Dance and the Political: States of Exception

Author(s): Mark Franko

Source: Dance Research Journal , Summer - Winter, 2006, Vol. 38, No. 1/2 (Summer -
Winter, 2006), pp. 3-18
Published by: Congress on Research in Dance

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Dance and the Political:
States of Exception
Mark Franko

M y first idea was to compare Ausdruckstanz literature to work in other fields on the
theorization of fascist aesthetics.' This would establish a critical framework for the
vexed question of the fascistization of German modern dance. As the research of Susan
Manning, Marion Kant, and Laure Guilbert has made patently evident, Ausdruckstanz
begs the question of dance and politics because of the easy and massive accommodation
of German modern dance to the cultural policies of the Ihird Reich. The history of
Ausdruckstanz has long been veiled, but the original research of these scholars persuades
us to reconsider dance modernism from the political perspective. An early twentieth
century avant-garde art movement and an authoritarian state apparatus encounter each
other at a moment crucial in the development of each; something new is being created,
both artistically and politically, that reveals contradictory forces and tendencies at work.
Only when these dance scholars lifted the veil and rewrote history could we begin to
perceive dance in the full light of the political. They have inaugurated an area of inquiry
that requires further work. But any serious critical development of dance study methodol
ogy must also be tested against their re-evaluation of Ausdruckstanz.

Mark Franko received his PhD in French from Columbia University and danced professionally
before becoming a dance historian, theorist, and choreographer. He is the author of five books:
Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer, and Studiofor Dance (I955-I964), 7he Work
of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the I93 oS (CHOICE magazine "Outstanding Aca
demic Title" for 2003), Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (I 996 de la Torre Bueno prize
Special Mention, forthcoming in Slovenian by Zavod En-Knap), Dance as Text: Ideologies of the
Baroque Body (published in France by Editions Kargo and forthcoming in Italy by L'Epos), and
Ihe Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography. He edited Ritual and Event: Interdiscilinary
Perspectives (Routledge, 2005) and co-edited (with musicologist Annette Richards) Acting on the
Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines (Wesleyan). He serves on the editorial boards
of Discourses in Dance and Dance Research Journal and is a member of the College of Le Centre
d'Etudes et de Recherches en Danse Contemporaine. He has taught at Princeton University,
New York University, Columbia/Barnard, Purdue University, Paris 8, the University of Nice,
Montpellier 3, and the Catholic University of Leuven, and has lectured throughout Western
Europe. He is currently professor of dance, and chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at the
University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dance Research Journal 38/1 & 2 SUMMER / WINTER 2006 3

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 Yet, I can understand why it is better I not discuss Ausdruckstanz here, today. My
areas of specialization are the French baroque and North American modernism. When
the conference organizers asked me to widen the scope of my presentation I wrote the
following abstract:

In what historical and aesthetic circumstances does it become justifiable and neces
sary to speak of dance as political? Of what kind of politics are we speaking in such
cases-what kind of power? Above all, what sort of relationship can be established
between dance and the political such that politically alert methodologies can reveal
more about dance than dance itself is perhaps "willing" to reveal? Is the politics of
dance necessarily mute? Or, is it possible for a (any) politics to control dance-to
manipulate its meaning? Does dance have a "political unconscious"?

No sooner had I written this abstract than it became very hard to write the paper. I became
tangled in the phenomenal presence of dance, the politics of the relation between dancer,
choreographer, and institution, and so-called real-world politics: the political sphere itself.
The best approach was, I decided, to try to answer one by one my own questions.

In what historical and aesthetic circumstances does it become justifiable

and necessary to speak of dance as political?

It is justifiable and necessary to speak of dance as political in circumstances that are

conjunctural, that is, in circumstances where forms of movement and socio-political life
take shape simultaneously if apparently independently. Dance frequently attains height
ened cultural visibility at such moments, which makes it productive to examine within
the terms of our problematic. Dance can also intervene in political considerations in a
proto-conjunctural context. Rather than being quintessentially visible because cultur
ally central, it may in such cases be highly marginal and invisible. Since the seventeenth
century, dance has served to fashion and project images of monarchy, national identity,
gendered identity, racialized identity, and ritualized identity. But in most of these areas
it has also demonstrated the ability to stand apart, acting as a critical theory of society. It
goes without saying that I would consider both functions as political.
With the development of modern dance in Germany and North America earlier in
the twentieth century, the body in motion became a choreographic touchstone of national
identity. Choreographers sought themes and subject matter that celebrated national identity
in terms of physical types and qualities of energy and resolve, all of which were construed
to have racial overtones. In the I 930S and I940S dance entered the field of ideological con
flict between capitalism, fascism, and communism in America and Western Europe.3 The
growth and development of the nation-state and its attendant ideologies has determined
the semiotics of the relationship between dance and politics until at least the end of World
War II. For Sally Banes, even the most experimental choreographic production of the I 96os
took place under the ideological aegis of democracy, bringing the experiments of Judson
Church Dance Theatre thirty years later into line with a certain ideology of American iden
tity (Banes I 994). More recently, this semiotic relation of dance to the modern nation-state
has become relevant to postcolonial identities in international situations.4

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 In the case of artists who achieve iconic national status, the impact of national con
sciousness on the creative process can be tracked at the level of strategic artistic and pub
licity-related decisions. It is possible that the artist's situation becomes one of intentional
cooperation, or of the more or less willing co-optation of the dancer/choreographer by a
bureaucratic state apparatus. Susan Manning's work on Mary Wigman opened up this
area of inquiry, and indeed this very kind of inquiry. Whether we call it appropriation,
accommodation, or collaboration, the artist's politics is frequently compounded by the
situation of the woman artist in the twentieth century who both manipulated her own
image and suffered its manipulation by forces beyond her control. For example, the price
paid by Martha Graham in the late I 930S and early I 940S for her national celebrity was
a discourse transforming her artistic profile. She was prominent enough to appear in an
editorial cartoon next to Mussolini and Hitler in I 942. Ihe image is of Graham looking
religiously at a piece of fabric. "Strange Talisman," the legend reads. "Dancer Martha
Graham always carries with her a bit of s oo-year-old cloth from the dress of a medieval
italian saint" (Cox I 942). Graham may be side by side with men who are world leaders,
but she is presented as out of touch with the modern world, and as superstitious. Even
as a counterweight to Hitler and Mussolini, Graham is presented under the auspices of
what Toril Moi has identified a propos of the critical reception of Simone de Beauvoir as
"the personality topos." "The implication," specifies Moi, "is that whatever a woman says,
or writes, or thinks, is less important and less interesting than what she is" (I990, 27).5
Since her Frontier (I935) and American Document (1938) Graham took it upon herself to
personify American identity. A Nazi radio broadcast acknowledged this and proposed that
Germany was masculine and the United States feminine.Therefore, the American media
feminized Graham throughout the early I 940S in the name of a masculinized national
identity. My point is that for Graham, different and contradictory motives impinged
on a structurally confined cultural space, which was her own space of cultural action.
The possibilities this space represents can be both enabling and distorting for personal
and aesthetic identity. I would consider the political as very precisely the entanglement
of these different forces and motives that partake of the personal, the artistic, and the
institutional. Politics are not located directly "in" dance, but in the way dance manages
to occupy (cultural) space.
Given this state of affairs, I find continued resistance to the idea of dance and the
political perplexing. Mark Morris is one highly visible choreographer (at least in the
United States) who publicly denounces the validity of a connection between dance and
the political.6 His denial surely has something to do with the politics required to under
gird his own canonical reputation as a choreographer.The canon determines whose work
is seen and survives over time: the modernist canon requires that dance be apolitical to
qualify as great art that is worthy of entrance into the canon.7 I believe that politics is as
closely and substantially connected to dance in the real world as dance itself is connected
to ritual in anthropology. Dance, however, does not operate directly in the political sphere,
and thus dance is not, strictly speaking, political. As against Morris, there actually is no
"is" in the presumed equation between dance and the political; to say that dance is not
political is not to say much. An adequate dance studies should therefore constantly return

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 to the complex interactions between dance and the political designated as political in a
variety of ways. It is reflection on this variety or diversity of relationships that has true
methodological value for dance research.
If dance is not political strictly speaking, then what is it? I would answer that dance
is ideological, and it carries inevitable political effects for this reason.8 Ideologies are the
persuasive kinesthetic and visual means by which individual identities are called or hailed
to larger group formations. If, conversely, dance is anti-ideological, then it is deconstruc
tive in the sense that it practices a critical self-reflexivity.The self-reflexivity that can be
said to characterize some postmodern dance since the i 960s can be explained in political
terms as a rejection of ideology's hold on dance. "Dance can only be subversive," writes
Janet Wolff, "when it questions and exposes the construction of the body in culture" (I 7,
96). However we characterize the great divide between modernism and the postmodern
that separates the world of contemporary movement research from the compromises of
an earlier period, formal shifts can be accounted for in ideological terms.
On a micro-historical level, dance may perform protest, a direct and local way of
upsetting a power balance.9 What the body itself, when given pride of place, can be
thought to oppose also lends definition to how dance makes the political flare up. The
dancer's body, as Dominique Dupuy has said, can be "intolerable," "a provocation," and
"a living blasphemy" (2003, I 5). Somewhere between these poles of ideological suasion,
deconstruction, and protest, we can pinpoint resistance. Resistance is a trope within which
movement and representation are ambiguously articulated. This is because dance can
absorb and retain the effects of political power as well as resist the very effects it appears
to incorporate within the same gesture. This is what makes dance a potent political form
of expression: it can encode norms as well as deviation from the norms in structures of
parody, irony, and pastiche that appear and disappear quickly, often leaving no trace.
Here, we could refer to appropriative restagings and the debates over political intent

they give rise to. For example, Pina Bausch's rewriting of Vaslav Nijinsky's Rite of Spring
recasts the seminal ballet story as a battle of the sexes much more explicitly than does
the original. This raised, at least for the American public, the question of Bausch's gender
politics.I1 When Matthew Bourne restaged Swan Lake for a cast of male swans, the way
in which dance can represent sexual orientation takes on a new dimension. In these and
similar cases, it is the presence of a work from the past that acts as a foil for a heightening
of the unrealized political possibilities in the original.
Ihe dancing body has rhetorical, persuasive, and deconstructive force in the social field
of the audience, which is a variant of the public sphere. Public controversies are not neces
sary for a danced politics. The way in which dance alters public space by occupying it is
full of political innuendos, as is any unprecedented use of public space for the circulation
of bodies. Dance can exert ideological power without emblematizing it. Thoinot Arbeau
called dance "a mute rhetoric."", If ideology is a persuasive and therefore fundamentally
rhetorical appeal to the mind and the senses, choreography is a potent means of its capta
tion. But choreography can also effectively undo or counter such rhetorics. The notion of
"detournement,"as Situationists theorized it in the I960s with its procedures of quotation
and citation, was particularly relevant to dance and the political in the last decades of the

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 twentieth century. Distancing from the cultural constructions of the body has proceeded
not just through a questioning of the body per se, but through the questioning of lexicons
and syntaxes that have effected such constructions in dance. Thus, we could note that Mark
Morris's cross-dressed roles in Dido andAeneas (i 989) play with the sex/gender construct.
But they also evoke baroque and modernist vocabularies, which themselves encoded this
construct in particular historical ways, and come to do it yet again in Dido andAeneas with
different inflections. Ihe sex/gender politics in which this dance engages is also therefore
engaged with a politics of dance history expressed in, by, and through choreography.
The tools with which to unpack this persuasiveness or this dissuasion vary according
to historical period. One can talk of spectacle in the baroque and one can appropriate
John Martin's terminology of metakinesis in the I920S and I 930s. It is important meth
odologically, in my view, both to think with, but not within, the models of the histori
cal period under scrutiny, and also to develop those models in the direction of relevant
terms for contemporary analysis. To understand the mechanisms of power in baroque
spectacle, for example, one examines the relation of court ballets to narrative, the role
of text, image and movement in their construction, the historical circumstances of their
production, the dance techniques, musical techniques, and choreographic genres, etc.
Here one comes across notions of the intermediate, of "gli affetti," of military culture
and aristocratic culture, etc.I2 But one should also engage with the extensive theoriza
tion of the baroque since the I920S, a theorization relaying that historical period to our
present. This would include a rethinking of sovereignty both politically and aesthetically
(Benjamin, Schmitt), of the baroque in relation to the postmodern (Debord, Perniola),
of baroque aesthetics in the contemporary context (Wolfflin, Sarduy), and of baroque
political thought (Kantorowicz, Agamben). The manner in which the historical models
can be brought into dialogue with the subsequent theoretical crystallizations illuminates
the relation of dance to critical studies. Dance studies is fundamentally interdisciplinary
in the way it conjugates specific knowledge of structured movement systems and cho
reographic protocols as well as performance styles with the critical approaches to power
and representation that would otherwise remain relatively disembodied.

Of what kind of politics are we speaking? What kind of power?

When we speak of dance and politics, we speak of the power of dance to make and un
make identities. Because dance molds the body and its ways of moving, it cannot help
but propose models of subjectivity in either an affirmative or a negative sense. Sound,
costume, staging, plot, and text influence such models to various degrees. When we speak
of dance and the political, we also infer the politics of interpretation. Which critics or
theorists have provided influential, indeed canonical, interpretations that have shaped our
apprehension of what we see? What are the presuppositions of such influential texts-even
if they appear as ephemera-and what other writings have been suppressed or gone un
noticed? What ideological credence has been bestowed on the "great" critic, and with
what ideological consequences for the art of dance? 'The history of dance and politics can
often be read and deconstructed in the encounters between performance and the print
discourse that marks its passage with a discursive afterlife.

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 But politics can also be internal to dance. William Forsythe has recently identified
the connection between dance and politics in the relation between dancer and choreog
rapher in that the choreographer curates the dancer's autonomy. Forsythe spoke recently
of ballet-like computer language-as an art of command. But countering this quality, he
proposed choreography as an enabling practice that can promote the dancer's autonomy
(Forsythe 2003). For Forsythe, the dancer-choreographer relation is where dance meets
the political. From this vision emerges a political potential that also becomes visible in
performance. One can say by extension that in dance we read the relation of dancer to
choreographer as a political relation.
In the sixties, small dance companies in New York were something like the micro
groups with which Fredric Jameson characterized the decade (I984, I78-209). Our
understanding of choreography-specifically of how it gets done-extends to the small
social groups enabling choreographic practice. In this way, by examining dance's social
conditions of possibility, we have already moved beyond strictly formal considerations.
The evocation of everyday movement and improvisation seems inevitable at this level.
Systems of technical training or protocols for nontechnical training have been instru
mental in the fostering of communitarian identities. Accounts of such communities and
how they support practice require ethnographic approaches. Mass dance in the thirties
played a role in the creation of Communist Party culture (known as movement culture).
In 7Ihe Work of Dance I have tried to extend our understanding of the impact of dance
on the (mass) spectator to the relationship between choreographic procedures and the
administrative entities responsible for group movement in social life. This would be the
first step in the description of a choreo-politics, following the sense in which Foucault has
spoken of a bio-politics. Susan Manning has discussed the relationship between leader and
group in Wigman's company during the I 920S. Ihese and similar analyses presuppose a
continuum between what happens offstage and onstage, an important presupposition of
any methodology that wishes to highlight the confluence of dance and the political.'3
Power also encompasses cultural policy and the ways in which dance fuilfills the role
of public art. This is the case with commissions-frequently governmental commissions
and grants that have existed in the United States since the 1930S through the WPA, the
Eisenhower Fund, and the NEA. We see that the lack of any critical awareness of ideol
ogy in the political sphere today goes hand in hand with the dismissal of performance
as cultural diplomacy. While dance was exported across the world by the United States
during the Cold War as a tool of foreign policy, today dance-like all the arts-plays
little or no role in international relations.'4
In authoritarian societies, such commissions aim to institute a totalized environment
through which architecture and interior design, media and gesture become relays in a
cultural mode d'emploi of body, space, and movement. In democratic societies, public in
terpretation of publicly commissioned or sited work can have volatile effects frequently
leading to the manipulation of the public sphere.Is This was certainly the case with the
controversies over certain artists funded by the National Endowment for the Arts in the
I980s, which led to the downsizing of that agency. Cultural policy defines itself with
respect to emergent identities that are construed as offensive to the public, and thus dance

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becomes by definition public art. In situations such as these, the political class appears
radically estranged from the artist class, and the deepest animosity emerges between the
agents of political bureaucracy and those who labor in the studio. It has mostly been the
case of late that the political class also mobilizes the public against the artist class. Ihis
has much to do with what Michael Brenson has called "the political banishment of the
artist's body" and of their "living histories" (200I, I04).
We are speaking of cultural politics, and therefore of cultural power. Although we
are constantly reminded that dance has no power, the move to squelch it once it stands
forth in an unorthodox manner is often immediate. Ihe possibility for a cultural politics
to manifest itself in/as dance presupposes the political feasibility of its performance in
the face of cultural policy. Exceptional moments are those in which dance has escaped
censure. Here we speak of dance in relation to events and eventfulness.
Ihis was also the context of the seminar on dance and politics that took place under
the auspices of Le Mas de la Danse and the CND at Vincennes in 2001. Ihe publica
tion Danse etpolitique documents those presentations and debates.'6 The seminar was
organized around the concept of the political as linked to events, notably the bombing
of the Cathedral of Reims, the October revolution, the stock market crash of i 929, and
the bombing of Hiroshima. Topics were resumed under the rubrics of dance and state
power, dance and work, the collective body as body politic and/or national body, and the
notion of historical trauma.
I would like to call attention to a methodological debate that emerges from the Vin
cennes discussions. What I shall call formalism and contextualism for lack of better terms
appears to divide the interpretive community of the seminar.'7 Those who favor move
ment analysis over all other critical methods are formalist in a disciplinary sense. For the
formalist sensibility, critical theory is imported from outside the discipline. It is of the
nature of the strictest disciplinary conception of dance studies therefore to diminish the
interpretive importance of context. I am pointing out a tension over issues of disciplinar
ity in dance studies, but I hope this will not be misunderstood as an attempt to foster an
opposition between two methodological tendencies; we need both, but they should be
better integrated.'8 Historians seem to be taken for contextualists even though not all are
enamored of critical theory. From the perspective of this debate, dance studies is either a
new and self-sufficient discipline (the formalist model) or a parasitic trans-discipline (the
contextualist model). History without critical theory can of course just be considered a
supplement to movement analysis, and in this sense a subset of history.
The issues raised in this debate are largely methodological, but they also have inter
pretive consequences. The formalist model seeks descriptive and theoretical tools that
account for the dance experience in the most unmediated manner possible (for example,
movement analysis) whereas the contextualist model takes dance as an extension or dis
tillation of social practices-a symbolic action-and thus conceptualizes dance to some
degree as mediated. To be an unmediated discourse of dance is to function as closely to
dance as possible as a discursive and experimental complement to movement research
and contemporary performance. The historically, culturally, and institutionally determined
conditions in which this movement research crucially takes place-the historical condi

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 tions of its possibility-are displaced in the name of dance's immediacy. What seems to
characterize the formalist persuasion in dance studies is a brand of anti-historical impulse.
This is a consequence of phenomenology that implies an eternal present. This idea can, in
my opinion, lead to a narrow definition of the contemporary, one that is both anti-social
and anti-historical-and for this very reason, actually anti-contemporary. Andre Lepecki
writes:

An art that needs living bodies to exist is projected, as a research object, to an in

tangible past. It is as if one needed the veil of death in order to face the essence of
dance. (Or is this veil a symptom that something unbearable may lie at the core of
dance?)'9(I994, 23)
What do we have to fear from confronting ghosts or from engaging with layers of seeing
and meaning that complexify dance's presence rather than associate it with the figure
of truth: the body unveiled? Lepecki's question can be turned against itself. What is
unbearable in the past? Cannot the "intangible past" be thought of in terms of Foucaul
dian genealogies? What does it mean to pry apart the terms dance and the past? This is
a strategy whose effect would be to foreclose quotation and citationality, both of which
always presuppose a previous discourse, and therefore a previous inscription. Toward the
end of her masterly study of German modern dance and its relationship to the Nazi era,
Laure Guilbert invites aestheticians to grapple with that archival inscription in movement
terms. But, does not Guilbert's book itself count as dance history?20 And if so, then can
not dance history be actually intradisciplinary? Must the social and political entailments
of dance, the history of movements within the dance community, and of the sensibility
to movement itself, be rigorously segregated within dance studies? The methodological
challenge we face is to articulate awareness of the traffic between bodies and ideologies
acquired by virtue of all that has happened both in dance and in dance studies with the
close analysis of how dancing itself actually works.2,

What sort of relationship can be established between dance and the political such
that politically alert methodologies can reveal more about dance than dance itself is
perhaps "willing" to reveal? Is the politics of dance necessarily mute? Or, is it possible
for a (any) politics to control dance-to manipulate its meaning?

In order for a methodology of danced politics or political dance to exist, there must be a
general theory of the political in dance. Certainly, such a theory would directly concern the
three methodological areas proposed in this conference: politics, gender, and identities. Yet,
politics-my assigned area here today-is the term closest to the "political sphere"properly
speaking. So what is the "political sphere" and when or where did dance enter it?
The history of dance can be useful to us here. Western theater dance begins in the
political sphere.IThe seventeenth-century Theatre State is so named because in it the real
operations of theater have direct political significance. It is a historical commonplace that
court ballets, particularly in France, mirror the diplomatic maneuvers and ideological aims
of the monarchy. At the center of these early-modern media exercising control over the

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 territory of early national states, is the king's body itself: a privileged site of interaction
between dance and power.
Jiirgen Habermas's proposes that "representative publicness" preceded the existence
of a public sphere: "This publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as
a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute"
(I994, 7). It is the effect of public self-display as epitomized in court ballet to distinguish
power from the private and hence to function as a status attribute against the public sphere.
Public self-display in a prestige economy was embedded in dance aesthetics influenced by
traditions of courtly social dance. We can hypothesize, following Habermas, that courtly
social dance and its adaptations to court ballets were, despite their class restrictions,
fundamentallypublic acts. There was no place for privacy within them.
Representative publicity has the effect of"subjecting"the onlooker-that is, of bestow
ing upon the onlooker his or her subjectivity, which is cognate with subjugation. "Public
authority was consolidated into a palpable object confronting those who were merely
subject to it and who at first were only negatively defined by it" (Habermas I 994, I 8).
Michel Foucault similarly envisages the direct exercise of monarchical authority in the
political sphere as a form of subjugation.22 Dance is an attractive site at which to test such
a theory since it is far removed from punitive violence and yet the most characterized by
public display of the sovereign person.
In Dance as Text I asked whether the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
monarch, rather than being the sole agent of political power, was not actually a pro
tagonist of ritualized political struggle.23 Here, the context of theater is more than just
a platform for display, but also a social process. The importance of the burlesque ballets
between i 620 and I636 was their emergence as a form of symbolic political negotiation
carried out between feudal rivals and sovereign authority. I claimed that the burlesque
was not an embarrassment to people of good taste, but an innovative use of movement
in dialogue with the absolutist entailments of ballet spectacle. Within the carnivalesque
reversals of the burlesque genre, a key figure of which was the androgyne, a power struggle
with class dimensions took on performative dimensions.24 Ihe figure of the androgyne
was subversive in this context because it could imply the dynamic inversion of power
relationships between king and nobility.
Royal cross-dressing further complexifies this picture, as well as the notion of rep
resentative publicness itself. The cross-dressed king unsettled the patriarchal basis of
hypermasculine iconography in relation to royal power. It signaled a choice, in my
interpretation, to move beyond representations of power toward evocations of force.
"Sovereign is he," wrote political theorist Carl Schmitt in I922, "who decides on the
exception" (I985, 5). The exception is the suspension of the juridico-political order,
but in ballet it marks the suspension of consecrated relations between representation
and power. If power is force in mourning, as Louis Marin put it, then force brought
out of mourning is the most transgressive of power's resources (I98I, 236).The king's
sexual indeterminacy in ballets where he plays the androgyne is also directly linked to
problems of succession for which mourning and melancholy are the symptoms. Simi

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 larly, but at a different level, some of the king's cross-dressed roles are anti-normative
figures of force that imply the exception implicit in sovereignty.25 Thus, the king's
performance of anti-normative roles is both an assertion of legitimacy and a threat
of legitimacy's suspension. In both cases power is performed in unorthodox, because
nonrepresentational, terms. Dance history contains insights not just into the relation
of dance to political power, but also into dance and the politics of representation. It is
precisely at the level of the politics of representation that we touch upon the question
of how dance history is to be represented.
What allows a danced event to emerge on the horizon of historicality or narrativity?
Any serious discussion of the exception challenges the canon itself. Challenging the ca
nonical exclusivity of dance history obliges us to invoke forgotten or suppressed alterna
tives-culturally, aesthetically, and politically. If, as Hayden White claims, the possibility
of historical narrative is founded on law, legality, and legitimacy, then the effect of dance
studies on dance history is to destabilize the subject of history itsel.26 Interdisciplinary,
intertextual, and ethnographic, dance studies may be unsettling to a dance world that
functions on the basis of canonical representations and historical narrative. Canonical
works are often made to appear politically neutral because of their aesthetic excellence.
Comparison of canonical and noncanonical figures, however, can reveal the political
alternatives contained within canonical works.27 If we are to seriously explore dance and
the political as a historical relation, we too must decide on the exception. Seventeenth
century court ballet is exemplary in this respect because certain works reveal something
not revealed to be knowledge anywhere else: the representation of the exception. Because
the notion of the exception is encoded in that of sovereignty, the keyword, I believe, is not
representative publicness, but sovereignty, with aUl it entails of the relationship between
power, force, and the exceptional.
The context of these remarks is to situate the relation of dance to the political sphere.
If dance sits squarely within the political sphere in the seventeenth century, this is not
subsequently the case. For Habermas, the public sphere develops as a bourgeois phenom
enon in the wake of representative publicness. The public sphere is formed of "private
individuals who came together to form a public" (I994, 56). Ihe public sphere is the
domain of property owners and family members who elaborate a notion of their own
subjectivity in public through fiction and letter writing. Most interesting for us is that that
very subjectivity becomes dependent for its elaboration on the presence of an audience:

The diary became a letter addressed to the sender, and the first-person narrative
became a conversation with one's self addressed to another person.... Subjectivity,
as the innermost core of the private, was already oriented to an audience (Publikum).
(Habermas I989,49)

'This eighteenth- and nineteenth-century development of a public sphere that could en

gage in rational dialogue with power shifted away from the literary to the choreographic
and performative. How and why modernity invested in the trope of motion is beyond
the scope of this paper. But I ask you to consider here the revolution of Isadora Duncan
as an instance of the dancer discovering and elaborating her subjectivity in/as the public

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sphere. It is possible that with Duncan, dance enters the public sphere. Elsewhere I have
written:

Duncan's subjectivity was unstably positioned on a threshold between privacy and

publicity because her dance was an act of public display unveiling hidden nature as
prior to or intrinsically outside society, from elsewhere by definition. Although op
posed to the separation of these spheres, Duncan also relied on their segregation to
dramatize her opposition. In this sense she took performance where she found it as a
public act for a private self.28 (Franko I995, 2-3)

The dialectic in Duncan's work between privacy and publicity is what makes her chore
ography foundational for a Habermasian concept of the public sphere in dance. It is the
appearance of the body before an audience in the elaboration of its private subjectivity
that enables dance to enter the public sphere and thereby obtain political relevancy at
that point in history.
Catastrophic events of the twentieth century cannot be accounted for or responded to
in adequate corporeal and choreographic terms with the notions of sovereignty and public
sphere.29 What these events point to in different ways is "historical trauma." In Dance Pa
thologies Felicia McCarren points out connections to trauma from Romantic ballet (Giselle)
to the early female soloist of historical modern dance (Loie Fulier). In this context trauma
is diagnosed as hysteria, and its iconography is contained in the photographs of Charcot's
Salpetriere clinic.3? McCarren's analysis is based on the figure of the pathological, and more
particularly, of hysteria (I 998). Hysteria, although having lost its scientific validity, persists as
a general term for the changing manifestations of trauma whose violence breaks the limits
of the self or of the body.3' The relation between the unconscious and the body is forged
in the historical crucible of hysteria, which stands at the origin of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Parts of the body become fragmented and dispersed as parts of a scene, as is frequently the
case in the Tanztheater of Pina Bausch. It seems that we touch here upon a psychoanalytic
dimension of dance that dance studies has left relatively untouched. This problematic also
opens onto memory and how the body remembers. Trauma also occasions the blotting out
of memory. Dance studies should be alert to how the body forgets.
If we explore the issues of dance and the political with reference to the tropes of sov
ereignty, public sphere, and trauma, they need not necessarily be ordered in any historical
sequence, nor do they necessitate the correlation of dance and event in any cause-effect
sense. To the contrary, they are present in dance today as elements of the genealogy of
the political. Perhaps they constitute a first step toward a general theory of the political
in dance from which further methodological developments can be derived. It should be
added that methodology is not limited to the operations our sources allow us to perform,
but it extends to the theoretical grids we can set up and the sorts of questions these grids
enable us to ask.

Does dance have a "political unconscious"?

Rather than divide dance studies between mediated historiographic and immediate de
scriptive schools, I propose the historico-critical practice of writing and choreography

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 I have practiced to illustrate other possibilities. For example, I have asked by means of
choreography whether some baroque dance could deal with subjugation as an effect of
representative publicness rather than only with the embodiment of representative public
ness itself. In other terms, I have attempted to conjugate trauma with sovereignty.
Le Marbre tremble was premiered at the Toulon Art Museum in the photography
exhibit "Le corps/la galere: noir et blanc," curated by Fran,ois Soulages in I986. It was
developed in conjunction with Ernestine Rubin's photographs of Pierre Puget's caryatids
in Toulon, themselves modeled after galley slaves in the Marseilles harbor.32 "La galere"
is the galley ship set into motion by slave labor, but also the bodily suffering of that labor
("la galere" is slang for suffering in modern French). The patterns and gestures of the
dance dialogue with the dissolving montage of photographed statues. Photographs of the
caryatids were projected onto the performer's body, as well as onto a screen behind him.
Ihe costume, designed to evoke the disappearance of the caryatid/slave's lower body into
a stone block, was made of a material that also acted as screen capturing the projected
photographic image.
Not unlike my scholarly attempt in Dance as Text to rehabilitate the burlesque as an
artistically viable (because politically motivated) choreographic act, Le Marbre tremble
inverted the conventional "subject" of seventeenth-century baroque dance. This subject
becomes the subject of the reception of representative publicness rather than of its pro
jection. Through this juxtaposition of research and choreographic methodologies the
political exists within the folds of dance (to borrow Deleuze's term)-within the folds
of history, movement, and iconography; and in the choreography of the fold itself. Le
Marbre tremble was a spatialized and temporalized mode of thinking in which the dance
reflected self-consciously on the history of its own relation to politics. It fragments that
history in the multiplicitous figures of its past engagements with form. An internal history
of dance, one that favors the integrity and self-sufficiency of dance without essentializing
its presence, constitutes the political context.
I would like to suggest that the representation of political reality itself is what allows us
to understand aesthetics precisely as historical insight. Power cannot function outside of
the representational field, and representation, along with its crises, is an aesthetic matter.33
TIhis is why I believe not only that dance and politics have much to do with one another,
but also that a theory of dance and the political need not necessarily resolve itself into
action or be crassly propagandistic. Although politics may appear to be a "hard" word,
the insights associated with it can be subtle and pervasive.
Ihe intertwining of research and writing with choreography and performance is, for
me, also a political move, one in which dance accedes to the discourse of its own inter
pretation. This double practice obviates the rejection of history in the name of a more
direct engagement with dance. Dance, when conscious of its own politics, stands in the
most unmediated or immediate relation to itself. The very awareness of the political his
tory carried by the body enables us to think the relation between dance and the political
choreographically, and therefore within the logic of movement and its performance.'The
choreographic relationship between dance and the political becomes critical in relation

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 to its own history. Methodologies of dance and the political could be construed in this
context as intradisciplinary. This is the only viable compromise position in the method
ological split of dance studies itself.

This paper was one of three keynote addresses to the international colloquium "Discourses of
Dance: Keywords for Research Methodology" (Les discours de la danse: mots-clefs pour une
m'thodologie de la recherche) held at the Palais des Festivals et des Congr's at Cannes on
November 29-December I, 2003. Sponsored by the Centre national de la danse, the conference
was divided up into three days under the rubrics Politics, Gender, and Identities; each day began
with a keynote on the general theme from a theoretical perspective followed by four papers ad
dressing the theme in a determined historical context. The theme of gender was pursued relative
to eighteenth-century ballet, that of identities was strictly contemporary, and, as is clear from the
keynote, the political theme was organized around German modern dance of the early twentieth
century. Conference organizers Susanne Franco (Facolt'a di Design e Arti, Universit'a IUAV di
Venezia) and Marina Nordera (Dance Department, Universite de Nice, Sophia-Antipolis) have
edited the papers for publication in Italian-I discorsi della danza: Parole chiaveper una metodologia
della ricerca (Torino: UTET Libreria)-and in English (at Routledge).The Centre national de la
danse has, unfortunately, decided not to pursue its original publication plans for a French edition.
Ihe volume, however, will be significant for the terrain of dance studies in Western Europe, and
particularly for the sharing of resources and work between dance scholarly communities in the
United States, Italy, and France.

Notes
I wish to thank Janet Wolff, Isabelle Ginot, and Susanna Franco for their helpful suggestions on
earlier drafts of this essay.

i. A sampling of analyses of cultural fascism and/or of fascist aesthetics might include Erin
G. Carlston (1998), Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi (1997), Alice Yaeger Kaplan (1986), Vivian M.
Patraka (1999), Jeffrey T. Schnapp (1996), Barbara Spackman (1996), and the anthology edited
by Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman (1990).
2. Susan Manning has written of Wigmans "accommodation with fascist aesthetics" instead of
a fascist appropriation of her work (1993,45). See also Lilian Karina and Marion Kant (2003),
and Laure Guilbert (2000).
3. See Mark Franko (2003).
4. See Marta Savigliano (1995).
5. The cartoon also spoofs Mussolini and Hitler for pretending to be that which they are not,
or pretending not to be that which they are: Mussolini poses for photographers standing on a
table to increase his stature and Hitler submits to nose surgery.
6. At the "On Dance" series at Barnard College, New York City, on October 11,2004, Morris
made the claim that the only political choreography ever made was Graham's Deep Song, and he
encouraged the undergraduate dance students to read and take seriously Arlene Croce s critique
of Bill T.Jones's Still/Here, which she had called victim art and wrote about without seeing.
7. See Mark Franko (2007).
8.1 have developed the terms of this claim relative to North American dance of the 1930s in
my The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the i?jos (2002).
9. See Susan Leigh Foster (2003).
10. See Ann Daly (2002).
11. See my analysis of this phrase from his Orch?sographie (1588) in Franko (1986).

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 12. See Kate Van Orden (2005).
13. Here, the concept of the parergon can be useful. See my "Dance and Figurability" (2001).
14. See Naima Prevots (1998).
15. "When ... guardians of public space refer their power to a source of social unity outside
the social, they attempt to occupy?in the sense of filling up, taking possession of, taking
possession by filling up?the locus of power that in a democratic society is an empty place"
(Deutsche 1996, 275).
16. Danse et politique: D?marche artistique et contexte historique, edited and commented on by
Fr?d?ric Pouillaude. Along with the conference that followed on dance and figures of commu
nity (September 2002) whose results have been published by the CND as Etre ensemble, it is the
precursor to Les discours de la danse. These three events, when taken together, constitute the first
sustained international discussion on dance and politics.
17. The qualities of formalism are not those of abstraction but of formal description. Hayden
White (1999) uses these terms slighdy differently.
18. Any analysis that privileges aesthetics to the detriment of context risks reading dance in
an ahistorical way, one that, most pertinently for my theme, misses the sociological ramifications
of aesthetics. This is not by any means to dismiss phenomenological analysis, especially not the
French variety that I consider to be the best that there is in this field, but rather to weigh meth
odological tendencies in the balance of interpretive results. All dances embody their own historical
context; one cannot separate context from embodiment. Analysis of the conditions of production
and reception also serve to historicize diff?rent embodiments of a dance.
19. Although the context of Lepecki's remarks is not fully articulated in this article, he conjoins
the challenges of dance studies with a rethinking of dance criticism.
20. "A movement history remains to be written in the light of my conclusions. But for it to take
place there would have to be a veritable exchange between aesthetics and the other disciplines
of the human sciences." ("Une histoire du mouvement resterait ? ?crire ? la lumi?re des conclu
sions de cet ouvrage_Elle n?cessiterait pour advenir qu'un v?ritable ?change s'instaure entre
l'esth?tique et les autres disciplines des sciences humaines.") (Guilbert 2000).
21. Dominique Dupuy (2003) has underlined the importance of "la relation entre le politique
et la mati?re de la danse," in "Ouvertures" in Danse et politique, 15-16.
22. See Michel Foucault (1979), especially "The Body of the Condemned" and "The Spectacle
of the Scaffold."
23. Margaret M. McGowan (1978) laid the groundwork for this approach to dance history.
Dance as Text aimed to extend McGowan's relationship between statecraft, political conjuncture,
and state-sponsored court ballet into choreographic aesthetics.
24. "The 'society of orders'did not exist as a system, but only as one aspect of a distinctive early
modern form of a society of classes" (Beik 1985, 335).
25. See my "The King Cross-Dressed: Power and Force in Royal Ballets" (1998).
26. See Hayden White (1987).
27. This was the approach I took in Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics where I compared
Duncan to Valentine de Saint-Point, Graham to the left-wing dancers of the 1930s, and Cun
ningham to Douglas Dunn.
28. See also further discussion p. 14 et seq.
29. See Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Mark Franko (2006).
30. See Georges Didi-Huberman (1982).
31. See Claude Rabant (2003).
32. See my "Pour un Nouveau Statut du Baroque en Chor?graphie: l'Effet Puget" (1988).
33. In this paragraph I am indebted to the thought of F. R. Ankersmit (1996).

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