Choreography has been defined as an art of composing moves and gestures (i.e. of composing dance). For centuries the notion ‘choreography’ applied only to ballet. Nowadays, however, it is used in every practice where human movement has an artistic character. 

Within a choreographer’s practice both gestures and moves, no matter how common or everyday, may become means of artistic expression. The aim of choreography is to emphasise the meaning of a gesture or to construct new meanings concealed and manifested within a combination of gestures. However, it is choreography that can oppress those who perform gestures within it. Thus it refers directly to the matter of enforcement (i.e. violence). One may even say that choreography is a domain of power. From this perspective, marches, for instance, may be considered peculiar choreographies of power (or of the State).

Simple gestures themselves are in fact means of communication in everyday life. Common and often hardly noticeable, they define the basic level of existence of an individual human being, i.e. his or her character, way of behaving and communicating with others, needs. However, a gesture may become a means within a choreographer’s practice but it may also break the spell of choreography (i.e. of oppression) – it may introduce true life back to the realm of a spectacle. Thus it has to be said that there is something within a gesture that one may call its double nature.

It is not without reason to say that choreography becomes an oppressor due to the repetition of gestures that it appropriates and to its own specific rules and requirements concerning the body and movement (in terms of the rhythm of a repeated gesture, its speed etc.). Breaking the repetition or not meeting the requirements are therefore two possible ways of breaking the spell of a spectacle (i.e. of oppression). 

One may compare the issue of a choreography of power (which includes, among others, marches or seemingly static composition of a choir with its unique attitudes and mimics of the singers) to ballet. It is ballet that has its own strict regulations and requirements concerning the body (weight, height, anatomical details like, for instance, the shape of one’s foot etc.). These requirements result directly from the character of the dance; without meeting them, it would be impossible to achieve the desired effect. Therefore, ballet is a realm of oppression and of power.

On the other hand, more open and free techniques of contemporary dance, especially of the so-called improvisation, use bodies and gestures in order to search for new forms of expression freed of the requirements of classical ballet. This kind of dance is a place of meeting of the oppressor (i.e. of the elements of ballet technique as well as the requirements in terms of the physical fitness of the dancer etc.) and the oppressed (i.e. of a dancer’s body with all its limitations or a body which does not fully meet the imposed requirements). One may thus say that this type of dance is in fact a domain of a constant struggle and renegotiation of the relationship between the rules of choreography and pure joy of movement. It is therefore a realm of resistance whose goal is to undermine the authority.

In consequence of the discussion above it has to be emphasised that movement can express both oppression (or discipline) and resistance (or negotiation). Moreover, when used as a means of resistance, it can be performed in a discrete and gentle way, almost invisible for the opposed forces but still causing change. Obviously, this is the very reason for it had to become a means within the critical artistic strategies that resisted totalitarian ideology.

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Marches and mass gatherings (as well as other forms of a ‘collective affirmation’ of the system) have been associated with oppressive and totalitarian ideologies for a very long time. We may find their patterns in Huxley’s, Orwell’s and Rand’s classical anti-Utopian novels as well as in films – from the march of the workers in Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ to Riefenstahl’s documents on Nazis’ great gatherings and sports events. At this point it is worth mentioning that the strong connection between totalitarianisms and professional sport might be another proof which supports the claim that power (violent power, State’s power, totalitarian power) keeps influencing and changing (i.e. oppressing) the bodies of its subjects through movement (through sport in this case). The Nazi adoration of an athletic body of a sportsman would be the best example here.

However, totalitarianisms seem to be strongly connected with simple gestures of everyday life as well. Particularly within communist iconography one may find a huge number of pictures (posters, paintings etc.) depicting people performing the simplest activities like shaking or waving hands, smiling or singing songs in order to affirm the system and to confirm its friendly and fruitful character. For instance, Aleksander Kobzdej’s famous socialist painting entitled ‘Pass me a Brick’ (1950) depicts three bricklayers during their work. Simple, everyday gestures of the workers symbolise the idea of laying the fundaments for the People’s Poland. Similarly, in Juliusz Krajewski’s  painting ‘Thank you Tractor Operator’ (1950) a group of people smile, shake hands and wave hats in order to thank a tractor operator (who represents the communist party) for the plentiful harvest.

This exploitation of simple gestures by the totalitarian ideology and its aesthetics may seem to be one of the biggest difficulties within this text (as we insisted that choreography rather than simples gestures of the everyday belongs to the realm of totalitarian power). But, as we mentioned above, the two types of movement within the public domain of a totalitarian country constantly meet and struggle. It was also said that the oppressive character of choreography stems from repetition. And it is repetition as well as spectacle, iconography and icons (symbols) themselves that can help us to overcome the difficulties.

It has to be said that a gesture – if it is supposed to remain only a gesture – cannot be repeated just for its aesthetic quality or for any other reason except for its most basic and practical, everyday purposes (i.e. communication, self-expression etc.). If it is, it becomes something else: a means of artistic expression or a symbol (an icon). This symbol may be then used within iconographies in order to communicate particular information. But it loses its connection with the everyday. It becomes art (i.e. a part of a mimetic code of art) or, in some cases, a propaganda. It means that the gesture disappears when it is repeated (or reproduced). It becomes an image that lives beyond the human, i.e. within the realm of the spectacle of power.

It is a feeling of this simple fact that let the artist Jiri Kovanda follow his exceptional practice in the former Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. His discrete actions in the public space of Prague consisted of gestures (and mimics) of everyday life, for instance looking into the eyes of others (i.e. searching for an eye-contact with strangers) or simply standing among a constantly-moving crowd. But at the same time – one has to notice this – these simple gestures were devoid of the repetitive (or rather reproductive) features of a spectacle (one may paradoxically say that they were devoid of the features of art itself). Every action was exceptional, not-like-the-others – even if each of them consisted of repeated similar gestures while they were happening. Additionally, there was almost nothing within this practice – except maybe the artist’s personal decision of enacting ‘art’ and, in some cases, a photographer documenting the action –  that might have made the passers-by realise that they were experiencing art. One may say then – in accordance with what was claimed above – that the gestures were enacted in order to bring back life into the realm of a spectacle of power (i.e. to resist).

Autorem zdjęć jest  Magdalena Szady.

Thinking of invisibility, we should refer to such seemingly simple categories like the body and clothes. Clothing ourselves is one of the most obvious and every-day behaviours we can actually think about. It is impossible to imagine a world without clothes (at this point it is worth mentioning that Giorgio Agamben finds nakedness almost impossible as a consequence of the influence that the so-called Christian ‘theology of clothes’ has had on the entire Western culture [1]). Covering our bodies is an inseparable part of culture, i.e. humanity (it provides the very first division between nakedness, i.e. intimacy, or privacy, and the public life, i.e. bios). It has been proved that covering is for primates equal to disappearing, i.e. that covering the body of a member of a group of primates makes the rest of the animals forget about the covered one.[2] It seems to be completely different for people for whom covering (visual exclusion) is mysteriously joined with a peculiar inclusion of what has been covered.[3] The margins of exclusion may be invisible for most humans but they are still present in their (sub)consciousness.

We may find the role or the meaning of clothing (covering) especially interesting when we include a perspective of structuralism in this text. Claire Pajaczkowska writes:

‘For Peirce, the relationship between signifier and signified takes place across a spectrum of relational qualities that can be identified at three points of qualitative difference. Peirce called these firstness, secondness and thirdness, or icon, index and symbol. Each has a different level of proximity between the signifier and its signified, with the firstness of the icon having the most direct, proximate relationship of resemblance. For example, an iconic image of the sun might be a diagrammatic circle with rays spreading outwards from the periphery. There is a relationship of visible resemblance between the icon and its meaning. The indexical relation to sunlight might be a photograph, where traces of sun exist in the form of chemical changes in the photographic process. A symbolic representation of sun exists in the word ‘sun’, which bears no resemblance to the signified except through convention and encoded patterns of difference.’[4]

Referring to this theory we may perceive clothes as an index of a body (or even as its icon as we will see further) – since it resembles the body-like shapes (which means that the body ‘influenced’ the fabric in the process of designing and making the garment). Ergo: the garment has its symbolic (indexical) ‘meaning’ and clothing (i.e. giving the shape to the fabric, which includes the designing and making of it) is a process which leads towards designation. Additionally, if we understand the whole process of the formation of culture as a constant ‘production’ of symbols (or rather a whole sphere of symbols), it is not without reason to say that some sorts of visual exclusion are essential for the emergence of culture itself. From this point of view, covering is a way from the lack of meaning (nature) to significance (culture).

Finally, referring again to Pierce’s structural theory, we may also understand the true and the most distinct meaning of hiddenness (covering, clothing) which, paradoxically, results for humans in preservation of memory. Claire Pajaczkowska notes:

‘The drape is iconic in that it literally denotes the invisibility of things that are ‘gone’, ‘lost’ or ‘dead’. The hiddenness that the textile can create, and therefore signify, is the relationship between perception and memory, which is the element common to both forms of signification (we can make visible, or present in representation, referents which are no longer present to our senses, and we can, through representation, sustain a memory of what once was but no longer is).’[5]

[1] Giorgio Agamben, “Nagość” (‘Nudities’), translation to Polish: Krzysztof Żaboklicki, edited by Wydawnictwo W.A.B., 2010

[2] According to dr Robert Sapolsky’s (Stanford Univeristy) studies on a population of wild baboons in Kenya (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky).

[3] The term ‘inclusive exclusion’ was taken from Giorgio Agamben’s ‘HOMO SACER. Sovereign Power and Bare Life’, 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a.

[4] Claire Pajaczkowska, ‘Tension, Time and Tenderness. Indexical Traces of Touch in Textiles’, Royal College of Art, 2009, p. 6-7.

[5] Claire Pajaczkowska, ‘Tension, Time and Tenderness. Indexical Traces of Touch in Textiles’, Royal College of Art, 2009, p. 6-7., p. 7.

Part of: Michał Bieniek's ‘The (In)visible Exclusion’. Theory and Artistic Practice. (Royal College of Art, Curating Contemporary Art Department, London 2011)

In Mark Wigley’s ‘Untitled: Housing the Gender’, the author argues that the public space (understood as space for political activity of men) has been founded (and always founds itself) on the exclusion of women. It is not without reason to make this hypothesis much wider and say that the public space (space for ‘public life’) always constitutes itself through the exclusion of an individual (in relation, for instance, to the concept of a ‘scapegoat’ or a ‘homo sacer’) or some particular groups of people (for example, ancient slaves and contemporary refugees). Hanna Arendt seems to have started the debate (writing about refugees and drawing parallels between the rights of man and of the nation-state) in her ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’ and Giorgio Agamben refers to her thought in his ‘Homo Sacer’ when he cites Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (a French politician from the time of the Revolution):

‘Natural and civil rights are those rights for whose preservation society is formed, and political rights are those rights by which society is formed. For the sake of clarity, it would be best to call the first ones passive rights, and the second ones active rights. All inhabitants of a country must enjoy the rights of passive citizens… all are not active citizens. Women, at least in the present state, children, foreigners, and also those who would not at all contribute to the public establishment must have no active influence on public matters (…). Thus children, the insane, minors, women, those condemned to a punishment either restricting personal freedom or bringing disgrace will not be citizens.’[1]

Then Agamben marks his meaningful comments:

‘Instead of viewing these distinctions as a simple restriction of the democratic and egalitarian principle, in flagrant contradiction to the spirit and letter of the declarations, we ought first to grasp their coherent biopolitical meaning. One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside (…).Once zoē is politicized by declarations of rights, the distinctions and thresholds that make it possible to isolate a sacred life must be newly defined.’[2]

As we can see, Agamben’s concept of homo sacer (a sacred man) proves, if it is correct, the crucial role of exclusion (one’s banishment or, in a wider context, the necessity of defining the ‘inside’ as an opposition of the ‘outside’) in the formation of culture and in sustaining social or national integrity.[3] (Agamben’s major and most terrifying proof in this matter is the sagacious analysis of Nazism as an idea of national integrity and ‘racial purity’ to be achieved through exile and extermination of the ‘others’, the ‘in-humans’).

In the process of ‘cultural exclusion’, it does not really matter what social group (ethnic or sexual minority, older or handicapped people etc.) has been excluded – in every case the reason for this cruel and mostly unconscious mechanism is the same: it is the supposed necessity of maintaining social integrity through delimitation of the borders between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. What is important for us in this particular text is to simply observe the very mechanism and realize that the exclusion is nothing more than making things (or people) invisible by putting them out of others’ sight, i.e. on the margins of social life (however, the methods used within this process may include such horrifying ‘solutions’ like, as we have already said, exiling or extermination). Moreover, we should notice that a necessary condition for thus understood exclusion is its own... invisibility. Only through its own hiddenness it may remain an origin (or a funding condition) for social life (and public space). Only the invisibility of the mechanism of exclusion guarantees that the mechanism of social life and political activity works properly.[4]

[1] Giorgio Agamben’s ‘HOMO SACER. Sovereign Power and Bare Life’, 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a, p. 83-84.

[2] Ibidem, p. 84

[3] As well as French anthropologist and writer Rene Girard’s concept of a ‘scapegoat’ whose sacrifice (i.e. killing or banishment) was critical for ancient communities in order to maintain their own integrity (by dismissing a thread of a reestablishment of a primordial violence).

[4] According to Rene Girard’s „Sacrum i przemoc” (‘Le Violence et le Sacre’, 1972), translation to Polish: Maria and Jacek Pleciński, Wydawnistwo Naukowe Brama, Poznań, 1993 (part I), 1994 (part II).

Part of: Michał Bieniek's ‘The (In)visible Exclusion’. Theory and Artistic Practice. (Royal College of Art, Curating Contemporary Art Department, London 2011)

Samoidentyfikacja dotyczy relacji: z otoczeniem, z rodziną, z przyjaciółmi (i z ludźmi zupełnie obcymi), z domem, z ulicą, z miastem, z krajem. To także relacja (określenie relacji) z nawykiem, z tym co ‘naturalne’ – z własną ‘naturą’, którą przecież możemy sprowadzić do nawyku, rytuału codzienności, wychowania, podejmowanych wyborów, niezrealizowanych aspiracji (bo być może bardziej określa nas to, czego nie robimy niż nasze działania). Samoidentyfikacja to przyznanie się (do czego?) i objęcie tego, co nam umyka. To zgoda na brak znaczenia i znaczenie tego braku. To brak sam w sobie – bo wytyczenie granicy jest wyznaczeniem przestrzeni (nie)obecności. To, co ‘za granicą’, weryfikuje (za)wartość tego co z(a)warte.

Przekroczenie granicy ujawnia jej immanentny charakter – granica podróżuje wewnątrz tego, co (kogo) zawiera. Przekroczenie granicy jest zawsze tylko usiłowaniem. To zadanie domowe, z którym nie zdążymy na czas. To miejsce, w którym znajdziemy zaledwie samych siebie: niegotowych, tkwiących na obrzeżach czasu, który nie daje się podzielić.

‘Przekroczyć granicę’, ‘nie mieć granic’ to igrać z ogniem (czyli z unicestwieniem, z pustką – albo z wiecznością). ‘Świat bez granic’ to w istocie ich przywrócenie. Świat, który przekroczył własne granice zamyka się w nich ponownie z metodyczną dosłownością – ze strachu przed ‘rozpuszczeniem’, zatraceniem się, nieistnieniem. Świat bez granic, zatrwożony własnym sposobem bycia, rozmyśla o braku.

Ciało tego świata jest nieokreślone, nieznana jest jego płeć. Ciało tego świata zawarło i urzeczywistniło wszystkie potencjalności po to, by stanąć na granicy braku. To ciało oczekuje.

The concept of Ewa Partum’s ‘Self-Identification’ is simple: three black-and-white photographs depict a naked women (the artist herself) walking the streets of a city. Only in one of these pictures (collages) we can actually verify which city this is: the presence of the Belvedere building, which is literally the seat of political power in Poland (a palace where the President lives) lets us assume that the city is Warsaw. In the remaining two pictures the city remains unknown. And this impossibility of recognition should make us understand that the artist’s work is not about a particular city but the idea of a city itself.

In the first of the three mentioned above photographs the naked figure is just walking along a street full of (fully dressed) passers-by. She is in front of us, walking towards the viewer. In the remaining two she is shown in profile – passing by the Belvedere and standing in front of a fully-dressed policewoman who aims a gun at her (the gun is blurred but we can still see it). All these photographs trigger a question about the presence of a body in the city, i.e. how does a body live in the city? What is the connection between a body and the city? They also ask about the relationship between the body and power (political power, violent power etc.). It seems that the answer cannot be separated from Agamben’s reflection on the threshold which divides the inhuman (animal) from the human, zoe (simple life) from bios (political life).

Agamben’s theory of the origins of politics (which I am now simplifying) says that the first political gesture was a gesture of absolute subordination of one’s life (a simple life) to the will of a sovereign (who constitutes himself by the power to kill or to do anything to anyone). It means that politics itself was established by this very gesture of killing (taking one’s life) not in terms of any kind of a ritual or punishment – but simply in order to establish a very first relation: a relation of full dependency on the sovereign. This gesture of dependency was then preserved in ancient Rome in the relation between the father and the son: vitae necisque potestas, which meant that the son’s life was fully subordinated to the father (the sovereign), who could took it whenever he wanted to and without being accused of homicide. This kind of relation was also repeated through ages in terms of ban. A banned man, a werewolf, a bandit etc. – these are the figures which Agamben calls ‘sacred life’ (referring to an ancient Roman sacer esto). These figures (in relation to which/whom everyone is a sovereign who can kill without being accused of homicide) are the vessels which contain and preserve violence itself – not the visible violence which constitutes and maintains political power but the original violence, i.e. the very first gesture of politics (not natural violence but the violence which established political dependency).

So, how does the body live in the city? Agamben might have said that through an inclusive exclusion. The body must be excluded from the city (polis) in a way in which zoe (simple, animal life) is excluded from bios (political, human life). But at the very same time the inclusion of what has been excluded must occur (as a category on which politics has been founded). Agamben: ‘There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion’.[1] The body seems to preserve the forgotten – the original gesture of politics (since it exists both to kill and to be killed). The exposure of the body within the city (polis) to which it gave a beginning is a meaningful political gesture. Agamben: ‘...the state of nature is not a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the City but a principle internal to the City, which appears at the moment the City is considered tanquam dissoluta “as if it were dissolved” (in this sense, therefore, the state of nature is something like a state of exception).’[2] It is not without reason to say that this exposure is a gesture of an objection against a law in force without signifying, i.e. a gesture which evokes an exceptional state of nature – a state of dissolution and indistinction between violence and law, the animal and the human and the private and the public as well.

[1] Giorgio Agamben ‘HOMO SACER. Sovereign Power and Bare Life’, 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a, p. 8

[2] Ibidem, p. 70

Part of: Michał Bieniek's 'Self-Identification and the lost gestures. Reading Partum through Agamben' (Royal College of Art, Curating Contemporary Art Department, London 2010)

W jakiej relacji to co prywatne (indywidualne, intymne) pozostaje w stosunku do sfery publicznej, a więc otwartej i wspólnej? Wydaje się, że jedno wpływa na drugie, a mur dzielący te dwa obszary jest umowny (pozorny). Choć jest jednocześnie ściśle strzeżony, bo jego istnienie gwarantuje i chroni jednostkową tożsamość – poprzez ustanowienie „mojego”, „własnego”, nieprzekraczalnego… Zapominamy jednak na co dzień, że nasza jednostkowa tożsamość zanurzona jest w tym, co publiczne, a więc w normach i wartościach przyjętych jako wspólne – a przynajmniej mniej lub bardziej obecnych w zbiorowej świadomości. Budowanie tożsamości, samoidentyfikacja, to tworzenie colleage’u: zapożyczanie i zapośredniczanie, kreowanie nowego obrazu. „Abject” – to co odrzucone i odpychające – jest prawdopodobnie momentem wydarzania się, procesu… Jak pisze Katarzyna Pabijanek (http://www.obieg.pl/artmix/18385), „abject” konstytuuje prawidłowe i czyste ciało, którego rozpoznanie i określenie jest warunkiem samoidentyfikacji. To prawidłowe ciało istnieć może dzięki określeniu granic i odrzuceniu tego, co odpychające (pozostające w bezpośredniej relacji z funkcjami biologicznymi). To odrzucenie nie jest jednak tożsame z anihilacją. „Abject” pozostaje i trwa – jak groźba, ale też jak obietnica. „Abject” to przestrzeń negocjacji, grożąca (lub obiecująca) zburzeniem lub naruszeniem muru i koniecznością ponownego włączenia lub usunięcia składowych tego, co znajduje się wewnątrz – modyfikacji prawidłowego ciała, prawidłowego obrazu… „Abject” zagraża i jednocześnie ocala obie sfery: prywatną i publiczną, zmuszając je do ciągłej negocjacji i weryfikacji wyobrażeń o sobie samych, ich konstrukcji, schematu…