Ser Pilo Paga (SPP) y Generación E: meritocracia y baja cobertura

My interest in going beyond the 20*'’ century’s aesthetics of deconstruction was supported through Deleuzian theory. In the Deleuzian assemblage, contraction, as a point o f intensity, can create greater deterritorialization than deconstruction. In the Deleuzian assemblage, the drawing together or contraction and the drawing apart or deconstruction happen simultaneously. The paradox lies in that contraction separates, while deconstruction joins. Massumi states that in Deleuzian theory, “paradoxes should nor be taken into as mere frivolities. They are serious attempts to pack meaning into the smallest possible space without betraying it with simplification” (1992, p.20-21). Paradoxa are generated through contractions. Thus, Deleuzian theory favours contraction, over deconstruction, by suggesting that contraction and deconstruction happen simultaneously and thus, in effect, contracting them. Contraction deconstructs deconstruction.

Deleuzian theory can thus offer to dance studies a passage from deconstructionist or Derridean aesthetics to post-deconstructionist, contraction-based aesthetics. In Deleuzian theory, difference is explained (and created), not through deconstruction, but rather through contractions that create greater difference through deterritorialization, than deconstruction does through reterritorialization. Nonetheless, neither contraction nor post-deconstruction is the opposite of deconstruction, exactly as the fold is not the opposite of the unfold (Deleuze, 1993).

Thus, deconstruction and contraction may not have the same aesthetic effects. Their difference is defined by intensity. Fensham in her Deterritorializing Dance: Tension and the Wire (Discourses in Dance, 2002) used Deleuzian theory to examine Forsythe’s deterritorialization in Eidos: Telos’ (2001). She states that Deleuzian deterritorialization “requires the creation o f connections...It can begin when two or more material agents excite one another and become dislodged from a mass formation” (2002, p.68). I propose that Deleuzian deterritorialization fits better with interdisciplinary approaches which contract or draw together materiality, in order to differentiate difference. Put more simply, the contraction thus produces greater difference. Through the different arrangement o f the agencement, Deleuzian theory provides a way out o f a pessimistic Foucauldian deconstruction, as reproduction of power knowledge relations. A way out o f disciplinary control becomes possible, through the differentiation o f difference from its own logic.

Performance theorist Simon Jones, in his study o f Fugacity^^ (in Heathfield, Templeton & Quick, 1997), argued for a new naturalism in contemporary performance, by drawing analogies with the sciences o f complexity, in an analysis of the Wooster Group’s Brace Up! In this performance, “o f cut-becoming-join and join- becoming-cut” he traced an attempt to break away from linear perspective in theatrical narrative, similar to perspectival painting in Renaissance naturalism. Jones stated that “we should not be fooled into taxonomies o f discontinuity grounded upon the surface of these theatres’ developments” nor make “the history o f continuity threatening to flatten the various experiences o f these theatres.” However, he suggested that these naturalist practices ‘inflect’ theatre by changing signs. Their refusal to relate content to form, fails “to recognise the place o f the centre as staged in their work.”'^

Devising theatre became deconstructionist when performance structures refused to acknowledge difference from within unification, and thus, became expressive rather than tranformative. I agree with Jones that these theatres are naturalist, although viewing devising practices in parallel with Deleuzian theory, fails

"Fugacity" is derived from the Latin for "fleetness" which is often interpreted as a tendency to escape. In science, it is a chemical term with units o f pressure that is intended to better describe a gas' real world pressure than the ideal pressure.

' ^ D ue to the design o f the special edition Shattered Anatomies ( 1997) there were no page numbers

given.

to demonstrate the latter’s historical importance and the aesthetic primacy o f contraction. I would suggest that devising practices become aesthetically naturalist when they mimic a natural interconnection o f contraction and deconstruction. Locating Deleuze in the historical context, as after post-structuralism, indicates more clearly the aesthetic prominence o f contraction, over deconstruction, as a point of transformation, despite Deleuze’s theory acknowledging the scientific necessity of both ‘join’ and ‘cut.’ Lastly, contemporary performance works, might be understood as deconstructive, because they use aesthetic processes of devising (which comes from the Latin dlvidere, to divide) or ‘cut-becoming-join’ and have different effects from processes o f ‘join-becoming-cut.’ Moreover, the contraction, in my view, does not produce the cut by joining or adding disparate elements, but rather unfolds through folding. Without implying that ‘join-becoming-cut,’ or what Lepecki (2006) names, ‘contractile’ practices cannot resonate with vital theories (and the natural sciences), I want to propose, that in aesthetics, these processes bring about transformation.

Massumi suggests that “meaning is the contraction o f difference” and that “in the separation-connection o f the act o f meaning, the separation runs deeper than the connection” (1992, p.20). Separation runs deeper in the diachrony o f the arts, due to institutionalization. It has also become more intense, due to the prominence of deconstruction in post-structuralist performance. Thus, contraction becomes more prominent after deconstruction. Then the intercorporeal aesthetic becomes about destabilization (and simultaneously, re-stabilization), in order to suggest other forms and methodologies stemming from the body, itself a differentiation o f difference, a singular multiplicity.

Conflicting movement, bodily, disciplinary and aesthetic methodologies were integrated through practice and application. Bergson’s elan vital (vital force) stands beyond these juxtapositions and interruptions as a unifying force. In practice, and through bodily processes, inappropriate, conflicting methodologies can find a way to integrate, rather than deconstruct or be deconstructed. The moving body tends to integrate and unify, as argued earlier in the contextual section, through movement analysis. But the body maintains a transformative intensity, by constantly disrupting aesthetic habits, or fixities, through the work o f interdisciplinarity.