Page 16 - the foreign language of motion

ephemerality, the very trope that documental traditions aim to prevent, is reframed by a Derridean theoretical approach that,
means to throw the presentness of the verb to be into the space of friction between writing and dance, a space mediated by gendered bodies as systems of exchange, as practices of counterfeiting, as spaces of troubling restlessness through which dance’s presence becomes undecidable, multiple, lawless, a presence whose present can point simultaneously toward yet unthinkable ontological coimpossibilities of pastness, presentness, and futurity. (2004, p.137)
Lepecki and Phelan argue for the ephemerality of dance as a powerful theoretical tool wherein dance’s disappearance constitutes its most generative feature. This recognition of live performance has served to validate the work of live artists and to support the notion that a defining aspect of performance lies in its “resistance to linguistic grasping” (Lepecki, 2004, p.139) as a performance cannot be caught, held or made available to history by language. To attempt to do so is a form of violence to the ontology of performance.
This argument has been strongly debated and problematized by performance researchers who consider documentation not only an integral element of a practitioner’s work, but a form of performance in itself. the kinesthetic archive project is concerned with practitioner-led approaches to performance writing rather than documentation per se and proceeds from a number of questions. It asks: How might writing slip from its documenting, historicizing bounds to enter into the slippery ontology of performance? Can writing make itself disappear?
I am imagining academic writing as a monster ready to eat anything in its path – including, and maybe especially, dance. By the time this rhetorical style and its grammatical forms are done with a dance, all the life will be sucked out of it. Perhaps practice-led researchers create well-intentioned monsters, monsters trying to change their ways by confronting logocentricity and advocating for the knowledge-producing value of embodied and material knowledges, but which somehow become monsters nevertheless. Just like this essay is. Just like, perhaps, academic research has to be. Does it? In any case, writing has indeed been cast as monstrous – or at least violent – in its ability to disfigure, maim and destroy the life of live arts. But are monsters always bad? Don’t we need monsters in the same way we need failure?2 Don’t monsters offer spaces for imagining and becoming?
And isn’t writing one of the central practices underpinning vast amounts of creative work? Both Lepecki and Phelan gesture toward the potential for a non-documental mode of writing, a writing that is performative rather than constative3. A writing of movement rather than fixity. A writing of erasure rather than presence.
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