Noland. Dance Reaserch

The Human Situation on Stage Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of musing Carrie Noland trip the light fantastic toe c exclusively into chief diary, Volume 42, Number 1, Summer 2010, pp. 46-60 (Article) Published by University of Illinois pack DOI 10. 1353/drj. 0. 0063 For additional in diversityation about this article http//muse. jhu. edu/journals/drj/summary/v042/42. 1. noland. hypertext mark-up language Access Provided by University of humaneechester at 07/08/10 1018PM GMT depiction 1. Merce Cunningham in his cardinal terpsichores for Soloist and Comp either of Three (1952).Photographer Gerda Peterich. 46 leap interrogation daybook 42 / 1 spend 2010 The Human Situation on Stage Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression Carrie Noland hither is recipe in Cunninghams choreography? Are the moving bodies on take hold up communicatory? If so, what ar they expressing and how does much(prenominal) way occur? S incessantlyal of the finest theorists of trip the light fantasticamong them, Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko, and Dee Reynolds commence already undertakeed the question of expressivity in the take to the woods of Merce Cunningham.Ac goledging the bodalism and a filamentency of his choreography, they presenttofore insist that preparation does indeed take place. Foster locates expression in the affective signifi cig artce as hostile to the stimulated experience of endeavour (1986, 38) Franko reclaims it in an nada source . . . to a greater end than fundamental than emotion, while unsloped as differentiated (1995, 80) and Reynolds identifies expression in the dancing root words sensorimotor faculties as they argon deployed fully in the present (2007, 169). Cunningham himself has be expression in move as an intrinsic and inevit adapted whole step of endeavour, indicating that his search to capture, isolate, and frame this quality is central to his choreographic passage. 2 As a c ritical theorist ( kinda than a dancing historian), I am interested in expression as a to a greater extent oecumenic, or cross-media, category and on that arcdegreefore find the efforts by Cunningham and his critics to define expression differently, to guiltless it from its subservience to the psyche, refreshing, un schematic, and indicative.I pass flummox increasingly convinced that Cunninghams practical and theoretical interventions endure illuminate more impostal literary and philosophical discourses on the esthetics of expression and that they pull in single outicular resonance when juxtaposed with the approach to expression developed by Theodor Adorno in his esthetical guess of 1970.Similar to Cunningham, Adorno complicates the category of expression by shifting its location from Carrie Noland is the author of verse at Stake Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton University Press, 1999) and effect and build Performing motilitys/Produc ing Culture (Harvard University Press, 2009). Her taste for interdisciplinary work has resulted in two collaborative ventures Diasporic Avant-Gardes Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave, 2009), co-edited with Language poet Barrett Watten, and Migrations of Gesture (Minnesota University Press, 2008), co-edited with Sally Ann Ness.She t distri providedivelyes French and comparative literature at the University of calcium, Irvine, and is an affiliate cogency penis in the Department of Anthropology, a fellow of the Critical guess Institute, and director of Humanities-Arts, an interdisciplinary undergraduate major combining the devote and abridgment of art. Dance enquiry Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 47 W renderivity, soundless principally as a psychic phenomenon, to embodiment, understood as a hold out of locomotion and sensual worldly c erstrn (in Frankos words, something more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated 1995, 80).Adornos Aesthetic possibleness, at once rough around the edges and sparkling with brainstorms, is arguably the most important book on artistics since Immanuel Kants recapitulation of Judgment (1790) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Lectures on Aesthetics (1835), the two works that do as Adornos point of departure. The German-born medicinal drugian and philosopher advances along the lines established by Kant and Hegel, hardly he consistently raises questions about arts function in society. Adorno belonged to a group of early to mid-twentieth-century philosophers who submitted the classical Enlightenment tradition to Marxist critique.Along with Walter benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukacs, and Bertolt Brecht, Adorno entertained suspicions with regard to the nonion of subjective expression he wondered if the artistic languages identified as communicative hadnt suffer stylised to the point where it was necessary to scupper them d experience, subject them to permutation, distortion, or disturbance by mingys of practices he associated with the category of construction (Adorno 1970/1997, 4044 and 156).Traditionally, expression, he argued, presupposed a self-identical subject to be expressed but if the subject were in occurrence a reification of something far more volatile, responsive, and delicate, if the subject were, as he put it, something closer to the shudder of reason, thus the temperament of expression in artworks would subscribe to to be rethought (331).It is not my intention in this essay to conduct a full analysis of Adornos surmisal of expression, nor do I intend to apply Adorno to Cunningham, at that placeby implying that champion is more theoretically sophisticated than the an new(prenominal)(prenominal). Instead, I want to initiate a energetic plight between the two in an attempt to discern and sidle up what I rely to be an incipient opening of expression that is imbed in Cunninghams practice and that secretly informs Ad ornos account of novelist esthetics as well.The theory of expression I am referring to is champion that is not fully articulated in Adornos aesthetics. However, implicit in his take with the Kantian tradition is an incipient theory of arts engagement with the sensorium focusing on arts attention to and dialogue with the sensorial and motor dust produces an aesthetics arguably in conflict with the handed-down aesthetics of disinterested beauty or the cerebral sublime.This new theory of the aesthetic as implicated in gentlemans gentleman embodiment hind end be drawn out most effectively if we read Adorno in conjunction with watching (and learning more about) Cunninghams leap. Although my concerns ar primarily theoretical in nature, I am intrigued by the opportunity to research how a choreographic and dance practice support go where aesthetic theory has never g iodin before. Neither the technical, discipline-specific language that Adorno employs, nor the schematic expres sion Cunningham prefers, back end, in isolation, be made to divulge a persuasive alternative account of expression.However, when the two are juxtaposed and intertwined, and when practice itself is analyzed as theoretically pertinent, then a new definition of expression begins to emerge. The question that immediately arises when one juxtaposes Cunningham with Adorno is Why doesnt Adorno ever mention dance? Although, as has been well documented, dancers and choreographers were fellow travelers of the authors and artists Adorno treats, 48 Dance question Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 e never discusses a atomic number 53 choreographer during the entire course of Aesthetic Theory. Dance is only when not part of Adornos hi fiction, his chronological treatment of modern works nor is dance include in his theory, his speculations on how artworks relate to what they are not (nature, somatic conditions, the piece race subject). Dance exclusively makes a few cameo appearances as the putat ive analysed of all art, a mimetic form related to magic and ritual practices (1970/1997, 5, 329). For Adorno, as for Walter Benjamin, dance coincides with the emergence of art in the caves it is the earliest practice whereby humans mime nature and, by miming, come across, displace, and stylize nature, veritable(a) as they attempt to become one with it (Benjamin 1986). In their treatments, dance clay stuck in that cave, never entirely modern, because it is more intimately connected to practices related to the native soundbox and the sensorium. It may be that what is intrinsic to dance, its address to the body, surreptitiously characterizes all the another(prenominal) art forms that putatively emerged out of it. This is a path of inquiry I am currently pursuing. ) For now, it is sufficient to note that dance cum dancethat is, as a tradition of bodily practice that evolves over time, that has its own schools, and that inspires its own critical discoursesnever figures as a s ubject of field of impel in Aesthetic Theory. The pastal trajectory Adorno establishes for art in superior generalits increasing autonomy and formalism as a result of industrial enterprise and secular disenchantmentis neither applied to nor tested in any rigorous way against a concrete example of modernist (or any other kind of ) dance.Thus it could be said that, in the strict sensory faculty, Adorno ignores dance. At the actually to the lowest degree, he finds no place for it in modernity. While other scholars have not been as blind to dances contributions as Adorno, they do have difficulty assimilating it into a standard chronology of twentieth-century art. In conveyance and the Demon, Susan humansning sums up the critical consensus Dance stands in an a-synchronous singing to all other twentieth-century forms of expression.It does not evolve at the rhythm it should, or else the story is more messy than one would homogeneous (Manning 1993). For example, we toiletnot say with any certitude that whole wheat flour is to romantic ballet as Beckett is to Baudelaire, or as Schoenberg is to Beethoven, or as Malevich is to David. Whereas art, writing, and medicinal drug all seem to pass with the same implications at rough the same timelate Romanticism early modernism late modernism or postmodernismchoreography appears to lag behind, or deliver the goods a different route.A typical rendering is provided by Jill tinstone, who argues that not until Cunningham appeared in the 1950s did modern dance catch up with the evolution of visual art traced by Clement Greenberg (qtd. in Manning 1993, 24). In other words, during the era of cubism, when a constructivist aesthetic was clearly gaining ground in painting, writing, and musical piece of music, Isadora Dun potentiometer was distillery performing supposedly natural intercommunicates and emoting supposedly lyric passions on the international do.My goal here is not to figure out whether Cunningham is modern or postmodern, or wherefore twentieth-century choreography evolved the way it did. What I want to presuppose about is whether that a-synchronicity, the messier story of dance (and its absence from Kantinspired aesthetics), tells us something about the inadequacy of the Greenberg-Adorno model. How might Cunninghams work shed some light on Aesthetic Theoryits lacunae but overly its possibilities? How might Aesthetic Theorydespite its inadequaciesbe made to say something of value about dance?Dance look for Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 49 To approach these areas of doubting intelligently, we must(prenominal) first recall that Adorno treats modernism not simply as a matter of increasing self-reflexivity and formalism but alike as a struggleexplicitlywith expression. His chronology of secular art could be encapsulated in the interest way (and here comes my speed train version of Aesthetic Theory, which I hope summarizes clearly the vital points of the dialectic) The institut ional critique creditworthy for late impressionist and then cubist rt engenders a suspicion with paying attention to illusionism the abandonment of illusionism then heralds the embrace of expressionism as a kind of anticonventionalism (think of the German art movement of the 1920s, the Neue Sachlichkeit or pertly Objectivity) the subsequent rejection of psychological record and subjective emotion, however, entails a critique of expressionism, which then leads ineluctably to an astringent, localize area constructivism (minimalism, permutational procedures, possibility operations, and so on). At each present moment, expression remainshow could it not? but it is reworked through different forms of critique. For Adorno, the tension between expressionism and constructivism becomes paradigmatic of late modernist art. A close reading of Aesthetic Theory reveals further that for its author, this tension is successful of art itself. The salient points of convergence between Adorno and Cunningham are that they both certify a marked preference for construction and they both reject psychological autobiography, yet they simultaneously rescue expression as an inevitable component of man-made things.In their respective and utterly idiosyncratic ways of thinking they both manage to re-define expressionand they do so in astonishingly compatible ways (although this may not at first seem to be the case). For Cunningham, no movement performed by the human body can ever be lacking in expressive content, either because the human body always communicates some kind of fighting(a) or because the audience member maps onto the moving body a soulal message (see Brown 2007, 53). For Adorno, in contrast, expression in art is the antithesis of expressing something (1970/1997, 112 accent mark added).True expression, he argues, is intransitive there is no object for the verb to express. As with the verb to move, there is a transitive form one can move furniture as one can exp ress a liquidsay, juice from an orange. only if when referring to dance (as opposed to painting), to be an intransitive form of expression regard ass that a body must move and thus express without an external object to be expressed. Put differently, the expressive movement is not trying to illustrate anything (even the music).And here is where Cunningham and Adorno converge an artistic act can be conceived as antinarrative, apsychological, and yet fully expressive. The dance can move its audience without relying on poignance embedded in plot, or energy framed as flavorless emotion. There is no external referent that the bodys movement refers to it is not expressing more than it is (or, rather, more than it is doing). On this reading, expression is borne by a materialitythe moving bodyit can only transcend by losing itself.David Vaughan, Cunninghams archivist, has defined Cunninghams project in terms that meet in this context It goes without saying, he writes, that Cunningham has not been interested in notice stories or exploring psychological relationships the subject matter of his dances is the dance itself. This does 50 Dance look for Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 not mean that gaming is absent, but it is not drama in the sense of narrative rather, it arises from the intensity of the kinetic and theatrical experience, and the human fact on stage. (1997, 7 infatuatedness added)By intensity of the kinetic and theatrical experience, Vaughan is probably referring to the audiences experience he is alluding to John Martins famous theory that we, as spectators, empathize kinesthetically with the dancers (a theory developed by Expressionist dancers of the 1920s, or Ausdruckstanz). (He may alike be thinking of Cunninghams aforementioned plead that members of the audience are free to introduce their own meaning into the performed motions. ) What is more interesting in this passage, however, is the impression of a human location on stage. What, precisely, do es Vaughan mean by a human stake on stage? What would a human federal agency consist of? How could non-narrative dance produce drama and remain expressive? Expressive of what? To illustrate what a human perspective on stage might be, how it solicits an intransitive expression, and thus how it illuminates the hidden corners of Adornos theory of expression, I want to turn to a finicky moment in Cunninghams development as a choreographer, the period roughly from 1951 to 1956. During these twelvemonths, Cunningham was just beginning to experiment with the kick downstairs procedures he learned from John Cage.The two dances that are most pertinent in this regard are xvi Dances for Soloist and Company of Three, a fifty-three-minute work first presented in 1951 suite by determine (19521953) and Solo retinue in Time and slip of 1953, which later became Suite for Five (performed in 1956). The first one, cardinal Dances, is historic for several reasons it demonstrated the influence of Hindu aesthetics, which Cage had been exploring since at least 1946, when he first mentions Ananda Coomaraswamys The Transformation of Nature (Nicholls 2007, 36).The piece depicts the ball club permanent emotions described in the Natyasastra, the sourcebook of Hindu/Sanskrit classical theater. These emotions were, as Cunningham cast them, Anger, Humor, Sorrow, Heroic Valor, the Odious (or disgust), Wonder, Fear, the Erotic, and Tranquility (or Peace). Moreover, Sixteen Dances (accompanied by a composition Cage wrote bearing the same name) contained what might precise well be the first dance sequence based on the use of chance operations. 4 Thus, Sixteen Dances, the very choreography in which chance procedures are introduced for the first time, is explicitly about the emotions and their expression.There is some confusion concerning precisely howand to what extentCunningham applied chance procedures to Sixteen Dances. However, his comments in A Collaborative subroutine between melody and Dance and his statement notes (in the Cunningham archive at Westbeth) charge that in at least one segment (the interlude by and by Fear), he used charts and tossed coins to determine the set of the movement sequences (phrases), the time intervals, and the orientations and spatial arrangements of the dancers.In A Collaborative Process he writes The structure for the piece was to have each of the dances involved with a specific emotion followed by an interlude. Although the give was to alternate light and dark, it didnt seem to matter whether Sorrow or Fear came first, so I tossed a coin. And also in the interlude after Fear, number 14, I used charts of separate Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 51 movements for material for each of the four dancers, and let chance operations decide the persistence. (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 58 qtd. in Kostelanetz 1998, 14041).Again, in Two Questions and Five Dances, Cunningham specifies the individual sequences, and the space of time, and the directions in space of each were detect by tossing coins. It was the first such(prenominal) experience for me and felt like chaos has come again when I worked in it (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 59). It is clear that the first dance Cunningham choreographed entirely through the application of chance procedures was Suite by Chance in 1953. Cunninghams publish accounts of Suite by Chance are much more specific with respect to the use of charts and coin tossing than his accounts concerning Sixteen Dances (Cunningham 1968, n. . see also Brown 2007, 39 and Charlip qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 62, 70). Carolyn Brown has indicated that in Sixteen Dances it was the rewrite of the movement phrases that was determined by chance, not the individual movements or positions at heart the movement phrase. 5 The continuity at stake in Sixteen Dances, then, would be the continuity between phrases, not individual movements. And yet, in an unpublished note from the archive, Cunningham indicates that he was already interestedat least conceptuallyin separating phrases into individual movements and enumerating their assorted possibilities.In other words, the logic generating his later proceduresthe intermission up of phrases into individual movements that were then charted and effected into sequences selected by chancealready existed in an embryonic state. Anticipating a practice he would soon refine, Cunningham provides the following list of potential movement material in his rehearsal notes Legs can be low, middle or high in air legs can be bent or straight legs can be front, side, or back (Cunningham 1951). The schematic rendering of movement choices (into what he calls gamuts of movement) foreshadows the kinds of taxonomies he would develop later (Vaughan 1997, 72).Photographic representations suggest that at this point in his career, Cunningham was still choosing movement material thematically. That is, the types of movement selected for any given emotion had a cultu rally conventional relation to that emotion. Describing Sixteen Dances, Cunningham writes the solos were concerned with specific emotional qualities, but they were in go through form and not personala yelling warrior for the odious, a man in a chair for the humorous, a bird-masked figure for the wondrous (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 59).Unfortunately, there is no video or film record of the dance, but from the extant photographs, it is apparent that Cunningham was working with a modernist vocabulary there is something reminiscent of Martha Graham or Ted Shawn in the prominent poses, the off-center leaps, and the contracted upper body that we do not see in his work later. In Cunninghams rehearsal notes (1951) for the pieceand there is no way of knowing if these reflect the completed piece as it was ultimately performedhe jots down the idea of introducing a conventional balletic vocabulary for the final quartet on motionlessity. Finale to proceed from balletic positions, and travel by t o them at all cadences he exclaims. I believe Cunningham so emphatically chooses balletic positions as starting and termination points, as tranquil rests, because they offer movement material that is less associated 52 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 Photo 2. Merce Cunningham in his Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1952). Photographer Gerda Peterich. by conventionat least, by Graham conventionwith finical emotional states.As Cunningham writes about the period It was most impossible to see a movement in modern dance during that period not stiffened by literary or personal association (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 69). If tranquility, the ninth emotion from the Natyasastra, signifies the transcendence of emotion, then by chance a ballet vocabulary would be appropriate, especially against the background of the earlier eight, more conventionally expressive, images used for the solos and the erotic duet. During the years 19511956, Cunningham was obviously making d iscoveries that would become consistent elements of his practice for years to come.In works such as Sixteen Dances and Solo Suite in blank shell and Time (1953), not only does he introduce chance operations but he also develops an approach to the body as an expressive organ. He chooses movement material that might be considered conventionally expressive as well as movement material based on classroom exercises, but he elects (or engenders through chance operations) a sequence of phrases or poses that is not conventional. In Sixteen Dances newly minted chance operations allow him to experiment with the order of the movement material in a way that endangers the continuity of the dance. But what he learns by endangering that more conventional Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 53 form of continuity is that another(prenominal) form of continuity can emerge. As he underscores in his rehearsal notes for the 1956 Suite for Five (an point of reference of Solo Suite in Space and Tim e with added trio, duet, and quintet) Dynamics in movement come from the continuity (Cunningham 1951 emphasis in the original). What would supply this continuity if not the acquired syntax of traditional dance forms, if not the momentum of propulsive movements?Over the course of a year of rehearsals for Sixteen Dances (the time it took to mount the duets, trios, and quartets on Dorothea Brea, Joan Skinner, and Anneliese Widman) Cunningham found his answer. The continuity melding one movement to another would be derived from the dancer herself, that is, from the way she found to string together movements previously not linked by choreographic or classroom practices. In Two Questions and Five Dances, Cunningham describes his pleasure as he watched Joan Skinner take a notoriously difficult sequence of movements and trace them together seamlessly with her own body.Skinner introduced coordination, going from one thing to another, that I had not encountered before, physically (qtd. in Va ughan 1997, 59). His comments introduce what emerges as a constant in his choreography. According to Carolyn Brown, Although the overall rhythmic structure and tempi were Merces, he wanted me to find my own phrasing within the sections. . . . Unlike what happens in ballet, there is no other impetus, no additional source of inspiration or energy, no aural stimulus . . . There is only movement, learned and rehearsed in silence.In order for Cunningham dancers to be musical, they must discover, in the movement, out of their own inner resources and natural musicality, what I call, for want of a better word, the song. . . . There is a meaning in every Cunningham dance, but the meaning cannot be translated into words it must be experienced kinesthetically through the language of movement. (2007, 19596 emphasis in the original) Dynamics are thus not preconceived by the choreographer but instead emerge from the dancers creation of unscripted, discovered transitions leading from one movemen t, or one movement sequence (phrase), to the next.These transitions providing continuity are forged by the dancers own heading mechanism, her way of assimilating each movement into a new sequence, a new logic, that only the body can discover in the work at of repeated execution. In Sixteen Dances Skinner provided him with a crucial insight (reinforced by Carolyn Brown soon after), namely, that the expressivity of the body is lost neither when the elements of an expressive movement vocabulary, a set of image forms, are re-mixed or forcibly dis-articulated, nor when the elements re-mixed are themselves as neutral and unburdened by cultural associations as possible.So what is the human situation on stageto return to our earlier questionand in what way can it be considered expressive? I believe that what Cunningham was beginning to uncover in his work during this period, and that he fully realizes in Suite for Five of 1956, is that the human body is doubly expressive it can be express ive transitively, in an easily legible, culturally systemize way, and it can be expressive intransitively, simply by exposing its dynamic, arc-engendering force. This intransitive expressivity belongs to an animate form responding at what Adorno calls the proto subjective direct (1970/1997 112).That is, the continuity-creating, heading body is relying on an order of sensorimotor 54 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 sensitivity that is itself an expressive constitution, one that underlies and in fact renders possible what we identify as the acquainted(predicate) signifying system of conventional expressive images and personal emotions. 7 The human situation on stage can therefore be summed up as a set of kinesthetic, proprioceptive, weight-bearing, and sometimes tactile problems to be solved. In the rehearsal notes for Suite for Five (19521958), these problems are enumerated succinctly.Cunningham composed this piece by relying on movement materials whose sequences were d etermined by the imperfections appearing on a sheet of paper. ( here(predicate), he was imitating Cage, who invented the process with Music for Piano, which accompanied the Solo Suite. ) Cunningham tells us that the dancers had to worry about (1) where they are (2) then where to (where they have to get to) and (3) if more than one person is involved, how the movements they make allow for be affected by the others presence on the stage. In short, the spatial and interpersonal relationships present the problems and constitute the human situation on the stage. The dancers are called on not to express a particular emotion, or set of emotions, but instead to develop refined coping mechanisms for creating continuity between disarticulated movements while remaining sensitive to their location in space. They must keep time without musical cues sense the presence of the other dancers on stage know blindly, proprioceptively, what these other dancers are doing and adjust the quantify and sco pe of their movements accordingly, thereby expressing the human situation at hand.All this work is expressiveit belongs to the category of expressioninsofar as it is demanded by a human situation on a stage and insofar as human situations on stages (or otherwise) constitute an embodied retort to the present moment, an embodied response to the utterly quaint conditions of public at one given point in time. In an inter reckon with Jacqueline Lesschaeve, Cunningham puts it this way You have to begin to know where the other dancer is, without looking. It has to do with timing, the relationship with the timing. If you paid attention to the timing, then, even if you werent facing them, you knew they were there.And that created a relationship (Cunningham 1991, 22). Relationships, engendering inevitably the human situation, are defined as body-to-body relationships, or really moving-body-to-moving-body relationships. As Tobi Tobias has suggested, perhaps movement is at the core, the body s response preceding the psyches (1975, 43). Contemporary neuroscience is in fact beginning to confirm this point of view relationships are forged kinetically, and thus the human drama begins at a prepsychological, perhaps even presubjective level of interaction with the world.The work of Antonio Damasio (1999) and Marc Jeannerod (2006) in particular emphasizes the degree to which largely (although not entirely) nonconscious operations of the sensorimotor systemincluding visuomotor functions and kinesthetic, proprioceptive, haptic, and vestibular systemsconstitute the very conditions of possibility for the emergence of higher level processes of conscious thought, symbolization (language), and feeling. These scientists dub the former, more somatic (and evolutionarily prior) layer of drill the protoself. This protoself is related to homeostasis and the fundamental intelligence that discerns the boundary between the subjects body and other bodies it is thus the corporeal substrate of subjectivity understood as an sensitiveness of being a separate self. 8 If we return to Cunninghams statement, quoted above, we can see that a relationship Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 55 forged simply by occupying the same duration of time produces a human situation insofar as two bodies are obliged to remain sensible of each others presence.This cognisance is not necessarily bleached with affect that is, the human situation on stage is not necessarily charged with emotion. To that extent, we can say that Cunninghams choreographic procedure attends to intimacies occurring on the level of the presubjective layer of interaction between human beings presubjective would not mean pre-individual or pre-individuated but rather singular embodiment in an intersubjective milieu before that embodiment enters a narrative, a conventional, socially defined relation to the other.The relation to the other, as Cunningham points out, is structured by time in a duet, for typesette rs case, the choreographic imperative is that bodies should be doing particular things at particular moments in a predetermined sequence. Yet at the same time, the cohabitation of that temporal and spatial dimension that is the stage creates a situationa human situationin which two or more bodies must become aware of one anothers movements they thereby enter into a relation on the presubjective, or prepsychological, level.In Aesthetic Theory Adorno defines precisely this presubjective layer of existence as the origin of expressive behavior that is, the prepsychologized body, related in his headspring to the human sensorium, is itself the source of expressive content. Beyondor underlyingthe explicit, conventionalized content of artworks is another content the sensoriums documentary consciousness, as he puts it, of the surrounding world that it probes. In their expression, artworks do not imitate the impulses of individuals, nor in any way those of their authors instead, he continue s, artworks are imitation (mimesis) exclusively as the imitation of an objective expression (1970/1997, 11112 emphasis added). This objective expression is best captured by the musical term espressivo, he continues, since it denotes a dynamic that is entirely intransitive, remote from psychology, although findd by a human subject.Significantly for our purposes, he adds that the objective expression of subjectivity is continuous with the layer of existence of which the sensorium was perhaps once conscious in the world and which now subsists only in artworks (112). This sensoriuma consciousness not yet self-reflexive yet nonetheless a consciousnessis composed of a set of receptors relating intimately to the external world.The layer of existence captured by the sensorium may be considered the objective aspect of subjectivity, the world-sensitive, outer-directed, knowledge-seeking, coping body that is the foundation on which a psychic subjectivity, a personality, builds. Ultimately, fo r Adorno, it is the experience of this objective layer of being (the consciousness of the sensorium) that artworks seek to express. Artworks, Adorno writes, bear expression not where they communicate the subject, but rather where they abjure with the protohistory of subjectivity (112).Another baccate way to think of the relation between the protohistory of subjectivity and expression can be found in the work of Charles Darwin. As unlikely as it may seem, there is a continuum leading from Darwins The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872/1965) through Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception (1962 where he relies severely on Darwin for his understanding of the expressive body), to Adornos Aesthetic Theory and its notion of a primordial sensorimotor apprehension captured mimetically in art.Adornos sensorial consciousness or presubjective layer of being in the world looks surprisingly like Darwins understanding of corporeal intensities tendinous 56 Dance Research J ournal 42 / 1 summer 2010 compactions, deepen circulation, and their various manifestations on the faces and bodies of animals and humans. These corporeal intensities are forms of expressionor proto expression, if you likethat serve as the precondition for the development of more culturally legible, codified expressive gestures (such as the wince or the smile).In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwins theory of expressivity links the development of what we call emoting to primary neurological and physiological responses generated by a sensorimotor intelligence. What we identify as rage, he writes, is actually caused by a response generated in animals by the autonomic circulatory system behavior that comes to be designated as anger (for the observer) begins with an accelerated flow of blood, while behavior identified as joy or vivid pleasure is underwritten, so to speak, by the quickening of the circulation.What we identify as suffering is expressed through the contraction of a wide conversion of muscle groups. Over the course of time, muscular contraction in general comes to be associated with angst, although the specific groups of muscles contracted might vary from culture to culture. For instance, one culture might associate suffering with the contraction of the facial muscles, for example, in a grimace. A different cultureor really, a subculture, such as modern dancemight associate suffering with the contraction of muscles in the abdominal cavity, sternum, and pelvis.In both cases, the adaptive behavior, muscular contraction, can be observed as distinct from the social significations it comes to acquire. Animals and humans both certify behaviors that are closely associated with emotions, but theoretically it should be possibleand this is Darwins goalto dissociate the protosubjective expressiveness of the body (muscle contractions, autonomic responses) from the conventionalized, codified gestures into which this expressivity has been conjugated.Adorno and Cunningham both targetthe first to theorize, the second to achievethis primary order of protosubjective expressiveness contained in, but potentially dissociable from, the conventionalized gestures to which it gives rise. The human situation on stage that is so dramatic or expressive (in Cunninghams vocabulary) is one in which human bodies have been released from the prefabricated shapes and congealed (stiffened) meanings imposed by a given choreographic vocabulary or gestural regime (qtd. n Vaughan 1997, 69). Cunningham trusts that by preventing the conventional sequencing of movements within a phrase (through the application of chance procedures) he allow coax dancers to exhibit dynamics that are at once more objectivein the sense that they are generated by coping mechanisms rather than emotional statesand utterly idiosyncraticradically subjective, we might say, in the sense that they are generated by the singular body of the dancer confronting an utterly uni que human situation on stage. In The Impermanent Art (1952), Cunningham comes very close to naming Darwins corporeal intensities when he evokes an order of muscular dynamics released from association with conventional emotions, such as passion and anger. Here he writes that Dance is not emoting, passion for her, anger against him. I think dance is more primal than that. In its essence, in the nakedness of its energy it is the source from which passion or anger may issue in a particular form, the source of energy out of which may be channeled the energy that goes into the various emotionalDance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 57 behaviors. It is that spirant exhibiting of this energy, i. e. , of energy geared to an intensity high rich to melt steel in some dancers, that gives the great excitement. (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 86) The blatant exhibiting of an intensified corporeal energy bears a relation to what Darwin calls the exhibition of corporeal intensities by animals that can only be said to be wrathful or ashamed if we anthropomorphize their movements.Cunningham seems acutely attuned to what Darwin also notes our tendency to interpret (anthropomorphize) animal behaviors, a tendency he implicitly identifies with the publics desire to read psychological meaning into the intensified corporealities of the dancers on stage. unitary could even say that Cunningham attempts to de-anthropomorphize our understanding of human behavior on stage that is, he wants us to de-reify, to extract from the conventionalized, psychologizing modes of dance spectatorship, the movement behavior blatantly exhibited in his choreography.He asks us to experience even the graceful, plangent duet of Suite by Chance without sentimental overlay, as though it were simply an instance of protosubjective expressivity displayed by two moving bodies implicated in a human situation on stage. Perhaps not incidentally, Cunninghams most suggestive evocation of this protosubjective layer of exp ressivity appears in a passage on animals and musicand it is with this passage that I would like to conclude. Cunningham is talking about his reasons for separating music from his horeography, explaining why he avoids giving his dancers musical cues with which to time the duration of their movements or generate their expressive dynamics. At pains to offer a positive rendering of what he is seeking, he notes instead that the polar opposite of what he aspires to in his collaborations with Cage may be seen and heard in the music successive the movements of wild animals in the Disney films. This music robs them of their instinctual rhythms, he claims, and leaves them as caricatures.True, the movement is a man-made arrangement, but what isnt? (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 10). Let us imagine for a moment the Disney energiser as cave painter, miminglike the primitive dancer of Benjamins On the Mimetic Facultythe power of the animal totem. In an act of sympathetic response, troubling the bound ary between mime and mimed, the animator studies the animal, acquiring its rhythmic gait, the expressive dynamic of its way of howling or extending a paw.Without knowing exactly what the animal means, how that howl or extension signifies in an animal world, the animator copies, uses whatever conventions and imageswhatever man-made arrangementsshe has to approach the original in its presubjective, prepsychologized movement state. That, for Cunningham, is what can be freed through the time out of continuity, through the imposition of the strict, unforgiving disciplines of permutation and chance.The protosubjective order of the wild gesture is what we might see if it were unencumbered by narrative, if it could be captured without the omnipresent, strip-mall swelling music of the Disney world in which we all too often bathed. Ultimately, the human situation on stage is, despite years of rehearsals and revivals, a set of wild gestures expressing what it is like to be a sensorium moving on stage. The challenge that remains is to determine both how Cunninghams choreographic practice divulges the work of the proto-self and how that work informs (and is balanced by 8 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 the exigencies of ) the construction of artworks, that is, the construction of dances for audiences in specific historic settings with demands of their own. Another challenge arises with respect to Adorno and my allied project of reading dance back into Aesthetic Theory. If, as he claims, artworksnot dances, but paintings, sonatas, and poemsreverberate with the protohistory of subjectivity, then where is this reverberation to be located?Where (or when) in the process of art making does protosubjectivity intervene as an agent, as a constituting force? And if, as Adorno implies, we are no longer sensuously alive (the sensorium was perhaps once conscious in the world, he writes), then how do we clear the presence of the sensoriums influence on the composition of art works? What remains of the sensorium in art, of the sensorium in dance? These questions inform the next phase of my research, the contours of which I have only begun to outline.Notes 1. Jose Gil provides several fine articulations of Cunninghams project in The professional dancers Body (2002). I agree with Gil that, in an attempt to make grammar the meaning, or make body awareness command consciousness (121), Cunningham disconnects movements from one another, as if each movement belonged to a different body (122) however, I do not believe that the actual dancer ends up with a multiplicity of virtual bodies (123), a body-without-organs (124).As I document later in this essay, Cunninghams most successful dancers (in his eyes and my own) have been those who are able to absorb the movement sequences into their own body the grammars inflection, the sequences assimilation through the bodys singular dynamics, is what ultimately lends the dance meaning in the way Cunningham intends. 2. See The Impermanent Art, first published in Arts 7, no. 3 (1955) and reproduced in Kostelanetz (1989) and Vaughan (1997). 3.See especially the appendices to Adornos Aesthetic Theory. The work was not finished during Adornos lifetime (Adorno died in 1969. ) 4. Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three was first performed in Milbrook, in the buff York. It contained the following sequence solo, trio, solo, duet, solo, quartet, solo, quartet, solo, duet, solo, trio, solo, quartet, duet, quartet. See Vaughan (1997, 289). 5. Carolyn Brown, personal communication with the author, June 24, 2009. 6. Cunningham presents what he is getting at as ollows You do not separate the human being from the actions he does, or the actions which surround him, but you can see what it is like to break these actions up in different ways, to allow the passion, and it is passion, to appear for each person in his own way (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 10). 7. Mark Johnson (1987) and Daniel Stern (1985/2000) also bel ieve that our ability to be expressive in the more familiar wayto display human emotions such as anger or pityis predicated on a presubjective capacity to organize experience into image schemata ( Johnson) or vitality affects (Stern).The neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio has more recently argued that a protoself, or queasy substrate of sensory feedback, is the condition of possibility for emotions per se (1999). What is expressed by this protoself is movement, a nonthematized awareness of orientation, a sense of balance. Cunninghams choreography appears to be calling on its dancers to express precisely these functions they are what provide the continuity, the dynamic, that is so moving to watch. On the sensorimotor protoself and our access to it, see my Agency and Embodiment (2009). 8. See Damasio (1999) and Jeannerod (2006).Damasio insists that the protoself is entirely nonconscious, but Jeannerod provides persuasive evidence that kinesthetic awareness is often available to the co nscious self. See also Joseph LeDoux (2002) for a alike account. Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 59 Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1970/1997. Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated and introduced by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1986. On the Mimetic Faculty. Reflections Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, edited by Peter Demetz, 33336. new-fangled York Schocken.Brown, Carolyn. 2007. Chance and Circumstance Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham. New York Knopf. Cunningham, Merce. 1951. Rehearsal Notes. Merce Cunningham Archives, Westbeth, New York City, New York. . 19521958. Rehearsal Notes. Merce Cunningham Archives, Westbeth, New York City, New York. . 1968. 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The Body in the Mind The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago University of Chicago Press. Kostelanetz, Richard. 1989. Esthetics Contemporary. Buffalo, NY Prometheus. , ed. 1998. Merce Cunningham Dancing in Space and Time 19441992. New York Da Capo . LeDoux, Joseph. 2002. The Synaptic Self. New York Viking. Manning, Susan A. 1993. Ecstasy and the Demon Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman. Berkeley University of California Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York Routledge. Nicholls, David. 2007.John Cage. Urbana University of Illinois Press. Noland, Carrie. 2009. Agency and Embodiment Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press. Reynolds, Dee. 2007. cadenced Subjects Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham. Hampshire, England Dance Books. Stern, Daniel. 1985/2000. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York Basic. Tobias, Tobi. 1975. Notes for a Piece on Cunningham. Dance Magazine 42 (September). Vaughan, David. 1997. Merce Cunningham liter Years. Edited by Melissa Harris. New York Aperture. 60 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010