Alain Badiou: Handbook of Inaesthetics
Chapter: Dance as Mataphor for Thought.
Keywords: dance, thought, metaphor, Nietzsche, spirit of gravity, flight, child, light, innocence, play, aerial, dancing -mad feet, intensification, military parade, unconstrained body, active power, vulgarity, principle of slowness, virtual moment, event, unfixed, subtracted, silence, Mallarmé, principles, space, anonymity, omnipresence, sexes, subtraction, nakedness, gaze, spectator, theatre, kiss, fulgurant, absolute, exact vertigo
“Dance is nothing but the mysterious and sacred interpretation of the kiss”.
“The dancer does not dance”.
Mallarmé
Summary
For Badiou poetry, theatre, cinema and dance are the pretexts in his analysis regarding the identification of the arts. This chapter is totally devoted to dance. The main statement we find in the text is that “Dance is not an art” that Badiou will elaborate tthrough six “principles” of dance, which he defined subtractively from related principles for the theater. These six axioms are: the obligation of space, the anonymity of the body, the effaced omnipresence of the sexes, the subtraction from self, nakedness and the absolute gaze.
But first lets see what is dance. Badiou in accordance with Nietzsche considers the dance as metaphor for thought because is free from the law of Gravity. The essential characteristics of dance are designated within the text in a poetic and imaginative way.
Dance. Dance. Flight.Birds. Dance like a bird. Dance is innocent. Child. Dance a body before a body. A body that forgets to fetter. The unconstrained body. Dance, a new beginning. Dance, a play that frees the body. Body free from gravity, free from conformity. Dance is a circle in space, dance is the primer mover, dance is affirmation. Dance as fountain. Dance and the intangible Air. Dance is aerial. dance as active power.It is the movement of its own intensity. But dance has also its opposite. The dance of the aerial and broken body, the body of the military parade, the aligned body, the hammering body, the servile body, the sonorous body. The German body and its dance. The body on points.
- The dance that follows the principle of slowness.
- Dance as metaphor for the unfixed.
- Dance as metaphor for the event “before” the name.
- Dance is subtracted from time. There is something in dance that is prior to time.
- Dance and silence.
- Dance is prior to music on which it relies.
First, dance requires a “pure site” or a space situated on the edge of the void of space. It takes place according to Badiou, in a completely neutral space, devoid of theatrical décor and demands “space and spacing, and nothing else” . Second, the anonymity of space/setting extends to one of character. Badiou claims that dance, in contrast to the needs of theater, does not need a narrative structure, and, in terms of its characterization, “depicts nothing” ). Third, it asserts the “erased omnipresence of the sexes”It reveals the pure form of sexual difference, in a way that the couple male dancer/female dancer cannot be reduced onto the couple man/woman. Fourth, dance should effect a “subtraction from self”; following the statement of Mallarmé—”the dancer does not dance” The (true) dancer never knows the dance she dances, the dance itself appears spontaneous. Fifth, dance should have no need for adornment, and essentially reveals “nudity” , an absence of the décor of costume. The sixth and last principle relates to the spectator rather than the dance itself, and requires of him or her a kind of rigorous impersonality, free of desiring gaze.
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