Dance's Shimmering Call

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Notes

¹Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Harper Collins, 1985).

²Brian Massumi, “What Concepts Do: Preface to the Chinese Translation of A Thousand Plateaus,” Deleuze Studies, no. 4 (March 2010): 1–15.

Manning clearly defines her terms when talking about “autistics” and carefully tries to avoid a glorification of what many experience as a debilitating disorder:

Autism is a modality of becoming before it is any kind of state. This is not to negate the movement disorder that tends to accompany the “classical autism” of which I speak throughout, nor to downgrade the myriad everyday challenges that tend to set autistics apart. It is simply to emphasize what classical autistics themselves continuously underscore: that autism is also and perhaps especially a way of perceiving the more-than of the coming-to-appearance of a worlding always under way. (p. 180)

Later she writes,

Lest it has not been clear enough when the concept has come up throughout this book, let me repeat: while all autistics I have encountered prize this mode of perception, none of them would ever create a simplified relay between autistic perception and the everyday experience of an autistic. For autism is a complex world at once full of perceptual richness and replete with painful misalignments to everyday neurotypical existence, many of them of the motor variety that make independent living if not impossible, then very difficult. Not only that: there is no “single” autism. Autism is a spectrum, with as many infinities of perceptual difference as there are within the misidentified “neurotypical” group. (p. 218)

⁴Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Harper Collins, 1985).

I participated in two week-long intensive dance workshops with Deborah Hay in Philadelphia (2008 and 2012).

The opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) was directed by Robert Wilson, with music by Philip Glass and original choreography by Andy de Groat. Childs's choreography was used in later stagings. It recently finished touring its fourth staging in the opera's four-decade history.