Abstract
The choreographer Deborah Hay calls this one of her core mottoes, in dance and in life. What does this instruction imply if taken for a maxim of performing citizenship? What advice can dance, the art of movement, offer to a body that, normally, is a citizen’s body by virtue of reflexes, not reactions? A policeman shouts, ‘Hey, you!’ and you turn around. This movement suffices to define you as a subject, as one subjected to the state’s authority, according to Louis Althusser (See, Louis Althusser (1971), ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press), pp. 121–176). To the extent that citizenship is a legal status, not an achievement or a competence, the only performative utterance demanded from citizens by the state’s representatives consists of such small responsive movements of acknowledgment. The more automated, the more reliably locked into behavioral routines these responses are—the fewer signs of a true performance they show—the better, from a statist point of view. Disobedience, in this scenario, is left with only two alternatives. You either ignore the policeman and walk on; or you turn against him and engage in a confrontation—perhaps put up a fight. Police have been trained to deal with either form of insurrection.
Highlights
“Move your fucking head!” The choreographer Deborah Hay calls this one of her core mottoes, in dance and in life
What if citizens learned how to continue the movement of turning their heads around in a way that turns the reflex into a reaction— that changes the situation, slightly but effectively, by using the turnaround as a mode of communication with others, referring and relating the policeman’s presence to the presence of other citizens—of citizens who understand how to self-organize spontaneously, who are versed in forming a collective, in establishing a civil constellation any time and in any place through a sequence of distributed reactions? For this to happen, moving your head in response would have to become a performance, a bodily activity that draws on skills, on practical and theoretical knowledge
It would need to be practiced as a political movement
Summary
“Move your fucking head!” The choreographer Deborah Hay calls this one of her core mottoes, in dance and in life.
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