Second part

“Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.”

— Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (p. 4)

What does it mean to collect and publish dance scores against the background of the debate on the ontology of performance, as it has just been sketched out here? Over the past months, the visual artist Ludovic Burel and I have met up with a number of artists working in the field of dance to discuss their use of scores¹⁰. What vision is implied in this project? What sorts of archives did we have in mind, assuming beforehand that they might exist; what kind of archives have we found or produced? What fictions were we pursuing?

One of the first artists that Ludovic and I met in Paris was Vincent Dunoyer, who has been working as an independent choreographer since the late 1990s. For Solos for Others (2003), he made a photo-score of 99 photos, which were “copied” by himself and then by the young dancer Etienne Guilloteau. In the first round Guilloteau was sitting and showing the photos to Dunoyer, by holding them up in the air one after the other in random order, before throwing them onto the ground, where they would clutter on the floor, visible to the audience. The executioner, Dunoyer, would glimpse at the photos and reproduce the poses on the spot. The stage was arranged so as to create an allusion to the photographic set-up of photo-shoots (with a backdrop and strong light). Overall, the presence of the photographic was strongly marked, as if Dunoyer wished to point out that self-representation would never be the same once the photographic paradigm entered our culture in the nineteenth century, having rearticulated our self-image.

When we met Dunoyer in person (en chair et en os), we could take a closer look at the photo-score, which he had brought to our appointment in a brown envelope. It was a pile of cardboard pictures, which visibly showed the traces of having been frequently used over time. On all of them he was naked to his underwear, reenacting “moments” from his own performance history: one could recognize the curving, spiraling spine of a Steve Paxton, from whom Dunoyer copied an improvisation-solo (in Carbon); relicts from dances by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, with whom he danced for a long time; or fragments from a piece he performed in, by the Wooster Group¹¹. In most of these “source-performances” Dunoyer copied the movements of dancers or choreographers other than himself. “My body is my work”, he told us, and for a moment he looked like an exquisite assimilation machine which, plugged into the motor of mimetic desire, “incorporates” other bodies.

Following Schneiderʼs vision, one might say that Vincent Dunoyer is a mobile archive that samples the living relicts from his physical memory. Yet, one has to be careful not to reduce this living stock — gestures, actions, sounds and images — to the level of sheer flesh. That would precisely deny the fact that this body is never “pure” flesh, but is always already extending into an elaborate circuitry of technologies of all sorts. The flesh is never a safe “home” of departure or arrival, nor is it an interiorized history one “owns”; rather, it constantly functions in a loop with other modes of mediation. Just as in the photographic self-portraits, the poseur must leave himself and “be with” the camera in order to present himself as himself (a dislocation to locate oneself as oneself), Dunoyer has been oscillating among a series of mimetic apparatuses for more than a decade — video, photos, the gaze of the spectator, other bodies, etc. The remains of his performance history were physical, indeed, but a physicality that was always mediated and remediated as it was pervaded by the existence of other objects, relations, agencies — human and nonhuman.

Later, as Ludovic and I would pay visit to other artists at their homes, studios, or rehearsal spaces, we would get an opportunity to deepen this more complex understanding of dance-related performance practices and their remains. Performance practice is restricted to none of the sides: the oral or the written, the bones or the flesh, objects or physical traces. What characterizes performance is a perpetual enmeshing all of these planes of emergence, thwarting any binary opposition.

The homes themselves bore witness to this; performance objects merged there with the habitual surroundings of ordinary life. A flight case, so common in theaters, would serve as a coffee table in the domestic setting, or a former prop could transform back into a couch or an object for everyday use. Videos and dossiers were piled on shelves, flyers and notes were stacked away in folders, receipts and bills were lingering around as reminders of the expenses that the performances entailed. The homes were not dormant mausoleums, designed for commemoration, but practical households where lives and careers were interlocked. During the talks we frequently tapped into our memories to recall the performances we had seen, or we used our imagination to fill the blanks of what we had not seen. Quite naturally, choreographers would enter their body archives and demonstrate certain gestures, or hum the melodies that helped them memorize movements (neenneeNaaaaHUPsakeenee; tatatatatata; dumdumWAITWAITdumdum). But we would also consult computers, watch DVDs, browse through notebooks, or listen to recordings on minidisk. All these sources of information were already integrated into a process of mediation, quotation, recycling, often shifting from one mode to the other. The written would be talked about, and the talking would be written down, while bodies reenacted gestures, handled objects, entered circuits of information, activating formerly lived experience and further imaginations thereof, etc. To look for “scores” in this context was a particular challenge. Contrary to the music tradition, dance practice has never strictly reserved the word “score” for a specific object, encoded in notation on a piece of paper, indicating a body of work that can then be instantiated with great rigor in performance. Likewise, it has never depended on copyright laws and distribution networks to publish and sell these scores. Up to date there is only one known example in contemporary dance, of such an autonomously and officially published dance score in the form of a marketable book: Schreibstück (2002), by the German choreographer Thomas Lehmen. But for the rest, most scores in dance do not aspire to “autonomy” or “self-sufficiency”; they are heteronomous working tools, whose use is ad hoc, local and mostly in tandem with verbally or physically communicated agreements.

Moreover, the English word “score”, so it became clear in many conversations, covers a far larger range of applications than the French word “partition” allows. The French choreographer Mark Tompkins stretched this to its widest sense by defining the score, in his improvisational practice, as “the determination of one or more parameters for decision-making in action”¹². Much in the same way, when Lisa Nelson speaks of her Tuning Scores, she does not refer to a written score at all, but to a set of shared agreements and tools that together constitute “a communication and feedback system for an ensemble of players”. The dancers make use of “calls” (stop, go, replace, reverse, repeat, end, etc), which function as editing tools and enable them to choreograph the performance activities on the spot. To a certain extent, following a score in this case resembles more a process of learning and enacting the “rules” of a game than following a unilateral and linear set of directions.

This is not to say that dance scores cannot circulate outside their original biotopes of labor; obviously some do. In Europe and the United States, for example, there are study groups of dancers who continue to work with Lisa Nelsonʼs Tuning Scores. In 1996, William Forsythe used a book of preparatory drawings by Italian Baroque painter Tiepolo as the basis of a score for Daniel Larrieu and the Centre Chorégraphique de Tours. He had scribbled lines, arrows, numbers on the bookʼs reproductions of the drawings, which together formed an enigmatic riddle that Larrieu and his dancers were free to interpret. In the meantime, Forsythe would remain in dialogue with the group through fax. The choreography-at-a-distance that resulted from this, Hypothetical Stream, later resulted as well in other versions by the Ballett Frankfurt and by the students at the dance school Parts, in coordination with the ex-Ballett Frankfurt dancer Elizabeth Corbett.

In a similar vein, the score that Antonia Baehr made for Holding Hands (2001), the first piece of a trilogy of research on emotion, has also been used by other artists, notably by Sophia New and Petra Sabish.¹³ After Schreibstück, Thomas Lehmen developed parameter-based systems (autopoietic in nature, in analogy to the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann), which he collected in a box, Funktionen (2004); these can serve as a toolkit for anyone who feels inspired to make use of it. Yet, when moving outside the sphere of the immediate proximity of the choreographer, these scores enter a whole range of possible implementations, ranging from attempts to stay as close to the practice from which they emerge, to free applications, and even bolder pirate versions. In most cases, however, scores are fundamentally characterized by the contiguity and metonymy of tools and aids: they are a trace of and a reroute back to a praxis, whether directly or indirectly, mimickingly or mockingly, revered or reversed. Metaphorically, linking us back to the body and its modes of enactment, one could say that they are neurological centers of determinacy in a larger synaptic network where information fires.

Scores can proliferate in yet another way: through their emergence in the public arena of the performance itself. Indeed, what characterizes many contemporary uses of scores is that they let the score telescope into the order of the performance. As a result, the score is not a hidden recipe, the “obscure” blueprint that secretly steers and determines once and for all the “thing” — a Wizard of Oz, behind the curtains. Rather, in many of these recent works, the performers show their interactions with the score and point at the specific conditions of emergence of their actions, instead of sustaining an illusion that movement comes solely from a deep interior source. Sometimes this happens in quite subtle ways, as when the score is present as an index that suggests a wider set of arrangements. For example, in performances by Myriam Gourfink, such as in Contraindre (1993), the scores are integrated in the scenography on computer screens; and in certain dance pieces by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker the dancers follow floor patterns, furnished by her composerfriend Thierry De Mey, which are marked on the floor. In Après-Midi (2003), a proposal by Antonia Baehr, William Wheeler and Henry Wilt, four untrained female performers are invited to perform in drag and follow the instructions that they hear through the headphones of a mini-disk.14. At certain times during the performance the audience hears flashes of these instructions aloud and can observe the interrelation between the “instruction” and the actual performance activity. For Both Sitting Duet (2002), the performers Jonathan Burrows (an English choreographer) and Matteo Fargion (an English composer) decided to bring the score into the spectacular frame. They perform the dance with their books in front of them very much like musicians in concert use their scores as a memory aid.

In other cases scores move beyond this subtle indexicality and become fully accessible and comprehensible sources, so that spectators and performers share the same information. In The Show Must Go On 2 (2004) Jérôme Bel reveals the script behind his piece. He rearranges the letters of the title of the piece as if participating in a game of Scrabble, and with every new word that shows up (for example, “s t u n t m a n”, “s h o w m e n”) the dancer Frédéric Seguette performs a matching action. Interestingly, Seguette never jumps into action right away, but allows the word that was just composed to resonate for a while. In doing so, he makes the spectator a co-actor who can also follow the script and imagine an action. The script becomes then a score for audience and performers alike.

Thomas Lehmen too, wants the audience to have full access to the score, which they can hold in their hands while watching the performance of Schreibstück¹⁵. According to Lisa Nelson, such a democratic “sharing” of the tools will help the audience enhance their observation: “When the intelligence of the system appears it can be very fun”. Ultimately, the aim, she says, is not the score itself (its execution) but what it produces and facilitates. Scores are not systems to cultivate as such, but a “generatrix” for more complex interactions to happen and to observe.

Some of the scores that Ludovic and I have come across during these generous meetings with the artists were published in the section “Icônes” of the French journal Multitudes (2005, nr. 21). For this publication, a small selection was opted for, and perhaps that is just fine. There is always something tricky about publishing such materials, for although many of these scores and notations have an aesthetic appeal, the aim is not to mystify them and have “documents (…) transformed into monuments”¹⁶, “exiled from practice (…), by carving them out of their sphere of use”¹⁷. It is, quite on the contrary, to add further possibilities of extension, (re)emergence and access to these performance documents, as they drift in and out of context(s) and echo their multiple existences.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following artists for their generosity, scores, and time: Susanne Beggren, Amos Hetz, Myriam Gourfink, Vincent Dunoyer, Antonia Baehr, Thomas Lehmen, Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert, Thierry De Mey, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Heike Langsdorf, Elizabeth Corbett, William Forsythe, Lisa Nelson, Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion, Jérôme Bel. Thanks to Paula Caspao for the proofreading.

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