Learning by making and making by learning how to learn

Contemporary Choreography in Europe: When did theory give way to self-organization? (fragment)

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There is a new technology of the dancer’s self, a new care of the body already in practice now, entirely dissociated from the premises of mastery and authenticity. I will illustrate it from an example of the choreographers I have worked with.1 Instead of pondering whether to take a ballet or modern dance class or any of the established bodypractices as a general warm-up before the rehearsal, some choreographers think they should rethink their training more specifically. Each project develops its own technical procedures and the body specializes accordingly.

Another approach to physical technique in currency now stems from the question: what kind of body practice should one set up from the concept and work method one is elaborating in parallel so that such a body practice may positively interfere and transform a habitual methodology? So, rethinking the body training anew runs along two lines: either dancers have become pragmatic and opportunistic to fully accept that their body intelligence is relative to and instrumental for particular purposes, or they invest in searching for means without ends in order to prevent themselves from consolidating the knowledge or the “mindset” in which they’re going to make a performance. In both cases, they give up the trust in the organic wholesome curriculum training diet.

The constructivist approach towards a more specific but plural body practice described above, wouldn’t be possible without critical theory’s incursion into choreography in the 1990s. Until the 1990s, one could go away with speaking about dance performances by asking what kind of object of dance a performance produces; by defining, first, style with a formalist concern with the body as the instrument for a certain technique and, second, subject matter by way of metaphoric representation. In the 1990s, another approach settled in: not what kind of object a dance performance is, but what kind of concept of dance it proposes. Concepts of dance sourced other – not specially, autonomously or intrinsically belonging to dance – domains of knowledge, theoretical discourses and cultural practices: semiotics, historicity, speech act theory, poststructuralist theories of text and death of the author, concepts from the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, cinema techniques, opera, pop, digital art, sports etc.2

Speaking to choreographers, dancers and performance makers of the generation between mid-20s and 40s now, one gets the sense that everybody wants to learn, as simple as it sounds: to learn rather than produce. The change in attitude from making to learning, and learning how to learn in order to make, perhaps comes from the realization of a larger frame that artists as workers share. What could be common about the frame is what Paolo Virno called the practice of an intellect in general: the faculty of language, the inclination to learn, memory, the ability to correlate, the inclination toward self-reflection.3 The fact is that artists nowadays represent the type of worker in an immaterial economy of services and information, constantly producing outside of the (paid and recognized) labor-time, in a non-calculated productivity.

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1. Eszter Salamon, Andros Zinsbrowne, Mette Ingvartsen et al.

2. Among the choreographers whose work proposed a new relationship with theory in the 1990s are: Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Tino Sehgal, Mârten Spângberg, Tom Plischke,

3. This is the definition of multitude and its contemporary forms of life from Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), New York, 2003.

Bojana Cvejic (born 1975 in Belgrade) is performer and performance theorist, currently researching for a PhD degree in philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University in London.

She directed several independent music theatre performances in Belgrade and was a co-founder and member of Walking Theory performance group (YU).

Since 2000 she has been collaborating with Jan Ritsema with whom she made and performed productions such as Verwantschappen (2000), TODAYulysses, Pipelines. A construction, KNOWH2OW, and CoCos: Breeding, brains & beauty. As a dramaturg, she has collaborated with Christine Gaigg, Eszter Salamon, Mette Ingvartsen and Xavier Le Roy.

She has been teaching performing arts theory and conducting workshops in Belgrade, Brussels, Lisbon, Warsaw, Montpellier and other cities.

Her essays and reviews appear in magazines such as Walking Theory, Etcetera, Maska, Frakcija, International Magazine for Music New Sound, Musical Wave etc.