I can’t escape my body. My feet swell.  My eyes itch. When I walk, I feel like my left side is squashed up under my rib cage and the rhythm of my gate is slightly uneven.  I have a hard time standing on one leg to put on my shoes.  I have a scar on my left cheek from a stealthily thrown pinecone.  On my left shoulder, I can still see the trace of a persistent chicken pock.  My left breast bares the mark of a surprise shot from a pellet gun at close range. My body holds me – a collage of past and present experience and sensation embedded in my skin, my muscles, and my bones. 

Jacques Lacan’s linguistic development of the human self neglects to recognize the power of this deeply familiar and idiosyncratic corporeality.  Lacan situates language – its lexicon and its grammar – in the Freudian father’s central tower, imposing its binary worldview on all who enter its kingdom. In Lacan’s grand narrative, we enter the kingdom, submitting to its rules and conventions in an effort to connect, to share, and to engage in community. By dismissing the relationship between being and body, however, Lacan ignores the human self’s immanent potential to subvert the rules of language and transcend its binaries.

Contemporary choreographers Meredith Monk, Mark Dendy, Joe Goode, and Ohad Naharin pose a compelling threat both to the throne of language and the power structures on which it rests through their presentation of an articulate embodied self.  Through the use of the body as source, site, and medium of experience; the incorporation of personal story; a recontextualization of self in relation to other; and the direct engagement of audience members as participants in, rather than observers of, the performance experience, Monk, Dendy, Goode, and Naharin offer alternative visions of a non-discursive self that moves alongside, rather than within, the discourse of Lacan’s big Other, language. 

Employing a hybrid performance form that merges animated text with a highly expressive physicality, these dance-theater artists offer what Luce Irigaray calls “`a new poetics’” (Irigaray, Ethics 5), a socio-cultural-aesthetic vision that exceeds the limits of conventional language.  Their works operate outside of Lacan’s discourse of the symbolic self, shrouded in myth and dualism, and embrace in its stead a dynamic, complex, contradictory, and idiosyncratic sense of self that by its nature eludes fixed representation.

Often delighting in the slipperiness of signification and the impossibility of articulating concrete meaning, Meredith Monk, Mark Dendy, Joe Goode, and Ohad Naharin turn away from the attempt to fix the unfixable, embracing movement, music, images and words as thoroughfares through which meaning can travel, but in which it never rests.

Meredith Monk:  A Non-Discursive Self

In “Mercy,” a collaboration between Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton, suspended time, polyphonic vocal music, layered imagery, and mediated perspective create a liminal, dreamlike performance space that attempts to elude the limitations of “the discursive mind:”

“I hope that my work is immersive for an audience, that they can just drop down into it, and that they can let go of the chatter of the discursive mind for a short period of time,” [Monk] explains. “What I’m trying for is the kind of direct experience that we can’t filter out. In a sense we filter our experience by labeling it; we have a kind of verbal screen that filters out direct experience, and I think that the power of music is that you can get past that to direct experience of the present moment.” (Varty)

Monk’s deliberate effort to move beyond the verbal filter expresses her desire to bypass the reifying <subjective I> and engage her audience’s affective selves.  Monk wants her audience to enter the piece, suspending for the duration of the performance the tendency to label and categorize, the linguistic “need” to decode and master.

Towards this effort, Monk and Hamilton repeatedly deconstruct the written and spoken word in “Mercy,” calling attention to and subverting its captivating power.  In the opening of the opera, Ann Hamilton sits in profile alone at a desk, writing: "These are 12 stories of mercy."  The penciled letters appear to the audience one-by-one on a giant-sized projection – first as a movement impulse, then as a dark line or curve on a white background, and finally as the recognizable symbol of a letter that stands with other letters to form a single meaningful word.   The deeply sensual act of Hamilton’s writing – the pencil rubbing against the paper, leaving traces of grainy lead in uninterrupted curves – carries as much, if not more, meaning than the words themselves.

In a later scene, a giant open mouth shakes from side to side, suspended in extreme slow motion.  First hinting at a smile and then relaxing its heavy lips, the mouth echoes the deep round tones of Monk’s densely layered vocal score.  Just as the mouth becomes familiar, we are drawn into the space of a video that flies us over the surface of a text.  We move, in the most literal sense, through the lines on a page in a book.  Isolated words rush briefly to the forefront: “stepmother… infant… fantasies… structure… means… authority… anger… author….” The kinetic activity of the structuralist script amplifies the affective force of its double-coded signifiers.

A man and a woman look at each other.  Slowly, they turn their focus to the audience.  They are singing, repeating "help" over and over again, calling out to us with rhythmic breath accents in between each song-cry.  A second woman enters and carries away the chair that stands between them.  As the chair recedes, the man and woman shrink into almost-nothingness, cowering into heaps of isolated selves on the floor, their collapse echoing the failure of their sung plea to spur us, the audience, to action. 

In the environment constructed by Monk and Hamilton, we read Hamilton’s written text in relation to the image of her isolated profile; the swinging lips, in relation to the haunting vocal score; and the pleas for help, in relation to the collapsed bodies of their criers. In Monk and Hamilton’s non-discursive world, an infinite number of kinetic, visual, aural, and tactile associations fill the space with a virtual symphony of subjective meaning. 

As audience members, we know ourselves in the world of “Mercy” through direct sensory experience.  As the layers of sound, imagery, and movement accumulate, we learn the rules by which the piece operates and claim our place within its structure. Arguably, in the case of Monk and Hamilton’s work, we constitute ourselves in relation to an anti-structure, a framework built on fluidity and difference. By subverting our limited, conventionally language-based understanding of the world, Monk and Hamilton suggest the possibility of a new subjectivity, a subjectivity with the expressive agency and the interpretive capability to move seamlessly between Lacan’s real (kinesthetic), imaginary (visual), and symbolic (linguistic) orders.

Mark Dendy: Meeting the Other on a Bus Ride to Heaven

Language means by virtue of agreement, a conventional acceptance of certain relationships between signifiers.  Luce Irigaray questions the self/other binary that pervades the Lacanian symbolic, a dualism which she believes privileges one side of the binary, male, at the expense of the other, female – (Irigaray, To Speak 227). Challenging these reductionist conventions in the contemporary symbolic, Irigraray asks:

What if women were not constituted on the model of the one (solid, substantial, lasting, permanent…) and its base of contradictions, both effective and occulted within a proper hierarchy.  What if women were always `at least two,’ without opposition between the two, without reduction of the other to the one, without any possible appropriation by the logic of the one, without the autological closure of the circle of the same? (Irigaray, To Speak 231)

Anchored in the space between the Real and Imaginary orders, a fluid nexus where form and matter engender each other (Irigaray, To Speak 232), Irigaray’s Feminine Symbolic offers a fluidity that allows for the diversity of contemporary experience.  

In “Bus Ride to Heaven,” Mark Dendy performs Irigaray’s “what ifs,” disputing the self/other binary and its social and political ramifications by assuming the genders and personalities of a transvestite prostitute, a televangelist super star, a young gay student, and a Southern grandmother. As he realizes each new character, Dendy accepts Irigaray’s challenge and “plunges back into undifferentiation” (Irigaray, To Speak 233), violating the laws of Lacan’s linguistic order by quenching the “insatiable” desire to reunite with the other by becoming her and him.

Dendy chases the discourse of the other to the bus stop of Christian fundamentalism.  The grandchild of a closeted Southern Jew who became a Presbyterian minister’s wife, Dendy was raised to believe that the only thing worse than being a homosexual was being black.  “You learn to hate yourself before you know what you are,” (Dendy) says Dendy of his childhood experience of homosexuality.  In “Bus Ride,” Dendy confronts fundamentalism’s rejection of the other with a down-to-earth spirituality of inclusion and tolerance. “Jesus’s best friend was a hooker,” (Dendy) he quips in an interview; and when we meet Pawnie, we understand the attraction. A transvestite prostitute stuffed into a too-tight sliver of black lingerie, Pawnie sits with legs open wide on a delicate wire chair, glancing into the faces of audience members as she might glance into a mirror, a mirror which in Irigaray’s words offers “no specular doubling through simple surface reflections in the face-to-face, but rather the illusion of a possible translation of one into the other through repetitions in mirrors of all kinds” (Irigaray, To Speak 142).

Binaries dissolve in Pawny.  She dresses like a woman, but sits like a man.  She uses feminine intonations with a deep voice.   She has an illicit occupation, but is more forthcoming about her life than any other character. She is a foul-mouthed hooker in full get-up on her way to heaven.  Presenting these contradictions as empowering rather than debilitating, Dendy establishes inclusive alternatives to the rigidly defined linguistic order.  Employing what Susan Kozel has called an “aesthetics of distortion” (103), Dendy challenges the exclusivity of Lacan’s patriarchal dualism through transgressive humor, playing to preconceptions and stereotypes even as he breaks them down. 

Joe Goode: Felt Performance and the Feminine Symbolic

Since the early 1980s, San Francisco-based choreographer Joe Goode has been creating “felt performance” based on personal, emotionally charged material approached and understood through a sensual, tactile theatricality that parallels Irigaray’s Feminine Symbolic.  Goode makes a deliberate effort to subvert the constitutive power of social convention in his choreographic and performance practice, attempting to enter the material from “ a precipice on which I can stand and risk seeing myself or my material in some new light” (Goode), a liminal space that recalls the nexus between the Real and the Imaginary where Irigaray situates her Feminine Symbolic. Goode’s music-dance-theater performances challenge audiences to enter this same in-between space.  “Have you ever stood outside yourself, only it wasn’t you?” he asks in “Remembering the Pool at the Best Western,” beckoning his audiences into their own metaphysical realities, where language and corporeal experience collide and transform.

In “What the Body Knows,” Goode addresses the comparative signifying potential of the body and language directly. While dancer Liz Burritt tells us over and over again about the nice, sweet, good little girl she was as a child in overly exaggerated, saccharine sweet tones, her intensely focused, wide-open eyes and disturbing, gelatin smile show us something else. The strain in her facial muscles, the plasticity of her posture, and the affectation in her voice reveal the dishonesty in her words and hint at a story that lies hidden in her bones.  In this context, Goode exposes the spoken text as artifice. Her body communicates the truth; and we, as audience, the embodied other with whom she is engaging, understand it.   Goode pushes a view of the self that is more solidly aligned with the reality of the body than with the dissociative potential of any words that body may articulate.

In the same piece, a wildly athletic tango filled with sex, desire, and primal urges shifts the thematic focus to the role of the body in relationships. Can two bodies really know each other? The question is multilayered for the dancers in the piece.  The profound physical trust between the performers reveals itself in one daring lift, throw, and catch after another. These partners know every contour of each other’s frame. Through Goode’s process, their own ideas, stories, or experiences have been incorporated into the work.  These are their own relationships they are dancing, even if only obliquely. The dancers are engaged in an intensely physical present within a world constructed by them, through abstractions of their own experience.

California performance artist Tim Miller, known for his deeply physical autobiographical work, writes that “finding a way to be more present in our bodies and open to the narratives we carry in our flesh and blood is the quickest route to the revelatory material about what it means to be human” (Drukman).  The body knows desire.  The body knows a partner’s ambivalence. The body knows feeling trapped. The body knows dishonesty.  The body feels.  The body remembers.  The body cries out. What does the body know? “[I]t’s about being present with what is,” says Goode (Scherr).

Ohad Naharin:  The Self in Real Time

Ohad Naharin builds on this concept of self as an embodied presence in “Minus 16,” a piece which stresses a relevant nowness through the attention paid to clock time, the use of improvisation within the structure of the dance, and various levels of corporeal entry of the audience into the performing world. Staging one dancer directing a string of intimate gestures towards the audience in front of the curtain in the midst of intermission, Naharin begins the piece in our world and our time without the distancing effects of theatrical lighting or music.  Only the dancer’s costume distinguishes him from the otherwise noisy crowd milling through the aisles towards restrooms and wine, echoing the dancer’s animated body language and facial expressions. Intrigued by the anomaly of this performative being in our midst and seduced by the flirtatious energy of his directed gaze and the suggested “meaningfulness” of his movement, we migrate towards our chairs and grow mostly quiet.  We watch as the dancer pulls the traces of our own embodied present onto the stage, transforming our physical reality into his own by mimicking our gestures and impulses within the context of his own idiosyncratic movement vocabulary.  The immediacy of the dancer’s improvisation vibrates pleasurably through our own bodies.  We witness, feel, and participate in his present moment.  We identify with the dancing self who has transformed our movement into his own, bringing us, as audience/other, into his physically engaged  <being I>.

After sixteen minutes, our dancer/self is joined by others – displaced mirror images, dressed in the same clothes and moving in the same idiosyncratic style, challenging our assumptions about the improvised nature of the last sixteen minutes.  Was our dancer-friend performing set choreography?   Are these dancers who are joining him improvising now? Naharin and the dancers continue to play in this deliberately confused space between dancer and audience, performer and self, improvisation and choreography, through collisions of obviously authored, intensely athletic feats of unison dancing and explosive departures of the individual dancers from the shared group space and movement. 

In one section, the dancer’s recorded voice calls its embodied counterpart out of the unison group who stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a line, marking time in deliberate, directed steps – a chain of dancers splitting the stage in half as they walk back and forth from one side of the stage to another. The individual dancers improvise to the accompaniment of their own voices speaking about themselves, playing with moments of suspension and stillness against bursts of technical virtuosity, physical challenges that highlight the dancers’ engagement in the act of the attempt. 

We witness again the intensely focused self that surfaces in the risky partnering of the Joe Goode Performance Group, and again the question arises: Where is the <I>?  Is the dancer’s self in the story she is telling us?  Is the story we hear present in the body we see dancing? Yes.  Both/and. It is impossible to separate ourselves from our stories of self, from the concept of < I >, the cogitatum that we form through a language limited by its own assumptions and structures. We are as present within the attempt to communicate through language – in the placing of the pencil to the page, the rubbing of the grainy lead onto the smooth surface of paper – as we are in the attempt to throw ourselves through space. We cannot be in the words, themselves, but we are present within the act of speaking them, the act of writing them.  Once articulated, the story and the memory of the dance become part of a shared history, the traces of embodied acts, the remainders of the fluidity of our being selves.

In a passage that could easily have been written into any one of the four performances presented, Luce Irigaray playfully charges her readers to confess the “unconfessable:”

Speak.  Say everything that comes to you.  Just as it comes to you, right here, now.  Don’t omit or exclude anything.  And don’t worry about contradictions or conventions.  Don’t organize what you say. (Irigaray, To Speak 137)

We cannot articulate the present moment, because the moment has passed.  We can never say what comes to us now.  We cannot be in language.  But we can be in our bodies, as we have been in our bodies since we were born:  present in their polyphonic vibrations, in their metaphoric potential, in their visual spectacle, in their otherness, in their remembering, in their knowing, and in their inescapable commitment to “being present with what is” (Goode qtd by Scherr).

Endnotes

____________________

1. A self constituted in relation to Lacan’s symbolic order.

2.  I use “sense of self” to hint at the humility, unanswered questions, and experiential investigation with which these choreographers approach the presentation of self in their works. 

3. For a description of Miller’s dance-based performance Live Boys by David Gere visit <http://www.artistswithaids.org/artforms/dance/full_intro.html>. For more on Tim Miller visit <http://hometown.aol.com/millertale/timmillerbio.html>.

4. Goode is speaking here about “Hapless,” a piece created three years before “What the Body Knows.”

Bibliography

“Bus Ride to Heaven.”  Chor. Mark Dendy.  Mark Dendy. Prod. Douglas Rosenberg.  Videocassette. American Dance Festival, 1996.

Dendy, Mark.  Interview with Douglas Rosenberg. Mark Dendy. Prod. Douglas Rosenberg.  Videocassette.  American Dance Festival, 1996.

Drukman, Steven. "The Future of the Body," American Theatre Sept. 1999: 20, Questia, 2 Mar. 2006. <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001311486>.

Goode, Joe. “Deep Background: Coming Out Again.” Dance/USA Journal. Spring 1999.  23 Jan. 2006. <http://www.joegoode.org/rev_spring99.html>

Irigaray, Luce and Burke, Carolyn.  Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1993.

Irigaray, Luce. To Speak is Never Neutral. Trans. Gail Schwab. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Kozel, Susan. “‘The Story is Told as a History of the Body:’ Strategies of Mimesis in the Work of Irigaray and Bausch.” Meaning in Motion. ed. Jane C Desmond. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 101-109

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006.

‘Mercy’ By Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton (An Excerpt). (1-3) Connecticut College, New London.   20 Oct. 2001.  Online Video.  MeredithMonk.Org. 3 March 2006. <http://www.meredithmonk.org/interdisc/index.html>

“Minus 16.” Chor. Ohad Naharin. Perf. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Cadillac-Palace Theatre, Chicago. April 2001.

“Remembering the Pool at the Best Western.” Chor. Joe Goode. Artists in Exile: A Story of Modern Dance in San Francisco. Dir. Prod. Ed. Austin Forbord and Shelly Trott./ Rapt Productions.  Videocassette.  Oregon, WI : Artworks Video, 2000.

Scherr, Apollinaire. “Dancing Fool, Joe Goode’s Hapless Antics.” Metro Active.Com 18 Jan 1999. 23 Jan. 2006 <http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sfmetro/01.18.99/joegoode2-9902.html>

Varty, Alexander. “Words Get in Monk’s Way.” Straight.com. 10 Nov 2005. 3 March 2006. <http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=14011>.

“What the Body Knows.” Chor. Joe Goode. Perf. Joe Goode Performance Group. Dance Center of Columbia College, Chicago. 22 Mar. 2003.

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