Subversion and the Dancing Body: Autonomy on Display

Abstract

Pe rf o rman c e Re s e a r c h 8 ( 2 ) , p p . 6 1 – 6 8 © Tay l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 0 03 61 The ideas behind this essay sparked my mind some time ago, after seeing a performance by Conrad Drzewiecki, the doyen of Polish dance, at the International Contemporary Dance Conference and Performance Festival in Bytom in 1998. It was his work Waiting for that struck me. Despite not being featured in the official programme and somewhat bashfully presented by the organizers themselves, Waiting for turned out to be one of the highlights of the festival – not due to the relief of chancing upon something ‘contemporary’. It had nothing to do with the laborious search by ‘western’ producers for ‘different’ performances which could be successfully presented in the stage market, fitting the ‘acquired taste’ of dance audiences. Nor was it a result of paternalistic approval, in the sense of ‘well done, but we have seen this already’, which whilst of course is no guarantee to sell, is at least a polite and respectful way of admitting someone’s quality. Drzewiecki’s performance – a short solo by a dancer wearing a rich gold costume, whose movement and gestures were bent on decorating his body – clearly evoked the Central European dance of the 1930s. Nonetheless, Drzewiecki’s ‘past’ was not that of historical tradition, now only vaguely present as a recognition of the former dance articulation that remains in western scholarly knowledge and its categorizing of dance history; nor was it a past reflecting the impossibility of development – the still innocent state of the dancing body, which, because of its specific historical situation, could not become aware of all the contradictions and aesthetic deconstructions of its ‘bodiescapes’. It was somewhere in-between: a utilization of the past to stay in the present. It revealed our eternal confrontation with different ways of being present, a basic need for dystopian time. For me, the manner in which the performance disclosed our disillusioned idea of the exclusiveness of the present – of the exclusive and hegemonic ways of forming our present presence, which are often inscribed in the articulated modes of the dancing body – was most surprising. All in all, what was this ‘waiting for’? It was a display of pure autonomy: of a deep belief in the autonomy of the body, of an autonomy which was not out of time, an articulation of the past, but about time. Its content had been discreetly embroidered already in its title: fixation and openness, distance and closeness, decoration and subversion, all at the same time. It opened the possibility of disclosing a variety of simultaneous histories.