Daniel Clifton and Matthew Rogers in Tere O'Connor's Wrought Iron Fog (2009).
Catch-all phrases tend to flash up to describe Tere O’Connor’s work: masterful, technical, traditional, artisanal, abstract, structural, and most telling, “not conceptual.” Claudia LaRocco, writing recently for The New York Times, went out of her way to partition O’Connor from his younger peers in dance. She postulated that O’Connor’s work remained “rigorously movement-focused” at a time when many choreographers are placing themselves in a broader context of “conceptually driven live art and multimedia projects.”
LaRocco’s writing reflects an anxiety in the dance world about criticality. The polemic here is that dance-as-choreographic-movement-practice does not or simply cannot coexist with conceptual, critical, or theory-based practices. Tellingly, conceptualism in dance is referred to as “non-dance dance,” as if dance becomes its negation as soon as an idea enters the frame (or stage). Non-dance dance refers to a set of practices originating in Western Europe in the early 1990s that privileged an interrogation of the conditions of performance over formal movement invention. Leading figures of this “post-studio” choreographic practice include Xavier Leroy, Jérome Bel, and Ivana Müller.
Conceptual dance —engaged in and influenced by broader artistic practices of institutional critique, relational aesthetics, and appropriation—exists within a historical and ideological continuum of postmodern dance, a movement originating in the 1960s and strongly associated with a New York provenance (Cunningham, Forti, Rainer, Brown, et al.). Owing a great debt to the ideas of John Cage, postmodern dance took hold as a reaction against the authorial autonomy, expressionist tendencies, and metaphysical moodiness of modern dance as much as it embodied a protest against the codified structures of classical ballet. Unlike its “non-dance” descendant, postmodern dance was deeply invested in choreographic invention and movement research. This American movement quickly went viral: postmodern dancers and choreographers established influential careers in Western Europe, (Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, and more recently Anna Halprin), while dancers and choreographers from Western Europe came in droves to New York well into the 1990s to study postmodern dance. It is easy to forget that Pina Bausch, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker, and Sasha Waltz all trained in New York at one time—at Juilliard, the Cunningham studio, Tisch, and Movement Research.
Postmodern dance’s geo-poetic center is New York while conceptual, post-studio practices have an institutional purchase in Germany, Belgium and France. But to enjoy this tidy classification system too much permits a problematic construction: European dance is “non-dance” conceptualism while American dance is choreographic and not conceptual. It is this kind of antinomy that must be deconstructed—and it fails entirely when considering conceptual, movement-based work like O’Connor’s.
Yvonne Rainer’s dances in the 1960s investigated movement’s critical potential. Rainer was a choreographer who worked in a studio and made dances. Many of her most important works—Trio A comes to mind—are strictly dances: no text, no costumes, no video projections. Yet Trio A is a conceptual work that addresses the problem of seeing dance, specifically, and spectatorship in late capitalism, more generally. No small achievement for a four-and-a-half minute dance. As Carrie Lambert-Beatty writes in her recent book on Rainer, the “averted gaze” of the dancer in Trio A—a quantifiably small intervention—antagonizes centuries of Western performance and spectatorship. This and Trio A’s other movement-based interventions —the evacuation of dynamics and the continual deferral of climax, the choice of athletic movements rather than virtuosic ones, the serial (one-thing-after-another) structure, the handmade quality, the refusal of smooth transitions—constitute an exception to the so-called rule: a dance that engages critically with history and contemporary culture through choreography.
O’Connor is working in this vein. His practice is situated in the realm of criticality that dance-as-dance can access. The site of his work is the gaze of the spectator. What do we see? How do we see? Can we look at the body without pleasure? Can we look at the body without desire? Can the body ever be seen for what it is or is it always seen as a representation of itself? These questions have become even more relevant since Rainer addressed the issue of “one group of people in a room looking at another group of people” in the 1960s. Contemporary culture offers endless possibilities for spectatorship of the body, expanded by our increasingly virtual relations with each other. The embodied practice of spectatorship, central to dance, allows us to rehearse our seeing in the controlled space of the theater before re-entering the world of fractured, mediated, over-determined bodies continually offered up to the gaze.
Collapsing O’Connor into formalism and out of conceptualism does two things: it aligns him with traditional rather than contemporary practices and renders choreography an insider’s game reserved for those with specialized knowledge. Partitions like LaRocco’s fail to account for another tradition, that of Rainer et al, in which conceptualism and choreography meet. And this kind of thinking overlooks the critical questions provoked by O’Connor’s choreography. His practice—conceptual, formal, ironic, non-immersive, anti-totalist—signals a movement across contemporary art toward the hand-made and the embodied, and coincides with a current reconsideration of abstraction. O’Connor is picking up the pieces of abandoned projects. Performance in the 1960s, and dance in particular, has been noted extensively for its commitment to establishing alternative conceptions of the body, gender, sexuality, and social relations. In its reluctance to goad the viewer, refusal of narratives and dramas, and insistence on spectatorship and formal interrogation as keys to transforming the way we see each other, 1960s dance was deeply committed to oppositional practices. This is O’Connor’s gene pool. Like his Sixties comrades, O’Connor approaches these critical issues of performance with conceptual innovation and rigorous formal investigation.
Something unaccounted for in O’Connor’s work if we only consider its relationship to postmodern dance. In his search for resurrectable forms, he is also looking at ballet. Classical dance normally appears below Fourteenth Street (so to speak) under the cover of parody, but not for O’Connor. He manages to take ballet seriously and to address it sincerely—though that irony does not escape him. And why ballet? What does this form offer up in terms of oppositional potential? Didn’t the postmoderns adamantly reject classical dance and all its myths of heroism and virtuosity, its hierarchical structure, and its rigid gender roles?
We may find guidance in considering Alain Badiou’s writing on dance. For Badiou, the dancing body is the thinking body. Neither imitation nor expression, dance is a metaphor for thought manifest in space, for the idea as an immanent intensification and a physical reality. The vertical body is the dancing body for Badiou, as it “pricks the floor just as one would puncture a cloud.” Here, Badiou refers to the ballon of classical dance—the dancer’s muscular draw of the body away from the earth. The restraint of dance and its lift from the floor is what he values, in opposition to the performed effort of the military parade and its obedient, laden footwork. O’Connor seems to share this view as his lithe, “lifted” dancers nearly tip-toe around the stage. They are unencumbered, unfixed, posed somewhere between lurch and leap and flight. Indecisive, their bodies make quick changes throughout the space and uncannily pitch themselves into the air. This choreography of midair suspensions and the dancers’ “on-toe” movement quality suggest an affinity with Badiou’s reading of dance as an affirmational rather than deductive artistic practice. And if so, both O’Connor and Badiou could face legitimate challenge as idealists, nouveaux Kantians raiding the icebox of ballet for the ballon that can lift us of our current ideological nightmare. But there’s something in the choreographer’s ironic shifts of pace, his almost-but-not-quite representations of social relations, his campy coordination of movement with music, that saves the work from becoming an easy vision of utopia. Then again, O’Connor is trying to articulate something new, an alternative to the trenches of post-modernity and late capitalism we currently endure. He goes about it cautiously, though, thinking it through, puncturing clouds toe by toe.
-B.G. & R.K.
Works Cited
Alain Badiou, “Dance as Metaphor for Thought,” in Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford University Press, 2005).
Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960 (MIT Press, 2008).
Claudia LaRocco, “Not a Patriarch, but a Leader All the Same,” The New York Times, 6 November 2009.
