Real-time Authorship: Experiencing is the work

by Chrysa Parkinson and Romain Bigé

T his text, weaving two voices, is a meshwork

that started in Warsaw at the Museum of
Modern Art during the creation of a live exhibition
curated by choreographer Boris Charmatz and collab-
orator Martina Hochmuth: expo zéro (2016). Ten
dancers, visual artists, curators, and thinkers of the
arts were gathered to present a one-off, one-day-long
performance tackling the question: What would be
your museum of dance?
In Warsaw, the idea emerged of a museum that
would collect specific sensations involved in the
practice of dance; it would be a museum of the dancer’s
bodymind. This thought experiment afforded a
renewal for our conceptions of what “a work of dance”
could be; it meant there was another work visible
on stage than the choreographer’s. This could be
described as the work of attention practiced by the
dancer—the attending to movement and affect, time
and space, touch and tone. And this work could be
considered as a work of art too. Parallel to the choreog-

photo © Mandoline Whittlesey

rapher’s authorship of the staged work, there would
thus need to be conceptual room for another author-
ship: an experiential authorship.

Experiential authorship is a concept developed by

dancer Chrysa Parkinson, through which she values
and reinforces her role as a dancer. Quoting from her
contribution to Material for Movement and Thought:
Reflections on the Dancer’s Practice and Corporeal-
ity (Roos and Foultier, 2013):
As a performer, I do not sign the works I parti-
cipate in. I do not own them. That’s all right
with me. How I am comprehended in any one
performance is often different from how I’m
constituted as an artist. I cannot necessarily
author my image on stage as a dancer, but I
can author my experience by choosing what’s
relevant in my experience to this particular role,
and then again to the next. Finding plasticity
in the border between what I’m included in and
what I’m made up of allows a productive gap that
produces a particular, specific agency, giving and
taking form. This is an ongoing, volatile practice,
rife with glitches.
Chrysa Parkinson performs in expo zéro, a project curated by Boris
Charmatz and Martina Hochmuth, on May 7, 2016, at the Museum of
Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland.
With the desire to investigate this concept together,
we (Chrysa Parkinson and Romain Bigé) coauthored the
following reflections, using the “I” pronoun as a plural entity
encompassing both of us. Sometimes it is very clear, from
our distinct professions (a professional dancer and a philos-
opher-improviser), who has authored the lines, sometimes
not—we left it that way. Undertraining (2011)—a book by
Boris Charmatz and Isabelle Launay—similarly mixed the
words of a long interview between a dancer and a dance
scholar. We owe them for having paved the path for this
method of blending authorships.

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Multitudes of the author
Claiming experiential authorship affects how I docu-
ment what I’ve done, how I choose to work, with whom I
choose to work, and how I might teach a role I’ve created
in another author’s work. Claiming authorship means I
claim the ability to respond (responsibility), and claiming
responsibility means I am accountable for my choices in
what materials I use, where, and with whom.
photo © Mandoline Whittlesey
Romain Bigé invites members of the audience to nap in expo zéro,
a project curated by Boris Charmatz and Martina Hochmuth, on
May 7, 2016, at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland.
This has sociopolitical implications concerning our
image of what a collective action is. Especially, it chal-
lenges a certain tendency to limit responsibility to one
subject (the author) as opposed to the multitudes they are
composing with. This tendency has been constructed in
the West by modern narratives: in theater, with the “rule
of the three unities” (unity of time, space, and action); in
history, with the stories of the “Great men,” the heroes,
privileged over the stories of the masses.
But the reality of a creation process—and for that
matter, of a life—doesn’t fit the narrative of a single
20    CONTACT QUARTERLY WINTER/SPRING 2018
individual blazing his or her own path. Even in the simplest
of my gestures, I am a cohort of movements that are coalesc-
ing: involuntary, voluntary, conscious, and unconscious
movements, within us and without us. In each gesture,
all these levels are deployed and organized together. In
Western philosophy, a classical moralist might argue that
to say every action is collective is to dissolve individual
responsibility and endanger our ethics.
But I am not saying that the individual doesn’t exist;
I’m saying that there is only an individual because and
thanks to the anonymous movements that support them
in their being. Claiming experiential authorship affords
the possibility to perceive and refine those anonymous
movements.
Authorship, ownership, and control
What seems very important to me in this discussion
is to make a distinction between authorship, ownership,
and control. I can author without owning or controlling.
When dancing in a piece by another choreographer, I am
the author of my gesture, but I am not controlling every
single aspect of it on a physical level, nor am I owning the
material that I am dancing. A physical image of the differ-
ence between owning, controlling, and authoring could be
three different hand movements: owning as a movement
where the hands are grasping and pulling toward the
body; controlling as a movement where the hands are
pulling strings or shaping another body; and authoring
as a movement of the hand affixing its signature to the
finished work.
This retrospective gesture of signing recalls gestures
of resistance to capitalistic modes of production, where
the workers imprint their signature on the pieces of metal
they are producing, so that their work wouldn’t be diluted
into an anonymous process of production. In Marxist
terms, this gesture is the first gesture of emancipation
(ex-manceps: to throw off the yoke of the owner); it is not
about owning the means of production but understanding
that one is essential in it.
Within the creation of a dance piece, this claim has
immediate consequences because it forces us to see that
works are not created by only one author (the choreog-
rapher, who, after the creation, will own the rights to
restage the piece). Rather, works exist at the crossroad of
a multiplicity of authorships. In French, performers are
called danseurs-interprètes (dancers-interpreters); this
points to the idea that performing is interceding for the
work to come into being. The dancer interprète is truly a
ferryman—interprètes translate and transport not only
meanings but also rhythms, affects, and tones.
There is no “Trisha Brown technique” outside Eva
Karczag or Stephen Petronio or Lisa Schmidt [Lani
Nahele], who taught the technique from their experience
within the company and from other sources that were

This is still about signing but
no longer about signing after
the fact. It’s a constant gesture
of accompanying the event as it
unfolds, like placing one’s hand
on a moving body. [C.P./R.B.]
part of their own personal stories. And it is even going
too far to say that they taught a technique; Eva, Stephen,
Lisa, and many other dancers have passed on procedures,
methods, and somatic approaches that were useful to
them in dealing with the technical demands of Trisha
Brown’s pieces and rehearsal process. Trisha Brown
herself deliberately avoided creating “a” technique and
invited her dancers to approach the work as best they
could through whatever methods they found applicable.
So this is not to say that Trisha Brown just sat around.
She created context for those dancers-interpreters (which
she elected) to transmit and invent their own technical
approach.
In the same way, Nancy Stark Smith says that Steve
Paxton didn’t teach Contact Improvisation as a finished
Julie Cunningham performs in expo zéro, a project curated by Boris Charmatz and Martina Hochmuth, on May 7, 2016, at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland.
form. He offered a set of practices and a proposal, gleaned
from his experience with many forms of movement (from
gymnastics to martial arts to modern dance), which
served as a context, a “frame,” and he left the middle
empty for exploration. In improvisation the question is
clearly, What is happening in the “empty middle”? And a
similar question can be asked of Trisha Brown’s choreog-
raphy. She can be said to “own” what is happening within
her dances (her name is attached to it), but who is the
author?
Real-time authorship
The form of authorship I am interested in is not the
retrospective authorship, in which I can say after the fact:
Oh, yes, that was me; oh, yes, that is “mine.” I am more
interested in the instantaneous aspect of authorship, in
those moments when I feel that the situation calls for me
to show up. Let’s call it “real-time authorship.”
This is still about signing but no longer about signing
after the fact. It’s a constant gesture of accompanying the
event as it unfolds, like placing one’s hand on a moving
body, like reading the braille of a body moving—except
it’s my own body, and my job is to decipher myself. This
is where the relation between authorship and agency
begins to emerge. I can have agency without after-the-
fact authorship; I can be the author of my actions as I
am doing them and not feel the need to claim that this
photo © Mandoline Whittlesey
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 Precisely when I am not doing my
habitual moves but am giving my
partners and myself the gift of that
small, undecided part of myself is
when I am the author. [C.P./R.B.]

action was mine once the action is done. Authorship is a
supplemental gesture that changes the value of the action
but not necessarily the action itself. Agency is more like
a condition—never complete; always conditional; always
in flux as a place, a state, or a way. As I move, I am given
the opportunity to experience, refine, and detail my own
agency. I get to have a (kin)aesthetic experience of my
own agency.
For a long time I was interested in improvisation
specifically because it was asking me to constantly take
responsibility for my actions—it afforded me a space
where I could become conscious of my own agency in
what was happening. Sensing my own agency required
that I train my ability to be conscious of my choices,
even after the fact. Working with experienced improvis-
ers, I noticed there was a great deal of combing through
the experience that we had had when performing. This
taught me a kind of self-consciousness that I realized
could be—with some close attention and hard work—an
entry to awareness, both self-awareness and awareness of
others. This self-focused awareness may seem strange in a
collective improvisation, where apparently the whole
art consists in remaining plastic, in not imposing one’s
view on the situation, in being in a state of permanent
diplomacy between how I am constituted and how I
am framed.
When I look up the etymology, improvisation reads
“to be without provisions” (in-provisus), to be stripped
bare. From the fact that I am constantly aiming to remain
without provisions, am I less the author of the action? To
be in the state of listening is actually, more than in any
other situation, where I feel I am the author. Precisely
when I am not doing my habitual moves but am giving
my partners and myself the gift of that small, undecided
part of myself is when I am the author. Why? Because it is
only this un-provisioned part in me that offers the agency
to actively, presently author. All the rest has been pre-
authored by me and by those beings whose presence
and movements have shaped my own.
Once I had understood that it wasn’t so much the
freedom that I enjoyed in improvisation but more the
augmentation of potentials, it became clear that I wanted
to work with people whose modes of working might leave
me without provision. Many choreographers—like Tere
O’Connor, ZOO/Thomas Hauert, and Mette Ingvartsen—
initially invited me to develop a methodology for an
unknown. They were, at the time I worked with them,
searching for practices. “What if we used this thing we
know well in some other way? What would that make?
What if we used this tool/material we don’t know at all?”
In retrospect, I think there have been moments when
I, as an artist, was developing an identity and working on
that through the art works. I was going to choreographers
with the desire to be fed. For me, that’s a mistake, or at
least it confuses matters. It delegates authorship to the
choreographer, who becomes a professor—an enseignant
in French—literally someone who en-signs students. That
shouldn’t be their role.
On the other side, I’ve worked with artists like
Deborah Hay, David Zambrano, and Anne Teresa de
Keersmaeker, who had existing practices they invited me
into. They had provisions, but provisions that were new
to me. In training my ability to change from one world to
another, but also in training my ability to stay with one
world, I discovered another space that was requiring my
authorship. Doing a piece 126 times, as I did with Anne
Teresa de Keersmaeker’s En Atendant (2010), not counting
the thousands of times I repeated the exact same gesture
in rehearsal, I realized how much of my activity had to do
with sense-making, coherence-making, value-making.
Values are “things” (sensations, affects, judgments, col-
ors) that are attached to other things so that those things
become more—or less—than what they are. This is really
what I “make” as a performer: I am adding values to a
world (the work I am dancing in) that doesn’t need them;
this world needs me (as a value-maker), but it doesn’t
specify the values that I am making. Another dancer could
perform in the same role and could value it differently—
adding color or subtracting affect according to his or her
own sense-making—without obliterating the role.
It is important—crucial—that I don’t confuse my
sense-making with the other authors’ systems of values.
If I do lose the sense of what I am responsible for, I can
no longer author my experience, I am only forced to do

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 things, I am waiting for the other (my partner, my choreog-
rapher) to value my experience. But that is not their job.
Their job is to give me obstacles, frames, relationships.
When I dance, my responsibility lies in the attempt to
overcome these obstacles, to sense within those frames,
to engage in those relationships, and to generate the
meaning for myself.
What is authoring whom?
Author comes from the Latin augeo: I generate. To
author my movements means that I generate them. This
generation, though, cannot mean that I would produce
them out of thin air. I have in me movements that are not
mine, movements that belong to other kinds of beings
(from rocks to plants to animals to fellow humans to
things made by humans) that circulate in me1. Children,
in their games, mimic not only each other, not only
other animals, but also windmills, rivers, galaxies. What
choreographs me is thus not only my partners and the
1 In his Anthropology of Gesture (1969), Marcel Jousse talked about Mimism as the
fundamental law of the universe.
photo © Mandoline Whittlesey
Chrysa Parkinson performs in expo zéro, a project curated by Boris Charmatz and Martina Hochmuth, on May 7, 2016, at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland.
score but also the world I am enmeshed in, that plays me
and that I replay.
When I talk about authoring my experience, I can say
that my experience of this rock is my experience, and I can
claim it and compose with it as part of myself. The rock is
not mine. The experience is. Thus, instead of being stuck
in the human-to-human world of movements, I open to
the idea that it is still very much me that is at stake in this
rock, in this tree, in this vibrant city, in the pull of gravity
that is bathing me and others.
As a dancer, this is an experience I can channel back
into the studio. This opening and channeling back is the
complex, multitudinous work of sensing that constitutes
me and constitutes what I make—moment to moment,
over and over, in real time.
u
To contact the authors:
Romain Bigé, romain.bige@gmail.com
Chrysa Parkinson, chrysa99@gmail.com
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