Examples of work responding to these challenges include scholar Erin Brannigan’s writing on dance in galleries which aims to re-centre dance, by asking what it is about dance that the visual arts is desiring; the current exhibition “A Different Way to Move: Minimalismes, New York, 1960-1980” curated by Marcella Lista and presented at Carré d’Art in Nimes, which seeks to highlight the influence of American Postmodern Dance on the development of Minimalism; Sara Wookey’s recent residency at the TATE Modern involving a weekly movement practice for museum staff, in order to question the role of dance in the museum; and numerous critical texts which point to the often undervalued labour of the skilled performer in exhibitions, written by artists including Abigail Levine, Yvonne Rainer and Sara Wookey. 1 When Claire Hicks invited me to guest edit an issue of Critical Dialogues on the topic of dance and visual art, I was interested in bringing a slightly different perspective to the conversation. I was keen to hear from artists and curators who are engaged in experimentation across and between dance and visual art, with a focus on how these activities are providing space for questioning, and possibly expanding, their practices. What do these experiences and experiments across different methods, contexts, mediums, ideologies, modes of spectatorship, histories, futures, economies, speeds and languages offer one’s practice? What emerges when a practice exceeds the limits and possibilities of its originating artform? How might a practice that has been born from the nexus between artforms behave? Given the dialogic nature of the topic of exchange between dance and visual art, I proposed that contributions take the form of conversations between people about conversations between artforms. The responses to this proposed framework reveal a wonderful and thoughtful resistance; resistance to the disciplinary categories of dance and visual art, and resistance to the
contributors’ practices being defined by these disciplines. At times, these writings wrestle head-on with the impossibility of distinguishing the point where one artform ends and another begins, and at other times they consciously avoid the act of naming ‘dance’ and ‘visual art’ altogether. Angela Goh and Bhenji Ra articulate a shared strategy that aims to resist assimilation into any given context or performance platform. In what they describe as, “Always showing up as the alien”, Ra and Goh propose a kind of “monstrous” dialogue whereby they always already position themselves as the Other, with no intention of becoming like their host (the institution). Their use of the drawing game known as Exquisite Corpse puts this desire into practice by simultaneously embracing collaboration and rejecting it. It is a dialogue working at the limits of a wilful not-knowing; a dialogue which ensures that one cannot become like the other through the act of exchange because one never knows, or truly understands, what the other is doing. And yet, its parts work together in producing singular, irreducible beasts. In what might be understood as the flipside to Goh and Ra’s practice of maintaining themselves as the Other, Daisy Sanders and Ivey Wawn develop a writing practice that moves towards a singular voice, by erasing their own names from the dialogue and collapsing their two perspectives into a single text. This writing-towards-monologue connects with an aspect of Wawn’s choreographic practice, which she refers to as radical nondifferentiation. Here, Wawn is interested in approaching the world in ways which ‘diffuse boundaries’ between entities. Radical non-differentiation implies an ethics of togetherness, attentive to responsibilities that we each have to all beings and non-beings who happen to share this world.
5