Impure Gestures Towards ‘Choreography in General’: Re/Presenting Flemish Contemporary Dance, 1982–2010

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Notes

1. Only recently, since 2005, under the artistic direction of Kathryn Bennetts, has the RBoF undergone a significant change. Bennetts, who formerly worked with William Forsythe at Ballet Frankfurt, brought choreographies by Forsythe and Jiři Kýlian into the repertoire, and commissioned new work by David Dawson, Nicolo Fonte and Helen Pickett.

2. In 1982, De Keersmaeker had an immediate success with her debut, Fase, followed up by Rosas danst Rosas (1983). Simultaneously, Fabre, with his background in visual arts, adapted the ingredients of experimental performance art in his seven-hour This is theater like it was to be expected and foreseen (1982) and in The Power of Theatrical Madness (1984).

3. Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, ed. by Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), pp. 308–14 (p. 309).

4. David Michael Levin, ‘Balanchine's Formalism’, in What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 123–44 (p. 123).

5. A similar point of view is put forward by Sally Banes and Noël Carroll in ‘Cunningham, Balanchine, and Postmodern Dance’, Dance Chronicle, 29 (July 2006), 49–68.

6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 27–73.

7. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 49–62 (p. 58).

7. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 146–66. For the classic critique, see Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

9. For a more detailed elaboration, see Rudi Laermans, ‘”Dance in General”, or Choreographing the Public, Making Assemblages’, Performance Research, 13 (March 2008), 7–14.

10. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1999). Some of the substantial arguments and case studies supporting this specific perspective are, unfortunately, absent from the abridged English translation (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006).

11. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).