2014

Dear Bruno,

I hope this email finds you well.

Since a while now I am more and more interested in the question of body. What kind of body do we work with today, manipulate, form, move… Andre Lepecki wrote in one of his essays that presence can mark or unmark a dancing body. Without being sure what he really meant with this paragraph, I started thinking about if there still was such thing as an unmarked body and if so in what sort of corporal space would it be located? What image would a body have if body today would be the result of discourse much more than a manipulated object of society? I stumbled over this quote of Foucault, and I find it to be close to what I experience if I think about the todays discourse within dance and the body.

In The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language Foucault said: … all manifest discourse is secretly based on an "already-said"; and ... this "already-said" is not merely a phrase that has already been spoken, or a text that has already been written, but a "never-said", an incorporeal discourse, a voice as silent as a breath, a writing that is merely the hollow of its own mark. It is supposed therefore that everything that is formulated in discourse was already articulated in that semi-silence that precedes it, which continues to run obstinately beneath it, but which it covers and silences. The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this "not-said" is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said.

I struggle with the relation to a body that became much more a costume, a hollow of its own mark as Foucault says - a marked social dependence, a didactic interaction of its own being. Is this the (marked)body we work with today, or could we look at the unsaid, the in-between space of the manifested discourse? Could the (unmarked)body be the unsaid, and if so how could it be approached?
I think I am interested to find an ever existing but forgotten body, unfold its landscape of various elements which evoke a different movement within the idea of choreographic practice and performance, which spreads the possibility of thinking space and which creates corporal environment that gives voice to the unsaid.

In relation to your work, you mention the body as a creative machine. A place of chaos and a substance created out of differentiations. What especially caught my attention was the idea of body being a creator of a sense and non-sense choreography at once. The body not only as the signifier or the corporal translation of a concept, but as a passage presenting simultaneously a space of thought, feelings and life/movement, as also a space of contradiction, dysfunction and uncoordinated actions.

The choreographer Philippe Gehmacher claims for a body’s own expressiveness in opposite to the reduction of bodies to images. “The Body I use is a fragile, material body, a broken and uncoordinated body: Just about everything that makes up the shadow side of the civil body, the body we wish ourselves and symbolise.” This physical materiality of bodies in his work, is present in stumbling, contracting, torsions and spasms. A language composed around movement that contradicts the systematized & controlled we encounter every day. Gehmacher describes that the body on stage can choose to show in a strictly physical way, and represent through its defaults, its own expressiveness. Taking Gehmachers idea in account, we could say that a body’s corporal quality is its own disfunction and as such its bodily identity.

On your website you mention the body as junk and you call the images you produce the post-choreographic junk. I was interested if you could elaborate more on your concept of junk and how your created images relate to your choreographic practice and physical body. (as junk) Are you thinking about a production of body, through the cultivated waist of our time – or are you referring more to a dysfunctional physical body as Philippe Gehmacher mentions it?
Bringing together these thoughts to the initial question of the (marked) and the (unmarked)body, I wonder if  it is less about bodies physicality but rather more about presence in it self. The visual anthropologist Hans Belt points out, that the body is always an image, even before its pictured, so ones individuality drives from that image. Potentially, body was/is and will be constantly marked through its constructed images, based on the relations build everyday of its environment. So in order to redirect the position, question of body in todays discourse, could we open up to the idea of a marked body and the unmarked presence?

I hope to hear from you soon

Kiss

Julia