Our virtual has definitively over-taken the actual and we must be content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.
Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War did not take Place
Performance—the Being in the world of performance—is particularly difficult to mimic in the digital realm. As the pandemic subsumed our lives, the digital realm became reality, possibly permanently. But performance, being so physical and so embodied, flies in the face of digitization. Therefore, we should not mourn dance’s graceless transition to the digital world, as performance includes an unavoidable sense of what it means to exist amongst other people. This sense should never be replaced. We should instead reject the attempt to force dance into complete submission to digitization.
The blow to the performance industry cannot be attributed to the pandemic alone. Live performance was already facing its own extinction in a world becoming increasingly dominated by screens, which in Walter Benjamin’s words, “emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual,” creating fertile ground for new modes of exploration.
We must view the relationship between the stage and the screen dialectically. Each platform has its own version of profound intimacy. Through a camera the creator is able to exercise control over framing and angles; they have the ability to zoom in on shifting laugh lines on the face, or each individual pore on skin; there is an ability to draw attention to details that a spectator in a theater would have never even thought to observe. At the same time, there is an invaluable quality of live performance—similar to what Benjamin called the aura—that is transcendent, ephemeral, and unmatched. “Even the most perfect reproduction,” Benjamin writes, “of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”
When something is being seemingly undermined, the instinctual reaction is to double down and vehemently oppose all threats—but there is nothing worse for creative and generative potential than an environment so suffocating and stifling. While depression-era photographers captured moments of agony in ways that were not technologically able to be captured before, visual artists of other mediums were more concerned with the idea of competing with newness than they were with fulfilling a ‘why’; time and time again, the abandonment of the ‘why’ has arguably been much more detrimental than the threat of newness.
Creators of live performance now simply do not consider the whys—there is no contemplation of creating outside of what they do. We think in terms of our craft, rather than any sort of creative vision. There is no room (let alone incentive) for an artist to think, “what medium would allow me to articulate this idea most thoroughly?” This lack of consideration made what could have been (and could possibly become) a new way of understanding movement’s place in the world into a half-hearted season of “digital” performances to satisfy shareholders until theatre doors are able to open. Everything that happened over the past year felt like placeholder text. Most viewers were already supporters or members or aspiring members of a heavily institutionalized, deeply incestuous, culturally irrelevant void—and even then, there was a tendency to log-in and tap-out. Far from being a surprise, this was simply a further unmasking of a deep set stagnation and artistic bankruptcy that already existed.
There is little that disgusts me more than the omnipresent tendency to describe dancers (people) as a commodity. Dancers and dance creators think more as businessmen than as artists. We are encouraged to market rather than cultivate ourselves; we are advised to think about our hireability rather than our artistic capacity; this is why we have been abandoned by both the transcendence of art and the innovation of the digital world. If we attempt to become a perfectly malleable commodity, we will never be better than the machine, but if we remain unwilling to explore new potentials, we will be erased by the fact that we are neither new nor truly antiquated. This is the simple idea that’s so fascinating about dance, but lost on so many dancers: the body is not a machine, yet it is always inventing and reinventing itself. It has so much potential because it can never truly be mechanized or antiquated.
We are increasingly defined and enslaved by industry. Amongst rampant digitization and looming obsolescence of laboring man, the artist as craftsman (the artist who has been fighting for their own essentialism and assimilation into the economic structure) will find that at the end of this fight is their own extinction.
There is fertile ground to reinvigorate a sense of liveness. I do believe (I must believe) that after the past year, there is a renewed undercurrent of desire somewhere—a desire to experience things, a desire to participate, a desire to be in the world. If dancers care to maintain any relevance (which we sometimes seem satisfied with abandoning, as we retreat into exclusivity as a way of coping with our obsolescence), we must approach making and performing as artists rather than as craftsmen. Whether we are exploring movement through the stage or the screen, now is the time to enter the world asking why are we creating, rather than what are we creating. There is so much potential that movement hasn’t realized. There is fertile ground for newness in cultural production, and we will either be a part of it, or we will not.
Lots of truth. Thank you for creating + sharing, Cassidy!
Thank you for writing this, I really enjoyed reading