Out of Joint (Noor Abed, 2018)

Noor Abed: In Out of Joint, I was interested in restructuring movements and teasing out desires, while focusing on the concept of ‘dance’ as a social construct. The work developed from thinking about choreography and possible imaginary relationships of individuals, a model of relations that are loosely bound together by a process of modernization and intercultural contradictions. By combining these two dances - one choreographed for the stage, the other inspired by documentary footage of a pre-wedding dance in Palestine, I wanted to highlight the tensions between ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’, and focus on situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed.

In both dances, and through the process of editing, I wanted to examine movement as a staged action: What does the stage, any stage, take away from us? What does it contain that remains invisible? And how can the political unconscious be revealed through practices of movement? Through the work, I attempted to examine the intervals between movements as something relational, which seemed to reveal their weaknesses and negotiate with their surroundings, touching a sense of fragility in the social structure that is usually denied.

The two dances are woven together by a text of short sentences as a subtle narrative throughout the video. The text was inspired by the concept of ‘nostalgia for the future’ as a manifestation of a specific cultural moment, which I understand as a formal nostalgia of the current moment that deals with what Mark Fisher described as our incapability of producing the ‘new’, the ‘now’, leaving us therefore with an endless return of dead forms.

Your text Dance-War, and your book Public Sphere by Performance (co-written with Ana Vujanović), introduced me to concepts of the Political Unconscious and Social Choreography: what is the choreography that regulates the social lives of individuals? How is the public sphere constituted through performativity? Your writings were an entry point to an ongoing stimulating process for a whole body of work, which I’ve been producing since 2015, while examining the relation between ideology and aesthetics and thinking of the line between discourse and bodily practice. How can we question ideology in its form as embodiment? And how do we analyze political and social ideologies through notions of choreography?

In Dance-War, you write about the political unconscious as an aesthetic figure. Considering Andrew Hewitt’s definition of Social Choreography as ‘an attempt to think about the aesthetic as it operates at the very base of social experience’, how does the aesthetic operate within and derive from social experience?

BC: If the aesthetic entails a continuum, which ranges from the experiences in everyday life to the artistically and culturally delineated affects and sensations, then it is impossible to maintain the two-tiered structure between modes and relations of production on the one hand (the Marxist “base”), and social reproduction, to which the aesthetic would pertain on the other hand. This thesis lies at the core of Hewitt’s concept of social choreography qua aesthetic ideology by which he shows that the aesthetic operations on the body are present at, and constitutive of, the base (and not determined and reflected as the superstructure). Thus, ideas are formed and instilled in embodiment. The experience of the self in one’s own body becomes the locus of truth and it would be hard to claim that the body is a mere reflection of ideas determined by the mode and relations of production. The affective-experiential turn makes it hard to extract the ideological worldview from embodiment. There is a circular twist to the functioning of ideology: because we are doing (performing), we believe there is something that underlies our performance. What is that, if not capitalism in a general sense? Is it individualism or communalism? Or in still narrower terms, proceduralism (as a belief in the logic of operations and process) or the ethos of intense life? After Public Sphere by Performance, I continued to investigate this aesthetic mode of ideology in the figure of dancing solo. In contemporary Western culture the format of solo dance is a blueprint of aesthetic individualism today, as it entails a number of ethopoetic operations, which would describe analogically how the individual relates to herself or himself. Some of them are a conflation of the body and the self such as autoaffection, territorialization, or speaking in the first person singular. In the new book, written with Ana Vujanovic – Performing the Self (upcoming, Archive books) – I am looking at various figures and their auto-narratives through the matrix of solo dance. Now I would like to ask you something with regard to social choreography as a method you use in some of your video work.

Keeping Together in Time (Noor Abed, 2016)

BC: One of your video-installations is titled Keeping Together in Time (2016, Noor Abed). In the eponymous book Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, William McNeill suggests that the rhythmic synchronization of gestures and movements, as in marching and other military drills, forms the “positive force” of a “primitive solidarity of muscular bonding” in armies. Typically war rituals in traditional societies are imagined as groups dancing unisono. This has borne negative connotations for social choreography by and large, whereby a group or a mass performs in time together. I’ve often witnessed western-centric audiences perceive social choreographies of any ideological variety– be they fascist, nationalist, socialist or simply recreational, - as totalitarian. As if dancing or singing together must imply an oppressive sense of unity and distorted consciousness. The antidote to this totalitarian image is a discotheque or a rave in which the mass of individuals stomp to the same beat – they dance all differently, alone but together. I have gone to the late-night dancing under a bridge in Madureira, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, to watch (and sometimes to dance myself with) a mass of people synchronize, i.e. gradually build a dance unisono to a phrase of R&B music over time. A hundred or more, casual, or nonprofessional dancers, mount and dismantle long phrases with complicated steps without any effort, and more importantly, without a model. Looking from above, it is a social choreography, consisting of a process of regular but relaxed moments of synchronization in the myriad versions of a dance, an aesthetic and social order of the type that social democracy might have dreamed of. According to Gabriel Tarde (The Laws of Imitation, 1890) we never imitate individuals, instead we imitate flows that traverse individuals, which are always flows of belief and of desire. The moments of synchronization mark the going in and out of phase within a process, in which both the dance and the crowd are individuated.

In my view, unisono doesn’t signify aggressive homogenization. The sensations that it produces are adrenalized, and the emotional, hormonal and other neural activations endow the body with a readiness to act. In one cultural context, this is perceived as excitement, in another it is feared to be threatening. What is the traction that rhythm holds for you when you stage singing or dancing in your works?

NA: During the research phase of the work Keeping Together in Time, a friend of mine suggested your text Dance-War to me as a reference. I read the text a few times and checked every reference you mentioned in it. Until today, I feel that Dance-War was a very essential reference to Keeping Together in Time in particular, but also a turning point in my practice in general. Your text suggests an observation of the interaction between practices of dance and war from a critical perspective, and how they relate to particular historical situations. Within the context of warfare, how are practices of dance and choreography recomposed as technologies of political and militant history? How does war become the political unconscious of these dance practices? I kept untangling these thoughts in regard to the connection you made to Paul Virilio’s conception of ‘pure war’, which he defines as a logistically invisible war, in a constant state of preparation for absolute destruction beyond the frontline.

I was working on Keeping Together in Time for an exhibition in Sharjah, UAE, and was inspired by the myth of the Dancing Cannon (Al-Raggas), which is located in the center of the city, standing outside the Sharjah Fort as a symbol of pride and heritage. The weapon was nicknamed ‘the dancer’ for its powerful kickback when fired, which many likened to dance. One day the cannon stopped working, and people believed that music and songs were needed in order for it to ‘dance’ again. As the story goes, the cannon reacted to the people’s performance and began working on its own. Consequently the city would win every battle in which Al-Raggas was used.

The work I ended up making consisted of three parts: the first, a map sketching the city’s historic lines of defense; the second part is a video, featuring a group of people endlessly chanting, in the hope that the cannon will respond; the third part is a sound installation, that spreads these chants throughout the city, according to the performance locations on the map.

In this work, rhythm attracted me for its capacity for social formation through collective synchronized performances and for allowing me to consider 'performance' as a method of survival. I was inspired by ‘battle chants’ as a practice - performed historically during the preparation phase preceding the escalation of war – and thinking therefore of ‘performance’ as a sociopolitical form, that is rooted within notions of survival and solidarity, in which it actively navigates a gap between repression and liberty. The video I made features a group of people continually chanting in a state of endless preparation for an action to occur. The work as a whole walks the line between consideration of group performance and military defense strategies. My interest rests strongly in thinking of the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community. It is a further exploration of the connection between the notion of ‘synchrony’ and social action.

BC: In With Love (Part I, 2015, Noor Abed) we see an English Renaissance social dance, in which a woman is partnered by three ‘invisible figures’ (black costumes cover their bodies make them hardly visible). These invisible others appear more by consequence, as they manipulate the woman through invisible stage-hands. Many types of partner dances in Western traditions show a sexist asymmetry between genders. A woman is led, turned and swung by a man. In the second appearance of the same dance, the graceful turns extend to somewhat more violent moves: the woman is pushed on all fours, her head is spun, she is lifted and carried like a corpse, or shuffled around on the floor. All this is accompanied by John Playford’s 17th century music. In the third version of the same dance, she performs the same movements in silence, only her footsteps are heard. The ‘invisible figures’ are absent in that same dance, which now appears gentle. The woman is rehearsing her steps and she now resumes all agency over her movement. The reversal is strange, because the same woman perpetuates the same choreography alone. The narrative sequence of the three versions of the same dance situates us in the ambivalence between submission and resilience.

The woman in the video is you, dancing. I am saying it because it is quite rare nowadays in visual art works that the artist dances or performs themselves. How did you come to dance? And how come you are dancing yourself in your video works?

With Love (Noor Abed, 2015)

NA: Frantz Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth: “Any study of the colonial world therefore must include an understanding of the phenomena of dance and possession". Living in a state of dispossession - being born and raised in Palestine - I realized early on that everything can be dispensable, except for my body. The medium and the study of performance, therefore, has been crucial throughout my practice. In fact, the work With Love (2015), was one of the first pieces where I decided to collaborate with other bodies. Before that, I produced a series of video-performances, in which I danced and performed as well, while examining body movement and space politics (as a physical examination of the body in relation to territoriality).

While working on With Love, I was highly interested in examining the personal body as a social one. I investigated how the ‘repetition of gestures’ operates within the body’s awareness of its own history, while marking the body as a symbolic subject in constant transformation. For me, selfhood is primarily socially constructed on psychological and physical levels, and I understand how it is constantly permeated and controlled by repetitive discipline within social power relationships. Throughout the dance (in the work With Love) I aimed to emphasize the importance of performative repetition in the process of subject formation. As repetition is used to destroy the subject’s own process of domination over the body, bodies become experiential and automated, repeating and transforming the history of that very domination. It is the combination of constructing and deconstructing that activates a space for social structures to be negotiated.

My own body was curious (in this work) to think through movement, and to acknowledge transformative and continually shifting positions of power. Performing in person was very essential to my creative process and to the understanding of an experience, that is evoking emotional sensibility and exhausting itself in controlled movements. Perhaps it is important to mention that I worked with professionally trained dancers in this work (for the first time), while I was never trained as a dancer myself. After this work I kept a bit of a distance from the stage.

BC: The last question I would like to ask you is in regard to your position, but I will start with my own. As a citizen of collapsing Yugoslavia in 1999, when I moved to Belgium I was confronted with a decision regarding my work: will my work focus on the past and the present of a decade of Balkan wars, or do I have the right to a wider horizon of topics? I opted for the latter, because it implied that I could use my experience of growing up in Yugoslavia methodologically, rather than thematically. I didn’t want to be cornered into the identitarian game of representation, forced to always speak of/for the place of my origin. That said, social choreography as a method wouldn’t have stuck with me, were it not for my childhood experiences in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Did you face anything similar questioning the position from which you will be heard and received? In that respect, I am intrigued by the notions of imagination and waiting/projection, which I encountered in your videos Surface (2017), Penelope (2014), and Where To (2011). Ntone Edjabe, a journalist from Cameroon working on the South-African platform Chimurenga, told me that the only way to reseize the means with which we write the history of the continent, was to create myths and tell stories that grapple with the incomprehensibility of certain great events, as for example, Festac 77 in Lagos (known also as the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture), which gathered tens of thousands of works from artists of both the continent and the diaspora alike, but which couldn’t be properly documented. What is the dramaturgical role of imagination and myth-making in your work?

NA: When I moved from Palestine to Los Angeles for my higher education, I was shocked by how much my identity was foregrounded in the way people would perceive me and discuss my work. Every work I made, regardless of the content or form, was interpreted as grounded in my identity and standing in for my place of origin. I struggled with the immediate frame I was given, and realized that I was interested in looking outward towards a broader vision of communality and the socio-political structures that people share with others, rather than turning people back to themselves. Therefore, imagination and myth-making became far more urgent means to question social identity.

Myth approaches history from a different perspective, reflecting an alternate reality. It can be seen as a collective dream and public imagination that creates a parallel space, which merges with the main political reality from a different angle and highlights its absurdity. For me, creating and grounding a mythology, are ways to overturn the characteristics of dominant discourse, and rewrite reality.

These works started from questioning the contradiction between the actual and the imaginary/ mythical, one that assumes a binary opposition between two systems: that of the representational code of reality, and that of fantasy. Since the ground rules of these two worlds are incompatible, neither one can fully come into being; each remains suspended, locked in a constant conflict with the other. This sustained opposition foresees the possibility of an interpretive closure through systems of representation. Here, I seek to naturalize the mode of the myth within established methods of representation, as something that is ontologically necessary to society’s vision of everyday life.

Penelope (Noor Abed, 2014)