Réponse à Gregory Scott – A reply to Gregory Scott

Lors de la séance du 19 octobre, Julia Beauquel a répondu aux remarques de Gregory Scott concernant son livre publié aux Presses universitaires de Rennes, Esthétique de la danse.

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Je remercie vivement Maud Pouradier et Pierre Fasula pour l’organisation de cette conférence en ligne, qui me donne l’occasion de raviver certains aspects de ma réflexion sur la danse dans son contexte le plus approprié, and of course,thank you, Pr. Gregory Scott, for your work and for this stimulating presentation. 

I am very pleased and honoured to be able to discuss with one of the philosophers thanks to whom I learned so much, especially in the context of this debate with Noel Carroll and Sally Banes. I already met and discuss twice with Noel Carroll a few years ago, and also with professor Julie Van Camp, who had written her dissertation on dance and the problems of its definition (in 1982, one year after I was born!) with https://philpapers.org/rec/VANPPO. 

But since the publication of my dissertation, seven years ago, no one ever intended to discuss it with me (not even in France). So this is like a resurrection, both of the book and of an important part of myself that I let aside for some time (even if my more recent book, Danser, une philosophie, 2018, met some acknowledgement and success in a wider audience ; unfortunately, it is already unaccessible, due to its editor bankruptcy.) In short, this event provides me some oxygen, and I feel like being my true self again. Thank you for that ! 

I would like to make a few precisions, first about the definition of dance and second, about the cluster approach :

I. DEFINING DANCE or CHOREOGRAPHIC ART ?

A. Defining dance has never seemed to me a crucial problem : as a dancer studying philosophy, I was intellectually intrigued by other aspects of dance that I was experimenting in practice. I explore those in the second part of my book (expression, motion and emotion, understanding of dance, body and mind, action and intention, constraint and freedom, capacities, rightness of execution and interpretation or performing, and other topics in dance aesthetics). But in the context of a philosophical dissertation, I certainly had to examine the possibility of a dance definition, and, notably, the distinction between dance (generally conceived) on the one hand, and choreographic art on the other. In my research, the distinction between the aesthetic and the artistic had to be taken into account. Among many other creations or productions that have to be correctly apprehended, this distinction allows to differentiate, for example, as I wrote in the book, the remarkable work of the famous Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in relation to Steve Reich’s music on the one hand, from its plagiarism by the R&B singer Beyoncé on the other hand.

Both are dances (ordered human movements) ; however, only the first one is relevant to the choreographic art form and history, whereas the second belongs to pop culture ; this follows from the famous Arthur Danto’s cases of the indiscernible paintings of a tie : one by Picasso, the other by a child. To repeat Danto’s words,  

“To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry — an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”

“The Artworld” (1964)

→ Cognitive, contextual aspects,notablythe workshistorical background, as Jerrold Levinson alsoargued, are decisive to identify, apprehend, appreciate and evaluate them properly.

B. Concerning dance as an art, a formalist (or structuralist) and empiricist definition in terms of “ordered, human movements made for themselves or for the sake of pleasure” encounters many other problems noticed by other philosophers, that I only modestlypresentedin this first chapter; as I want to leave time to other speakers for the discussion, I am not intending here to recountall of them in detail, buthere are brieflythe main difficulties:

First, such a definition arguablyincludesmovementsthat are notdances(some singers movements in opera, drama,film, or performance art…) andmovements that are not artistic(such as the Macarena, summer dances, disco dances, or even, to some extent, rhythmic gymnastics, synchronised swimming…) on the one hand. On the other hand,and maybe more importantly,itexcludessomeartistic entities:manychoreographic worksin France, for example, those of Maguy Marin, donot seek pleasure, but, in fact,exactly the contrary.Wether we approve it or not, choreographers like Jérôme Bel, mainly want to make the audience think, sometimes in shockingthe spectators or making them endure a trying, demanding experience (with loud, continuous sound for instance, in Umweltfrom Maguy Marin). However,they are consideredchoreographers, presented in dance programs,although what they propose is choreography without dance, and without aiming at a purely sensible, perceptual aesthetic pleasure. Rather, the effect of those works can be a form of intellectual satisfaction.

→ About the “order” condition (“bodily “ordered” movement”) : I assisted to numerous improvisations by dancers during experimental music festivals that consisted more in an intended disorder and chaos than in ordering anything. 

Second, apart from this default of categorization, saying that the “Ordered movements are made for the sake of themselves, or of pleasure” unfairly deprive choreographic art of its content, or meaning. Dance as an art does not only consist in composition methods or movement techniques and styles, without content. It seems to me that many choreographers’ purpose is to mean something. The question is not only :

– “What does dance consist in? What is it made of”? (“human movement”) 

Or 

– “How is it done?” (“it is ordered”). 

An important question is also: 

-“Why is that way? What does it convey, express, what does it mean?”

To me, it would be sad if dance was devoid of content, and it would bring dance back to old despising prejudices about the superficial, purely corporal and sensible nature of dance, a form that would not be in itself sufficient : a non autonomous medium, a mere accompaniment to or illustration of other arts such as music. 

→ See on this topic Catherine Kintzler paper “La danse, art du corps engagé, et la question de l’autonomie” in the first book I co-edited with Roger Pouivet in 2010 : Philosophie de la danse, Presses Universitaires de Rennes)

To conclude on this first point:when writingmy dissertation, I tried to take into account both:

–the american philosophical discussion about defining art,

– and thereality of choreographic art that was all around me.

Even though my personal aesthetic taste was often very frustrated, I didn’t want to close my eyes on the extremely diverse ways choreographic artists were creating and evolving.The cluster theory seemed to me an objective manner to embrace the fair points of various philosophical arguments and the contemporary dance productions.

This was not easy. 

That lead us to my second point, that will be shorter:

II. THE “CLUSTER APPROACH”

The one you read p. 87 and disagreed with is not a cluster strategy that I defended, but served in the context of my comments on Berys Gaut, as an example or an attempt to apply his conception to dance. It was part of a thinking process, intellectually challenging, aiming at more and more precision and specification (until page 158).

I actually present my ownkind of “cluster definition” almost 71 pages further in the book, after two more chapters that I meant to include into it. But more than anything, it functions as a sort of summary( recap) of all those 158 pages on ontology, to an end of clarity, before moving to another topic: the aesthetics of dance. The ontological chapters mainly serves the purpose of determining, as precisely as possible, the topic of my writing. I found enlightening to discover and expose in detail the mainarguments, counter-arguments and responses of essentialists, anti-essentialists, contextualists, functionalists (Nelson Goodman) and aesthetic realists (Roger Pouivet) : they show how complex and nuancedthe problem is and what kind of tools or subtle strategies philosophers can invent to try to solve it. I view this stimulating discussion between thinkers as a succession in which every new conception attempts to improve the previous one(s), in completing, refining it.

When I reach the cluster, it is for me the final stage (the height, the acme) of the discussion, exactly for the reason you underly (extreme flexibility) ; it is a way of ending this part of the book, showing how it could be possible to acknowledge the fair points of each preceding approach. Here is my proper “cluster definition”:

Voici le résultat auquel nous parvenons au terme des réflexions menées dans les chapitres I, II et III. 

Définition: 

Danse : « Ensemble varié et ouvert* de propriétés esthétiques réelles et relationnelles, à la fois formelles et contextuelles, du mouvement humain fonctionnant sur le mode de l’exemplification littérale et/ou métaphorique »

* Précisées dans le cluster : (i) être une pratique ou un spectacle (un artefact) composé(e) des mouvements d’un ou de plusieurs corps humains, (ii) mettre en évidence des relations spatiales et temporelles, (iii) être formellement complexe et cohérent(e), (iv) incarner des propriétés rythmiques, (v) être le produit d’un haut degré technique, (vi) être expressif(ve), (vii) avoir un vocabulaire, une grammaire ou un style identifiable, (viii) être le produit d’une intention de faire une œuvre chorégraphique, (ix) avoir des relations (historiques, théoriques, institutionnelles) avec d’autre productions de la même forme d’art ou avec d’autres pratiques artistiques, (x) fonctionner sur le mode de l’exemplification littérale et/ou métaphorique (plutôt que sur le mode « de l’abstraction, de l’évocation ou de l’allusion » → Beardsley), (ix) posséder des propriétés esthétiques non réductibles à des propriétés physiques et susceptibles d’être appréhendées par un récepteur approprié, (x) véhiculer des significations complexes, (xi) être un exercice d’imagination créative (être originale), (xii) être intellectuellement simulant(e), (xiii) être le produit d’une création individuelle ou collective, (xiv) être une improvisation, une série d’improvisations ou une composition pouvant faire l’objet d’une multiplicité d’instanciations (xv) être identifiable et ré-interprétable au moyen d’un système notationnel ou d’une enregistrement vidéo.

– Chacune de ces propriétés du cluster peut caractériser une œuvre chorégraphique donnée. 

– Une œuvre chorégraphique peut être caractérisée par plusieurs de ces propriétés du cluster.

– Il n’est pas nécessaire que la totalité des propriétés caractérise une entité pour que celle-ci soit une œuvre chorégraphique.

– D’autres propriétés pertinentes peuvent être ajoutées à la liste.

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