The Choreography of the Gaze: Looking Back at Spectators in Works by Pina Bausch and Jacques Tati
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The choreography of the gaze: looking back at spectators in works by Pina Bausch and Jacques Tati Nitin Vengurlekar A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of the Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of New South Wales November 2018 Thesis/Dissertation Sheet Surname/Family Name : VENGURLEKAR Given Name/s : NITIN Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar : PhD Faculty : Arts and Social Sciences School : Arts and Media The choreography of the gaze: looking back at spectators in works by Pina Bausch Thesis Title : and Jacques Tati Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) This thesis proposes a new theory of the gaze to understand specific choreographic strategies of dance-theatre practitioner Pina Bausch and film-maker Jacques Tati and their potential impact on spectators. It examines how Bausch in her early works Blaubart (1977) and Café Müller (1978) and Tati in his masterpiece Play Time (1967) conceive of and deploy choreography as a critical practice and framework for exploring and ultimately reorganising the relationship between being and seeing in the new physical and politico-cultural spaces of post-World War Two modernity. By interpreting the mutually illuminating strategies of Bausch and Tati in relation to recent work on the Lacanian gaze, I come to argue that these artists use choreography not simply to facilitate critical looking and self-reflexivity but also to disrupt the spectator’s capacity to position herself altogether in relation to images. I describe this disruptiveness as a process through which gestures and spaces stop meaning and start looking back at spectators. Jacques Lacan’s conception of the gaze as objet petit a offers a means of understanding the disruptive sense of images and/or objects looking back at the subject. Recent interventions in psychoanalytic film theory crucially revise earlier conceptions of the gaze in film studies precisely to argue that the gaze ruptures the plenitude of meaning presumed to be established in the realm of the Imaginary and instead induces an experience of the Real that is necessarily unrepresentable. This thesis contends that the Imaginary is in fact crucial to understanding the aesthetic territory from which the gaze emerges and its relation to ways of moving and practices of becoming/being. I therefore examine how the selected choreographies create the conditions for the gaze by reproducing the structure and imagery of the Imaginary. Lacan’s notion of the gaze is used to understand the way in which the selected works bring their spectators into an encounter with their own becoming as subjects. By challenging the frames through which spectators look, the works ultimately challenge political narratives of subjectivity based on hierarchical and historically inscribed visual relationships with bodies, objects, and images. Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents a non-exclusive licence to archive and to make available (including to members of the public) my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known. I acknowledge that I retain all intellectual property rights which subsist in my thesis or dissertation, such as copyright and patent rights, subject to applicable law. 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Name Signature Date (dd/mm/yy) Nitin Vengurlekar 20/11/19 i Abstract This thesis proposes a new theory of the gaze to understand specific choreographic strategies of dance-theatre practitioner Pina Bausch and film-maker Jacques Tati and their potential impact on spectators. It examines how Bausch in her early works Blaubart (1977) and Café Müller (1978) and Tati in his masterpiece Play Time (1967) conceive of and deploy choreography as a critical practice and framework for exploring and ultimately reorganising the relationship between being and seeing in the new physical and politico-cultural spaces of post-World War Two modernity. By interpreting the mutually illuminating strategies of Bausch and Tati in relation to recent work on the Lacanian gaze, I come to argue that these artists use choreography not simply to facilitate critical looking and self-reflexivity but also to disrupt the spectator’s capacity to position herself altogether in relation to images. I describe this disruptiveness as a process through which gestures and spaces stop meaning and start looking back at spectators. Jacques Lacan’s conception of the gaze as objet petit a offers a means of understanding the disruptive sense of images and/or objects looking back at the subject. Recent interventions in psychoanalytic film theory crucially revise earlier conceptions of the gaze in film studies precisely to argue that the gaze ruptures the plenitude of meaning presumed to be established in the realm of the Imaginary and instead induces an experience of the Real that is necessarily unrepresentable. This thesis contends that the Imaginary is in fact crucial to understanding the aesthetic territory from which the