all a City of ghosts. For Benjamin, the field of such negotiations is not
exhausted by actual past experiences of the City, but also takes in those experi-
ences which did not ever happen. The experience of the City includes the lost
choices and the missed encounters... the forfeiture of an experience itself
leaves traces which persist and shape the experience of the present. The
surrealists were the masters of the experience of the City that might have been,
but not for us. Finally, Benjamin insists that the experience of the City is
ecstatic and futural, haunted by intimations of the future, whether as the City
ecstatically fusing into an epic unity of its past, present and future citizens
as in the Paris of Victor Hugo, or in the melancholy of the allegorical City
which lives on without us, in repetitious change, as in the Paris of Baudelaire’s
anti-epic poetry.
(Caygill 1998: 119)Dance produces many examples of disclosure of urban skills and their employ-
ment, producing, at its best, a kind of urban symptomatology which, like the
urban, escapes the intent of the makers:
the presentation of these bodies carried meaning regardless of the narrative
or conceptual theme of the dance. Are their bodies grounded or do they
sustain an image of lightness through the dance? Do they use a lot of space,
or is their movement contained, bound to their body by some unknown
force?
(Albright 199 7 : 33)These dancers provide, to use the title of one such dance group, a kind of
‘active graphics’. For example, in La Tristeza Complice(The Shared Sorrow) by
the Belgian dance group Les Ballets C. de la B., the aggression and empathy of
the city are conjured up.
Set in a theoretical huis clos of a public waiting area, La Tristeza Complice
features the particular neurosis of despair of each vagrant character as they
enter the space one by one. We see the crazed man in his underwear careering
through space on one roller blade, at times gliding gracefully and at other
times limping around the stage. Then there enters the tall lanky drag queen,
precariously balanced on his heels as he fights off the taunts and abuses of
two adolescent boys. More characters enter the fray, including a bag lady
whose compulsive arranging and rearranging of her possessions bespeaks
a spiritual searching for her self.... In the midst of all the loneliness, however,
there are several extraordinary moments of physical communication. Often
these moments arise from the kinaesthetic rhythms of the movement itself
rather than from a specific dramatic intention. In this public no-man’s-land,
there is little direct interpersonal contact, but physical energy is contagious,
and when one person begins a rhythmic, repetitious stamping combina-
tion, others are drawn in to his dance. Sometimes this exchange of energy146 Part II