Dancing Other-Wise: Ethics, Difference and Transcendence in Hae Kyung Lee and Dancers

Abstract

Dancing communities use technique to solve material problems in the here and now. Technique’s protocols make the body communally readable and available. They offer interpersonal, social, and archival infrastructure. And they generate primary and secondary rhetorics of affiliation that bridge multiple dimensions of difference within the global city. Yet dancing communities, and technique itself, also organize and, in turn, are organized by the ineffable. For the Sem family in Chapter 3, the celestial Apsara proved too fragile to withstand the withering effects of horror and privation. In other dancing communities, though, technique anchors a collective metaphysics in the material. Here, dancers use rhetoric and images of transcendence to build solidarity and incarnate ethical opportunities and obligations to their audiences and to each other. Technique uses metaphysics and is, in turn, enchanted by it. If the former is, at the simplest level, denotative, making the body legible and communicable, then metaphysics, the latter, is another voice that offers a way of constituting a company community, of characterizing the transporting effects of legible bodies’ beauty, and of grappling with the capriciousness of those bodies’ finitude.