Theatrical Apparatuses of Disjunction

Abstract

Before our inquiry continues with the theatrical aspects of representation, we need to explicate the term “theater dance” within the Western-centric (West European and North American) tradition within which the choreographies considered here are made and presented. The attribute of “theater” means more than an institutional distinction from nonartistic dance practices such as social dancing or traditional folkloric dance. Since its modern professionalization in the eighteenth century, dance as an art discipline in the Western tradition has taken place within the theater, whereby most of the aspects of its production and presentation have been regulated by the apparatus of theater. Like other performing arts in the period of the Neo-Avantgarde of the 1960s-’70s, experimental practices in dance, most famously those of the choreographers of the Judson Dance Theater, contested theater under the principle of fusing art and life or temporarily abandoned it for other ideologically or physically more suitable performance sites—galleries, or the street and other sites of everyday life. In the 1990s and 2000s, when Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Eszter Salamon, Jefta van Dinther, and Mette Ingvartsen entered the field of contemporary dance and performance, their work fully resided in the institutional framework of theater, yet it incorporated the historical experience of Neo-Avantgarde performance art, which renounced theater and theatricality in the name of the everyday and art-into-life.