Choreographing the enquiry:
Traversing The Fantasy
I am a choreographer in training.
A thought I have been preoccupied with for a while is why and how movement is made. Having originally set out on a research journey that wanted to understand dramatic intention behind movement, I have been led to discover more about the intrinsic sensations of the body where movement naturally occurs. I could, as others have, define these movements as ‘intuition’, as ‘embodied-cognition’. These movements could appear as improvisation, a desire to dance to music, they could not just be dance but rather movement that aims to calm me down such as ‘stimming’, the movement patterns could be something as simple as movement as part of a reflex, the natural pull away of my hand when it touches something too hot to handle, or my understanding of proprioception when navigating a busy tube station. All of this thinking is body-thinking, it is thought that is ultimately guided and led with the whole of the body, not just the brain. In a recent conversation with Dr. Aby Watson, a queer neurodivergent choreographer, performer and academic of ‘stim-dancing’, Watson reminded me of the ‘neuro’ in neurodivergent, emphasising the fact that neurons ran throughout the body and this made me want to think more of the diversity in body-thinking that exists and ranges person to person, body to body.
As a choreographer in training, I seek to become aware of how my body thinks. Not aware so that there is an outcome of me then being able to manipulate what my body thinks, as perhaps I had previously tried to achieve with using dramatic intentions in my work, or indeed during technical dance training, but to become aware so that I understand what my body wants to say in the moment and why, so that environments that I can set up in my rehearsal studios can foster and give affordance to my body and help it generate material.
Seeking to do this has led me into practices that facilitate greater reflection on my improvisations, my habitual movement, my struggles and thoughts whilst choreographing and I have created feedback loops that circle practice with reflection with theory with practice with reflection with theory and so on.
Through doing this reflection and research into my practice, what becomes clear is how my confidence, my fear and my shame around how I move holds me back. I am preoccupied so much more with how a movement will be perceived when choreographing than I am with what the movement is exploring, the enquiry of my choreography. A shift was needed at the beginning of my research, towards this idea of choreography and dance as enquiry rather than as a creative outcome or product, in order to loosen up myself from the perfect, and I feel as though this shift of thinking is continuing to help with maintaining an openness in my choreographic development.
On the day that I am writing this, I feel not like a choreographer at all, the etymology of the word being to ‘write dance’, a dance (Khoreia) writer (graphein). This is partly what I do, but some of the dancing doesn’t become written, it doesn’t form enough as ideas to be fully constructed into coherent words and some of the dance remains as philosophical thoughts of enquiry that float around, change and interrupt what I make. These thoughts have the ability to shift constantly and so my practice does as well. In fact, right now, I feel much more like (albeit a mediocre) philosopher who has chosen dance as the knowledge sharing output for my thoughts, wonderings and abstract enquiries about the world and how I take part in it.
You cannot say things like this and not sound wanky and pretentious.
But this is how I can best describe what I am feeling, which in dance, isn’t often put down in words.
At the moment, the enquiry, the knowledge-seeking, the making dance that makes me think more about how and why I and others make dance, is what is exciting to me, rather than creating the best version of Cinderella that dance has ever seen. I think it’s important to add here that I believe the best ways to share knowledge is through engaging, entertaining, relatable, fun and enjoyable experiences for the viewer. So, even the best production of Cinderella that dance has ever seen could be how someone, a choreographer, enters enquiry about the why they make dance, the how they do it and enquiries about dance and philosophy more broadly. It’s hard not to mention internationally acclaimed choreographer Wayne McGregor here, who’s work deals with scientific, body-knowledge enquiry, but who’s work is frequently performed on ballet stages to audiences in their thousands each year, many of whom might be unaware of Wayne’s research that assists the making of his dance and simply in awe of the spectacle this research can produce.
Through researching how and why I make dance and entering choreographic enquiry, I have found a sticking point in my practice that makes me more and more curious each time I come across it. It’s the concept of ‘the imagined’ in dance-making. Fantasy. At first, this came up in my practice as me wanting to understand how intentions and actor-training systems could help me to pin down my imagination so that it was helpful in the performance of my dance to provide me with the ‘right’ textural qualities that I felt that the dance I was doing, needed. I feel it more important now to focus on my use of fantasy and imagination that already exists in the ways that I make dance. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek states that there are fantasies so engrained in us that it’s these imaginings that help us see and process the world. He writes a wordy definition of what it means to traverse these fantasies, and upon reading it, I realised that Traversing The Fantasy is something I want to do much more in my practice. Zizek says:
“In our daily existence, we are immersed in ‘reality’, structured and supported by the fantasy, but this very immersion makes us blind to the fantasy frame which sustains our access to reality. To transverse the fantasy therefore means, paradoxically, to fully identify with the fantasy, to bring the fantasy out.”
Writing from my choreographic practice, not only does my body think with it’s many neurons, but it can also fantasize and believe it’s own lies. That makes choreographing the reality of something, working with the reality of my body, a challenge. Zizek goes on to quote Richard Boothby who says:
‘Traversing the fantasy’ thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic reality, but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of fantasy that transcends imagining.’
It took me a while to understand what this means, but I’ll continue for now. Zizek helped me by framing Boothby’s remarks, saying:
“Traversing the fantasy is ‘not to see through it and perceive the reality obfuscated by it, but to directly confront the fantasy as such. Once we do this, its hold over us is suspended – why? Because fantasy remains operative only insofar as it functions as the transparent background of our experience – fantasy is like a dirty intimate secret which cannot survive public exposure.”
Importantly, Zizek/Boothby/Lacan is not asking everyone to stop fantasizing, but writes about what happens when there is an awareness of the fantasy, in the moment it occurs.
Let’s look at a fantasy that has come up in my improvisational dance practice. That fantasy is ‘I am seen as ‘good’ if I dance with a balletic alignment’. For whatever reason, perhaps my training, perhaps being a product of a western society, that is a fantasy that has a severe grip on my practice and has done for a long time. If I traverse this fantasy, however, I am noticing when a movement I do makes me feel ‘off’ and I recognise this discomfort that makes me feel the pull to ‘restore’ this movement, in my case, to get back to balletic alignment and to return to the fantastical image in my head of a ‘good dancer’. I am made aware of this impulse and I believe the fantasy that if I do restore my movement, I am good, I am valuable.
But if I am to traverse the fantasy, I would not do this. I would not rush into the known. Instead, I would continue to dance whilst aware of an arising tension that unsettles me, aware of this feeling of an awkwardness in the body and aware of the fantasy that correction towards how my body has been codified by trained technique equates with an idea of ‘goodness’. And it’s in this unresolved sensation of dancing both ideas at the same time, dancing the feeling of the pull of correction into good ballet alignment and the not rushing to do so, where I feel like I am finding my choreographic material at the moment. It’s in this gap that I think things are interesting, that I feel like I’m finding ‘self’ in dance. And this makes sense, because it’s my body in a kind of dialogue of where I’ve been (my training, my fantasies) and what my body wants to say in the moment.
I am just a choreographer in training… so let’s look at someone who is established. Let’s circle back on Wayne McGregor’s work. Through understanding more about my own practice, my perception of how McGregor works has changed from thinking his interest was simply in generating new movement (and almost failing to do so, with it so rooted in balletic language), to now thinking that one of his interests is in this dialogue between how a body has been trained and how it wants to think.
^ Dancers Joseph Sissens, Fumi Kaneko and William Bracewell in a streamed rehearsal of Wayne McGregor’s MADDADDAM, filmed at The Royal Ballet and Opera House.
In fact, I could see his work as trying to embody this tension between how something has been trained to move and the vitality at the core of these bodies and how they truly want to move and think like. Viewing Wayne’s work this way makes it much more moving to me. The work no longer is about the stories or technology that Wayne collaborates with, but instead, they become tools in which a body sits in the tension between their trained system and defying it. McGregor choreographs this unsettled place, of landing neither in or away from systematic dance, allowing the dancers to dance both their understanding of their training, their awareness of the pull towards it and to not rush back to ‘the known’ or ‘their known’.
I’ve written of queer theorist Sara Ahmed and her definitions of orientation and dis/orientation before, particularly Ahmed’s definition of queerness as ‘facing towards a home that has been lost and towards a place that is not yet home’. This feels like the gap where Wayne is asking the dancers to dance in. It feels like I’m watching dancing that is a recognition of the unsettled nature of the ‘home’ of bodies and the queering of balletically trained dancers.
I am researching my practice to understand what my ‘home’ is, what comes up that pulls my body to a known and what unsettles this. I’m interested in becoming more aware of my fantasies that help me process the realities of when I’m choreographing and I’m interested in what happens when I don’t rush back to the known, when I choreograph this unsettling. Not because I’m defying the way that my body has been coded up until now, because that is part of my artistic self too, but because by dancing in the unsettled place, I open more doors to more enquiries. I am open to more choreographic material. I am working to give affordance to more choreographic possibilities. As a choreographer in training, that feels like the most important thing I can be doing for my practice right now, perhaps forever.
