and in the criteria specified for physical competence, a coherent (or not so
coherent) set of principles that govern the action of the regimen. These
principles, reticulated with aesthetic, political and gendered connotations, cast
the body which enacts them into larger arenas as of meaning where it moves
alongside bodies bearing related signage. Theories of bodily significance
likewise exist for any prior historical moment. Circulating around and through
the partitions of any established practice and reverberating at the interstices
among distinct practices, theories of bodily practices, like images of the
natural body, are deduced from acts of comparison between past and present,
from rubbing one kind of historical document against others. In the fictional
encounters between texts, such as those expressing aesthetic praise, medical
insights, proscriptive conduct and recreational pursuits, theories of bodily
significance begin to consolidate.
(Foster 1995: 8)Then again, dance can produce new bodily expressions which turn on the body’s
power to purposely transgress, play, or dissimulate. The body is not just written
upon. It writes as well.
To approach the body as capable of generating ideas, as a bodily writing, is
to approach it as a choreographer might. Dance, perhaps, more than any other
bodycentred endeavour, cultivates a body that imitates as well as responds.
Even those dance-makers who see in the dancer’s body a mere vehicle for
aesthetic expression must, in their investigation of a new work’s choreographic
problematics, consult bodies, their own or the dancers’. During this playful
probing of physical and semantic potential, choreographers’ and dancers’
bodies create new images, relationships, concepts and reflections. Here bodies
are cast into a discursive framework where they can respond in kind to
the moved queries initiated in the process of formulating a dance. Such bodies
have, admittedly, been trained so as to accomplish this fluency, a disciplining
that strongly shapes the quality of their interaction with dance-making.
Nevertheless they sustain a ‘conversation’ throughout the rehearsal process
and sometimes in performance, their imagination invents and then lucidly
enunciates their specific corporeal identities.
(Foster 1995: 15)Dance can, then, be seen as a form of ambulant ‘theorizing’ (Stewart 1998).
Dance has evolved forms which can aid this process. Of these, perhaps the best
known is Contact Improvisation (see, for example, Novack 1990) developed
in the 19 7 0s but with recognizable roots in the ‘performative revolution’ of
the 1960s. Contact Improvisation is a practice which mixes together the casual,
individualistic improvisatory ethos of ordinary social dancing with the kind of
task-oriented movement favoured by early postmodern dance groups such as
the Judson Church Dance Theater. It focuses on the process of becoming and is
therefore an improvisational process of touch with no real end point.
Afterwords 141