Corps 00:00 (2002)

Phantom Body

“We need a connection with technology. There’s no better art than dance to achieve it”, said John Cage in 1986. A few years later, his artistic partner, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, inaugurated a creative connection with computers. Dance, then, helped materialise the necessary connection with technology. We might question why dance was the preferred medium to connect with technology. It could be argued that Cage was asking the body to get involved, or that it was necessary to go through the reality of the body – a need for embodiment.

First, a chronological update: Cunningham’s connection was made in two stages, with two, 3D movement simulation software programmes: Life Forms and Character studio, used in particular for the virtual dance sequence in Biped. The former, and more specifically the Sequence editor programme, enabled movements to be developed and memorised until sequences, (“shapes and transitions that are impossible for the human body to produce”), were obtained. A knee touches a shoulder, a pirouette becomes the starting point for a jump without run-up… In short, reference points break down both physically and mentally. Here, Cunningham was witnessing the explosion of the body’s anatomical determinism and its mental reflexes, the radical culmination of his work which already consisted of choreographing the movements of the legs, arms, and torso separately and casting lots to determine the order in which they should be linked together. Character Studio – designed by Susan Amkraut and Michael Girad of Unreal Pictures – imitates, models, and manipulates the co-ordinates of movements recorded from real bodies using a technique known as motion capture: sensitive photo markers are attached to the joints, and previously choreographed movements are captured by optical cameras that keep track of them, filming them and translating the light impacts into computer code. If Life Forms attempts “combinations of movements that would be impossible for a real dancer, it’s seeing something we’d never thought of”, with Character studio it becomes possible to change the structure of the model body: “You can abstract the coordinates of a rhythm – a real rhythm, recorded on such and such a part of the dancer’s body, the right leg let’s say – and transpose it onto another element of the body, an arm for example. I think we could see other things this way. Not artificial things: possibilities that are really part of the body but that we don’t actualise because we don’t know we have them […] We could plug another pair of legs into Biped if we wanted to. Obviously, it’s of relative interest for dance, but it’s possible.” It is precisely this possibility of a body that interests dance in its connection with technology, and in this Cunningham is the most American of choreographers, still a pioneer of the New Frontier and liberal availability: “to see something we hadn’t thought of”, to actualise a body we do not know we have.

Dance is the actualisation of this body, and this actualisation is realised in the connection with technology. When young Belgian choreographer Cindy Van Acker connects her body to computerised electrical stimulators that short-circuit her movements, she posits the birth of a possible dancing body beyond its physical form. With its grafted, plugged in, and computerised body, Corps 00:00 features choreography that stages the exposed practice of a real body as a support for a possible body that transcends it. Wrought with technology, her body does not seek the repair of medical prosthetic devices, nor does it desire a higher level of performance. On the contrary, overwhelmed by artificial stimuli, it becomes the spectacle of its own deformation: there is something beyond it that says that the body is not limited to its form, that it is not a formatted piece of data. Featuring contractions, involuntary disarticulations, and external impulses that interfere with the dance movement at the same time as participating in it, Van Acker’s choreography thwarts the integrity of both movement and the body. The choreographic act defined by its connection with technology exposes a floating body with an impossible outline: a real body doubled by its phantom. The organic body, its organisation into a sculptural volume, into a linear drawing, are systematically disrupted by a virtual, involuntary, invisible yet perceptible body. Through technology, dance brings this phantom body into existence, and in so doing exposes the inadequacy – though not the negative inadequacy – of the real body that practice has often tried to negate (classical virtuosity) or thwart (Cunninghamian fantasy). Van Acker’s body is incomplete; a medium for invasive technology, it does not close itself off, but on the contrary, displays its openness.

In its connection with technology, the dancing body remains open; traversed by the machine, it sees its limits pushed back. This does not mean gaining in power, precision, or speed. It means experiencing its moult, seeing its skin fall, hitherto perceived as a signifying site, as an interface. “Surface, the skin was once the beginning of the world, and simultaneously the limit of the self. As an interface, it was once the site of the collapse of the personal and the political. But now, stretched and penetrated by the machine, skin is no longer the smooth, sensual surface of a site or a screen. Skin no longer signifies separation […] but the disappearance of inside and outside”. (Stelarc, “Vers le post humain”, Nouvelles de danse, no. 40-41). So the technological connection creates a choreography of open bodies, of controlled, constrained, and involuntary movements – of internal rhythms and external gestures. Amputees often experience a phantom limb; dance in connection with technology is the actualisation of the ghostly sensation of an additional body, virtual albeit visual, rather than visceral. The body is coupled in such a way as to mobilise its phantom. The result of their interaction is a choreography of formlessness, mobilised less in the quality of its movements than in the act of presence of its possible bodies. — Laurent Goumarre