Orthogonal Logics

“By trying to control, to shape, my body through the calculated tools and methods of bodybuilding, and time and again, in following these methods, failing to do so, I am able to meet that which cannot be finally controlled and known: the body.” 

and so...

ON SPEECH

When listening to Jeanine Durning speak about her practice of non-stopping, she talks about the indeterminacy of her process with ease, she is comfortable in and curious about not knowing what will come from her scores. When I have heard other dancers do philosophy, they often speak poetically and in a way that feels like their language is circling around some sort of illusive phantasm. Jeanine repeatedly insists that the "languging" of movement for her is most often retroactive and is always an approximation of one's lived experience. Conversely, from the perspective of a witness, the use of language to capture movement or distill its meaning/significance should be understood as an afterimage rather than a faithful impression. Durning's INGing practice of continuous improvised speech attempts to close the temporal-spatial gap between language and movement. Reminiscent of the surrealist's automatic writing practices or Clarice Lispector's The Stream of Life where she continuously tries to achieve the deceptively difficult task of writing "in the moment".

André Lepecki, on the other hand, approaches dance through the lens of his formal training as a cultural anthropologist, a vocation whose practitioner's become experts at noticing patterns in human behaviour and tracing them back to their origin using methods not dissimilar to medical diagnostics. André's language is decisive and definitive, he seems more interested in word play and punchy phrasing. André is not a dancer while Jeanine is and it shows in the way they speak- how one figures speech is a movement practice that can be shaped by social and institutional training.

ON TIME

How time is understood by a population is liable to influence one's sense of place and self-value. André says that there is a "kinetic unconscious of modernity" which compels humans in the West to be in constant forward motion. Foucault writes about discipline being a segmenting force that "arranges a positive economy; it poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time: exhaustion rather than use" (154).” This "ever-growing use of time" is achieved through the seemingly infinite segmentation and fragmentation of time into smaller and smaller units allowing for micro-temporal control of the body at work and endless points at which to evaluate its efficiency. As André says in his talk, the project of modernity is to create "properly constituted subjects for movement" and so it should be of no surprise that "the only art form that modernity actually invented was an art form made to capture movement which is called 'choreography'".

Foucault argues that a confluence of factors facilitated micro-temoral control to become a useful disciplinary mechanism, namely the maturation of post-enlightenment natural sciences and the development of the table (aka spread sheet) as an information management system in the eighteenth century; in a play on words, Foucault refers to these as "cellular" systems in reference to the architectural atomism of monastic cells and the cell as a smallest discrete component of the compound organism that is the human body. Of course, now in the age of Excel spread sheets, we colloquially understand a "cell" as also denoting the negative space between four intersecting lines on a grid. Foucault describes the table as "both a technique of power and a procedure of knowledge" (148) which divide the human body and and track various aspects of its behaviours, allowing one to detect patterns in human at a scale much greater than was previously unobservable. ON EXHAUSTION AND COUNTING

What is productive movement? How do you evaluate the value and quality of a gesture? Non-stopping as a way to de-mechanize the body- Continuous

The score of nonstopping- a way to start the doing- holds the doing, sets the parameters- easy structures/simple scores foregrounds the experience, makes it difficult to "perfect"

Bring more attention to what the artist is attending to

The proposition is put back on the practitioner- what is the specificity in the moment of doing that you are aware of- what do you find yourself attending to?

The absences of structure reveals what structure is needed- gives the dancers agency to discover and articulate these things for themselves

Non-stopping as a revealing mechanism

-Failure of the body using metric measurements as a control to reveal that which the body conceals from view (surface evaluation)(a means of liberatory self-control)

The treadmill- once a machine built to inflict punishment on to prisoners- the monotony of the action was the most tortourous of all- now used as a machine for gaining physical endurance and strength and the autonomy that comes with it

Body building and "fitness" culture -Fitness for what? -CONDITIONING THE BODY FOR THE PURPOSES OF SELF-EXPRESSION

-Acker argues for the legitimacy of a language of the body in which breath and meaning are the same

"Dancing with LoRA" - Johanna Spieker- Trying to teach AI how to dance -Overloading the system to reveal the limits of its capacities- Dancing "the most pure form of human expression"

Treadmill used for punishment in 19th century prisons while also extracting human energy for commercial production ie. milling grain "In The History of the Tread-Mill, Hardie noted that it wasn’t medieval-style agony that bestowed such infamy upon the apparatus—the treadmill wasn’t the rack or an iron maiden, after all. It was ennui, stemming from the treadmill’s “monotonous steadiness and not its severity, which constitutes its terror.” -https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/history-of-the-treadmill/

Inspired by my readings, this week I have been thinking deeply about how movement has been archived.

I spent the afternoon last Thursday at the Toronto reference library looking through various texts about choreographic notation systems, gait analysis, and Eadweard Muybridge's early time-motion studies (referenced in several of my reading this week) in order to better understand how others have historically taken on the task of recording and analyzing the human motion and more specifically, movement during walking. In my research at the library I recognized echos of Federici's claim that "techniques of capture and domination [of human movement] have changed depending on the dominant labour regime and the machines that have been the model for the body" (122) emblematized by the stark formal contrasts between choreographic notation styles from the 18th to 20st centuries. Though always based off of the grid of the musical staff whose invention preceded the codification of 18th century French court dance by several centuries, the scrolling calligraphic lines of Beauchamp-Feuillet notation mimic the organic geometry of the gardens of Versailles and hand-scrolled romantic poetry, while the more contemporary Labanotation resembles an electronic schematic and early counter-intelligence cryptography. The former notation debuting on the inciting edge of industrialization and the latter gaining popularity at the dawn of the computer age- the two represent the shift from European seigneurialism to technocracy.

Prior to the codification of dance, the intrinsic ephemerality of the art meant that choreography had to be held in dancer's muscle memory and transmitted through person-to-person instruction. Dance's dependence on its practitioners' bodies as repositories with their infinitely variable physical and psychic conditions, meant that a gesture's translation from body-to-body left it vulnerable not only to infinite variation but also liable to become permanently lost should it not be passed down before its body-archive irreparably decayed.

The Sun King's (Louis XIV) commission of a choreographic notation system (Beauchamp-Feuillet notation) in 1700 was part of a much larger project during his reign to codify France's artistic output and so spread their influence . As Agamben writes, "[a]n era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate" (137)- and so to record French court dance on paper was to give it the sophisticated authority of a text while the physical characteristics of its paper substrate allowed it to reach beyond the boarders of France's empire. Now liberated from the dancer's body-archive the international dissemination of these choreographic texts extended the already powerful cultural influence France had over Europe at the time.

To keep the script legible to the newly-initiated, the Beauchamp-Feuillet scores depict a basic bilateral division of the body with the notation representing the basic movements of the limbs, trunk, and head, their duration and direction. In the introduction to her comparative analysis of choreographic notation systems, founder of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, Hutchinson Guest (1989) describes how the fidelity (or resolution) of a notation style expresses the intention of its author/inventor to either leave space for the dancer's creative interpretation or record enough detail for a faithful reenactment of a specific performance (xi-xii). I believe the endurance of both the Beauchamp-Feuillet system could very well be due to their low-fidelity or simplicity like poetry- the speaker or dancer's style is able to develop in the spaces between symbols. Pearson and Shanks (2001) argue that the "[material] traces left behind by performance are perhaps more susceptible to the approaches of contemporary archaeology than methods taken from textual analysis: the documentation of unwritten happening, attested through material trace, is an archaeological project" (9)- In an age over-saturrated by digital video documetation, it is interesting to think about intentionally creating and archiving material traces of process and performance. Other notes: -Paintings on the surface of the pavement denoting crosswalks, bikes lanes, the bilateral division of traffic, a sort of choreographic notation

-Dance an unproductive action under capitalism without limiting public witness of it- this erases the labour of bodily conditioning, learning, and practice

-When photography and then film became a publicly accessible archival media for capturing human movement, choreographic notation seems to have mostly fallen out of common use.

That is, until digital three-dimensional modelling technology

-Biometric scans like choreographic notation, render the body placeless

-Resolution

-Poetry in what is left unsaid

-Forensic gait analysis- gait now pathologized and weaponized with technological precision -Mo-cap- archiving and transposing human movement -Diagnostic gait analysis- how are the metrics of a "normal" walk determined? If it is the average sum of all walks, does a normal walk exist? Under this system would everyone not have something "wrong" with their gait? Week 3 Bibliography

Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks. "Introduction." In Theatre/Archeology, 1-12. Routledge, 2002.

Agamben, Giorgio. "Notes on Gesture." In Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, 133-140. Translated by Liz Heron. Verso, 1993.

Kloetzel, Melanie. Site and Re-Site: Early Efforts to Serialize Site Dance. Dance