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Choreographic/Political Performances: Bodies, Spaces, Actions (Steven Cohen, Femen, Nuit Debout) Michel Briand

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Choreographic/Political Performances: Bodies, Spaces, Actions (Steven Cohen, Femen, Nuit Debout) Michel Briand Choreographic/Political Performances: Bodies, Spaces, Actions (Steven Cohen, Femen, Nuit debout) Michel Briand Abstract:Choreographic activism could be exemplified by three case studies: performances by Steven Cohen, esp. Coq/Cock, 2013; “sextremist” actions by the Femen, since 2012; Nuit debout (“Up all night!”), a democratic forum at the Place de la République, 2016. Some issues are crucial here: “dancing” social and political conflict and ethical/aesthetical interactions; deconstructing/constructing heterotopic spaces and utopian bodies; carnivalesque interplays of irony, critical thinking, spectacular celebration and denunciation; dialectics of discursive and synesthetic pragmatic and negotiation. These performances may also compare to anti-AIDS actions. This paper intends to study choreographic activism or artivism (i.e. art activism) in three context-specific case studies, considered through three main pragmatic perspectives: - Occupying and building up (heterotopic) spaces and times: where? when? - Standing up against and for (esthetic, ethic, and political) values : what? - Queering bodies, discourses, identities, and communities: who? how? But I first would like to state some epistemological and methodological prolegomena about the relation between dance and politics, relying both on ancient, esp. Greek, and recent scholarship on aestheticizing politics and politicizing aesthetics. Politics and dance: humanity and space, dissensus, carnival 1. The Aristotelian definition of human being as phúsei zoon politikón (“a political animal by nature”), in Politics 1253a1-11, implies that a person defines her/himself both as an animal (with a sensitive and practical body as well as embodied psychology, cognition, and thought) and as a part of an organized group (a pólis, not “town”, like ástu, but “city”, that is a “public body” ideally based on eleuthería - freedom, autonomía – self-governance, and koinonía - mutuality). By definition, political life relies upon the interactions, altogether participatory and conflicting, of those two kind of bodies, individual and collective (both “animal”, that is “living, animated”, zoon), through sensorial, especially visual, oral-aural, gestural, kinetic expressions and performances, and in specific spaces, e.g. on the agora (the 1 central public space of the city, where people meet and exchange material goods as well as discourses) and in some other central or peripheral spaces, temples, sanctuaries, gymnasia, theatres, assemblies, councils. A decisive space is also the khóra, the territory forming, with the “town” (ástu), the whole “city” (pólis). In Plato’s Timaeus, 48e4, khóra is a concept referring to a site, receptacle, matrix, substratum or interval, interpreted by Heidegger as a “clearing” where “being” appears. Kristeva (1984) uses this concept in to study poetic/artistic negativity against social and linguistic codes, and Derrida (1994-1995) analyzes “cette chose qui n’est rien de ce à quoi pourtant elle paraît donner lieu – sans jamais rien donner pourtant”, (“this thing which is nothing else than what it/she seems to give rise to — though without ever giving anything”). In reviews, Derrida’s work was presented of special interest to readers in philosophy and literature, but also in “space studies” (architecture, urbanism, design”). Dance studies were often forgotten, before their recent philosophical reevaluation. Khóra, “territory”,i “place” (of an activity), “position” (also for a soldier), is, at least for ancient Greeks, though not for modern linguists, etymologically related to khorós, first “dance area” (in Homer’s Iliad XVIII, in Crete, and an agora, in Sparta, for the historian Pausanias), and in classical Greek “choral dance and song”: DSA conference in Malta was a polis, with a khóra, as well as various khoroí. This corporeal and spatial aspect has been underestimated in political science and history, but not any more in practical philosophy, where dance and politics are well connected, either to govern and control kinetics (like dances and individual/collective emotions and passions in the utopian Republic of Plato) or to handle, adjust, and mediate it, for instance with the help of notions like pathos, phantasia, praxis, mimesis or catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics, Rhetoric, and Politics. Thought divergent, Plato and Aristotle’s agree that politics is not only a question of rational regulation, negotiation, and decision-making, whenever that exists anywhere. Identities and communities are dynamic and 2 precarious, moving social and cultural constructions based on physical, emotional, and practical, exemplarily artistic, devices, forms and forces. 2. In democratic politics, contrary to a widespread opinion, dissensus (“dissent, discord, conflict”) is as decisive as consensus (“concord”). And, from Greek harmonía, etymologically related to árma, “chariot”, as a “good assembly”, and meaning “adjustment, adaptation, assemblage”, then “proper proportion” (of a building or a body), finally “acoustic accord, chords, musical harmony”, “harmony” denotes tenseness and intensity. Likewise tónos (teíno “to stretch, extend”) means “rope, chords”, “tension”, “energy”, and “musical mode”. The architectural and biological, then esthetical, concept of “tensegrity” (“tensional integrity”), in relation with system and rhythm, is quite useful in this perspective: flowing movement without tension nor even organization, is meaningless chaos; structuration and tension, without any floating or looseness, is dead order. And it is quite tempting here to replace “tension” by “dance”, at least metaphorically: various scientific as well as popular etymologies of the word “dance” relate it to lexemes denoting “tension” (indo-european *ten- “to tense, strain, reach, extend, spread”), in Latin or in Old High German. About dissensus as providing an agonistic model for democracy, I refer here to Mouffe (2005) and Mouffe - Erreión (2016), who promote a radicalization of democracy as the construction of an active “people” (dêmos). Dissensus itself has been problematized by Rancière (2010), about the articulation of sensitivity and politics, as in Rancière (2000) and (2011). These studies were first published in French, and fully read by the Femen or a part of the public in Nuit Debout, who are interested in experimenting the relation of politics and aesthetics. Conversely, Rancière (2017) was first published in English, and then translated in French, some years after the artivist performances studied here, all by artists who know about politics, and activists who know about art, especially performing arts.ii I here also refer to Andre Lepecki’s “kinesthetic politics” and to politicized choreographies and choreographed 3 politics, as in Siegmund - Hölscher (2013),iii and Kowal – Siegmund – Martin (2017).iv A crucial point is that these issues are transcultural both in space and time, that is transhistorical, from classical to contemporary times (see Briand (2010) and (2016)). 3. There is not enough space here to develop the role of carnival, as a post-Bakhtinian concept and an efficient conjunction of (political) ritual and (choreographic) spectacle, as well as (choreographic) ritual and (political) spectacle. A decisive concept here is choreographed anti-authoritarian and carnivalesque performativity against oppression, illusion, ideologies, insulting discourses, spread out in space and time, and various kinds of institutionalized violence (in authoritative states, neo-liberal globalized capitalism, or multidimensional cultures of hate, like racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.). A crucial issue is also the way carnivalesque blurs and articulates boundaries, codes of identities, communities, times, spaces, discourses, and practices, and above all binary oppositions such as male/female, academic/popular, tragic/comic/camp, esthetic/political … As a provisory conclusion, I would mention Butler’s reflections about performativity vs. expression in gender (especially queer) studies, now influent in performance studies (Butler 1990), and about the activist bodies, discourses, and movements (Butler 1993 and Butler – Athanassiou 2013). This performativity has some relation with the Deweyan idea of “art as experience” (1934), and that may help to justify the following structure of this paper in three parts, about: 1. Occupying and building up, 2. Standing up, and 3. Queering. The three related case-studies are: Steven Cohen’s performances, especially Coq/Cock; the Femen’s sextremist actions against Front National, Manif pour Tous, Civitas; Nuit Debout (several months of political debate on the Place de la République, Paris) Occupying and building up (heterotopic) spaces and times: where? when? Three main relations between performance and spaces as political territories and matrices for energized bodies can be noticed in these three examples. 4 1. Occupation. Nuit Debout uses to be compared with long lasting events like Occupy Wall Street and integrated in the so-called “movements of places”. It is related with specific sites, first with Place de la République, where a monumental statue of Marianne stands, a popular allegory of French Republic, inaugurated in 1883. The place was given its name in 1879, at the beginning of the 3rd Republic. Its previous name was less political (Place du Château d’Eau / Water Tower Square). Just before, during the Second Empire and the Hausmannian urban revolution, its reorganization had also military reasons, although it was an important site for the Carnaval de Paris. During
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