Correspondances (notes for a minor choreographic)

I

Dear Vlatka,

As I write to you, I begin noticing the hands moving across the keyboard. The leaps and coordinated actions of a group of fingers working in concert to form a word or a sentence; the stutters and long hesitations of a phalanx trailing behind; the pulsing of a tendon under repetitious daily strain. These hands dance as they write. Or, not quite dancing nor writing, these hands are dancing-writing. Whatever they can signify is predicated on the indeterminacy of their motions, their singular rhythmic and improvisational logic, their pragmatic yet speculative trajectories. These hands gesture to you. They sound out a way, intuit a mode of passing sense and sensation, dream of new modes of correspondence. These hands are not mine. In this movement toward you, they estrange themselves from the body. Or rather, what they signal is the body’s perpetual motion away from itself, its becoming foreign in the act of address, of commoning. These hands usually go unnoticed. They are negligible, barely legible; some might call them flimsy, others unpredictable. And yet coursing through the shadow of writing and of dancing, these hands might be said to erode, however slightly and imperceptibly, the structural and normative tendencies of those two registers. These hands gesture toward a minor choreographic.

II

Choreography—a term coined under the regime of Louis XIV for a codified system of dance notation—was first challenged for its inability to represent the movements of the upper body, particularly the hands. Despite putting forth significant formal and technical innovations, Raoul Auger Feuillet’s tome Choreography or the Art of Describing Dance (1700)—which outlined what is now known as the Beauchamp-Feuillet system—is tied to Baroque dance’s specificities and as such depicts the intricate motions of legs and feet at the expense of the head, shoulders, arms, or hands. The only hand in sight, one might suggest, is that of the male choreographer, abstracted yet omnipresent, that writes down the dances to be performed. As such, the system appears as a potent technology for the capitalist and colonialist regimes, one that can efficiently disseminate a distinct aesthetic, equating bodily difference with technical lack and thus shaping a homogeneous, standardised, and normative political body.

A quarter of a century later, Pierre Rameau’s Dancing Master (1725) sought to supplement Choreography’s lacunae. It plotted how the dancing body should be positioned and held, and insisted throughout that the hands always be “neither open nor closed” and “above all without affectation.”[i] Hands, the author argues, are central yet overlooked “details.” Particularly, they are that which signal and determine the social function of choreography: through them, the dancing body gestures toward, touches, holds another. And so Rameau engages in countless meticulous descriptions, half writing, half drawing, of how hands should be presented, how they should meet each other or make an exit. What begins as a logical treatise slowly unravels, bifurcating in poetic—almost schizophrenic—meditations, as words become drawings become lines become circles become ellipses. In other words, what the hands are meant to do and look like becomes less and less legible as the writing progresses, as if this heightened attention to their manifold back-and-forth motions led to a disintegration of the subject.

Take that Figure of the lady holding the right hand and going all the way around and leave the hand…One follows the writing-drawing in spirals, trying to decipher and speculate on one hand’s grasp and motion. Is the hand dancing or writing? Where does one trajectory end and another begin? Amid dizziness and disorientation, meaning is unmoored, representation blurred, and subjectivity uprooted, as if to mark the impossibility for the nascent discipline of choreography to fulfill its totalising promise of bodily capture. Other scenarios start to emerge at the edge of legibility: a collection of poetic, excessive hand dances that diverge from and refigure the able and neurotypical body.

III

I began to be moved at the sight of two hands holding each other—you holding me holding you. Or, rather, two hands gesturing at their reflection, moving simultaneously toward and away from themselves. A minute puncture in symmetry. The body composed in your Anatomies, 2008—two sets of arms and legs cut off and rearranged in space across thirty collages on paper—unfolds in a series of minor variations, slightly diverging patterns in space. A body that cannot reproduce itself in its own image. A body becoming fractals, bursting open into new geometries as many abstract yet affective diagrams, improbable scores for an intimate dance of self-foreignness.

In Anatomies, I see the hands—your hands, estranged—as the punctum: the small, poignant details through which the work turns into haptic choreography. I follow their orientation, composition, and entanglement. I am touched by their invitation, subtle and eerie, which recasts a field of relations. This is their “minor gesture.” The “minor,” Erin Manning reminds us, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is “a force that courses through [the major], unmooring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards.”[ii] The minor gesture, then, emphasises a practice in strangeness, a study of that which is unstable and unpredictable yet operative and affirmative, capable of activating a difference in register, a shift in tone. If choreography is that which captures, depicts, and reproduces bodies in relation to dominant forms and knowledges, then Anatomies stages a minor choreographic: It unravels the body—whole, able, stable—in favor of a mobile, empathetic, indeterminate physical force.

IV

I began noticing my insistence to return to the archive to look for a trace I knew didn’t exist. Investigating the intersection of sexual economies and feminist practices in late-nineteenth century dance, I combed through various papers at the Paris Opéra library—administrative notes, artistic statements, letters to and from influential supporters of the art—in search of writings by women dancers. This quest was somewhat doomed from the start, misguided by predetermined notions of value and agency. I had to go through a great deal of materials to really understand the scarcity of what I was looking for, but the recognition of this scarcity allowed me to perceive other registers and modalities at work. A brief note I read early on resurfaced: “Dear monsieur Laquonie, with other danseuses we write to you to ask for one hundred francs for a young danseuse at the Opéra whose father is seriously injured. Emma Sandrini.” This short missive, signed by a danseuse étoile, acknowledges a collective endeavor and an act of care. It recasts a hierarchical field as relational, infused with solidarity. I started to imagine hands holding each other across the ranks imposed by the institution, from the corps de ballet to the soloists: an assembly of hands dancing-writing this letter in common. The feminist work of dance made manifest through and as a myriad of imperceptible gestures, occurring beneath and beyond the dancing onstage or the writing in the archive.

Another document came back to haunt me: a small photograph of a Paris Opéra dancer and courtesan/sex worker, Constance Quéniaux, who was recently “discovered” as the model of Gustave Courbet’s infamous Origin of the World, 1866.[iii] Courbet’s painting depicts a vulva, a naked torso cut off from its limbs. A body reified yet fragmented, like a remnant of a statue, motionless, its history and imaginary stripped from the flesh. In the small image captured by Eugène Disdéri (who is known for the invention and popularization of the carte de visite photograph), Quéniaux is offering her back to the camera, her front kept from view, in what is known as an effacé position. The body here “erases” itself as it dances, as it writes. This image is uncanny: Its composition appears unfinished, lacking the poise of the usual ballet portraits of the time. She is off balance, on her way somewhere, her right hand reaching beyond yet severed by the frame. Her fingers enacting a slight puncture in representation. A gesture of refusal and excess, a rehearsal for a performance, for another life, perhaps. Historians have suggested that her identity as the model of Courbet’s painting was kept secret because, by the time it was exposed, Quéniaux was becoming a widely influential and respected figure in the Parisian art and literary society. She created a rich life in which she lived of men but with women, whilst spending her later days in a villa she had bought in Normandy to support orphans and disabled people. And I am drawn back to the hand in the photograph—her hand, the haptic register it makes manifest. Who is it gesturing toward, what is it smuggling into the future? What are the relations it invents, the minor choreographies it holds?

V

I began remembering Once Over, a performance you and I did in New York City in 2009, in the frame of your solo exhibition “Or Some Other Time” at the Kitchen. Sitting across from each other at a small square table wrapped in white paper, our hands gestured to and away from each other, negotiating together a series of shapes, moves, patterns, and rhythms. We experimented with different registers of gestures—across the narrative, the ordinary, and the abstract realms—using various compositional strategies: repetition, transformation, call-and-response.

We performed in a black-box theatre in front of an audience while the action and its resultant soundscape were recorded by a suspended camera and microphone and projected as a live feed onto a large screen hanging behind us on the stage. There, the dislocated and disembodied hands appeared either as fully fledged protagonists plotting a story without resolution or as a slowly moving landscape composed of fragmented yet autonomous bodies. At once a plane of inscription and a microstage, the table offered a ground on which to write and dance, to write-dance, to choreo-graph. It became a field of actions: an artificial device for framing and intensifying encounters as the coming together and dispersal of bodies. I recall that our hands never touched. Yet across the intimate distance of the table, they carried in common an affective if uncertain choreography: an investigation of correspondence as the delicate holding together of the unknown.

Trying to grasp the contours of By the Means at Hand—the expanded scene it assembles—I picture again an assembly of hands: this time, hands of artists, foreigners meeting across different locations and exchanging artworks be carried to Venice. In the “catalogue of hands,” the photographs of the disembodied hands figure a series of impersonal transactions, ones that reflect on and imagine their own logics of exchange and circulation, forge alternative means and pathways, smuggle art and sense otherwise. They score a minor choreography, one that courses through a major art network and organization (the Venice Biennale) to inflect variation through a multiplicity of works, practices, voices, and experiences that fold the peripheries within. By the Means at Hand can be said to be sustained between bodies in movement, through complex choreographies of gathering and dispersal, as many foreign lives in the making. It lives across and by those hands that carry and hold in common. As such, it is a work of commoning, one that enacts a nonextractive logic and can unsettle—however slightly and imperceptibly—the sedimented materialities and hierarchies of objecthood and authorship in art economies. Its spectral assembly of sustenance makes manifest what passes from hand to hand: an invisible gestural presence, the force of collectivity.

In that spirit, with love,
Noémie

[i] Pierre Rameau, Le maître à danser, Qui enseigne la manière de faire tous les différens pas de Danse dans toute la régularité de l’Art, & de conduire les Bras à chaque pas (Paris: 1725), 42.

[ii] Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 1.

[iii]The historian Claude Schopp made the find by stumbling on a sentence in a letter by Alexandre Dumas fils to George Sand in which Dumas expresses his opposition to Courbet’s political views and aesthetic choices: “One does not paint the most delicate and the most sonorous interior of Miss Queniault (sic) of the Opera.” C.f. L’origine du monde. Vie du modèle (Paris: Phébus, 2018).

Noémie Solomon works as a writer, teacher, dramaturg, translator, and curator around questions of movement histories and notations, ecologies of performance, and experimental choreography. She holds a PhD from New York University and has taught dance and performance theory at NYU, McGill University, Brown University, Wesleyan University, and Hollins University. She edited the anthology DANSE (Presses du réel, 2014) that translated and presented key texts on the somatic and linguistic trades between francophone and North American choreographic cultures. Her curatorial projects include “Dance on Time” at iDANS in Istanbul; “Solos and Solitudes” at Danspace Project in New York City; “Dancing is talking / Talking is dancing” at MoMA PS1 in New York City, and “Rituals of Care” at Gropius Bau in Berlin. Noémie is director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance.