Exposer la danse : Négocier collectivement et dans l’action les répertoires de gestes

• Main Author: Anne Bénichou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de liège 2020-07-01
• Series: Signata
• Subjects: body; interaction; institution; politics; space
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/signata/2839

Over the last decade, numerous museums traditionally devoted to the visual arts have become receptive to contemporary dance. Some choreographers prefer galleries in museums and exhibition centres to traditional theatres. This integration of dance with the art museum is not a new phenomenon, of course, but it has expanded considerably and taken on unprecedented forms. A new museum object has recently appeared, the “dance exhibition,” which consists in exhibiting the dance without adopting either the format of an exhibition on dance or a dance performance adapted to the museum’s spaces. Rather, it involves the orchestration, using scores, of four components: the performers’ bodies, the visitors’ bodies, the time and space of the exhibition, and the memory of what has taken place. In this article, I explore the following hypothesis: dance exhibitions function as “scenes of appearance” in which “communities of singularities,” open to differences and dissensuses, negotiate repertoires of gestures in action. On the basis of analyses by Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Irit Rogoff, I show that these exhibitions offer non-normative and non-consensual approaches to participation by the public. In them, things are done together but separately. Each individual invents their manner of appearing before the others, giving rise to new ways of “being-together” that are distinct from participatory forms of relational aesthetics. These exhibitions also contribute to new modalities of memory and of the transmission of works related to the “repertoire in action” jazz performances analyzed by sociologists Robert Faulkner and Howard Becker. This mnesic, dynamic, and collective process interacts with the museum archive. For the duration of the exhibition, it helps to transform the museum from a lieu de mémoire, devoted to the collection of art objects whose selection, conservation, and mediation are the responsibility of experts, into a milieu de mémoire, composed of a plurality of actors who, together, negotiate repertoires of gestures. This experimental and exploratory vocation seems to be threatened, however, by the success of dance exhibitions, which are on the way to becoming a new revenue stream for both art museums and dance.