By the third performance I attended at Montpellier Danse Festival, I stopped asking what kind of choreography I was witnessing and began asking where dance itself was taking place. One of the greatest gifts of a festival such as Montpellier Danse is the possibility of testing habits of perception alongside other important aspects relevant to a specific art form. International dance festivals are not mere collections of performances, they expose different ways of looking at dance that gradually reveal themselves as historically contingent rather than self-evident. For anyone writing about dance, the real challenge is not to describe how a programme frames choreography or what kind of performances are presented, but to explore what that particular understanding of dance might become if a festival is seen as a temporary space of possible redistribution of perception across artists, audiences and critics.
After coming back from Montpellier, among all the questions raised for me, one seemed to become more relevant, and it deals with the possibility to consider how dance produces conditions for thought to be created, shared and received. Because dance criticism is addressed both to artists (as feedback) and to readers (as information and critical thinking), the issue of perception and sensitivity are not primarily matters of an individual writer’s subjective viewpoint. Rather, it concerns criticism’s capacity to shape (or at least articulate) a shared understanding of what contemporary dance can be and what counts as its distinctive features. Therefore, being more than personal opinion, criticism has a constitutive function and it concerns the ability to articulate a shared understanding of dance as a living ecosystem.
Twenty years have passed since the publication of dance scholar André Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, and the possibility for writers to resonate with ‘thought-full’ dance productions acquires renewed focus. Lepecki argued that contemporary choreography was dismantling the modernist idea of dance as a continuous production of movement, relocating its specificity in practices different from ‘dancing’ such as stillness, repetition, hesitation, archival re-enactment and various conceptual procedures. What once appeared as radical exceptions has become part of the current vocabulary of contemporary dance, sometimes a real canon. But, if the so-called ‘choreography of exhaustion’ has itself become familiar, where does dance’s specificity now reside? And how can we portray it to properly prepare and accompany its future?
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Dance no longer asked only to be recognised in movement or technique, but in the imaginative labour required of those creating the artwork, and of those watching and witnessing the creative labour itself
Montpellier’s new collective artistic direction seems to have suggested different answers, all of them rooted in a form of pluralism allowing every work presented to kind of subtly ‘embrace’ the ones programmed before and after. It is not only the idea of a recognisable fil rouge, but a sort of fertile stubbornness aimed at displacing dance’s specificity away from any single, unique ontology. Across works that differed radically in aesthetics and format, what seemed to shift was less choreography itself than the conditions of spectatorship. Dance no longer asked only to be recognised in movement or technique, but in the imaginative labour required of those creating the artwork and, later, of those watching and witnessing the creative labour itself.
Undoubtedly, participative projects such as Vision by Eric Minh Cuong Castaing have enriched the scene since they become regular in dance festivals around the world. Among various benefits, this helped also to fill in the gap between all sorts of extreme physical ableism that contemporary dance mainstreamed, starting back (at least) from the 1980s, and the idea that being a member of an audience does not exactly equate with being ‘anonymous’, passive and uncreative any more. By recognising a perceptive and a creative power to the audience’s presence and gaze, dancemakers have accomplished a radical revolution, because spectatorship itself is relevant to every choreographic world.
Jane Gallois’s sextet, Imminentes, reveals amazing feminine virtuosity which is not an end in itself but a function to the production of meaning. Gallois allows a form of bodily-based resistance which happens to enter dialogue with other forms of feminine resistance, such as Héla Fattoumi and Sondos Balhassen’s Twama Paradise, where the two artists show how belonging and having memories can lead to completely different paths while working on resemblance as a choreographic research starting tool. Staged autobiography and collective memory dance alongside the audience’s perception and creativity.
Thus expanded, choreography allows redistribution of the labours of spectatorship and authorship. The works no longer seem to contain all of the dance within themselves. They unfold through the relationships they establish – with one another, with their spectators, and with the memories and expectations each audience member brings into the venue. Choreography no longer seems to exist solely within the work itself, apparently, because dance does not reside in movement alone but in its capacity to offer shared opportunities of imagination.
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Festivals such as Montpellier Danse remind us that dance produces more than performances
Dance once produced movement and conceptual structures; what if today’s dance specificity lies in producing conditions under which thought or perception itself is choreographed? This might be the case of Armin Hokmi’s Bazm (Repertoire), a challenging, perception-based minimalist dance performance inviting the audience to reflect on the essence of dance heritage and collective memory. Or, Abby Zbikowski’s Radioactive Practice, which explores the resistance and the limits of the human body while contouring hyperproductivity as a questionable mode of functioning.
Festivals such as Montpellier Danse remind us that dance produces more than performances. The conditions under which dance becomes thinkable may vary, but programmes that keep pace with transformations, like choreography itself, are one of those places where art can continue to ecologically unfold and, possibly, keep thriving through multiplicity. ●
Gaia Clotilde Chernetich’s trip to Montpellier was supported by Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse
