Keeping in mind Andre Lepecki’s description of dance as the production of improbable subjectivities (1), I am thinking about contemporary dance, and its embrace of pedestrian movement. Through Lepecki we are handed a definition of this pedestrian lexicon: that movement which offers a probable human subject.* This performance style can feel lacking in information. If I were to see a dance where people, dressed in social clothes, walked around a stage, completed or mimed tasks, or communicated with each other, I would conclude that the performance was challenging the audience to categorize, and think about genre conventions (2). Excepting the intense use of space, time, and mise en scene, I would not regard the content of the performance as important, and instead consider the stylistic choice to fully commit to pedestrian movement (3). In a similar vein, I can assume that in regards to the dancer’s performance experience, the most affecting aspect would be the tension that arises when remaining casual while consciously “performing” a “dance”, as pedestrian movement is natural/simple to practice and carry out. Of course, many dances in this amorphous genre slip in and out of a “pure pedestrian” style, sliding along a spectrum that polarizes social and “dancey-dance” movement (4). This variation provides context, and invites the audience to read the dance (Ralph Lemon talks about the choreographic trend of making “semiotic salads”), as pedestrian movement often seems to clearly signify some human process. In many contemporary “dancey-dances”, this partiality to the pedestrian does not surface through striped down, social movement, but rather through some stylization that, regardless of movement quality, posits a subject through bipedal sensibilities: A personality who mainly uses their arms and hands to emote and signify, and their legs to inspire awe, or move from one place to another. These readable gestures (such as a hip thrust, a bow, a raised fist, or a movement identifiably from a cultural dance form) repeatedly juxtaposed against less “meaningful” movements (a high kick, a triple pirouette), produce this improbable subject, a proper “Other” to take in and speculate about. The experience of this dancer-semiotician is playful. They are comfortably exploring potentials of movement while remaining close to their bipedal and social instincts. This pleasurable experience for both performer and viewer provides one explanation for why this way of moving is so popular. 1. I believe he talks about this in his introduction to Dance (whitechapel press) 2. I use the word social in this post to mean behavior that would be seen as acceptable/normal in (most) public spaces in western society. This is a really conservative a kinda dark definition. 3. A really awesome example of an "exception" in this scenario would be Jerome Bel's name given by the author (1994). 4. This is an actual term dance studies/artist people use to describe dance that comfortably resides in the popular notion of “dance”. * We can think of the object-dancers of Cunningham’s formal dances as negations of these probable subjects or improbable subjects.
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