André Lepecki - Exhausting Dance

In one of the first scholarly books in English dedicated to recent European contemporary dance, Lepecki examines the work of key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990s in Europe and the US. Through their vivid and explicit dialogue with performance art, visual arts and critical theory from the past thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenge our understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement.

Some quotes from the introduction to get a sense of how the book moves:

"I invoke throughout the book Roland Barthes's and Michel Foucault's critique of the authority of the author, Jacques Derrida's critique of representation and general economy, Avery Gordon's notion of the sociological force of the spectral, Anne Anlin Cheng's reframing of the Freudian notion of melancholia, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of body without organs, Peter Sloterdijk's unveiling of a kinetic ontology of modernity, Frantz Fanon's critique of ontology in the colonial condition, and Judith Butler's recasting of the Austinian performative - in order to understand the choreographic deployments of these crucial concepts."

"Much of my argument in this book turns around the formation of choreography as a peculiar invention of early modernity, as a technology that creates a body disciplined to move according to the commands of writing."

"In that sense, to exhaust dance is to exhaust modernity's permanent emblem. It is to push modernity's mode of creating and privileging a kinetic subjectivity to its critical limit. It is to exhaust modernity."

"If there is one contribution I would like to propose to dance studies it is to consider in which ways choreography and philosophy share that same fundamental political, ontological, physiological, and ethical question that Deleuze recuperates from Spinoza and from Nietzche: what can a body do?"

As the kinetic project of modernity becomes modernity's ontology (its inescapable reality, its foundational truth), so the project of Western dance becomes more and more aligned with the production and display of a body and a subjectivity fit to perform this unstoppable motility.

"If there is one contribution I would like to propose to dance studies it is to consider in which ways choreography and philosophy share that same fundamental political, ontological, physiological, and ethical question that Deleuze recuperates from Spinoza and from Nietzche: what can a body do?"

Lepecki, A. (2006) Exhausting Dance: Performance and the politics of movement. New York: Routledge.