Dance Reading Club 1: When Dance Fails as a Gesture

Due to the pandemic restrictions, the programme of Studio ALTA had to find a way to rethink the frame of planned shows considering the limited number of audience members. One such example was the performance Assemblage, in which the piece made for the black box went out of the box and readapted its scenography and choreography to the park Karlovy sady, in front of the building of Invalidovna, where Studio ALTA currently resides. The performance became somehow part of the park’s everyday movement and, with its extended choreographic references to walking and postmodern movement material, created a playful sci-fi girl game with objects and scenography reminding of artificial prosthetic nature in the context of urban pseudo-nature in the park. Kids and dogs and the virus were crying, barking and lingering around. The game with this close-to-dead nature was nevertheless very vivid and brought a certain ecstatic, fearless energy into the bright day of invisible cold lack of mutual touch.

After this performative experience, part of the audience moved to the Living Room of Studio ALTA, where we continued with the discussion based on the just-watched performance in combination with several reference video excerpts of performances mentioned in the text Writing Laughter – Violent Desire by Jenn Joy, from her book Choreographic. Three video excerpts of performances mentioned in Joy’s text were projected just before the discussion started: La Ribot – Laughing Hole, Luciana Achugar – Sublime Is Us, Didi Dorvillier – Choreography, a Prologue for the Apocalypse of Understanding, Get Ready!

At stake was the gesture as a movement expression used also as a communication tool, bearing its historical and semantic predetermination. Referring to the text by Jenn Joy, we were interested in cases when this meaning oscillates on the edge of understanding and loses its primal graspability. Observing the strategies of the performances allowed us to examine when failure, spasm, and stumbling become choreographic tools – and when these tools form an artistic statement. Before dwelling on the topic of failure and spasm, we first had to clarify what the gesture means and signifies in contemporary dance and broader socio-political contexts, in order to examine why it fails.

Is gesture a simple movement action or a whole performance that acts as an artistic action? Is gesture a body that appears and disappears? How does gesture abandon its context and enter another realm? What language does gesture speak?

In the performance Laughing Hole by La Ribot, laughter becomes a gesture – a moment of language’s failure. Laughter draws the spectator’s attention, awakens her sensibility and affects her bodily state. The gesture of laughing dissolves the meaning, because the laughter is detached from its source – the reason, the meaning of laughing – and it acts as a gesture in itself. This stumbling, nonsensical dizziness creates another meaning of gesture as we know it and reveals its impact on the spectator through physicality. The gesture is then determined by the conditions in which it acts, by the context which it reflects. Jenn Joy, in her text, also refers to Andrew Hewitt, who describes gesture as a transmitter of socio-political force which, by creating a moment of spasm, implies a mode of resistance.

How do we read a movement as a gesture? What does it mean to think gesture in a choreographic way? If we take failing as transformation, as an opening – is it the gesture that fails, or is it us who fail to understand the gesture?