Τhe pandemic and the digital media solution: perspectives and queries relating to the art of dance

The connection between dance and the moving image has been aesthetically and historically documented since the dawn of modernism in the arts. Wedged between the photographic studies of Eadweard J. Muybridge and choreographer Merce Cunningham’s avant-garde experimentations is a century of technological innovation, during which the use of technology in the field of dance has garnered ambivalent reactions. At times, technology is viewed as being diametrically opposed to the physical presence of dancers, as if dance were not already a technology governing the human body’s natural strength and abilities. At others, it acquires an emancipatory dimension, which reinforces the existing narratives on the dancing body —particularly so in relation to that dominant conception that used to link dance to the ‘here and now’ of the dance movement and therefore consolidated the myth of dance’s ‘ephemeral’ nature. Nowadays, we no longer ask ourselves the question whether dance takes place in digital environments but rather seek to discover how technology is embedded in dance (and choreography), suggesting new ways of controlling the body’s materiality while redefining the notion of humanness on the condition that dance, as an expression of the body, as well as the desire to transmit ideas provide a good point of departure from which to contemplate the issue Spinoza raises in his famous quip: no one knows what a body can do.

The domination of the digital does more than merely confirm the omnipotence of the image in contemporary culture; it also demonstrates how the realm of our digital/ digitalised culture extended farther than a simple simulation of ‘reality’ in our screens, evolving into a biopolitical strategy that enabled technology to become incorporated into all aspects of our lives. It is certainly no accident that the technological colonisation of the public and private sphere was accomplished during a period in which human contact came to be considered precarious, a risk factor for transmitting the coronavirus and for accelerating the spread of the pandemic. Paradoxically, the digital world became the main vantage point people stand on to contemplate the ‘outside’: their work, their relationships, leisure and creativity. However, notwithstanding the various ominous scenaria for a technological proliferation or intermediation that will end up capitalising humans and their intrinsic wealth, what is at stake here is not to reintroduce the virtual/real binary, as if to suggest that the latter can fully encapsulate the eternal struggle between illusion and reality. Similarly, the solution would not be to conjure an essentialist understanding of human expression and communication ascribing specific, fixed and universal characteristics to the art of dance and its digital imprint. Dance governs collective representations, cultural values inscribed on the body —and partly also constructing it— the labour of the dancers refracted through the clichés of artistic virtuosity and (self-) expression. More than anything else, however, dance is a medium that can offer insight into how we experience our body, acknowledging it as a locus for personal and collective, imaginary and real experiences.

Hence, the problem is formulated anew, this time focusing less on the aesthetic perception of the digital, that is, on how we evaluate a work created in the digital sphere, and more on the fact that the body emerges as a necessary and sufficient condition for the dance event— in other words, on the fact that dance delineates freedom as the power to not dance and therefore as the choice to move or remain still. Under the present circumstances, the shift towards the digital is also a political decision, as it is portrayed as an aesthetically felicitus solution corresponding aptly to the conditions that rendered it necessary. There is, however, an ontological question to be considered here, namely that of body politics and of the body as a carrier of the political, which becomes even more problematic if we fail to examine the circumstantial convergence of the digital field with the dance field. What, ultimately, can a body do in the digital sphere? Can we comprehend the digital not as an actualisation of the possible, as a substitute solution of the present condition of precarity, but as a virtual expression of a creativity with the potential to defy the productivity syndrome?

Bearing in mind, then, that technology is not neutral as it already carries within it political choices and objectives, how can we invent a new way of co-existing beyond and through the impossibility of touch which has been imposed on us during the pandemic? What I have in mind is not a framework dictating forms of resistance or resorting to the transcendental to help us envisage solutions that would be free of contradictions. Nevertheless, if it is true that the virtual became constrained within the field of the visible and its digital products, are we, then, not perhaps trapped in a dystopia of the visual? Could it be that our digital means are not, in fact, the modern means of artistic production which we envisioned thirty years ago, but rather yet another entrepreneurial tool for the artist, imposing a specific field of action? I will leave the question suspended, as it is too soon to predict the full impact the health measures adopted in order to curtail the spread of Covid-19 will have on the art world.

In the current circumstances, the political does not present itself as a message or a critical commentary on what we have been experiencing during the pandemic. The political within the aesthetic emanates from our specific way of experiencing space and time, a sense of perception that gives rise to ways of being together or apart both inside and outside of the digital world. It reminds us, also, that our artistic practices, especially in the dance field, can fashion forms of visibility that may reconfigure our way of existence and our common sense; become entangled in what one could call our ‘shared’—though not necessarily unanimous— sense of the world; and suggest ways for us to remain active and creative in a non-compulsive way and to unilaterally protect creativity’s intrinsic value even beyond the production of work. In other words, we need to weigh the practical benefits the digital means may offer and examine what can be achieved through them in a time of pandemic. In addition, we need to evaluate the impact they have on our everyday life and bodily experience, which, in a technogenic environment, is constructed in a completely different manner. If dance remains a relational practice, let us wonder what can be salvaged or what is at stake when dance is inscribed in the digital environment, before we sign the eulogy of its universal domination.

*Anastasio Koukoutas is a dance theorist, dramaturg and essayist. Anastasio was part of the ARTWORKS Dance Selection Committee 2019 along with Ermira Goro and Christos Papadopoulos.

**Τhis text was part of  the 2nd publication of ARTWORKS that reflects the SNF Artist Fellowship Program 2019-2020.