to come never undone

In times of sexual explicitness, it is difficult to pretend we are still holding desire in psychoanalytic brackets. One could argue that hip-hop, amateur porn, new feminist subjectivities in popular American sit-coms, manifest a successful undoing of the Christian formula in the Western sexual ethics, [desire]-act-[pleasure]: desire and pleasure kept in the parentheses of the sexual act. Desire repressed and pleasure as the satisfaction of desire, taken as the before and the after of fantasy. It seems that only theatre, in a strict sense, still adheres to the psychoanalytic mechanism of desire as fantasy: desire being situated in between the need of something and the address of a demand for somebody. The reason why one still loves theatre or dismisses it entirely as an obsolete genre is the imaginary script the spectator is dictated to play: she perceives a sensation insofar as it is associated with the memory of the first arousal and satisfaction of desire. The spectator identifies herself in the need to recognize a representation, a hidden, twisted or hallucinatory reproduction of a sensation which becomes the sign of its impossible fulfillment.

However, one could see it completely otherwise: desire is never the sign of lack, the lack of the object, the impossible real, or law of prohibition and deprivation. It is the sign of force or power – what a body is able to do. The performance to come exactly makes the shift in the Western-traditional understanding of desire and enacting of desire upon the spectator. It forwards questions we simply couldn’t do without today: can desire be dissociated from need, demand, pleasure and restriction? Can it operate without lacking an object (what is desired) or missing a subject (to whom desire belongs or who it addresses) without feeling? How does it materialize a production which is real, because it doesn’t cross itself out as imaginary, symbolic or significant, always already standing for something else, and thereby isn’t couched in an established order of the body in socius? What does it mean for the art of choreography to think its territory as a field of forces, and the movement of the body not as an instrument, medium, or site of inscription, but as the machine driving a desiring production?

open (w)holes

While we are assuming the position of spectators, the performance has already begun as a spectacle, but a spectacle only to begin with. Five bodies in tight blue all-body-and-head-covering suits enter a meticulous construction of an image of a collective sexual intercourse. At first sight, the image may resemble the 18th-century engraving tableaux that represented the obscene libertine practices of orgiastic or sado-masochistic sex. But the possibility of references to Masoch’s novels or the politics of Dangerous Liasons or of de Sade’s Philosophy in Bedroom soon vanishes - looking closer we find there’s no real copulation simulated nor are there any models of mastery-slavery to draw a political point from.

Bodies are coupling by their parts seeking connections, which fall into a range of oral activities beyond fellacio. It appears that each body-part can hinge with any other body-part, become “genital” so long as it generates a contact with another part. The contact is often made by blurring which body-part extended and which had to invaginate, who is giving and who is taking or receiving there, who demanding and who allowing, who penetrating and who being penetrated. All oppositional or identifying distinctions are given up, and the couplings constantly shift from passive to active, dominant to subordinated and vice versa, shattering any idea of the stable hierarchical roles of the sexes.

The question whether it is a heterosexual or homosexual kind of intercourse at stake is irrelevant, since the body-parts acquire the singularity of the couplings and uncouplings on a level below, not determined by a belonging to a particular gender/sexuality. It’s important to understand here that the resulting non-reciprocity is productive and not subtractive of possibilities. It simply isn’t based in the dissymmetry of man and woman, the traditional understanding of the terms of sex, being necessarily virile and obsessed with penetration or exclusion of the other. Nothing is actually problematic about the difference between penetrating and being penetrated – the performance suggests – for each coupling at the same time uncouples itself in chains or multi-directional lines, which proceed by connectibility, the very possibility of making and unmaking connections.

Our sight so intricately deviates – and that’s why I said this was only a spectacle to begin with – from presenting images to movement, the perception of ever new reconfigurations of bodies in disjunctive synthesis. The law of contact is separation: one body-part will connect to affect and be affected by the other and disconnect to reconnect, triggering a combinatorial productivity. The process is called transformation, lying in the ability to rearrange bodies continually in new and different patterns or configurations. As a consequence the process is indifferent toward the result to be achieved. Reconfigurations follow not by a desire for “more...and more...and more” – which would point out to an insatiable desire and thereby frustration – but by an abundance of possibilities “and...and then...and then...” without possession.

Ingvartsen explores diverse modes of assembling bodies in images and movements of reconfigurations within or without sexual activity. As if, at first, we had to be introduced to the opening and cracking of bodies into excessive connections with a little care, so that the possibilities emerged out of bodies linearly adjusting and accommodating themselves in scenes of orgies. No sooner than the spectators learnt there is no exposure of sexual obscenity in play, the bodies spin in an exponentially more rapid dynamic, moving out as they move into assemblages, never lasting longer than a moment of simultaneous conjunction and disjunction, never attaining or always evading the completion of a collective body figure to observe. There is not one choreographic figure realized, but a multiplicity of figures passing through in terms of potentialities rather than possibilities.

The shift from possibility to potentiality reflects a change in the mode of production we could call morphogenesis. Bodies can no longer be viewed as objects and subjects of desire, they are perverted into active agents of matter, disclosing matter’s own immanent intensive resources for the generation of form. The sensation of morphogenesis, characteristic of biological, chemical, or metallurgic processes for example, is engendered here by multiple forkings, bodies diverging in two or more directions or connections at the same time, and even more importantly, by creating new structures without homogenizing the components (irreducibly different body-parts) and without submitting them to the hierarchical control of organism, many in one. Who do the performers – bodies in blue dress – represent, should we ask the question at last?

The fact that we could only analyze the choreographic procedure by body-parts rather than by the units of bodies as subjects as private persons as stage personas etc., indicates a partialization, which is erotic as such, erotic in the horizontality of parts acting as indivisible but connectible and thereby modifiable wholes. They appear singular not because of the fetishization of the unique nature of one’s shoulder or pelvis, but because all parts meet at differing speeds in trajectories without anticipated destinations. They intersect, hinge and unhinge at places and times which are not reversible. The connections emerge as being with one another in relation to exteriority, where all tensions are physical, not psychological.

The opening of a field of possibilities and potentialities of corporal contact, shape, activity, and dynamic, is described so far here as if it resembled a kind of randomness originating from animal(-like) behavior. To animality, although there is no randomness at hand, we should certainly add another deterritorialization here of the human, that is, by way of machine. First, it appears as a tentative mechanism of assembling full bodies in large rocking movements that will gradually transform their positions and actions: leaping from one position of rocking to and fro into another; however, achieving a maximum of meaningful change from a minimum of physical leap. Later on, another mechanism is mounted only to mutate in a machinic assemblage. From the top of a wrist of a standing male which starts to turn mechanically as a clock hand, to the surging and falling mouth of a lying female, a chain of mechanical loop-repetitions transforms separate movements for each performer in intensity. The degree of the changing force of movements changes the movements themselves. What first was a mechanical chain of causally interdependent small movements, now becomes a non-unitarian machinic collective, transversally united by a growing intensity.

There are many more situations to discover in this so-called blue part. Relations between bodies and their activities which will seem to contradict some of the main points about the forms of sexual flows of desire, discussed as the choreographic procedures above. The wrestling which uncovers the difference between the same-sex or different-sex wrestling movement along the lines of anatomical competition vs. textural friction or skin-into-skin penetration. Or the charmingly elaborated feet- or “ass-spanking” fetishes. As I said, there are many more which perhaps escape the analytical eye or interpretive interest. However, these situations could all be approached from the point of an it, be it orgiastic, animalistic, mechanical or machinic configurations and assemblages. What they produce is the choreography of an impersonal and neutral sexuality, desire not belonging neither to the performer nor to the spectator, as she doesn’t desire to be desired. The choreography of the post-human or non-organic desire produces, what Mario Perniola in his book “The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic” calls, a thing that feels, the field of extremely sharp sensibility.

explicit rather than inexpressible

The unconditional approval of the unlimited space opened up by the disappearance of the subjects, figures or private persons, is abruptly broken by a radically different act. Performers take off their blue suits and put on dancing clothes, slightly tinged by the style of 1940s. They come together as a choir who starts vocalizing from an immediately high pitch of orgasm. Each of the performers, divided between three young females and two young males, is “texted” a female or male orgasm by earphones. Though naturalistic they may seem, sounds of a building-up sexual enjoyment are composed in waves of modulation, where the male and female orgasms don’t coincide, or not at least until the end, when we had heard the second wave of waves losing the track of a central climax.

So there we are, in the middle of the end-point, orgasm as the prototype manifestation of self-fulfilment. For the first time revealed, faces of the performers are now individuated by means of exact reproduction, each one not being uniformly stage-directed but affected in sheer effort of facilitating vocalization by facial expression.

Orgasm emerges as an intermezzo marking the pivotal point in the performance for an even more unexpected act to come: a swing dance begins. A jive, the jazz dance on big-band music popular in 1940s and 1950s. All performers join the movements of brisk, violent, floor-rubbing and swinging, air-tossing and high-flying partnering, where number five makes always new structures of couples, triples or solos spring. The virtuosity is again not in the competing individualized achievements of performers, but in the choreographic composition of movements and bodies in a social dance, which was never deliberately choreographed in the manner of liberating flows of desire. Ingvartsen choreographs the driving and latent force of the construction of jive and actualizes this drive in the way she composes and frames the scene of the social dance.

As the blue part turned itself outside in, and jive gets a blue background in substitution of blue suits – we may replace the abstract machine by a social machine, reminded that the desiring production of bodies cannot be differentiated from the social production of capital. The social implications of the choreography that we had just seen aren’t indicated or spoken of so as to be critically recognized. It would take ideological violence to claim that to come calls into question the established orders of our Western society. The organization of bodies and movement in this performance relates to social reality only by non-relation. This makes the force of its social impact stronger: an attitude that neither critiques nor proposes nor transgresses, since it obviates representing sexuality as well. We may think or not how different our society would be if we let all the diverse transmigrating flows of desire produce our reality. The performance makes it not an obligation, though, for it knows that it operates on another level of cognitive and sensorial processes. The orgasm acts as the pivotal point precisely in reversing the before and the after of an event, dismantling also the wished for organic whole of performance. A common narrative is broken, the order of a dance party which heats up desire for the sexual act which will end in the peak of orgasm. So is the social protocol of the spectator’s desiring gaze undone: instead of a cognitive, a dramaturgy of sensation without feeling reigns. Choreography unfolds the richness of manifold movement: from the sight of images, through the haptic and sonic surfaces, to the kinaesthetic enjoyment. One cannot come out of it undone.

- Bojana Cvejic, Etcetera 98, October 2005 -