8 Comments

1. Dea
   Posted June 4, 2010 at 12:14 pm | Permalink

   Dear Beat­rijs,

   Thank-you for your rel­e­vantly incor­po­rat­ing dance into the over­all theme of our class and blog. I believe that Crys­tal Pite’s com­men­tary on a kind of silence that is not really a silence accu­rately depicts her chore­og­ra­phy on many lev­els. Pite’s expe­ri­ence of silence appears to be a rela­tion­ship with “non-sounds” that make up vary­ing silences. What is espe­cially inter­est­ing to me is that although to an audi­ence, silence may be per­ceived when dancers move on a stage with­out music, voice, or pur­pose­fully “pro­duced” sound, to the dancer the rhythm of their danc­ing, and the rhythm of the move­ments that the body cre­ates is the most sound-producing, or alter­na­tively, noise-producing of all; the per­cep­tive audi­ence mem­ber should how­ever feel, or per­haps more accu­rately “hear” the noise of the dancer’s and choreographer’s rhythm. The binary between “silence” and “sound” then becomes less rel­e­vant as rhythm becomes the main source of com­mu­ni­ca­tion on the stage, but also between per­former and audi­ence. Rhythm, whether silent or not, thus com­mu­ni­cates with­out musi­cal mea­sure (even within a chore­og­ra­phy that appears to be devoid of space/place and time specificities).

   You use the term “raw light” to describe Kidd Pivot’s light­ing pro­duc­tion. What dif­fer­en­ti­ates “raw light” from other light sources? Per­haps your use of the term is sim­i­lar to Pite’s descrip­tion of silence. Both you and Pite clar­ify the impos­si­bil­ity of the bina­ries of “silence” ver­sus “sound” and “light” ver­sus “dark”.

   If you are inter­ested in fur­ther­ing your explo­ration of the Van­cou­ver dance scene then check out Emily Mol­nar Dance, and Wen Wei Dance. Although these chore­o­g­ra­phers and dancers are involved in very dif­fer­ent work than that of Crys­tal Pite, much of what you have dis­cussed in both your blog entry and in your pre­sen­ta­tion remains very rel­e­vant in their works also. Enjoy!

   Ps. I won­der why you have cho­sen to use Crys­tal Pite’s first name to refer to her through­out your essay, in con­trast with Michel Ser­res’ last name?

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2. leoniekebaerwaldt
   Posted June 6, 2010 at 1:25 pm | Permalink

   Hey Beat­rijs,
   I think your sub­ject is very inter­est­ing. I loved your pre­sen­ta­tion as well. When I was lis­ten­ing to your pre­sen­ta­tion as well as when I was read­ing your essay, I kept think­ing about this unknown and the bizarre need to get to know the unknown, to define it, to give dif­fer­ent words to it and dif­fer­ent states of being, such as ‘shadow’ or ‘noise’. I think this is an ancient prob­lem within philo­soph­i­cal think­ing. You can trace the categorizing/naming of the unknown back from the notion of the ‘a-discursive’ to Kant with his ‘Ding an Sich’, Schopen­hauer with his ‘Welt als Wille und Vorstel­lung, Nietsche with his ‘Wille zur macht’ and ‘Umw­er­tung aller Werte’ to The ancient Greek think­ing about the world as water and flux. Maybe even the notion of a monothe­is­tic tran­scen­den­tal God can be put in that line of thought.
   The best way I can think of the unknown is in terms of its func­tion. Like the a-discursive, the unknown is that third ele­ment which gives mean­ing to the for­mer oppo­si­tional ele­ments. All pre­vi­ous men­tioned philoso­phers need this inac­ces­si­ble ele­ment to con­sti­tute the mean­ing of every­day phys­i­cal exis­tence.
   But why not just name it the unknown, and give it all these mean­ings such as noise or will or flux or chaos (like in Annes essay about the ocean and my essay on Caribbean lit­er­a­ture).
   I don’t know, but this is some­thing that has been both­er­ing me for a long time now, maybe you have Ideas on that?
   Thanks for writ­ing the essay!
   You really com­bined all sorts of the­o­ries together in a beau­ti­ful way!

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3. stephanlitspat2010
   Posted June 7, 2010 at 1:02 am | Permalink

   Hey Beat­rice, I remem­bered you say­ing that for your last essay you wanted to use your pre­sen­ta­tion — where ‘use’ means not merely to keep the rec­ol­lec­tion of the pre­sen­ta­tion vivid, but also to do some­thing new with it, and explore things fur­ther. I think you did exactly that, so great job.

   There are a lot of inter­est­ing things you open up for dis­cus­sion. I can­not address all of them with­out mak­ing this com­ment an essay in itself, so I will be as ‘essen­tial’ as possible:

   You invoke the known — unknown dis­tinc­tion, which has a promi­nent func­tion in the works of Pite, but also in our course; we can see it in the dark-light dis­tinc­tion and the dis­tinc­tions between dis­cour­sive, non-discoursive, and a-discoursive. (Con­sid­er­ing the lat­ter, by the way, I am still very uncer­tain to say some­thing unflinch­ingly clear about it, to say ‘this is like this’ and ‘this is like that’.) If I got you right — or else, this is the way I’d like to see it — we must sus­pect this know – unknown dis­tinc­tion, for it runs the risk of falling into the same old subject-object dis­tinc­tion, where we live, on the one hand, in a world of phe­nom­ena from which we can­not escape, and where there also is the world of silence, noise, the real, and truth where ‘every­thing comes from’, indeed a sort of Ding-an-sich. Per­haps the cor­re­spon­dence aspect dis­ap­pears, but the divi­sion is still there, plus: another truth-claim is made, which leads to para­dox. I think you pay atten­tion to this when you link the divi­sion to Ser­res and to the Shan­ley quote.

   I agree with you that Pite’s goes sort of another way. By say­ing that her work doesn’t have any­thing to do with truth or untruth, you (or she) neutralize(s) the truth-claim aspect of it — and I think this is rightly so. Instead, she shows some­thing. The unknown is, like you say, trans­formed into some­thing that the dancers do.

   But I also think Pite is simul­ta­ne­ously inside and out­side this the­o­ret­i­cal dis­cus­sion. Like I said, I am uncer­tain to say some­thing unflinch­ingly about the whole a/dis/non-coursive dis­cussing – I am still guess­ing there a bit – so I want to avoid mak­ing too much assump­tions. (And if you know The Answer, please tell me ;-)) – But lets say that in the the­o­ret­i­cal dis­cus­sion the unknown becomes known through prac­tice. Rorty’s the­ory of the metaphor imme­di­ately comes to my mind: the metaphor descends in a lan­guage game and grad­u­ally mean­ing comes into exis­tence. In one way, Pite’s work is in line with this: the unknown becomes vis­i­ble, more or less, in the mov­ing of shad­owy bod­ies. What is remark­able, though, is that in Pite’s pieces the unknown becomes vis­i­ble as the unknown. Where in the­ory the vis­i­ble comes out of the dark­ness, in Pite the dark­ness is already vis­i­ble, next to the light. Both dark­ness and light are trans­formed into some­thing the writ­ers do. In this way she breaks with the theory.

   In another way, how­ever, she does seem to present us with a grad­ual going ´from dark to light´. First there are many shad­ows, then just one, and then also that one is revealed as Pite her­self. This rev­e­la­tion makes her at the same time the ulti­mate pup­peteer and ´just a part´ of the per­for­mance. (Very cool.) But here she also breaks with the the­ory. Where in the­ory the mak­ing vis­i­ble of one thing implies the keep­ing in the dark­ness of the other, in Pite in the end all shad­ows lose their dark­ness, every­thing becomes ‘mov­ing light’.

   I think my ques­tion is: does this make sense to you? As a last remark I think it is impor­tant to keep in mind that Pite is, like you say, giv­ing us a visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the dark-light dis­tinc­tion (thereby mak­ing this same dis­tinc­tion blurry). But it stays a rep­re­sen­ta­tion. The unknown itself doesn’t become vis­i­ble as such. On another level, though, we can say that she has made some­thing vis­i­ble by pre­sent­ing us this rep­re­sen­ta­tion in a whole new way – like a metaphor. But in the­ory this (we should assume) was done by also mak­ing another thing invis­i­ble. Not the shad­owy bod­ies – for they are part of the game – but the absence of cer­tain other things, req­ui­sites, music, dance-moves, etc. There are no tutu’s, for exam­ple. I am a bit puz­zled myself now about the whole dis­cus­sion, but I hope you get my point.

   Stephan

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4. Dea
   Posted June 7, 2010 at 3:19 pm | Permalink

   Hello again Beat­rijs, and hi Stephan and Leonieke,

   Leonieke asks why the unknown can­not sim­ply remain as being named the “unknown”; Stephan how­ever in his last para­graph seems to hint that the unknown can be equated to an absence of some­thing. I can­not iden­tify why the the­o­ret­i­cal or actual absence of “some­thing” (this could be as Stephan sug­gests the absence of a tutu, but it could just as well be the absence of a live python as we are not deal­ing with an inter­pre­ta­tion or trans­for­ma­tion of a known tutu-wearing clas­si­cal bal­let) could be an indi­ca­tion of what is unknown. The unknown for me, could as Leonieke sug­gests sim­ply remain the “unknown”, but as I imag­ine it, espe­cially keep­ing in mind Pite’s work as well as other dance per­for­mances, the unknown is where light is not shed. The shad­ows in this case become much closer to the known than the dolls or the pup­peteers them­selves do. In this case Stephan’s com­ment that Pite has cre­ated a new kind of vis­i­bil­ity com­ple­ments the idea the light high­lights the shadow, and iron­i­cally, the shadow becomes “more known” than the image the shadow represents.

   Any thoughts on this?

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   • stephanlitspat2010
     Posted June 8, 2010 at 2:54 pm | Permalink

     Hey Dea,

     I see I have to elab­o­rate a lit­tle more on my use of the notion of ‘absence’. Of course I don’t it as a lit­eral equa­tion with the unknown: it would be a bit extreme to say that when I am absent in class — I am sick or what­ever — it actu­ally means that I am ‘The Unknown’.

     My use is in line with Foucault’s thought of power as mak­ing one thing vis­i­ble, while keep­ing another thing dark. Like with the dif­fer­ent pro­duc­tions of space Fou­cault men­tions: in the times of Galileo space as homogein­ity was ‘in the light’ while space as emplace­ment was then in the dark, ‘absent’ so to speak, and it was this last kind of space which became vis­i­ble, into the light, present, in our times.

     So because ‘Power is every­where’ we could also see the work of Pite as some­thing which makes one thing light while keep­ing another dark. I used ‘absent’ to indi­cate that this kind of unknown­ness — the ‘really’ invis­i­ble one — is dif­fer­ent from the unknown or the dark­ness we see (!) on stage, i.e. the shad­owy bod­ies. So seen from another level, Pite’s play between dark and light is a way of artic­u­la­tion, which auto­mat­i­cally rules over other ways of artic­u­la­tion. With ‘doing this’ she does ‘not do that’. The exam­ple of the tutu was indeed a bit sim­plis­tic, on too small a level per­haps, but I hope I made it a bit clear.

     Con­sid­er­ing how we should call the ‘unknown’: I don’t care how we call it. Leonieke seems to pre­fer just call­ing it ‘the unknown’ for we should not try to define it. For the same rea­son I pre­fer the oppo­site. The pos­si­b­lity of giv­ing it many names, never anchor­ing in one of them, indi­cates the ungras­pable sta­tus of the unknown. In this way, merely want­ing to name it ‘the unknown’ is actu­ally try­ing to anchor it, define it, more force­fully. To repeat the last line of my essay: “Noth­ing should be closed off”

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5. beatrijs
   Posted June 8, 2010 at 4:18 pm | Permalink

   Hey Stephan, Dea and Leonieke,

   since there is this whole dis­cus­sion going on and I couldn’t reply ear­lier and I don’t really know how to do this in a com­pre­hen­si­ble way I’ll just try to put my ideas on every­thing that you guys said in one comment.

   @ Stephan: you say that Pite (@ Dea: I called her by her first name with­out a spe­cific rea­son in my post) is both inside and out­side the the­o­ret­i­cal dis­cus­sion. I think you’re absolutely right. But I mainly think so because for her, it is not a mat­ter of the­ory, it is a mat­ter of doing. She does what she does and what she does comes out of ques­tions that she feels are rel­e­vant for her per­son­ally and there­fore feels the need to trans­form them into danse. But her work is all the more inter­est­ing to me pre­cisely because she is so out­side of the­ory. It is most clear for me when she talks about the unmapped spaces in the clip on Fron­tier, what she called ‘terra incog­nita.’ She said there that in a way she found the the­o­rists ‘endear­ingly sim­ple’ because they named unknown land terra incog­nita. And of course she is right. Because from her point of view it is tak­ing the easy way out. It is like doc­tors that have come up with so many dif­fer­ent names for all sorts of med­ical con­di­tions of which they don’t know the ori­gin or the cure for it. These names don’t actu­ally mean any­thing, except for: ‘we don’t know.’

   But that is not what you meant. You meant that her work is both in line with the­ory (the the­o­ries we’re talk­ing about here now) and not in line with it at the same time. I agree with you about her shadow’s (her unknown) com­ing out of the dark­ness as shad­ows. There­fore they both become vis­i­ble and they do not. They become vis­i­ble as shad­ows. I also agree with you with regard to that ‘grad­ual going from dark to light’ that we can see in ‘Dark Mat­ters’. But I don’t know if I really agree with your propo­si­tion that she breaks with the­ory, because in Pite’s work all dark­ness (all the unknown) dis­ap­pears and becomes known. That doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily have to be so, right? That what we see becomes known, but that doesn’t mean that that is ‘all there is to be seen.’ You say in the end of your com­ment that — mak­ing a par­al­lel with the­ory — she made some­thing else invis­i­ble by mak­ing the shad­ows from the first part of the piece vis­i­ble. Maybe that already con­tra­dicts your first ques­tion (or maybe it was more a state­ment) that all dark­ness emerges into the light. But I’d rather see it as if it is not Pite that makes some­thing vis­i­ble or keeps or makes some­thing invis­i­ble. It is more a con­se­quence of that what she does. Because with every­thing that emerges into the light, there is so much more that doesn’t. We can see this on the level of her inten­tions, but that goes also regard­less of those.
   In your answer to Dea, it seems to me as if this is the same as what you argue. If that is so, I have noth­ing to add to what you said, because then we just agree.

   @ Dea: you said that for you, the unknown is where light is not shed. Because the shad­ows (at least par­tially) emerge in the light, and become known (as shadow), they are more known than those fig­ures that do not emerge into the light at all. Did I get you right with this inter­pre­ta­tion?
   I think it’s inter­est­ing what you say, because from it speaks this idea that by intro­duc­ing the shadow as a metaphor for the unknown, and then let­ting the shadow emerge in the light, makes the shadow (Pite’s shad­owy dancers) lose its (their) metaphor­i­cal func­tion, because the unknown ‘can­not’ come out of the dark­ness with­out los­ing its inher­ent mean­ing.
   That is a pre­cisely oppo­site posi­tion from the one I was try­ing to defend in my post, and it is in line with Ser­res, who says that every phe­nom­e­non rises from the noise, but at the same time leaves the noise as soon as it comes into existence.

   Another thing that is inter­est­ing is that most of the com­ment­ing is about light and dark­ness and about vis­i­bil­ity and invis­i­bil­ity, but not about sound. I agree with Stephan (again, pff) that I’d rather have a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent words for the same thing (how­ever con­fus­ing that may be for the inter­preter). That is why I have tried to per­ceive Pite’s work from so many dif­fer­ent angles, from so many dif­fer­ent words, that even­tu­ally come down to the same thing. But what I am con­fused about is whether we should make a dis­tinc­tion between the visual or the audi­ble. I have not done it in my post. In my opin­ion, Pite’s work plays with both the visual com­po­nent and with the audi­ble com­po­nent. She shows that there is never one or the other, but always both, and that one does not imply the absence of the other. Dea, you also talked about that in your com­ment. I think by the way that your addi­tion of the sounds that is pro­duced by the dancers them­selves is very use­full and com­ple­men­tary to my point. Ser­res talks about noise from this thought that sound can never be absent, unlike the visual. But in Pite’s work the light is not absent either, nor is dark­ness. If for Dea, the unknown is there where the light is not shed, where does that leave noise, sound or silence? Is it some­thing dif­fer­ent? Is it the same but seen from a dif­fer­ent view­point? Leonieke has a point with her com­ment here. But if we look at the unknown in terms of func­tion and as ‘that third ele­ment which gives mean­ing to the for­mer oppo­si­tional ele­ments’ does it then mat­ter whether we’re talk­ing about some­thing we can see or some­thing we can hear?

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6. stephanlitspat2010
   Posted June 8, 2010 at 4:53 pm | Permalink

   Hey Beat­rice, it’s not nec­es­sary now to give a long reac­tion: I think we pretty much agree. The remark, though, that in “Dark Mat­ters” every­thing that was dark first even­tu­ally turns into light, was on another level rather than that it con­tra­dicted the rest I have said. The way you described the per­for­mance, that what we see on stage — first many dark fig­ures, then just one, and then thát one also reveal­ing her­self (as Pite, you say) — made me say that there was this kind rev­e­la­tory process from dark­ness to light. So this is only on the level of ‘the mes­sage’ of what we see on stage, on the level of inter­play of dark­ness and light as we see it per­formed. (Although ‘the mes­sage’ just as the ‘inten­tion’ of a piece, are risky terms.) This inter­play­ing per­fomence itself is, on another level, indeed a power-relation where, as you say, “with every­thing that emerges into the light, there is so much more that doesn’t.”

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   • beatrijs
     Posted June 8, 2010 at 5:14 pm | Permalink

     Got it. I see what you mean. It’s always about lev­els. (I’m btw also amazed by the cool­ness of it. On mul­ti­ple lev­els that is.) What I said about inten­tion was just with regard to the chore­og­ra­phy as such. I know you think it’s risky but my inten­tion was not to play dare­devil. (with inten­tional ambiguity)

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