Some Notes on Poetics and Choreography

The distinction here is between language as the act of the instant and language as the act of thought about the instant. (Charles Olson – ‘Human Universe’ 1951 [1997: 156])

BEGINNINGS

Deriving an understanding of poetics from the work of poets, and emphasising poetics as a creative practice rather than as a critical act the following notes aim to contribute to a poetics of dance and to mark ways in which such a poetics can be identified, utilised and understood as a diverse set of approaches to creative practice. Creative practice can be thought of as the varied forms of poeisis that might shape forms of radical coherence in dance and choreography and which in turn might lead to an elusive ‘something else’ – the tendency for both language and movement to give rise to something beyond or outside the forms and intensities that make them visible and apprehensible to us. This ‘something else’ I have written about elsewhere (see Allsopp, 2013) For now I want to talk about the conditions – the poetics – that might give rise to the possibility of this ‘something else’.

What follows aligns a poetics of writing with a poetics of movement and draws on work in both mid-twentieth century projective and contemporary poetics (Olson, Bruns, Fisher, Nichols) and a poetics of contemporary dance (Louppe) that suggests that both poetry and dance are ‘languages’ that operate in excess of the functions of language, and open the possibilities of radical approaches to coherence and affection. Choreography as a term already holds or combines ideas of writing and movement and is thus already a poetics of sorts.¹ From this ‘choreographic’ perspective of movement and writing I want to gather together some readings and writings on poetics which will provide a background to what might already be close linkage between a poetics of dance and a poetics of writing. I want to draw on poetics in a general sense as an approach to creative practices that can propose the possibilities of radical coherence – or how things might hold together without falling into conventional forms and flows – and the kind of radical empiricism (or re-engagement with perceptual and affective experience) that stems from the process-based philosophies of Whitehead and Deleuze. As Levi Bryant pointed out in his blog Larval Subjects writing about the effects of the ‘textual turn’:

[I]f we wish to speak of [the] world today we cannot do so directly, but must pass through the interval of another text, through a close reading of another philosopher, rather than to make claims directly about the world. [ … ] Is there a way that it is possible today to renew discourse about the world, or are we irrevocably doomed to commentaries on texts?

(Bryant, 2007 April)

I think that there is a practical and potentially radical poetics to be found in working with and between poetry and dance which I hope might serve the purpose of providing a common ground for an exploration of creative practice and the questions of how, what, who and so on that it raises. What follows is an oscillation, a moving to and fro between the terms of choreography: writing and dance; a refusal to settle into any single position, a series of breaks, or fractures, discontinuities: a constellation of readings.

In ‘Traps or Tools and Damage’ (2007) the poet and painter Allen Fisher develops the image of the trap as a means of conceptualising and practicing a ‘discourse about the world’ and its relation to the functions of art:

Traps are what we are all inside of, traps constitute what is known, where to place what is known, between what boundaries. Traps, and springing them, initially determine what tools are selected for description, traps are depicted in the earliest graphic art and therefore the earliest language and clear expression of consciousness. The patterns of connectedness that enable traps and consciousness to work invoke descriptions of the prey and forethought for predation. Traps can be benign like a camera capturing light, or a cider press squeezing the juice from an apple. Traps can be concealed from us inside habitual experience and conditions. Traps involve inventive perception and thus ‘crowd-outs’ and as such provide tools, that is they bring about procedures of selection that produce pattern, and thus patterns of connectedness, through measurement, repetition and recurrence. My work challenges the conditions of being trapped by what we know; I use deliberate acquisition of knowledge, a reappraisal of poetics as method, and specific tools for transformation from damage, with a view to springing traps to meet the aesthetic and pragmatic functions of art.' (Fisher, 2007: 349)

The ‘inventive perception’ that traps may involve and the procedures of selection they bring about can be seen to describe a practice of choreography as itself a continual attempt to move beyond what we know and discover possibilities that are inherent in the moving body and in its relation to other bodies. The ‘inventive perceptions’ enabled in choreographic practices are not of a different order from the forms of poetic practice which underlie or frame a poetics of poetry and text.

POETICS

For some thinkers, a definition of poetics is derived from a critical rather than a creative act. Roman Jakobson's description of the ‘poetic function’ in his influential Code/Message model of the speech act foregrounds ‘poetic function’ as inherent in all communication. The poetic function places a particular emphasis on the message itself within an act of linguistic communication (see Jakobson, 1960: 356). For Roland Barthes poetics is a hypothetical descriptive model that allows the analysis of how (literary) works are constructed. It is not a form of hermeneutics (interpretation) and is not intended to find or recover a meaning in the text; it describes how meanings are generated by the text and how and why readers accept them as meaningful (see Barthes, 1990 [1953]). Poetics in this usage can also be compared with Gerard Genette's notion of the ‘paratext’ – those devices (titles, subtitles, prefaces, blurbs, programme notes etc.) which act upon the reader by raising expectations and creating a contract between reader and text (see Genette, 1997:1-2).

For Roland Barthes in ‘Death of the Author’ (1968) and Michel Foucault in ‘What is an Author?’(1969) writing, as a creative practice is not something to be completed and therefore appropriated, but an endless practice. Writing ceases to be either a psychological expression of the poet's subjectivity or a representation of something external to its own workings. Choreography can also be thought about (and practiced) in similar terms – eschewing both psychological expression and ‘aboutness’ as the reference to something beyond its own workings. The approach taken here is primarily to consider a poetics of dance as a creative practice that can be aligned with a poetic practice. If poetics – seen from the perspective of mid-twentieth century critical theory and structuralist thought – is a means of understanding how rather than what meanings are generated by texts, then how might one begin to apply the term to dance? A distinction can be drawn between the critical act where a focus on poetics implies a focus on ‘how’ the meaning of a message is constructed, and to what effect; and a creative act within poetic practice, where a similar emphasis on ‘how’ a message is constructed foregrounds the act of making meaning over the imparting of a particular idea. The emphasis then is placed on process rather than interpretation.

As I have indicated the term ‘choreography’ in itself provides a conceptual bridge between movement and writing. The ‘textual turn’ of the late 20th century, and its implications for dance read as a form of textual practice, has tended to obscure the discussion (if not the practice) of the experiential and sensory aspects of a poetics of dance. This is effectively addressed by Laurence Louppe's rhetorical question ‘Why a Poetics?’ in the opening chapter of Poetics of Contemporary Dance (1998) noting, in relation to Dominque Dupuy's poetic reading of movement as ‘ an event which is becoming’, that the

[c]ritical perception of a work will thus be caught up in this becoming, which means that the work of movement is a becoming as much for the maker performer as for the spectator: to dance is to show what the dance makes (of)/does to me, [ … ]. Bodies are traversed or touched by what they do or by what they perceive. In dance, in an exemplary way, the dissemination of any possible reading (and probably of the subject of that reading) will pass through all the dimensions of experience. The danced movement will inscribe itself in the body that creates and sustains it, and in the body that receives or perceives it. A dance poetics will therefore be located at the intersection of these different polarities. It should itself be that intersection, the fluid interstice where these corporeal exchanges are negotiated. (Louppe, 1998/2010: 7)

The ‘turn to text’ is visible in her vocabulary of ‘reading’ and ‘inscription’ but her emphasis is on the experiential, the ‘fluid interstice’. Louppe's observation that dance inscribes or ‘becomes’ itself in both the dancer and the observer builds on the sense of Genette's statement in the initial epigraph that ‘[o]nly in the active meeting between an intention and an attention is there a work of art. Art is for everyone also a practice.’ (in Louppe, 1998: 3) Dance – and more generally the art work – depends on a reciprocal practice of intention and attention. We ‘do’ art – we engage with it – and how we ‘do’ that is itself a poetics. For Louppe poetics defines and uncovers ‘what touches us, animates our sensibility and resonates in our imagination’ in the art work.

Thus, poetics is the ensemble of creative conducts that give birth, meaning and sensuous existence to a work. Its goal is to observe not only a field where sensing is foremost in the ensemble of experiences but the very transformations of this field. The object of a poetics, like that of art itself, is at one and the same time knowledge, affect and action. But poetics also has a more particular mission: it does not only tell us what a work of art does to us, it teaches us how it is made. (2010: 3-4)

A poetics of dance includes the process of perception as a reciprocal and inclusive factor and replaces the common conception of a oneway communication that separates the dancer from the spectator with the experience of a shared work – an ‘intensified dialogue’ which involves an ‘encounter in time and space’ that cannot be postponed or deferred and which ‘enters the realm of forming/transforming’

[ … ] understanding dance involves knowledge not only of its products but also its practices. The art of movement can only be understood by implicating one's knowledges in it, and usually by involving oneself in its activity, in its poiein / making, where creative processes are already charged with the artistic complexity that they are employed to make visible. (2010: 6)

Laurence Louppe notes here the transitional and transformative project of poetics that partly derives from her readings of Barthes and the French structuralists. It also resonates with a wider strand of contemporary American poetics that I want to open up here in an attempt to bridge what might be perceived as a distance or at least a distinction between a poetics of dance and a poetics of writing/poetry. I want to suggest that poetic thinking – ‘the poetic mind’ – crosses these boundaries as Louppe also suggests, and in the act and practice of making enables us to utilise what the poet Robert Creeley in 1964 called ‘a sense of measure’ as a means of ‘coming into the world’ – a phrase which connects with Levi Bryant's concern with the possibility of a renewed discourse about the world.

MEASURE

The examples of mid-20th century and contemporary poetics that I will refer to here emphasise poetics as a practice and as a process rather than as a critical act. They are intended to show potential alignments between a poetics of dance and movement, and a poetics deriving from poetic practitioners, and are ‘for use’ in the making of dance and choreography. The following examples utilise ideas of measure, of process, of inquiry, of knowledge, of trace, and of materiality that are integral to forms of poetic and choreographic and movement practice. Concerning measure Robert Creeley writes:

[ … ] I am not at all interested in describing anything. I want to give witness not to the thought of myself – that specious concept of identity – but, rather, to what I am as simple agency, a thing evidently alive by virtue of such activity. I want, as Charles Olson says, to come into the world. Measure then is my testament. What uses me is what I use and in that complex measure is the issue. I cannot cut down trees with my bare hand, which is measure of both tree and hand. In that way I feel that poetry, in the very subtlety of its relation to image and rhythm, offers an intensely various record of such facts. It is equally one of them. (1972: 34)

Creeley's sense of measure records not only ‘the act of thought about the instant’ as Olson put it but the physical immediacy of dance as a practice and the limitations that are measured by and measured through the body in the process of making dance.

PROCESS

For the poet and anthologist Jerome Rothenberg poesis is a ‘primary human process’; a ‘recovery’ of the familiarity of experience, a poetics that engages the outside as (and through) process. Rothenberg notes, again invoking the possibility of art as a conduit to another or ‘real’ world:

By poesis I mean a language process, a ‘sacred action’ (André Breton) by which a human being creates and recreates the circumstances and experiences of a real world, even where such circumstances may be rationalised otherwise as ‘contrary to fact’. [ … ] This ‘power of the word’ [ … ] has continued as a tradition among poets and others who feel the need to ‘express the inexpressible’ – a belief in what William Blake called ‘double vision’ or, in Lévi-Strauss's paraphrasing of Rimbaud, that ‘metaphor can change the world’. (1981b: 120)

The poetic process that Rothenberg invokes here seeks to recognise and activate the ‘poetic mind’ which he describes as ‘that drive to make it new (E.Pound), to pit the old transformative ways of thought against the other, intervening drive towards an authoritative written text and, what confronts us once again, the reduction of particulars to what has become the monoculture.’ (1981b: 121)

INQUIRY

In other terms and in a shifted cultural climate, the Language poet Lyn Hejinian in her introduction to The Language of Inquiry (2000) sees the transformational processes of poetics as predicated on inquiry – ‘a thinking on’

[Poetics] assume poetry as the dynamic process through which poetics, itself a dynamic process, is carried out. The two practices are mutually constitutive and they are reciprocally transformative. [ … ] poetry has its capacity for poetics, for self-reflexivity, for speaking about itself; it is by virtue of this that poetry can turn language upon itself and thus exceed its own limits. Language is nothing but meanings, and meanings are nothing but a flow of contexts. Such contexts rarely coalesce into images, rarely come to terms. They are transitions, transmutations, the endless radiating of denotation into relation. (Hejinian, 2000: 1)

This process of inquiry is in turn ‘embedded in the world’ and in the language that we use to bring the world into view which in turn results in a praxis that addresses the formation of both perception and knowledge.

Poetry comes to know things as they are. But this is not knowledge in the strictest sense; it is, rather, acknowledgement – and that constitutes a sort of unknowing. To know that things are is not to know what they are, and to know that without what is to know otherness (ie. the unknown and perhaps unknowable). Poetry undertakes acknowledgement as a preservation of otherness – a notion that can be offered in a political, as well as epistemological context. This acknowledging is a process, not a definitive act; it is an inquiry, a thinking on. And it is a process in and of language, whose most complex, swift and subtle forms are to be found in poetry – which is say in poetic language.

The language of poetry is a language of inquiry not a language of genre. It is a language in which a writer (or a reader) both perceives and is conscious of the perception. Poetry, therefore, takes as it premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience. (2000:2-3)

These insights also have their parallels in a poetics of dance and the processes of movement and its possibilities for the articulation of forms and choreographic images. These are inscribed in space and time, becoming and disappearing in excess of language and in excess of movement giving rise to something beyond or outside the forms and intensities that make them visible and apprehensible to us. A poetics of practice as articulated by Lyn Hejinian maps precisely onto a choreographic poetics:

Poetic language is also a language of improvisation and intention. The intention provides the field for inquiry and improvisation is the means of inquiring. Or, to phrase it another way, the act of writing is a process of improvisation within a framework (form) of intention. In the course of the experiencing of experience, poetic language puts into play the widest possible array of logics [ … ]. All these logics make connections, forge linkages. That indeed is the function of logics; they motivate the moves from one place to another. But the emphasis in poetry is on the moving rather than on the places – poetry follows pathways of thinking and it is that that creates patterns of coherence [whether radical or conventional].

KNOWLEDGE

Miriam Nichols in Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside (2010) makes a similar point concerning knowledge and inquiry in slightly different terms. The title of her first chapter (taken from Aztec philosophy) asks ‘How to Walk on the Slippery Earth?’ – a question which proposes that ‘knowing is performative, creative, and participatory, not discursive, passive or theoretical. It is concrete, not abstract; a knowing how, not a knowing that’. The distinction between knowing how and knowing that is, according to Nichols, as follows:

Knowing that can always reveal exclusions and blindnesses in knowing how, but such a critique applies one set of criteria (truth in all possible worlds) to another (how to walk on the slippery earth). Taken alone, each of these methods has limits that result either in the sceptical disallowing of perceptual experience – the familiar [from which we are estranged], Olson would say – or in dangerously inflated claims for local ways of doing things. [ … ] Given the aim of knowing that, theory cannot do otherwise. (2010: 5)

TRACE

The poetics of process that is implied in ‘knowing how’ is also reflected in Alan Badiou's essay ‘Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp’ (1997). In his first analysis of André Breton's question (1922) which asks ‘[c]ould it be that Marcel Duchamp arrives more quickly than anyone else at the critical point of ideas?, Badiou proposes that

Art has become a question of movement, of what we get to rather than the abolition of this ‘getting to’ in a result closed in the idolatrous cult of the work of art. Art is only the trace of its own action.

This restates a poetics of transformation and process, a poetics of measure – ‘what uses me is what I use’ – a poetics of inquiry as a ‘thinking on’, and a poetics of traps, and inventive perception, each of which develop and give shape to a choreographic poetics.

MATERIALITY

In 1971 Jerome Rothenberg published a text entitled ‘New Models, New Visions: Some Notes Towards a Poetics of Performance’ which argues that performance now runs through all art forms causing the arts to ‘merge and lose their old distinctions’ and that their origins ‘take in all times and all places’:

(4) From this there follows a new sense of function in art, in which the value of a work isn't inherent in its formal or aesthetic characteristics – its shape or complexity or simplicity as an object – but in what it does, or what the artist or his surrogate does with it, how he performs it in a given context. [ … ].

(5) There follows further, in the contemporary instance, a stress on action and/or process. Accordingly the performance (or ritual) model includes the act of composition itself: the artist's life as an unfolding through [her] performance of it. [ … ].

(6) Along with the artist, the audience enters the performance arena as participant – or, the audience ‘disappears’ as the distinction between doer and viewer [ … ] begins to blur. (Rothenberg, 1981a: 168-9)

Some of the implications of the ‘turn towards performance’ in the 1960s and 1970s as indicated by Rothenberg can be seen in more recent models of poetics – for example Gerald L. Bruns in The Material of Poetry (2005) proposes three theses for a poetics that are centrally concerned with materiality and performance. The first thesis states that

‘poetry is made of language but is not a use of it – that is poetry is made of words but not of what we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, descriptions, narratives, expressions of feeling, and so on. The poetry I have in mind does not exclude these forms of usage – indeed a poem may ‘exhibit’ different kinds of meaning in self-conscious and even theatrical ways – but what the poem is, is not to be defined by these things. [ … ] poetry cannot be adequately conceptualised, valued, understood or (much less) produced when in the service of the forms of discursive practice of which these terms [such as communicative, expressive, narrative, transparent] are constitutive. The double bind occurs when we discover that much of contemporary poetry is in fact made from non-poetic, everyday, socially and even intellectually distinctive forms of discourse.' (2005: 7)

This might well describe a post-Judson approach to dance movement where the use and integration of non-aesthetic, everyday, functional forms of movement expands the field of dance beyond the forms of practice that are conventionally constituted by the terms of classical dance techniques and movement. Similarly Brun's second thesis that ‘poetry is not necessarily made of words but is rooted in and in fact already fully formed by, sound produced by the human voice (or voice and mouth) even when these sounds are modified electronically’ (2005:8) finds a parallel in the use of forms of movement not predicated on the human body or indeed choreographies derived entirely from texts rather than movements (for example Jackson Mac Low's The Pronouns (1964); or Thomas Lehmen's Schreibstück (2002) where neither movement itself nor individual performance is the central focus).

As a poetic equivalent Bob Cobbing's Marvo Movie Natter (1968) provides an example of a poetic practice that both problematizes how we might think about and in particular be enabled to read certain experimental practices (as Gerald Bruns suggests). The poet Lee Harwood describes Cobbing's work as a ‘[v]oice in the next room, voice heard through the static on the radio transmitter. Not clear enough to hear exactly what is being said, but a voice so urgent that we have to listen, to work with it [ … ]. (1999: np) Or, moving closer to a statement on poetics, Bob Cobbing's Random and System (1999) begins:

poetics of domestic noise/fabric of the everyday/a silent tongue sounding/an eye scanning/does a blank page not have a duration/is it silence or noise/we tongue it with our eyes/polyphonic skin of event/on the pool of meaning making/active erasure of existing common sense /interrogating conventional boundaries/through gesture and posture/through habitus and through manipulation/human society as a conversational swarm/formlessness if indefinite community/populations/multiplicities territories/[ … ] (Cobbing, 1999: np)

This attention to a poetics of materiality – to the material conditions of both writing and movement – reasserts in Barthes’ terms what he calls in ‘The Pleasure of the Text’ (1975) ‘vocal writing’ or ‘writing aloud’ and, as Kaja Silverman has argued, ‘conjures up a vision not only of writing-as-voice but of the word made flesh’ (1988: 190) a vision which resonates with a choreographic poetics – a material poetics that articulates the body or the tongue rather than meaning or language, and reinstalls the author in the guise of the scriptor – the embodied writer as choreographer moving, forming and transforming.

Miriam Nichols' re-reading of projective poetics, a poetics of the outside makes the following point about the ‘reading’ of perceptual experience in poetic work which would include such work:

[Charles] Olson (1950) famously appealed to perceptual experience as a means of renewing poetic language and restoring the ‘familiar’ – intimacy with nature and the body – to the human species. In the 1970s and ‘80s, however, it was precisely perception that fell under Jacques Derrida's post-structural critique of phenomenology, a critique that many academics took to be definitive. Over the same period Jacques Lacan's neo-Freudian psychoanalysis became important in the literary world, and this was another kind of discourse that consigned experience to the imaginary realm of méconnaisance, a space to be exposed by the analyst and deconstructed by the aware critic as ‘always already’ mediated by the unconscious and the symbolic order. These philosophies focus on the production of experience through the socialisation process: whatever counts for reality at a given moment is to be regarded as a heavily mediated sociolinguistic construct rather than a spontaneous experience. From this perspective, there is no specifiable ‘outside’ to consciousness [ … ] In contrast, Olson and others of his company were interested not in how experience is produced, but how the human species might be redefined and repositioned in relation to planetary life. In the theory decades, however, the vocabulary of projective poetics, steeped as it is in mythopoesis, seemed naive in its situating of humanity in a cosmos ‘outside’ the mind when psychology and postmodern philosophies had so firmly moved everything in. (Nicols, 2010: 3)

Nichol's re-reading of projectivism also arguably finds a parallel in those areas of dance and choreography (for instance the Judson Dance Theatre and its legacies) that have remained, or situated themselves, ‘outside’ as material, embodied and poetic articulations that seek to engage the ‘familiar’ and position themeselves as measure in relation to the world.

ÉCRITURE

In a further attempt to bridge the grounds between the dancing subject and writing subject, between dancing and writing as poetic practices, another possible understanding lies in the notion of écriture – the inscription of the body in writing – developed initially by both Barthes and Foucault – which in some senses provides a parallel to the ideas of poetics that we have mentioned already. In Sally Gardner's introduction to Poetics of Contemporary Dance (2009) she writes:

Louppe, after Barthes, discusses écriture as closely related to dance ‘style’ and ‘composition’. The concept of écriture carries the necessary idea of an active writing of and through the body itself where the body is not simply the transparent vehicle or a transcendent idea. The idea of écriture is also important because contemporary dance is not simply ‘self-expression’ or ‘interpretive’: that is, although it is ‘individual’ it is not simply personal. Discussing literary authorship Foucault says that, écriture creates a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears. (What is an Author?) The dance/author/subject, however cannot finally disappear, and écriture is that which prevents the performer from being what Louppe calls a ‘presenter’ or one who ‘shows’, rather than one who ‘writes’. Écriture arises in the relation between the choreographer and the dancer (even if they are one and the same person) and in the work they do to define, as they compose, the dance: écriture inscribes the values of the movement ‘style’ insofar as these are particular, communicable and apprehendable but are not a (universal) code. [ … ]. As Louppe points out, there are many aspects of contemporary dance processes (including its historical beginnings) that are ‘invisible’, as they take place in regions ‘upstream’ of what is usually recognised as visible or they come from a place other than the one where legitimated conducts of thought and knowledge usually recognise themselves. (Gardner, 2009: xvi-xvii)

For Louppe écriture is what founds the choreographic act, however it might be conceived or defined. For it contains the whole ‘work’ of the dance. Later in her discussion of composition she notes that:

the whole is not only the sum of its parts: it lies in that which, at each moment, in each articulation, works on and disturbs the whole. In other words composition begins with the ‘invention’ of the movement, the qualitative particulars of its relation to space and time: and continues until a complete construction has been elaborated out of these same characteristics. [ … ] Composition in dance [ … ] is elaborated primarily through what Deleuze calls (a propos of Bacon) ‘pathetic logic’, the sensuous and emotive contamination of one zone by another'. (2010: 151)

ENDINGS

The logic of sensation, as a ‘restoration of the familiar’ (Olson/Rothenberg) perhaps finds an equivalent in Olson's (1950) ‘One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception’. Not simply to explain what poetics means but to explore what it does, how it works – know how rather than know that (or know what in Lyn Hejinian's terms). The question of poetics here – how the artist (dancer/writer/choreographer) assembles the ‘experiencing of experience’ as a shared perception is in a sense what the endless practice of making involves us in – how to avoid ‘aboutness’ or the ‘act of thought about the instant’ in Olson's words – whilst maintaining reciprocal legibility or a sense of acknowledgement. The critic Jennifer Daryl Slack notes that Deleuze ‘explores Francis Bacon's practice of painting without telling a story, which liberates ‘the figure’ from the mode of representation and accesses the sensation that exceeds meaning and representation.' (2005: 133) The rubrics or ‘givens’ that converge in a logic of sensation are ‘sensations with intensities: coloured, textured, flavoured, shaped, accumulated, coagulated.’ Rubrics are not things, objects or ideas as such, but already affective movements, flows, blockages and intensities that suggest that both poetry and dance can operate in excess of the functions of language and discourse, opening possibilities of radical coherence and affection. Poetics or ‘a poetics’ is not simply a background or underlying structural aspect of a work, or a means of determining meaning, but a convergence of logics beyond ‘aboutness’ that provide the conditions for the emergence of a ‘something else’. The poetics of choreographic practice that I have outlined here challenges the ‘conditions of being trapped by what we know’ and engages the ‘inventive perception’ that is involved in springing benign choreographic or poetic traps so that we can move beyond what we know and open towards other logics of creative practice.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article is based on a keynote lecture given at the Inter-University Centre from Dance (HZT)/University of the Arts, Berlin for the Erasmus Intensive MA Project ‘Practicing Composition: Making Practice’ in November 2013. I would like to thank Dr Kristen Kreider for her helpful comments and suggestions for the version published here.

Notes

¹ See for example André Lepecki (2004) ‘Inscribing Dance’ in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance & Performance Theory Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press pp.124-139.