Noland. Dance Reaserch

The valet de chambre federal agency on Stage Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of manifestation Carrie Noland jump enquiry Journal, Volume 42, Number 1, pass 2010, pp. 46-60 (Article) Published by University of Illinois Press DOI 10. 1353/drj. 0. 0063 For additional information approximately this article http//muse. jhu. edu/journals/drj/summary/v042/42. 1. noland. hypertext mark-up language Access Provided by University of homosexualchester at 07/08/10 1018PM GMT Photo 1. Merce Cunningham in his 16 dancings for Soloist and bon ton of trey (1952).Photographer Gerda Peterich. 46 terpsichore Research Journal 42 / 1 summer metre 2010 The Hu man Situation on Stage Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression Carrie Noland hither is establishion in Cunninghams breaker point dancing? argon the moving bodies on do communicative? If so, what atomic number 18 they expressing and how does much(prenominal) expression occur? S ever soal o f the finest theorists of boundamong them, Susan Leigh Foster, crown of thorns Franko, and Dee Reynolds pee-pee already approached the question of expressivity in the piece of work of Merce Cunningham.Acknowledging the formalism and astringency of his choreography, they n angiotensin-converting enzymetheless insist that expression does indeed take place. Foster locates expression in the affective signifi crowd stunnedce as debate to the wound up experience of crusade (1986, 38) Franko finds it in an energy source . . . to a gravider extent fundamental than emotion, plot of ground bequeathd as differentiated (1995, 80) and Reynolds identifies expression in the dancing instances sensorimotor faculties as they atomic number 18 deployed fully in the present (2007, 169). Cunningham himself has defined expression in leaping as an intrinsic and necessary quality of figurehead, indicating that his search to capture, isolate, and frame this quality is central to his choreograp hic process. 2 As a decisive theorist (rather than a leaping historian), I am interested in expression as a to a greater extent general, or cross-media, home and in that respectfore find the efforts by Cunningham and his critics to define expression differently, to free it from its obsequiousness to the psyche, refreshing, unconventional, and suggestive.I have fit increasingly convinced that Cunninghams pr comportical and theoretical interventions stinker illuminate more(prenominal) usanceal literary and philosophical discourses on the esthetics of expression and that they have ill-tempered resonance when place with the approach to expression break-danceed by Theodor Adorno in his aesthetical possibility of 1970.Similar to Cunningham, Adorno complicates the category of expression by shifting its location from Carrie Noland is the author of Poetry at Stake Lyric aestheticals and the Ch wholeenge of engineering (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Agency and Embodiment Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Harvard University Press, 2009). Her taste for interdisciplinary work has resulted in two cooperative ventures Diasporic Avant-Gardes Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave, 2009), co-edited with Language poet Barrett Watten, and Migrations of Gesture (Minnesota University Press, 2008), co-edited with S whollyy Ann Ness.She teaches French and comparative literature at the University of atomic number 20, Irvine, and is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, a fellow of the Critical Theory Institute, and handler of Humanities-Arts, an interdisciplinary undergraduate major combining the utilization and analysis of art. Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 47 W subjectivity, mum primarily as a psychic phenomenon, to physical body, understood as a function of locomotion and sensual existence (in Frankos words, something more fundamental than emotion, firearm just as differentiated 1995, 80).Adorn os aesthetical Theory, at in one case rough around the edges and twinkle with insights, is arguably the most(prenominal) important book on aesthetics since Immanuel Kants Critique of Judgment (1790) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Lectures on Aesthetics (1835), the two works that serve as Adornos point of departure. The German-born unisonian and philosopher advances along the lines established by Kant and Hegel, just he consistently raises questions about arts function in society. Adorno belonged to a group of early to mid-twentieth-century philosophers who submitted the classical Enlightenment tradition to Marxist critique.Along with Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukacs, and Bertolt Brecht, Adorno entertained suspicions with require to the nonion of subjective expression he wondered if the artistic languages identified as expressive hadnt become conventionalized to the point where it was necessary to break them down, subject them to permutation, d istortion, or dissonance by immorals of put ons he associated with the category of construction (Adorno 1970/1997, 4044 and 156).Traditionally, expression, he argued, presupposed a self-identical subject to be expressed but if the subject were in fact a reification of something far more volatile, responsive, and delicate, if the subject were, as he put it, something closing curtainr to the shudder of consciousness, past the nature of expression in artworks would have to be rethought (331).It is non my intention in this es arrange to conduct a full analysis of Adornos theory of expression, nor do I intend to apply Adorno to Cunningham, thereby implying that star is more theoretically sophisticated than the other. Instead, I take to initiate a propulsive engagement in the midst of the two in an approach to discern and highlight what I believe to be an incipient theory of expression that is embedded in Cunninghams practice and that secretly informs Adornos account of unexamp ledist aesthetics as well.The theory of expression I am referring to is nonp areil that is non fully articulated in Adornos aesthetics. However, implicit in his debate with the Kantian tradition is an incipient theory of arts engagement with the sensorium focusing on arts perplexity to and dialogue with the sensory and motor body produces an aesthetics arguably in conflict with the traditional aesthetics of disinterested beauty or the cerebral sublime.This naked as a jaybird theory of the aesthetic as implicated in human embodiment stop be drawn out most effectively if we read Adorno in conjunction with watching (and learning more about) Cunninghams dance. Although my concerns are primarily theoretical in nature, I am intrigued by the opportunity to explore how a choreographic and dance practice can go where aesthetic theory has never g mavin before. Neither the technical, discipline-specific language that Adorno employs, nor the schematic idiom Cunningham prefers, can, in is olation, be made to divulge a persuasive alternative account of expression.However, when the two are juxtaposed and intertwined, and when practice itself is analyzed as theoretically pertinent, then(prenominal) a new definition of expression begins to emerge. The question that in a flash arises when one juxtaposes Cunningham with Adorno is Why doesnt Adorno ever mention dance? Although, as has been well documented, terpsichoreans and choreographers were fellow travelers of the authors and artists Adorno treats, 48 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 e never discusses a whiz choreographer during the entire course of Aesthetic Theory. Dance is simply not part of Adornos history, his chronological interference of modern works nor is dance included in his theory, his speculations on how artworks relate to what they are not (nature, natural conditions, the human subject). Dance save grasss a few cameo appearances as the putative origin of all art, a mimetic form related to magic and ritual practices (1970/1997, 5, 329). For Adorno, as for Walter Benjamin, dance coincides with the emergence of art in the caves it is the earliest practice whereby humans mime nature and, by miming, interpret, displace, and stylize nature, even as they attempt to become one with it (Benjamin 1986). In their treatments, dance remains stuck in that cave, never solo modern, because it is more well connected to practices related to the organic body and the sensorium. It may be that what is intrinsic to dance, its address to the body, surreptitiously characterizes all the other art forms that putatively emerged out of it. This is a path of inquiry I am currently pursuing. ) For now, it is competent to note that dance cum dancethat is, as a tradition of corporeal practice that evolves oer time, that has its own schools, and that inspires its own critical discoursesnever conventions as a subject of study in Aesthetic Theory. The diachronic trajectory Adorno establishes f or art in generalits increasing autonomy and formalism as a result of industrialization and secular disenchantmentis neither employ to nor tested in all unrelenting trend against a concrete example of modernist (or any other amiable of ) dance.Thus it could be said that, in the strict sense, Adorno ignores dance. At the very least(prenominal), he finds no place for it in modernism. While other scholars have not been as blind to dances contributions as Adorno, they do have difficulty assimilate it into a standard chronology of twentieth-century art. In Ecstasy and the Demon, Susan Manning sums up the critical consensus Dance stands in an a-synchronous relation to all other twentieth-century forms of expression.It does not evolve at the rhythm it should, or else the story is more messy than one would like (Manning 1993). For example, we cannot say with any certitude that Graham is to romantic ballet as Beckett is to Baudelaire, or as Schoenberg is to Beethoven, or as Malevich i s to David. Whereas art, writing, and music all seem to pass through and through the same moments at about the same timelate Romanticism early modernism late modernism or postmodernismchoreography appears to lag behind, or follow a different route.A typical rendering is provided by Jill Johnstone, who argues that not until Cunningham appeared in the 1950s did modern dance catch up with the evolution of visual art traced by Clement Greenberg (qtd. in Manning 1993, 24). In other words, during the era of cubism, when a constructivist aesthetic was fire uply gaining ground in painting, writing, and musical composition, Isadora Duncan was still execute supposedly natural gestures and emoting supposedly lyric passions on the international stage.My goal here is not to figure out whether Cunningham is modern or postmodern, or why twentieth-century choreography evolved the federal agency it did. What I want to phone about is whether that a-synchronicity, the messier story of dance (and its absence from Kantinspired aesthetics), tells us something about the inadequacy of the Greenberg-Adorno model. How force Cunninghams work shed some light on Aesthetic Theoryits lacunae but besides its possibilities? How baron Aesthetic Theorydespite its inadequaciesbe made to say something of value about dance?Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 49 To approach these areas of questioning intelligently, we must first take away that Adorno treats modernism not simply as a effect of increasing self-reflexivity and formalism but also as a struggleexplicitlywith expression. His chronology of secular art could be encapsulated in the following way (and here comes my speed train version of Aesthetic Theory, which I hope summarizes clearly the vital points of the dialectic) The institutional critique responsible for late impressionist and then cubist rt engenders a suspicion with adore to illusionism the abandonment of illusionism then heralds the embrace of expressionism as a kind of anticonventionalism ( think of of the German art motion of the 1920s, the Neue Sachlichkeit or cutting Objectivity) the subsequent rejection of psychological narrative and subjective emotion, however, entails a critique of expressionism, which then leads ineluctably to an astringent, target areaive constructivism (minimalism, permutational procedures, detect trading operations, and so on). At each moment, expression remainshow could it not? but it is reworked through different forms of critique. For Adorno, the tenseness between expressionism and constructivism becomes paradigmatic of late modernist art. A close reading of Aesthetic Theory reveals further that for its author, this latent hostility is productive of art itself. The salient points of convergence between Adorno and Cunningham are that they both show a label preference for construction and they both reject psychological narrative, yet they simultaneously rescue expression as an inevitable component of man-made things.In their respective and utterly idiosyncratic ways of thinking they both get it on to re-define expressionand they do so in surprisingly compatible ways (although this may not at first seem to be the case). For Cunningham, no movement performed by the human body can ever be lacking in expressive content, either because the human body always dies some kind of dynamic or because the audience member maps onto the moving body a personalized kernel (see brownish 2007, 53). For Adorno, in contrast, expression in art is the antithesis of expressing something (1970/1997, 112 emphasis added).True expression, he argues, is intransitive there is no object for the verb to express. As with the verb to move, there is a transitive form one can move furniture as one can express a liquidsay, juice from an orange. but when referring to dance (as opposed to painting), to be an intransitive form of expression means that a body must move and thus express without an external obj ect to be expressed. Put differently, the expressive movement is not trying to illustrate anything (even the music).And here is where Cunningham and Adorno converge an artistic act can be conceived as antinarrative, apsychological, and yet fully expressive. The dance can move its audience without relying on pathos embedded in plot, or energy framed as categorical emotion. There is no external referent that the bodys movement refers to it is not expressing more than it is (or, rather, more than it is doing). On this reading, expression is borne by a materialitythe moving bodyit can only transcend by losing itself.David Vaughan, Cunninghams archivist, has defined Cunninghams project in end points that resonate in this context It goes without saying, he writes, that Cunningham has not been interested in telling stories or exploring psychological bloods the subject matter of his dances is the dance itself. This does 50 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 not mean that bid is ab sent, but it is not drama in the sense of narrative rather, it arises from the intensity of the kinetic and histrionics experience, and the human speckle on stage. (1997, 7 emphasis added)By intensity of the kinetic and theatrical experience, Vaughan is probably referring to the audiences experience he is alluding to John Martins famous theory that we, as spectators, empathize kinaesthetically with the social dancers (a theory developed by Expressionist dancers of the 1920s, or Ausdruckstanz). (He may also be thinking of Cunninghams aforementioned claim that members of the audience are free to introduce their own mean into the performed motions. ) What is more fire in this passage, however, is the notion of a human situation on stage. What, precisely, does Vaughan mean by a human situation on stage? What would a human situation consist of? How could non-narrative dance produce drama and remain expressive? Expressive of what? To illustrate what a human situation on stage might be, how it solicits an intransitive expression, and thus how it illuminates the hidden corners of Adornos theory of expression, I want to turn to a particular moment in Cunninghams ripening as a choreographer, the breaker point roughly from 1951 to 1956. During these years, Cunningham was just ancestry to experiment with the chance procedures he learned from John Cage.The two dances that are most pertinent in this regard are Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three, a fifty-three-minute work first presented in 1951 Suite by opportunity (19521953) and Solo Suite in Time and Place of 1953, which later became Suite for Five (performed in 1956). The first one, Sixteen Dances, is historic for several reasons it demonstrated the influence of Hindu aesthetics, which Cage had been exploring since at least 1946, when he first mentions Ananda Coomaraswamys The Transformation of Nature (Nicholls 2007, 36).The piece depicts the nine permanent emotions described in the Natyasastra, t he sourcebook of Hindu/Sanskrit classical theater. These emotions were, as Cunningham recast them, Anger, Humor, Sorrow, Heroic Valor, the Odious (or disgust), Wonder, Fear, the Erotic, and Tranquility (or Peace). Moreover, Sixteen Dances ( attach to by a composition Cage wrote bearing the same name) contained what might very well be the first dance sequence based on the use of chance operations. 4 Thus, Sixteen Dances, the very choreography in which chance procedures are introduced for the first time, is explicitly about the emotions and their expression.There is some confusion concerning precisely howand to what extentCunningham applied chance procedures to Sixteen Dances. However, his comments in A Collaborative outgrowth between Music and Dance and his statement notes (in the Cunningham archive at Westbeth) indicate that in at least one segment (the interlude by and by Fear), he used charts and tossed coins to jell the order of the movement sequences ( verbiages), the time i ntervals, and the orientations and spatial arrangements of the dancers.In A Collaborative Process he writes The structure for the piece was to have each of the dances involved with a specific emotion followed by an interlude. Although the order was to alternate light and dark, it didnt seem to matter whether Sorrow or Fear came first, so I tossed a coin. And also in the interlude after Fear, number 14, I used charts of correct Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 51 movements for material for each of the four-spot dancers, and let chance operations decide the continuity. (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 58 qtd. in Kostelanetz 1998, 14041).Again, in ii Questions and Five Dances, Cunningham specifies the individual sequences, and the length of time, and the directions in space of each were discovered by tossing coins. It was the first such experience for me and felt like chaos has come again when I worked in it (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 59). It is clear that the first dance Cunningham chor eographed entirely through the application of chance procedures was Suite by Chance in 1953. Cunninghams published accounts of Suite by Chance are much more specific with respect to the use of charts and coin tossing than his accounts concerning Sixteen Dances (Cunningham 1968, n. . see also Brown 2007, 39 and Charlip qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 62, 70). Carolyn Brown has indicated that in Sixteen Dances it was the order of the movement phrases that was determined by chance, not the individual movements or positions within the movement phrase. 5 The continuity at stake in Sixteen Dances, then, would be the continuity between phrases, not individual movements. And yet, in an unpublished note from the archive, Cunningham indicates that he was already interestedat least conceptuallyin separating phrases into individual movements and enumerating their various possibilities.In other words, the logic generating his later proceduresthe breaking up of phrases into individual movements that were then charted and ordered into sequences selected by chancealready existed in an embryonic state. Anticipating a practice he would in short refine, Cunningham provides the following list of potential movement material in his rehearsal notes Legs can be low, shopping mall or high in air legs can be bent or straight legs can be front, side, or back (Cunningham 1951). The schematic rendering of movement choices (into what he calls gamuts of movement) foreshadows the kinds of taxonomies he would develop later (Vaughan 1997, 72).Photographic representations suggest that at this point in his career, Cunningham was still choosing movement material thematically. That is, the types of movement selected for any given emotion had a culturally conventional relation to that emotion. Describing Sixteen Dances, Cunningham writes the solos were concerned with specific emotional qualities, but they were in image form and not personala yelling warrior for the odious, a man in a chair for the humorous , a bird-masked figure for the wondrous (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 59).Unfortunately, there is no characterisation or film record of the dance, but from the extant photographs, it is apparent that Cunningham was working with a modernist vocabulary there is something reminiscent of Martha Graham or Ted Shawn in the dramatic poses, the off-center leaps, and the contracted upper body that we do not see in his work later. In Cunninghams rehearsal notes (1951) for the pieceand there is no way of knowing if these reflect the completed piece as it was ultimately performedhe jots down the appraisal of introducing a conventional balletic vocabulary for the final quartet on tranquility. Finale to proceed from balletic positions, and return to them at all cadences he exclaims. I believe Cunningham so emphatically chooses balletic positions as starting and termination points, as tranquil rests, because they offer movement material that is less associated 52 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2 010 Photo 2. Merce Cunningham in his Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1952). Photographer Gerda Peterich. by conventionat least, by Graham conventionwith particular emotional states.As Cunningham writes about the period It was almost impossible to see a movement in modern dance during that period not stiffened by literary or personal connection (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 69). If tranquility, the ninth emotion from the Natyasastra, signifies the favorable position of emotion, then perhaps a ballet vocabulary would be appropriate, especially against the background of the in the beginning eight, more conventionally expressive, images used for the solos and the erotic duet. During the years 19511956, Cunningham was obviously making discoveries that would become consistent elements of his practice for years to come.In works such as Sixteen Dances and Solo Suite in Space and Time (1953), not only does he introduce chance operations but he also develops an approach to the bod y as an expressive organ. He chooses movement material that might be considered conventionally expressive as well as movement material based on classroom exercises, but he elects (or engenders through chance operations) a sequence of phrases or poses that is not conventional. In Sixteen Dances newly minted chance operations allow him to experiment with the order of the movement material in a way that endangers the continuity of the dance. But what he learns by endangering that more conventional Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 53 form of continuity is that some other form of continuity can emerge. As he underscores in his rehearsal notes for the 1956 Suite for Five (an source of Solo Suite in Space and Time with added trio, duet, and quintet) kinetics in movement come from the continuity (Cunningham 1951 emphasis in the original). What would supply this continuity if not the acquired syntax of traditional dance forms, if not the momentum of propulsive movements?Over the course of a year of rehearsals for Sixteen Dances (the time it took to mount the duets, trios, and quartets on Dorothea Brea, Joan mule skinner, and Anneliese Widman) Cunningham found his answer. The continuity melding one movement to another would be derived from the dancer herself, that is, from the way she found to string together movements previously not linked by choreographic or classroom practices. In Two Questions and Five Dances, Cunningham describes his pleasure as he watched Joan Skinner take a notoriously difficult sequence of movements and thread them together seamlessly with her own body.Skinner introduced coordination, going from one thing to another, that I had not encountered before, physically (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 59). His comments introduce what emerges as a constant in his choreography. According to Carolyn Brown, Although the general rhythmic structure and tempi were Merces, he wanted me to find my own phrasing within the sections. . . . Unlike what happens i n ballet, there is no other impetus, no additional source of inspiration or energy, no aural stimulus . . . There is only movement, learned and rehearsed in silence.In order for Cunningham dancers to be musical, they must discover, in the movement, out of their own inner resources and innate musicality, what I call, for want of a better word, the song. . . . There is a meaning in every Cunningham dance, but the meaning cannot be translated into words it must be experienced kinaesthetically through the language of movement. (2007, 19596 emphasis in the original) Dynamics are thus not preconceived by the choreographer but alternatively emerge from the dancers creation of unscripted, discovered transitions leading from one movement, or one movement sequence (phrase), to the next.These transitions providing continuity are forged by the dancers own coping mechanism, her way of assimilating each movement into a new sequence, a new logic, that only the body can discover in the process o f repeated execution. In Sixteen Dances Skinner provided him with a crucial insight (reinforced by Carolyn Brown soon after), namely, that the expressivity of the body is lost neither when the elements of an expressive movement vocabulary, a set of image forms, are re-mixed or forcibly dis-articulated, nor when the elements re-mixed are themselves as unbiased and unburdened by cultural associations as possible.So what is the human situation on stageto return to our earlier questionand in what way can it be considered expressive? I believe that what Cunningham was beginning to give away in his work during this period, and that he fully realizes in Suite for Five of 1956, is that the human body is double expressive it can be expressive transitively, in an easily legible, culturally systemize way, and it can be expressive intransitively, simply by exposing its dynamic, arc-engendering force. This intransitive expressivity belongs to an animate form responding at what Adorno calls th e proto subjective level (1970/1997 112).That is, the continuity-creating, coping body is relying on an order of sensorimotor 54 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 sensitivity that is itself an expressive carcass, one that underlies and in fact renders possible what we identify as the familiar signifying system of conventional expressive images and personal emotions. 7 The human situation on stage can therefore be summed up as a set of kinesthetic, proprioceptive, weight-bearing, and sometimes tactile problems to be solved. In the rehearsal notes for Suite for Five (19521958), these problems are enumerated succinctly.Cunningham composed this piece by relying on movement materials whose sequences were determined by the imperfections appearing on a sheet of paper. (Here, he was imitating Cage, who invented the process with Music for Piano, which accompanied the Solo Suite. ) Cunningham tells us that the dancers had to worry about (1) where they are (2) then where to (where the y have to get to) and (3) if more than one person is involved, how the movements they make will be affected by the others presence on the stage. In short, the spatial and interpersonal relationships present the problems and constitute the human situation on the stage. The dancers are called on not to express a particular emotion, or set of emotions, but instead to develop clarified coping mechanisms for creating continuity between disarticulated movements while remaining sensitive to their location in space. They must nourishment time without musical cues sense the presence of the other dancers on stage know blindly, proprioceptively, what these other dancers are doing and adjust the timing and scope of their movements accordingly, thereby expressing the human situation at hand.All this work is expressiveit belongs to the category of expressioninsofar as it is demanded by a human situation on a stage and insofar as human situations on stages (or otherwise) constitute an embodied repartee to the present moment, an embodied response to the utterly unique conditions of existence at one given point in time. In an converse with Jacqueline Lesschaeve, Cunningham puts it this way You have to begin to know where the other dancer is, without looking. It has to do with timing, the relationship with the timing. If you paid upkeep to the timing, then, even if you werent facing them, you knew they were there.And that created a relationship (Cunningham 1991, 22). Relationships, engendering inevitably the human situation, are defined as body-to-body relationships, or really moving-body-to-moving-body relationships. As Tobi Tobias has suggested, perhaps movement is at the core, the bodys response prior the psyches (1975, 43). Contemporary neuroscience is in fact beginning to confirm this point of view relationships are forged kinetically, and thus the human drama begins at a prepsychological, perhaps even presubjective level of interaction with the innovation.The work of Antonio Damasio (1999) and Marc Jeannerod (2006) in particular emphasizes the degree to which largely (although not entirely) nonconscious operations of the sensorimotor systemincluding visuomotor functions and kinesthetic, proprioceptive, haptic, and vestibular systemsconstitute the very conditions of possibility for the emergence of higher level processes of conscious thought, symbolization (language), and feeling. These scientists dub the former, more somatic (and evolutionarily prior) layer of activity the protoself. This protoself is related to homeostasis and the fundamental intelligence that discerns the boundary between the subjects body and other bodies it is thus the corporeal substrate of subjectivity understood as an sentience of existence a separate self. 8 If we return to Cunninghams statement, quoted above, we can see that a relationship Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 55 forged simply by occupying the same duration of time produces a human situation insofar as two bodies are obliged to remain cognisant of each others presence.This awareness is not necessarily black with affect that is, the human situation on stage is not necessarily charged with emotion. To that extent, we can say that Cunninghams choreographic procedure attends to intimacies occurring on the level of the presubjective layer of interaction between human beings presubjective would not mean pre-individual or pre-individuated but rather singular embodiment in an intersubjective milieu before that embodiment enters a narrative, a conventional, socially defined relation to the other.The relation to the other, as Cunningham points out, is structured by time in a duet, for instance, the choreographic imperative is that bodies should be doing particular things at particular moments in a predetermined sequence. Yet at the same time, the cohabitation of that temporal and spatial dimension that is the stage creates a situationa human situationin which two or more bodies must become aware of one anothers movements they thereby enter into a relation on the presubjective, or prepsychological, level.In Aesthetic Theory Adorno defines precisely this presubjective layer of existence as the origin of expressive behaviour that is, the prepsychologized body, related in his mind to the human sensorium, is itself the source of expressive content. Beyondor underlyingthe explicit, conventionalized content of artworks is another content the sensoriums neutral consciousness, as he puts it, of the surrounding world that it probes. In their expression, artworks do not imitate the impulses of individuals, nor in any way those of their authors instead, he continues, artworks are fake (mimesis) exclusively as the imitation of an objective expression (1970/1997, 11112 emphasis added). This objective expression is best captured by the musical term espressivo, he continues, since it denotes a dynamic that is entirely intransitive, remote from psychology, although gi ved by a human subject.Significantly for our purposes, he adds that the objective expression of subjectivity is continuous with the layer of existence of which the sensorium was perhaps once conscious in the world and which now subsists only in artworks (112). This sensoriuma consciousness not yet self-reflexive yet nonetheless a consciousnessis composed of a set of receptors relating intimately to the external world.The layer of existence captured by the sensorium may be considered the objective aspect of subjectivity, the world-sensitive, outer-directed, knowledge-seeking, coping body that is the foundation on which a psychic subjectivity, a personality, builds. Ultimately, for Adorno, it is the experience of this objective layer of being (the consciousness of the sensorium) that artworks seek to express. Artworks, Adorno writes, bear expression not where they communicate the subject, but rather where they reverberate with the protohistory of subjectivity (112).Another fruitful w ay to think of the relation between the protohistory of subjectivity and expression can be found in the work of Charles Darwin. As unbelievable as it may seem, there is a continuum leading from Darwins The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872/1965) through Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception (1962 where he relies heavily on Darwin for his reasonableness of the expressive body), to Adornos Aesthetic Theory and its notion of a primordial sensorimotor apprehension captured mimetically in art.Adornos sensorial consciousness or presubjective layer of being in the world looks surprisingly like Darwins understanding of corporeal intensities goodish 56 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 contractions, accelerated circulation, and their various manifestations on the faces and bodies of animals and humans. These corporeal intensities are forms of expressionor proto expression, if you likethat serve as the precondition for the development of more culturally legibl e, codified expressive gestures (such as the wince or the smile).In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwins theory of expressivity links the development of what we call emoting to primary neurological and physiological responses generated by a sensorimotor intelligence. What we identify as rage, he writes, is actually caused by a response generated in animals by the autonomic circulatory system behavior that comes to be designated as anger (for the observer) begins with an accelerated flow of blood, while behavior identified as joy or vivid pleasure is underwritten, so to speak, by the speed of the circulation.What we identify as suffering is expressed through the contraction of a wide variety of pass groups. Over the course of time, muscular contraction in general comes to be associated with angst, although the specific groups of muscles contracted might vary from culture to culture. For instance, one culture might associate suffering with the contraction of th e facial muscles, for example, in a grimace. A different cultureor really, a subculture, such as modern dancemight associate suffering with the contraction of muscles in the abdominal cavity, sternum, and pelvis.In both cases, the adaptive behavior, muscular contraction, can be observed as distinct from the social significations it comes to acquire. Animals and humans both exhibit behaviors that are tight associated with emotions, but theoretically it should be possibleand this is Darwins goalto dissociate the protosubjective expressiveness of the body (muscle contractions, autonomic responses) from the conventionalized, codified gestures into which this expressivity has been conjugated.Adorno and Cunningham both targetthe first to theorize, the second to achievethis primary order of protosubjective expressiveness contained in, but potentially dissociable from, the conventionalized gestures to which it gives rise. The human situation on stage that is so dramatic or expressive (in Cunninghams vocabulary) is one in which human bodies have been released from the prefabricated shapes and congealed (stiffened) meanings imposed by a given choreographic vocabulary or gestural regime (qtd. n Vaughan 1997, 69). Cunningham trusts that by preventing the conventional sequencing of movements within a phrase (through the application of chance procedures) he will coax dancers to exhibit dynamics that are at once more objectivein the sense that they are generated by coping mechanisms rather than emotional statesand utterly idiosyncraticradically subjective, we might say, in the sense that they are generated by the singular body of the dancer confronting an utterly unique human situation on stage. In The Impermanent Art (1952), Cunningham comes very close to naming Darwins corporeal intensities when he evokes an order of muscular dynamics released from association with conventional emotions, such as passion and anger. Here he writes that Dance is not emoting, passion for her , anger against him. I think dance is more primal than that. In its essence, in the nakedness of its energy it is the source from which passion or anger may issue in a particular form, the source of energy out of which may be channeled the energy that goes into the various emotionalDance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 57 behaviors. It is that insistent exhibiting of this energy, i. e. , of energy geared to an intensity high enough to melt steel in some dancers, that gives the great excitement. (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 86) The blatant exhibiting of an intensified corporeal energy bears a relation to what Darwin calls the exhibition of corporeal intensities by animals that can only be said to be angry or ashamed if we anthropomorphize their movements.Cunningham seems aggressively attuned to what Darwin also notes our tendency to interpret (anthropomorphize) animal behaviors, a tendency he implicitly identifies with the publics desire to read psychological meaning into the intensi fied corporealities of the dancers on stage. One could even say that Cunningham attempts to de-anthropomorphize our understanding of human behavior on stage that is, he wants us to de-reify, to extract from the conventionalized, psychologizing modes of dance spectatorship, the movement behavior blatantly exhibited in his choreography.He asks us to experience even the graceful, plangent duet of Suite by Chance without sentimental overlay, as though it were simply an instance of protosubjective expressivity displayed by two moving bodies implicated in a human situation on stage. Perhaps not incidentally, Cunninghams most suggestive induction of this protosubjective layer of expressivity appears in a passage on animals and musicand it is with this passage that I would like to conclude. Cunningham is talking about his reasons for separating music from his horeography, explaining why he avoids giving his dancers musical cues with which to time the duration of their movements or generat e their expressive dynamics. At pains to offer a positive rendering of what he is seeking, he notes instead that the polar opposite of what he aspires to in his collaborations with Cage may be seen and heard in the music accompanying the movements of speculative animals in the Disney films. This music robs them of their instinctual rhythms, he claims, and leaves them as caricatures.True, the movement is a man-made arrangement, but what isnt? (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 10). Let us imagine for a moment the Disney animator as cave painter, miminglike the raw(a) dancer of Benjamins On the Mimetic Facultythe power of the animal totem. In an act of sympathetic response, troubling the boundary between mime and mimed, the animator studies the animal, acquiring its rhythmic gait, the expressive dynamic of its way of howling or extending a paw.Without knowing exactly what the animal means, how that howl or extension signifies in an animal world, the animator copies, uses whatever conventions a nd imageswhatever man-made arrangementsshe has to approach the original in its presubjective, prepsychologized movement state. That, for Cunningham, is what can be freed through the disruption of continuity, through the imposition of the strict, unforgiving disciplines of permutation and chance.The protosubjective order of the wild gesture is what we might see if it were unencumbered by narrative, if it could be captured without the omnipresent, strip-mall swelling music of the Disney world in which we all too often bathed. Ultimately, the human situation on stage is, despite years of rehearsals and revivals, a set of wild gestures expressing what it is like to be a sensorium moving on stage. The challenge that remains is to determine both how Cunninghams choreographic practice divulges the work of the proto-self and how that work informs (and is balanced by 8 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 the exigencies of ) the construction of artworks, that is, the construction of dan ces for audiences in specific historical settings with demands of their own. Another challenge arises with respect to Adorno and my allied project of reading dance back into Aesthetic Theory. If, as he claims, artworksnot dances, but paintings, sonatas, and poemsreverberate with the protohistory of subjectivity, then where is this reverberation to be located?Where (or when) in the process of art making does protosubjectivity intervene as an agent, as a constituting force? And if, as Adorno implies, we are no longer sensuously alive (the sensorium was perhaps once conscious in the world, he writes), then how do we recognize the presence of the sensoriums influence on the composition of artworks? What remains of the sensorium in art, of the sensorium in dance? These questions inform the next phase of my research, the contours of which I have only begun to outline.Notes 1. Jose Gil provides several fine articulations of Cunninghams project in The Dancers Body (2002). I agree with Gil t hat, in an attempt to make grammar the meaning, or make body awareness command consciousness (121), Cunningham disconnects movements from one another, as if each movement belonged to a different body (122) however, I do not believe that the actual dancer ends up with a multiplicity of virtual bodies (123), a body-without-organs (124).As I document later in this essay, Cunninghams most successful dancers (in his eyes and my own) have been those who are able to absorb the movement sequences into their own body the grammars inflection, the sequences assimilation through the bodys singular dynamics, is what ultimately lends the dance meaning in the way Cunningham intends. 2. See The Impermanent Art, first published in Arts 7, no. 3 (1955) and reproduced in Kostelanetz (1989) and Vaughan (1997). 3.See especially the appendices to Adornos Aesthetic Theory. The work was not finished during Adornos lifetime (Adorno died in 1969. ) 4. Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three was first performed in Milbrook, naked as a jaybird York. It contained the following sequence solo, trio, solo, duet, solo, quartet, solo, quartet, solo, duet, solo, trio, solo, quartet, duet, quartet. See Vaughan (1997, 289). 5. Carolyn Brown, personal communication with the author, June 24, 2009. 6. Cunningham presents what he is getting at as ollows You do not separate the human being from the actions he does, or the actions which surround him, but you can see what it is like to break these actions up in different ways, to allow the passion, and it is passion, to appear for each person in his own way (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 10). 7. Mark Johnson (1987) and Daniel Stern (1985/2000) also believe that our ability to be expressive in the more familiar wayto display human emotions such as anger or pityis predicated on a presubjective cognitive content to organize experience into image schemata ( Johnson) or vitality affects (Stern).The neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio has more recently argued that a protoself, or unquiet substrate of sensory feedback, is the condition of possibility for emotions per se (1999). What is expressed by this protoself is movement, a nonthematized awareness of orientation, a sense of balance. Cunninghams choreography appears to be calling on its dancers to express precisely these functions they are what provide the continuity, the dynamic, that is so moving to watch. On the sensorimotor protoself and our access to it, see my Agency and Embodiment (2009). 8. See Damasio (1999) and Jeannerod (2006).Damasio insists that the protoself is entirely nonconscious, but Jeannerod provides persuasive evidence that kinesthetic awareness is often available to the conscious self. See also Joseph LeDoux (2002) for a similar account. Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 59 deeds Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1970/1997. Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated and introduced by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis University of Mi nnesota Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1986. On the Mimetic Faculty. Reflections Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, edited by Peter Demetz, 33336. saucily York Schocken.Brown, Carolyn. 2007. Chance and Circumstance Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham. New York Knopf. Cunningham, Merce. 1951. Rehearsal Notes. Merce Cunningham Archives, Westbeth, New York City, New York. . 19521958. Rehearsal Notes. Merce Cunningham Archives, Westbeth, New York City, New York. . 1968. Changes Notes on Choreography. Edited by Frances Starr. New York Something Else Press. . 1991. The Dancer and the Dance Merce Cunningham in Conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve. New York Marilyn Boyars. Damasio, Antonio R. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.New York Harcourt Brace. Darwin, Charles. 1872/1965. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Chicago University of Chicago Press. Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading leaping Bodies and Subjects in Co ntemporary American Dance. Berkeley University of California Press. Franko, Mark. 1995. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington Indiana University Press. Gil, Jose. 2002. The Dancers Body. In A Shock to Thought Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Brian Massumi, 11727. London Routledge. Jeannerod, Marc. 2006. Motor Cognition What Actions Tell the Self. Oxford Oxford University Press.Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the capitulum The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago University of Chicago Press. Kostelanetz, Richard. 1989. Esthetics Contemporary. Buffalo, NY Prometheus. , ed. 1998. Merce Cunningham Dancing in Space and Time 19441992. New York Da Capo. LeDoux, Joseph. 2002. The Synaptic Self. New York Viking. Manning, Susan A. 1993. Ecstasy and the Demon Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of bloody shame Wigman. Berkeley University of California Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Sm ith. New York Routledge. Nicholls, David. 2007.John Cage. Urbana University of Illinois Press. Noland, Carrie. 2009. Agency and Embodiment Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press. Reynolds, Dee. 2007. Rhythmic Subjects Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham. Hampshire, England Dance Books. Stern, Daniel. 1985/2000. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York Basic. Tobias, Tobi. 1975. Notes for a Piece on Cunningham. Dance Magazine 42 (September). Vaughan, David. 1997. Merce Cunningham Fifty Years. Edited by Melissa Harris. New York Aperture. 60 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010