. Claudia Gitelman and Randy Martin (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 2007). 33. Manning, Politics of Touch, 63.