Defigurative Choreography: From Marcel Duchamp to William Forsythe
Author(s): Gabriele Brandstetter and Marta Ulvaeus
Source: TDR (1988-), Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 37-55 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1146717 . Accessed: 01/02/2011 18:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TDR (1988-). http://www.jstor.org Defigurative Choreography From Marcel Duchamp to William Forsythe Gabriele Brandstetter Modern dance presents itself to the viewer as a text whose matrix absorbs and transfigures a variety of codes. Three of these codes-image, body, and language-will be considered in terms of distinct notions of the concept of "figure" and the strategies of its integration into the choreographic text. Choreography-with theatrical performance forms that are loosely classified into different genres with such terms as ballet, modern dance, postmodern dance, and dance theatre-brings into view the problematic of what is cur- rently being debated in the discourse of "the crisis of representation." The question "Are we conscious of the ways in which we represent things with our bodies?" serves as the starting point again and again for the work of the Frankfurt-based choreographer William Forsythe (in Odenthal I994:37). And it is the code of classical ballet from which he draws his interrogation-ballet that in the 20th century, in the process of its rejection,' its restoration as a "pure," formal dance,2 and its hybridization as it is combined and cross-bred with multiple other movement codes-that has undergone myriad transfor- mations and therefore is always present in Forsythe's choreography if only as the matrix of a performance convention. The questioning of the possibility of representation is tied to the notion of the figure. In what follows, the concept of "figure" will be used in four con- texts: first, in the sense of the physical form of the body, in reference to the corresponding convention in the visual arts, particularly sculpture; secondly, as rhetorical figure, but here understood specifically as the unity of a movement figure and its rules of combination in the vocabulary of ballet; third, as inter- pretive unity, in Erich Auerbach's sense of the "figura" of the figural principle as it relates to the dramaturgy of the choreographic text in Forsythe's works (see Auerbach I953); and finally, in the processual sense, as perceptual phe- nomenon (as in the phenomena of the "figure-ground relation" and the "fig- ured after-effect"). "Figure" marks a unity of the prevailing language materials in representation. Derived from the Latinfingere, "figure" stands for the external shape of a body and, in a broader sense, for sculpture as well. The spatial form of the dancer's The Drama Review 42, 4 (T16o), Winter 1998. Copyright ? 1998 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 37 38 Gabriele Brandstetter body presents "figure" as a unity. In theatrical performance conventions, figure has traditionally been the bearer of identity. But in relation to the choreo- graphic text, figure also means the unity of a movement figure and the deriva- tive possibilities of its positioning in the syntax of movement sequences. The task of choreography-with which Forsythe confronts himself in his works-is to abandon this notion of "figure" as unity (or, as he says, as "operative unity"), to stage this dissolution within and by means of the choreographic presentation of figure. "One springs out of one's own body into nothingness, into 'Man wei3 nicht' [one doesn't know]" (Forsythe in Odenthal I994:34). Before I follow this process-the dissolution of figure, which presents itself as defiguration-in Forsythe's work, I would like to show certain possibilities of representation and dissolution (and dissolution within representation) of "figure" using the model of the "Transformer" (see Hawthorne 1989 and Lyotard 1977). A Transformer is a small figure, a toy statue, made of: connected pieces, which in one form look like a robot, while in a sec- ond, they resemble something different: a vehicle (truck, car, motor- cycle), an animal (insect or dinosaur), or one of the inanimate objects (a cassette, a tape recorder) that increasingly have been making their way into preteen culture. (Hawthorne I989:2)3 Transformers are two different figures in one, two corporeal manifestations, which through certain manipulations-through slip mechanisms and snap de- vices-are converted into one another by means of hinges. The term "Trans- former" describes the changing of form, which is not a metamorphosis, but a folding of prefigured patterns into a mechanically equipped alter ego. They are cars or radios anthropomorphosized. Through a few "opening" move- ments they are concealed or revealed as fantastic robots. An ad states, "Trans- formers-more than meets the eyes. Transformers-robots in disguise" (in Hawthorne I989:6). The Transformer becomes the figure of a form-changing and -disappearing in which a back and forth (fort/da) game of defiguration and refiguration becomes visible-an illusion in which the Transformer is staged as performer. The ad slogan refers not only to the doubled form but also to the necessity of a double vision. The manifestation of the Transformer that is in view doesn't let its alternate figure disappear completely. This one, on the horizon of anticipated repetition, lies at the periphery of the visual field-it is absent and yet still barely present on the horizon of the transformative act. But the mechanics of folding into the one or the other without an intermediate space entering as a gap between them in the moment of twisting, a mechanics which thereby admits no deviation from the cliches of the product, neverthe- less reinforces a preset binary pattern in that it "reduces all relationships to confrontations" (6). The fascination of the transformer is simple-Porsche as Batman, Batman as Porsche. As processes of defiguration and refiguration in choreography, "trans- former/transformation" suggests something different. Forsythe's pieces work at the opening of such simple folding structures. Choreographer and dancer become transformers of open figures, transformers of themselves: "You're in the situation that you watch a piece that isn't yours. I called it Alie/nA(c)tion. I created a piece that's a stranger to me. I don't know the choreography" (Forsythe in Odenthal 1994:36). Alie/nA(c)tion, like Forsythe's other choreographies, has to do with this act of the foreignness of "the same" as a modality of not knowing;4 it has to do with the experience of otherness, strangeness, and alienation as performance, as "ac- tion," and as process. The dissolution-de- and refiguration-of "figure" in Defigurative Choreography 39 choreography is not possible without giving up the idea of identity that, in the performance of signs, is coupled with "representation." I will trace these as- pects along two lines: first of all, in terms of the surrender of "figure" as the formula for identity and pictorial unity in artistic representation-a transgres- sion of the borders of art as a system and its presentation in the artifact-which is prominent in the works of Marcel Duchamp. As an example, I will consider his work usually referred to as the Large Glass (I915-1923), as well as its cho- reographic transcriptions. The relation of "figure" at the interface of image and movement is evident in the work's actual title, La Mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires, meme (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), a title which no longer acts as the topos of identity indicating unity, but rather enters into a choreographic translation with the decentering and marginalization of meme, the topographical figure of identity. I will then follow the processes of defigurative choreographing in various works of William Forsythe. Meme-or Decentered Movement With Marcel Duchamp's work The Large Glass-which he worked on from I915 to 1922 and officially declared "definitively unfinished" in I9235-the notion of the "work" in its insularity moves out of the center of representa- tional conventions. With this work Duchamp formulated the question of whether there exists between the designations of art and anti-art a third possi- bility-a locus of indifference in aesthetic specification. The work of the artist begins at this site of indetermination, out of the not-deciding, as movement, a movement that-"as critique of painting"6-becomes an open-ended passage from the center to the margin of the field of determination in art. Duchamp spoke of a "great delay"-a process which in no way refers to production. It doesn't have to do with the time or tempo of the creative process, but rather with the movement itself as the structure of representation. "Delay," as end- lessly slowed-down movement, replaces the appearance of the image. Move- ment becomes image. In the notes to the Green Box (1934) Duchamp wrote: "Use 'delay' instead of picture or painting; picture on glass becomes delay in glass-but delay in glass does not mean picture on glass" (in Sanouillet and Peterson I973:26). Thereby neither the category of the presentation itself (art as the representational form) nor the genre (picture, painting, sculpture) is nameable: Time, which can in no way be fixed, alone steps into the gap of in- determination-"A delay in glass" (Daniels 1992:73). Delay, referring to what? Correlative sizes of the site, the relative time, and fixed coordinates are not discernable. In terms of the motionless and static connotations of glass, this formula of retardation works like an ironic reversal of the dynamism of the avantgarde (the "Dynamo" of the Futurists, for example)-the process of end- less slowing down until the melting point is reached. Octavio Paz considered this "glass" and its enclosures-and here even the spectator is enclosed, since he can't perceive this glass "sculpture" without seeing himself in it-as "one of the most hermetic works of our century" (1978:29). But I am not concerned here with an analysis of the many interpre- tations of the Large Glass, the Machines Celibataires (see Carrouges 1954; see also Szeemann I975). Rather, I am considering the act of staging as staging of the act-of the act in the sense of action and acting as well as in the sense of nude portraiture in the visual arts. Duchamp began his career with his scandal- provoking painting Nu descendant un escalier (Nude Descending a Staircase, 19I2)-a presentation of nudity literally set in motion. The choreography in Duchamp's work, which moves the figure of the nude (as a unity) out of the center and into an undefined border zone, already begins with this early I Defigurative Choreography 41 painting; mise a nu7-a staging (mise-en-scene) of the nude as act of the act and as staging of the staging, meme. The movement of delay also appears in the title La Mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires, mmem... itself.8 The title stages a figure of decenteredness. In the winding movement of the phrase, there is a pull toward the periphery-glid- ing out to the margin and over the edge in the ellipsis of an interrupted line, as an undefinable rallentando [gradual slowing]. The adverb meme, pushed to the edge, after the comma, was added later by Duchamp (Paz 1978:33; Daniels 1992:97 ff)-this too a delay. Used as an adjective, the word meme signals an almost emphatic intonation of identity. According to Maurice Grevisse, meme stands as "adjectif 'indefini' et variable" for that instance that is "not the other" ("qui n'est pas autre") (I980:514). Meme, whose etymological roots go back to the Latin egomet ipse ("moi-meme en personne"),9 stresses identity in more ways than one. Le grand Robert lists the following uses for meme: l'identite absolue of the one and the same; simultaneity (la simultaneite); similarity (la similitude); and equality (l'egalite) (Robert 1985:353)-the absolutely homogeneous, af- firmed as a figure of unity with the term meme. Does meme as a figure of identity now slip out of the center of the Large Glass (the center that displays love-m'aime)'I to the periphery? As an adverb following the sentence," meme, "self/even," moves to the edge, into a marginal position, in which not identity but uncertainty and openness are indicated. As an adverb, meme becomes a particle of indeterminacy, the supplemental word, which Duchamp, in interviews with Pierre Cabanne, claimed he added precisely because it had no significance and had nothing to do with the title or the art- work: "The adverb, a magnificent demonstration of 'adverbiality' meant noth- ing" (Paz I978:33). The particle's ambivalent position-as a figure of uncertainty-at the margin of the sentence, enables movement: the pull away from the center-the point that in choreographic terms marks the midpoint (of the circle) as the locus of identity of the figure (Forsythe sets up and disturbs this ballet topos in his choreography for In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, I988)- into the open produces a curious suction. This movement-always, of course, slowed down-appears as repeated thrusts, as, perhaps, in the many supplemen- tal notes, the texts from the so-called Green Box, which enabled the Large Glass to become a book'2 and an exhibition room (en miniature).'3 This movement of supplements to the text of the Large Glass, which stages the "nude" anew as "eros' matrix," continues on the stage in the works of Merce Cunningham and Jan Fabre, which I shall briefly examine. First, con- sider Merce Cunningham's choreography in Walkaround Time (1968), for which Jasper Johns reproduced Duchamp's La Mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires, meme. The Large Glass was divided up and screened on individual, mobile, clear plastic boxes that were scattered throughout the room (see Sontag I990:30 fi). This time, the Large Glass (which by I93I had been bro- ken in transport), has stepped out, scattered, from its own center. In the movement of the nine dancers (an analogy to the nine celibataires in Duchamp's Large Glass) between the transparent "glass" cubes, the figures are staged to be next to each other and after each other at one and the same time. Their bodies show through the glass, and in a constant exchanging of posi- tions, a proliferation of the figures occurs: they are alternately placed in front of or behind the transparent geometric bodies, appearing as if they are embed- ded in exhibition cases. Following Cunningham's choreographic principle of taking every location and every figure in the room as equal and equally en- titled, using chance to situate the bodies as "points in space and time" (see Cunningham in Kostelanetz I992:37-39) and allowing all viewer perspectives in this spatial arrangement, the multiplied glass becomes a staggered frame of movement. A frame, however, which-as mise-en-scene of the figures-itself 1. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) by Marcel Duchamp (1915- 1923). Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier. (Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art) 42 Gabriele Brandstetter participates in the movement. The displayed transparency of the glass allows the bodies of the dancers to appear incorporeal, transparent, comparable to the exhibitive and mirror effect of shop windows.'4 The view through the ex- posed figures becomes the mise-en-scene of the mise a nu-of the act of movement and of the unclothed figure. Cunningham sets Duchamp's cut-up love-machine into separate geometrical figures within his choreography, and the movement of the dancers in the gaps becomes the hinge of the decentered parts. 15 "The logic of the hinge," writes Paz, rules the world of Duchamp's work: What unites, separates; by uncovering the object, transparency interposes itself between that object and my gaze [...I]t is the glass that separates us from the desired object but which at the same time makes it visible. The glass of otherness and of sameness: we cannot break it or escape from it because the image that reveals us is our own image as we watch it watch. (Paz 1978:152-53) Always gliding toward the periphery-in the border position of the self/ meme, into the out(side) of the identity-figure-the dancers walk (sit, stand, pause) in the circle of time.16 The alphabet of the Cunninghamesque movement figures, the elements of his training such as the "roll ups," everyday movements, as well as complex jump combinations and balance positions, step into the trans- parent image-space of the glass: motion inclusions, implements of time. "Delay," the deceleration of the relationship between text and production, appears to apply to the aforementioned transcriptions of the Large Glass as well as to the Large Glass itself.'7 The circularity of the process in the erotic ma- chinery of the Large Glass-the Walkaround Time of a never resolved suspense of desire-becomes the motor that drives Jan Fabre's piece Elle etait et elle est, mmem (She Was and She Is, Even, 1991). Fabre, who counts Duchamp among the artists who have influenced his work, staged the Large Glass as an incessantly cycling speech-movement (see Mattenklott 1993). The Bride as "sex-cylinder" (Duchamp) in La Mariee mise nu par ses celibataires, meme becomes a speech machine in Fabre's transcrip- tion. In Duchamp's Glass, the "letter box" of the alphabet forms the hinge between the vertical and the horizontal parts of the Bride: "The line of sepa- ration between above and below/ is my desire-magnet" (Fabre I99I:37). Sub- sequently, in delay, the mixture of letters is expelled. Fabre's nonstop speech from the mouth of the Bride-the subtitle reads: "Solo for a Young (Mary Ascending) Woman"-exhibits an ejaculate of never-changing words issuing from desire's "machine celibataire." My only function consists of making love again and again and again and again, and again, and again in many different forms. (Fabre I991:30) In a monotonous voice, the Bride, "sous toutes sortes de figures," spells out text from Duchamp's Large Glass, ordering its elements into an assemblage of quotations: the "chocolate grinder," "fly wheel," "pistons" and "buffers," "cylinders," "tin, cords and iron wire," "illuminating gas" and "love gaso- line"; men/spectators-"the poor suckers...voyeurs/ with a stolen glance/ in wait for my undressing" (Fabre I991:33). Mise a nu de "moi-meme," and yet Defigurative Choreography 43 "no exposed I" (33)-a meme that is marked, and that indicates the "identite absolue"-is revealed here; there is only emptiness. Fabre's choreography stages this "exposing" (of emptiness) through the posi- tioning of the bodies and spaces. In the production of She Was and She Is, Even he staged three spaces in a specific relationship: on one side, the inner stage space, on the other, the audience space-as "a long, narrow, dark body for the 'voyeurs"' (in Hoet and de Greef 1994:127). In between lies another space, a "no-man's-land" separated by a lit surface: the space of the enraptured figure of the woman (Assomption), Mariee/Maria. "The in-between-space as eternal pas- sage between longing and fulfillment" (127). This space, which remains empty-blank-becomes the objet trouve of the choreography. The "lit surface" is forced open as the locus of transparency; cut in as figure, and in there the "in- sect" of the Bride'8 presents itself as (glass) enclosure. In France, "mariee" is the popular name for a moth: "noctuelle" (owl moth) in "glass" (Paz 1978:33-34). With the idea of the insect Fabre makes another connection to Duchamp, to both the Large Glass and the most famous of his Readymades,'9 the urinal titled Fontain (1917): to the one, with his object Passage I (1993), a sculpture of a uri- nal completely covered with preserved, large, shimmering-blue beetles; and the other, with a series of female figures that are exhibited as an installation entitled Wall of the Climbing Angel (I994). Here, Fabre works with wire sculptures that resemble female mannequins and are covered with dresses made of shimmering beetle shells. Suspended in the emptiness of the gallery space, these suits of ar- mor-a frozen metamorphosis between nature and art-again etch the space of the Mariee (the virgin/the insect) into the glass: "Transformers in the Skies." Fabre's interest in working with insects, which from the very beginning and in many ways has informed his creative activity, can be traced back to his study of the research done by his grandfather, renowned entomologist Jean- Henri Fabre (Hoet and de Greef 1994:19, 48). For Fabre, even drawing is asso- ciated with the image of the insect: in the activity of etching and in the idea of metamorphosis. His works in the visual arts arise from the cutting of tracks into a surface: the endless scribbling of the Bic ballpoint pen on cloth and pa- per. In Changing Leaves, a series in which he mounts insects on Bic-blue paper, a reversible encounter occurs-the insect as paper, the paper as insect (Hoet and de Greef I994:4I). The idea of etching in space also dominates Fabre's choreography. The etching cuts the physical form, the unity of the figure, in two. The "insect," as the figure of the divided, segmented form, replaces the "individual" as a figure of indivisible unity of form. In Fabre's ballet works De danssecties (The Dance Sections, 1987) and The Sound of One Hand Clapping (I990, a collaboration with Forsythe), the figures of the dancers-some of them in armor, appearing like shining insects-cuts through the space in ex- tremely slowed down, extremely precise movements and poses. Fabre calls these performers of intersection "warriors of beauty": "The warriors of beauty are insect, actors and dancers. We are all social insects" (Hoet and de Greef I994:13). In the theatre, the work of choreographing on the "insect" body of incision in the end is directed toward the zone between the sharp edges of the outline, which-like the contingent movement of the scribbling of blue sur- faces-no longer derives from the workings of the rational codes of ballet. As in the drawings, which he makes aggressive through "rips" (51), Fabre also seeks to "rip open" the space with the staging of movement: as a tear in the fissure in which "the space between the dancers begins to dance" (II7). Such reflection of the self-mirroring open space points to the choreographic search for the bottom of the bottom-the mise en abyme2? of the dance-which Forsythe again and again stages in his works, literally, in the destabilizing of the foundation of the movement in a gaping crack in the floor. 44 Gabriele Brandstetter 2. William Forsythe's Alien/A(c)tion. Ballet Frankfurt, 1993. (Photo ? Self Meant to Govern Dominik Mentzos) William Forsythe's Choreography William Forsythe's works reflect always anew that the beginning and the end of the text of choreography are not representable. The gesture of pointing toward this nonrepresentability is imaginable, however-as performance. At the "end" of Alie/nA(c)tion, the curtain rises and falls four times, in repetition of the punning word game that a dancer/speaker (the choice of "languages" in Forsythe's choreography releases all conventional patterns of ascription, roles, or figures, of theatrical presentation) scans along with the rising and falling of the cloth black-box: "Cut, Schnitt, Shit, Schnitzel..." The end as a "cut" and the beginning of a piece as the preview of a (technical) rehearsal, in which ev- erything has already happened and been repeated. For example, "Firstext," the first part of Dreiteiligen Ballettabend (A Ballet Evening in Three Parts, 1995), whose title announces itself as the "first text," is dissimulated in a choreogra- phy "without a beginning." In Forsythe's words: "In Slingerland I spin in all directions like crazy. Beginnings are dark and there is no end in sight. No fixed points, lines, or planes: no balance, no justice" (in Horowitz 1989). In his choreography, Forsythe attempts to bring to performance those ideas about text that have been put forth in the discourse of poststructuralism. A passage from Roland Barthes's S/Z, about the inconclusiveness, the multi- vocality, the endless reinscription and translation of text, was printed in the program of Forsythe's ballet Impressing the Czar (1988): In fact, the meaning of a text can be nothing but the plurality of its sys- tems, its infinite (circular) "transcribability": one system transcribes an- other, but reciprocally as well: with regard to the text, there is no Defigurative Choreography 45 "primary," "natural," "national," "mother" critical language: from the outset, as it is created, the text is multilingual; there is no entrance lan- guage or exit language for the textual dictionary, since it is not the dictionary's (closed) definitional power that the text possesses, but its in- finite structure. (Barthes 1974:120) The entry into a movement text, the picking up and rewriting of it as cho- reographic process, looks different in Forsythe's work than is usual in ballet re- hearsals. In the search for new combinations and positions of the dance figures, he instructs his dancers to renounce the idea of "meaning": "You have to get used to simply babbling these words and developing a sense of being confronted with them in the middle of the sentence" (in Fischer i993:n.p.).2' In order to show his process, to penetrate the transversality of languages (speech, writing, step), Forsythe relies on the system of (verbal) speech in nearly all his stagework. Reaching for the thesaurus is part of the choreographic work. In Artifact (1984) Forsythe presents a "lexicon" of words and a structure scheme based on a syntax that was developed in the rehearsal process (see R6mer 1993:27-46); in Eidos: Telos (I995), definitions and etymological references are juxtaposed. What does the term "figure" mean in this context? In the representational domain of dance movement, primarily two meanings of the term "figure" are involved. In one, "figure" means the spatial form of the dancer, that is, the statue, the outline of the performing body. And in the other, the term refers to specific movement unities. Forsythe speaks of the fig- ure as "operative unity." Ballet presents a system of such operative unities as smoothly connected figures. Yet even within the terminology of ballet, the term "figure" is not singularly defined. Since the I7th century, "figura" has been used in social dance and in the dance of the theatre (ballet) to connote specific step combinations (danzefigurate) as well as the con-figuration of danc- ers ordered according to a specific pattern.22 And in the early I8th century, Raoul-Auger Feuillet defined "figura" as an element of choreo-graphy in the senses of both word and writing in his system of dance notation for ballet: "fig- ure," "le chemin que l'on suit en dansant,"23 in which he designates "le chemin" as "line," the prewritten line of choreography that the steps follow-"La ligne sur laquelle on danse." Jean Georges Noverre in Lettres sur la danse ([1760] 1966) used the term in the sense of tableau. So the idea of the "figure" in ballet appears to waffle indecisively between image and writing, between body and line, statue and ornament. Basically, however, the following holds: In classical ballet, the logic of how steps and turs are combined, the rules that connect elements of preparation, pirouette, and final position with the corresponding port de bras- all follow the aesthetic principle of the (beautiful) unbroken line. Choreography, as practiced by Forsythe, considers this unity of figure de- ceptive, the unbroken line a pretense. Forsythe's operations of de- and refiguration do not aim for a superficial splitting or destruction of the code. Rather, they direct our gaze toward the basic disconnectedness, toward the gaps in the unity of the figure. The architect Daniel Libeskind, with whom Forsythe collaborates, formulates this as follows: "What is revealed at different points in different ways is the gap between the moments in time. The parts that ensure that something continues are those parts that cannot be shown, because they are missing" (Libeskind I989:I4). Forsythe's choreography stages the absence of these connecting joints in the figure, the hairline cracks in the line: the disappearance of the copula. He starts with a classical pose, a ballet step or an enchatnement, disarticulates this figure, distances or shifts the hinges by setting each line in relation to each angle, and so arrives at a movement series that is defigured through multiple joint locations, which "does not look like ballet at all": 46 Gabriele Brandstetter But we began with a familiar ballet position because we always orient ourselves to it, we can always use it as point of reference. By continually approaching such a figure differently, plucking it apart and putting it back together in different sequences, I can bring forth a tremendous vari- ety of information with very little material. (in Fischer 1993) The mortar between figures disintegrates, the elision of transitioning parts, the extremely rapid reversals in direction and counterdirection put synaptic barbs into the gliding, into the appearance of seamless ballet figures. The ele- ments are inverted, juxtaposed, and put next to one another-often in pastings and clumpings with indistinct edges, following a grammar of discon- tinuity: figures of a "steptext" (the title of an early Forsythe choreography) whose seams remain visible. It is those moments of congestion, of harsh ar- rangement, of vibration (the gap-jumping rhythm almost too fast to perceive) in the choreographic line, that are so extraordinary about this dance piece. The dancers, trained in the system of classical ballet, learn to work with it in such a way that they rewrite, decompose, and build in, deviate from, or en- large interruptions of the interlacings in the code, each in his or her own im- provisatory experiment. An exchange of speaking (of the common code) and spelling (of one's "own" defigured alphabet) takes place: "The dancers learn to spell back their own language" (in Fischer 1993). Elsewhere, Forsythe stresses that the dancers should create their own personal "ballet slang." Amanda Miller, choreographer and long-term collaborator with Forsythe, speaks in this context of "doodling"-scribbling and scrawling. The speaking and writing of the movement text as a form of a parole, which-like scrawl- ing and babbling-transform the langue of the fixed ballet code. Thus the dancers develop a lexicon of multiply branched transcriptions of single ballet figures and their combination possibilities. This results in the nearly exponen- tial growth of movement lexemes, whose collection, selection, and recombi- nation-with all the choreographic possibilities, (de)figuring with catachrestic and metaleptic operations-can now be stored in a specially developed CD- ROM program, from which dancers and choreographers can draw. In works like Self Meant to Govern (1994) or Eidos:Telos (I995) and Dreiteiliger Ballettabend (1995), the choreographic patterns are based on these defigurative operations: [I]n other words, positions suggest movements within an associative chain or organization, which is based on where the limbs are placed in relation to each other. Your kinesphere functions as a memory-say, for example, your hands are near your knee, and you remember that that is where the movement sequence "A" begins or ends. You then perform "A" no longer in its original orientation, as it is prescribed in the move- ment vocabulary. This unoriginal orientation puts your body into yet an- other orientation, accessing some other sequence of movements; but you keep trying to re-adjust yourself back and forth between states of dis- and re-orientation. (Forsythe 1995:39) The movement of an oscillating "dis- and re-orientation" organizes the structure as a constantly reversible process. The pro- and retrogression of memory-the remembering of the order in the movement sequence, the me- moria of the passing of time and space-become the generators of a vocabulary that appears like an alternating current. "Reversals" of direction, metaleptic exchanges complicate nearly every motion of the dancers. It is this effect that not infrequently awakens in the spectator the impression that a figure or line is growing out of the impulse of both an inward and outward mobilization. Defigurative Choreography 47 Up to now we have been discussing "figure" primarily as a movement sign in the choreography and its defiguration in the transcription process of Forsythe's work. But what has been said also applies in a comparable way to the "figure" of the body: the dancers' spatial form, the "figura" of their out- line, and the configurative form of their movement relationships fall under the transformation processes of the code as well. In subverting the art figure of their ballet bodies-molded into instruments of presentation through labori- ous procedures of inscription-the dancers become "transformers" of them- selves. A dissolving of the outlines of and connections between the parts of the body occurs through the continual isolation of single parts and their con- ventional coordination. Screwings, twistings, and multiple initiation centers of movement impulses allow the bodies to appear as polymorphous figures. Their fragmentation imparts upon the viewer the impression, as critic Edith Boxberger writes, that the elements of the movement deform into a "mean- dering flow of contortions and intertwined convolutions, which frays in all di- rections at once and spreads out amoebalike [...], an oscillating construction, fickle and fragile, full of unrest" (I994:32). The unity of figure, even as "operative unity," is not given. Despite the implication of the title Self Meant to Govern, in Forsythe's choreography a cen- ter of operation that governs the movement cannot be discerned: it is grounded in the loss of linking elements that are still capable of demarcating the identity of the figure as a representational unity. Meme, as a particle that signifies an identite absolue, is also displaced in Forsythe's text work: In the verbal paradigm that forms the choreographic matrix of Artifact, "THE SAME" stands isolated-in the middle yet pushed to the edge, as a term in the function of a shifter: "'THE SAME' as stage direction, 'THE SAME' as infinite principle, 'THE SAME' as the eternally repeating, the indistinguish- able, the end of the exceptional and the unique" (R6mer I993:36). The arti- fact, whose working contours are ever dissolving in the dance. The same occurs with the vocabulary of the dance. A figure that could to such an extent be read as a concrete unity would be a ballet position, for ex- 3. "Despite the implication of the title Self Meant to Govern, in Forsythe's cho- reography a center of opera- tion that governs the movement cannot be dis- cerned; it is grounded in the loss of linking elements that are capable of demarcating the identity of thefigure as a representational unity." Bal- let Frankfurt, 1994. (Photo ? Dominik Mentzos) 48 Gabriele Brandstetter ample, or a pose like the arabesque-with the extension of the supporting leg and the stretch, back and up high, of the free leg-a fragile structure sus- pended in gravitational and antigravitational countertension, whose immanent sustaining dynamic lies in the play of balance. The place of the "self" that gov- erns the figure is the center of gravity, as the center of the distribution of the lines of strength. It is in this area of construction and control of the movement figure that Forsythe's work begins-namely by turning to Rudolf von Laban's "Choreutik," his theory of the relation between body, movement, and space: I am in the process of approaching movement in a completely new way, in which I am thinking about inner crystalline structures. According to traditional opinion, movement in ballet moves from the center of the body out into a hypothetical space. But I presuppose an internal, crystal geometry that occurs naturally in the body, which in turn influences the movement in the space. (in Fischer 1993) Here Forsythe follows ideas developed in the I92os by the expressionist dancer and dance theoretician Rudolf von Laban, who systematically researched the body and its relationship to the immediate environment (kinesphere) and thereby discovered the regular crystals of both the dodecahedron and foremost the icosa- hedron to be those stereometrical figures that could be used as models for the plateaus and angular relations of movement (Laban 1991). The crystalline struc- ture of the icosahedron enables a multilateral description of body movement in the environment of the kinesphere, which takes several perspectives into account simultaneously. Yet the lines and planes of movement direction thus described and the "swings" articulated by the body and carried out according to these di- rections all emanate from one center, a midpoint between the spatial orientation and the movement coordination. This is where Forsythe's choreographic analyses begin. What happens, he asks, when multiple axes, planes, and points of the kinesphere are activated and become the initiating point of movement? When every point of the kinespheric figure of the body can become the center of movement, a network of interfering systems develops. No longer does one single center of gravity govern the movement figure, as is the case in classical ballet. Rather, a multicentric agglomerate of points distributed over the body initiates and conducts the motions in the space. For example, the solo in In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated plays with this figure of the center-of the one point of gravity and its control-with the topos in ballet's hierarchy that celebrates the prima bal- lerina as etoile in this "elevated position." In Forsythe's choreography the soloist defigures this topos; she falls, so to speak, out of the discursive space. She dis- mantles the pose, for example, by gliding out of a balanced arabesque, extending the figure to its tipping point, and then slipping into an extremely rapid pirou- ette-as with falling, passing over the conventional preparation and instead mo- bilizing the port de bras from the shoulder, in an isolated spasmodic outstretched movement, followed by a head movement of the epaulement, of a torsion of the torso in the opposite direction, while teetering on her point shoe. The synchronization of such defigurations of the ballet vocabulary in the course of a sequence no longer welds unities together. This choreography is simultaneously its own metachoreography, in the analysis of movement and space of the given matrix. The figures generated in this way during the course of transformation become similar to one another, they take on the visual qual- ity of fractals: "Fractal geometries [...] are the images of the way things fold and unfold, feeding back into each other and themselves" (Forsythe 1995). In terms of the relation of figure and space, the patterns of such choreography reveal a similarity with the designs that are known as "parquet deformations" (Hofstadter I985:I95-2I8): gradually developing transformations of divisions Defigurative Choreography 49 of the plane, or tessellations, which, through the lengthening or rotating of a line or through the introduction of a hinge, result in a complete distortion or regrouping-like a type of ornamental morphing. In Forsythe's choreography the complexity of the spatial figures and their interferences is of course much greater: Our gaze would be confronted with a space filled with a dense concen- tration of angularity, complex circularity, symmetry, laterality, sphericality, contraposition, convexity, concavity, rectilinearity, and dis- tortion [...;] the extraordinary proliferation and perfect disorder of these marks may bring to mind the appearance of a page covered with incom- prehensible glyphs. (Forsythe and Levine 1987) In the polyphony of the figures in space, the line or the definable network of movement signs falls apart. Their linking is disturbed, the stability of the figure-as body and as movement sequence-begins to wobble. With each step a fall is implied. Laurie Anderson describes walking as falling: You walk...and you don't always notice it, but you're constantly falling. With every step...you fall. You fall forward a little bit and you catch yourself. You keep falling and catching yourself. And in this way you walk and fall at the same time. (Anderson 1989:13) Every step is a falling. The choreography inscribes the fall, not in an obvious falling into one another of the dancers, as in the movement theatre of the Ca- nadian group Lalala Human Steps, but in one of the patterns that derive from the basic structure: in the exploration of the borderline between stability and fragility, between centeredness and decenteredness. At this point of equilib- rium, which is displaced with every step, the conditions of the presentation of "figure"-as a mode of choreographic representation-are put in question. Marcel Duchamp was aware of this in the Large Glass. The exposition of the eros' matrix (matrice d'e'ros) in La Marie'e mise a nu par ses celibataires, meme acts as a critique of the myth of Eros and at the same time marks its never definitive affirmation. A "delay in glass," in terms of equilibrium. Or in Duchamp's words: "Et-qui-libre? Equilibre" (in Paz I978:72). Forsythe's choreography exposes disequilibrium. The copula's falling out of the order of the figures conceals and reveals the fall out of the center of grav- ity-a constant subversion of the balance structure that creates the illusion of elevation and stable geometry in classical ballet. The movement pattern in Forsythe's choreography consists of ellipses. In the network of the slipping, destabilizing centers of gravity that are thrown all over the figure and-in myriad points of interference-into the space, there nest gaps, holes, tears. Here Forsythe follows the concept of a postmodern architecture that stages Sturz und Rif [collapse and tear]: subversive structures that display the mo- ments in which their stasis is threatened (Jonak 1989:7). The outline of Forsythe's choreographic structures articulates a similar ar- chitecture of imbalance. In his analysis of Daniel Libeskind's works, Forsythe comes to comparable conclusions; when the underlying model and its con- ventionalized axioms are corrupted, hybridized, the structures proliferate: "The rational, orderly grid actually turns out to be made up of a series of decentered spaces" (1989:19). The process of defiguration therefore also relates to the total structure of a "piece"-whatever is to be signified with this formula of the performance of a movement representation of a certain duration in a certain place. A ballet work with a beginning and an end and a dramaturgy of repeatable figures and 50 Gabriele Brandstetter climaxes can no longer be described. So there is no "figura" of representation in the sense of a figural routine of expectable structures that are fulfilled ac- cording to the logic of the code. Instead, each performance realizes a different possibility for the presentation of the figures-the body and the movement fig- ures. Each repetition shows another surface of the text; each reading refigures a new variant of how the figures can be linked. In the structure of the pieces, choreographic, precisely established parts alternate with gaps, which the danc- ers fill anew in each performance (for which a time indicator behind the stage serves in guiding the orientation in space and the temporal coordination). Some of these choreographies seem to consist exclusively of such gaps, in whose intervals the actual "sentences" are inscribed, as, for example, in Self Meant to Govern, whose matrix is organized in such a way that each of the dancers has to manage her own parcours. And so she has various structural pos- sibilities to consider: there are clocks onstage, whose hands point toward letters instead of numbers. Each letter denotes a movement sequence that consists of figures, which are collected in a lexicon that was compiled specifically for this choreography. For the dancers onstage, a certain movement (which can be chosen out of her own "ballet-slang") is suggested by the letter that is indi- cated. In this way, the performers transform the figures and their interlacings. Comparable processes-simultaneous and postponed within the grid of these movement figures that are coming into contact with one another-concern the complete score of the staging: sound, light, projections of pictures, objects in constant coordination and isolation. But I'll leave this aspect for another time. Finally, considered in the sense of perceptual unity, "figura" disintegrates even in the spectators' perception. In the growing entropy of the choreo- graphic textual weave there no longer are any fixed spectatorial vantage points. Even the spectator falls out of the balance of his or her position: "But recent spatial transformation has brought about an unforeseen difficulty: it is no longer possible to see the entire text from one position. It seems that the characters suspended in the foreground obstruct our view of the characters lo- cated behind them" (Forsythe and Levine 1989). The stability of the observation-from what Fabre calls the "king's perspec- tive" in theatre-is subverted: a disturbed equilibrium of seeing. Forsythe stages and thematizes the physiological perception phenomenon of parallax (also the title of a 1989 ballet): an apparent substitution or change in the direc- tion of the observed object, which seems to shift between the angles of sight lines. The spectator is-in the network of the signs and figures of the text- constantly confronted with parallactic displacement. Furthermore, in the third part of Alie/nA(c)tion, a translation of this perceptual phenomenon is staged, which is known as "figural after-effect": the alteration of the figural or spatial attributes of figures (their apparent slipping or tipping to the opposite side), after a specific figure has for a while been fixed in the same region of the vi- sual field. Forsythe plays with such perceptual phenomena: The sentence "Ev- erything is all right," spoken by a black dancer, gradually spills into a narration of catastrophes, while the group of dancers synchronously translates the word "right" spatially by dancing on the "right side." That it is a black dancer is significant, since Forsythe is choreographically critiquing the polarization of the political left and right as well as those who claim to know what should and shouldn't be considered "politically correct." The spectator is faced with the question: Who stands or moves on the right side of which text? The words displace the figures, and the figures the words. In "Of Any If And," the third part of Gemischter Ballettabend (Mixed Ballet Evening, I995), two speak- ers sit at the back of the stage, incessantly and nearly inaudibly whispering a text, while at the front of the stage a couple of dancers repeatedly begin and break off movements in an attempt to "con-figure" themselves. Out of the Defigurative Choreography 5 I 4. William Forsythe's In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated in 1992: "Afigure that could to such an extent be read as a concrete unity would be a ballet position, for example, or a pose like the arabesque [...,] afragile structure sus- pended in gravitational and antigravitational countertension, whose immanent sustaining dynamic lies in the play of balance. " (Photo ? Dominik Mentzos) 52 Gabriele Brandstetter flies, staggered tiers of blackboards descend at specific intervals, on which are written single, disconnected words separated by spaces-elements of a "uni- versal writing" (Forsythe 1989:14) whose rules of syntax seem to be lost: a spatial letter-box, which keeps pushing in front of the figures of the dancers; a chiasmus24 of speech, movement, and writing elements. Forsythe continually works with various rhetorical and poetic processes within the text. For Im- pressing the Czar, he included one of Oscar Pastior's "anagram" poems in his choreographic textwork, whose title "Misverstand oder der Wegweiser?" (Misun- derstanding or the Signpost?) likewise marks theme and anathema, lexicon and material, in the context of "choreography." The gaps in the text-its blurred zones-demand from the reader of this text the search for another way of seeing. Forsythe's suggestion: "So, in order not to miss relationships that could provide the key to understanding this lan- guage, let us move into the text" (1988). Thus the spectator him- or herself becomes a figure in the choreographic text, no more integrated than the other existing text elements left over from the process of transformation; an inter- rupted process, an act of writing with disturbance factors, as is reflected in the title of another Forsythe piece: Enemy in the Figure (1992). -translated by Marta Ulvaeus Notes I. The passatismo of ballet, which was judged to be both an aesthetically and technically "decadent" form of theatrical performance movement, was, in a repeated Querelle des anciennes et des moderes (the aesthetic quarrel that has taken place in France since the Re- naissance over the question of which should take precedence, the ancient or the mod- em), a topos of new dance concepts in the early 20th century. See Brandstetter (1995). 2. Since the era of the Ballet Russes under Serge Diaghilev, the aesthetic and the perfor- mance conventions of ballet have undergone massive change. One of most profound of these was the elimination of narrative. The destruction of the traditional dramaturgy of Igth-century ballet is a "wound" that, as we can see in current civic theatre produc- tions, is still healing. 3. Hawthorne interprets the phenomenon of the Transformer in light of cultural and me- dia/technological change and the associated political implications as a sign of the "irre- vocable penetration of cybernetic into popular culture" and as a signal of the "militarization of childhood" (1989:2). 4. In Forsythe's choreography Artifact, the following lines are repeated uninterrupted as a monotonous poem of no longer knowing: "they will never remember where/ they al- ways forgot which/ they never remember how/ they always forgot where [...]." 5. The giving up of the idea of a completable work leads to another concept of the "art- ist," still within the romantic dichotomy of art and life. See Dieter Daniels (1992:82) and Thierry de Duve (1989). 6. Marcel Duchamp: "Painting is the critique of movement, but movement is the critique of painting" (in Paz 1978:2). 7. In his above cited analysis, Octavio Paz comments that the translation of mise a nu as "denuded" or "unclothed" falls short: "[I]t is a much more energetic expression- stripped bare, exposed. It is impossible not to associate it with a public act or a ritual- the theatre (mise en scene) or an execution (mise a mort)" (I978:32). 8. Here I am using the title with the ellipses, which are sometimes included, other times not. 9. Meesme and medisme, meisme (IIth century) comes from metipsimus (from the Latin metipse [the same], which followed the model of superlatives like maximus, minimus. Io. This homophony (meme/m'aime) has been suggested as the interpretation of the title, but while Duchamp disputed this, he also played with it (Paz I978:33). I . Duchamp said in an interview that meme reminded him of the famous double mono- syllable of Bosse-de-Nage, Dr. Faustroll's monkey: Ha-Ha (Paz I978:33). 12. After the first exhibition of the Large Glass (New York, 1926), Duchamp issued the notes he made as he was creating the work, which were reproduced as exact facsimiles. Defigurative Choreography 53 The Green Box appeared in I934 under the same (meme) title as the Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. See Daniels (I992:I02 ff). 13. Later, Duchamp produced La Botte-en-Valise (I935-I94I), a numbered series of what he called "portable museums": cardboard boxes with miniature replicas, photographs, and color reproductions of single pictures, Readymades, and the Large Glass. I4. In reference to this effect of the Large Glass, Duchamp noted in the White Box (A l'infinitif): "i. Show case with sliding glass panes-place somefragile objects inside. - Inconvenience-narrowness-reduction of a space, i.e. way of being able to experi- ment in 3 dim. as one operates on planes in plane geometry." And further: "No obstinacy, ad absurdum, of hiding the coition through a glass pane with one or many objects of the shop window" (in Sanouillet and Peterson I973:74). IS. For Cunningham's choreographic concept of space/time as "inbetween space," see Brandstetter (1991). I6. How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run (1965) is another example of Cunningham's choreo- graphing of everyday movement as performance. I7. In the text of Jan Fabre's transcription of The Large Glass for the theatre this is stated as follows: "I fulfill my function/ Very slowly... I give my best and create sparks with/ my desire-magnet" (Fabre I99I:39). i8. "The bride's names are Motor-Desire, Wasp, and Hanged Female" (Paz I978:33). For H.P. Roche, the Bride in Duchamp's Large Glass is half dragonfly, half praying mantis. I9. Duchamp's ideas lead to a further connection between the Readymade and dance of the '9os. Meg Stuart presents the body itself as "readymade" in her solo Thought Object, Ready Made (1992). The dancer, who doesn't "dance" or move out of her fixed position, stands at the center of the stage. Her movement consists of "transmissions." She transfers docu- ments, bits of paper, alphabet letters (like those taken from Duchamp's box) from one jacket pocket into the other-"memory junk" from the story of the self that the figura/ persona of her identity (soi-meme) can't find in her memory traces. The becoming trans- parent and disappearing of consciousness remains as faceless readymade, an eternal deferral. 20. Regarding this and other notions of "mise en abyme," see Jacques Derrida's The Truth in Painting (1987) and Lucien Dallenbach's Le recit speculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme (I977). 21. Forsythe further comments: The most important thing is that you may not try to make out a meaning, as little as I try to put forth a meaning when I continuously recombine these steps. I look for a result through mathematical, in this case, new grammatical combinations. This result will look unnatural since I want no naturalness. (in Fischer 1987) 22. The history of the concept of "figure" in dance and its many branches hasn't been suf- ficiently researched. It seems that the concept "figura" (first referred to following a ballo a cavallo [horse ballet] by A. Carducchi, called II Mondofesteggiante [1641]) was first asso- ciated with specific "figures" of the popular contredanse in the second half of the I7th century. "Figure" in this case means step combination and the configuration of the dancers' relation to one another (Desrat [I895] I977:I44). 23. This characterization of "figure" can also be found, following the French tradition, in early-I8th-century German-language dance publications. See, for example, Johann Pasch, Beschreibung wahrer Tanz-Kunst ([1707] 1978:40). 24. The figure of the chiasmus appears in many deconstructionist writings. Derrida visits this switching of positions in "Parergon": "Pas sans pas [step without step/step without not/not without step/not without not]" (I987:33). References Anderson, Laurie I989 Parallax I (November). Frankfurt a.M.: Stadtische Buhnen Frankfurt. Auerbach, Erich 1953 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barthes, Roland 1974 S/Z: An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. 54 Gabriele Brandstetter Boxberger, Edith 1994 "Paradigmwechsel im Tanz: William Forsythe und das Ballett Frankfurt, Jan Fabre, und Saburo Teshigawara." Ballet international/Tanz aktuell 2 (Febru- ary):28-32. Brandstetter, Gabrielle 1991 "Intervalle: Raum, Zeit und K6rper im Tanz des 20. Jahrhunderts." In Zeit- Riume, edited by Martin Bergelt and Hortensia Volckers, 225-70. Munich: Hanser Verlag. 1995 Tanz-Lektiren: Korperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Carrouges, Michel 1954 Les Machines celibataires. Exhibition catalog. Paris: Chene. Daniels, Dieter 1992 Duchamp und die anderen: Der Modellfall einer kiinstlerischen Wirkungsgeschichte in der Moderne. Koln: Dumont. Dallenbach, Lucien 1977 Le recit speculaire. Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil. Derrida, Jacques 1987 The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Desrat, G. 1977 [I895] Dictionaire de la danse. Hildesheim; New York: Olms. Duve, Thierry de I989 Nominalisme pictural: Marcel Duchamp, la peinture et la modernite. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Fabre, Jan 1991 Program notes for Elle etait et elle est, meme. Brussels: Kaaitheater. Feuillet, Raoul-Auger 1968 [1701] Choreographie ou l'art d'ecrire la danse par caracteres, figures et signes demonstratifs. New York: Broude Bros. Fischer, Eva Elisabeth 1993 [1987] Excerpts from an interview with William Forsythe. In the program notes for Artifact (1984). Frankfurt a.M.: Stadtische Biihnen Frankfurt. Forsythe, William 1988 Program notes for Impressing the Czar. Frankfurt a.M.: Stadtische Biihnen. 1989 Parallax I (November). Frankfurt a.M.: Stadtische Biihnen Frankfurt. 1995 Program notes for Eidos: Telos. Frankfurt a.M.: Stadtische Biihnen Frankfurt. Forsythe, William, and David Levine 1987 Program notes for The Loss of Small Detail. Frankfurt a.M.: Stadtische Biihnen Frankfurt. Grevisse, Maurice 1980 Le Bon Usage: grammairefrancaise avec des remarques sur la languefrancaise d'aujourd'hui. Paris: Duculot. Hawthorne, Melanie 1989 "Transformer: Robots in the Skies." In Parallax I (November):2-8. Frankfurt a.M.: Stadtische Biihnen Frankfurt. Hoet, Jan, and Hugo de Greef 1994 Jan Fabre im Gesprach mitJan Hoet und Hugo de Greef. Stuttgart: Edition Cantz. Hofstadter, Douglas 1985 Metamagical Themas: Questingfor the Essence of Mind and Pattern. New York: Basic Books. Horowitz, Helen 1989 Program notes for Slingerland. Frankfurt a.M.: Stadtische Biihnen Frankfurt. Defigurative Choreography 55 Jonak, Ulf 1989 Sturz und Riff: Uber den Anlafi zu archetektonischer Subversion. Braunschweig/ Wiesbaden: Friedr. Viehweg & Sohn. Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. 1992 Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space in Time. Chicago: a capella books. Laban, Rudolf von 1991 Choreutik: Grundlagen der Raum-Harmonielehre des Tanzes. Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel. Libeskind, Daniel 1989 Parallax I (November). Frankfurt: Stadtische Biihnen Frankfurt. Lyotard, Jean-Francois 1977 Les transformateurs Duchamp. Paris: Editions Galilee. Mattenklott, Gert 1993 "Indentitat oder Ahnlichkeit? Ein Motiv in der Dramatik Jan Fabres." In Jan Fabre: Texts on His Theater Work, edited by Sigrid Bousset, 47-55. Brussels: Kaaitheater; Frankfurt a.M.: Theater am Turm. Noverre, Jean Georges 1966 [1760] Letters on Dancing and Ballet. Translation of the 1803 St. Petersburg revised and enlarged edition by Cyril W. Beaumont. Brooklyn, NY: Dance Horizons. Odenthal, Johannes 1994 "A Conversation with William Forsythe." Ballet international/Tanz aktuell 2 (February):33-37. Pasch, Johann 1978 [1707] Beschreibung wahrer Tanz-Kunst. Reprinted by Kurt Petermann in Documenta Choreologica I6. Paz, Octavio 1978 Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare. New York: Viking Press. Robert, Paul 1985 Le grand Robert de la languefranfaise: dictionaire alphabetique et analogique de la languefrancaise. Vol. VI. Paris: Le Robert. Romer, Christel 1993 "William Forsythes 'Artifact': Versuch einer Annaherung durch Sprache." In William Forsythe: Tanz und Sprache, edited by Gaby von Rauner, 27-46. Frankfurt a.M.: Brandes & Apsel. Sanouillet, Michel, and Elmer Peterson, eds. 1973 Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Oxford University Press. Sontag, Susan 1990 Cage-Cunningham-Johns: Dancers on a Plane. New York: A.A. Knopf in as- sociation with Anthony d'Offay Gallery. Szeemann, Harald 1975 Junggesellenmaschinen/Les Machines celibataires. Exhibition catalog. Bern: Stampfli. Gabriele Brandstetter is Professor of Contemporary German Literature at the Universitdt Basel. Her research interests include classical and contemporary German mu- sical theatre and dance. Her most recent books include Tanz-Lektiiren: Korperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995) and Ton- Sprache: Komponisten in der deutschen Literatur (Paul Haupt, 1995).