Issue #08: What the body can do. Dance and Ethics.

March 2015

According to Felix Guattari, ethics and aesthetics go hand in hand. Why ethics? Because individually, and together, we are responsible for the future. Why aesthetics? Because everything, even tradition, has to be continually reinvented.

To what extent then is the aesthetic domain affected by ethical concerns? If dance is an interactive, relational practice of innovation, then it will by its very nature be subject to ethical forces and concerns. Ethical notions of responsibility need not be posed in terms of dogmatic morality (rules and responsibilities) but may be thought corporeally, in terms of force, fluctuation, power, and affect. In short, the ethical is already implicated within the domain of dance simply because we dance. It is found in the tactile flow of information, from one body to another. It is implicated in the choice to empower one kind of dance, one domain, one body type over another.

In that sense, ethics is always political.

This issue of the Dancehouse Diary investigates the notion of ethics within and in relation to the moving body, in all its permutations and combinations. It looks at issues of training, innovation, relations between bodies, including the body politic, or muse upon the ethical dimensions of making art or the moral conventions of what is conveyed with art.

Encountering the Ethical

Ethics is intimate, personal, in your face, more so than the political. There is a proximity to ethical relations. Ethics is based on touch. The body materialises these relationships, puts a material face to their potency. We are touched by others, touched literally, metaphorically, directly, indirectly. Read more...

Opening into Otherness, Iyengar Yoga as Corporeal Ethics

The possibility for ethics rests on the difficulty of having to respond to the irreducible difference of an other. Responsibility for an other’s difference, alterity, paves the way for an ability to act. ‘i’ come into being through my subjection to the unknowability of an other. in having to respond to this unknowability of the other, responsibility as ethics emerges. Read more...

The Ethics of Criticism

The ethics of criticism are complicated by the notoriously fraught relationship between artists and critics. I believe this stems from the mortality of our work. We, the artists, spend weeks, months or years creating something, crafting it as carefully as we know how. We offer it to the audience and we are proud. Then a critic comes in. They spend an hour with our work and become the authority. Read more...

Anti-Obscurantism

Choreography and performance carry the potential to imagine new relationships and ways of being human. Material, ideas and sites, the elements of a work, are merely the sum of its parts. The ‘work’ (as noun and verb), is that unnamable effect it has on us, with potential to morally and ethically challenge. Read more...

Evolution(s) of Ethics

This article addresses the evolution of ethics in dance, proposing that the post modern movement and its influences heralded the birth of an emerging dialogue that catapulted dance into the intellectual domain. For without a dialogue or a framed “mise-en scene”, the ethics are hard to pinpoint. Conversely, part of the strength and weakness of dance lies in its corporeality; for a long time, it had not found a language, and yet, its ongoing presence ensured an existence of peripheral enquiry. The birth of ethics in dance lay in its success in developing a language around its corporeality, and its ongoing concerns continue be gleaned from the ever- evolving dialogue both personally and collectively, from current cultural and political movements. Read more...

DIARY ENTRIES: The Ethics of Intervention

According to Felix Guattari, ethics and aesthetics go hand in hand. Why ethics? Because individually, and together, we are responsible for the future. Why aesthetics? Because everything, even tradition, has to be continually reinvented. We have invited a variety of practitioners and artists to look at the notion of intervention—from body to body, through touch, for example, or between performer and audience—as it might relate to ethical questions. Read more...

An Ethics of Touch

Standard art criticism is not very helpful in elucidating this interaction between paper and place, between representation and presence, between a single work of art and a roaring mass of bodies, because it is beholden to literature – in particular, a nineteenth-century concept of literature as a solitary, individual activity. Read more...