Dancing Returns: Recovering Modernism’s Movements

Abstract

Dancing Returns: Recovering Modernism’s Movements Michelle Clayton (bio) In the fall of 2016, as performers rehearsed for an exhibition by choreographer-artist Tino Sehgal at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, the walls were literally coming down around them.1 In Sehgal’s previous retrospectives, such as the one mounted at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau in the summer of 2015, visitors had moved through separated, often pitch-black spaces, orienting themselves around invisible bodies who announced their presence in individual outbursts or erupted, unsettlingly, in collective humming. But for the Palais de Tokyo, for a piece titled “These Associations,” Sehgal wanted to open up the central space, to set his moving mass of performers —an international, cross-generational group of dancers, writers, sociologists, and travel agents—roaming around the ground floor, intermingling with one another and with visitors, singing, sprinting, and playing games. For that to happen, the walls had to come down.2 The goal was transparency: making all visible to one another—performers, publics, curators, the artist—in the hope that, as all moved around one another and around the exploded exhibition space, new vantage points, new associations would continually come into view. I was a participant in “These Associations”: officially as a performer, inevitably as a researcher, occasionally as a visitor, moving with the memory of what it felt like to visit earlier exhibitions by Sehgal.3 Participating in the piece offered an unusual opportunity to see the assemblage of a work from the inside, to take part in its development and feel its duration; over three-hour shifts and a three-month run, it afforded numerous insights into the relation between bodies occupying the same space from different and fluid subject positions. And as it coincided with the beginning [End Page 307] of a year of archival research into dance from a century earlier, the experience began to give shape to questions I would grapple with in my own scholarly work. What is the relationship between dance and architecture, its sites of choreography, performance, storage, and/or retrieval? How does the body of the spectator or scholar participate in experiments in recovery or reanimation? How do we go in search of bodies from the past, in museums, theaters, and libraries, and how do we bring those bodies to life, in performances, exhibitions, and writing? Finally, how do we recount the performances that weren’t recorded, but that left traces in and on the bodies that performed or viewed them?4 These questions have been at the center of critical discussion and creative practice among performers and publics alike over the last decade, as museums, libraries, theaters, and media platforms have begun staging new approaches to modernism, recoveries of modernist dance, and/or—in an intriguing overlap—danced recoveries of modernism. In what follows I will unpack a series of encounters that try out forms of embodied engagement with the past—what I am here calling “dancing returns.” Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. After-image of Israel Galván’s performance in Leuven’s Central Library, November 17, 2016. [End Page 308] Dancing Libraries We begin with a photograph from the end of an evening in November 2016 (fig. 1). The photo shows part of the main reading room of the Central Library of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium: a library built in 1636 in imitation of Italian models, gutted and pillaged in 1797 by French occupiers, burned to the ground by German soldiers in 1914, built anew with donations from British and American libraries in the 1920s, destroyed once again by shelling in 1940, then reconstructed after war’s end according to its 1920s instantiation, the form in which it now lives on. That 1920s form was designed by the US architect Whitney Warren, a specialist in neo-Renaissance buildings who had spent ten years studying in Paris, and who was also inspired by Spanish architecture. The library therefore incorporated a clocktower modeled on the Giralda of Seville, which itself had been commissioned in the late twelfth century to adorn the Great Mosque of the Almohad dynasty, was modified by the addition of a Renaissance-style bell enclosure after...