a

/
1

IMPERFECTIONS IN THE PAPER

Among the great arts of time music, literature, and dance the latter is the
only one, in the West, to have maintained a continuing relation w i t h oral tradition.
This mode of transmission, which has largely disappeared from the canons of our culture and is judged primitive by some, even though it is fully operative in other very
(!

complex musical traditions, remains linked to the history of dance, and even more, to

((!)

its very identity. Dance can have no recourse to the sign, for its essence is to forego
the c/eOL/rthat leads t h e r e . The access to dance, w h e t h e r it be perceptual or
interpretative, is a direct access that surges up from the heart of matter, from the
heart of emotion, above all in contemporary dance. Dance is lived and traversed as a
living present; it has, in appearance, no need for a symbolizing system that would be

^^^^ jb^^^^fei^^o^ l O p a l

incompatible with experiential givens and would reduce the sensible fabric of movement to an all-resuming graph, universal, transferrable from one place to another,
from one textuality to another. IVlovement is necessarily punctual. Though it may be
analyzed or qualified, it can never coalesce from a determined stock of lexical elements which would furnish its texture or definition. Even in the great school traditions, which operate on a fixed vocabulary, the miracle of dance is to transcend the
gestural glossary through the poetic ennanation of an event, unique in color and intensity. Even w h e n fixed in advance, its vocation is to rediscover what Trisha Brown
calls "the innocence of the first act"': the gift of dance is to be immersed in its own
sensation without any immediate need for an orientation, for a formal categorization.
At its source, the m o v e m e n t of c o n t e m p o r a r y dance is multiple: f o r m l e s s , it
reposes in the infinite sweep of its possible germinations. Its force and clarity require
it to shed, at the moment of its emergence, all the parasites that could alter or deflect
its course, even if this course is still shaken by counter-tensions. But in the intimate

An
^ '

fibre of its dynamic, it retains the shadow of the possibilities that gave it birth. From
I

ft
3.

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-^z

its unfurling springs the flood of "phantom movements" whose accumulated impul-

signification that dissolves. This is not the formulation of another language. It is a

sion it preserves, as in certain paintings where one sees the painter's " r e g r e t s , "

transformation of re-presentation itself.

shades that haunt the final composition, clinging after-images of the could-have-been.

sign. This trajectory is perturbed by the presence of a living body, intervening as

For dance, and above all contemporary dance, does not produce definitive figures. It

such. Representation supposes the absence of the object, the absence of being.

provokes acts.

We know that the analysis and transmission of acts does not come

Here, life inhabits what will never be its icon or its index. Dance de-represents'; it

about through the sign, but rather through the contamination of " s t a t e s " w h o s e

courses through zones of perception where meaning can only be invented amidst the

movement develops the degrees and qualities of energy, its tonalities. The reading,

debris of signification. To return danced movement to a site of inscription is therefore

the capture of such givens can only be immediate. It suffers no delay, nor any passage

grave. It amounts to the reimposition of a figure from which dance had slipped free.

It is a trajectory

between the real and the

through a grid of translation. Movement is most certainly readable, but its phrases

It also a m o u n t s to the reconstruction of a representational architecture w h o s e

are be grasped flush with the organic and perceptual tissue that gives them birth.

restraints had been broken, whose frame had been burst...

At the moment when the first inklings of what is now called contemporary dance

And yet the site of inscription wherein hover, mysterious shadows, the accesso-

appeared, in the person of Loie Fuller, on European stages in the course of the

ries of the scribe has always, almost fatally, been bound to the destiny of Western

1890s M a l l a r m d r e a m e d of dance as a " p o e m u n b u r d e n e d of scribal

dance. Better: its inscription is what dance inscribes. For dance only became a poem

accessories"^ A counter-writing, the reverse of any grapheme, dance would lead to

without a scribe through the absorption of the Graph into itself, all the way into its

the abolition of the Letter, opening up the supreme space of the poem, wherein

own organic and subjective tissue. Mallarm himself foresaw this": the dancer, in his

nothing but a pure whiteness w i t h o u t content is inscribed. Only the organic can

work, becomes "Signe" or "Cygne" [swan], a whiteness, an obstinate presence in

approach the threshold of this space swept clear of signs, only movement can des-

the sedimentations of time and space, which petrifies in the icy mirror of the rigid,

ignate it and, simultaneously, what is most unattainable in it: the possibility "to arrive

completed act. In the transmission of the name, in the permanence of the ancestor,

by physical means to the most impalpable realm of thought."

Mary Wigman's wish

in what founds the present moment. Daniel Dobbels reads the invisible, indecipher-

could seem paradoxical. It is only the resonance of a boundless aspiration. The

able "gramma" that w e hear in the name Graham (Graham = gram = gramma, the let-

dance: endless journey beyond inscription.

ter)^ A secret dilemma tense in the heart of dance. The notion and activity of "choreography," as understood in the different meanings this word has assumed over the

Mallarm's phrase was no more than the visionary disclosure of what was about

centuries, is unique to the West (we will return to this point). In this writing of the

to occur before his eyes. Fuller revealed dance as a poetic state, moving and colorful,

overall organization of space, does life not seek to decrypt its own letter?

a permanent return to the source of all dynamics, escaping from the traditional definitions of art and thus consigning to failure any attempt to name the flaming energies of
the body, to enclose t h e m in a concept.

In Canto XVIII of Paradise, in a passage with which choreologists are quite familiar,

Contemporary dance w a s born, an art

Dante invites the reader to contemplate a strange spectacle: supernatural creatures,

w i t h o u t scribe, a voyage of wavering dynamics and trajectories. Isadora Duncan

each bearing a flame, move singing through the heavens. At the end of each musical

w o u l d no more search to capture its contours in a tightly clasped container, than

phrase, they regroup and form a letter of the alphabet or a heraldic s y m b o l . There

Rodin would seek to retain the overflowing masses of stone within a peripheral limit.

we witness, in detail, what three centuries later will become an important procedure

A new stage emerges for dance, where it is less the sign than the very process of

of the early baroque "ballet": the danced movement stops at the end of each musical

10

(oiiQiiiict.-jxiirnhiijiuLr ok-

sequence, and the unfolding of the dance leads to the constitution of a planimetrie

UI/O.,. \ui,Afi.-.V.i,l,,utU^,,dU.<,jKfi.k
.J(^,W,< tA.,fU,_,,.^,,i,,.Jcp,.,.^.,,,c.....,r^,,l,,,

figure that the audience can read from above. The poet shamelessly anticipates our

'}(YK farnUimuH vi<t.,wi,i..l,,fiiift ji/,Hit.

(ij.rf .""-.- Il,<nii;.,aty. ^a! Pii ji-y nlmt^/ijri,,],!,.
all, ,,.-ft.y..,i y ..)" o<
,,h} i^fUMii-tlli
lUjiiiii till' n'"pli<i AiiiiK jH'inipl.iijirM.i nfnirr:

chronologies, and his premature description pays no heed to the decrees of dance
history, w h i c h w i l l fix the o f f i c i a l birth of such p r a c t i c e s m u c h later, in the
Renaissance. Thus he invites us to step back yet further from the purely historical
field wherein these enigmas are formulated, wherein these analogies weave their

^aUe -pciir toniU-iM Ji^'iiiimyirj ,lrjpni

threads. It is of little moment, for us, whether Dante could have really witnessed
such a performance in his own time. The site of dance circulates through Time, it
/

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>

1
^
" ,ff..,'_J-

1j

Di

haunts both the real and the imaginary. Seen from far off, or up close, the stage of

\-

the dance belongs less to an objective reality than to a moving surface of writing, a

kind of nowhere without fixed base, in which bodies assemble and unfasten a mysterious geometry. (Thus in Dante's text, under the steps of the celestial dancers, the
three stems of the lily, symbol of Florence, spread out to form the M of Mary, which
vanishes in turn into the night.) In this visionary evocation w e rediscover all that
founds the Western conception of dance: the quest for a sign inscribed in matter, for
the cartography of a " t e x t " which movement will read in a space it does not know.
As if even before worldly matter had achieved its organization of the visible and invisible, it already contained an inherent "letter," like the Vowels of Rimbaud's poem,
a sign that is latent in organic tissue as well. This writing, as w e have seen, has no
previously instituted support: it disperses in all dimensions, it is interior to every anatomy, to every kineosphere. Perhaps the world's writing insinuates itself into the
course of the heavenly lights, as suggested in the Zohar (on the basis of a JudeoArabic source, with which Dante was no doubt familiar). Maybe it wanders still today,
through the "imperfections in the paper" that Merce Cunningham scrutinizes in the
pages of his notebooks, deciphering innate dances. Far from being one chance procedure among the others that Cunningham uses, these traces w o u l d then be an
immanent writing, an autonomous composition that the paper bears within itself,
even before human intervention lays down the slightest sign. As if what allowed
itself to show through here, on the surface of a sheet of paper observed in its transparency, were all the possible surfaces that movement haunts in their very texture,
yet still leaves blank, unmarked.

13

-o

To choreograph is, originally, to trace or to note down dance. This is the nneaning
that Feuillet, the inventor of the w o r d , assigns it in 1700, in the title of his w o r k
Choreography,

or the art of describing dance with demonstrative

characters,

figures,

and signs (The French title contains a savorous hesitation in spelling, a delight for the
modern semiotician: we read "I'art de d'crire,"

almost as if, in English, one were to

read "the art of de-scribing..."). Since Feuillet's time, the acceptation of the term has
undergone a singular evolution, and today "choreography" refers, not to the activity
of notation, but rather to the creation of dance, or to "composition," as is also said in
the Anglo-Saxon w o r l d . Numerous elements encouraged this semantic mutation:
among others, one must point to the influence of Rudolf von Laban, a great admirer
of Feuillet, who contributed to a reintroduction of the latter's vocabulary to the stage
of modern dance. It is certainly not through any concern for etymological legitimation
that w e recall the presence of the idea of notation, of tracing, in the creative act of
dance. But one cannot help observing that to designate the creator of dance, the
West has favored the word that refers to the presence of the scribe within, the one
w h o measures, consigns, registers, and above all archives. This presence stems
from an irreversible inheritance that contemporary dance finds forever in its possession, in its very practice and in the concepts that designate it, despite its will for a
clean break, despite its aspiration to liberty and independence w i t h respect to the
written. It is as if the letter, the diffuse textuality inscribed in life, had immediately
and since time immemorial impressed its seal on the heart of the destiny of dance,
an invisible sign which movement and its projection in space will little by little decipher, transcending the mark.
To compose, to create in dance, is designated in French by the verb crire, to
write. Choreographic writing has nothing to do with notation, in appearance at least.
A choreographer is said to have produced a very " w r i t t e n " work, without having ever
laid down the slightest line on paper, or at least, without foregrounding any such practice. Choreography, for the contemporary creator, corresponds to a transformation of
latent motor organizations, of the time and space that they contain, and of the play of
exchange b e t w e e n these interior polyphonies and the objective spatio-temporal

14

givens witli which, among other things, the act confronts them. It is therefore above

the obscure history of notation (but also through the very nature of the notational

all a matter of an intenor score, moving and intimate. This score is within all of us: it

process) a blind spot, a suspension of perception.

is the ensemble of breathings, pulsations, emotive discharges or mass displacements

Here w e are are surely quite far from the idea of notation as nomenclature, as

which are focused on our bodies. It is the geography of the influxes diffused around

archival technique, a neutral and public way of deciphering danced movement.

But

us by the imaginary vision of space, it is the quality of the relations that w e can have

choreographers' drawings also f o r m part of this story. They participate, w i t h or

with the objective givens of the real the very givens that movement " s c u l p t s " ^

without the consent of their authors, in a long scriptural history by which movement

embraces or disperses according to its own axes of intensity. Such perhaps is the

has sought to inscribe itself and to remain in memory, that is, in tiie world.

real configuration of the " g r a m " that constitutes us: an organic, non-figurative writ-

wing in no way represents a final twisting, the sensible metamorphosis of an initial

ing, a "splashing"^ This "splashing" would then be what is carried along in the pro-

aim or a semiotic displacement motivated by a desire for exhibition in a museum, as

The dra-

cess called " m o t i l i t y " : a certain quality of movement (and of thought in this move-

occurs with other types of notation that have long since acquired the character and

ment) that allows us to traverse autonomous and limitless regions of the imaginary,

force of an institution. Manuscript musical notations, the bearers of scrawls and

making us full-fledged " s u b j e c t s " w i t h o u t having to constitute us in fixed bodies,

fevers, pulsations of the hand that traced them, can easily be deflected from their ini-

armed and insensitive^ This is the finality of choreography today, whatever the pro-

tial, essentially functional status as acts of recording, in order to highlight their graphic

cedures, the discourses, the stylistic options that accompany it. So it comes forth

and emotive value. This is all the more true in that numerous contemporary com-

from the work of an artist like Trisha Brown, so it was invented, exalted, by Mary

posers, regretting the barrenness of classical sheet music, now compose their scores

Wigman in the quest for an absolute poetic movement, with no other figural legiti-

in the form of diagrams, landscapes, linear apocalypses, whose intent is at times de-

mation than its o w n energy, in the motor configuration of its emotional source'".

liberately pictorial, as in the work of Morton Feldman or John Cage. An important

Thus it is understandable that, faced with such an irreducible tool, the contemporary

exhibition at the Staadt Gallerie of Stuttgart in 1986 presented these new visual

dancer and choreographer plunged more deeply in their practice than any other crea-

objects". The same is true for Picasso's writings, tight, obstinate, scratching graph-

tor should need to use a relay surface, a conjunctive tissue between the body, its

emes which were exhibited at Muse Picasso in Paris in 1989, as an activity carried

movement, and the space of projection where the inner score can unfurl. Regardless

out alongside painting, but sharing its visual impact and impulse, contaminated by the

of the way it is used (project or memorization), the essential thing is to see this sur-

graphic storm of the oeuvre, a subset and relay of the pure plastic gesture.

face as the limit of the scriptural, the tracing of what the letter does not say, but

Such presentations gain their force from the ambiguous relations that these docu-

where another text shows through, another reading of living substance. The status

ments maintain with the official histories of institutionalized forms of writing; and it

of these markings is necessarily anonymous and secret. They will follow the general

could well be that the displacement of the word and the letter to the center of the plas-

fate of dance notations, w h i c h is to escape almost always f r o m the public eye,

tic arts, as practiced in our centun/ from Magritte and Klee to Broodthaers and Haacke,

whether because the public is not interested (and here w e rediscover the phenome-

proceeds from a similar ambiguity'^

non of the "exclusion of the visible" descnbed by Didi-Hubermann with reference to

All the more so as these signs can also figure a mysterious writing, a secret, inde-

the " b o t i " of Santa Annunziata in Florence), or because the very destiny of the cho-

cipherable code, no doubt enveloping essential rhythms and symbols which cannot

reographer's "papers"

requires them to remain invisible, to concretize an intermedi-

be reached by any denotation. As such, they can be integrated to the image, as in

ary state between the object of vision and the object of non-vision, to designate in

the work of videast Gary Hill where they become a speech from before all images, a

16

17

speech from before all speech, a kind of matrix of gnosis, attaching itself to the roots
of the imaginary.
Even if they too are bearers of this type of combined event, where the entanglements of preexisting elements furrow new lines of reading, dance notations are of a
very different nature, and above all, have a very different destiny. Because they are
perfectly unknown, the state of surprise that their discovery provokes does not need
to be redoubled by an effect of deflection. One cannot deflect from an accustomed
usage that which has already been deflected, or rather, that which history has rejected. Dance notations have no precise cultural status, they occupy no place of
authority or of symbolically invested reference. The scribe of dance is a quite small
and modest scribe, provisional and without posterity. He scribbles his "hieroglyphs"
(as Feuillet puts it) in the shadows of writing. Aside from the baroque period, at the
hinge-point of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it must be recognized that
dance notations have never been the object of official interest, and even less of institutional interest. They form no lineages, all the way until Laban's notation. For no
stabilizing power, no corporative interest ever opposed their incessant transformation.
No councillor, no clerk or federation of typographers ever bound them in place, on the
strength of conviction and for particular advantage, unlike verbal and musical notation.
Bachelor machines, linked in each case to a specific choreographic language itself destined to disappear, they have disappeared as well, traces even more evanescent than the
phenomenon they sought to account for. Their genealogical tree cannot be drawn.
Despite certain rare influences they have formed no trunk, aside from the systems
generated by Laban's, who in this respect remains the great inseminator of contemporan/ dance. Almost all the systems for the writing of movement are born not of an inheritance, but of a solitan/ and profoundly orphaned uneasiness or fun/. Thus one can well
understand that the larger human community, so often indifferent to the existence and
the importance of its own movement and therefore, no doubt, indifferent to dance"
should show no interest in systems of notation. But this disinterest touches even
the dance community".
It would be superficial and reductive to dwell on the punctual, factual aspects of

19

;HOREGRAPHIE^
o u
L A R T DE D E C R I R E

.A
TAR
ET

D A N C E ,
CARACTERES
SICNUS

PIGURES

DEMONSTHATIFS,

c Icfuucli OH nppiciiil fj(iltincii[ ilc I'uy - mcmc iau[ci

P.,r M.

the rejection of notation by dancers. Independently of the historical context in which

FEVlLLET,

M.uirt

,U D.v.

the dancer's practice has evolved, far short of the subjective and sensible instances
which keep him in the present, there is, plunging deep within him, not an instanta-

PARIS,

Diidi, t"ji]b.iiii5 S. Gniniiii,! kCouiIrapiii

neous expressivity but rather a kind of archaic fear, linking back to a far more buried,
even immemorial stratum of experience, a fear whose signs are already manifest in
history.
If the famous "druidic alphabet" used to mark the dance figures executed in the
ballet hall and inscribed in the libretto is indeed related to the "Celtic" or esoteric
figures current in the early baroque period, one cannot ignore the fact that the druidic
religion, of which Julius Caesar gave such a savage description, forbade writing.
the figures of the dance then represent this interdiction or its transgression?

Do
Does

every writing, every codex of movement, refer to the law or its deviation? Does writing refer to the death sentence of the process in its designation (as Derrida described
it in his Grammatology),
ping-point?

or on the contrary, to the limit, to the traversal of this stop-

Karsavina, the recalcitrant student of an austere tutor's courses in the

L j fi jure inc jLilicrc cll ^iiiml IciJiui Daiictuijquifiguicmcnrcm-

Stepanov notation system at the Imperial School of Dance, would in later years write
in her memoirs that these traces were "cabalistic signs of black magic"'^ Thus a captivating and deadly power intervenes in these "hieroglyphs" of dance notation, in this
ancient scrawl whose unreadability goes hand in hand with its excessive and mysterious power.

Does something then die or fade away like bodies made victim to a

spell, is something lost in the very conquest of its memory, in the quest for an invisible writing, for a sign that must be ripped from the body of the dancer, torn forth
from his creative power?

Jc dl( done qilt liTl .[ii;

,!.n:; on .ijncc quclnill crptq

.;,rck cm.J,,'!;.,.
U\.V,r.
.I>,M... , .. ..:< . . , .! I . ; . .. I'l.. . ,. 1 I 1 . 11 .. i.,'.i.i;' 1.
I: l"ij-i:;
j!.;/r'l./'.|'l^"-..-; ':(;,..';;'i!r.ii<';i.i.^.;...-|'.^^
...^..rrn'crni.<-|-r
.
l:.ii.J
.LIKC. . !.-^

It will be said that the notation of a dance does treason to its emotion and to the
urgency of a present moment, to a real transferal of energy; it will be said that what

,;, J MIir^J l;i r-^

Ii Mihii; ... in^..; I = 111
ii .,l!v;.;r c;i
|;r-:,,,
U r:..l\.,.,,V
i^il.
a, .1 l.^i.Lr , icll:
,!.-,-....i;i.ciikr.ri"^
,
O.m.il ll .jri-.,'i.
.- in ("ii.-r. il l I; <^.- I. r..-: Ici MM J I ir.-.i;ri
.;.,^Ki...,l f,.i..,;]. . k, v.. ,|.;l\,n..M.I:-,'.i;:l:-ll^r>..r;-!in''i,.1
r,.;-n-,i-.i.- , I ...i, hiik; pr.T ki^ I'.i
k.. :n- 1 k"-

comes about in danced movement what is " t o r n " out there, far more than simply
manifested cannot be translated, cannot be brought back, is linked to its pure emotional and physical actualization, which no sign can restore, which no sign has even
the right to inscribe as a definitive event in the annals of human time. These arguments are current, I have already evoked them in another form. In my view there is

20

something much more grave here, something much stronger, drawing its resources

come from professionals and friends of an expressive fever, these papers are always

from the double notion of the Law that seems to impose notation and the

Interdiction

inhabited by something beyond the visible. They are scattered leaves of paper, transi-

whose object notation so clearly becomes. And this paradox stems from the fact that

ting between the "mirror-sheet" and the "body-sheet" (to borrow Sami All's terms'^).

the dancer is a veritable avatar of Orpheus: tie has no right to turn back on his course,

Mirrors without a doubt, but also membranes, skins, the interface of porous spaces.

lest he be denied the object of his quest

Into the subterranean night of his body are

The site of the illusory transaction between inside and outside, the metaphor of that

projected all the myths of fateful unveiling: Psyche revealing the mystery of desire; the

final bodily envelope which is the surface of inscription or of painting, and which is

fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. The dancer is imprisoned in "the innocence

only the prolongation of the cutaneous and intercutaneous elements determining the

of the first act." All his force serves only to nourish and to renew this innocence. All

conjunctive territories of the imaginary. Scattered pages, you are but the ultimate

his force gathers in this limitation. Like the great mystics, he remains on the margins

skin where the body reads the limit of its own sensation: in you, a dialogue is enga-

of revelation, in the shadow of a night which has nothing "fusional" about it: for it is

ged with a possible vertigo, with a flow of weight into space, with an impulse that

but the threshold of this abandonment, beyond which the work of the body may

frees the visibility of a springing tension, a bursting energy, a phaseless figure of

begin.

speed or rotation.,.

Why then is writing an obsession (both literally and metaphorically)? Why, across

Writings, systems, drawings, it matters little: they all must be discovered and fol-

centuries of Western culture, this obstinate quest to weigh the depth of the night's

lowed through notation's long, laggard assimilation of the sign asleep in the body.

darkness, to measure the intermittences of its light, to seize the trace of its invisibility,

What does this sign say, what does it account for? At first, it knew not: the sign to be

always questing for a sign that would traverse the night?

read in the body knew not of what it was the sign. It was searching for itself, as sign

Why all these drawings, tracings, planes, grids, trajectories cast on paper by a

and as body. It only took form in the body's mobility. It had first to trace the figure of

hand rich w i t h its o w n m o v e m e n t , as if the m o v e m e n t of the hand had read the

this mobility, before discerning the unfigurable. Little by little, it would accept to figure

movement of the body, and projected its flux? Why all these crumpled, yellowed, for-

that which escapes all figurability. This is a long, strange story...

gotten papers, found in the choreographer's dwelling or elsewhere, in the diverse and

I do not mean to trace a "gradus ad Parnassum" whose origins would lie in the

inaccessible sites of the archives of dance? Poor papers, so often, like the bits of

shadows of strictly codified dances, inflexible in their vocabulary (though not in their

wrapping or tracing paper on w h i c h Mary W i g m a n set her uprooted landscapes,

movement), and from which the luminous conquests of the modern era would finally

without scale or reference point. Like the old programs where Merce Cunningham

emerge. Each moment of notation has had its flashes of astounding intuition, but has

scratches out his grids or his animal heads. Like the lined or squared schoolchild's
paper used by Dorris Humphrey, Yvonne Rainer, or Dominique Bagouet.

also known its regressions, its troubling diminutions. The history of dance notations

Scrawled

offers nothing resembling a linear and "progressive" unfolding, no more than the his-

working notes? Of a project, of a memorization, of a floating form of writing which

tories of other symbolic practices. Thus the strange fifteenth-century manuscript of

has not yet invented its surface?

the Basses Danses of Cerbera and its echoes in a later text of Tarragona reveal a sys-

The paper in no way retains a record of the dance, it retains a trace which itself

tem of astonishing signs, articulated, in the reading of Carles Mas Garcia, along t w o

cannot be consigned anywhere else. It retains the upsurge where the interior score

axes of symbolization: one relative to the disposition of movement in space, the other

assumes a figure. The body does not write it, for it writes the body. Even when they

to the graphic stylization of the lexeme that designates this movement in language".

22

23

One can always point to the low artistic impact of a repertory of ball dances ad-

dressed to the cultivated aristocracy of Catalonia, or to the limited number of fully

constituted and therefore coded figures to which these graphemes refer, as well as
the linear, processional, and purely directional aspect with which they are seemingly
concerned. But the combinatory system we find here, the form of writing, the treatment of space as a rising wall where the dancing body advances towards a rift in the
sky, everything here is troubling, surprising, provoking questions about space and
sign, and about the genius of the scribe who was able to invent, at the dawn of the
Renaissance, a system of representation that is wholly unique in the period.
And at the far end of this histon/'s unfolding there is for those who would refuse

4 Owatiltv

the terms of progressive evolution something that tears profoundly within the unjlAiwiu.

attainable realm that previous notations had only designated. An anecdote reported by

vmefCawni/^ (ji.wL__a.lK.

Anne Hutchinson-Guest is eloquent here: visiting Pierre Cont, our explorer (and guide) in
the history of notations commented that the Cont system does not register certain
directional axes of the extremities, a troublesome gap for the reading of Anne Humphrey,
7 i>

for example. It does not matter, said Cont in reply: movement has an essential truth

C(U_ 'JWA-

that does not depend on the details of configuration. Should his statement be taken as a

failing in the system, or on the contrar/, as a remarkable breakthrough in consciousness?

If the second option is possible, it signals that something has broken out in the twentieth
centun/, that something of the sign has rejoined the necessity of movement, its profound

%<yuJ

reality. There is something here which no longer gathers up the visual in the closure of a
figure; something which, on the contrary, escapes all formal molds, opens up to the
experience of movement as the essence of movement. The memory of movement
would then be the memor/ of that which returns in us, of that which makes its return like
a wave of life falling back from the shore. The inscription of movement would be memory itself, the shadow cast by experience. It would be the seismography of an intimate
unfurling. As the wave is born from another wave, so the body alone can decipher the
echoes of a resonance that returns, like a faded percussion in the material of paper, a
rhythm that need only be awakened.
To be sure, it is in a very different context, in the Ouattrocento, that the West first
elaborates the idea of archiving dance through written procedures'". This archiving is

24

lull'

'W-

c4>W)7aUuti^'

i)

exactly concomitant with the invention of the choreographic act. To project a movement or a symmetrical interrelation of diverse movements into space means both writing in space and writing on paper. Even as they set out on the conquest of visible territories with which to invest and mark out the imaginary realm, as in cartography and
visual perspective, the dancing masters became the owners, the "authors" as w e
would say today, of their "basses danses" or "balli", compositions which will be signed
with names such as Messer Domenico (da Piacenza) or Messer Guglielmo (Ebreo). No
specific signs to invent: a verbal description aligned on a rather simple glossar/ of rhythmic and motor figures, all ready at hand, is today quite enough to let us read and reconstitute these dances perfectly. Like the rest of Quattrocento art, these notations entered
tranquilly into the reserves of the market, their sublimity intact.
But the sheet of paper on which the imaginar/ of movement is inscribed cannot indefinitely remain innocent, like a simple "abaco" notebook wherein the spatio-temporal
dimensions of the figures of human movement would be consigned'". The mysteries
borne by this movement are too vast; it could hardly avoid raising the all-embracing questions of social and cosmic space that it potentially contains, even when limited by the
codes of cultivated dance. Rapidly, the renewal of sign systems implied by dance notation is integrated to the ensemble of inquiry into writing and language, as it is posed
throughout the baroque era, from Jakob Bhme to Leibniz, and later, by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau^": human anatomy and even physiology, as Michel Foucault read them in his
history of the imaginary at the opening of the seventeenth century, are in correspondence with the very wheels of the universe. The glandular system, among others so
important today, let us recall, in the work of certain kinesiologists like Bonnie Cohen, for
whom the gland determines the nature and localization of movement^' is linked to all
the elements, to all the astral gravities which determine the grand ballet of the universe
evoked by Father Mersenne. Danced movement as it appears in the first court ballets is
therefore the deciphering of arcana, similar to the magical language of the world sought
by the Rosecrucians^'. It is the premonition of a writing without "language," which
draws its signs directly out of formless matter. Dance in its turn will come to trace on
the surface of paper all that which the body's movement sets resonating in the deeper
regions of consciousness, where no word can reach.

26

And what of the Feuillet writing system, born with the classicists' return to rationa-

munication of dances through space and time. From an initial point of view, it is a

lism"? Does it refer to the baroque dancers' quest for "another script," the script

matter of teaching everyone the fashionable figures and c o m p o s i t i o n s that are

which traces, as early as 1581, the essentially symbolical geometric figures (isosceles

danced in court balls, or of reproducing the "best entres" of ballets for the stage, to

triangles, circles, spirals, etc.) of the Ballet Comique de la Reine? To compose, in the

be reinterpreted by current practice. This manner of communicating dance through

West, means rewriting the world. It is still true today, despite the breach in time that

the intermediary of paper, like a letter or a bottle thrown in the sea, gives even those

is modernity. For Feuillet, who appeared at the far end of the seventeenth century, it

English dancing masters who are "remoted from London" a sensation of victory over

was enough to mark the world; but he marked it in a singularly beautiful way, impres-

time and space:

sing matter with feathery traces which the world's surface seems barely to restrain

"And ev'ry dance in ev'ry clime be read;

from flight. In one of his finest treatises, in 1721, the dancing master John Weaver

By distant masters shall each step be seen,"

described this wnting with a metaphor both poetic and concrete, calling it the traces
rejoices the amiable London poet Soane Jenyns in 1725'". Better yet, the sheet of

of "steps in the snow or the dust." What the earth's surface retains of human passa-

paper literally represents objective space. It is a space oriented by the sign. Again in

ge, the imprint of its successive support-points, is destined to disappear like move-

1725, Pierre Rameau, author of Le Maitre a danser, recommends turning the score

ment itself. The ephemeral is within the world, and human trajectories are only Inscri-

each time one reaches the far end of a course, so as to begin again in the opposite

bed within the general instability of the environment.

direction. The sheet of paper follows the dancer's orientation, it becomes a traced
The trace, in Feuillet's writing, engages t w o superimposed orders of representa-

partner in a parallel space, it accompanies his movement, precedes it, slips before it

tion, which are entirely heterogeneous in nature: 1) The tracing on the floor of a path

in an aerial rush of feathery traits. This multiple concomitance of the spaces of dance

representing the line of an undulating trajectory; 2) The vertical axis of the body as

eternally restates the problem of paper as a "field," as a mobile surface, a metaphori-

represented by the same line, as though the human spinal column were projected

cal soil, calling into question the very existence of real grounds and the orientation of

upwards along the axis of human movement. The thrust of the step, indicating the

trajectories.

movement of the free leg on either side of this axis, brings forth another fundamental

Only in the twentieth centun/ will such profound questions again be posed in such a

factor: the lateral and sagittal transferal of weight which, through the alternation of

pertinent way. Laban, whose clandestine and indirect links to Feuillet we have already

support-points, authors all human displacement.

Laban would later be most pro-

remarked, will be the first to posit the writing of dance as a consignation, not of formal

foundly impressed by this tremendous discovery, and above all by its formulation in

figures, but of deep sensorial realities w h i c h inhabit the human body, or as the

abstract signs, each of which marks the quality of destabilization presiding over the

ensemble of the organic score on whose basis w e conceive space, and project our-

exchange of supports; it is not known whether he discovered Feuillet's

Choreographie

selves into it. The first of these givens is weight, whose displacement with respect

in Paris around 1907, or in Munich, the capital of baroque disequilibria and of the flow-

to the center of gravity itself mobile is the source of the entire imaginan/ vision of

ing masses of s e v e n t e e n t h century sculpture, more or less contemporary w i t h

the body. Thus Laban's notation will use weight-blocks to mark the passage of gravita-

Feuillet. Whatever the case, in the work of the dancing masters and in the entire cultu-

tional impulses with respect to the axis. For as in Feuillet's system, it is the vertical axis

re through which they move, the inscription of the motor sign takes on a considerable

that marks the laterality of the body, whereby the fluctuating discharge of weight will

importance. As a system of memorization, writing allows for the distribution and com-

symmetrically circulate. This circulation of weight is the effort that constitutes space

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29

around our own vertigo, on tlie basis of intensified concentrations of weight at a given
place in the continuing mementum. The dinnension of the weight-blocks indicates the
inner duration of the nnovennent, henceforth free of all cadence, of all exterior signal.
Their configuration indicates their directional dynannic, while their degree of coloration (a
scale from black to white) designates qualities of intensity and emission (the flux).
In a general way, a multiplicity of proposals for notations of movement will be
stimulated by the emergence in the humanities of a consciousness of the "technologies of the body" (to borrow Mauss's expression), conceived as a variety of experience and even as a symbolics quite distinct from other signifying systems; and the
process will continue in the ground-breaking discoveries of bio-mechanics and the
experiments in time-lapse photography although very f e w of the resulting proposals, it must be said, will match the depth and conceptual novelty of Laban's discoveries. Like his, these new notations have the merit of aiming for universality, of
attempting to decipher all human movement, beyond any recognizable gestural code.
Some will even extend their ambition to the attempt at describing absolute movement, the movement of animals or of nature (Eskhol Wachman). Laban himself noted
" t h e m o v e m e n t " of i m m o b i l e o b j e c t s , w h i c h , long b e f o r e Nikolais, he called
" m o t i o n " : a perpetual clinamen of apparently immobile forms, which in their very
immobility (the vase, the chair) retain the imprint of the movement and the human
energy that gave them birth in labor and pain. In Cunningham's aleatory grids one still
sees something of this permanent movement of things, a movement which could be
reembodied once more, between t w o concomitant and dissociated organisations.
But the inscription of movement has not always remained innocent.

In 1936,

eight hundred performers were grouped together in a Berlin Stadium around a score
by Laban. The monumental choral choreography Neue Freude und Tauwind,

de-

scribed by Valrie Preston-Dunlop, led the inscription of dance toward the fatal role
that it had one day to play, in space and in the history of man. This vast, centralizing
gathering was authored by the distribution of a transcription, whose complicity with
the Law results from something more than Laban's political unconsciousness (shared
by Wigman at that time). Choreography and inscription here rediscover their dis-

31

quieting role as conquest and occupation, redoubling the abuse of power over bodies

There are many ways to interpret the appearance of these small, fragile figures,

as well as territories.

lost in the sheet of paper without any direct relation to space, or time, like the reoccupation of an existential envelope, at once cutaneous and graphic, as though the line

Perhaps there is a significance in the fact that sonne years later the soldier Nikolais,

contained the essence of being without any conjunctive rapport to the world. One

in the long hours of boredonn preceding the Allied landing in Normandy, should have

can, for example, link the segmented aspect of these drawings to the fragmented

conceived a system of notation not without resemblances to Laban's. Nikolais confi-

movement that French dancers inherited from the a certain interpretation of the direc-

ded to me that at the time of his crossing to France, his "papers" caused him the

tional in Cunningham. One can also find here the projection of a state of isolation

greatest concern: he feared he might be accused of transporting secret plans of

with respect to living matter, from which the straying figurine is detached, a fetish, a

espionage. A justified fear. For can anyone inventory such counter-spaces w i t h

doll, a tiny human hieroglyph, inscribing its silhouette as best it can in the already

impunity, chart such counter-territories unmarked by any reference-point of the occu-

saturated text of the history of bodies.

pying powers, but overrun with labile waves rolling one into the other, linking center
Can anyone confront human

But this body, which has forged itself a contour like a graphic carapace allowing it

powers with spaces that are not zones of involuted energy? What the dancer Nikolais

to escape from space, which has become letter or ideogram in order to guard against

and periphery in a constant reversal of movement?

its o w n errant poetics, this body today bears something which seems to unbind it.

here opposes to the world order is an extreme consciousness of human mobility, not

There is a thinking of dance which traverses the protective walls w o v e n in haste

as force of attack but as inherent motion, as the incessant and multidirectional circula-

among the interwining surfaces that choreography holds back at the limits of the

tion of living substance, which makes each movement into an ever more infinite tra-

impalpable. Not a thinking which rips apart, but one which links, which irrigates. You

jectory, ever less delimited by space in the form of an institution, in the form of an

see it in the thermic centers of density that Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker lights up

end-point to the fluctuation of human becoming.

like electric discharges in the weave of her own textuality, guided by the intensities of
But it was necessary that dance notations, like all writing, once confront the law,

the musical scores that she reads, dwells with, and prolongs in a parallel interpreta-

so as to rediscover themselves on the far side of inscription as the trial of death. Or

tion provided by the body. You see it again in the drapery that appears in Bagouet's

better and this would hold for all the misadventures of modern German dancers in

notations, as though an emotive envelope were rolling up space into the movement

the interwar period so as to reinvent the outside, the space w i t h o u t which the

of bodies, reintegrating the fragment into the continuous fabric of the real.

body cannot know its own gravitational displacement'^ It was only after this supreme

Scattered papers, tiny surfaces of life, memory-bodies, mirror-bodies, to w h a t

traversal that contemporary dance appeared in France, already burdened, already

mysterious universe does the multitude of your traces refer? Unfinished writings,

mined by history. It is perhaps not surprising then to observe what will happen after

humble springboards of a virtual space, modest advances beyond the possible, you

this supreme outburst of the letter, the culminating moment for all the great notators

exist but halfway, in the absence of the body that alone can read you.

of the modern era. Through a kind of inward turn that seems to graphically isolate its

Incomplete

objects, intermediaries between nothingness and life, you are not content like other

own figure as though it were the index of a body floating in a boundless space, the

objects to be the furnishings of reality, or to impress yourself in the imaginary: you

young French or Flemish choreographer manifests a desire to return to the body-as-

leave the order of things but provisionally, the better to transform it. And this without

contour, to the anthropomorphic pictograph, whose motor flux had been liberated by

revolution, without fury, content to return, with unflaggingly patient labor, over the

modem dance.

minute traces you have laid down at the limits of writing.

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