Ⅰ. Introduction: Isolation and Connection during the Pandemic
In January 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic began in South Korea, and we faced a completely different personal and social situation than ever before. The epidemic not only produced fear because it threatened the lives of individuals, but also ravaged entire communities. Isolation through quarantine increased the intensity of the suffering of the poor and the socially disadvantaged, and as the private spaces of the infected were exposed publicly, hatred, discrimination, and selfishness toward specific members of society surfaced.1) The pandemic also spawned various controversies around state control, censorship, and physical freedom in relation to policies such as social distancing, quarantine, and limited business hours. As the pandemic spread in time and space, and international problems such as racial hate crimes directed against Asians occurred, it became an opportunity to rethink how the individual's body is connected to others. Dance scholar André Lepecki (2020) points out “In confinement, we experience a radical rearrangement of the range of our actions and movements, while we become extra-aware of the absolutely extra-individual, communal, collective, societal, and even planetary impact of the smallest of our gestures.” During the epidemic, the recognition that we are closely connected to each other, led us to rethink about relationship between self and others in dance.
The Covid-19 crisis has brought people together, we live in a world of provisional entanglements, where disturbances arise around certain nodes and link, and where some people, regions, and groups get disconnected (Vujanović 2021, 3). This study discusses choreography that has changed since Covid-19 from perspectives of ‘common’ and ‘individual’ and proposes concepts of post-choreography. The term Post- has the double meaning of 'away from-' and 'after'. In this study, post- choreography has the meaning of escaping from the dominant concept of choreography and at the same time imagining the choreography in the future. In the history of dance, post-modern dance developed experiments on new dance through criticism of modern dance. Taking the meaning of post as starting point, my thesis will not attempt to define some concepts of post-choreography. Rather I will discuss from practice, within my own artistic practice during pandemic. Based on a critical perspective on the individualization and privatization of dance in neoliberal capitalistic parts of the world, I would like to propose a post-choreography that aims for the collectivity of dance since Covid-19.
Since dance is an art that takes place in public places as collective works, the issues of connection and separateness, and of the individual and the common are important from an ontological and political point of view. Thinking of connection through the isolation caused by the coronavirus does not equate with devising a way out of the current situation. Nor are artists looking for a strategy to return to the previous (state of) artistic work and presentations, accepting the limitations and restrictions they have been given. Rather, how does the pandemic act to help us find connections that were not previously found in our bodies and in our work. Rather than lamenting the feelings of helplessness, depression, or anxiety caused by isolation, it is an opportunity to look out for someone who is invisibly connected to me and to take care of my surroundings and environment, which might have been an object of indifference before. One can experiment with different ways of being "together."
As history has consistently shown, dance has survived and changed with the times, even in moments of crisis such as war or disaster. According to Randy Martin, “Applied to dance, crisis is only a metaphor, since no one could deny that special motion and momentum of dance is inherently progressive, hence creative”(1998, 1). The coronavirus undoubtedly cuased crisis and despair, but it is also gave momentum that hopefully can be used to move to the next stage in history by creating the progressive movement we envision through dance.
Ⅱ. Choreography as Collectiveness
“It's good to rely on others. For no one can bear this life alone.”
- Friedrich Hölderlin (Nancy 2000, 1)
Even before the spread of the virus, there was a tendency to approach choreography from the point of view of collectives, collaborations, networks, and communities in order to recover the communal senses rather than of the individual. Since the 1990s, artists have taken a critical attitude toward the capitalist market, neoliberal society, and art ecosystem. Appropriating the concepts of ‘common,’ ‘collectivity,’ and ‘community,’ which were forgotten in liberal countries, they have foretold a reorganization of theory and practice in art making. Rethinking the value of the common in dance and choreography does not mean pursuing something of a group that has lost its individuality by considering 'common' as a concept opposite to that of the individual. Jean-Luc Nancy notes that "Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of singularly plural coexistence. We do not have meaning anymore, because we ourselves are meaning-entirely, without reserve, infinitely, with no meaning other than us"(2000, 3).
Therefore, the common refers to the plural of an individual. This distances itself from the old ideology of ‘communism,’ which erases the individual and takes the form of a group. Not only are all people different but they are also all different from one another (Ibid, 8). Rethinking the individual through connection with others is possible not only by physical contact, but also by emotional, social, and political conditions. This is the opposite of the privatized and fetishized arts creation that recognizes only one author and the expression of ‘I.’ When the term choreography reappeared in 1920’s, it referred not only to the choreographer as author of dance but to choreography as a creative process (Foster 2009, 106). The understanding was that choreography does not belong to one person, but refers to the contribution of multiple artists to a single work.
The form of collaborative or collective arts that is being developed in contemporary performing arts can be a mode of critical experimentation into the artistic field of individualization, privatization, and marketization. However, even if the group is considered in dance, there is always a hierarchical structure through the distribution of responsibility within work process. It is a way in which one leader has power with responsibility and distributes his or her knowledge, feelings, and thoughts to the rest of the participants. Leadership which established itself as charismatic by an aura referring to a unique, nonrational extraordinary quality that performer perceived in and/or attributed to an individual (choreographer) to the extent that individual seems to inspire and compel them as both individuals and group to follow his or her lead (Cvejić 2003, 2).
However, collective politics means that everyone forms a group as experts without hierarchy in the space of dance work, and all their work should not be attributed to one person. Work entails cooperation on the basis of what the human species has in common: the capacity to work, imagine, and produce, or what after Marx has been referred to as general intellect (Vujanović & Cvejić 2022, 18). People involved in the work, such as dancers, stage crew, producers, and dramaturgs do not support one choreographer instead they participate with their own practice. All the people who make up the ecosystem should not be alienated or excluded, and the shift to an ecological perspective allows for creating common and collective values. Thinking ecologically, “You are fully embodied being who has never been separated from other biological being[s] both inside and outside your body, not for one second” (Morton 2018, 104). Discussions of common and individuals after disasters need to be dealt with in a more ecological background, in a different way from reviewing the choreography of common and individuals in contemporary art in the political context of the post-Cold War era in the 90s.
Thinking of the values of the common in artistic practice is to find the alternative methodologies for living and working together. As dancers we experience that even private and autonomous physical activities such as breathing and moving can be extended to other people, communities, and transnational issues. The idea that individual thoughts and practices can arise through connection with others in the process of work, while recognizing the differences among the participants, is not 'created' by someone's outstanding thoughts, but rather can be said to be 'connecting' while maintaining the individuals' colors and the properties of each individual's thoughts and materials. This is a standpoint that places 'composition' as the origin of art creation rather than something comparable to God’s creation (Lepecki 2014). In Plato's Timaeus, it is said that the beginning of the cosmos and nature was not 'created' but 'constructed.' It is to look at the origin of the universe by the demiurge, the 'constructor.' Generally composition in dance means ordering of each element. In the early 1930s, choreography as a composition is to make movement into the final result mainly through the compositional principle of movement, time, and space (Foster 2009, 105-106). It was not an arrangement of steps that are shared amongst a community of practitioners, as in Raoul Auger Feuillet’s time. but rather a creation of both the movement and its development through time (Ibid, 106). Contrary to this, as an expanded approach to the medium of contemporary dance, theories, discourses, objects, values, emotions, nature and more can be taken as materials for composition, and each gets incorporated in an orderly manner without losing its character. This does not mean listing movements and generating rules in the classical way.
In choreography, each element obtains identification through other elements, or each material by other materials and this creates yet another meaning and knowledge in the in-between space between materials. This connection forms collectiveness as a constellation. Walter Benjamin's proposed the concept of “Konstellation” to discuss the relationship between ideas and phenomena. He said, “Ideas are eternal constellations, and while their elements are grasped by the points of these constellations, the phenomenon is divided and saved at the same time” (Benjamin 2009, 45). Benjamin referred to ideas as objective and potential arrangements of phenomena, as objective explanations of phenomena (Ibid). I suggest that applying Benjamin's “Konstellation” to choreography emphasizes the relationship between participants in the process of creation and constructs the form of collectiveness through the opposing or intimate concepts formed by each part. In choreography, the concepts of the individual, the common, composition, and constellation are materialized in the question of how one can sense invisible connections and become an identifiable subject in connection with others and environment.
Ⅲ. Network and Entanglement: Project of “Entanglement Residency”
In June 2020, I worked with choreographers Lim Jee-ae [Im Ji-ae] and Jang Hye-jin in 'Entanglement Residency,' a project for experimenting with 'doing together' and 'being together' through the artistic imagination even when physical movement was impossible. This project started with a study on curation in dance, focus on curation led by artists. Considering that the original etymology of curation was 'to care,' the keyword 'care' was the basis of our intention for bringing together and connecting people.
This project was done in a simple manner, exchanging emails with artists who could not meet because of the distance, asking about their well-being, creating and sending ‘scores’ based on memories with them or associated images. In this project, a letter was sent to an artist by email every day, and artists who had previously received emails were included in bcc. We called it ‘snowball curation,’ and a total of 26 artists were invited to a digital virtual space called Entanglement Residency.
(An exmaple of a letter)
Dear, Ryoko
Hey! I hope this email finds you well and that everyone in your area is healthy. You might be surprised at this email with a weird subject. I will explain what this is about.
...
Entanglement Residency is an art project which started from the thought of how to connect with each other and continue art work in the era of 'non-contact.' It is also an experiment on 'curation' asking ‘how can we gather?’
...
I looked for information about the belly button on Google.
It is an organ that has no function and remains as a ‘trace.’ As I read this in an article, I thought ‘The underline drawn in the book, the sewing machine left in the corner of the room, the box of useless things-all that remains are traces of love.‘
Your work seems to have left a trace in me,,, Because this is the pandemic era, I want to take care of all that remains with love.
Figure 1
Entanglement Residency. 2020. Examples of scores. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/얽힘레지던시/.
We put our faith in the existence of invisible forces and bonds of connection, and focused on experimenting with sharing our daily life with someone. It was also an experiment in taking care of others who were temporally and spatially distant, and how artists could practice caring in a disastrous situation. In particular, the artists who received letters and scores were not pushed to give an answer or do anything in particular, in order to place importance on the practice that is not for achieving a certain purpose or result, and to suggest loose solidarity and care. In regards to the financial aspect of art production, it was also a way of working without demanding the same from others. The artist who received the letter would continue to receive the scores for other artists, personal memories, artists' concerns, and feedback for two months. They might or might not read letters, perform scores, write replies, be given knowledge, and therefore they were exposed to the potential of diverse experiences and could engage as much or little as they wished. A total of 26 scores were proposed through this project. These were made public through social media and became an open source that anyone who wished could freely use.
It was clear that this project fulfilled a purpose for the artists of overcoming the disaster and continuing their practice. However, could we discover the attributes of choreography in this? Could it be called a choreography simply because all project members were choreographers or dramaturgs who were active in the field of dance? From the perspective of the project members' practice and its temporality and spatiality, this could be viewed as certain proposals for post-choreography that had arisen from a critical stance towards neoliberal art-making after, or even before, the emergence of the Coronavirus.
First, it showed the exploration of the relationships between the individual and the common. We focused on individuals who were scattered around the world, using the memories shared with them as the material for artistic practice, developed a score for a single person, thought about that person for a day, and performed the work for them. Every day, like a ritual, a participant initiated work for an other artist, and this was shared with a number of participants and expanded into a collective memory and artistic practice. In this project, the invited artists and invisible practices for them could be connected to form a constellation. What surfaced was not the expressions of unique thoughts of individual choreographers, but individual subjects and practices crystallized by revealing their differences.
The second is the network as a method of choreography. The pandemic will not turn out to be an opportunity to change how we live together and (not) care about one another unless we change the social imaginary of the collective body (Vujanović 2021, 9). Accordingly, our process and result was to from a network. This means that the artistic work and experiments was carried out not by the expertise of the three members, but by the expanded structure of included subjects, men and women, from range of national and cultural backgrounds. To achieve this diversity, we had to reconsider how we invited people, and curated in a different way than the existing manner, where participants are invited based on the interests of the curator or leader of the art project. Expansion of network does not mean a creation of associations with diverse people with expertise for use, but rather a network from an ecological perspective that could be recognized as an interest in a world we do not know and the backgrounds and individualities of the people who make up art and society.
Finally, our project was rooted in a sense of uncertainty. We tried a reckless experiment every day in which we could become entangled with somebody by performing the score they made while thinking of that person. With the belief that the somebody could be connected just by thinking, acts such as telepathy, prayer, ritualistic action, suggestion, and care were borrowed as methods of entanglement. Each day we traced our memories through the practice of intertwining with others, and were able to experience things or phenomena with different sensations than before. We also structured our practice through an ecological sense of uncertainty that structures the potential for what might not happen. Timothy Morton points out that not being able to be in the subjunctive is a big problem for ecological thinking (2018, 2). If we were allowed so black and white, it would edit out something viral to our experience of ecology, something we can’t actually get rid of: the hesitation quality, feelings of unreality for or distorted or altered reality, feelings of the uncanny (Ibid). This ecological mode of creating uncertainty is a practice for reaching a utopian space or time, against the tendency of neoliberal art, which gets owned by someone at the moment the result was produced and becomes a commodity in the market.
Ⅳ. Conclusion: Choreography as Constellation
As we experienced personal difficulties such as depression, exhaustion, and isolation due to Covid-19, we came to realize that this was not an individual problem, but a social, communal, national or global problem. Even the gastronomic sense of the body that occurs in the private realm works closely with the surroundings with which one has a relationship. This realization led us to a series of practices aimed at restoring a sense of the common in art and criticism against the principles of modernist art creation, which depends on an individual's unique ideas or genius abilities. All the participants in the work share the rights and responsibilities and, going beyond the production of an art work, they seek artistic values in discourses and methodological experiments produced in the process, and pursue diversity arising from individual labors and expertise. This is to disperse the power and responsibility of the conventional choreographer, freeing him or her from the burden of creating everything from the position of an omniscient creator. At the same time, based on the diversity of different participants, this project leads to creative expansion (Lepecki 2014). This is not the order of creation by the One, but the politics of creation through the construction of diversity and connectivity. In addition, it takes an ethically critical position to a single person's ownership, with all participants of the work being given the remuneration of labor and the author's right.
Choreographer Mårten Spångberg (2012) asserts in his manifesto on dance, “If the 21st century is the age of performance, its structure is choreography.” In all kinds of performances and activities that occur socially, beyond the space of theaters or art galleries, choreography can be found through the subject and movement, the occupied place and the context, and their connective structures. This is not a choreography in the narrow sense of organized movements, nor is it an extended choreography that includes all other kinds of media and texts that can be embraced by dance or movement. It refers to formation of constellation through the network and interdependence of individual elements operating behind the phenomena of performance and dance. The collaboration we pursue in an art work is Donna Haraway’s Sympoiesis, that is, 'making together.' The people who participate in the work cannot be wholly subjects or objects. Collaboration is not about joining forces to create a single result, but (about recognizing the fact that) me and my practice are not completely mine but depend on the other people, and I also create the other person's body and actions (Choi 2020, 30).
The ideal artists of neoliberalism are those who entrepreneurize themselves, exchange capital for the labor of those employed for their work, and create works without fail. While following the trend of collaboration or co-creation, it is often the case that the employment status is emphasized in the process, or all added values such as ownership, authorship, symbolic capital of work are attributed to one person. This lacks sensitivity about the vulnerability of having to depend on different actors, denies the interconnections of performers, and excludes politically democratic methods. Discarding the figure of the author-genius and the notion of private ownership over artworks is one more way to experiment with the collective as inscribed in the individual, and vice versa (Vujanović 2021, 7).
I discussed post-choreography with the idea of togetherness. Ecological awareness means thinking and acting ethically and politically on a lot of scales, not just one (Morton 2018, 33). Experiencing the coronavirus disaster together, we have ecologically discovered the fabric of individual vulnerabilities and interdependence. And we came to realize the necessity of solidarity and practice of the common as the only actions of protecting our lives in the post-Covid era. Isn't this the question we face with postchoreography? Can we imagine a relationship that transcends race, class, society, and culture in dance? Can we liberate participants from all hierarchies through a democratic way of working? Can we allow for unruly and seemingly meaningless behaviors that anticipate all the unpredictabilities and potentials with a sense of ecology? Can artistic value be found in remainders and by-products of labor rather than capitalized art productions? Can we be entangled with one another through invisible responsiveness?
