Who's There?—Community of the Question

Abstract

It used to be, in the clamorous sixties, when with all the enchantments of dissidence we were shattering language, abandoning texts, and going for broke with the body, or extolling body language, that dance was preferred to theatre, or at least the bourgeois theatre, burdened as it was with words—or the words, words, words that are, in their Hamletic disposition, an impediment to action. But if dance and theatre were sometimes merged or conflated, as in the tradition of Martha Graham, we have now seen a generation of choreographers, like Alain Platel in Belgium or Jerome Bel in France, who merge them too, but with street arts or social action, or with a high-tech guerrilla strategy, on rooftops with satellite disks, as if in some radicalized extension of that other tradition, from the Judson Memorial Church, with its offbeat anti-aesthetic, during the years of the counterculture. The Judson was not especially political, and there were trained dancers there, like Yvonne Rainer or Trisha Brown, but in renouncing virtuosity, mere dance, in favor of “found” movement or task-directed events, there was another kind of activism, which might change the site of performance or the spectator’s relation to it—and sometimes in public spaces, where if there was anything like a public, they’d have sure been surprised to see it. Thus, if in the church itself they might have performers upside down on a ceiling or, in autistic slow motion, crawling on a floor, they might elsewhere in the city have them in a spidery web (with rather tenuous ropes) coming down from the top of a building. In their affinities, meanwhile, with new music, Cage’s silence, Rauschenberg’s collage, and the interplay of performance with all the visual arts, the Judson choreographers initiated still other ideas: exploring everyday movement, the gestures of eating or dressing, with barely a humming sound; and in the relation of movement and time, testing the viewer’s endurance, as in a matrix of no-time, monotonic at long duration, with the boredom as conceptual; or, breathtaking, breath-catching, the sonic propelling motion, as if danced on the vocal tract. Such ideas were taken up by or inseparable from alternative modes of theatre that, with rock music and blue jeans, soon came over to Europe—along with the