by Jenn Joy
Eyes breathe. Like open wounds. - Rosmarie Waldrop
Two dancers walk onto the stage and wait. They begin to smile, or almost, as a halting series of facial tics morphs from smile to frown to yawn to gag. Her eyes roll back into her head. His tongue reaches grotesquely out of his mouth. Performing an atrophic virtuosity, the dancers' faces appear to be choking on the very air that surrounds them. As their expressions accumulate and retrograde - eyebrows distort, tongues thrust, noses torque, mouths become gaping voids, hysterical laughter - they transform into spasms across the surface of the body that generate contorted, staggering movements across the floor. At the precarious edge of collapse, the dancers' bodies appear disarticulated and out of control, severing choreography's anticipated relationship to mobility and stasis, graceful expertise and beautiful uncertainty. Pausing they remove their clothes arranging them in abject piles at their feet and then carry them off-stage.
In these opening moments of Glory choreographed by Jeremy Wade and performed by Wade with Marysia Stoklosa, we encounter a choreographic limit. Subverting a virtuosic notion of dance through an existential examination of extreme facial gesture, the dancers direct our attention to the expressive potentialities of the face, a move not unlike Samuel Beckett's Not I (1972). Yet in place of Beckett's flood of hysterical language spoken by the disembodied mouth, Wade choreographs the mouth as a site of impossible speech interrogating possibilities of representation and language through expressions of ecstasy, of despair, of shame, of pleasure, of pain. The bleed between these seductive and repulsive, recognizable and illegible expressions, performs an excessive polyvocality not contained by the significatory logic of representation. Instead the face becomes a site of alteric and affective communicability. Glory's faces differentiate between language as a function of representation and communicability as a transitive poetic address. Trespassing into the realm of philosophy, Giorgio Agamben describes the face as the site of communicability, the place where politics must be exposed. He writes: "Be only your face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather, go with them, in them, beyond them" (2000:100). Agamben's choreographic imperative argues for a rethinking of political language as passionate gestural expression spreading out from the face that resonates with the disorientating decompositions and re-compositions of the face in Glory. Here the spasm as choreographic address proposes an almost impossible body, one that rejects coherence and unity striving instead to articulate a more vertiginous flux of subjectivity.
This oscillation along the threshold imagines a political potency for choreography as a movement of body and of language that imagines the "beyond" of something else - what I call the spasm. The choreographic spasm produces a conceptual distortion between forces disfiguring or reconfiguring elements in interaction. Spasms call attention to the kinetic potentials of individual bodies - pushed into movement, caught in stillness, reverberating in between - questioning philosophic and psychological notions of subjectivity. Not only a physical movement, the spasm is simultaneously a theoretical labor marked by the difficult and at times uncomfortable proximity of ideas that contort and convulse when brought into dialogue. As a movement of thought, the spasm interrogates the visual through the kinetic, the body through language, expression through emotion, performer through witness, pain through pleasure. It is not stagnant even when appearing as latency, in these moments it quivers and trembles.
Specifically in Wade's choreography, the spasm works as a choreographic mode that attempts to expel the body from its limits through what he describes as "a three-dimensional kinesthetic blur. Add levels of speed, levels of rhythm, add fluids, flesh, chemical, emotional, behavioral bodies, add detail, memory, position, history, character, add light, sound" (Wade 2007). In the rehearsal process, Wade works with authentic movement scores and improvisation to locate gestures internally as dancers move under the influence of specific words' empathy, anger, repulsion, shame, ecstasy, intoxication, anxiety, attraction. Subjecting the resulting gestures to the de-representational play of improvisation, the extreme states of shaking, convulsing, trembling, falling are continually refined to interrogate language. The play between physicality and language enacted in the rehearsal studio and on the stage challenges techniques of representation and signification, creating new choreographic possibilities or what Agamben might refer to as communicabilities for excessive, spasming subjectivities to move. This is perhaps the creative political power of the choreographic, as a generator of mutant identities and potentialities. "A work of art," as Felix Guattari proposes "is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation...which leads to a recreation and reinvention of the subject itself" ([1992] 1995:131).
Now naked, the dancers lie face down on the darkened stage. They tremble, a mild convulsion passes through their bodies, which transforms into a creeping mobility as they slowly peel their bodies from the floor edging away from the light. No longer completely recognizable, the slow progression of almost larval forms emerging from and disappearing into the darkness approaches abstraction as they ambulate using only their shoulders, chin, and hips. Thick muscular flesh slaps against the floor, amplifying the difficulty of horizontal mobility. Crawling to the edge of the stage, Stoklosa grabs Wade's mouth with her own, she appears to be chewing or consuming him as they roll over, onto, into each other. As they intertwine she whispers building to a scream "the road is long and I am tired and small." In this moment of the extended kiss, the mouth becomes as Wade describes it a "devouring machine" (2007). Until this moment the states of spasms occur as individual gestures in parallel, as a duet or a mirror, yet in this phrase distance dissolves under the intensity of attraction disfiguring and refiguring their relationship. Sweat moves across and between bodies, limbs become more confused. This is communicability as all consuming, submerged in an erotic and volatile physicality. It is a body almost possessed, desperate, messy, intimate, disorientated, and disfigured in a moment of relational-sensational plexus.
Naked the body becomes an extension of the face. As facial tics saturate the dancers' bodies, we witness flickering sensations of weight, of balance, of fragility, of effort across their muscular flesh. This intensely intimate, sensual, and perhaps violent dependency participates in the extreme gesture of the spasm as it "devours" a coherent conception of bodies and subjectivities, forcing an at times illegible and distressing vision of the inability of language and movement to account for Wade's and our experience. This is the site and possibility of the threshold that Agamben imagines in the face - a zone of communicability that calls us to action breaking with passive spectatorship to open up to the disturbing affective modes of sensual address. Yet this end is never final, suggesting only a place of exhaustion from which to begin again.
Works cited
Agamben, Giorgio
2000 [1996] Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Guattari, Felix
1995 [1992] Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wade, Jeremy
2007 Email correspondence with the author, 22 June.
