Abstract
The writing here explores three performances of the production Sol Niger by the dancer-choreographer Keith Hennessy. I did not enjoy or feel called on to participate in the first performance I attended, or as I subsequently realized, was part of, and that is the point of this chapter. In a field of increasingly disunified aesthetics where we are not necessarily going to ‘see’ a production we identify with — through, for example the representations promised by conventional comedy and tragedy1 — and where we may well be faced with something we do not ‘like’, do not understand or recognize ethically or formally, how do we make up our minds about whether to work on that difference or dismiss the experience? Surrounded by ever-more opportunities for making difference from the diversity of ethnicity, gender, age and other unrepresented lived states, how can we decide if a particular production will be worth it? Worth it because life is short, especially life available for these decisions. Worth it in terms of the value we make for ourselves or others, in terms of the change that is effected, the need that is addressed. Desire is easier because we recognize, and chase, its shadow. The bottom line for me is that I know Keith Hennessy and respect his views, but then — having decided to work on difference — how do I do so without getting pulled back into the representational system of hegemonic culture?
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Notes
Lynette Hunter, ‘Internationalism, Performance and Public Culture’, in The Local Meets the Global in Performance, ed. Pirrko Koski and Melissa Sirha (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 21–4.
Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance (‘Différance’, in Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), entered critical discourse in the 1960s, and has been a compelling element in Western philosophy ever since. Here it is used in the spirit of its attempt to find a way of talking about the experience of being faced by a radical sense of incomprehension, a difference beyond metaphysical ontology. Derrida also describes the experience as ‘aporia’ in Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); it is referred to in some writings as ‘vertiginous’ (see Nicole Brossard, Baiser Vertige, Montréal: Typo/Poésie, 2006).
This is a ‘performativity’ that does something different to Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as identities constructed iteratively through complex citational practices in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993). It is closer to, but still different from, Diana Taylor’s sense of the ‘perfomatic’ that mediates between hegemonic discourse and hegemonic agency in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (London: Duke University Press, 2003). For a short critique of the latter, see Lynette Hunter ‘Performatics: Making a noun out of an adjective’, in the On Performatics issue of Performance Research 13.2 (2008), 7.
On partial knowledge see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and Politics of Empowerment (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1990); and for situated knowledge, see Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988). For foundational work in afropessimism, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
See Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 279.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1997), 146–7.
Stephen Morton, ‘Postructuralist Formulations’, in The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. J. Macleod (London: Routledge, 2007), 162–3.
See Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 68.
Lynette Hunter, Critiques of Knowing (London: Routledge, 1999), chs 5 and 6.
Situated textuality is a development out of the situated knowledge epistemologies that cluster around the work of Sandra Harding on ‘strong objectivity’, see Donna Haraway (‘Situated Knowledges’); and Lorraine Code on ecological rhetoric, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Lynette Hunter, ‘Allegory Happens: Allegorical opportunities in late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century arts’, in The Cambridge Guide to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 266–80.
Lynette Hunter, Modern Allegory and Fantasy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), see 180–1 for comments on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of allegory as ‘ruin’ in The Origins of German Tragic Drama.
See Emanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 159–60; see also the translator’s Introduction, xli–xlii.
Lynette Hunter, ‘Unruly Fugues’, in Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Practice, ed. P. Bowman (London: Routledge, 2003), 233–52.
Gayatri Spivak defines catachresis thus, ‘A concept-metaphor without an adequate referent is a catachresis’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), 281.
Tani Barlow reworks Henri Lefebvre to underpin the use of ‘historical catachresis’ in this way, Journal of Women’s History 18.2 (2006), 29, n.14.
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Hunter, L. (2013). Constellation: Engaging with Radical Devised Dance Theatre: Keith Hennessy’s Sol Niger. In: Lichtenfels, P., Rouse, J. (eds) Performance, Politics and Activism. Studies in International Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341051_9
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