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Performing Abstraction and Brazilian Art

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Performing Abstraction and Brazilian Art arts Article Machine Bodies: Performing Abstraction and Brazilian Art Mariola V. Alvarez Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA; [email protected] Received: 7 October 2019; Accepted: 15 January 2020; Published: 19 January 2020 Abstract: In 1973, Analívia Cordeiro produced the videodance M3x3. Filmed in a Brazilian television studio and choreographed by Cordeiro with a computer, the work explores the limits of the human body through abstraction and its inhabitation of a new media landscape. Tracing the genealogy of M3x3 to the history of videodance, German and Brazilian art, and Brazilian politics, the article spotlights the media central for its conceptualization, production, and circulation to argue for how the video theorizes the posthuman as the inextricable entanglement of the body and technology. Keywords: Brazilian art; videodance; computer art; Analívia Cordeiro; modern dance; abstract art; posthumanism 1. Introduction With an invitation from the annual performing arts celebration of the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland to show her work, Analívia Cordeiro recorded M3x3 in 1973 in black and white in the studios of TV Cultura in her hometown of São Paulo, Brazil, based on choreography formatted with a computer.1 Technology overdetermined M3x3 in multiple ways: a camera recorded it, a television served as the medium for viewing it, and a computer programmed it. Nine female dancers, dressed in black and white costumes, move across a 3 m 3 m gridded stage for over six minutes. The title × emerges from this set design. The camera cuts between two points of view—from above and squarely in front of the dancers, making visible the lines of the dancers’ positions and their placement within the dotted line matrix. Each dancer moves independently and autonomously, adhering closely but not completely to her assigned square. In the course of the video, the group does not come together or synchronize except in the timing of the whole work. As a result, the viewer’s attention remains distracted and dispersed. With the absence of any plot, the dance abruptly ends with the completion of the choreography. The article does not claim that Cordeiro was the first artist to connect dance and video, though within Brazilian art history, she was a pioneer, and M3x3 is considered to be “the oldest tape admitted as belonging to our [Brazilian] video history” (Machado 2007, p. 277). Cordeiro, unlike most Brazilian video artists who identified as visual artists, came from the world of dance. The inherent interdisciplinarity of her work marks the tape as constitutive of contemporary art and worthy of attention, but unfortunately it has also been the reason for the neglect of her practice.2 Cordeiro’s early videos loop between dance, television, and computers, and this entanglement of bodies in movement, machines, and data is at the heart of this analysis. Given the significant interest in the body in postwar Brazilian art, whether the phenomenology of Neoconcrete art or the body in pieces with art under 1 The video can be viewed on Cordeiro’s Vimeo site, see https://vimeo.com/46551344. 2 I borrow this idea of video’s interdisciplinarity from (Ma and Suderburg 2012, pp. ix–xxx). Arts 2020, 9, 11; doi:10.3390/arts9010011 www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Arts 2020, 9, 11 2 of 11 the dictatorship, dance is uniquely able to visualize the impacts of technology on the body.3 M3x3 was produced during an almost decade-long military dictatorship in Brazil, in which citizens lived in a pervasive climate of fear and endured brutal repression. Yet, the military leaders continued the programs of previous administrations to power the economy through national industrialization and production. This essay locates M3x3 at this intersection of machines and bodies in order to think with Cordeiro about the effects of technology on the physical body, its movements, behaviors, and organization. Abstraction can be seen throughout the video artwork including in the non-narrative format of the dance and, most importantly, through the fragmentation of the dancers’ bodies which this essay elucidates in its discussion of the recording techniques, computer programming process, and costume design. The resistance to the unification of the body challenges the autonomy of the human itself, theorized through the lens of posthumanism and considered in particular through the historical context of the Brazilian dictatorship at the time of the video’s production. I argue that the hybrid form of dance and technology—in its production, choreography, and circulation—underlines the limits of the human. The video questions the ways in which the body will inhabit new media in its movements and behaviors and how advanced technologies will reshape the category of the human. To perform, or in other words to experiment with the effects of technology on the body and its biomechanics, Cordeiro abstracted the body. Significantly, given Cordeiro’s focus on the discipline of dance, the human is defined through its physicality, not just as a rational animal. My essay examines the posthuman body in M3x3 as embodiment altered by new media. In order to make my case I address how technology determines the work by organizing the article around the media that produced the work: video, television, and computers. Cordeiro’s interweaving of dance and video art proposes a new chapter in the history of “videodance” which I explain in the first part of the article, before turning to the radical decision to format a computer to aid in the choreography of the dance and, thus, its engagement with the discourse of digital embodiment in posthumanism and Brazilian history. Prophetic and revolutionary Cordeiro envisioned a future that has now come to pass in which bodies have been re-shaped by the technologies with which they interact daily. 2. Videodance Cordeiro’s video operates as an example of videodance which can be defined in one way as the perceptual difference in the experience of live versus recorded dance. The term, attributed to the writings of Jeffrey Bush, Peter Z. Grossman, and Vera Maletic, originally considered the relation of dance to television broadcast and how video would produce a new spatial and temporal performance of dance (Bush and Grossman 1975; Maletic 1987–88).4 In this way, the development of new media and its application to dance forced the evolution of the field and, simultaneously, the body’s capabilities and its perception. Bush and Grossman’s article, written only two years after M3x3, reminding us of the incipient theorization of the form, challenged videodance to address “both halves of the word” and, therefore, rethink the performance of dance. Videodance does not include a live, in-house audience and instead must rely on “the movement of the dance within the window” of the television monitor (Bush and Grossman 1975, pp. 12–13). For much of the history of performance, the live act has been privileged as the site of authenticity, originality, and present-ness (Jones and Heathfield 2012). Documentation of the event whether by a still or moving camera only highlighted the gap between the original and the copy and, thus, the viewer’s distance from the “missed” event. In contrast, videodance is not a recording of a live performance 3 On phenomenology and Neoconcretism, see (Alvarez 2013). On Brazilian art during the dictatorship, see (Calirman 2012). 4 Douglas Rosenberg(2012, p. 3) has more recently proposed an expanded concept, “screendance,” to include “film or video as well as other screen-based software/hardware configurations.” I have decided to use the original term, videodance, to describe Cordeiro’s work given its historical context and its specific considerations of dance and television. Arts 2020, 9, 11 3 of 11 in front of an audience, but rather the dance is performed for the camera and, thus, the viewer’s experience is mediated by the camera. Videodance challenges the categorization of dance as only a live experience, and through its cross-disciplinary promiscuity pushes dance into the visual arts and addresses the corporealization of the body through media. The time or “liveness” of videodance never ceases to exist—its mediation makes every repeated viewing the live act and connects audiences, now potentially at great geographic distances, in radically new ways. The dancers’ bodies materialize only through the mechanisms that record them and present them. Artists such as Len Lye (Rainbow Dance, 1936) serve as early precedents of this form, though Maya Deren’s film A Study for Choreography for Camera (1945) perhaps most famously takes recorded dance as its central preoccupation. The dancer, Talley Beatty, moves in front of the camera, but more radically the camera controls the point of view and through expert editing Deren created movement with the camera. The camera dances, jumps, and glides, shifting the viewer from the natural world to inside a domestic space and back again over the course of the short avant-garde film. Videodance offered the potential for surprise location changes, multiple viewpoints of the dancer’s body including a focus on only a specific part like the head or leg, temporal dissolution, and a sense of weightlessness. Deren’s film concludes with a sense of flight as Beatty jumps and the camera-eye shows us multiple parts of his body through quick editing, holding him suspended in the air before touching down gently onto the ground. The camera extends the spatio-temporal dimension of the dance and transforms the human body into an imaginary potential. Consequently, the body is abstracted; the artist refuses the wholeness of the body visible on the stage. Videodance alters the body in both space and time in order to transcend its physical limits and to reduce it to disjointed body parts.
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