This text was written in Swedish for a Field Course in the Humanities, within the Critical Studies Programme, Master’s Studies/Second Cycle, the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg, 2015.
Scenographic sensualism: In the field with the city dancers Astrid von Rosen Please do not quote without permission from the author. Contact:
[email protected]
Hyderabad, July 2015. Before entering the Hindu temple, we – two female academics from Europe – had to remove our shoes, hand over our bags, cameras and mobiles, and pass through a metal detector. We had been advised to wear socks, because when the sun was shining the marble floor could be scorching hot. On this day it was a bit hazy, the air surrounding us was at body temperature, and a mild and pleasant warmth streamed up through our feet from the floor. The sensuality of all this became increasingly palpable as we wandered through the temple, reinforced by the sculptures, the images of different gods, and the religious rituals and practices that were going on close by. The various activities we encountered, the fragrances, touches (feet against floor or ashes on face), sights and sounds, together created a multisensory experience. I was not entirely new to the Hindu world of ideas, but the gaps in my knowledge were still glaringly obvious. This didn’t bother me; I wasn’t there to know or prove facts, but to move in the unknown. As I now write about the experience, the limited memory of the contact between my feet and the warm floor enables me to recall a wider and more complex experience. Using Edward S. Casey’s terminology, the memory of my feet’s pleasure can be called an erotic body memory which admittedly is fragmentary (concentrated to a limited part of the body) but that, once activated, leads to a more holistic experience (my entire body becomes present in the historical situation).1 Erotic body memories are different from habitual memories, those that make it possible for us to walk or sit, and from traumatic memories, which are firmly tied to an unyielding painful core. Both erotic and traumatic memories are fragmentary, but while the latter are closed off and immobile, the former are open and mobile. My erotic or sensual – the word I prefer to use in a scenographic context – body memories from the visit to the Hindu temple resemble a number of memory traces I have from a series of fieldwork activities (workshops consisting of place-activation events in an urban environment) conducted to initiate a research project about non-institutional dance in the 1980s.2 The pattern is the same for all these memories: a pleasurable, sensual and somatically anchored fragment turns out to be a doorway into a more comprehensive sequence of memories. The aim of the fieldwork was more specifically to investigate the dance company Rubicon’s project “City Dancers” by activating the public places – the city being understood here as an archive – that were occupied by the dancers during 1986–89: the Garden Society of Gothenburg, Göta Square, the Great Harbour Canal, the sloping lawn between the University Humanities Library and the water-lily pond, Haga Square and Haga Church, and the major street Vasagatan.
1
Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, Indiana University Press 2009, pp. 158–162. The first phase of this initiation is described in more detail in Marsha Meskimmon, Astrid von Rosen, Monica Sand (eds), Dance as Critical Heritage: Archives, Access, Action, Critical Heritage Studies, Göteborg 2014. Available online: http://criticalheritagestudies.gu.se/digitalAssets/1497/1497255_dach-report.pdf 2
This text was written in Swedish for a Field Course in the Humanities, within the Critical Studies Programme, Master’s Studies/Second Cycle, the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg, 2015.
Rubicon was founded in 1978 by three women choreographers and dancers, Eva Ingemarsson, Gun Lund and Gunilla Witt, and was the first Swedish dance company outside Stockholm to receive support from the Swedish Arts Council.3 At first Rubicon performed for children and toured the region, but in the early 1980s, inspired by dance-theatre icon Pina Bausch, the choreographers decided to investigate what dance really is in a more fundamental way. They spent nearly a year in a studio walking together, which was a way to create new traces in their bodies – traces without roots in the classical ballet training system – and out of this they further developed their collective work. Rubicon did not have a stage of its own, so they decided to take over the city with dance. In light of the 1968 student revolt in Paris, occupying streets and squares was not an unusual choice of strategy. They quickly became known and were easy to recognize because they nearly always performed in yellow rain clothes – the same kind as were worn by the city park workers. The new dance established itself in Gothenburg and the surroundings, a change that mostly has persisted until the present day. Rubicon’s performances in the city helped non-institutional dance reach a large, new and often spontaneous audience. In many ways the group is a typical example of the postmodern and (in Sweden often) state-supported artistic dance that sought to collaborate across genre borders and occupied other settings than the traditional theatrical spaces. Like contemporary choreographers on the international scene, Ingemarsson, Lund and Witt incorporated everyday movements into their work. The pieces were anti-elitist but at the same time distinctly affirmed that the new free art was professional, and therefore deserving of public funding. What in my view makes Rubicon’s “City Dancers” project essential to investigate is its local creation of meaning (rather than its more typically postmodern characteristics), and the transformative power and democratic potential of its actions. On a theoretical level our fieldwork was based on what Marsha Meskimmon – who helped arrange the actions and took part in them – calls “feminist corporeal-materialist aesthetics”, that is, an aesthetics based on situated knowledge, embodied subjectivity and materialization of meaning.4 The choice to corporeally activate public spaces where a dance company had previously performed reflected an ethical and feminist standpoint. Jana Perkovic expresses it as follows: “Instead of insisting on the masculine, disembodied notion of ‘public sphere’, as a political space in which we cultivate rationality as the highest expression of our ‘Western’ value, perhaps we should embrace the concept of ‘affective public sphere’, a space of emotional exchange in which we ought to make room for grief, anger, sadness, love.”5 When we collectively occupied the locations where Rubicon had performed, a dynamic interweaving of bodily knowledge production and politics was emphasized, as opposed to the traditional disembodied protocols. Because essentially nothing of substance has been written about Rubicon within academia, a historiographic field was also activated, bringing epistemological conditions and processes into play.6
3
A fourth member of the original group, Gunnel Johansson, left after a short time. Marsha Meskimmon, “Art Matters: Feminist Corporeal-Materialist Aesthetics”, The Companion to Feminist Art Practice and Theory, edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford (forthcoming) 2016. 5 Jana Perkovic, “An Ethics of Touch”, Dancehouse Diary, Issue 8, 2015. Available online: http://www.dancehouse.com.au/development/research/researchdetails.php?id=103 (2015-08-08) 6 For more about historiography, see Thomas Postlewait and Charlotte M. Canning, “Representing the Past: An Introduction on Five Themes”, Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, edited by Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2010, pp. 1–34. 4
This text was written in Swedish for a Field Course in the Humanities, within the Critical Studies Programme, Master’s Studies/Second Cycle, the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg, 2015.
At the first event, a workshop held on 29 October 2013, about 20 researchers and practitioners gathered on Göta Square in Gothenburg. As participants we had agreed to follow the instructions that artist and researcher Monica Sand gave us on site.7 A preliminary runthrough of materials on Rubicon available in a public database served as a foundation for the collective place activation, but we had consciously decided against trying to reconstruct the choreography (a different, though no less important project). When we filled the steps leading up to the Museum of Art’s former entrance (in use in 1986, but now moved to street level), an intricate, multisensory interplay arose between architecture, air, scents, sounds and bodies. I remember the experience of breathing in and using my voice to get an answer from the museum’s imposing brick facade at the same time as I listened to the others’ sounds or songs and observed and interacted with their movements. Someone was crawling on the stairs, another walked with distinct steps horizontally along the landing. A year later, all of Rubicon’s performance sites listed above had been activated, and my body and consciousness held a store of memories. Remarkably many of them can be described as sensual, that is to say, fragmentarily pleasurable but connected with complete experiences in a constructive way. An example is when activator Kajsa Sandström instructed us to open our mouths and allow the wind to occupy the hollow space.8 It felt unusual – gentle and at the same time revolutionary – to interact with the place and its air space in that way. Through the memory of the wind in my mouth, an intimate act in some sense, a complex multisensory memory grows of how the place was taken over. The collective place activation events have clearly made my body (or parts of it) into a sort of archive of sensual memories of place activations. But how can these memories be made productive in the creation and writing of dance history? In concrete terms, what happened after the fieldwork was over was that the body memories became productive when I worked with other materials: information, stories and movement demonstrations that Rubicon’s choreography had contributed, was well as archival materials such as films, photos, posters, programme leaflets and reviews. Without going into the details of the process, the result was that I put the place activation events – and thus the creation of sensual memories – into a model of scenographic analysis that I have developed in recent years (a work in progress).9 The model, which consists of three analytically separate registers (not layers or levels, terms that readily acquire hierarchical connotations), is holistic and tries not to exclude any relevant aspects of the stage event. Its achieves its clarity through the analysis beginning with the Monica Sand, “Gå i historiens fotspår: En aktivering av konstens kritiska potential i stadsrummet”, Dance as Critical Heritage: Archives, Access, Action, edited by Marsha Meskimmon, Astrid von Rosen, Monica Sand, Critical Heritage Studies, Göteborg 2014, pp. 51–57. Available online: http://criticalheritagestudies.gu.se/digitalAssets/1497/1497255_dach-report.pdf 8 Monica Sand had divided us into groups and delegated to dancer Kajsa Sandström the task of directing our work with the sloping lawn by the Humanities Library, 23 May 2014. 9 See “Inferno i trötthetssamhället: En scenografisk analys av Ett drömspel i Oslo 2014”, Arche 52–53, 2015 (in press); “Scenografera Sillgateteatern: Ett spel mellan kropp, bild och språk”, Lidenskab och levebröd: Utøvende kunst i endring rundt 1800, edited by Svein Gladsø, et al. Fagboksforlaget, Bergen 2015, pp. 315–334; “Koreografi, komplexitet och kritisk rörlighet: En undersökning av barndomens närvaro i dansteaterverket Kung Oidipus”, Arche: 46-47, 2014, pp. 101–114; “Anteckningar om scenografi”, Arche: 36-37, 2011, pp. 178–187; Knut Ströms scenografi och bildvärld: Visualisering i tid och rum, (dissertation), Gothenburg Studies in Art and Architecture 32, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, Göteborgs universitet, Göteborg 2010. Without going into the development of the model in detail, I want to mention that it was initially based on Jacques Lacan’s theory of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. Along the way points of contact with Julia Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic and the symbolic have become more clear. I have also taken inspiration from models in theatre studies, above all Willmar Sauter’s ideas about the theatrical event and the different modes of performance analysis. 7
This text was written in Swedish for a Field Course in the Humanities, within the Critical Studies Programme, Master’s Studies/Second Cycle, the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg, 2015.
imperative to do scenography; that is, to position oneself – as an actively interacting body, hence abandoning the traditionally distanced audience or researcher position – in a space with all its components and gaps.10 It was precisely such intense and in many cases erotic bodily exchanges between people and environments that the place activations described above made possible. The first register, with which this text is primarily concerned, focuses on what I call scenographic sensualism. This stresses bodily engagement – material, sensual and even impossible experiences (such as the risk of falling and breaking one’s leg). The key thing – just as in the temple visit described above – is to take part in the creation of memories, to be present and open for knowledge rather than trying to pin down answers. The investigation of the visual, physical, multisensory, spatial and intermedial expressions on the Göta Square steps led to my gaining – through the interplay with the other participants – a firmly grounded bodily understanding of the place and a chance to better understand the play with architecture and space enacted by the Rubicon dancers. The second register operationalizes scenographic semiotics. This involves identifying signs and their contributions to possible meanings in relation to the context. In this way the stage event can be related to conceptions, pictorial worlds and conventions of the cultural imaginary. The purpose is not (and this is important) to pin down fixed meanings, but to lay bare the building blocks of images (moving and extended in time, material and multisensory image events) and the links to their contexts.11 An example is Rubicon’s aesthetically effective use of yellow rain clothes, which both contributed to the colouristic potency of the choreographic pattern and actualized the dancers’ role as professional culture workers. The third register concerns scenographic structures. This is about investigating the symbolic or governing structures that regulate the event. An example of such a structure, relevant in the case of Rubicon, is cultural politics. This concerns questions about who is granted support and why, and who is not considered eligible for grants. When Rubicon danced on the steps of the Museum of Art, several culture political structures were activated. The museum’s longstanding traditions and its financing, valuation and selection system had no room for the local and innovative dance’s bodies. The cultural politics that supported Rubicon had no systems that could handle an audience that was impossible to count, that was free to come and go as it pleased, in the urban space. In the “City Dancers” project, Rubicon questioned prevailing institutional arrangements and created mobile art that not only brought the very museum building into play but also raised questions of democracy and public space. In one and the same movement – worming one’s way down the steps – all three registers were present: the scenographic eroticism/sensualism, semiotics, and structures. The yellow-clad dancers’ material actions, with their associated 10
An earlier version of my text was presented as a paper within the Choreography and Corporeality working group, IFTR Conference Hyderabad, India, 6–11 July 2015. I am thankful to the group for their valuable comments on the text. For an interesting early example of bodily activation in a historical milieu, see Lena Hammergren, “The re-turn of the flâneuse”, Corporealities: Dancing knowledge, culture and power, ed., Susan L. Foster, Routledge, London 1996, pp. 53–69. 11 This methodological approach is based on an art history tradition. For a useful example of using semiotics to reveal building blocks (in contrast to an overly narrow fixing of meanings) in an academically structured way, see Lena Johannesson, “Sittandets semiotik och den kvinnliga modernismen”, Från modernism till samtidskonst: svenska kvinnliga konstnärer, eds. Yvonne Eriksson & Annette Göthlund, Bokförlaget Signum, Lund 2003.
This text was written in Swedish for a Field Course in the Humanities, within the Critical Studies Programme, Master’s Studies/Second Cycle, the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg, 2015.
symbolic significations, inverted the art world’s hierarchies as embodied in the stairs and neoclassical arches of the architecture. The participants in the place activations were exposed to – and made conscious of – the highly mobile complexity that characterizes urban milieus. The open and challenging exploration of the places was thus not an attempt to reproduce Rubicon’s choreographic movements, but made it possible for the participants to move erotically (in a pleasurably fragmented way, but in alliance with greater wholes) within the fundamental principles by which the dance company worked: (1) the choreography was created in close interaction with the public space, architecture, structures (such as pedestrian paths and passageways) and human beings; (2) formal aspects (for example form, line, colour, rhythm space, scale and composition) played a fundamental part in merging large scale moving multisensory dance images with the city’s living and mobile spaces; (3) material and bodily interaction with the surroundings (like gliding or crawling down a stairway) are equally central in the works; (4) triggering a change of perspective is a particularly powerful component of their work; and (5) even if the audience were free to come and go as they pleased, the choreographers sought out choreographically ideal locations where their compositions could be experienced in the best possible way. A multi-camera documentation undertaken by filmmaker Lindo Sternö contributed to giving the collective fieldwork lasting value: what we did cannot easily be erased and forgotten. Today the documentation is preserved in a digital archive whose moving pictures help me – and potentially others as well – to remember the collective place activations. The erotic fragments in the archive of the body, however, are not digitally archived, though they are connected to the work of the camera and can be activated through the filmed material. In summary, on a methodological level, the carefully planned actions succeeded in placing the researcher’s own body on a practical and material stage for action, a scena, to use Peter W. Marx’s term.12 The activations function as a kind of play where something new is created, experienced and made accessible in the exchange between the environment and human bodies. This play can be described as a scenographic event where the participants are theatrically active in the creation, among other things, of sensual – or using Casey’s term erotic – body memories.13 The model for historical scenographic analysis described above is not just something I brought with me to the study – it has also developed in the encounter with Rubicon’s choreographers, dancers and works. The scenographic sensualism functions as a means to make such knowledge processes possible. Images accompanying the text: 1) Workshop on Göta Square stairs, 29 October 2013. Photo Linda Sternö. 2) Rubicon, Götaplatsens trappor, première 22 November 1986. Photo Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin.
Peter W. Marx, “Making a scene! Considerations on the concept of scena”, presented at the “Making a Scene”-workshop of CRASSH at King’s College Cambridge, 12 January 2015. I am thankful to Marx for permission to cite his text. The article is available online: https://www.academia.edu/10261717/Making_a_scene_Considerations_on_the_concept_of_scena (2015-08-08) 13 Traumatic memory traces should not be understood as worthless, dangerous or uninteresting; they can be processed and gain meaning. 12
This text was written in Swedish for a Field Course in the Humanities, within the Critical Studies Programme, Master’s Studies/Second Cycle, the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg, 2015. 1
Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, Indiana University Press 2009, pp. 158–162. 2
The first phase of this initiation is described in more detail in Marsha Meskimmon, Astrid von Rosen, Monica Sand (eds), Dance as Critical Heritage: Archives, Access, Action, Critical Heritage Studies, Göteborg 2014. Available online: http://criticalheritagestudies.gu.se/digitalAssets/1497/1497255_dach-report.pdf 3A
fourth member of the original group, Gunnel Johansson, left after a short time.
Marsha Meskimmon, “Art Matters: Feminist Corporeal-Materialist Aesthetics”, The Companion to Feminist Art Practice and Theory, edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford (forthcoming) 2016. 4
Jana Perkovic, “An Ethics of Touch”, Dancehouse Diary, Issue 8, 2015. Available online: http://www.dancehouse.com.au/development/research/researchdetails.php?id=103 (2015-0808) 5
6
For more about historiography, see Thomas Postlewait and Charlotte M. Canning, “Representing the Past: An Introduction on Five Themes”, Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, edited by Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2010, pp. 1–34. Monica Sand, “Gå i historiens fotspår: En aktivering av konstens kritiska potential i stadsrummet”, Dance as Critical Heritage: Archives, Access, Action, edited by Marsha Meskimmon, Astrid von Rosen, Monica Sand, Critical Heritage Studies, Göteborg 2014, pp. 51–57. Available online: http://criticalheritagestudies.gu.se/digitalAssets/1497/1497255_dach-report.pdf 7
8
Monica Sand had divided us into groups and delegated to dancer Kajsa Sandström the task of directing our work with the sloping lawn by the Humanities Library, 23 May 2014. See “Inferno i trötthetssamhället: En scenografisk analys av Ett drömspel i Oslo 2014”, Arche 52–53, 2015 (in press); “Scenografera Sillgateteatern: Ett spel mellan kropp, bild och språk”, Lidenskab och levebröd: Utøvende kunst i endring rundt 1800, edited by Svein Gladsø, et al. Fagboksforlaget, Bergen 2015, pp. 315–334; “Koreografi, komplexitet och kritisk rörlighet: En undersökning av barndomens närvaro i dansteaterverket Kung Oidipus”, Arche: 46-47, 2014, pp. 101–114; “Anteckningar om scenografi”, Arche: 36-37, 2011, pp. 178–187; Knut Ströms scenografi och bildvärld: Visualisering i tid och rum, (dissertation), Gothenburg Studies in Art and Architecture 32, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, Göteborgs universitet, Göteborg 2010. Without going into the development of the model in detail, I want to mention that it was initially based on Jacques Lacan’s theory of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. Along the way points of contact with Julia Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic and the symbolic have become more clear. I have also taken inspiration from models in theatre studies, above all Willmar Sauter’s ideas about the theatrical event and the different modes of performance analysis. 9
This text was written in Swedish for a Field Course in the Humanities, within the Critical Studies Programme, Master’s Studies/Second Cycle, the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg, 2015. 10
An earlier version of my text was presented as a paper within the Choreography and Corporeality working group, IFTR Conference Hyderabad, India, 6–11 July 2015. I am thankful to the group for their valuable comments on the text. For an interesting early example of bodily activation in a historical milieu, see Lena Hammergren, “The re-turn of the flâneuse”, Corporealities: Dancing knowledge, culture and power, ed., Susan L. Foster, Routledge, London 1996, pp. 53–69. 11This
methodological approach is based on an art history tradition. For a useful example of using semiotics to reveal building blocks (in contrast to an overly narrow fixing of meanings) in an academically structured way, see Lena Johannesson, “Sittandets semiotik och den kvinnliga modernismen”, Från modernism till samtidskonst: svenska kvinnliga konstnärer, eds. Yvonne Eriksson & Annette Göthlund, Bokförlaget Signum, Lund 2003. Peter W. Marx, “Making a scene! Considerations on the concept of scena”, presented at the “Making a Scene”-workshop of CRASSH at King’s College Cambridge, 12 January 2015. I am thankful to Marx for permission to cite his text. The article is available online: https://www.academia.edu/10261717/Making_a_scene_Considerations_on_the_concept_of_s cena (2015-08-08) 12
13
Traumatic memory traces should not be understood as worthless, dangerous or uninteresting; they can be processed and gain meaning.
