I began to study philosophy at the same time that I began to study dance, at college in the early 1980s. Both of these choices surprised me at first, as I had originally planned to study politics and become a civil rights lawyer after college. I see now that these two areas of inquiry were routes toward figuring out how to bridge the divides between my academic self and my increasingly explosive physicality. Figuratively as well as literally divided into day and night, my academic experience and the club scene I thrived in were separated by geographic distance and differing class values—a study in the cultural bifurcation produced by the hierarchies of brain and brawn. But these body/mind boundaries were always porous for me, and they became increasingly so as I explored the epistemological origins of the Cartesian split in my survey of Western philosophy course while also taking my first modern dance class. My desire was to become both verbally and physically articulate, and I savored those moments when vague impulses or ideas found the right expressive gesture or crucial wording. By the time I was a senior, I was choreographing a quartet and writing a thesis on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1962). Somewhere along the way, philosophy and dance leaned into one another, beginning a duet that would lead to a life spent thinking and moving.

In 1892 Loïe Fuller, often figured as one of the “mothers” of modern dance, brought an infringement suit in New York against a chorus girl named Minnie Renwood Bemis in an attempt to enjoin Bemis from performing a version of the Serpentine Dance, which Fuller claimed to have invented. The dance, distinctive for its use of yards of illuminated silk fabric, made the American-born Fuller famous in Europe and spawned a host of imitators on both sides of the Atlantic.

Intent on staking her proprietary claim on the dance, Fuller took the precaution of submitting a written description of it to the U. S. Copyright Office. Ultimately, however, the judge for the U.S. Circuit Court denied Fuller's request for an injunction on the grounds that the Serpentine Dance told no story and was therefore not eligible for copyright protection. Although Fuller clearly regarded her expressive output as intellectual property, dance at the time lacked legal recognition as a copyrightable category in its own right and merited protection only if it qualified as a “dramatic” or “dramatico-musical composition.”

Reconstructing and citing historical dance pieces as well as making the dance stage a site for archiving dance performatively have become major trends in contemporary dance (as this issue of DRJ demonstrates). Contemporary choreographers have left behind the incessant striving to create new movements and instead are engaging in dialogue with the past. While the “avant-garde” in Western stage dance was once perceived as embodying the “new” and was believed to be different from dance forms considered marked by tradition, these demarcations are now being challenged by both dance historians and artists (Franko and Richards 2000; Burt 2003). What's more, reenactments increasingly destabilize distinctions between the artistic and academic fields as they highlight the performative nature of “doing history” and present modes of research that involve lectures, texts, and documentation in a stage setting. As such, the past is a playground for the present—a notion of history that is also encouraged academically by a critical historiography that reflects on the narrative structures implicit in doing dance history (White 1990; Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999). History as well as the act of memory are now considered a process that “constitutes, stages, re-stages, and constantly modifies its object while simultaneously creating new models and media of commemorating” (Fischer-Lichte and Lehnert 2000, 14; my translation).

No critic of phenomenology, arguably, has been more influential in prefiguring recent discourses on power, gender, and sexuality that have emerged in dance studies in recent decades than the philosopher-historian-critic Michel Foucault. The number of dance scholars directly citing Foucault, and the number influenced indirectly by his ideas through intermediary theorists such as Judith Butler—perhaps the single most popular one—is so large as to require an essay of its own just to survey. Virtually every analysis of choreographic practice that has addressed these topics since the 1980s has drawn directly or indirectly on Foucault's theories. Indeed, the very mention of the term “discipline” in current dance scholarship (and many related fields as well) more or less automatically makes reference to Foucault's genealogical study of incarceration, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, translated into English as Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, and, in particular to the chapter, “Les corps dociles” or “Docile Bodies” (Foucault 1975, 137–171; 1975/1995, 135–170).

Dance is virtually always music-and-dance, unavoidably interdisciplinary and ready for “marriage,” or so the familiar metaphor tells us (Du Manoir 1664/1985; Humphrey 1959, 164). Apart from a few notable exceptions from within modern dance—like the silent dances of the 1920s and 1930s or the flamboyant rejections of musical tyranny by Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer from midcentury—the centrality of music within dance and the “musicality” of the dancer have long been considered unquestioned facts of life.

Yet traditionally, there have been fundamental differences in practice and conceptual frameworks between these two art forms or (within the academy) “disciplines.” Music has a history of being thought “alone” and uncontaminated by matter outside itself. Often, it needs no other partner. Then, in dance, the performer is central—as Yeats famously wrote: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”—while in music, the score object, written by a composer, has been central and the performer, until quite recendy, relatively marginalized.

The dimming of the house lights focuses attention on the still darkened stage, although awareness of the others in the auditorium and its quieted bustle does not entirely fade. From the stage, the sound of several people taking five or six measured footsteps in unison, then stopping, momentarily precedes the lights (stage and house) fading quickly up to reveal nine performers. They stand, facing out, dressed in ordinary clothes (shirt and jacket, jumper and skirt, different colors), steady gaze directed at the audience. They stand in the gaps between a series of reflective slabs, each of the same regular dimensions, slightly wider and taller than the performers themselves. Behind the performers is a further line of panels cut from the same material. After a brief pause, the space darkens.

The dancer, Xavier Le Roy, walks with a calm yet deliberate pace across the empty stage toward its center, where he stops, with his back facing the audience. He slowly lifts his arms in front of him and, after a brief moment of suspension, makes a hand gesture, as focused as unexpected, as if channeling a stream of intensities—a gesture to which the music responds. Echoing Le Roy's movement, Igor Stravinsky's most notorious score, Le Sacre du Printemps, begins its first notes. The performer goes on gently whisking the air, with a fluid yet measured pace, and thus engages an uncanny dialogue with the recorded symphony by conducting the seemingly empty space before him.

In an essay entirely devoted to the subject of dance in Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics [Petit manuel d'inesthétique (Badiou 2005b)], we find the following contentious statement: “Dance is not an art, because it is the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body” (69). At first glance, this statement seems strangely familiar to the reader versed in writing about dance, particularly philosophical writing. “Dance is not an art”: Badiou critiques Mallarmé as not realizing this as the true import of his ideas. It is familiar because it attests to a certain problem in aesthetic thinking, one that relates to the placement and position of dance and the works that comprise its history into what can be seen as certain evaluative hierarchies, particularly vis à vis the relation of dance to other art forms, and in particular, those involving speech and writing. Dance seems to suffer from a certain marginalization, subtraction, or exclusion, and its practice seems to occupy a place of the perennial exception, problem, or special case. The strangeness of the statement, on the other hand, relates to the widespread view outside of academic writing that the status of dance “as art” is actually completely unproblematic. What follows therefore is a critical commentary on this assertion of Badiou, placed both in the context of Badiou's writing, and in the wider one pertaining to the problem of exclusion just outlined.

One of my favorite childhood memories is from my first dance class. I ran into the studio and started jumping, jumping, jumping literally for joy when I noticed suddenly that I was not alone. There were other children in class, and they were all jumping too. We jumped together, spontaneously in sync, oblivious to what must have been looks of parental incredulity peeking through the door. The teacher stopped us well before anyone fell to the floor but not so soon as to mistake the extraordinary (teachable) moment. Human beings can bond together through rhythmical movement and expressions like joy, and dance is fundamentally about making those connections: to self, to others, to the world, and beyond. In sixty seconds, our little dance community was born.

The first time I saw films of the Wigman solos on video, I experienced a vague, ambivalent feeling of recognition: something in these dances felt very familiar, although the choreography retained its historical strangeness seen through the eyes of a contemporary dance student. The uncanniness of the experience functioned as a powerful trigger to think about something that concerned me but that at first I couldn't fully understand. For one thing, it made me think of my dance education in Ecuador, and it occurred to me that there could well be significant similarities between Ausdruckstanz and Ecuadorian modern dance (I shall develop this idea at the end of this essay). In a personal research project in 2007, while studying at P.A.R.T.S. between 2004 and 2008, I learned and performed three of Wigman's solos: Seraphisches Lied, Pastorale, and Sommerlicher Tanz, from Mary Wigman's dance cycle Schwingende Landschaft. At that time I realized I was dealing with a totally different physicality for which my contemporary training was insufficient, and I had to seek different technical tools in order to perform these solos. First, I realized I had to develop other modes of muscular tension, as my training in release techniques did not suffice. Second, I was bound to consider movement not purely as a physical activity (I imagine that Wigman would have dismissed such an option as mere gymnastics) but rather as a tool for expressing a subtext. Despite these insights, my approach remained rather vague. The mere knowledge that I was dealing with a different physicality and mental involvement did not enable me to define them accurately.

To reenact nine solos Mary Wigman performed during her first U.S. tour (1930–31), Fabian Barba establishes a contract with the audience based on representational codes of modernist dance in the early twentieth century. As one enters the theater, a little program is found on one's seat with the intended course of the evening. The program mentions the place and date of the reenactment—in German, with an English translation, as it might have been during the American tours—but not the year. Reading it, we learn that six solos, Aus dem Tanzcyklus “Schwingende Landschaft” (From the Dance Cycle “Shifting Landscape“), dated 1929, will be performed. There will be an eight-minute intermission after which three other solos are to follow: two from Visions and one from Celebration. The program is printed in the typography of those days and the contractual agreement of the dance concert—written in small letters as is usually the case with contracts—is indicated at the bottom: “The audience is kindly asked not to leave the room during the intermission. At the end of the recital and upon demand from the public, two dances can be shown again as ‘encores.’”